10,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
This is the story of a village in East Anglia, astride its common stream - a saga of continuity and change which stretches back two thousand years. Rowland Parker tells the story of those who lived and died in the village, cutting out the familiar but domineering clamour of kings, prelates, politicians and absentee landowners. But since the common man leaves comparatively little trace, it took thirteen years of detective work to piece together, combing through reports of archaeological excavations and manor court rolls, collecting stories at the pub and inspecting old wills and land tax returns. Although The Common Stream was created by one man interested in the history of his village of Foxton in Cambridgeshire, with it Rowland Parker succeeds in giving us, at last, the true story of the English, alive with their feuds and fun, their farms and families, their fights and fornications.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
The Common Stream
ROWLAND PARKER
Contents
Maps and Ilustrations
Map showing the British village and Roman villa
Reconstruction of the Roman villa
Map showing the area of the early Saxon settlement
Map showing the course of the Town Brook, which determined the position and shape of the village
Map showing the location of houses built or rebuilt from 1550–1620. Blank circles indicate houses whose history cannot be traced.
Richard Dunnidge’s house (No. 3) as it appeared a few years ago
Michaelhouse (No. 14) today
The Manor House of Foxton Bury – ‘The Bury’ today
John Fuller’s house (No. 15) as rebuilt in 1660
Reconstruction of the Malthouse, from details revealed during restoration. The boy on the cart is young Stephen Rayner, carving his initials and the date 1743
The Village Pump in Mortimer’s Lane
Acknowledgements
One cannot spend thirteen years on researching and writing a book without becoming indebted to a lot of people for help, advice and encouragement. The hesitation with which I approach the duty of thanking them is caused by doubt as to my ability to do so adequately, certainty that I shall have forgotten some to whom thanks are due, and uncertainty as to the order in which I ought to mention those whom I have remembered. Alphabetical order would seem to be the least invidious method. But that would place Philip Ziegler last on the list, which will not do, for his wise and tactful suggestions have resulted in the revision of large sections of six chapters of the book. Derek Parker, George Ewart Evans and several others have helped in a similar way. Without their help the book would not have reached the stage of publication, and I marvel at the patience shown by those kind people towards an amateur writer so inexpert that he had to write the book three or four times before getting it right.
If time spent and trouble taken on my behalf were the deciding factors in determining precedence, then first place on the list would go to Mr J. M. Farrar, the Cambridgeshire County Archivist, and his staff at the County Record Office. At frequent intervals over a period of ten years they kept me supplied with documents, copies of documents, maps, reference books, etc., far too numerous to be listed in detail, without which I could not have begun my work, far less finished it.
It would not have been inappropriate to have followed the time-honoured practice of putting ladies first. Miss H. E. Peek, Keeper of the University Archives, kindly made available to me copies of the wills and probate inventories in her care, and her former assistant, Miss M. E. Raven, performed feats of weightlifting worthy of much more than this brief mention. Mrs D. Owen, Ely Diocesan Archivist at the University Library, saved me much time and gave herself no little trouble for me. Without her I should not have known of the volume of Overseers and Churchwardens’ Accounts which provided the material for a whole chapter of the book.
The chapter on the medieval village was made possible by courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, through the kind cooperation of Mr J. G. Camps and Philip Gaskell. To them, as to the Trustees of the British Museum, the Principal Probate Registry and the Historical Manuscripts Commission, I tender my warmest thanks.
I have had more good fortune than I deserved both as regards the nature and the timing of much of the help received. Dr Martin Henig, of the Oxford Institute of Archaeology, produced a masterly report on the Shepreth gem just at the moment when such encouragement was badly needed. My good friend Peter Layng supplied me with transcripts of Parish Registers when they were the very thing I wanted.
Then there are all those people in and around the village who tolerated, even encouraged, my prying and questioning. While thanking them all most heartily, I will mention but two: Mr Walter Stock, whose long memory was an invaluable asset, and Joe Cox, from whose photographs most of my sketches were made.
It is inevitable that a book like this, involving so much translation, transcription, deciphering and interpretation, should contain some errors. I hope that they are not too numerous or too noticeable, and accept the sole responsibility for them.
