there were so-called Collegia fabrorum, with a Praefectus Fabrorum, established in many cities for the purpose of extinguishing any fire that might break out.56 Trajan, however, was afraid lest these artizans thus enrolled should be diverted from their original institution, and, becoming nothing else than what the Greeks called Eraîρoɩ, or associates banded together for mere purposes of pleasure, should make use of their organization for political intrigue. The inscription found in 1848 in Africa, which dates from the reign of Trasamundus, king of the Vandals, who having married the sister of Theodoric, was led perhaps by his relation with Italy to introduce into his own country, together with other Roman institutions, that of a fire-brigade, sets forth in a quaint and striking manner the duties which the Prefect of the Vigiles was expected to perform. It was, indeed, a common custom with the Romans to engrave their laws and decrees on tablets of bronze or marble, so that they might be seen by all and be preserved to distant ages. We have a remarkable example of this custom in an inscription of the time of Constantine the Great, which is found registered in the Theodosian Code, and another regarding the Roman VIGILES, setting forth a law made by the emperors Severus and Antoninus, which can be read in the Digest. The inscription on the stone in the Caliph's house of Aïn-Beïda, first published in the Inscriptions Romaines de l'Algérie, Paris, 1855, in folio, and reprinted in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. viii. (Berolini, 1881), under the number 2297, runs as follows :— ERIS SECURITAS SOPORANTION MUNIMEN DOMORUM, TUTELA CLAUSTRO The words soporantion for soporantium and discossor for discussor prove this inscription to belong to a time of decadence. Willmanns, who republished the inscription in the Corpus, says of it, "Who this person may be who is thus 56 Hence Symmachus says (x. Ep. 27, alias 34), Sunt qui fabriles manus augus tis operibus accommodant, per alios fortuita arcentur incendia. spoken of, I do not know; it may refer to some animal (fera) kept instead of a watch-dog.' It was reserved for De Vit in 1868 to show the identity of this inscription with a passage of the seventh letter, seventh book, of Cassiodorus, containing the warrant or formula of the Præfectus Vigilum in Rome.57 To show the meaning of these five lines in the African inscription, I will translate the whole context, as I find it in the works of Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric, king of the Goths in Italy from the time that the latter fixed his residence in Ravenna (A.D. 493-526). It may be well to observe that the great design Theodoric proposed to himself in the government of his new kingdom was to re-establish as far as possible the system of administration of the ancient Republic of Rome, at least such of it as remained embodied in the government of the later Emperors of the West. Hence he elected senators, named consuls, appointed prefects, reestablished the fire-brigades, &c. For each one of these offices Cassiodorus was instructed to draw up a regulation, which contained in brief the scope and duties of the new dignity confided to each. Thus, then, he writes in his instructions to the Prefect of the Vigiles at Rome : "Wherefore be solicitous about thieves, whom although the laws do not allow thee to punish, they give thee power to pursue and find out. By thus doing thou wilt be the safety of those who sleep, the guardian of houses, the protector of sacred enclosures, watching in the dark night, and judging without appeal those whom thou mayest apprehend; thou, whose duty it is to over-reach the cunning of evil-doers, and whose glory it is to ensnare those who plot mischief. Thy office is to perform a nightly hunt, &c. Keep a sharp watch on the birds that prey at night; be not deceived by appearances; and as they find food in the dark, so canst thou find thy meed of praise. Be therefore faithful in the discharge of thy office. Suffer not thyself to be deprived by bribery of what thou canst earn by industry, for, although all that thou dost seems to be done in the deepest darkness, there is no action whatever that can be hid." 58 57 See his article published in the Bulletino dell'Istituto di Correspondenza Archeologica for 1868, pp. 62-4. Vide also Britanni e Cimbri, p. 391. 58 Cassiodorus, Opera omnia, Coloniae Allobrogum, 1656, p. 240. And to the Prefect of Vigiles at Ravenna he says:"To thee is committed the safety of fortunes, the monuments of the city, the welfare of all, namely, that thou shouldst carry on a covert war against the invaders of our houses, if ever thou shouldst hear that any of the citizens is to be attacked. Guard the fortunes of all: as long as thou art on the watch, we may sleep in safety, and no danger is apprehended. In a time of peace, thou gainest a victory over the thief in the night-time. At break of day, the defended city rejoices in thy laurels, and, while it regards thy prisoners, knows it has got rid of a secret enemy. Daily thou earnest a triumph, if thou watchest well and since the glory to be obtained in warlike strife is rare, it is easily procured for thee by the discovery of thieves." 