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the earliest in Britain, and the restoration of a temple decayed by time in the reign of Alexander Severus, all concur to prove that it was one of the first foundations of that people among the Brigantes ; while the superior magnificence of its public works proves it to have been a place of much more importance than an ordinary provincial station. Lancaster also bears almost equal marks of antiquity and splendour in the Roman sera ; yet, with these superior claims, according to Mr. Whitaker's hypothesis, neither Lancaster nor Ribchester is noticed in the Itinerary of Antonine, while an obscure baiting-place, a mere post-house, of which the remains are scarcely visible, is exalted into the Coccium of Antonine and the Rigodunum of Ptolemy. BOOK I. CHAP. IT.] ROMAN HISTORY. 13
Without repeating reasons so lately adduced for restoring the Ribble to its ancient name of Belisama, I shall now assume the point as proved, at least with the degree of evidence which such investigations admit of ; and shall merely state, that upon this river Ptolemy places his TLigodunum ; and upon this river the Itinerary of Antonine, if the line of the 10th Iter and the two given stations between which it is interposed, together with the in- controvertible evidence of remains, 1 be allowed to interpret, has fixed the station of Coccium.* Yet no concurrence of roads, no discovered remains, lead to the supposition that two 3 stations or towns of eminence in the age of Ptolemy or of Caracalla were planted on the banks of the Eibble. 4 How then is this apparent difficulty to be solved ? A little attention to British etymology and to the obvious appearances of the place will remove every doubt. In the first place, let the name, as it stands in Ptolemy, be stripped of the Roman termination dunum; and, with a British aspirate at the end, it becomes Rigoch. In the next place, cut off from the itinerary name its Roman generic termination, and we have Cochiu. G and C are convertible ; some MSS. of the Itinerary read Goccium, and the radical syllable CocJi, or Goch, is the same in both. Goch, in the British language is red Rhigoch, Red River ; and Goclmi, or Cochui, Red Water. And accordingly the stone, the sand, the soil, of Ribchester, are alike distinguished by this very colour, which would naturally arrest the attention of the first inhabitants, and occasion a name peculiarly significant and proper. This hypothesis, which goes far towards proving the identity of the place designed by both these appellations, relieves the antiquary from an embarrassment which he has never yet been able to shake off namely, that of having a STATION TOO MUCH an embarrassment
to the Koman Vallum. Eibohester cannot then be on this line. " The Tenth Iter, which passes from the north through Cumberland, Westmerland, and the whole length of Lancashire, and is identical with the line now under consideration; gives Coccium as the name of the station nearest to Manchester. As there are no remains of a station on the line of Antonine's Tenth Iter from Ribchester to Manchester, and as the remains of the Roman military road are easily trace- able throughout the whole space between these two places, Ribchester can be the site of no other Roman station than the Coccium of Antoninus." On Roman Ribchester, by John Just, Esq. and John Harland, Esq. Journal of the Archaeological Association, vol. vi. p. 299. 1851.] 3 I agree, however, with Mr. Whitaker, that there has been a Roman port about Freckleton, towards which the Watling-street, as it is called, first discovered by Dr. Leith upon Fullwood Moor, evidently tends. But this is entirely out of the question with respect to the present Iter ; and, moreover, it has been already proved not to be the Setan- tiormn Portus. 4 [" A second station has nevertheless been found on this river, near to Walton le Dale; and its discoverer, Mr. Charles Hardwick, has given a full account of it in vol. viii. pp. 127 140, of the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and again in pp. 39 46 of his valuable History of Preston. A fall of earth at this place has recently disclosed a very fine portion of Roman pavement, probably forming part of the military road from Walton to Lancaster. The pavement lay about 30 inches below the present surface of the soil ; it was nearly ten yards wide, and was composed of boulder stones, sand, and gravel, very firmly set. Since then a well-preserved coin of Germanicus has been found on the site of the new station ; and these, together with numerous fragments of pottery, &c. abundantly prove that the Romans certainly had a second permanent station on the Ribble not far from the present town of Preston." From a paper On the Roman Topography of East Lancashire, by T. T. Wilkinson, F.R.A.S. &c. read before the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, March 16, 1865.] HISTORY OF WHALLEY. [BOOK I. CHAP. II. which has driven Camden to seek for Coccium at Cockley, 1 and Mr. Whitaker to place it at Blackrod ; while, on the other hand, it has compelled Horsley, who saw with his usual sagacity the real situation of Coccium, to remove Rigodunum to Warrington, as he had previously confounded J3elisama with the Mersey.