R. P.
Cottage on the Green
Foxton
April 1974
Introduction
This is a true story with a triple theme. First it tells of a brook or stream, ‘common’ in the sense that it is but one of a thousand such streams which spring from the folds of hills everywhere, and especially in the chalklands of East Anglia. This particular stream rises a few miles to the south-east of Royston and meanders gently on a mere ten-mile course to join the River Rhee. In order to find it today you would need a large-scale map, and you would need to know exactly where to look for it, because the stream has no name, nor ever had, other than ‘Brook’. Even the local inhabitants are for the most part unaware of its existence. And having found it, you also would have some doubts; for in places the stream has been filled in and it flows, if at all, in an underground pipe. In other places it is so overgrown with nettles and reeds and tall grasses that you might well fall into it before you knew that it was there. In yet other places, especially in a dry season, you could walk dryfoot along its bed for long stretches, as do the hares and pheasants. Only the willows mark its course with any real prominence, and even they, stricken by age and neglect, are fast disappearing; for no one, it seems, ever thinks of replanting a willow. How can such a miserable stream, such a symbol of neglect and decay, have significance enough to merit its role as one of the principal threads in my story?
Part of its significance lies in that very fact that it is a symbol of decay. Part lies in the very distant past, long before this story begins, when every spring of water and every stream born of those springs was the object of veneration by groups of primitive men who knew, as surely and instinctively as the birds and beasts still know, though most men have forgotten, that the water of those springs and streams was life itself. The unfailing flow of that precious commodity, over which man had no control, could only be the bounteous manifestation of a divine power, indeed the very abode of divinity itself. And so the mind of man peopled the springs and streams with spirits, nymphs, goddesses – always female, for the notion of fertility was inevitably linked with the perennial flow of water. Then later, when man ceased to wander and developed the art of living always in one place, that place was determined by one of those springs or streams. Every village, not just in East Anglia but all over the world, owed its original location in part at least to the proximity or availability of water. Nymphs and sprites faded into the background, only vaguely remembered if at all, and considerations of practical commonsense took their place.
As man became more and more settled, and needed to define the area of his settlement, practical considerations found another role for the stream. What better boundary-marker could there be? This aspect of the stream’s significance is invisible on the ground today, but clear enough on the map. To the ten miles of our particular stream we must add a further seven miles of contributary streams. Of that total of seventeen miles, well over half constitute either county boundary, between Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, or parish boundaries separating the parishes of Reed, Barley, Great Chishill, Melbourn, Thriplow, Fowlmere, Shepreth and Foxton. At about the same time as the stream acquired this secondary role, the word ‘common’ also acquired a second meaning. It became common in that it belonged to no one in particular, but to everyone in general – everyone, that is, in one particular community. It was in fact the only thing, other than air, sunshine and rain, which was really and truly ‘common’.
At least four of the villages listed above owe their existence to this one small stream-complex, and the account of the birth and growth of one of them, Foxton, is the second thread of my story. Rather more than a thread, it is a relatively wide and long expanse of tapestry. Long in that it extends over two thousand years. Wide in the sense that, though I may seem to tell only the story of one small village, I am in reality telling the story of many villages. All over East Anglia, the East Midlands, Central and Southern England – an area extending some eighty miles in all directions with Foxton at its geographical centre – there are hundreds and hundreds of villages. To tell the story of one is, in a way, to tell the story of them all. Of course they had, and still have, their differences and their individual characteristics. But the main stuff of which my tapestry is woven – early settlers, manors, serfdom, freemen, yeomen, buildings, crops, constables, enclosures, etc. – is common to them all. I might have chosen to illustrate my theme from the records of all the villages; had I done so I would have lost in depth and continuity what I gained in width. I might have tried to deal with a hundred villages in the same detailed manner as I have dealt with Foxton and its immediate neighbours; that would have entailed another hundred years or so of research, and I do not think I shall live that long. Moreover, the result would have been not one book but fifty, all very much alike. I chose to write about Foxton because I happen to live there; because, by pure chance, there is a remarkable wealth of documentary material available relating to Foxton; because unique archaeological opportunities in the immediate vicinity have presented themselves, again by pure chance. It so happened that, a few years ago, the River Rhee was properly dredged for the first time in its long history, and the dredger brought to light along with the mud enough relics of the past to fill a small museum. Not every villlage, of course, can boast a Roman villa, and my villa belongs geographically to Shepreth; but, as there were no parish boundaries when Roman villas were built, I have not hesitated to include it in my story. It was not chance which put the villa there; it was that same practical commonsense to which I have already alluded.
