Under Another Sky (5 page)

The authority on Colchester’s archaeology is Philip Crummy, a small, wiry Scot with a bleakly pessimistic sense of humour belying his ferocious commitment to the town’s Roman history. As we stood together outside the castle, he told me he imagined Eudo Dapifer, companion knight to William the Conqueror, ordering the temple ruins, perhaps still substantial, to be cleared away and then his castle built from the existing masonry. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘a building hewn out of the Roman ruins. It’s a statement that he’s the new boss around here. This is the traditional centre of power, and he’s appropriating it.’ He pointed out the rubbly grey material at the base of the building: Roman. Then, about two thirds of the way up the walls, a line of vertical tiles stuck together with pink mortar. These are, says Crummy, pilae stacks on their side – pilae stacks being the little pillars supporting a Roman floor, around which the hot air of a hypocaust heating system would swirl. So many of these stacks were reused in the fabric of the castle that they must have come from a large public baths complex, he thinks – and a town like Camulodunum will certainly have had big public baths, though they have never been discovered.

In the museum is the tombstone of a centurion of the 20th Legion, a northern Italian called Marcus Favonius Facilis: he stands staring out of his niche, an elegant figure in full armour, his left hand resting on his sword hilt. Nearby is a memorial to Longinus Sdapeze, an officer of the first cavalry regiment of Thracians from Sardica – modern Sofia. It is altogether less polished, less classical in its form, than the northern Italian’s gravestone. The officer sits proud on his high-stepping horse, his armour rendered roughly, so that it resembles a coat of feathers. Trampled beneath the animal’s hooves is a naked, cowering bearded man, the barbarian – the Briton? – whom the Roman has brought low. I was transfixed, too, by a case of luxurious marbles, brightly coloured and exotically named. Here was giallo antico from Africa; pavonazetto from Asia Minor; green porphyry from Greece. Elsewhere were wine jars from Crete and Gaza, a fish-sauce container from Spain, chalcedony beads from Hungary. In assuming Roman-ness, Camulodunum had become a small vein in an arterial system of commerce and trade that stretched from here to Tunisia to Palestine.

Crummy took me to Colchester’s Victorian army garrison, where he and his team have been able to excavate because the barracks – with their imperial-sounding names, such as Hyderabad and Meanee – have been sold off for housing. One day Crummy and his team came upon the foundations of what seemed to be a road – and another identical one, running parallel with it, some seventy metres away. It was only when a press officer for the housing developer made a joke about the chances of their finding a chariot (which would be good PR, as opposed to roads, which are too dull to make headlines) that, said Crummy, ‘the penny dropped’. The identical stretch of ‘road’ was, he surmised, in fact the opposite side of a chariot-racing track. His hunch turned out to be right – or, rather, was eventually established after nearly two years of slow and steady work. Beneath the garden of the now empty sergeants’ mess, where, when Crummy walked me here, beds of overblown roses bloomed amid the untamed grass, two of the perhaps eight starting gates for the chariots had been discovered. Towards the centre of the track, up against the turning posts, the soil was found to be compacted and rutted: evidence, thought the archaeologists, of the charioteers’ tactics of angling around them as tightly as possible. A local campaign had secured some of the land on which the circus stood, and there were plans for an interpretation
centre and a café. ‘Ben Hur in Colchester?’ ran the headline in the
Guardian
when the discovery was announced.

Back inside the walls of Colchester, I wandered down Maidenburgh Street in the Dutch quarter – where Flemish weavers settled in the sixteenth century – and peered through a window in one of the buildings partway down the street. Here were low walls, carefully preserved for public view, that described a gentle curve: the foundations of a Roman theatre. Further down the lane was a little Saxon chapel built on the line of the theatre wall; indeed, built out of its very bricks and masonry. I pushed open the door and found myself in an anteroom full of flower-arranging impedimenta. Opening a second door, I was suddenly drenched in incense-laden air, facing an iconostasis. This Saxon chapel, with its Roman foundations and its Roman bricks, which had been restored by the Normans, and later by the Victorian Gothic architect William Butterfield, is now a Greek Orthodox church. It is dedicated to St Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great. In local folklore, Helen was the daughter of King Coel, whose stronghold was Colchester Castle. The story is told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century work
A History of the Kings of Britain
: Coel, who rules from Colchester, sues for peace when the great Roman senator Constantius arrives on British shores. After Coel dies, Constantius marries his daughter and seizes the throne, later becoming the ruler of all Rome.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work, though regarded as authoritative until well into the Renaissance, is a repository of myth rather than fact. His version of Britain’s early history – the source for which he vaguely and dubiously claimed was a nameless ‘very old book’ – provides some compelling narratives, stitched through with the threads of legends, many from his native Wales. He tells the tale of the giants Gog and Magog who once roamed the land; the fate of King Arthur; the story of Lear. He claimed that Britain was named after a man named Brutus, a grandson of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who fled his home city to Italy after the Greeks’ sack, and whose descendants founded Rome. It is telling that Geoffrey needed to give Britain a classicising foundation myth, ascribing to it grand legendary origins on a par with Rome’s: the literary equivalent, perhaps, of building your castle on the ruins of a Roman temple. It is a story that nobody tells any more.

