of their sheep's fleeces being soiled by the passing trains, need be in no present fear, as they were but lately, of having the country blackened by iron blasts. Meanwhile landlords receiving at the rate of 2007. per acre for land, to be restored to them in working condition, after the abstraction of the iron

stone.

are

The air of the county is keen and bracing, and the health and longevity of its inhabitants beyond the average of the kingdom. The celebrated Northampton Tables, the foundation of all the Life Insurance calculations, were framed by Dr. Price on the Bills of Mortality kept in the parish of All Saints, Northampton, considered at that time as a fair average for insurers and insured: the increased general longevity has now caused them to be abandoned as too favourable to the offices. The Northampton Bills, however, have a more poetical claim to fame. The clerk of All Saints, whose business it was to deliver them yearly to the Mayor and other worthy inhabitants, was accustomed, with the view to the augmentation of his Christmas-box, to accompany them with a copy of verses. No doubt the subject was growing oppressive and the theme a little threadbare, when John Cox, who held the important office in 1787, hearing that Cowper was staying at Weston Favell, walked over to ask the poet to favour him with a copy of mortuary verses. Cowper, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, humorously describes the interview. On his referring the plain, decent, elderly personage who sat before him to a namesake Cox, a statuary and a first-rate maker of verses, the clerk answered that he had already borrowed help from him, but that he was a gentleman of so much reading that the people of the town could not understand him. The simple, good-natured Cowper came to the relief of his petitioner, and for seven successive years furnished the mortuary verses which now appear in the poet's collected works, and which founded at the same time the fame and the fortune of John Cox. The custom is still retained, and offers a fair opening for an aspiring native poet in a field which Cowper did not disdain to occupy.

Remarkably free from epidemics, its high average elevation makes it a trying climate for pulmonary complaints. Consumption and rheumatism are its prevalent scourges. A subsoil of stiff clay and the abundance of grazing-land foster damp. Cold singly, or damp singly,' says Dr. Robertson, the great medical authority of the county, may be successfully resisted by the human frame, but when they act in concert they constitute the pestilence that walketh in noon-day.' The extensive system of

6

*

In an admirable address, which briefly touches on all the characteristics of the county, in the 'Report of the Provincial Medical Association.' Hereford. 1845. drainage

drainage which is being adopted in every direction, and for the outlet of which the ground is remarkably favourable, will soon reduce the latter of these two evils. The writer of the 'Magna Britannia,' in 1738, assigns as a reason for the healthiness of the county, one which would hardly be accepted in these coast-frequenting days. The air of Northants is exceedingly pleasant and wholesome, the sea being so remote that it is not infected with its noisome fumes.'

Northamptonshire, a part of the district once occupied by the Coritani, contains few traces of its earliest inhabitants, and can exhibit no British remains above-ground. The Rollright circle in Oxfordshire is the nearest existing vestige; but antiquaries have not failed to trace British earthworks at Borough and Arbury hills, at Rockingham, and elsewhere. Though Roman and later encampments have superseded the original extructions, the tracks of an earlier people are still discoverable on those heights which must needs have been the first spots to be seized on when war was the normal state of the country. On Borough Hill the excavations made by Mr. Baker discovered some of that rude sun-baked pottery, the characteristics of which, the wide mouths of the jars, the parallel lines and zigzag ornament, are considered to mark them as British.

The Romans have left more distinct marks in the portion of Watling-street which runs across the south-west of the county, dividing lordship from lordship, from Towcester (Lactodorum?) to Lilbourne (Tripontium?), and in Ermine-street, which entering by Caistor branches off at Upton; one line, the Forty-foot Way, leading to Stamford, the other, the Long Dyke, to West Deeping. The Car Dyke (runs from Peterborough to East Deeping. Along both Ermine and Watling streets Roman remains have continually been turned up, and not only in their immediate neighbourhood, but throughout the whole county, isolated tracks of the Romans have been discovered, proving a very extensive settlement of the conquerors in this rich midland soil. The most considerable are the tessellated pavements discovered at Weldon in 1738, at Cotterstock in 1736, at Nether Heyford, and more lately at Harpole and Whittlebury. The twenty-seven Roman sites given to this county by Reynolds in his Iter Britanniarum might now be trebled.]

We cannot enter on the great antiquarian tilt-yard of the last century-the Roman Itineraries; but must leave Leland, Fulk, Talbot, Camden, Gough, Gale, Morton, Stukeley, Baxter, Horsley, Pennant, Reynolds, and the rest, to fight out their own battles. We were inclined to adopt Baker's suggestion that Burntwalls near Daventry is the ancient Benaventa of the

Britons

Britons and the Issanavaria of the Romans; but Mr. Botfield, in a paper in the Archæologia,'* has newer lights, and draws from Issanavaria the traces of Shawney, where he would place it; while from Benaventa, Baker extracts the root of the modern Daventry, though fatal to its current pronunciation, and the rebus on its seal of 1595, where a savage nondescript, half Highlander, half Saracen, is designed to represent a Dane, who stands with his hatchet ready to cut down a devoted tree. From these nominal riddles it is better to turn to those material evidences, the remarkable and extensive earthworks, the largest, perhaps, says Baker, in the kingdom, which crown the neighbouring heights of Borough Hill; and indeed no one can mount its commanding summit and survey the various lesser hills that rise below him on every side, without being convinced that so sovereign a position must have been occupied from the earliest period of military speculation and defence. Since the enclosure the plough is gradually effacing the marks of rampart and foss, and the line of circumvallation, which enclosed an area of about 150 acres, is in many parts utterly erased. Excavations were made here in 1823, by Baker, on the conjectured site of the Prætorium, and part of the hypocaust, a tessellated pavement, and a few articles of the bathing toilette, were brought to light. The researches, at that time stopped, were, owing to a more obliging tenant, resumed in 1852 by Mr. Botfield with great success, and the result communicated in the paper noted below. Mr. Baker here opened also the range of tumuli, though in some cases he had been forestalled; the arms and other remains, figured in his History, were of both ante and post Roman date, and are now in Sir H. Dryden's safe keeping. On this hill races from time immemorial were continued at intervals, till they were cried down' on the hill being enclosed in 1805; and the course over which British and Roman horses doubtless ran has given way to its modern representative at Northampton, where the Pytchley Hunt races constitute a popular and improving spring meeting, which has lately paid homage to archæology by the institution of the St. Liz stakes.