The third thread of my discourse which you will find – not always very obviously – interwoven with the others is again ‘the common stream’. Here I am using the phrase metaphorically. This is no chronicle of kings and prelates and nobles, though here and there brief mention will perforce be made of some of them. It is the story of the Common Man, of the ordinary men and women who in their countless thousands have trudged through life and then departed from it, leaving little visible trace. That little, multiplied a millionfold, constitutes a large slice of what we call our national heritage. We are all, with few exceptions, descended from those common men. We live in a land which is still largely what they made it – still largely so, despite recent efforts to alter much of it out of all recognition. Those efforts are however succeeding well enough to lend an atmosphere of urgency to a book like this, which seeks to record something of the past before that past wholly disappears. We have inherited the characteristics and temperaments which caused those common men to act as they did. Given the same circumstances, we would have done – would probably still do – what they did. We would almost certainly fail to do what they failed to do, without the knowledge born of their failures. Human nature does not change very much, if at all. You will not be straining imagination far, and I shall have succeeded in my task, if in reading the pages which follow, you sometimes get the impression that you are reading about yourself – or, let us say, about your neighbour.
I said earlier that my story was true. I say it again, with this qualification: there are some parts of my story which cannot be categorically stated to be either true or false. In the early chapters especially there are statements and descriptions which depend upon the accuracy of my interpretation of such evidence as is available. There are instances where the facts may be insufficient to warrant any definite opinion. Where this is the case, I hope I have made it clear. Where I have not written what actually did happen, I have written what I firmly believe, and have good reason to believe, could have happened. I trust that any professional historian who may chance to read this book, and whose opinions are at variance with mine, will forgive me when I plead as excuse that I am not writing ‘history’, but a story. That is why I have refrained from giving references for every statement which I make, or quoting the views of other writers in order to refute or confirm them. Where it seems desirable I have referred briefly to the sources of my information at the beginning of each chapter, but I have chosen not to clutter up the text with notes which the non-historian would probably not trouble to read or verify.
* * *
Ask one of the thousands of motorists who travel regularly along the A10 and he will tell you that Foxton is a level-crossing sandwiched between two garages half-way between Royston and Cambridge. Ask one of the residents or intending residents, and you will be told that Foxton is where they have built and are building all those new houses ‘just off the A10’. They are right; but ask me, and I will tell you something more. Get away from that traffic roaring along the main road; ignore the barricades of new houses confronting you at the north, east and west approaches – unless you want to buy one – and come with me to the heart of things. Leave your car and walk; otherwise you will be out of the village again in less than two minutes and you will say: ‘Yes, I know Foxton – a church and a pub and a few old houses. Very quaint. I love these old villages.’
It isn’t ‘quaint’, you know. It’s very ordinary really. Just half a mile ot street with houses strung out along it. But take a closer look. Sit for a while in the wooden shelter on the Green and look around; your gaze will take in five centuries of domestic architecture, and do it with pleasure, for this is the prettiest part of the village; one of the prettiest spots in England when the cherry-trees are in blossom. Let your mind wander back over those five centuries, and another five if you can manage it; you will have outstripped human memory, but not human presence. Within a stone’s throw of where you sit men have worked and played, bought and sold, drunk and laughed and cursed for those ten centuries and more. Look down the village street, past the conical brick cottage which was once a malthouse, past the Old Black Boy – a pub for two hundred years but a pub no longer – to cottages with whitened walls and roofs of thatch or moss-grown tiles. Then wander along that street. The new bungalows and houses do not clamour for your attention; each seems to know that it is only the latest in a long succession of houses on that self-same spot, and not the last. The south side of the street affords a view of fields on a chalky hillside. You have only to climb a gate to get into a grass field, though you have a fine view of the huge thatched barn without doing that.*
At the road junction you can take in at a glance the school, the chapel, the one and only pub, the post office-cum-shop, and the academic-looking building of the University Tutorial Press; no architectural merit here, just plain workaday utility. But beside you, and beyond along Station Road, are more thatched cottages. Those low broad eaves, leaning walls and squat square chimneys suggest ‘Tudor’ even to the uninitiated; and Tudor they are, more so even than the plain exterior suggests, for their real attraction is the timber framework visible only on the inside, and not always then. Farther on there are more, so obviously restored or in process of restoration that you suspect, rightly, that they are occupied by newcomers to the village, not by families whose forebears have lived here for generations. The church tower has been visible all the way along the street. The Bury (see illustration on p. 191) is not so easily noticed, and when you do see it you might not guess that an Elizabethan house stands hidden there. You would ask in vain for the ‘lord of the manor’, but you would see a room once used as court-room of the manor and cellars once full of manorial ale on a spot where once stood manorial halls.
