Through East Anglia in a Motor Car. James Edmund Vincent
facts must be borne in mind. County divisions are, of course, long Post-Roman; they have no meaning in relation to Roman Britain, which was simply a remote and not very important province of the Empire. By the end of the year a.d. 46 the Romans had overrun the south and the Midlands of England, annexing part entirely, leaving the rest to "protected" native princes. Such were the princes of the Iceni, who occupied Norfolk, most of Suffolk, and part of Cambridgeshire, and, for inter-tribal reasons, took the side of the conquerors at the outset. The Iceni rebelled twice. The first effort was puny; they were defeated, and they returned to their native princes. Then, in a.d. 61, came the affair of Boudicca, better known as Boadicea, "the British warrior queen," and so forth. It is quite an interesting little story, of which our poetic dramatists might easily have made use, and it is told shortly because, judging from personal experience, the details may not be generally familiar. Besides they are essential to an understanding of East Anglia as a field for the "prospector," so to speak, on the look-out for Roman "finds," and to know of how little account East Anglia was under the Romans is to understand the more easily why many so-called Roman remains are really not Roman at all.
The Icenian "Prince Prasutagus, dying, had bequeathed his private wealth to his two daughters and the Emperor Nero. Such was the fashion of the time—to satiate a greedy Emperor with a heavy legacy lest he should confiscate the whole fortune. Prasutagus hoped thus to save his kingdom for his family as well as a part of his private wealth. He did not succeed: the Roman Government stepped in and annexed his kingdom, while its officials emphasized the loss of freedom by acts of avarice, bad faith, and brutality against Boudicca (Boadicea), the widow of Prasutagus, her daughters, and the Icenian nobles." All this happened when the Roman Governor was away fighting in North Wales, and his absence enabled the rebellion, which Boadicea immediately headed, to gain temporary and very substantial success. Her Icenian warriors destroyed a whole Roman army, three Roman towns, and seventy thousand lives. Then Suetonius came with his trained legionaries; a single great battle destroyed the Icenian power for ever, and their whole country was laid waste. We hear no more of the Iceni in history. Their sometime territory, of little agricultural value in those days, simply became a part of the province, thinly populated, having a few country towns and villas, centres of large estates. In it we have no reason to look for traces of large military stations of early Roman date for, as we have seen, the Iceni were wiped out of existence in a.d. 61; and, after Hadrian built his wall from Carlisle to Newcastle in a.d. 124, the frontier, on which Rome always kept her soldiery, was never to the south of that wall. Some military stations there are of later date, fourth century, which were erected for the specific purpose of beating off the Saxon pirates (hence, and hence only, the phrase "the Saxon Shore") who began to raid the southern and eastern coasts of England, running up the rivers in their vessels of shallow draft. Such were Brancaster, guarding the mouth of the Wash, and Burgh Castle defending the outlets of the Waveney and the Yare, and with them we shall deal later, in their place.
As for the roads they all radiated from London, as indeed they do still in large measure. One passed direct from London to Colchester and thence, viâ Stratford St. Mary and Long Stratton and Scole, to Caistor-by-Norwich. Such names as Stratford and Stratton, unless shown to be of modern origin, are strong evidence of Roman occupation, and at Scole, where the road crosses the Waveney and enters Norfolk, have been found some Roman remains and, perhaps, traces of a paved ford. That is the road on which we are now travelling. Caistor-by-Norwich, where we should not have seen much if we had halted—that is the worst of these Roman remains—is in all human probability Venta Icenorum, concerning the situation of which debate used to be carried on vehemently. What we might have seen is a rectangular enclosure of earthen mounds covering massive walls, having bonding tiles and flint facing to a concrete core, the walls themselves being visible on the north and west, and a great fosse surrounding the whole. Its area is about thirty-four acres, and there were towers at each corner. A careful analysis of the evidence leads to the sure conclusion that this was a small country town and not a great military fortress.
