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out of Germany and were beginning to harry
the Kentish coast. Naval counter-measures were taken, and there
was a general liveliness in the Channel. The great seamark and
(we may think) signal-station on Richborough hill, now more than
ever necessary, was hastily secured with an earthwork and a
triple ditch. Then the shrewd stroke of an enterprising admiral
of the Channel Fleet changed the problem. Carausius beat back
the pirates and at the same time battened upon the proceeds of
their piracy. Finally, he aimed at empire itself, and for seven
years compelled Rome to tolerate him as the petty lord of this
corner of the Roman world. But his success had shown both the
strength and the danger of the Channel Fleet. It is probably
significant that with the Carausius-episode this fleet vanished
from our records. After the recovery of Britain by the regular
government in 296, the first line of defence against the Saxons
was no longer the single powerful unit which had given Carausius
his empire. The motto ‘divide and rule’ had more than once
triumphed in Roman policy, and now again came to the rescue. A
flotilla of some sort must indeed have been retained; but the
main defence was now divided amongst a number of strong coastal
castles, of which that of Richborough is, by excavation, the
best known to us. It may ultimately be found that this new
system owed its inception to the initiative of the vigorous
usurper himself; that it was, in fact, intended as a means of
preventing the violation of his little empire by the powers of
Rome no less than by the pirates of Germany. Be that as it may,
the old and timid reluctance of the Roman or Romanized mind to
accept concentration and mobility as a permanent element in
defence had now once more asserted itself.62 The
fleet retired into the background; the old seamark on
Richborough hill was swept away; and in the place of the roving
fleet and its seamark rose the rigid, passive curtain-wall of
the great castle. The arteries were hardening in the ageing
body-politic of Rome.
And so Rutupiae did its work in the storms of the
fourth century. Of its fate in the fifth century we as yet know
little. The abundance of late coinage, if it be not due to a
limited period of very exceptional congestion, suggests that
Richborough may, like Verulam, have sheltered a Romanized
population well on into that dark century. Later, perhaps, the
Saxons also for a while inhabited it; they certainly buried
their dead occasionally within the shadow of its walls, and
eventually established a small church there. But the town itself
never revived. Its doom was sealed ultimately, perhaps less by
Saxon pillage than by the gradual blocking of its harbour. The
tidal estuary around it became dry land and could be drained and
cultivated. Only the great circuit of its walls remained, erect
though ruined, still looking out over sea and land from the
lonely hill amid the marsh. In the twelfth century those ruins
had power to inspire legends. To-day they excite the duller
studies of the historian, and arrest for an instant the fleeting
curiosity even of the present age.63
62 The hint in the Notitia
of a mobile field-force under the command of the Comes
Britanniae is too ‘nebulous to provide a real exception.
There is certainly no clear trace of the operation of such a
force in fourth-century Britain.
63 The
stories that Arviragus defeated Vespasian at Rutupiae, and that
Arthur fought with Modred there, ‘are inventions of Geoffrey
of Monmouth (iv, 16; xi, i). He had heard of the
ruins of Richborough, as he had heard of Silchester and
Porchester, and so he introduced them into his tale. The Latin
name, Rutubi, he may have learnt from Bede. |