CIV.—THE WELSH MARCH :—MONMOUTHSHIRE AND HEREFORDSHIRE.—EARLY HISTORY.—(Continued.) A BOUT three
miles to the east from Ross, in Herefordshire, and A. nearly one mile to the south of the road leading from Gloucester, in the parish of Weston-sub-Penyard, is Rose or Bury Ha This site, which was first pointed out by Horsley, seems to be in harmony with the distances in the Antonine Itinerary, if identified with that of the Roman ARICONIUM. Camden records a tradition of this station having been ruined by an earthquake, the popular way of accounting for the disappearance of the Roman towns under the accumulations of soil ; and John Phillips, the author of The Splendid Shilling, has introduced this supposed incident into his poem Cyder. " The appearance of the soil at Bury Hill is very different from that of the adjacent country, which is inclined to red, while this is of an extremely dark hue. The area on which the city stood, according to tradition, occupied three or four fields, and several acres exhibit this darkness of soil." About the middle of the last century " great part of the ground was in open and rough state, with heaps of rubbish, overgrown by briars ; but the proprietor, a Mr. Meyrick, resolved to enclose and level it ; and in so doing many antiquities were found, with an immense quantity of Roman coins and some British. Among the antiquities were fibulae, lares, lachrymatories, lamps, rings, and fragments of tesselated pavements. Some pillars were also discovered, with stones having holes for the joints of doors; and a vault or two, in which was wheat of a black colour and in a cineraceous state. The surface is now very little undulated," but in the beginning of the present century coins might still be picked up, " when, after ploughing, the clods were broken by a gentle rain, and innumerable pieces of grey and red pottery lay scattered over the whole tract, some of them of patterns by no means inelegant. The coins are chiefly of the Lower Empire ; some of Constantius and Trajan have been found, many of Tetricus, and one of Antoninus Pius. On the reverse of the latter is the Emperor habited as a high priest, pouring out the contents of a patera upon an altar, over which is the sun, with the legend Sacerdos Dei Solis.' The coins are of copper, silver, and gold. Some of the large stones found among the ruins of this station, and which appear to have been used in building, display strong marks of fire. In widening a road that crosses the land several skeletons were discovered, and also the remains of a stone wall, apparently the front of a building. The stones were well worked, and of considerable size. The earth within what appeared to have been the interior of the building was extremely black and shining. Numerous pieces of pottery, bones of men and animals, and bits of iron were dug up here. The adjoining lands were thickly strewn with scoria of iron ore, some of considerable size; these, indeed, have been found scattered throughout this part of the country, in some places lying in large heaps. These were probably connected with the Roman works in the neighbouring Forest of Dean. A piece of land near the station bears the name of Kill-Dane Field. For a gentle eminence Bury Hill commands the view of an extensive range of country ; to the south rise the rival hills of Penyard and Chace ; and westward the while fertile tract of Herefordshire, bordered by the mountains of Monmouth and Brecon." Remains of statues, urns, and vases have also been found on this site. The name Rose, given to it in some maps, has been derived by topographers from the Keltic Rhos, " a mountain meadow," or a moist large plain. " In either case it is not inapplicable to the situation of ARICONIUM, under the high hill of Penyard, and in an open country, with several streams in its vicinity."
About Site miles west north-west from Hereford, in the parish of Kenchester, about half a mile from the right bank of the river Wye, antiquaries now generally agree in placing the site of the MAGN1E, or MAGNA, of the Antonine Itinerary. "It seems to have been in the form of an irregular hexagon, its area being raised about four or five feet above the level of the adjacent country, and was once surrounded by a wall, the foundations of which may be traced." The area thus disclosed is twenty-one acres. "The south-west and south sides are the highest ; the road that runs by the side of the former seems to occupy the site of a ditch ; but no appearance of such is visible on the other sides. Numerous irregularities, arising from the foundations, ruins, and walls of buildings, overspread the area, and great numbers of Roman coins, bricks, leaden pipes, urns, burnt wheat, and large bones have been dug up here. Towards the east end is a mosaic fragment remaining of what is supposed to have been a Roman temple ; it consists of a large mass of cement of almost indissoluble texture, in which are embedded rough atones, irregularly intermixed with others that have been squared. This fragment is called the Chair, from a niche which is yet perfect ; the arch is principally constructed with Roman bricks, and over it are three layers of the same materials, disposed lengthways. Here, in 1569, a tesselated pavement and stone floor were discovered, and in the succeeding year buildings of Roman brick were found on which oaks grew. About the same time, Sir John Hoskyns discovered a hypocaust, about seven feet square, the flues of which were of brick, three inches square, artificially let into one another. Another tesselated pavement of a finer pattern was found in the earlier part of the last century, but soon destroyed. An aqueduct or drain of considerable extent, with the bottom entire, was also opened here towards the close of the same century, and various other vestiges of the ancient consequence of this city have been frequently found. The entrances appear to have been on the east, west, north, and south sides. About two furlongs to the north runs a small brook," the Wye flowing on the south aide of the site at nixed double that distance. Between one and two miles from Keuchester is Credenhill, "a very high and steep eminence, crowned by a vast camp, surmounted by almost inaccessible works, and forming a very conspicuous object for many miles round." The area of this camp is about 40 acres, bounded by a double ditch and rampart. Some antiquaries consider it to have been an exploratory camp for the defence of the city beneath, at Kencheater. The Roman roadway connecting MAGNA with GonastNIUM can still be traced in Four-Ways Common, near Madley, and several entrenchments occur in several parts of the line as it crosses the county. A glance at the Ordnance or any good county map of Herefordshire will at once detect the straight line of a Roman roadway passing from Kenchester by Stretton-Sugwas, Holmer, Luggbridge, Stretton-Gransham or Grandison, and Promo Hill, into Worcestershire and to Worcester.
