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forming an obstacle which would to this day prove formidable to troops, especially if unprovided with artillery. The names of most of these dykes, Brand, Brent (i.e. burnt), Fleam (? flame), and Worsted (the place of war), bear testimony to the traces of battle and conflagration still visible along their course when our English ancestors entered the land and bestowed upon them these abiding designations.

$24. Besides these relics of warlike handiwork, there have here and there been found in the county traces of the ordinary village life of the Britons. These have been chiefly unearthed for a moment during the process of coprolite digging, and have unhappily been almost always destroyed in that process without being seen by any but the diggers. One such, however, at the village of Barrington, was carefully watched during the work, and was found to consist of a collection of circular pits, from twelve to twenty feet in diameter, and from two to four feet in depth, cut out in the chalky clay, and usually with a small drain running from each for a few feet down the gentle slope on which the whole were built. The entire settlement was surrounded by a four-foot ditch and rampart. These pits were doubtless the dwellingplaces of the ancient British villagers, a superstructure of wood and thatch completing them into very passable wigwams for the scanty population, who supported themselves partly by hunting, but more particularly by the pasturage which the open chalk lands afforded for their sheep and their scarcely larger oxen, and by the rude tilth immediately around each little community.

§ 25. From these and such-like relics we can in some degree reconstruct the physical and ethnological development of our county in the remote and unrecorded past. But not till we find ourselves brought into contact with the great name of Rome do we enter the regions of its actual history.

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§ 1-4. Beginning of authentic history-Invasion of Julius CæsarRoman conquest of Britain-Cambridgeshire friendly-Rebellion against disarmament-Battle of the Dykes.

§ 5-7. Roman oppression-Rebellion of Boadicea-Devastation of Cambridgeshire.

$8-11. The Pax Romana-Roman roads in Cambridgeshire-Identification of sites-The Notitia-Itineraries of Antoninus.

§ 12-16. Camboritum-Romano-British remains-Ash-pits-Pottery

-Thimbles-Coins.

§ 17-24. The Diocletian system-Position of CambridgeshireRomano-British army-Vandlebury-Allectus - British fleetConstantine the Great-Magnentius-Maximus-The last Constantine-Geraint-Britain denuded of soldiers-Barbarian in

SI.

roads.

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UTHENTIC history begins for our island with the enterprise of Julius Cæsar, undertaken, as it would seem, rather with a view to making a sensation at Rome by carrying the eagles to so distant a region, than with any idea of permanently occupying the country. But the first wave of Roman invasion, which thus, in 55 B.C., broke upon the shores of Britain, spent its force just before it reached the borders of Cambridgeshire. The stronghold of the chieftain who then stood forward as the British champion-Cassivellaunus (as Cæsar Latinizes his native name Caswallon)-is commonly sup

posed by antiquaries to have been somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. Albans. At all events, he was not an Icenian; and when, a century later, the Romans again entered the land, this time as permanent conquerors, the Iceni not only submitted, but co-operated as "friendlies" in the earlier campaigns of the invaders. Thus, while other clans were subdued and disarmed as a result of the operations of 46 and 47 A.D. (in which Vespasian, the future Emperor, was singled out, in the words of Tacitus, by his courage and resource, for the high destiny awaiting him), the inhabitants of Cambridgeshire retained their military strength unbroken. Indeed, they were, in all probability, positively the freer for the advent of the Romans, having been previously to some extent kept down by the widespread power of Cunobelin,1 Prince of the rival sept of the Trinobantes, whose home territory comprised Essex and Middlesex, while his suzerainty seems to have been acknowledged by at least the whole of Southern and Eastern Britain. Already, in the days of Julius Cæsar, had the Trinobantes become "prope firmissima omnium ejus regionis civitatum," and since his date their power had enormously developed, probably by that adoption of Roman culture to which their coins bear witness. capital fastness of Cunobelin was no further off than Camelodunum (Colchester), and the deep impression made by the sway which he thence exercised is shown in its lasting effect upon local and national tradition. Not only was Camelodunum the only site in Britain deemed worthy to be advanced to the dignity of a Roman colony (whence its present name of Colchester Coloniaceastre), but the remembrance that it had once been the seat of British royalty was handed down from bard to bard, till "Camelot " became the capital city of their ideal British monarch, King Arthur, and was finally iden1 See Chapter I., § 22.

* Cæsar, "Bell. Gall.," v. 20.

The

tified by the mediæval romancers with the most ancient historic capital known to them, the West Saxon royal city of Winchester. The Iceni had, doubtless, submitted with little pleasure to the eclipse of their ancient greatness by this rise of a rival clan, and rejoiced to see the power of the Trinobantes fall before the invading Romans. If they were to be subject-allies, it was better to stand in that relation to these world-wide conquerors than to upstart neighbours of their own.

§ 2. But when Ostorius, in A.D. 50, succeeded Aulus Plautius in the proprætorship of Britain, the Iceni began to feel the pressure of the foreign yoke. On the excuse that the unsubdued clans were raiding the districts well affected to Rome, he not only, by swift and unexpected manœuvres, cut to pieces the raiders, but determined upon a general disarmament of all Britons alike"friendlies" as well as "hostiles." On this point the Iceni doubtless felt as the kindred Highlanders felt towards similar measures adopted by the government of George II. To such freeborn warriors the surrender of their arms was a degradation intolerable. Not only did they themselves refuse the demand of Ostorius, but they hastily organized a confederacy of the clans around and bade him defiance.

§ 3. The spot on which they drew together to await his onset was well chosen. Tacitus ("Ann.," xii. 31) describes in forcible words the earthen rampart and the narrow strait through which the Romans had to force their way; and though his brief narrative makes it impossible with certainty to identify the ground, yet it is more than probable that those four great dykes mentioned in our last chapter played a decisive part in the struggle.1 We have no reason to suppose that they were made for the occasion, for the strait between fen and woodland which they defended was the old and only entrance to the Icenian 1 See Chapter I., § 23.

realm, and had doubtless witnessed many a stout prehistoric struggle. But they would now be repaired and garrisoned, and would present a formidable obstacle to the advance of the Roman forces, which Ostorius, without delay, led to crush the movement. His natural line of march would be along the Icknield Way; and by it, at the head of his auxiliary forces (for he had no legionaries with him), he flung himself upon the British army. The first dyke which barred his way was impetuously assailed along its whole length at once, and the Britons behind it put to headlong flight. They had intended, presumably, to retreat from rampart to rampart, defending each in turn, but the impetuosity of the Roman charge carried all before it. Once the first dyke was stormed, those behind proved only obstacles to embarrass the rout of the defenders, and the space between no better than a deathtrap. Shut in between the forest to the east and the fen to the west, those fugitives only escaped who had the good fortune to force their way through the mad crush at the narrow entrances of Balsham Dyke and the Devil's Ditch. The rest were caught by the pursuing enemy and slaughtered wholesale, by way of express warning to such Britons as were still hesitating whether or no to join the anti-Roman league thus lucklessly inaugurated by the unhappy Iceni.

§ 4. The lesson was evidently not taught in vain. During the great campaign of the following year, which, by crushing Caractacus (or Caradoc, as his countrymen called him), completed the conquest of Britain, we hear of no movement in the eastern districts of the island, such as that which broke out with such fury in the rear of the invaders twelve years later. The Iceni and their neighbours had had enough of fighting for a point of honour, and had not yet been driven to fight by despair. Tacitus speaks of them at this date as "domiti ut pareant, nondum ut serviant."

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