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. 



