haverfield, roman coast defences (1912)

Notes on the Roman Coast Defences of Britain, Especially in YorkshireAuthor(s): F. HaverfieldSource: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 2 (1912), pp. 201-214Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/295957 .

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NOTES ON THE ROMAN COAST DEFENCES OF BRITAIN, ESPECIALLY IN YORKSHIRE.

(Plate XV.)

By PROF. F. HAVERFIELD, LL.D. D.LiTT.

It is a commonplace that Britain is an island. The further truth, that it is an island which is very closely tied to the continent lying east of it, is a good deal less familiar. Geographical writers are apt, even for historical purposes, to emphasise instead those two features of the island which Mr. Mackinder in his admirable volume has called its insularity and its universality, its separation, that is, from Europe, and its central position in the world. I feel, however, that both students of ancient history, and also modern men at this particular moment, are more concerned with the peculiar relation of Britain to Europe. It is not the insularity of the island but its dependence on the continent which really matters. This dependence dates from days long before the first appearance of man ; it is due, indeed, to the configuration of western Europe in remote geological periods. In those dateless days the seas which now divide our southern coast from France, and our eastern coast from the Low Countries and from Germany, were river valleys which took the drainage of a vast area extending from Wales and the Pennine hills on the north-west, to the Eifel, the Vosges and the Cevennes on the south-east. The rivers have long vanished, but their valleys, vast almost as the valley of a Missouri or a Mississippi, can still be traced in the configuration of the British and continental coasts. On each side of the sea the main rivers flow down to face each other, the main harbours of each land lie vis-a-vis and the natural entrances by which trader or soldier might wish to enter Britain open on to the main exits by which he might wish to start from the continent. Nor is it merely a matter of entrances or exits. That part of Britain which faces the continent is the lower-lying part of the great valley which I have mentioned. It is therefore fairly flat, and it offers no strategic obstacle to invaders. Its only features, its forests and its fens, are hardly large enough even to divert the march of armies and have been over-rated by writers like the late Dr. Guest and Mr. J. R. Green. The really difficult regions of Britain, the tangled uplands of Wales and west Yorkshire and the north, lie far away from the path of European aggressors. They might assist the rulers of Britain in checking an Irish invasion; they do not protect it from European influences. Britain is a land which was made to be invaded from the continent.

The earlier history of the island shows the results of these geographical features. In prehistoric days they helped the incoming



202 NOTES ON THE ROMAN COAST DEFENCES OF BRITAIN,

of two successive invasions by tribes whom we call Celtic. Some- what later, they enabled the Romans to conquer the south and east of Britain with very little trouble; it cost the armies of Claudius less than five years to march from the Kentish ports to the Humber, the Severn and the Dee, and to subdue most of the land within those boundaries. Later still, when the western Roman empire was near its end, it was English invasion from the east, not Scottish from the north or west, which broke down the Roman civilisation and converted Britain into England. Once more, the geographical kinship of southern England to Europe brought over in the early English period much Merovingian and French culture, and led directly to the Norman conquest and to the long connexion of the rulers of England with territories in France. In more modern times than these, from the Reformation till the other day, a great variety of causes, racial, religious, commercial, military, kept England in a really insular position. No European power during that period developed any lasting and permanent strength at sea; most of them were concerned far more closely with wars on the continent. But recent -changes have made it plain that the greatest of the forces which rule this world, the force of geography, has not lost its power, and that Britain is still an island laid open by nature to invasion from Europe.

In the Roman period, with which 1 am to-day particularly concerned, this characteristic of Britain resulted in a need for some form of coast defence, whether by the use of a fleet or by the provision of fortifications along the shore. In the early empire, while Rome was strong, the government used principally a fleet. A classis Britannica patrolled the Channel from a main station at Gessoriacum (Bologne) and subsidiary posts on the Kentish coasts at Dover and Lymne, and possibly elsewhere. The operation of this fleet, except in campaigns such as those of Agricola, was apparently confined to the narrow seas which divide the Kentish coast and the Thames estuary from the opposite Gaulish coast and the mouth of the Rhine. Those were, indeed, the regions where pirates could most easily pick up abundant booty, and we may suppose that the fleet was primarily intended to prevent such piracy. It would seem, however, that for two centuries at least, pirates seldom troubled the south-eastern coasts of Britain. It must have been in all parts and periods of the Roman empire as persistent an evil as it was in the Mediterranean till 1830. But when we find Roman " villas," that is, the comfortable residences of well-to-do landlords, planted on the very edge of the water, as at Eastbourne or in Mersea island, near Colchester, and when we note that similar houses are by no means uncommon within easy reach of the shore in many places, we must admit that, for a while at least, piracy can have been no very great evil in the eastern Channel and in the Narrow



