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Whether the royal dwelling-place of Cynobellinus stood on the site which was so soon to become the Roman colony, I do not profess to determine. The Roman town often arose on a spot near to but not actually on the British site. Roman Dorchester-if any trace of it be leftlooked up on the forsaken hill-fort of the Briton on Sinodun. Roman Lindum came nearer to the brink of its steep hill than the British settlement which it supplanted. I do not pretend to rule what may be the date or purpose of the earthworks at Lexden.1 All that I ask is that I may not be constrained to believe in King Coel's kitchen. But wherever the British settlement was, I cannot bring myself to believe that the site of the colony was other than the site of the present town. It was a site well suited for a military post, fixed on a height which, in this flatter eastern land, is not to be despised; it approaches in some faint measure to the peninsular position of Shrewsbury, Bern, and Besançon. On this site then the Colony of Veterans was founded while Claudius still reigned. When he had taken his place among the gods-Seneca to be sure had another name for the change in him-the temple of the deified con queror arose within the site which the Roman occupied to hold down the conquered people. And now comes the difficulty, the strange relation in which two such distant parts of Britain as Camulodunum and the land of the Silures appear in the narrative of Tacitus. The Iceni are subdued; the Cangi have their lands harried; the Brigantes submit. But in the East and in the West, by the banks of the eastern and of the western Colne, another spirit reigns. The Silures, the people of Caradoc, still hold out. Neither gentle

'It has been suggested that the extensive earthworks to be seen at Lexden are part of a system which took in the site both of an older and a later Camulodunum, a system belonging to the time of British resistance to Teutonic invasions. They would be a defence raised against the East-Saxons, as Wareham and Wallingford are defences raised against the West-Saxons.

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nor sternness will move them; nothing short of regular warfare, regular establishment of legionary camps, cau bow those stubborn necks to the yoke. With a view to this warfare in the West, the Colony of Veterans is planted in the East. Some have therefore carried Camulodunum elsewhere-though assuredly matters are not much mended by carrying it into Yorkshire-others, more daring still, have sought to depreciate the authority of Tacitus himself. as I read the passage, though the connexion is perhaps a little startling, though the wording is perhaps a little harsh, the general meaning seems plain. In order that the legions and their camps might be more easily established among the threatening Silures, a feebler defence was provided for the conquered Trinobantes. As I understand the terse phrases of the historian, the legions were removed from the East for the war with Caradoc, and a colony of veterans was thought enough to occupy a land where little danger was feared. How little danger was feared, how thoroughly the land was held to be subdued, appears from the defenceless state of the colony eleven years after. The colonists lived at their ease, as if in expectation of unbroken peace. The town was unwalled; the only citadel, the "arx æternæ dominationis," was the temple of the deified conqueror. The mission of the veterans was less to fight than to civilize their barbarian neighbours. They were sent there indeed as "subsidium adversus rebelles"; but they were sent there also "imbuendis sociis ad officia legum." Sterner work than this had to be done among the hills where Caradoc was in arms; but those who founded the unwalled colony hardly dreamed that, before long, work no less stern was to be done there also. They little dreamed what feats of arms were to be done upon the Roman as well as by him, in the land which they bad deemed so thoroughly their own that its capital hardly needed warlike defences against

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merry life, the life of conquerors settled upon the lands of their victims. The dominion of law which the veterans set up at Camulodunum did not hinder the conquering race from seizing the lands and houses of the natives, and insulting them with the scornful names of slaves and captives. Such doings are not peculiar to the dominion of the Roman; but it does say something for the Roman, as distinguished from the oppressors of our own day, that it is from a Roman historian that we learn the evil deeds of his country men. Tacitus neither conceals nor palliates the wrongs which led to the revolt of eastern Britain, as wrongs of the same kind still lead to revolts before our own eyes, as they always will lead to revolts as long as such deeds continue to be done. Crime was avenged by crime, as crime ever will be avenged, till men unlearn that harsh rule which excuses the wanton oppression of the tyrant and bids men lift up their hands in holy horror when his deeds are returned on himself in kind. Fearful indeed was the vengeance of the revolted Briton : but when he used the cross, the stake, the flame, against his oppressors, he was but turning their own instruments of civilization against themselves.

