Two Thousand Years in Exeter (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings: Caerwysc and Isca

The Antiquity of Exeter

HOW OLD IS EXETER as an inhabited place, and where did it originally start? Is it possible to answer these questions? Everybody knows that Exeter was a Roman town, but was there any settlement of people here when the Romans arrived in the South West in the year 49—more than nineteen hundred years ago?

There is good reason to believe that the site of Exeter, or part of it, was occupied some considerable time before the Romans appeared on the scene. This takes us back to a time well before written records, and we depend therefore on certain material evidence for our scanty knowledge of this distant time. This material evidence is mainly that of coins which have been found within the city during various kinds of excavations in the past 200 years; and there is also the evidence of ancient tradition.

Let us take the coins first. In the year 1810, a considerable number of Hellenistic coins—that is, coins of Greek types from the eastern Mediterranean struck after the death of Alexander—were found in Broadgate while workmen were digging at a depth of twenty feet. These coins, the largest discovery of their kind yet made in this country, could be dated as belonging to the third, second, and first centuries before Christ. They suggested some sort of trade at Exeter with the Mediterranean countries some time between, say, 250 B.C. and the birth of Christ.

This discovery was so remarkable and unexpected that many scholars refused to believe the evidence. Two distinguished numismatists in 1907, examining them again, decided that the coins had been planted on the site in order to cause confusion, or that some private collection had been lost there. In either event, they decided that the coins were not evidence for the existence of a trading settlement on the site of Exeter at that early date.

Since they wrote, however, two things have happened to alter the picture. In the first place, other Hellenistic coins have been found in Exeter and, secondly, many more have been found at various places along the south coast of England—for example, at Penzance, at Mount Batten (now part of Plymouth), and near Poole Harbour in Dorset. We must, therefore, accept the conclusion that there was considerable trading between the Mediterranean countries and southern Britain a century or two before the birth of Christ, and that Exeter (under some other name) was one of the places engaged in this trade.

Roughly speaking, then, we may say that there were people living in Exeter about 200 years or more before the Romans came, and that Exeter as an inhabited place is about 2,100 years old. It may be somewhat older than this, but no evidence for an earlier date has yet come to light within the city. Excavations in 2003 on the site of the new Crown Courts, however, unearthed traces of Iron-Age occupation—pottery and ditches—on the bank of the Larkbeare stream which led down to the Exe.

Nor do we know what the earliest traders dealt in which would interest Mediterranean countries. It was not likely to be tin—not in Exeter at least, as there is no evidence whatsoever of tin being worked on Dartmoor in prehistoric times. It was more likely to have been cattle and hides, for which Exeter may even then have been the chief market of the whole region. We know that Cornish tin was being exported as early as the fourth century B.C. Continental merchants fetched it possibly from St Michael’s Mount, carried it by ship to the west coast of France, and so overland to the mouth of the Rhone and the markets of the Mediterranean countries. It is most likely that the same thing happened at Exeter with cattle, hides, and leather, except that the Continental merchants came in all probability from immediately across the Channel, from such places as Rouen in Normandy, the shortest sea-crossing. It seems very likely then that the processing and marketing of hides and skins, which is still a major undertaking on the Marsh Barton Industrial Estate, is the oldest industry in the city, going back two thousand years.

What else can we say about this early Exeter? One thing is that the High Street is the oldest thoroughfare in the city. It began as an ancient ridgeway some time in the Iron Age, if not earlier, again some two or three centuries before Christ. These ridgeways—roads which run along the back of prominent ridges in order to avoid marshy ground and river crossings as far as possible—are among the oldest roads we have. At Exeter, the ridgeway came down over Stoke Hill (from where we do not yet know). At the top of Old Tiverton Road, where the roundabout now is, it forked. One trackway ran along the top of the conspicuous ridge of Mount Pleasant and so along Polsloe Road (all this line lies on a high ridge to those who keep their eyes open), ending somewhere near Heavitree Church or perhaps going down to the river bank.

The main trackway, however, continued straight down Old Tiverton Road, down what is now Sidwell Street, and so into High Street. This must have been the main route of those early traders. It is significant that the biggest finds of ancient coins were made within a few yards of the High Street.

The earliest inhabitants of Exeter probably lived in the area between Fore Street and Bartholomew Street, in what was hardly more than a native village, despite its widespread trading activities. Exeter has been so much built over in the past two thousand years that it is very difficult to see its original topography—its steep hills, its deep-sided valleys, and its ridges and spurs. But if we think away, so to speak, the modern houses and streets and levels, we find that the ridge along which the High Street ran ended in a spur overlooking the river. The tip of this spur is what is now the disused churchyard of Allhallows-on-the-Walls, ending at the turn in the city walls known as the Snail Tower. On this spur the British had an earthwork—a hill-fortress—of the same type as those we see on the hill-tops of Hembury or Woodbury, though not so grand or formidable. This was their fortress in times of emergency. It seems probable that the earliest inhabitants lived in huts on the leeward side of this spur, on ground sloping gently down to the riverside. Centuries later, this part of Exeter was still known as Britayne (before its name was changed to Bartholomew Street) for it preserved the memory of the time when the ancient British lived there.

The people who lived in Exeter before the Romans came were Celtic. They belonged to a tribe known as the Dumnonii, whose territory covered the whole of South-Western England from Land’s End right up to the Parrett Valley in West Somerset. It is possible that Exeter was their tribal capital even before the coming of the Romans, but certainly it became so immediately under Roman rule.

The early inhabitants of Exeter could hardly have numbered more than a few hundreds, about the size of a large village today. The richer among them were traders but most of them were farmers and fishermen. The Exe in those early days teemed with salmon, perhaps as thickly as the rivers of British Columbia today. At any rate, the word Exe derives from a British word Eisca, meaning ‘a river abounding in fish’, and these fish were beyond doubt salmon.

Fishermen must have been a considerable class in the town population. Then there were the farmers, cultivating small plots of ground around the settlement, most probably the level ground now called St Sidwell’s, and perhaps raising cattle on the hill slopes to the north and in the marshes near the river in summer. All trace of these ancient farms has disappeared long ago, with the building-up of the city.

The Site of Exeter

There were many good reasons why a village and a trading settlement should have grown up where Exeter stands today. Here a long ridge of dry ground approaches the river, ending in a spur. This ridge formed a small plateau just about 100 feet above the river level, and on this plateau the city later grew. Not only was the plateau well above the river, but it consisted of gravel soils, lying on top of harder rocks. So it not only gave dry soils for building, which were particularly important when the buildings consisted of timber-frame huts with mud walls, but also an unlimited supply of fresh water not far below the surface. Without water no inhabited place could survive for three days; but Exeter has always had an abundance of water from springs and shallow wells sunk through the gravel to the rock below. Hooker, the first historian of Exeter, writing 400 years ago, puts it like this:

In former times, the great majority of houses, especially in the main streets of Exeter, had their own wells. These were fourteen feet down, and at that level they contained four to six feet of fresh water. Practically all these wells have been filled in and would be very difficult to find today, but one was found in 1933 in the Cathedral Close. It may still be seen in the basement of the Well House pub. It is said to be Roman.

Not only...