A HISTORY OF NORFOLK Norfolk, to pause and consider the true history of the name Icknield Street. The result enables us to put the Iceni aside and pass on, free of theories, to the details of Romano-British Norfolk. 3. Places of Settled Occupation, Towns, etc. Norfolk, so far as it is at present known to us, contains no site which can with entire certainty be described as the site of a Romano- British town : it has no Silchester or Canterbury, revealing its character beyond question by its remains. But one spot, though unexplored and most imperfectly known to us, may perhaps be accepted as the site of a little town. This is Caister St. Edmund's, or, as it is generally styled, Caister-by-Norwich, about three miles south of Norwich itself. {a) CAISTER-BY-NORWICH Caister has generally been identified with Venta Icenorum, a place mentioned in the Itinerary, and also by Ptolemy and the Ravenna Geographer, though the name has been misspelt in their manuscripts. The scholars of the sixteenth century hesitated somewhat about the point, as when one writer explained Norwich to be the city of the Nordovices or Ordovices — a tribe really settled in Wales — and another placed the Brigantes in Norfolk instead of Yorkshire, and a little later Spelman identified Venta and Brancaster. But these fancies of early topographers were soon cast aside, and there has been practical agree- ment amongst antiquaries ever since. The evidence, though only cir- cumstantial, is indeed too strong to permit of much real doubt. Tacitus, Ptolemy and coins tell us enough to show that the Iceni inhabited Norfolk. Ptolemy names Venta Icenorum as the one noteworthy town of the Iceni, and the Itinerary places it at the end of a route which runs from London through Essex to Colchester and for some distance further, though it cannot all be traced with any certainty. Finds of British coins indicate further, as Sir John Evans has pointed out, that we may expect to find the chief town of the Iceni somewhere in the vicinity of Norwich.* Now, if we exclude two sites which are unquestionably military, Brancaster and Burgh Castle, Caister-by-Norwich remains the one spot within the probable limits of Icenian territory which agrees with our evidence. It alone can boast of Roman walls and an abundance of smaller remains, such as suit a town of some note, a tribal centre so long as the tribe lasted, and the end-station of a route : it alone can be brought into harmony with the indications of the Itinerary. Norwich antiquaries have sometimes set up the claims of Norwich itself as Venta Icenorum in preference to Caister-by-Norwich. But the Roman remains hitherto discovered in Norwich, even if those found in the suburbs be included, do not amount to much more than a few pieces of pottery and a few coins. They are wholly inadequate to prove the presence of a town such as we should expect Venta Icenorum to have been. Nor can any stress be laid on the fact that an eleventh century chronicler, William of Poitiers, once
- The precise localities where these coins have been found seem not to have been recorded. But
many come from ' near Norwich,' hardly any from Norwich itself.
