therefore proceed with confidence to describe from
existing remains the characteristics of the forts of the Litus
Saxonicum. In shape and size they are not uniform; they vary from
rectangular to oval, and from five to nine or ten acres. Their
fortifications conform more nearly to one type. The walls usually have
rubble-and-concrete cores, facings of flint or of stone in small regular
courses,16 bonding courses of tile or stone, and slight and
shallow foundations; they are thick and high, pierced by few and
variously constructed gateways, and defended externally by projecting
towers or bastions, usually of circular form. They betoken a period when
the defensive was all-important, and in this point, just as in their
lack of uniformity and in various details, they exemplify the fashions
of late Imperial fortification.17
The forts were meant for small garrisons of auxiliaries; of
those mentioned in the ‘Notitia’, Richborough alone had legionaries,
and probably not more than 1,000 of these. But the numbers of the troops
and the internal arrangements are otherwise unknown. Except at
Richborough and Lympne, hardly any Roman building has been found within
their walls, and the remains in those two forts tell us little. Of
barracks, such as appear in the fourth-century frontier forts of Mocsia
and Arabia, the Saxon Shore shows no single vestige.
The positions of the individual forts seem to have been
chosen for various reasons.18 In Kent the desire is
plain on the one hand to maintain communications with the Continent and
to hold the Straits of Dover, which must be a strategic point in any
British naval war, and on the other hand to block the navigable arm of
the sea which then made Thanet an island, and to protect the dwellers in
east Kent. On the East Anglian and southern coasts we trace rather an
attempt to watch those entrances by which barbarian raiders have so
often reached the interior of Britain. Thus the Wash is guarded by
Brancaster, the waterways behind Yarmouth by Burgh Castle, the estuaries
below Colchester by Bradwell, which incidentally protected Camulodunum
itself, and the creeks of south-eastern Hampshire by Porchester. But the
actual sites may suggest a further reason for their choice. Every fort—except
Felixstowe, if that was a fort—stands on the shore of some inlet or
harbour. Where, as at Richborough or Burgh Castle, the main part of the
fort crowns a cliff high above the water, the walls on the water-side
were in all probability carried down to the shore, or as near to it as
the lie of the land would permit. The significance of this is plain.
Whatever became of the classis Britannica in the fourth century,
these forts were evidently connected with ships. One fort, indeed, has
no other obvious reason for existing. Pevensey had nothing to defend. It
was a good landing-place for invaders. But it had no attraction for
pirates. North and north-east of it stretched the dense thickets of the
Weald, west the lonely downs of Lewes, bare save for a scattered
peasantry. There was no inlet here leading far into the interior, and
save for one villa on
16 A curious feature in the
facing of some of the masonry is a use of light or dark coloured stones
to produce the effect of ornament, as at Richborough (p. 30). This may
be copied from Roman brickwork: compare the bastion at Cologne. (See
also below, pp. 74, 75, etc.)
17 Fox, Arch. Journ. liii, 373, argues
that the absence of uniformity in the shapes of the forts points to
different dates of building. Richborough (he says), being rectangular,
was built before Pevensey and Lympne, which are irregular-shaped. It is
doubtful if this view can be maintained. It would seem that in the
fourth and fifth centuries, rectangular and other shapes were used
simultaneously and almost arbitrarily. Note the want of uniformity in
shape and detail of the fourth-century frontier forts on the upper Rhine
attributed to about A.D. 285—300: Wesideutsche Zeitschrift, xxv,
169, and plate 3.
18 Lewin’s account of these, Arch. xl,
362, is somewhat one-sided and theoretical. |