ESPECIALLY IN YORKSHIRE. 203

Seas. Whether the conditions were worse in the west and north is not easy to decide. No station of the classis Britannica can be traced there. An officer who has been assigned to it appears at Lydney, in west Gloucestershire, as beautifying the temple of the local Celtic god Nodon, but it is not clear that he was stationed in that region or belonged to the fleet, while his actual duties were financial.1 In Cumberland, on the line of the Roman Wall, one or two inscriptions record the fleet, but their meaning is pretty clearly no more than a statement that soldiers from this fleet were drafted off to assist in the construction of the wall; and in any case the places concerned are a considerable distance from the coast and can have little to do with naval activity. Probably, therefore, the Irish sea was in general left to look after itself, and the traders who carried on the scanty traffic between Ireland and the Roman world must have been able to defend themselves.

The attacks of the barbarians on the empire altered this happy state of security. The forces, whatever they were, which drove the Teutonic nations in vast hordes against the Roman frontier on the Rhine and Danube, drove also the lesser swarms of north German and possibly even of south Scandinavian seamen on to the coasts of the empire. These attacks by sea first became trouble- some about the end of the third century; it was then thought necessary to appoint a special commander, one Carausius, to deal with their assaults. The result was rather unexpected. He used his fleet not so much to destroy barbarian assailants as to assert the independence of the British province and to establish himself as emperor of a part of the Roman world. He first showed how sea-power could relieve Britain from its dependence on Europe and thus won for the name of Carausius a renown which it did not altogether deserve. This step caused the Roman government to make a change in the system of British coast defence which we cannot determine with certainty. When Carausius was dead and Rome had recovered the British province, the emperor Diocletian, or one of his colleagues or immediate successors, established an officer with the title, ".Count of the Saxon Shore " (governor of the coast which the Saxons vexed), and put under him nine forts which, so far as they can be identified, stood close to the coast at intervals from the Wash to Beachy Head or perhaps to Portsmouth. At the same time all reference to a British fleet disappears in Britain, while the naval defence of the opposite Gaulish coast, which was also called the Saxon Shore, was entrusted to a classis Sambrica, named, apparently, from the river which is now called Somme. 2

1 C.I.L. vii, 137; Mommsen, Bonner Jahrb. lxviii, 55, correcting Huibner.

2Not. Dign. Occid. xxxviii, 8. That the fleet was connected with the Somme (anciently Samara)

is shewn by the tiles stamped CLSAM which have been found on its estuary at Etaples: V. J. Vaillant, Recherches d'epigr. (Arras, I888), p. 385, and Epigraphie de la Morinie (Boul. I890), p. 249.




The garrisons of these forts were considerable, 500 or I,000 men perhaps ; they were land defences, clearly. It is, however, impossible to suppose that the naval defence of the British coast then came to a complete end. That is neither likely in itself nor does it agree with our scanty evidence. The positions of the forts which we know to have formed part of the Saxon Shore tell another tale. Each of them stands, or stood in old days, on a harbour slightly withdrawn from the sea. For example, Pevensey now lies among the marshes half way between Eastbourne and St. Leonards. Part of the marsh, however, is of recent growth: in Roman times the sea came up to the walls of Anderida, if only in the form of a roomy creek, giving passage through the mud of the Pevensey levels. Even so late as I700, small ships were able to struggle up to Pevensey bridge. Again, at Lymne, in east Kent, the ruins called Stutfall castle are now separated by a mile and a half of marsh from the nearest sea-beach, but it is quite plain that, before Romney marsh had been enclosed and drained by 'man and silted up by nature, ships could reach the lowest walls of the fort. 1

Elsewhere, as at Brancaster or Bradwell or Borough castle near Yarmouth, the sheltered harbour still exists. Nor is this the only feature which points to the naval use of these forts of the Saxon Shore. All of them stand on low ground, or if, like Richborough or Borough castle, they occupy the top of a gentle hill, their walls stretch down to the water side. This is very, plain at Stutfall. The huge fragments of this fort are dotted over the escarpment of high land which forms the northern limit of Romney marsh. The lowest of them are on the sea level; the uppermost are I50 feet higher, and the fort was obviously placed thus on the slope in order to combine access to a harbour with some slight elevation of general site. Had the harbour not mattered, the fort would have been planted still higher up, above the escarpment, where the mediaeval church and " castle " stand.