Cross the road to the church. Everybody says it is a ‘pretty’ church, and everybody is right. Most village churches are pretty. This one looks all the prettier for being seen against a background of trees and green fields, and for having as near neighbour the village hall which is just about as plain as any building could be. The tombstones in the churchyard will tell you little beyond the names of several generations of recent Foxtonians. The elevation of the churchyard several feet above the surroundings will tell you that many more generations lie beneath your feet. Be as respectful as you may, you cannot tread one yard of ground outside this church, or inside for that matter, where mortal remains do not lie buried. The door is unlocked and visitors are expected, so do go in. The guidebook will give you all the information you need. Then let your imagination take over. Let it take you back through the centuries. I don’t mean the centuries of Decorated, Perpendicular, Early English and all that. I mean the centuries of people, parsons, priests, pilgrims – right back to pagans. Here around you is epitomised the life, the hope, the folly of a thousand years. No book that I might write could ever do as much for the sensitive mind as twenty minutes quiet contemplation in an ancient village church.
Out in the sunlight, look once more at the street of houses, the farms, the countryside beyond. That is the setting of the story which I am about to tell.
* unhappily destroyed by fire, 31 May 1974
Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, THOMAS GRAY, 1751
1
British Village and Roman Villa
The sluggish stream, fringed with reeds and decaying trees, creeps unobtrusively between overgrown spinneys, past derelict quarries and low-lying patches which still defy all efforts at cultivation. Apart from these latter, the land on either side bears crops of wheat, barley or sugarbeet which effectively hide all traces of former human habitation. Except in the autumn, when the land has been ploughed and harrowed in readiness for the next crop. Then you may see here and there, if you keep your eyes turned towards the brown pebble-strewn earth, fragments of pottery or red tile, an oyster-shell, a patch of lighter soil strewn with larger flints. It was the discovery of half a Roman roof-tile on the surface in the spring of 1968 which aroused my curiosity and started me on a trail of exploration which led, after much digging in that gravelly soil and much delving into rumours and reports, to the discovery of a Roman villa and a British village.
Before beginning the story, I want you to look at the map overleaf (p. 19) which will show you more clearly where we are, what is there now, and what was there two thousand years ago. The shaded area along the course of the Brook indicates that here it was really an elongated mere, a quarter of a mile wide at the widest point, and easily fordable at the narrowest. The black dots indicate the location of hut-sites. There is no point in trying to count them, for the representation is only diagrammatic. There are in fact more than a hundred sites, all of which may not denote huts; some could have been threshing-floors or buildings other than dwellings. It was obviously not possible to excavate them all, and some of them do not show on the surface. It is quite probable that many more sites have been obliterated by the spinney, the quarries and the railway. The spot marked A is where grain-storage pits were found in about 1885. The spot marked B is where the burial-ground was found and partially explored in 1895 and 1903. Grain-pits and burials had all disappeared by 1910, swallowed by the advancing quarries, two huge pits which are now flooded. The ancient way shown running from the ford southwards through the village was still shown as a road on the Enclosure Map of 1823, leading from nowhere to nowhere. With that in the background of your mind, let us slip back in time two thousand years or so.
* * *
For longer than any of them could remember, the people had lived by the Brook, and if you had asked them who they were and whence they came it is unlikely that they could have told you. Many years before, their ancestors had lived in the northern part of what we now call Belgium. They had crossed the narrow sea, not unwillingly, though no doubt under a certain degree of compulsion in the form of stronger tribes and diminishing crops, to find a home in this fertile valley of light rich soil. They doubtless had a tribal name, but it matters as little to us now as, I imagine, it mattered to them then. In the days of migration they must have had a leader, one chosen for his wisdom in planning a move and for his skill and courage in carrying it out. Now their headman was probably chosen rather for his experience in rearing cattle and organising the growing of crops than for his courage. No more wandering for them. Here was water; here was pasture in plenty for their oxen, sheep and pigs; here they could grow wheat, barley and rye enough to feed themselves and fatten their livestock. The pools and meres were well stocked with fish and eels, easy to catch with nets in the clear spaces or with traps where the reeds made nets unusable. Those reeds, though a restriction on their fishing activities, were one of the many assets of the site, for they provided a plentiful supply of material with which to build the huts strung out along the Brook.
Map showing the British village and Roman villa
Moreover, they harboured many waterfowl, especially in winter. The motionless figure crouching knee-deep in cold mud for hours at a time considered his patient vigil amply rewarded if a lucky shot with sling and stone added a heron or a duck to the family larder, for meat was scarce in winter. They could live here by this brook, these people, for ever – or for as long as others let them live.
