VOL. XX. (2) 
ANCIENT CIRENCESTER 
89 
track and the war-path, and his burial-place is near it. But 
to the Roman the road is strategic, and the camp is the road 
or river guarder. 
What did the Roman find here ? He found a marked 
riverine town-settlement with its tribal huts, and probably 
there were two or three important wooden courtyard mansions 
of local British type of the ruling prince and his kinsmen. 
To it led three or four ancient and very irregular old tracks, 
some of which can still be traced and some of which (glorified) 
are still in use, accompanied by those inevitable tokens 
of antiquity the long-barrows and the later round ones. 
Follow on any map the Daglingworth and Duntisboume road. 
The first thing the Roman did lay in the General’s command, 
and that was to establish a scientific camp. In this case, I 
believe, it was made outside the town, and to its existence 
we probably owe the district-name of Chesterton, on its 
southern flank ; that may also give the reason why the later 
Bull-ring became established there and not on another site. 
The next thing the Roman did was to establish a temple, in 
which the symbol of empire, the sacred majesty of the living 
Emperor, or War-Lord Supreme, should be worshipped by a 
brotherhood, or official College of Augustales, for the easier 
Romanisation of the conquered and tributary Dobunic people, 
and for the easier assimilation of local religious cults. In 
its wake followed the Latin teacher and the Roman lawyer 
and the money-lender. Meanwhile the surveyors and the 
engineers carefully determined the outlay and directions of 
the required roads and the places of the future stations, or block- 
houses, along these. It may be asked if there is evidence 
as to which of these many Roman roads of Cirencester, 
the Fosse, the Ermine Street or the White Way had priority 
in the making ? We can only approach the answer with proba- 
bility by consideration of the known objectives of the conqueror 
during the first century. To this we can then say, the design and 
necessity of the all-important Fosse Way compels us to give 
it a first-century date, and the Ermine Street probably followed 
and even over-lapped its making. The Fosse, however, may 
have been completed on one side (that was the north-east 
side) of the town considerably before its extension to Bath 
