ROMANO-BRITISH SUFFOLK TO give any idea of what the district which we now name SufFolk was like in the Roman period it will be useless to have recourse to the pages of ancient writers, for only one recorded event, the great revolt against Rome under Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, can in any way be connected with the land with which we are dealing. Its inhabitants suffered doubtless in the struggle, and more so from the vengeance of tlie conquerors, which may have resulted in deserted homesteads and un- tilled fields for many years. One other event deducible from an ancient document which left a more permanent mark here than any consequences of the great rebellion was the erection on the coast of Suffolk of certainly one, and almost certainly two, of the fortresses called ' the forts of the Saxon Shore,' ' from the fact of their having been built to defend the east coast from the attacks of the Saxon sea-rovers, which during the decline of the Roman power towards the end of the 3rd century had become intolerable. We shall have more to say on this subject when the remains of these fortresses are examined. In default of anything like history we have a source from which we can at least make out some picture of the lives of those who lived on the soil of Suffolk during the ages of Roman dominion. This, as Dr. Raven well says, ' is the great unwieldy mass of unwritten testimony: coins, and medals, pottery, traces of domestic life and colonization, roads and forts, arguments fairly deducible from the soil and the set of the country, etc' Into this mass we propose to penetrate and give the results of such researches. The county of Suffolk lies for the most part compactly within natural boundaries. On the north the Waveney and the Little Ouse divide it from Norfolk, and on the south the Stour through all its length parts it from Essex. The little streams of the Lark and the Linnet help to separate it from Cam- bridgeshire and the fens, whilst the German Ocean for ever gnaws away its east- ern side and chokes its river mouths with shifting sands. All its principal rivers fall into the North Sea, and three of them are distinguished by one peculiarity in common, which had a decided influence on the choice of position of the sea fortresses at Burgh near Yarmouth (Gariannonum) and Walton. The pecu- liarity in question is that on approaching the coast the rivers do not discharge themselves directly into the sea, but at no great distance from the beach they make a turn to the south and pursue a course for miles in a direction roughly parallel with the shore line, before falling into the ocean. This is the case ' See the Notitla Dignitatum, ' an official directory and army list ' probably made up in the early years of the 5th century. 279