Not that there was any real threat to their security of tenure, so far as they could see. Some years ago, when it was rumoured that more peoples had come across the sea and were seeking land on which to settle, it had been suggested that they ought to make a ditch to protect themselves and their animals. The ditch had in fact been started, but was soon abandoned because there seemed to be no real need for it. Their neighbours to east and west were people like themselves, with undefended villages strung out along brooks exactly as was theirs. To the south of them there was ample space as far as the great mere (which, centuries later, was to be called, as they no doubt called it in their language, Fowlmere). To the north of them was the river, beyond which, as far as they were concerned, nothing really mattered. Across the river lived another group of settlers, a clan somewhat larger and therefore more powerful than their own. Although they spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods and lived in precisely the same way as the peoples south of the river, these People-beyond-the-river were so different that the only way to maintain amicable relations with them was to keep at a distance and give in to any demands which they might make. They, the People-beyond-the-river, evidently feared the attack of an enemy, for they lived in a village surrounded by a ditch and palisade. And since no enemy ever appeared from the woodlands on the higher ground behind the village, these people, determined that they should have enemies, chose to vent their spite on the peaceful People of the Brook. Not content with their own side of the river, they laid claim to a stretch of land on the south side, where they pastured their animals and reaped a crop of hay every year.
The Brook People, having no alternative, tolerated this violation of their territory. Likewise they were more curious than resentful when the other people used the south side of the river for their burial-ground. What did come near to rousing them to protest was the discovery that the People-beyond-the-river, instead of burying their dead decently in the chalk like every sensible clan, made a practice of burning their dead on a great fire of wood, and putting the ashes in pots, which they then buried. This wasteful practice, it seemed, only applied to the richer and more important members of the clan; and the richer a man was when alive, the bigger and better the pot in which his remains were buried. The Brook People came to this conclusion after digging up as many of the pots as they could find in the dark. Of course the People-beyond-the-river soon discovered what was going on, and they put an abrupt stop to the pot-stealing by breaking the pots at the time of burial and placing them inside larger pots, likewise rendered unusable. If you will glance again for a moment at the map you will see a spot marked C, not far from the river and the ford. It was here that in 1852 one of these burials was accidentally discovered by a farmer while ploughing. The rare and attractive Arretine* Bowl, found fragmented inside an amphora, was reconstructed and is now in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Whether the Brook People belonged to the federation of tribes which we call the Iceni, or to the Trinovantes, or to some other group, I cannot say, not knowing where the tribal boundaries were, if there were any. They themselves were probably equally uncertain on this point, simply paying tribute when it was demanded either in the form of corn or cattle or young men to serve in the army of whichever tribal ‘king’ happened to be the most aggressive at the moment. There is reason to believe from what little is known of the political situation in England before the coming of the Romans that our People of the Brook lived through a period of anxiety as a result of the aggressive expansion of the group of Belgic tribes called Catuvellauni to the southwest of them. The People-beyond-the-river may well have formed part of one of these hostile tribes.
When the Roman army of Julius Caesar defeated the Belgic chieftain Cassivelaunus and destroyed his stronghold at Wheathampstead our People probably enjoyed about two generations of relative peace and prosperity. There is evidence to show that, after the events of 55 and 54BC, and perhaps because of those events, their mode of living was markedly influenced by trading contacts with Gaul and the rest of the Roman Empire. One of the principal items of commerce imported into the country seems to have been pottery. This impression may be distorted by the fact that pottery is almost indestructible; broken fragments survive when most other materials perish. It is nevertheless clear that much pottery was imported, and that the pots were bigger and better than those which the British had been making and using.
One effect of this was the abandoning by the People of their age-old practice of storing their grain in pits dug in the chalk, a method of storage which can never have been really satisfactory. Even though the grain was part-roasted to prevent germination, it would still have gone mouldy after the same pit had been in use for a few years, a fact borne out by the large numbers of these grain-pits which have been found. It may be, of course, that partly-germinated, slightly mouldy grain was what was needed to make the kind of drink which best suited British palates. Some such brew will figure in our story for a very long time. But bread was needed as well as beer, and the storage of grain in large earthenware jars was an undoubted improvement on the old method; it was still in use some thirteen hundred years later. The People continued to use their rough locally made pots, of course, but it would seem that they preferred the better, imported wares when they could get them.
It has been suggested that they were introduced to a heavier and more efficient type of plough at about this time. The evidence for this however is slight, and on these light soils they would have been able to manage well enough with the wooden contraption, little more than a suitable crooked branch fitted with an iron point – perhaps even without an iron point – which they had always used. Hones for sharpening knives and sickles, and circular querns for grinding corn, were certainly imported from across the Channel and used by our People, for numerous fragments of such articles were found on the site of their village.