This coast defence of south-eastern England by fort and fleet was in the fourth century, as in earlier days, the chief effort of the Roman strategists. At first it seems to have been sufficient. So far as we can trace the dim history of the early assaults of Teutonic pirates on the British coasts, they were more inclined to attack the lands along the Channel than anything north or west, and more inclined to attack the continental shore than Britain. As I have said, the coast of Gaul which faces England bore the name Litus Saxonicum just as much as the Saxon Shore of Britain. It was no less vexed by Saxon pirates and it too got its name from its sufferings; it was a shore harried by Saxons. Indeed, there is

'I may record here, without arguing the matter, my dissent from the view of Dr. Rice Holmes (Ancient Britain and Julius Caesar, pp. 544, foll.).




reason to think that it suffered sooner than the British coasts. The pirates, it would seem, crept along the continental shore to pillage, in preference to voyaging across open water. But about 300 the British coasts were already endangered and about 350 the danger had grown very great; there is evidence that the Saxon and other pirate seamen now not seldom ventured on longer voyages. We can trace in the second half of the fourth century an extension of the defence, in some form or another, to the north of England, and this, illustrated as it has been by recent excavation near Saltburn, deserves our present notice.

The Roman frontier of fourth-century Britain lay along the line fortified two hundred years earlier by Hadrian, the line from Newcastle to Carlisle, from the Tyne to the Solway. The north- east coast of England forms, as it were, the right flank of this frontier. It may seem a flank which needed very little protection. The line of communications with the north from the base at York lay sufficiently far from the coast and was sufficiently well fortified to be in little danger of interruption. The land which lay between

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the vale of York and the eastern sea was a wild and tangled upland where nobody lived who was worth plundering or worth protecting. The coast itself is dangerous to those who do not know well its reefs and currents ; it is vexed with many storms, and lined for miles with long and precipitous cliffs. Nevertheless, when the barbarian attacks grew worse, that is after about 350, it was thought necessary to provide some form of defence for this coast as well as for the easier and richer south. We can instance four or five points at which we may think that we have detected traces of this defence (see map, fig. 30). In the most northern portion of the coast line, in Durham county, we have indeed few certainties. There are records of Roman buildings or other remains at two or three points on the coast, but they are too meagre and ill-attested to help our present purpose. Only one site, a spot of low ground close to the shore between Hartlepool and Seaton Carew, deserves notice here. At Carr House, once called Blue Houses, two miles north of Tees- mouth, remains have been found which date from various parts of the Roman period, but include a substantial element of the fourth century and particularly of the late fourth century. Among them are coins, said to number over one hundred, many potsherds, one or two fibulae and other small objects, and many bones of edible animals and shells. 1 No masonry has been recorded, but the coast has here suffered much erosion in recent times and, if there was a fort, it may have been washed away. Certainly it is difficult to believe that anyone, except a soldier, cared to live on the coast of Durham in the latter half of the fourth century; but if there was a fort here, it must have been placed on low ground, or else have stood some little way from these remains.

Of the other sites, scattered along the Yorkshire coast from Saltburn to Filey, we know more and the features are more definitely marked. One site, indeed, is ill-attested. Three others can be assigned with some confidence to the latter part of the fourth century and occupy characteristic positions which are wholly unlike those of the Saxon Shore in the south. Their walls do not come down to the water's edge nor do they stand in immediate alliance with easy and commodious harbours. They are perched on high cliffs which drop sheer to the sea, it may be three or four hundred feet, and they command wide outlooks; moreover, they are small, so far as we can tell; they could not have accom- modated the 500 or I,OOO men which garrisoned the southern forts. Their purpose is plain. They are signal stations, strong enough to be held against small parties of raiders, but meant primarily for scouts whose beacons would flash back to the interior and to their fellow-stations along the coast the approach of any large fleet of

1 Arch. Ael. Ist ser. ii, I O, znd ser. x, I03.




pirates. In prehistoric times, if we may believe the Irish archaeologist, Mr. Coffey, men were not afraid to sail even from Scandinavia or from Gaul direct to Ireland., In early mediaeval times there was direct communication, not perhaps by weekly or fortnightly sailings, from the coast of France to the shores of the Irish sea. In the seventeenth century the Barbary corsairs once or twice raided the Faroe islands and even Iceland. We need not be surprised if Saxons from the Elbe, or even Northmen from Scandinavia, not seldom reached the north-east coast of England in the fourth century.