The roadway from GORANNIUM is continued, as we have seen, northwards from Kenchester to the station of BRAVINIUM, identified with Brandon Camp, near Leintwardine. Portway, Stretford, Streat, Mortimer's Cross, and Wigmore are believed to indicate the line of this roadway. Frequent entrenchtnents are met with along its course. Numerous remains of encampments are to be seen scattered over the two counties of Monmouth and Hereford, to which antiquaries have variously assigned a British, Roman, Saxon, or Danish origin. Three stone pillars, on the summit of a hill near Trelech Church, a short distance from Llandago, are assigned to the British period. They arc of a composition of pebbles and cement, so soft as to crumble under the touch ; the outside of the stone, which is exposed to the air, is grey ; but when broken, the natural colour appears to be red. The strata of the neighbouring rocks consists of this substance, and fragments of a similar kind are spread over Trelech Common. The distance of the middle stone from the smaller of the other two is fourteen feet, and from the larger near twenty. The perpendicular height of the smallest is nine feet two inches ; of the middle, ten feet one inch ; and of the largest, eleven feet ten inches. They all incline. The largest is fifteen feet long above the ground, and fourteen in circumference at the base. No remains of detached villas have been discovered within the limits of Herefordshire, and a pile of stones called " Arthur's Stone," situated in the parish of Dorstone, constitutes the only remains of the anterior period in that county.
The Saxon tide of conquest swept over Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, but the boundaries between the two races were very variable, as the fortune of war changed from one side to the other. The Britons in this quarter were pressed by tribes belonging to the Mercian confederation, the liwiccas from Gloucestershire, and the Hecanas on the Herefordshire frontier. In 680 a Saxon synod was held at Hereford. At first, if we may give any credit to the Saxon Chronicle, the Gewissas, or West Saxons, were the leading power among the Saxon invaders in this contest on the western frontier of England, but afterwards the Mercian princes undoubtedly predominated in this quarter. The Severn and the Malvern Hills were, no doubt, long the great border line between the two races. Monmouthshire was often
an independent British principality under the name of Gwent ; at other times it seems to have been a dependency of the neighbour
ing British state of Morganwg (Glainorganshire); at other times, no doubt, that portion of it which lay to the eastward of the Usk, and where the ground offered less natural advantages for defence, bowed beneath the yoke of the Saxons. Offa, the great Mercian conqueror, subdued the country between the Severn and Wye, and protected his conquests by a high mound and ditch, " which extended from Flintshire to the Wye at Bridge Solers ; whence to near Bigswear, below Monmouth, the river served as the boundary ; and from thence to the Severn at Beachley the mound was reconstructed, and may be seen in a perfect state in many places." This rampart, " Offa's Dyke," continued down to the latest Saxon period to be the general boundary of the two nationalities. Harold, the son of Godwin, after reducing the Welsh princes to a tributary state during the reign of Edward the Confessor, made an ordinance that if any Welshman was found with arms on the English side of the dyke, his right hand should be cut off by the King's officers. On the other hand, during these border wars of the later Saxon period, Wales suffered so much from loss of her male population that marriages between Welshwomen and Englishmen, which till then had very rarely been permitted, were now allowed by the English King. This measure, however, only brought a few Welsh females to England, while the mountaineers generally remained unaffected by admixture. Harold caused a hunting-seat to be erected for the King at Portskeweth, in Monmouthshire ; but it was levelled to the ground by Caradoc, son of Griffith, prince of South Wales, almost all the men employed on the building being put to the sword. How little per'manent impression the earlier Anglo-Saxons made on Monmouthshire is evident from the fact that we do not find nor can we deduce any names of Marks within that county. Within the limits of Herefordshire, on the other hand, we can deduce no less than fifteen.
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