[Footnote 1:  Windle, Bertram, C.A., “Remains of the Pre-historic Age in England,” pp. 203-4.]

CHAPTER V

How the Roman Occupation of Britain affected the Forest and Vale of Pickering

B.C. 55 to A.D. 418

The landings of Julius Caesar, in 55 and 54 B.C., and the conflicts between his legions and the southern tribes of Britain, were little more, in the results obtained, than a reconnaissance in force, and Yorkshire did not feel the effect of the Roman invasion until nearly a century after the first historic landing.

The real invasion of Britain began in A.D. 43, when the Emperor Claudius sent Aulus Plautius across the Channel with four legions; and after seven years of fighting the Romans, taking advantage of the inter-tribal feuds of the Britons, had reduced the southern half of England to submission.

Plautius was succeeded by Ostorius Scapula in A.D. 50, and from Tacitus[1] we learn that he “found affairs in a troubled state, the enemy making irruptions into the territories of our allies, with so much the 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.