CITY OF KING CYMBELINE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 158, 4 June 1935, Page 2

CITY OF KING CYMBELINE.

COLCHESTER IN THE CENTURIES. _ FlA r E YEARS’ EXCAVATION. " The Society of Antiquaries lias received at Burlington iiouse (London) tlie official report, on Uve seasons’ excavation at colciiester. ihe loiiowing are extracts lrom an article by rur Uiiristopner Hawkes. The town oi Coienester has? long been renowned in British history. The Elizabethan Camden lound that “tlie inhabitants” actually •‘claim lor their townswoman Helena, tiie mother of Constantine tlie Great, daughter of King Coer’; and tlie espousal by tlie Caesar Uonstantius ot the Christian child of the nursery rhyme hero, with his pipe, howl, and ‘Tiddlers three,” is sun a iavounte subject of citizen pageantry.

The underlying instinct of pride in Colchester’s past is a suro one. As its name alone would warn us, tlie town is far older than the coming of the men of Essex, older, indeed, , than Helena. The first foundation on the present site was the Roman colony established, as Tacitus records, by the governor Ostorius Scapula about A.D. 60, the eighth year of the imperial conquest or Britain. But the story of Colchester begins even heiore the coming of Rome. The colony’s official name, in honour of tlie conquering Emperor, was Colonia Claudia 1 V ictricensis, and the Italian inscription which tells us this goes on to state tiiat it is “in Britain, at Camulodunuin.” Here in fact we have, Latinised, the place’s native British name, and lrom Die historian of the conquest we know that Camulodunum was the capital of the native dynasty of the great king Cunobelin, who achieved suzerainty over the whole of South-Eastern Britain in the first 40 years of the first century A.D., and is of course the Cymbeline of Shakespeare. Camulodunuin in the days of the Belgic princes of Britain was a centre of wealthy native civilisation in close contact with tiie Roman world. DYKE DEFENCES. Yet the site of the British city remained unexplored up to 1930. An excavating party lias now been kept in the field for five summers without interruption, and a brief review is possible ot the results, which are to iurm the first instalment of the full publication. First of all, tlie great dykes have been accurately surveyed, with the assistance ot aerial photography and trial digging has confirmed the suspicion that they are the genuine defences of Cunobelin’s city. Next and most important, the Shcepen Farm area has been conclusively identified as the site of the city itself, and a fourth dyke, invisible alike on the ground and from the air, lias been discovered by excavation to run from tlie low ground by the Colne for as much as half a mile right over the hill. It has been named the Slieepen Dyke, and defends the main occupied area, on, roughly, the same alignment as its fellow at Lexden. Its ditch is some 30ft wide and lift deep, and the primary silting lias yielded a series, in some places extremely rich, of pottery and Other relics of the half-century before the Roman conquest. There is nothing as yet to compare • with the regular groundplan of 'a Roman building, and it is rather in the abundance and variety of the pottery and small objects recovered that the material civilisation of the inhabitants can be measured at its highest. The glazed pottery of Italy and South Gaul, and the black, red, and buff wares of the Bclgic Province and the Rhineland were in use among all classes, together with metalwork likewise imported ; the material “Ronianisation” of Roman Britain had here begun well before the military conquest, and as elsewhere in the Empire the path of the legions was very evidently opened first by trade. An important result of this is that, by correlation with the material obtained on Continental sites, close datings for the deposits can he established. The second phase in the site’s history must he the direct sequel to the Roman conquest; not only was a part of the Lexden Dyke “slighted” (next the entrance partly explored in 1932), but the whole of the Shcepen Dyke and its flanking works was levelled to the ground, the rampart being thrown back into the ditch together with much material to date the event. The place now perhaps served as a depot for the army campaigning in the Midlands, and there are indications that it also served the builders of the new Colonia near by. QUEEN BOADICEA. This period takes ns into the reign of Nero, as the abundant yield of datable material makes clear; it was succeeded by a widespread fire. It is tempting* to assign this to the rebel tribesmen of Queen Boudicca, who swept down on Camulodunuin in A.D. 61, the more so as a large Roman force seems to have camped on the ruined site very soon afterwards. AVitli the rebuilding of the Roman colony in tlie following years the old site was at last deserted,* though interest returns to one quarter of it with the establishment, alter the middle of the second century, of the kilns where the manufacture (unique m Britain) of “Samian” as well as other potteiy and tiles was revealed in 1933. The period of Cunobelin s rule remains naturally the most important; and the committee are now preparing to put Air AI. R.. Hull, curator of the Colchester and Essex Museum, into the field for a second series of campaigns, with the object of exploring the central area of the British city.