DORSET
A huge hillfort with soaring earth ramparts enclosing an area of 47 acres (19 hectares). Maiden Castle was the central place of the Durotriges tribe. The Durotriges were probably ruled by 10 or 20 petty chiefs, each commanding a pagus, or district. They used up a great deal of energy in internal disputes and power struggles, and possibly fending off raids by Atrebates or Catuvellauni tribesmen. Although they were resolute and bold, they were not organized to defend themselves against Rome. The easy progress of Vespasian’s conquering army through Wessex shows that in AD 43 Durotrigian power was decentralized and uncoordinated.
Several centuries before, the Durotrigian heartland had been dominated by six huge hillforts, each with several ramparts: Maiden Castle, Eggardon Hill, Ham Hill, South Cadbury Castle, Hod Hill, and Badbury Rings. Tribal territories spread out from these power centers, which were roughly equidistant from each other. By 100 BC, the three biggest hillforts—Hod Hill, Cadbury, and Maiden Castle—had emerged as the most powerful, vying with each other for supremacy; this can be seen in the increasing elaboration of their showy defenses. They evolved into towns, and Maiden Castle was the most important of them. It emerged as the capital, with rows of round, thatched houses ranged along streets (see People: Dwellings).
The site began as a Neolithic enclosure on the eastern summit in 3700 BC and was turned into an unusual monument, a huge bank barrow, in 3200 BC. In the Bronze Age a small henge was laid out at what would be the center of the Iron Age hillfort. In 350 BC a small hillfort was laid out on the site of the Neolithic enclosure. In 200 BC a much larger hillfort was created by extending the single rampart westward to encompass the western summit. A hundred years later this was elaborated with extra ramparts.
After the Durotriges’ resistance to the Romans was crushed, the site was abandoned. In about AD 70 the Romans built an open settlement, Durnovaria, on low ground to the north; this has become Dorset’s county town, Dorchester.
Toward the end of the Roman occupation in AD 367, a rectangular temple 20 feet (6m) by 16 feet (5m) was built inside Maiden Castle. It seems to have been a purely Celtic impulse; it in effect replaced a much older round temple that had stood just 40 feet (12m) away 600 years before. An old, native British holy place was being commemorated and revived, just as the Romans were leaving; the old order was being restored. In fact, after the Romans left, another round shrine was built exactly on the site of the original Durotrigian shrine—a clear statement that people were conscientiously going back to the beliefs and customs of the pre-Roman age.
What we see at Maiden Castle is a reminder that who and what the British, French, and Spanish are today is not exclusively or even mainly to be attributed to the Romans. A standard version of school history is that everything started with the Romans, but modern archeology is showing something quite different. First, we can see that there was a relatively flexible Roman incursion into the Celtic world, one that was ready to tolerate, learn from, and incorporate Celtic customs and beliefs. Second, we see that the way people did things after the Romans had gone was in many ways the same as they had been before they arrived. As Francis Pryor comments, “It was said that the Romans gave us roads, language, laws and civilization. All this is false. The Romans invented all this barbarian nonsense.”
World History