I. The best known of these forts is that of Huntcliff near Salt- burn. This yielded chance finds many years ago1 and has recently been excavated, in 19II-1912, by the exertions of Mr. W. Hornsby and Mr. R. Stanton. By their kindness I am now able to lay before my readers a short account of their interesting discoveries, while subsequent pages of the 7ournal include a fuller account which they and others have been good enough to contribute (pp. 215-232). A mile or so east of Saltburn the long low mass of Huntcliff runs out to sea (plate xv, no. i). It is the northernmost outlier of the Cleve- land hills, and the most northerly too of the cliffs which fringe the Yorkshire coast with rare intervals for 50 miles from Saltburn to Flamborough head. It rises sheer out of the sea 300 feet or more, and a ridge of hill behind it towers nearly 200 feet higher. From it one can see north-west over all the flat estuary of the Tees and the south coast of Durham, and there is a wide though more limited view south-eastwards towards Loftus. On this headland, at a point 365 feet above sea level and on the brink of the precipitous cliff, stood a Roman watchtower. Most of it has been lost by falls of cliff; just enough survives to show its character. The foundations indicate a fort of roughly rectangular outline with strongly rounded corners, measuring 105 feet within the walls from east to west and perhaps the same (or it may be, more) from north to south. The northern part, two-thirds or three-quarters of the whole, has vanished and the length from north to south cannot therefore be recovered, but if, as one naturally thinks, the area was more or less square, the internal length and breadth may both be accepted as about 105 feet, and the internal area as about one-fifth of an acre. The defences of the fort were, first, a wall 44 inches thick, built of roughly coursed local stone and strengthened at the angles by projecting semicircular bastions, and secondly, a broad ditch, some 28 feet wide from lip to lip, which is separated from the wall by the usual Roman device of a flat berm. In the middle of the south face of the wall was an entrance not quite 7 feet wide, furnished inside with walling suggestive of either guard-chambers or a gate-tower;

1 J. C. Atkinson, Hist. ot Cleveland (Barrow, I874), i, 54.




whether the ditch stopped and left a passage of solid earth to this gate, or a wooden bridge was employed, has not been yet deter- mined. The peculiar bonding of the masonry of the two bastions and the absence of anything save cobble foundations at two points next these bastions has suggested to the excavators that there were also two other entrances by the side of the two surviving bastions (A B on plan, fig. 34, p. 2i6). I must confess that this does not seem to me likely. Three gates, separated by intervals of less than 50 feet, are a superfluous and even dangerous supply, and I would rather suppose that the peculiar bonding may be due to some accident in the course of building. Inside the fort was a rectangular building 52 feet long, of which only one wall survives, and two platforms near the south gate, each about iI by 12 feet, which appear to be additions to the original scheme but are of uncertain use. A well, 5 to 6 feet in diameter and I4 feet deep, completes the list of structural remains.

The smaller objects are important. In the recent excavations 25 coins were picked up, all except one being " third brass." Almost all belong to the second half of the fourth century; the latest coin is of Arcadius, A.D. 388-392. Earlier coins, noted 40 or 50 years ago, are of Valentinian. This evidence is conclusive. The fort, it is plain, can hardly have been built much before 360 and was occupied at least till after the overthrow of Magnus Maximus in 388. How much longer it was held may be doubtful. The coinage of Roman copper practically ceased very soon after 390 and for many years the earlier issues of copper continued in use. On our present evidence, therefore, the fact that the latest coin is little, if anything, later than 388-9 would not be inconsistent with the idea that the fort was held for ten or twenty years longer. Still, we should expect some positive evidence of so late a date and in default of it, may best leave the matter open. The pottery gives a general confirmation to this dating, but it is important because it can be dated within thirty or forty years from the coins rather than because it aids the dating of the fort. It consists entirely of quite late fabrics, principally black wares and red wares decorated with scrolls of white paint, which are otherwise known to have been in use in north Britain in the fourth century. There was, however, one piece of Samian.