Monmouth’s story of Coel is a fairy tale, perhaps born from some false etymology relating to the name of the town. In fact Colchester is more likely to have got its name from the word ‘
colonia
’, the Roman veterans’ colony, added to ‘-chester’, the Saxon corruption of ‘
castrum
’, the Latin for camp. (The official Roman name of the town was Colonia Claudia Victricensis – the Claudian Town of Victory.) The story does, however, have one or two facts woven through it: Constantine the Great and his father, Constantius Chlorus, were indeed both in Britain. Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the empire, was proclaimed emperor in York in
AD
306. But there is no evidence that the historical Helen, who is much more likely to have come from the eastern Mediterranean, ever set foot here, let alone was born here; and no evidence for a Coel at all. But the Helen myth stuck for a long while in Colchester: the town’s coat of arms, first used in the fifteenth century, has an image of the True Cross and its nails, fragments of which St Helen supposedly found on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It also bears three crowns, to suggest the Magi, whose graves she is also said to have encountered on her travels. The Orthodox chapel’s priest has written about St Helen: he reluctantly admits that the story of her connection to the town has no historical foundation. And yet, he argues, the tradition itself is what matters. She cannot be unstitched, now, from its history. Indeed, as a venerator of fragments from the past, and as a finder of the graves of those who died long ago, she might make rather a suitable patron for those who seek the revered objects of a lost Britain.

In fact, St Helen has, for the past century, had a serious rival as an ancient heroine for the town: Boudica. From the frontage of the town hall on the high street, which was built at the turn of the twentieth century, loom statues of famous figures from Colchester history. Here is a sculpture of Eudo Dapifer, and Edward the Elder, the son of Alfred the Great, who took Colchester from the Danes in 917. Tucked round the side of the building we see Boudica, gesturing portentously down a narrow side street. It is said that the spot occupied by the British rebel was meant for an image of Cunobelinus. Then, unannounced, in 1902, a sculpture of Boudica appeared in his niche – and not to universal acclaim, though perhaps the anonymous donor was inspired by the example of Thomas Thornycroft’s bronze sculpture,
Boadicea and Her Daughters
, which had recently been erected at Waterloo Bridge in London.

Boudica is, at best, an ambiguous heroine for Colchester, since her sole connection is that in
AD
60 or 61 she and her men took and burnt the town, and massacred its inhabitants. And yet she has, from her appearance on the town hall facade, been embraced. In 1909, she was one of the stars of the Colchester Pageant – a grand event, running over six days, and involving a cast of 3,000, that staged tableaux from local history. One of the posters showed Boudica as a Wagnerian heroine, a horned helmet upon her head, borne along in her chariot by fiery black steeds. Another promised the re-creation of BOADICEA’S VICTORY – ON THE ACTUAL BATTLE GROUND, among other attractions. In the modern successor of the Colchester Pageant, the annual Colchester Carnival, another Boudica, face daubed with blue, rides through the town in her chariot. When I enquired whether there had been a St Helen in the last carnival, I was told by its organiser that no one had come forward to take her on, and that Boudica was, in any case, ‘far more representative of an important event in Colchester’s history than the fictional St Helen’. I saw that there was, too, a new school in Colchester called Queen Boudica Primary. It seemed that this bloody queen had been adopted as a secular saint, feminist role model and an example to the young. I felt sorry for St Helen, her piety out of tune with the times. But it was time to go in search of Boudica – in her homeland.

… and a woman,
A woman beat ’em, Nennius; a weak woman,
A woman beat these Romanes.

John Fletcher,
c
.1613

Caratacus and Boudica are the first British characters in history. They are entirely Roman creations. There is no convincing archaeological evidence that they existed at all, beyond a few finds of Iron Age coins marked ‘CARA’. They are written into being, as figures of the British resistance against Roman rule, by Tacitus in his
Annals
– his last work, a now incomplete history of Rome from Augustus to Nero, composed around
AD
117. He tinges them with a dangerous glamour and a subversive nobility; they are tools in his often cynical, always penetrating, critique of the values of the Roman empire.

Caratacus, the son of Cunobelinus and brother of Togodumnus, had slipped out of the grasp of the Romans at the time of Claudius’s initial conquest in
AD
43, and we next hear of him seven years later, leading the Britons in south and then north Wales – where no doubt the hilly, inaccessible territory helped him and his men as they slipped from wood to cave to mountain. But he was finally brought to ground by the relentess Roman war machine, and defeated in battle at a great hill fort, somewhere in Ordovician territory in north Wales. Caratacus himself escaped from the melee and sought protection in northern England with the Brigantes tribe, but Cartimandua, as a Roman ally, handed him over to the conquerors. As Tacitus has it, in the years that had elapsed since Claudius claimed Britain at Camulodunum, Caratacus had become a famous name in Italy. And so the capture of this elusive guerrilla leader, ‘whose name was not without a certain
glory’, offered the opportunity for a spectacular public-relations exercise in Rome (as well as leading, according to Tacitus, to a false sense that Roman troubles in Britain had ended). ‘There was huge curiosity to see the man who for so many years had spurned our power,’ he wrote.

And so Claudius laid on a show, carefully stage-managed to make the capture reflect as gloriously as possible on himself. A parade was organised, with Caratacus’s splendid gold torcs and war booty carried aloft, and his companions, wife and children forced to follow. Finally came Caratacus himself, who, according to Tacitus, was the only prisoner-of-war who walked with his head held high. Approaching the tribunal on which Claudius sat, he boldly addressed the emperor on equal terms, saying that under different circumstances he might have been welcomed to Rome as a friend, rather than dragged there as a captive. He added: ‘I had horses, men, arms, riches: is it any wonder that I should lose them unwillingly? If you wish to rule the world, does it follow that everybody else should accept slavery? If I had been dragged before you having surrendered immediately, nobody would have heard of either my defeat or your victory: if you punish me everybody will forget this moment. But if you save me, I shall be an everlasting memorial to your mercy.’