Chapter XXXVIII

THE Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched, tiled and slated cottages and the church that stands on a commanding knoll in the background. When Newton was really new it would be impossible to say; perhaps its novelty may have been measured against the hoary antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down the valley. For what says the folk-rhyme:--

"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,
And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"

and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more than a camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone ones. Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint only, of which Norwich is principally built, is available for building materials.

One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn, so thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult to give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age, when it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late eighteenth century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual decoration of inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron sign of the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.

In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies Dunston, trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and the "Dun Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the circular brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few miles into Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used who shall say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and its wooden gate has gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into disuse.

Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the left, but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a grey beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its ancient camp may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of the great Roman camp established here to overawe the stronghold of the Iceni, four miles away on the banks of the Wensum, and now the site of Norwich.

Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified _castrum_. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic of its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments of flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough, its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the laggard imagination of the layman in matters archæological, which refuses to be stirred before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch that can be rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed and paced on three sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to physical test both height, depth and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure, now a turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase and was sufficiently defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so that no works are to be found there. How long it was before the Romans subdued the Iceni, whose great city is thought to have stood where Norwich does now, is not known. Nothing of that early time here, indeed, is _known_, and guesses are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman advance into East Anglia, which had for its objective the principal stronghold of the tribes, here came to its military ending. To compare things so ancient and romantic with others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman camps on the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with those that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date continued northward.

Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far. The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the "South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where the navigation ceased.

It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old channel.

The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins with this, and together they descend into the city.