285 



small circle within which he professed to find the whole theatre of 

 the British war. 



When he went to reside upon his living of Camerton he was 

 frequently being presented with coins and little pieces of pottery 

 or metal, which were found in the fields belonging to his parish or 

 the adjacent one of Radstock, near the line of the Fosse Road from 

 Bath to Ilchester. He was persuaded that there was something of 

 importance to be found there, and about 1816 he set about a 

 complete investigation of the place. The result was that he 

 uncovered the foundations of twelve or fourteen houses, and found 

 many hundred coins of all ages from the settlement of the Romans 

 in Britain to their departure, also many fibulae and small instru- 

 ments, portions of pottery and the lower half of a female statue. 

 All this left no doubt that thei'e had been a fixed settlement of 

 Romans at that place. Mr. Skinner could find no notice of it any- 

 where, nor any name which could be applied to it, when at length 

 he hit upon the bold hypothesis that this Camerton was no other 

 than the Camulodunnm of Tacitus, and that the authorities have 

 been altogether wrong in placing that celebrated station in the 

 eastern provinces of the island. In 1823 he published five coloured 

 engravings of a pavement found in a Roman villa at Wellow, 

 about two miles from Camerton, a discovery of vast importance 

 to him, as this pavement will rank with any in the kingdom for 

 beauty of workmanship, and may therefore be assigned to an early 

 time, say the second century. 



The establishment of his Camulodunal hypothesis was the point 

 to which nearly all his reading and thinking afterwards became 

 directed. An outline of his argument was laid before the Bristol 

 Institution, and was placed in the hands of Sir Henry Ellis, to be 

 read to the Society of Antiquaries. Mr. Phelps's Somersetshii-e 

 (throughout which book you will remark that the place is named 

 Camalodunum, in agreement with Mr. Skinner's rejection of the 

 derivation of the name from the god Camulus) contains observations 

 by himself and Mr. Skinner on the subject, and we may assume 

 Mr. Phelps to have agreed with Mr. Skinner, as also seems to do a 

 member of our Club in a Paper lately read before another local 

 society. 