So well established was the contact with the Roman world that when, in AD43, a Roman army again invaded Britain, many of the Celtic population in the south-east actually welcomed the invaders, possibly feeling that they had less to fear from them than from their own turbulent neighbours and racial kinsmen. Such opposition as there was, led by Caractacus, one of the sons of old King Cunobelinus, was rapidly overcome, and Colchester became the capital of a Roman province. Within a few months the People of the Brook would be made aware of their new status as subjects of the Emperor. What that meant in effect was that from then on they would pay their tribute of corn, hides and wool to the agents of the Roman Governor, and their young men would be liable for enlistment in the auxiliary units of the Roman army. It might also have meant that a quota of their womenfolk was demanded for service as slaves; but if that were so, it was not a Roman innovation. Any memory which may have lingered on as to their tribal origin and allegiance could now be allowed to lapse, for tribal hostilities were a thing of the past. Having been conquered, the People ran no risk of being attacked by anybody, and it seems reasonable to suppose that in the early days of the Province the Roman soldiers aroused more admiration than fear in the native inhabitants.
We know of course that there were some who were not content with their new masters, and that many of them fled westwards into regions where resistance presented fewer risks. The others stayed where they were and continued to till their lands. When the Governor Ostorius ordered the disarming of all the natives in the Province it seems that there was a fair measure of compliance with the order. Our People most probably had nothing but sickles and knives in any case, to which the order did not apply. The Iceni however, living in the territory to the north-east, resented the order to disarm. Instead of handing in their weapons they used them in an attempt at revolt, a rash gesture which involved them in a crushing military defeat. The site of the battle, if it could be called a battle, is not known, but it was probably near enough to the People of the Brook for them to hear about it at first hand, perhaps to see some of the wounded who fled the slaughter. They can hardly have known that they were witnessing the opening scene of a tragedy which was to wreck their own lives.
Peace was quickly restored and life went on as before. The People probably saw little of the Romans, though some of them may have participated compulsorily in the construction of the great new road a few miles to the west of the village. This road, straight as a spear, came from the south and led to the north for such distances in both directions as the People had no need or wish to travel. Whether it interested them or not, however, they must have been forced to admit that it was a great improvement on the numerous tracks which traversed their area and had served as roads until that time, and which indeed were to serve as roads for many centuries yet to come.
Soon after this the sight of Roman soldiers must have been even rarer, for the bulk of the army was campaigning in the west, far beyond the boundary of the Province. Before setting out on his campaign Ostorius inaugurated a measure which was to prove of great interest to the People. Many of the soldiers had by this time completed their twenty-five years of service and were due for discharge. Rather than return to their homes – if they had any ‘home’ after marching all over Europe for the best part of their lives – many of them chose, or were ordered, to stay in Britannia. Some had no doubt taken British wives; others probably intended or hoped to do so.
The Governor, while needing every available man in his army, also needed to leave behind in the Province a nucleus of trained men in case further trouble should break out. So he established what was called a colonia, based on and administered from Colchester. To each time-expired veteran was allotted a plot of land in the vicinity of the capital, where the old soldiers could become new farmers. The officers naturally expected something on a grander scale, and their gratuities took the form of quite considerable grants of land, which were obtained by the simple expedient of taking land from the British. The size of these officers’ holdings meant that they could not be concentrated near the capital, as was the colonia, and that they would be widely scattered over the whole Province, even in the remotest parts.
That obvious fact, and the evidence brought to light by excavation recently on the site of the village, justifies the use of a certain amount of imagination in reconstructing the events of the year AD48 (or thereabouts) in one of those remote parts of the Province. We cannot know all the facts, and must therefore make some assumptions based on the facts which we do know. We may safely assume, for instance, that the People of the Brook received a visit from a small party of officials, in the course of which visit they learnt that a portion of their land had been granted to an ex-officer of the Roman army; learnt also, no doubt, the serious consequences which would follow any attempt to thwart or hinder the settlement of that ex-officer. Likewise we may assume, with near certainty in this instance, the arrival soon afterwards of a team of workmen with cartloads of bricks, tiles and sawn timber, things which the villagers had never seen before.
Any resentment which had been caused by the first visit, or kindled since that visit, would, I feel sure, have given way to an excited curiosity as a result of the second visit. Soon the villagers would have been busy collecting large flints and stones from the surrounding fields, while others dug loads of grey clunch from the pits a short distance to the north-west. Whether they were paid for the work or not I cannot say; if so, they must have taken good care of the coins which they received, for not one seems to have been lost – at least, not one has yet been found. Perhaps they were used to make bracelets or necklaces. Payment, if any, may have been made in kind. The villagers may have been conscripted for the work and kept at it with the aid of whips, though I cannot believe that that was so. I cannot imagine a man taking up residence in a spot such as this, at a time like that, without the friendly cooperation of the native populace. Coercion would have entailed the presence of an armed guard. There could not have been sufficient armed men available to watch over the construction of every villa in the Province, or to ensure their protection when once built. All the known facts of the circumstances point to a considerable degree of collaboration.