tions on the character and credit of his favourite guide, Richard of Cirencester, the monk who, I fear, has led him, with a friar's lantern,- into many devious paths, through many a hog and brake, in his bold and excursive wanderings over the Sistuntian Monarchy. That the Itinerary published by Dr. Stukeley, under the name of Richard of Cirencester, is really genuine, by which I mean that it is the work of him whose name it bears, there seems no reason to doubt. 3 But a work may be indubitably genuine, yet of little or no
by Antoninus, I saw Cockley, a wooden chapel among trees, Turton chapel among precipices and wastes," &c. Camden (edit. Gotigh), iii. 127. " Mancunio in Antonini Itinerario succedit COCCIVM, quod at Cockly sacellum fuisse juxta Bury credam ego donee dies certiora dederit." The same sentence is in Camden, Brit. (ed. 1586), p. 429, but not in the edition of 1C07, from which it might seem that Camden abandoned this idea. P. A. L.]
sufficient confidence to deny, has now been decidedly determined in the negative of that long debated question, after it had, since his time, very much divided the opinions of those who have studied the Eoman antiquities of Britain. The Itinerary of Eichard is not only as Dr. Whitaker asserts of no authority ; it is a modern forgery of which the MS. has never been seen by any one. Nor was the work quoted before the middle of the last century. In the preface to Ricardi de Cirencestria Speculum Ilistoriale de Gestis Regum Anglice, edited by John E. B. Mayor, M.A. Fellow of St. John's college, Cambridge, and published in the historical series of the Master of the Eolls, 1869, the De Situ, with its accompanying " diaphragmata " or itineraries, has been distinctly manifested to have been the fabrication of Dr. Charles Julius Bertram, Professor of English in the Marine School at Copenhagen, who first communicated it to Dr. Stukeley in the year 1747. Stukeley, one of the most credulous of antiquaries, innocently helped his correspondent to the name of Richard of Cirencester, who was a monk of Westminster, after Bertram had at first named his pretended author " Richard of Westminster." Though some other writings have been attributed to Richard of Cirencester, Mr. Mayor shows that the Speculum Historiale is really his sole extant work. It is true that the genuineness of the Roman itineraries thus palmed upon antiquaries has been much suspected by others beside Dr. Whitaker, and questioned more particularly by Gough, by Reynolds the author of Her Britanniarum, by John Hodgson the historian of Northumberland, by Joseph Hunter the historian of South Yorkshire, by Eaine the historian of North Durham, latterly by our historical antiquaries Stevenson and Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, and by the learned foreigners Wex and Bo'cker: whilst Dr. Wellbeloved, in his Eburacum, as plainly indicated his unbelief by discreetly ignoring Richard of Cirencester altogether. But the great crowd of our county-historians and topographers
historians Hutchins, Nash, Hutchinson, Collinson, Polwhele, Shaw, Warner, Duncumb, Jones of Brecon, Fosbrooke, Hoare, Bray, Clutterbuck, Dallaway, Ormerod, Surtees, Horsfield, Brayley, and lastly Baines in his Lancashire ; together with
a series of minor topographers that might be enumerated to as long if not longer extent ; and, in addition, the more general authors on our national and local antiquities, the brothers Lysons, George Chalmers in his Caledonia, Pinkerton,
Thomas Wright, Roach Smith, and Beale Poste (until 1853, when he pronounced it apocryphal) ; the special writers on Roman roads, Major-General Roy, Leman, Bishop Bennett, and others ; and Robert Stuart, in his Caledonia Romano, ;
not to mention Eichard of Cirencester's devoted editor and champion Henry Hatcher, and Hatcher's biographer John Britton, with Dr. Giles a subsequent editor ; whilst the list of very learned though uninquiring believers is swollen by
the great names of Gibbon, of Lappenberg, and Dr. Lingard. Even such recent and important works as Mr. Mac- BOOK I. CHAP. II.] ROMAN HISTORY. authority. And such appears to be the case in the instance before us. This monk, who lived in the beginning of the fifteenth century, was undoubtedly a man of curiosity and
diligence, worthy of a better age. He travelled, he collated MSS., he drew maps, and he drew conclusions ; but these conclusions, unhappily, though the author of them has no
claim to any other regard than a modern antiquary, and in some instances even less, have been erected by the zeal of his disciples, Dr. Stukeley and Mr. "Whitaker, into original and
independent authorities. Yet he may be proved to have had no ancient materials which we have not, and he wanted some which we possess. The Fragmenta qucedam a, Duce
quodam Romano consignata appear to have been the Itinerary of Antonine ; the basis of his map was that of Ptolemy, whom he expressly mentions; and his general divisions of
Roman Britain were taken from the Notitia. To have adjusted all these, and to have formed an account of Roman Britain from the result, would have required a judicious and
faithful hand. This last the Monk had not : on the contrary, he was possessed with the general spirit of his profession in the middle ages something between bold conjecture and
inventive fraud. He laid out new itinera : he imagined colonies, towns invested with the Roman Cambridgeshire, the school and college maps of Roman Britain published by the Useful Knowledge Society, and the text of Ancient Geography superintended by Dr. William Smith, are all vitiated by the use of " Eichard of
Cirencester" as an authority. At the same time it will be only just to mention, in addition to the judicious critics already named, that some recent writers have set themselves earnestly and determinedly to work to stem the tide of
error: more particularly Mr. Daniel Wilson in The Archceolor/y and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, Dr. Edwin Guest in the Archaeological Journal, the Rev. Arthur Hussey in the Gentleman's Magazine 1853 and 1854, and the late Mr.
