more
insolence as they supposed that a new general, with an army unknown to
him, and now that the winter had set in, would not dare to make head
against them." Scapula, however, vigorously proceeded with the work of
subjugation, and having overcome the Iceni of East Anglia and the Fen
Country, he was forcing his way westwards into Wales when he heard of
trouble brewing in the North. "He had approached near the sea which washes
the coast of Ireland," says Tacitus, "when commotions, begun amongst the
Brigantes, obliged the general to return thither." The Brigantes were the
powerful and extremely fierce tribe occupying Yorkshire, Durham,
Cumberland, and Westmorland, and among them were the people whose remains
are so much in evidence near Pickering. They had probably been under
tribute to the Romans, and their struggle against the invaders in this
instance does not appear to have been well organised, for we are told that
when the Romans arrived in their country, they "soon returned to their
homes, a few who raised the revolt having been slain, and the rest
pardoned." We also know that in A.D. 71 Petilius Cerealis attacked the
Brigantes and subdued a great part of their country; and as the Romans
gradually brought the tribe completely under their control, they
established the camps and constructed the roads of which we find so many
evidences to-day. The inhabitants of the hills surrounding the Vale of
Pickering were overawed by a great military station at Cawthorne on a road
running north and south from that spot. It may have been the Delgovicia
mentioned in the first Antonine Iter., and in that case Malton would have
been Derventione, and Whitby, or some spot in Dunsley Bay, would have been
Praetorio, but at the present time there is not sufficient data for fixing
these names with any certainty. It has also been supposed by General
Roy[2] that Cawthorne was occupied by the famous 9th legion after they had
left Scotland, owing to the similarity of construction between the most
westerly camp at Cawthorne and the one at Dealgin Ross in Strathern, where
the 9th legion were supposed to have had their narrow escape from defeat
by the Caledonians during Agricola's sixth campaign. But this also is
somewhat a matter of speculation.

[Footnote 1: Tacitus, the Oxford Translation, revised 1854, vol. 1, book
xii. pp. 288-90.]

[Footnote 2: Roy, Major Gen. William: "The Military Antiquities of the
Romans in Britain," 1793, Plate xi.]