The tale is one of the most familiar, one of the most stirring, in that history of the former possessors of our island which so often passes for the history of ourselves. We see the British heroine, as we might now see some matron of Bosnia or Bulgaria, calling on the men of her race to avenge her own stripes, her outraged daughters, the plundered homes of the chiefs of her people, the kinsfolk of their king dealt with as the bondmen of the stranger. But we are concerned with Boadicea, her wrongs and her vengeance, only as they concerned the Colony of Veterans at Camulodunum. The tale is told with an Homeric wealth of omen and of prodigy. The statue of Victory fell backwards; strange sounds were heard in the theatre and in the senate-house; frantic women

sang aloud that the end was come. The men of the defenceless colony, and the small handful of helpers sent by Catus Decianus, guarded by no ditch or rampart, defended the temple of Claudius for two days till town and temple sank before the assaults of the avengers. So the first Camulodunum fell, in one mighty flame of sacritice, along with the two other great settlements of the Roman on British ground. London, not adorned like Camulodunum with colonial rank, but already the city of ships, the place where, as in after days, the merchants of the earth were gathered, fell along with the veteran colony. So too fell Verulam, doomed again to arise, again to fall, and to supply out of its ruins the materials for the vastest of surviving English minsters. All fell, as though the power of Rome beyond the ocean was for ever broken. But their fall was but for a moment; the sword of Suetonius won back eastern Britain to the bondage and the slumber of the Roman Peace. towns that the Britain had burned and harried again arose : a new colony of Camulodunum, this time fenced in with all the skill of Roman engineering, again grew up. It grew up to live on through four unrecorded centuries, carefully marked in maps and Itineraries, but waiting for a second place in history till the days when Roman and Briton had passed away, when the Saxon Shore had become a Sixcn shore in another sense from that in which it bears that name in the Domesday of the tottering Empire.

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The Roman then passed away from the Colony of Veterans, as he passed away from the rest of Britain. But in the Colony of Veterans he left both his works and his memory behind him. When I say that he left his works, do not fancy that I mean that he left the temple of Claudius behind him. On the grotesque delusion which mistook a Norman castle for a Roman temple I might not have thought it needful to waste a word. Only, when I was last at Colchester, I saw, written up in the castle itself, such names as

"Adytum," "Podium," and the like, implying that there was still somebody in Colchester who believed the story. Perhaps there was also somebody who believed that the earth was flat, and that the sun was only a few miles from it. The scientific antiquary will give exactly as much attention to the one doctrine as the scientific astronomer will give to the other. Of the two stories I should be more inclined to believe in old King Coel, in his fiddlers, and even in his kitchen. Yet I have come too lately from the Illyrian land, my mind is too full both of its past and of its present history, to let me believe that Helen the mother of Constantine was the daughter of Coel of Colchester. The strange likeness between the names of the river and the settlement, between the Colne and the Colony, accidental as it doubtless is, is, if not a puzzle, at least a coincidence. But King Coel will be at once sent by the comparative mythologist to the same quarters as Hellên and Romulus and Francus the son of Hector. Saint Helen, says Henry of Huntingdon, surrounded Colchester with walls. So she did many things at Trier which the last and most scientific historian of Trier is pulling to pieces in a way which must grievously shock some of his brethren. I trust then that I shall not shock any body in Colchester by disbelieving in old King Coel. do not think that I shocked anybody in Exeter by declining to believe that, when Vespasian marched off to besiege Jerusalem, it was because he was bent upon taking some city, and had found Exeter too strong for him.

