EARTHWORK.* "Canstin, and Noll, and Old Nick between them," says
Mr. Allcroft, "claim a most unfair share of the nation's antiquities." There is no chapter in this excellent book which' does not protest against ignorant attributions of earthworks to the Romans and to Cromwell, and yet we fear that, should it ever attain the popularity it deserves, the result will be an epidemic of such attributions :- "One never knows," we road in the introductory chapter, "where or when one may make a fresh discovery. Earthworks, it might be supposed, are so obvious that they must long since have been all noticed, recorded, and mapped, at least in this over,.
populous island of ours. Not at all In scores of villages and towns, the mounds and trenches, bigger or smaller, which alone mark the sites of British forts and Roman stations and
Norman castles, still retain fragmentary existence, but they are so obvious, so much a part of the recognised features of the spot, that they excite no remark. Year by year they are being slowly levelled down, and in the end they mostly perish utterly without over having been remarked at all," It is a true doctrine, but a dangerous ono, alike fox Hodge and for Jonathan Oldbuck. We can almost catch in these ,sentences the echo of the words of the Antiquary : "Indistinct !—why, you must suppose that fools, boors, and idiots, have ploughed up the land, and, like beasts and ignorant savages, have thereby obliterated two sides of the .square, and greatly injured the third ; but you see, yourself, the fourth side is quite entire."
Have real earthworks sufficiently distinctive characteristics to guide the intelligent observer to a right conclusion, and to save him from meeting an Edie Ochiltree Who "minds the bigging of the bit burrook " on the antiquity of Which he has staked his reputation P Mr. Alleroft's book is an answer to the question. It is the plain man's vade meoum to earth.' works. It pretends to no immense erudition, and' it lays claim to no great discovery, but it is the work of a careful' student, who knows all that has been said on this subject in recent years, who is not afraid to make up his own mind when authorities differ, and who has the power of expressing clearly and pleasantly his own views and those of 'others. Mr. Allcroft is a member of the Committee on Ancient Earth- works and Fortified Enclosures, and he has followed the classification of these remains adopted by the Committee. That classification is eightfold, with a miscellaneous section for works which fall under none of the eight heads. It begins with promontory fortresses, which depend chiefly on natural situation for their strength ; next collie contour forte, also on hilltops, but rendered secure by artificial defences ; then three classes of simple and less interesting forts ; then homestead moats, in some ways the most interesting of all; and finally great defensive enclosures and fOrtified villages. The author does not disguise the difficulty of the task of the :Committee :—
" There is probably no branch of inquiry in which it may be
said with more literal truth that every example is unlike all others. To detect the differences, to methodize them, to hunt the map over in the splendid uncertainty that here, or there, or on the next hilltop, we may happen upon some indifferent difference which may give the clue to a brainful of problems—it is a fascinating chase, and -though one's hopes elude one still, they load one out into the high places of the earth, the untrodden ways, the wind and the sunlight."
It is not within the province of a reviewer to summarise tha help which Mr. Alloroft offers to his readers; it is sufficient to say that, while be does not profess, like the Antiquary of Scott's tale, to have discovered" an infallible touchstone of antiquity," he shows by exposition and by illustration bow some of these problems have been solved ; and his book is not less useful as a guide to what has been done than as a help to those who wish to reconstruct the history of their own neighbourhood.. In the space at our disposal we can only give some indication.
Earthwork of England: Prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, Danieh, Herman, and Mediaeval. By A. Hadrian Alloroft. London Macmillan and.Co. [I8a. not.1
of his method of treating one or two of the topics with which he deals.