This particular road crossed the Ipswich river a few miles to the north-west of Ipswich, and a branch from it ran by way of Goodenham to Peasenhall. Thence it can be traced due east to Yoxford, where it ends, so far as our certain knowledge goes. From Peasenhall another direct road can be traced as far as the Waveney, near Weybread, and no further. Other roads there are of uncertain Roman origin, but the most important of them was the Peddar's (or Pedlar's) Way, which can be traced with certainty from Barningham, in Suffolk, to Fring, about seven miles from Brancaster, and perhaps even to Holme, which is nearer, and is, indeed, one of the supports for the theory concerning the nature and origin of Brancaster, but the modern roads seldom follow its course. A Roman road was supposed to run from Caistor viâ Downham Market, and across the Cambridgeshire Fens to Peterborough, but its existence is hardly proved in Norfolk, and its origin is hardly clear to demonstration in Cambridgeshire. These are all the Roman roads which need concern us, and the references to Roman roads in guide-books and on Ordnance and other maps may be disregarded. This is written not at all by way of disparaging the ordinary guide-books, some of which are monuments of learning and industry, and by no means in any mood of conscious superiority. There is no credit at all in knowing that which Mr. Haverfield has made easy, and, until he co-ordinated the facts and sifted the evidence, it was practically impossible for anybody but a specialist to know the truth. He is a specialist of the true scientific temperament, eager to acquire knowledge, cautious in inference, and it is to be feared that he and his like knock a good deal of romance out of travel in England. What they leave, however, is real; and it is worth stating once and for all.
At any rate, we were on a Roman road with a sound British surface on this genial January day, for genial it was by contrast with those which had gone before; and we sped along gaily, regretting not so much that a great deal of Norfolk is hilly, as that when there came a tempting downhill stretch there was generally a village or a cross-road at the bottom to counteract the temptation. Such were the circumstances as we passed down into Long Stratton, where our eyes were delighted by the first specimen on the roadside of the round church towers of flint for which East Anglia is famous. Many theories there have been as to the origin of this peculiar form of tower, but the best of them, because the most obvious and simple, is that of Mr. J. H. Parker: "They are built round to suit the material, and to save the expense of stone quoins for the corners, which are necessary for square towers, and which often may not have been easy to procure in districts where building stone has all to be imported." Now we bade leave to hills for a while, and at Dickleburgh the floods were out in some force. Scole came next, a pleasing many-gabled village with a fair share of Scotch firs, and once a great coaching centre. It also contains the White Hart Inn, of which Mr. Rye writes: "Of course the best known inn in the county was that at Scole, built by James Peck, a Norwich merchant, in 1655, the sign costing £1057, and being ornamented with twenty-five strange figures and devices, one of which was a movable one of an astronomer pointing to the quarter whence the rain was expected. There was also an enormous reproduction of the great 'bed of Ware,' which held thirty or forty people. The inn itself is a fine red-brick building, with walls twenty-seven inches thick, and with a good oak staircase." Scole, by the way, is only just in the county of Norfolk, and there is room for doubt whether the "White Hart" was ever so famous as the "Maid's Head" at Norwich. Mr. Rye, however, is entitled to be modest in this matter, even if modesty lead him into inaccuracy, for he saved the "Maid's Head" from being modernized by buying it out and out and restoring it in perfect taste. May the motor-car bring back prosperity to the "White Hart," and may the "White Hart" merit it. It is well situated at the crossing of two trunk roads, that on which we were travelling and the Bury and Yarmouth road. In our case it was not convenient to halt.
Here we entered Suffolk, crossing the Waveney, and a country of road surfaces far worse than those traversed up to that point. The rain had apparently fallen more heavily than it had near Norwich; but it had not rained gravel, an infamous material for roadmaking, nor could it account for the weary attitude of the tumble-down and illegible milestones. As it was, when hills were encountered the Panhard was hard tried, and the driving wheels, although they wore antiskid gaiters, revolved many times more than the distance covered by them warranted. There was simply no hold for the wheels in the dirty, porridge-like mud, concealing a crumbling sub-surface, and, now and again, although no great height above the sea had to be climbed, the gradients were almost trying, owing to the bad surface.
Shocking bad roads, luncheon