56 Report on the excavation of the Earthwork 



might be under such circumstances, by losing some of his 

 notes and misinterpreting others, even in these days of 

 developed intellect, with all the means of accuracy at com- 

 mand in writing, printing, mapping, lithographing, photo- 

 graphing, &c., to produce something which would have a 

 strong affinity for nonsense concerning the matter in hand. 

 Let him then suppose himself to be an ancient Briton 

 derivmg his mformation solely from oral sources. Let him 

 assume that he has to tell his story not to the members of 

 the Essex Field Club, but to a band of armed and painted 

 fanatics strongly fortified with preconceived opinions, and 

 determined to hear nothing which shall not accord with 

 what they knew before. Let him then suppose his story has 

 to be handed on by them to other savages furiously predis- 

 posed to different views, and that after that it has to serve 

 its time for eighteen centuries as subject-matter for nursery 

 and supper-table tales, each successive narrator clothing it, 

 as the painters of the Middle Ages did the characters repre- 

 sented in their pictures, in vestments of their own particular 

 time and place ; he will see that the evidence afforded by 

 tradition for any event of prehistoric or non-historic times 

 having occurred in the particular locality attributed to it is 

 unfit to hold any but a place of very secondary importance as 

 an element of scientific investigation. I shall, therefore, make 

 my apologies to Queen Boadicea for saying no more about her 

 connection with this locality than has been said by others in 

 papers that have been written upon these camps. There is no 

 objection whatever, that I am aware of, to the supposition 

 that Queen Boadicea made her last stand here against 

 Suetonius, if anyone desires that such a theory should be 

 held; but in this paper I have to deal solely with the 

 materials unearthed from beneath the ramparts. 



Two papers, both by Mr. B. H. Cowper, have been sent to 

 me for perusal ; one published by the Epping Forest Fund 

 in 1876, the other read before the meeting of the Royal 

 Archaeological Institute at Colchester in the same year. 

 The former is accompanied by plans of both camps by 

 Mr. W. D'Oyley, of Loughton. To these I would refer the 