Moreover, I would say that the collaboration was facilitated in no small measure by the novelty of the whole affair. The villagers would be fascinated as they watched the mortar being made, the timbers being cut to shape and fitted together on the solid foundations of flints and cement. The bags of iron nails must have aroused their cupidity, and several must have been stolen to be converted into knives. Before their wondering gaze the walls of the villa rose to a height hitherto unconceived of for house walls. Then the rafters were fixed into position with those tantalising nails, and the tiles laid on them. It was probably at this stage of the operation that wonder and admiration began to give way to doubt in the minds of some of the spectators as to the wisdom of the Roman responsible for all this novelty. To place heavy slabs of baked clay like that in a position from which they might fall on a man’s head was surely tempting providence? And, surely, things like that could not keep out the wind and the rain as did branches covered with a thick layer of rushes and turf? They could not know that some sixteen hundred years were to elapse before ever a roof was to be built like that again in this locality – and then not nearly so weather-proof as that roof was when finished.
Some of the villagers, I think, were not content to be mere spectators, but participated to a degree beyond that required by the master’s orders, learning how to mix mortar, how to make plaster, perhaps even to handle hammer and saw, tools quite new in their experience. Few, if any, of them can have learnt the art of applying the plaster to the walls, and fewer still the art of mixing the bright colours – red, white, blue, green and yellow – with which the plaster was decorated; though it is fairly certain that at least one of them did do so. As for the making of the floors, I doubt whether even one of them learnt how to set those thousands of one-inch cubes of sandstone in a bed of cement, or saw it done. Much later – some two hundred years later – native craftsmen did learn the art of making mosaic floors, but at this early stage the skilled craftsmen were all imported from overseas.
Reconstruction of the Roman villa
The villa was at last completed, along with stables, barn and outhouses, including a little shed with a cobbled floor in the garden where the master, once installed, took a bath every day. Perhaps not every day, but certainly with considerable frequency. When the villagers learnt of this strange habit, as they no doubt soon did from one of his household staff, it must have confirmed the doubts which had arisen earlier in their minds as to his sanity. True, there was no lack of water in the Brook, but to use it for such a purpose as that was unheard of.
Further evidence of this Roman’s eccentricity was provided when, perhaps before the completion of the villa – if not before, then certainly very soon after it – he ordered all the native huts situated west of the villa to be removed and all those east of the villa to be rebuilt in straight lines on a rectangular grid pattern. I can only presume that it was done on Roman orders. No British village such as this, to my knowledge, has ever been discovered which was not closely associated with a Roman villa, and only about four such exist. Others have no doubt yet to be discovered. The rectangular grid layout was a peculiarly Roman and military idea. As for the removal of the huts from the west to the east of the villa – a task of no great difficulty which could be accomplished in a couple of days or so – I think the simple explanation for it is that the prevailing winds blew mainly from west to east and the Roman ex-officer was more sensitive to the smell of the peasants’ huts than they were themselves.
Apart from that aspect of nicety, it is a fact, which even the most churlish of peasants must have soon admitted, that the novel geometrical arrangement did make movement about the village easier for man and beast, reduced the risk of many huts being burnt down when one caught fire, and gave everyone an equal share of space. Some of the villagers evidently took advantage of the enforced move to build for themselves a new type of hut, rectangular instead of round, with low walls of flints set in mud. A few even tried their hand at making mortar, though not with any lasting success – only one instance was found where the mortar was still recognisably mortar when excavated.
I can only guess as to the basis on which the villa estate was organised, for such matters leave no traces on or in the ground, but I am strongly tempted to see it as the forerunner of what later came to be called the ‘manorial’ system. It is, I think, fairly certain that the Roman master would have a number of slaves in full-time service, and that he would be able to call upon some, perhaps all, of the villagers for certain seasonal tasks such as ploughing, haymaking and harvesting. His domain of perhaps three or four hundred acres would, I imagine, include several compact blocks of arable land and a large stretch of pasture. Some of the pasture he might share in common with the villagers; some – the best parts, no doubt – he might fence off for the exclusive use of his own stock. All that is speculation. What I do know for certain about his farming is that he kept oxen, pigs, sheep and chickens, and that like the peasants he grew corn, some of which was ground to make flour.