But the walls are there, whoever built them, the walls which, at some date between the invasion of Boadicea and the invasion of the first East-Saxon settlers, were raised to shelter the Colony. And even the legend of Helen may be taken as pointing to the age of Constantius and Constantine as the most likely time for their building. Those walls are, as far as I have seen, unique among the inhabited towns of Britain. Neither York nor

Lincoln nor Exeter, nor even Chester, can boast of being still girded by her Roman walls in anything like the same perfection in which Colchester is. Nowhere else in Britain, save in fallen Anderida and Calleva, have I ever seen the line of the old defences so thoroughly complete. But unluckily it is the line only. While the circuit of the walls is so much more perfect than at York and Lincoln, the fragments which still re main at York and Lincoln have kept much more of their ancient masonry than can be found at Colchester. Still Colchester can show far more than can be seen at Chester, where, though the Roman lines are all but as perfectly followed by the later defences, little is left of the actual Roman wall beyond its foundations. As the abiding wall of a still inhabited town, the Roman wall of Colchester is, I repeat, unique in Britain. And a Roman wall I do not scruple to call it. In so calling it, I am far from meaning to rule that the whole circuit of the existing wall actually dates from the time of Roman occupation. I have no doubt that the lines are the Roman lines; I have no doubt that part of the wall is the actual Roman wall. But I have just as little doubt that it has been in many places patched and rebuilt over and over again; one great time above all of patching and rebuilding is recorded in the days of Eadward the Unconquered. But the wall has a higher historic interest, it becomes a more living witness of Roman influence, from the very fact that much of it is not actually of Roman date. This very fact shows, far more clearly, far more strikingly, how the arts and the memory of Rome lived on. Whatever be the date of any part of the walls, they are Roman; they are built more Romano. It is at Colchester as it is at Trier, as it is at Perigueux, as it is in a crowd of other places where the influence of Roman models had struck deep. In places of this kind the Roman construction lived on for ages. Here in Colchester we have actual bricks of Roman date in the places where the Roman engineer

laid them. We have bricks of Roman date used up again in the construction of later buildings. And we have bricks, not of Roman date but of thoroughly Roman character, made afresh at all times at least down to the fifteenth century. Here, where brick and timber were of necessity the chief materials for building, the Roman left his mark upon the bricks as in some other parts of Britain he left his mark upon the stones. Northern England reproduced the vast stones of the Roman wall in a crowd of buildings built more Romano, with masonry of massive stones. With such stones again, no less more Romano, did Ethelstan rebuild the walls of Exeter. Here at Colchester Roman models were no less faithfully followed; but here the mos Romanus naturally took the form of brick, and to build more Romano meant to build with brick and not with stone. It meant to build with bricks, either taken from some Roman building or cast in close imitation of those which the Roman buildings supplied. In this sense the castle of Eudo Dapifer may be called a Roman building. So may the one tower of Primitive Romanesque to be found in Colchester, which, while other towers of its type are of stone, reproduces in material as well as in form the campaniles of Italy. So may Saint Botolfs priory, second only to Saint Albans as an instance of Roman materials, not so much taught to assume shapes, as brought back to their true Roman use before Italy began her imitation of the arts of Greece. But the walls are Roman in a yet stricter sense than any of the other buildings around them. They are the old walls of the Colony, in many places patched, in some, we may believe, actually rebuilt. But they have undergone no change which at all destroys their personal identity. The wall is not an imitation, a reproduction, of a Roman wall; it is the Roman wall itself, with such repairs, however extensive, as the effects of time and of warfare have made needful. The walls of Colchester are Roman walls in

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the sense in which the walls of Rome are the walls of Aurelian.