Many skulls and other bones of human beings have also been found, all in the well; they belong to probably fourteen or fifteen persons of both sexes, varying in age from one or two to about 65. Several seem to be assignable to one family, which included a man of about 65, a woman of about 22, and two children, one two years old and the other eight. Except for one shin-bone of a man 6 feet high, the bones indicated smallish men and women, the former about 5 feet 4 inches tall, the women rather less. The skulls, so




far as they permitted measurement, were dolichocephalic; they were wide and low with a relatively small height. One skull bore the marks of a deep cut from some weapon. These bones belonged presumably rather to refugees or to the families of some of the garrison of the fort than to the garrison itself. Whoever they were, they were killed when the fort was stormed and burnt, and their bodies were cast into the ready grave offered by the open well.

IL A second fort may have existed on this coast at or near Staithes, It has not been explored, or even definitely located, and I

know it only from vague information communicated to me long ago by the late Canon Atkinson of Danby. I understand that Mr. Stanton also has noted faint signs of a post near Staithes, though he has not been able to excavate it. Less credence can be given to the view, often set out by older writers, that a further post stood about two miles west of Whitby, near Dunsley. Here no one has indicated any distinct locality or adduced definite remains. Indeed, the theory that there was any fort rests in reality on nothing better than the notion that the name Dunsley represents the Aoivov KoX1TO9

FIG. 31. LATE ROMAN INSCRIPTION FOUND AT PEAK (. 2IO).



2IO NOTES ON THE ROMAN COAST DEFENCES OF BRITAIN.

of Ptolemy. 1 This is an unsubstantial reason. Whether Dunsley be Dunum or not, the fact that Ptolemy mentions an estuary or bay is no proof of the existence of a fort. The Dunsley fort must be set aside as altogether unproven.2

III. Another fort is in every way better attested. It crowns the high promontory of Peak, 400 feet above the sea, which forms the southern end of Robin Hood's Bay (plate xv, no. 2). Here stone foundations and a Roman inscription were found about I77I close to the house once called Raven Hall, now the Ravenscar Hotel, when the house was built or rebuilt. 3 Of the foundations no record survives, though I have been told on the spot that some of them exist below ground. The inscription (fig. 3I) is now in Whitby Museum. Its lettering is fairly certain; the interpretation is in some points very doubtful.

IVSTINIANVS PP

VINDICIANVS

MASBIERIV PR

M CASTRVM FECIT

A . .O

The letters Pp at the end of the first line seem to denote praepositus. The sense of the third line is quite uncertain; SB might possibly be miscut for GIS, and, if so, the beginning of the line might be interpreted magister. At the end of it PR probably means praefectus, and in the fourth line M may represent militum; praefectus militum is a military title of the later empire, e.g. in the Notitia. The fifth line is quite unintelligible. The whole might be read, "Iustinianus the commander, Vindicianus . praefect of soldiers, built the fort." 4

The lettering of the inscription and its language belong plainly to a very late date, and by a lucky chance that date can be fixed. The Iustinianus of line i, as Sir Arthur Evans has pointed out, seems to be the officer of that name who was sent by Constantine III from Britain to Gaul about 407 and died in Gaul in that year. How long he may have served in Britain before he went to Gaul is quite unknown., but we may obviously assume that the Peak inscription

1 Ptol. ii, 3, 4. The notion is as old as the sixteenth century (Camden, etc.). Horsley (p. 369) however identified Dunum with the Tees.

2 A hoard of late fourth century (? silver) coins (Valens, Gratian, Theodosius, Arcadius, Honorius) was found long ago at Whorlton in Cleveland. But this is too far from the coast to concern us, and if the coins were silver, as seems probable from

the record in Ord's History of Cleveland, such hoards occur not very rarely elsewhere in Britain.

3 G. Young's Whithy (1817), ii, 708; L. Charl- ton's Whitby (1779), p. 43.

4 Huebner, C.I.L. vii, z68=Inscr. Brit. Christ. i85, and Exempla Scripturae Epigraphicae, 781. I have seen the inscription myself: tee Eph. Epigr. ix, p. 56i.