About the man himself, little of course can be said with any degree of certainty except that he was an ex-officer. That, I think, is quite certain. That being so, he would be past middle age and fairly well-off. I think he was married – there was certainly a woman on the premises, for many of the pots found were clearly part of a lady’s toiletry outfit. It would be only natural and in accord with commonsense that a man in that situation should have a wife, though whether she was British or Roman of course I cannot say. There would be no social degradation for the Roman in having a British wife, but it would undoubtedly be something of an honour for her to have a Roman husband of such status. Although the wife of a farmer, and as such far removed from a life of luxury and idleness, she would have slaves to command and would enjoy comforts unknown in a normal British household, such as a well-equipped kitchen and a good supply of tableware, including some fine glass. To live and work in a house with tiled floors, glass windows and locks on the doors must have been ample compensation for any disadvantages there may have been.
I do not think that they had any children. Children have playthings which get broken and left lying about; none were found. I think that the ex-officer wanted children, or at least a son. That may seem like a wild supposition. It may be; but, if well founded, it would explain the extraordinary number of oyster-shells found on the site. All Romans, it seems, ate oysters, partly no doubt because they liked them, but also because they believed that oysters promoted virility and fertility. Any Roman site provides a fair yield of oyster-shells; few sites can rival this both for the quantity and quality of its shells. If my calculations are correct, an average of two dozen oysters were consumed here each week for about eleven successive seasons, and there was at least one occasion when three dozen were eaten at one session. Seventy-two shells were found all together in the remains of a wooden pail which had been thrown or left standing just outside the kitchen-door. Among them was a small unopened oyster and a broken bronze lock-bolt which had clearly been used as an oyster-opener.
These oysters would almost certainly have been brought from Colchester by an itinerant trader who did the rounds of all the villas in a particular area, carrying his wares in large vessels or skins filled with brine. They might have been specially sent from Colchester by a former colleague of the officer. The only other thing we know, or can safely assume, about that officer is that, in common with most military men, he had a hearty thirst. Whether his taste was for wine or for home-brewed ale is not certain. Wine, I should say, for many fragments of amphorae were found, and a dozen flagons. One of these latter was almost intact when found, one other was capable of complete reconstruction and is a beautiful object, while two others, each with a capacity of nearly two and a half gallons, are the largest I have ever seen.
Of all the clues unearthed from the villa area and rubbish-pits to throw light on this Roman and his way of life, none can compete in interest and fascination with one small object found in the final stages of excavation at the bottom of a pit in a layer of black slime four feet below the surface. This is an oval seal-stone of sardonyx, with an intaglio image of Eros on its convex surface. Dr Martin Henig, of the Oxford Institute of Archaeology, who reported on it officially, has said of it: ‘It is one of the best gems, if not the best, ever to have been found in Britain.’ It certainly is of rare beauty and exquisite craftsmanship, and must at one time have belonged to a very wealthy man, possibly even to the Emperor himself. Tiberius, according to the historian Seneca, was wearing such a gem on his finger at the moment of his death. Seneca presumably had some reason for noticing and recording such a detail; he also had a financial stake in the exploitation of Britain. The symbolic significance of the intaglio image – Eros was the personification of the loveliness of young men and boys – accords well with the known tastes and character of Tiberius and other eminent Romans. One can only speculate as to the origin and history of this gem. The discovery of it is clear enough; how it came to be where it was found is also reasonably clear; the rest remains in intriguing obscurity.*
* * *
The months lengthened into years. Each year brought its round of ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, threshing. Each year brought its crop of lambs, calves, piglets, chicks. Life was normal, therefore good. The villagers, we may suppose, had adapted themselves to their foreign master and his ways, and found some advantage in his presence. The Province was peaceful. Or so it seemed.
Then one day in early spring, in the seventh year of the Emperor Nero’s reign, the trouble which for years had been smouldering beneath the surface of affairs broke out into the open. Once again the point of eruption was in the land of the Iceni. Their king, Prasutagus, who had recently died, had been a loyal ally of Rome. As a reward for this loyalty, despite the unfortunate incident of the revolt over banned weapons some ten years before, or perhaps because of his role in that affair, he had been allowed to retain his independent status, nominally at least. Now the imperial policy had changed, and it was decreed that there should be no more client kingdoms within the Empire. The so-called kingdom of the Iceni was to be henceforth part of the Province of Britannia. The emissaries of the Roman Procurator, sent from Colchester to put the imperial edict into effect, carried out their orders in an unwarrantably high-handed fashion which provoked Queen Boudicca to indignant protest at the confiscation of the royal property and estates. Roman arrogance was followed by outrage. The queen was flogged and her daughters violated. Protesting Icenian nobles received similarly harsh treatment. Indignation rapidly flared into revolt.