B. B. Woodward, F.S.A. in the Gentleman's Magazine 1866 and 1867. But the true mode of dealing with this unex- ampled deception was that contemplated, but not performed, by the Rev. J. J.. Conybeare, who " was confident that the
work was a modern forgery, and meditated a paper on the subject for the Archalogia. He considered the Latinity of Richard as not that of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but of the preface-writers of the eighteenth." (Nichols, Literary
Illustrations of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 439, 440.) This efficient process has at length been thoroughly accomplished by Mr. Mayor; who has devoted nearly 150 pages of his Preface prefixed to Richard of Cirencester's genuine work to
a thorough analysis and dissection of the whole composition of the De Situ, both in its language (which differs in style, orthography, and the names of places from those of the Speculum,) and in its statements, which he proves are borrowed,
not only from such authors as Tacitus, Casar, Ptolemy, Dio, Solinus, Isodorus, &c. from Beda, Gildas, and the medie- valists, but even from their commentators and scholiasts ; from Camden, Baxter, and Horsley, and other comparatively
modern materials. The Itinerary, Mr. Mayor states, as the result of his investigations, is in the main from Antoninus, but routes are broken, combined, and reversed. Where a town has two names, the name given by Antoninus is always
replaced by its synonym. Nine-tenths of the names in Antoninus re-appear, with additions from Ptolemy, the Notitia, Ravennas, the Tabula Peutingerana, as well as from Camden's, Baxter's, and Bertram's guesses and imagination. The
preposition ad, with the name of a mountain or river [this is exemplified in the Lancastrian ad Alpes Pentnos,] or with the number of a milestone, supplies many stations ; in media, ad fines, \_Ad fines is " a common name for Bertram's stations ;
see Iter v. and xviii. It is also common in Antoninus, but no example occurs in Britain." Mayor, p. Ixxxv.] and the like innocent fictions, supply more. Sometimes we have a station without a number, sometimes a number without a
station. Everywhere artifice is apparent. At the same time the carelessness displayed is only less astonishing than the credulity which has been so blind to it. * * * * Bertram's success is a signal reproach on the historical inquirers
of the last 120 years." In the sixth part of the library of Richard Heber there was a copy of Stukeley's Account of Richard of Cirencester, with notes by Dr. T. D. Whitaker. It was sold for 10s. (Lowndes, by Bohn, 2541 b.) Mr.
Mayor justly remarks, " These notes would be of interest ;" but he has not traced their present possessor. J. G. N.] 16
HISTORY OF WHALLEY.
[BOOK I. CHAP. II. Jus Latii, and others merely stipendiary, long after those distinctions were abolished ; he inserted some names, which, though real, were posterior to the Roman empire in Britain,
and some which may safely be affirmed to have been fabricated by himself. This is not a place for entering further into the controversy ; otherwise, I am prepared to support all
these assertions by irrefragable proofs, having had occasion to attend particularly to the subject when engaged in another work.
respect and reverence. made up this Iter. J. G. N. 1870.] Ad Alpcs Peninos - VIII. Alicana X.
Isurio
XVIII.