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was set up, and the fort in which it was found was built or repaired, not so very long before A.D. 406.1

IV. The last site which 1 have to mention is the high headland called Carr-nase2 which is the northern limit of Filey bay (fig. 32). Here, on the edge of the cliff, Roman remains were noted after a landslip in 1857, and a small excavation revealed foundations and various minor objects. The foundations covered a space of about 25 by 70 feet, but were not followed out to their full extent; they included rough masonry, a floor of puddled clay, five stone bases suitable for holding wooden pillars, and much burnt wood, as if from a fallen roof. Among the smaller remains were many potsherds, most of which (so far as can be judged from a bad illustration of them, which alone survives and is here reproduced, fig. 33)

rese mble the Huntcliff fragments, while one piece was of Samian ware, a fragment of which was also found at Huntcliff.3 Some

FIG. 33. ROMIAN POTTERY FOUND AT FILEY. After Cortis (p. 2I2).

1 A. J. Evans, Numismatic Cbronicle, I887, p. zo8 =Archaeol. Cambrensis, i888, p. 3I8; Zosimus, vi, 2 and Olympiodorus, in Photius, Bibl. Cod. 8o, Muller, Fragm. Hist. Graec. iv, p. 59. The latter gives the name as Iustinus, but this appears to be an error.

2 The name has been interpreted as equivalent to Caer-nase, the headland with the caer or fort upon it. Such a hybrid form is most improbable, and Mr. W. H. Stevenson tells me that until old

-spellings of the namc can be adduced, its interpretation must remain dubious.

3 I extract the following sentences from the report of Mr. Cortis: " The larger amphorae are of coarse bluish-grey clay, containing much coarse

sand and sometimes mica. The smaller jars are usu2lly of a fine well-burnt clay, black and often glazed on the outside, sometimes light coloured within. Many, both large and small, are ornamented in various ways; red and lighter varieties are also found, and one piece-of Samian. . . . The jar, which occupied a prominent position in the illustration, had been crushed, but enough of the fragments were found to enable a restoration. The material is a fine clay, burnt red. The jar is ornamented with a scroll in white paint, stands about I8 ins. high and is about 14 ins. in greatest diameter; it has two handles and on the rim between them a face and on the opposite side a little plain carving to correspond." This kind of face-urn is a well known type of very late Roman pottery.



ESPECIALLY IN YORKSHIRE. 2I3

forty coins were discovered, all of them " third brass " of the latest empire, but too corroded to be identified: more recently coins of Constantine and Constans are said to have been picked up here. Two millstones, a stone axe-head, some bronze rings and buckles, iron arrow-heads, the point of a sword, aid two pieces of glass, were also found. Mr. Cortis also records a fragment of shale inscribed with two lines of rude lettering, CASEAR SE I QVAM SPE. As it stands, this is a meaningless fragment; I fancy it may be even a forgery, the work of " Flint Jack " who forged one or two similar inscriptions and other alleged Roman antiquities in Yorkshire about the time of these excavations. '

Our knowledge of this site is plainly imperfect. Part of the buildings seem to have perished by landslip; of what remained in 1857, very little was laid bare, and our record of this excavation is not very satisfactory. But we need not hesitate to place the find beside those of Peak and Huntcliff and to recognise here also the traces of a fourth-century attempt to keep watch over the York- shire coast. 2

The facts which I have enumerated imply that the cliffs of the Yorkshire coast for fifty miles, from Saltburn to Flamborough head, were watched in the late fourth century by at least three outlook posts each perched on the edge of a lofty promontory, each of small size and meant for a signal station rather than for actual defence. We may wonder whether our three attested examples are fragments of a much larger system. There are other points of this coast where we might admit such signal stations. If Huntcliff commands the mouth of the Tees and the south Durham littoral, and the Peak looks out southwards almost to Flamborough, we might nevertheless accept intermediate stations less than twenty or twenty-five miles apart. Hints of such an intermediate station have been noted near Staithes, and we might also look for them on such a hill as that of Scarborough Castle and on the promontory of Flamborough, though the one is only seven miles north of Filey and the other only eleven miles south of it. No Roman remains, however, seem to have been found on Flamborough, while at Scarborough they are limited to a very few coins (including one of the first century and one of the third) and still fewer potsherds, found-be it noted- not on the Castle hill but on Southcliff. At present, however,

