A History of Lancashire. Fishwick Henry
in towns and villages. Probably in his time arose the forts at Mancunium (Manchester), Bremetonacæ (Ribchester), and Galacum (Overborough).
After the middle of the second century, the Brigantes as a tribe disappear from the page of history; henceforth they are Britons.
The Hadrian Wall, which stretches for seventy miles from the Solway Firth to the Tyne, nowhere touches Lancashire, but the frequent battles which raged in its vicinity were near enough to have an effect upon the district, and no doubt occasionally the invading forces from the North penetrated into the county. The Caledonians, in A.D. 180, broke through the wall, and for some time remained masters of a considerable portion of the North of England.12 In A.D. 208 the Emperor Severus, with his sons Caracalla and Geta, visited Britain, and sent some of his soldiers to the North, as he found that the inhabitants of what is now Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumberland had not yet become reconciled to the Roman government, and, to add to the difficulty, the people on the other side of the Hadrian Wall – the Picts and Scots – required repression.
Severus died at York in 211, and for the next fifty years little is known of the Roman rule in Britain beyond the fact that the names of several legates, who acted as its governors, are on record. Between A.D. 258 and 282 the historians are also silent about this district, yet coins of Posthumus, Victorinus and Tetricus (three of the usurpers known as the “Thirty Tyrants”) have been found in various parts of Northumbria which are now known as Lancashire. In A.D. 282 the Emperor Carus gave the island of Britain to his son Carinus, who was murdered in the year following. Passing over the next two Emperors, we find Carausius has the government of Britain ceded to him, and whilst on a visit to the Brigantes’ district he was assassinated at York, A.D. 293, by his minister, Allectus, who at once usurped the purple in Britain; but not being acknowledged, a powerful force was sent against him from Rome, which met him not far from London, and in the engagement which followed he was slain and his army defeated. In the beginning of the next century, the Emperor Constantius Chlorus undertook an expedition against the Scots, and for that purpose appears to have made York his headquarters; he died in that city on July 25, A.D. 306, and his son Constantine was at once proclaimed Emperor by the garrison there stationed. The exact date of the introduction of the Christian religion into Lancashire is unknown, but we know that in 303 the Emperor Diocletian persecuted the followers of the new religion in Britain, and that the first recorded British martyr, St. Alban, died in 304 near the city which bears his name. Great must have been the change in the aspect of religious thought which, in 311, led to the conversion of Constantine the Great. This illustrious Emperor had no doubt a powerful influence over spiritual affairs in Lancashire, although the latter part of his life was not spent in Britain; he died in A.D. 337. The latter half of the century witnessed the beginning of the decline of the Roman power; the supposed unpassable Hadrian Wall was not enough to keep back the Northern warlike tribes, who, making their way through it, soon became masters of the district near its southern side, and by A.D. 368 the invaders had even reached the metropolis.
At this time was sent to Britain a great general, Theodosius, who, with a large army, drove back the Picts and Scots to the north of the Clyde; he also restored and rebuilt many of the towns and fortresses, and to him is attributed the naming of the province of Valentia, which is comprised between Solway Firth and the Tyne, and the Clyde and the Firth of Forth. All this, however, did not prevent the Picts, Scots, and Saxon pirates from re–entering the country as soon as the Roman legions were withdrawn, their services being required elsewhere. Rome, in fact, at this time was fast declining in power, and by the year 410 she had been obliged to call all her troops away from Britain, and Honorius had proclaimed Britain to be an independent state – in other words, the Romans left the country either because they could not any longer retain it, or they did not consider it worth the great drain upon their resources which it must have been.
The so–called independence which followed was so disastrous that the Britons found the last state worse than the first, and entreated their former rulers to assist them in repelling the foes they themselves were unable to overcome. They wrote: “The barbarians chase us into the sea, the sea flings us back on the barbarians; the only choice left us is to die by the sword or by the waves.”
The appeal was in vain, and the wretched Britons were left to their own resources. That they were disorganized and without leaders will easily be understood, and to this must be added that for years the best of the youths had been trained as recruits and drafted off to the Continent, from whence very few returned; and then, again, the inhabitants, especially in the North (including Lancashire), must have been dreadfully reduced by the ravages continually made by the Picts and Scots. Thus it was that Lancashire, with the rest of the country, became an easy prey, first to the marauding foes from the North, and afterwards to those races which ultimately became the makers of England.
It is curious to notice the Roman influence on traditions still common in modern Lancashire – the beating of parish bounds recalls the Roman Terminalia in honour of the god of limits and boundaries; May Day is the festival of Flora; the marriage–ring, the veil, the wedding gifts, and even the cake, are all Roman. Our funeral customs are also Roman – the cypress and the yew, the sprinkling of dust on the coffin, the flowers on the grave, and the black clothes.13
CHAPTER IV
ROMAN REMAINS
The history of Roman Lancashire has so recently been published14 that, even if our space would allow (which it will not), it would be unnecessary, in a work of this description, either to furnish too much detail, or to dwell too long on the vexed questions of the subject which have not even yet been settled.
When the Romans invaded Lancashire, one of their chief difficulties was the want of roads, which rendered many parts of the district almost untenable, and to remedy this state of things, one of their first acts after conquest must have been to construct a way by which access could easily be gained to the newly–acquired territory. As everyone knows, the Romans were skilful in all kinds of engineering work, and as road–makers they have never been excelled; so durable were their pavements that we find remains of them still in all parts of the country. Up hill and down dale they went, from point to point, nearly always in a straight line – if a bog was in the way it was filled up; if a mountain, it was crossed. Taking these roads as they are now acknowledged by antiquaries to have run, and following alone their route, we shall come across the chief remains which time has left of our conquerors and rulers.
The main Roman roads in Lancashire are all believed to have been constructed during the Higher Empire; that is, at or before the time of Hadrian (A.D. 117–128). The minor roads are of later and uncertain date.
Of the nine towns which became Roman coloniæ, the nearest to Lancashire were Eboracum (York), and Deva (Chester), but Mancunium (Manchester) was also a great military centre, and from it there were five Roman roads.15 Two of these came from the Cheshire side of the Mersey, one passing through Stretford, and the other through Stockport to Buxton.
All trace of the road from Manchester to Stretford has disappeared, but its course ran through Cornbrook (near which it was cut through by the Bridgewater Canal) and by the botanical gardens to Crossford Bridge, on the Mersey. A few small remains have from time to time been found at Stretford, but scarcely sufficient to justify the idea that here was a Roman camp.16 On the Stockport side of the Mersey we have traces of the road to Buxton, but on the Lancashire side its site is covered by the modern highway, part of which is still known as High Street.
Another of the approaches to Manchester was from the east. This also only for a short distance was on Lancashire soil. It came from Yorkshire, and, passing through Glodwick and Hollinwood, in the parish of Oldham, skirts the township of Failsworth, where at the end of the last century it was visible for upwards of a mile, and was commonly known as the “Street,” or “Street Lane.”17 At Newton Heath traces of it were seen in 1857, and Whitaker saw remains of it in Ancoats and Ardwick.
In making the Oldham Park, a number of copper coins from
Xiphiline’s abridgment of Dion Cassius. It may be well here to state my general indebtedness to the late W. Thompson Watkin’s “Roman Lancashire”; Liverpool, 1883.
E. Sanderson, “Hist. of England,” p. 19.
“Roman Lancashire,” W. Thompson Watkin; Liverpool, 1883.
There are also traces of two other supposed Roman roads.
Whitaker’s “History of Manchester,” 1771.