"Of all camps in Britain," says Mr. Allcroft, "be their plan what it may, the Maiden Castle on Fordington Hill, two miles south-west of Dorchester, deservedly stands first." The name suggests yet another reminiscence of the Antiquary, who described an explanation of it as "invented to give consequence to trumpery woman-kind." He was thinking of the Maiden Castle of Edinburgh, for the name is a common one, and is probably an English transliteration or corruption of the Celtic maidun, or "large hill." The purpose of the Maiden Castle at Dorchester is even more doubtful than the significance of its name. The colossal size and the amazing complexity of plan upon which Mr. Alleroft remarks are sufficient witness to the importance of the fortress at some period in the remote past; but at what dale or by what manner of men it was defended and attacked none can tell, It has yielded up some records of its past, for when a pond was made within the area, forty years ago, there were found bronze rings and fragments of pottery, which show that it was inhabited in the Bronze Age. "Its extent, the strength of its ramparts and trenches, the laborious piling of mound upon mound, ditch upon ditch, proclaim it the stronghold of a people of large numbers and large resources." Near it are similar fortresses which point to the same conclusion, but there is no more definite information on which to argue. Mr. Allcroft's book is not solely, or even chiefly, concerned with such famous monuments as Maiden Castle; there is scarcely any part of England whose inhabitants will not find in it some familiar name, and in a chapter on pre- historic fortifications the author lays down some general principles which give much practical guidance for the identification of fortresses, wherever they may be. He is wise in warning his readers against a kind of speculation which used to be very frequent, and which mars the usefulness of at least one great book on early England,—the temptation to trace out in chains of earthworks the frontier lines of different tribes. It is, as Mr. Allcroft urges, "an unwarrant- able assumption that ancient tribes in the first place con- structed each some one uniform type of earthwork, and in the second place entertained a broad and well-calculated strategy, a unity of purpose for which there is no evidence at all."
The chapter on "The Primitive Homestead" contains many points of human interest. Mr. Allcroft discusses the "cooking-mounds" which preceded the use of pottery; the "kitchen-middens," with their accumulations of the shells of oysters, mussels, periwinkles, and cockles, testifying to the food of far-off days; the "pounds" or cooking-pits, often mistaken for camps; the "hut-circles," which continued to be made by miners and shepherds until quite recent times, and which may deceive the unwary; the "Pieta' Towers" of Scotland, and the Round Towers of Ireland; the done-holes, which in Ireland are popularly associated with the Danes; and the native villages, of which few examples are to be found, for when the Romans came the Celts learned more excellent things than even such a village street as that at Welton, in Staffordshire. With Roman civilisation Mr. Allcroft is not concerned ; his business is to point out how difficult it is to find Roman camps without traces of masonry, by the absence of which they are distinguished from Roman stations. "The tests of shape, area, proportions, and defen- sive features are all unreliable The only thing which can make probability into certainty is such exhaustive excava- tion as shall demonstrate that there is nothing not Roman upon the site." The Roman encampments were originally slight, and time has dealt hardly with them, and even the Roman stations, to some of the greatest of which Mr. Allcroft devotes a chapter, have not all survived.
Later chapters deal with Saxon and Danish earthworks, with Norman castles, and with the humbler mottled home- stead. " "From the thirteenth century onwards, probably every one who, though unable to build himself a 'castle' of whatever type, yet possessed something worth stealing, fell back upon the moat as a means of security," and their variety is very great. There is something peculiarly interesting in the "mottled grange," although those which have survived are not of any great age. Mr. Allcroft urges that such houses are rarely damp so long as they are kept in good repair, and explains this by a laudation of the honest builder of the Kiddie Ages. "His bricks were made of the right kind of clay rightly fired, his mortar was mixed with real lime, he knew how to make his walls damp-proof, and his timber was native oak thoroughly seasoned. The jerry-builder was not yet." We are by no means sure about the last state- ment, for we have been unfortunate enough to come across the tracks of the sixteenth-century jerry-builder, and we suspect that he has always been with us, though his work has naturally disappeared. How many of the triumphs of the twentieth-century jeriy-builder will survive to bear witness against him three centuries hence P If future historians judge by surviving buildings alone, the builders of these days may acquire a reputation which would astonish themselves.
Mr. Allcroft feels the charm of the mottled homestead
"Within the straitened precincts of such a moat doubtless dwelt alike Chaucer's far-ridden ' verray parfit gentil' knight, and his frankeleyn' with the complexioun sangwyn' begotten of many a sop-in-wine taken betimes • by the morwe.' In such a salting one thinks of slender girls and stately women, the mothers of a very crowd of home-keeping sons and daughters, that kneel meekly with clasped hands on either side of their parents' effigies —the women who now and again rode a-hawking with Dame Juliana Bernell? instructions at their finger-tips, or whiled away their rare spare hours with Plato his Phaedo or Euphues his England or Sidney's Arcadia, or the thin music of the virginals, but for the most part lived strenuous days of infinite quietude amongst their embroideries, their herbs and their babies."
We have said enough to show the value and the varied interest of Mr. Alleroft's book, and we commend it especially to those who know the South Downs,—a part of England which is specially rich in these memorials of the past, and to which the author devotes a chapter full of the love of the Downs as well as of the interest of what they have to tell us.
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