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We come then to a time when the walls of the Colony were still standing, but when the legions of Rome were no longer marshalled to defend them. Was there ever a time when those walls stood, as the walls of Bath and Chester once stood, as the walls of Anderida and Calleva still stand, with no dwelling place of men within them? That question I will not undertake to answer. think I remember that, in one of his scattered papers and lectures-when will they come together to make the History of the English Conquest of Britain the great master of those times, the discoverer of early English history, told us that of all the towns of England there was none more likely than Colchester to have been continuously inhabited through British, Roman, British, and English days. If I am right in thinking that Dr. Guest said this, he doubtless had some weighty reason for saying it. I have not myself lighted on any direct evidence either for or against such a proposition. It is only in a very few cases that we have any direct evidence as to the fate of this or that particular town during the progress of the English Conquest. And of the circumstances under which the kingdom of the East-Saxons came into being, we know absolutely nothing. The Chronicles are silent; no legend, no fragment of ancient song, is preserved to us by Henry of Huntingdon. We have nothing but a dry list of princes, and that given, as might seem at first sight, in two contradictory forms. We hear of Escwine as the first founder of the EastSaxon settlement; we find his remote descendant Sleda spoken of as the first East-Saxon king. In this I see no contradiction. The story of the growth of Essex is doubtless much the same as the story of the growth of East-Anglia and of the two Northumbrian kingdoms. Several scattered Teutonic settlements were

gradually united under a more powerful chief; he then deemed himself great enough, as the head of a nation and

no longer the head of a mere tribe, to take upon himself the kingly title. Such was Ida in Bernicia; such, we may believe, was Sleda in Essex. But we have no trustworthy details of the East-Saxons and their kings till their conversion to Christianity in the beginning of the seventh century. We have no trustworthy mention of the town of Colchester till the wars of Eadward the Unconquered in the tenth. All that we can say is that the Colony on the Colne, like the Colony on the Rhine, kept its name. One was Colonia Camulodunum; one was Colonia Agrippina; but Colonia was name enough to distinguish either. Latin Colonia became British Caer Collun; and Caer Collun appears in every list as one of the great cities of Britain. British Caer Collun passed into English Colneceaster, with no change beyond that which the genius of the British and English languages demanded. In British and in English alike it remains the city of the colony. From this preservation of the name I argue, as I have argued in the case of the one English city whose name ends with the title with which the name of Colchester begins, the sister colony of Lindum,' that, if Camulodunum ever was, like Deva, "a waste chester" it was only for a very short time. I inferred from the fact that Lindum Colonia kept its name in the form of English Lincoln, that, if Lindum Colonia ever lay in the state of a waste chester, it was but for a very short time. It was settled again and named again while the memory of its old name and its old rank were still fresh. And I make the same inference in the case of Colchester, though with one degree less of certainty, because I must stand ready to have it thrown in my teeth that the town is called, not from the Roman colony, but from the river Colne. Here is a point on which each man must judge for himself. I cannot get over the succession of Colonia, Caer Collun, Colneceaster. I feel that it

1 See Macmillan's Magazine, August 1875, Art"Lindum Colonia."

is awkward to say that the likeness of the name of the colony and of the river is purely accidental: it would be more awkward still to hint that the river may have taken its name from the colony. But the colony is a fact; the retention of its name is a fact; and, in the face of those facts, all that I can do is to leave the river to shift for itself.

It seems likely then that, whether Colchester was or was not continuously inhabited through all the revolutions of the fifth and sixth centuries, its time of desolation, if it had any, was but short. If it did not become the dwelling-place of Englishmen in the first moment of their conquest, it at least became the dwelling-place of Englishmen before its British and Roman memories were forgotten. But, as I just now said, of Colchester itself there is absolutely no mention in history between the days of Boadicea to the days of Eadward the Elder. All that I can find is a dark and mythical reference in the story of Haveloc as told by Geoffrey Gaimar. But we must not forget, even within the walls of the colony, that Colchester is not the whole of the East-Saxon realm. Colchester is not a city: it has never been the seat of an independent bishopric. That was because another of the Roman towns which was overthrown by Boadicea, lowlier in rank in those early days, had, by the time that the East-Saxons embraced Christianity, outstripped the veteran colony. London, already the home of commerce before her first overthrow-again, under her new name of Augusta, the home of commerce in the later days of Roman power-was now, as an East-Saxon city, the head of the East-Saxon realm, again the home of commerce, the meeting-place of merchants and their ships. London, not Colchester, became the seat of the bishopric of the East-Saxons, and remained so till the strange arrangements of modern ecclesiastical geography gave Colchester a shepherd in the realm of Hengest. But the very greatness which made London the head of the EastSaxon kingdom tended to part London

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