The Sistuntiaci in Anonym. Kavenn. (Petrie, xxvb.), the harbour of the Segantii (Ptol. ibid, xii b.), the mouth of
the Kibble (Horsley, 376-7). See Bertram (Havnise, 1758), i. 6, 53. In Bertram, i. 6, 31, and in map and index, Olicana, which
Ebtiracum xvii. Of this Iter, the three first stations alone are to be taken on the credit of the Monk ; as the fourth rests on the authority of Ptolemy, and fifth and sixth on that of Antonine.
proved even to be a conclusion of the Monk. Dr. Stukeley certainly supposed him to mean the Lunc ; and, for the road which Mr. Whitaker has so distinctly traced from the Neb of
the Nese to Ribchester, though I give entire credit both to the accuracy of his research and the fidelity of his representation, I must beg leave to remind him, that these appear-
ances prove nothing as to any particular station, but merely that a station or port in general existed at the former place.
Ptolemy, or it is a rash and arbitrary substitution, for the latter word is evidently suppressed to make way for the former. I am inclined to the second hypothesis, and for
these reasons : The genuine Rerigonium and Sinus Rerigonius of the geographer evidently lay on the sestuary of the Clyde, and upon the coast of Galloway. But the word a was
written in some MSS. Berigonium, which the Monk adopted, and very properly, in its real situation, but seems to have imagined that when written with the initial R it denoted
another place ; and, looking out for something, however distantly, resembling it in sound, unhappily fell upon Rigodunum, which he rashly and unwarrantably displaced. To these
BOOK I. CHAP. II.] EOMAN HISTORY. 17
conjectures I have only to add, that the Monk, not aware of the identity of Cocciivm and
Eigodunum, like all succeeding antiquaries, has had a station upon his hands, which he chose to dispose of at random, in a situation x which evidently led Mr. Whitaker 2 to seek
it at Blackrod. faintly echoed in the more recent name of this place the Ribelcastre of Domesday and the modern Rilchester. Hence it may be conjectured that there was an interval of time,
after the Romans withdrew from Britain, when it ceased to be inhabited and to have a name ; after which the first Saxon colonists of Northumbria found it, though abandoned,
yet conspicuous in decay ; and from the remains of its fortifications, united with the circumstance of its site, gave it the appellation by which it is still distinguished. 3
encampments (for to him unquestionably it must be referred), on the northern bank of the river, and flanked by the deep channel of a brook on the east ; corresponding to which, on
the west, is a large sluice or channel, to which tradition has assigned an use confirmed by many nautical relics, namely, that of a dock or slip for vessels. That the tides once rose
so high as to waft vessels of considerable burden to the quays of Coccium, there can be little doubt ; nor is it necessary to resort to the violent expedient of an earthquake, in
order to account for their recess. . A gradual aggestion of sands, aided by strong westerly winds, and not sufficiently repelled by floods from the land, will abundantly account for
an appearance so frequent that we have almost ceased to inquire into its causes. And that the high precipitous banks which now border this valley, at a considerable distance
from the stream, were once washed by the tides, while the sandy plain beneath formed a broad and irregular sestuary, is also credible : but the level of Rlbchester * itself, little
elevated above the plain, and still more that of the Roman town, which, from the appear- chester then belonged) sixteen are described as inhabited by a few persons, and the rest lay waste. at ragis of spring-tydes farther." Leland, vol. iv. part i. fol. 39. should ever have been a Port, for the following reasons : The Roman Road from that place to the Neb of the Nese proves the general level of the flat country to have been the same in the Roman sera and at present. Yet the
ascent of the tides to the level of Ribchester, to say nothing of the bars of rock, which must have obstructed it, would at high tides have inundated the Filde, by which means the Roman road to Lancaster would also have been
rendered impassable. The nautical remains, such as anchors, boat-nails, &c., discovered at Ribchester, are sufficiently accounted for by the supposition of a manufactory in iron carried on there, and by the use of a boat for the trajectus
of the Ribble, which was probably moored in the western foss of the station where it united with the Ribble. [Our author subsequently remarked, " All the nautical remains discovered about Anchor Hill prove nothing more than the
existence of a ferry, which the Romans must have had, and which our English ancestors also enjoyed as late as Edw. III.; and, with respect to the disclosure of an anchor, I know of nothing to negative the opinion, that, as the Calder
arises in a valley abounding with iron, the ore might be transported to Ribchester, and manufactured there for the use of their port below." Richmondshire, ii. 4.58. 1823.]
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HISTORY OF WHALLEY.
[BOOK I. CHAP. II. ances of floors, &c., Appears to have lain from two to three feet beneath the present surface, seem to indicate that even then the sea had hegun to recede, and that these
appearances belong to an earlier period in the history of the earth. posts ; and, of those which also appear to have been cities or populous towns, many form Yüklə 4,81 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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