Roman
fort; for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the handle of
a fine old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with plaster, with two
pretty laughing faces pinched lightly out under the volutes. A few days
after I felt like Polycrates of Samos, that over-fortunate tyrant, when,
walking myself in my garden, I descried and gathered up the rest of the
same handle, the fractures fitting exactly. There are traces of Roman
occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man
ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and
searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space
of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made.
There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till
fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being
taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago! But
there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile away, where
the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man hoeing brought up
a bronze spear-head. He took it to the lord of the manor, who was
interested in curiosities. The squire hurried to the place and had it
all dug out carefully; quite a number of spear-heads were found, and a
beautiful bronze sword, with the holes where the leather straps of the
handle passed in and out. I have held this fine blade in my hands, and
it is absolutely undinted. It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier.
Nothing else was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that
looked like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a
boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the edge
of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were presumably
unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the attempt. Hard by
is the place where the great fight related in Hereward the Wake took
place. The Normans were encamped southwards at Willingham, where a line
of low entrenchments is still known as Belsar's Field, from Belisarius,
the Norman Duke in command. It is a quiet enough place now, and the
yellow-hammers sing sweetly and sharply in the thick thorn hedges. The
Normans made a causeway of faggots and earth across the fen, but came
at last to the old channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge;
and here they attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were
foiled by Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds