ROMANO-BRITISH DERBYSHIRE 



in the black mould forming the floor near the entrance). Two coins of 

 Valentinian are said to have been discovered in this cave. 1 Anstey's 

 cave, also near Torquay, yielded in 1825 some potsherds and one or two 

 coins one, certainly, of Pius. 3 Finally, Ash Hole, on Berryhead near 

 Brixham, when examined by Mr. Lyte in 1820-9, * s sa ^ to have 

 contained Romano-British potsherds and a coin of Claudius. 8 



(h] The Borness cave in Kirkcudbrightshire has yielded a bit of 

 Samian and was apparently occupied in Roman times ; but the limits of 

 this occupation are doubtful. 4 



(A) CONCLUSION 



Such, summarized roughly and briefly, are the principal facts that are 

 known about the cave-life of Derbyshire and of Britain generally during 

 the Roman period. It remains to attempt an explanation of this cave- 

 life, and to suggest a cause and date which will make it intelligible. 



The explanation usually offered is that it was the cave-life of 

 Romano-British fugitives fleeing in the fifth or sixth century from the 

 invading English. This theory has often been put forward, but by no 

 one so clearly and eloquently as by the historian John Richard Green. 6 



The caves of the Yorkshire moorlands preserve traces of the miserable fugitives 

 who fled to them for shelter. Such a cave opens on the side of a lonely ravine, known 

 now as the King's Scaur, high up in the moors beside Settle. In primaeval ages it had 

 been a haunt of hyaenas, who dragged hither the mammoths, the reindeer, the bisons, and 

 the bears that prowled in the neighbouring glens. At a later time it became a home of 

 savages, whose stone adzes and flint knives and bone harpoons are still embedded in its 

 floor. But these too vanished in their turn, and this haunt of primitive man lay lonely 

 and undisturbed till the sword of the English invaders drove the Roman provincials for 

 shelter to the moors. The hurry of their flight may be gathered from the relics their 

 cave-life has left behind it. There was clearly little time to do more than to drive off 

 the cattle, the swine, the goats, whose bones lie scattered round the hearth fire at the 

 mouth of the cave, where they served the wretched fugitives for food. The women 

 must have buckled hastily their brooches of bronze or parti-coloured enamel, the peculiar 

 workmanship of Celtic Britain, and snatched up a few household implements as they 

 hurried away. The men, no doubt, girded on as hastily the swords, whose dainty 

 sword hilts of ivory and bronze still remain to tell the tale of their doom, and hiding in 

 their breast what money the house contained, from coins of Trajan to the wretched 

 ' minims ' that showed the Empire's decay, mounted their horses to protect their flight. 

 At nightfall all were crouching beneath the dripping roof of the cave or round the fire 

 that was blazing at its mouth, and a long suffering began in which the fugitives lost year 

 by year the memory of the civilization from which they came. A few charred bones 

 show how hunger drove them to slay their horses for food ; reddened pebbles mark the 

 hour when the new vessels they wrought were too weak to stand the fire, and their 

 meal was cooked by dropping heated stones into the pot. A time seems to have come 

 when their very spindles were exhausted, and the women who wove in that dark retreat 

 made spindle-whorls as they could from the bones that lay about them. 



1 British A 'ssoc. Reports from 1 870; Boyd Dawkins,C<w Hunting, pp. 325 foil.; Devon. Asioc.Trans. 11.469, 

 iii. I90,xvi. 199, etc. Dr. Brushfield has told me of the two coins,which do not appear in any published report. 



2 Devon. A ssoc. vi. 64, 69, x. 1 46, 170. A coin of Trajan was found in one of these caves (Davidson, 

 p. 78, Woollcombe MS.), and according to Mr. Worth in Anstey's Cave (Devon. Assoc. xxiii. 81). 



3 Devon. Assoc. xxiii. 78, Woollcombe MS. Other coins (e.g. Nero) are also quoted, but these 

 seem to have been found in the neighbourhood and not in the cave. 



* Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. xi. xii. ; Edinburgh Museum, HN, 1-179 5 information from Dr. J. Anderson. 



6 Green, Making of England, pp. 67-68 : one or two of his details are, I think, inaccurate. So too 

 Wright, Hist, of Leeds in the Proc. of the Geol. and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding, 1864-5, 

 pp. 365-6 ; Boyd Dawkins, Cave Hunting, p. 109 ; Pennington, Barrows and Bone Caves of Derb. 

 p. 59 ; C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant. i. (1848), 72. 



3 1 