But the most thoroughly Roman spot in the county is that of Caistor (Durobriva), whose name, like that of the neighbouring village of Chesterton, denotes its Latin origin. Histories of the place have been written both by Gough† and Artis, ‡ and the

'Account of Discoveries made on Borough Hill.'-Archæol., 1852.

4

+ Gibson and Gough's Castor,' 2nd edit. 1819.-Miscel. Antiq., No. VIII. The Durobrivæ of Antoninus illustrated in the remains of Castor, Northants.' By E. T. Artis. 1828. The Durobrivian pottery was a distinct ware, of superior quality, and more elegantly worked than that of the Upchurch district.

amount

amount of Roman remains from time to time dug up, and the series of coins, from Trajan to Valens, are very considerable and still continue to be found. Artis' excellent map shows Roman villas, iron-works, kilns for bricks and potteries, and pavements, scattered 'thick as thick' over the whole parish and neighbourhood. The tessellated pavements are very fine-one has been restored and relaid in the dairy-house at Milton. If pavements and roads are to be taken as tests of civilization, Minton and Macadam have scarcely yet achieved for Britain the position which her earliest conquerors impressed on their distant province. Our cosy carpets have probably to answer for the lack of the tessellated and encaustic pavements which were among the glories of Roman and mediæval art; but before the age of iron trams the mail-coach traveller knew of no road so certainly good as when 'before him lay

For many a league the Roman way,'

and was sure of a straight cut and firm bottom, and wide wayside turf, when he once got on the line of Watling-street. The rules for road-making were most minute; there were five distinct layers, each of which has its special material and name. In a cause tried last year at Northampton respecting a wayside encroachment, the point turned on the width of Roman roads, and the rich antiquarian lore of Mr. M. H. Bloxam was called into evidence; and in Mr. Botfield's excavations on Borough Hill, it was found that a fox had made his earth in the flue of a Roman hypocaust: thus strangely are distant ages brought into contact, and thus deeply was the Roman conqueror's footstep impressed upon the soil!

The state of the Roman buildings, generally indicating the ravages of fire, prepense devastation, and sudden abandonment, confirms the tradition of the rapid relapse into barbarism which took place on the departure of the Romans. The Roman element that remained must have been very small; and the generations that succeeded cared not to occupy the elegant villas of their former masters, but seem to have wreaked their vengeance on the works of a dominant people, whose occupancy, though it had passed from military tenure, was yet, like our hold in India, an isolated domestication, which had never amalgamated with the mass of the people. The ruder Northmen were of a more congenial spirit, and joined with the native British in trampling down the luxury and arts which the Romans had bequeathed them; nor was it till the revival of the faith by the mission of Augustine that Britain recovered its civilization, again from the hand of now Christian Rome.

Of

Of the happier Christian Anglo-Saxon period, Northamptonshire presents, in the church of Brixworth, the earliest and most complete example in the kingdom. The Roman bricks rebuilt up in the walls, and the basilican plan, are embodied with that earliest ecclesiastical style in England which a foregone theory only would hesitate to pronounce as Saxon. In a very elaborate and interesting paper, Mr. Poole has clearly demonstrated two distinct ante-Norman periods in the existing church. The fen country of Peterborough, then Medeshamstead, in the kingdom of Mercia, was the main scene of Saxon history; and the legends of Guthlac of Croyland and his sister Peaga, who left her name in Peakirk, are among the most interesting records of those times. The singular Saxon monument, still preserved in the cathedral at Peterborough, originally standing in the graveyard, erected to record the murder of Abbot Hedda and eighty-four of his monks killed by the Danes in 870, is the oldest existing Christian monument in Britain. It is mentioned by Ingulphus, whose dimensions and inscription all but exactly accord with the existing tomb.

Besides the rude transitional work of Brixworth there are Saxon works of higher finish in the tower of Earl's Barton, and in the tower and chancel arches of Brigstock and Whittering; but it is Barnack that affords the grandest example of this period, not only in the county but in the kingdom. The noble towerarch, which, after having been partially closed for five hundred years, has lately been opened, displays with the windows, doorway, niches, and ornaments of the tower, the singular transitionary work of builders passing, for the first time, from the use of wood to that of stone, and cutting their unwonted material, and employing it in construction, like joiners rather than masons. It is seldom that such a passing and momentary phase of art can be caught, and as it were historically photographed, for future ages, as it is in the petrified carpentry of Barrack. It is only just that this mother of many churches (for out of the quarries of Barnack rag-the hills and holes' of its neighbourhood-was dug the stone which built Peterborough and Croyland, Thorney and Ramsey, Ely and Bury St. Edmund's) should have so interesting a church of its own. The two stones in Caistor Field, on a land still called St. Edmund's Balk, but popularly said to mark the flight of Robin Hood's arrows, were probably connected with tolls paid in the conveyance of Barnack stone. A torso, of distinctly classical type and of native stone, in possession of the present rector, shows that the Romans were acquainted with the quarries, which are now exhausted.

* Reports of Northampton Arch. Soc.,' vol. i. p. 122. Vol. 101.-No. 201.

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