59 It seems, then, but natural to infer that no large Roman town unprovided with a garrison sufficiently numerous to undertake the office (and instead of being confined within the walls of fortified cities, says Gibbon, which the Romans considered as the refuge of weakness or pusillanimity, the legions were encamped on the banks of the great rivers, and along the frontiers of the barbarians), would be left without its complement of night-watchers or firemen, an institution which may then have been well known in such important towns of Britain as York, Verulam, London, Colchester, and Richborough, So sparse and desultory is the information accidentally left to us of the inhabitants and functionaries of the hundred cities of Roman Britain, that we cannot be surprised if a small brigade of VIGILES existed in each of them without any record of them being left to us. The Roman firemen were then a body trained to arms and accustomed to exact and rigid discipline. To explain, therefore, the existence of a cohort or numerus (for at that time. the two terms were used promiscuously) of VIGILES at Greta Bridge, in Yorkshire, we may suppose with some foundation 59 Ib. p. 241. In one of the laws of the Emperor Justinian (Novell. xiii.) we read that the charge of Prefect of the Constantinople Fire-Brigade fell into complete discredit upon the discovery that that worthy official had an understanding with the thieves who plied their trade at night and whose profits he succeeded in sharing. Thereupon the Emperor sup pressed the office and handed over the care of the Constantinople police to a Prætor of the people. Augustus in his original institution had provided for danger from both fires and thieves, for besides the seven cohorts of Vigiles he established in Rome, four other cohorts called Urban, each of 1500 men, for the purposes of police. that the Firemen scattered through the different cities of Britain may have been gathered together into a separate corps, and thrown forward for the support of the numerous forces engaged in defending the northern frontier against the continual invasions of the Picts and Scots. What a numerus was in the Roman army cannot very well be ascertained, as we find no definition of the term in the authors of that time. In the first ages of the Empire, the numerus appears to have been a body of irregular soldiers taken from some province independently of the fixed and regular levy; or else the numerus may have meant a body of men detached from the cohorts or alæ for some special service; or again a number of men enrolled for some special emergency, as the erection of fortifications, or the quelling of a sudden revolt, at the end of which they were disbanded. When however the numeri came to have fixed stations, as at the time when the Notitia was compiled, they were no longer irregular bodies of men, but acknowledged divisions of the army, as cohorts or alæ were. This agrees with what we learn from Zozomen, that in the fourth century the Roman cohorts began at that time to be called Numeri, though the two names continued to exist contemporaneously side by side : τὰ Ρωμαίων τάγματα ἄ νύν ἀριθμοῦς καλοῦσι (Η. Ε., i. 8; cf. Vegetius, de re militari, ii. 9). RICHMOND CASTLE. By GEO. T. CLARK. THE Swale, one of the principal tributaries of the Yorkshire Ouse, and the stream in whose waters Paulinus of York is said to have baptised 10,000 Pagan Saxons, rises in the north-western quarter of that County, in a wild and spacious tract of moor and moss, studded over with heights. ranging from 500 ft. to 1,500 ft., and even reaching 2,000 ft., from all parts of which a number of becks and gills converge upon the old town of Muker, to form there a considerable volume of water in its brightest, purest, and most attractive form. From Muker the Swale takes, with many windings, an eastern course, down a dale, wild and lovely even among Yorkshire dales, past the town of Reath, beneath many a scaur and across many a holm, past places whose names fall strange upon the southern ear, by many a camp of unknown antiquity, and by abbeys now venerable in ruin, until, about 18 miles below Muker, it emerges in ample volume from one of the most charming of its gorges, and in one of a succession of bold and graceful curves, sweeps round a tall and precipitous headland of rock, which, rising on the left or northern bank, projects about 130 ft. above the stream, and seems fitted by nature for the site of a mediæval fortress. Such at least was the opinion of earl Alan, when, five years only after the coming in of the Normans, in the centre of a brave and insubordinate population, here, upon the tabular summit of the rock, he founded the celebrated Castle of Richmond, the seat of a great northern earldom, an Honour, and the capital of a Shire of five wapentakes, to all of which it gave its name. While the castle occupied the broad summit of the promontory, and was protected naturally on the west, south, and eastern faces by a cliff, the river, and a steep slope, the neck of the peninsula to the north, not above 50 yards in VOL. IX. D |