I Eph. Epigr. ix, p. 562. 2 W. S. Cortis, Twenty-sixth report of rie Scar-

borough Philosophical and Archaeological Society (Scarb. i858), pp. I8-25; hence Wright, Intel- lectual Observer, Oct. i866, p. 234, and Mayhew, British Arch. Assoc. Journal, xliv, 353, who adds a mention of the Constantinian coins found (he says) about I888. For the inscription, see the

illustration of Cortis; from him depend Wright, Watkin, Arch. Journ. xxxi, 349, Hiibner, Eph. Epigr. iii, 143, who wrongly calls the object a tile. See also my note, Eph. ix, 562. When I visited the site with Mr. W. H. St. John Hope some years ago, no trace of ancient remains seemed visible.

3 See my notes, Antiquary, Oct. I893, p. i6z2 and i894, p. 245-



214 NOTES ON THE ROMAN COAST DEFENCES OF BRITAIN.

guessing would be inexpedient. The details of this coast defence must be worked out by future enquiry. We cannot venture more than a conjecture as to the dates when the defence began or when it was finally abandoned.

It is probable, indeed, if the Huntcliff coins give us any certain clue, that that post was built after 350 and perhaps even after 360. We might connect it with the restoration of order and of frontier defences by the elder Theodosius in A.D. 369; we might even put it a little later, though it would not be easy to put it late enough to come within the range of the Peak inscription. If Peak and Huntcliff belong, as they obviously must, to the same system, we must suppose either that the Peak inscription records rebuilding or else that some details in the system were added or destroyed after or before others. The latter alternative, indeed, is only too probable. It would be rash to suggest that all these forts had one builder and all fell in one campaign. History does not work in such pigeon-holes. There are several points in the years with which the Roman rule in Britain closed at which restoration or destruction would be probable. In particular, we know from Claudianl that Stilicho restored order in Britain somewhere in the last decade of the fourth century and probably about the year A.D. 398. We know further from tiles found at Pevensey that the forts of the Saxon Shore, or at least one of them, were restored after the accession of Honorius. That is plainly after January, 395.2 It is quite con- ceivable that the Peak fort may date from the same year as the Pevensey tiles.

Unfortunately the restorations did not last long. In 402 troops were withdrawn from Britain, as Claudian tells us, for the defence of Italy. 3 In 406 the great German foray swept over Gaul and cut Britain off from the Mediterannean world. In 407 the usurper, Constantine III, crossed to Gaul with many of the British troops. The end of Roman rule in Britain followed quickly, but it did not come before the end of Roman rule in most of Gaul and Spain. Even in its death-struggle the empire kept a grip on its outlying dominions. Perhaps the great lesson of the finds described above is their proof of the tenacity of the imperial government and its struggle to do its duty even on the shores of the ocean.

I In Eutropium, i, 393, foll: de cons. Stilich. ii, Z50-255. These passages have been supposed by Keller (Stilicho, p. 17) to refer to events in A.D. 385, while Bury (Life of St. Patrick, p. 328) refers the second to A.D. 388-391, and the first to A.D. 395-399. The latter date seems right. But I cannot help thinking that Birt is right in connecting both passages with the same events. It is true that in the first Claudian mentions only the Picts, in the second he mentions Picts, Scots, and Saxons, but the first passage is very brief and Claudian's rhetoric could hardly be pressed.

2 Honorius was created Augustus in Nov. 393, at the age of 9. But his name would hardly occur on a tile in this fashion till after his father's death. For the tile, stamped HON AVG ANDRIA, see Eph. Epig. ix, 128I and Proc. Soc. Antiq. Load. I905,

p. 411-

3De bello Pollentino, 4i6, "venit et extremis legio praetenta Britannis." Whether legio here means a legion or, as often in Claudian, a levy of troops, does not matter for our present purpose see my note, Classical Review, xxi (1907), I05.



J.R.S. vol. ii (I912). PLATE XV.

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[Pitcbfortb, pbot.

NO. I. HUNTCLIFF FROM THE NORTH: OLD SALTBURN IN THE FOREGROUND,

WARSETT BEHIND (pp. 207, 215).

J-

NO. 2. ROBIN HOOD'S BAY AND THE PROMONTORY OF PEAK FROM THE NORTH (. 210).



haverfield, roman coast defences (1912)

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