Colchester

• 1. Introduction

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  Colchester sits on a gravel hill in north-eastern Essex, fifty miles from London, and beneath its streets lies a story that stretches back further than almost anywhere else in Britain. When the Romans arrived in AD 43, they did not find a wilderness. They found Camulodunon, a thriving Celtic capital whose coins already bore the face of a king called Cunobelin, the very ruler Shakespeare would later immortalise as Cymbeline. That Celtic name, Camulodunon, meant the fortress of the war god Camulos. It was already the beating heart of Southern and Eastern Britain long before the legions crossed the Channel.

  From that Roman foothold grew the first city in Roman Britain, the first British capital, and a place whose walls are still standing nearly two thousand years later. Colchester would be burned to the ground, besieged, shaken by earthquakes, and bombed by the Luftwaffe. It would spin wool that clothed half of Europe, shelter Protestant martyrs burned within sight of a Norman castle, and produce, of all things, the woman who wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. By the 2021 census, its built-up area had grown to a population of 130,245. In 2022, it finally received the title of city, the distinction its founders might have said was long overdue.

• 2. Before Rome

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  Palaeolithic flint tools, including at least six Acheulian handaxes, have been pulled from the gravel deposits on which the city rests, material laid down in the Middle Pleistocene and shaped by an ancient ancestor of the River Colne. Hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic left behind tools too, among them a tranchet axe found at Middlewick.

  By the Neolithic and Bronze Age, the landscape around the hill was already monumental. A Neolithic henge stood at Tendring. Large Bronze Age barrow cemeteries were laid out at Dedham and Langham, and a cluster of twenty-two barrows was raised at Brightlingsea. An archaeological inventory taken in the 1980s counted over eight hundred shards of pottery from those early periods found within Colchester itself. One of the more striking discoveries was a pit at Culver Street containing a ritually placed Neolithic grooved ware pot.

  The Celtic settlement that would eventually attract Roman attention had been growing in power for decades before the legions arrived. The tribal chieftain Tasciovanus was minting coins bearing the Celtic name Camulodunon in the period around 20 BC to 10 BC. By the time Cunobelin took power, roughly from five BC to AD 40, Camulodunon had become so dominant that Roman writers were calling him King of the Britons. His coins bore the abbreviated name in five different forms: CA, CAM, CAMV, CAMVL, and CAMVLODVNO. The name has since drawn attention from a different direction. Chrétien de Troyes, the twelfth-century French storyteller who first put the name Camelot into writing, may have borrowed it, at some remove, from Camulodunon.

• 3. Capital of Roman Britain

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  In AD 43 a Roman legionary fortress was planted here, the first in Britain. Within a few years, as the frontier moved westward and the twentieth legion departed, the settlement was refounded as a colonia, its formal name recorded in a second-century inscription as Colonia Victricensis. It became the first capital of the province of Britannia.

  At its centre stood a Temple to the Divine Claudius, the largest classical-style temple in Britain. The city also contained at least seven other Romano-British temples, and two of the five Roman theatres known to have existed in Britain. The theatre at Gosbecks, built on the site of the old Iron Age royal farmstead, was the largest in Britain, with a capacity of around five thousand seats. At its height, in the second and third centuries AD, Colchester may have held a population of around thirty thousand.

  In AD 61 that flourishing capital was attacked and burned during Boudica's rebellion. Tacitus described in The Annals of Imperial Rome how Roman ex-soldiers had settled at Camulodunum before it was consumed in the Iceni uprising. After the destruction, the city walls, running approximately three thousand yards in circumference, were built between around AD 65 and AD 80. In 2004 archaeologists working ahead of a redevelopment of the Garrison discovered a Roman circus beneath the site. The chariot-racing track, an entirely unique find in Britain, was estimated to have held around eight thousand spectators, and excavations confirmed that a cemetery containing 516 burials surrounded it. A hoard of jewellery found in 2014 beneath a shop in the town centre, named the Fenwick Hoard after that shop, was described by the director of Colchester Archaeological Trust, Philip Crummy, as being of national importance and one of the finest ever uncovered in Britain.

• 4. Boudica to Danelaw

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  After Boudica's forces burned the colonia, London rather than Colchester became the capital of the province of Britannia. The city was rebuilt behind its new walls, but signs of trouble returned as early as AD 268-282, when there is evidence of hasty re-organisation of Colchester's defences, followed by the blocking of the Balkerne Gate during the fourth century.

  The archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler was the first to propose that the absence of early Anglo-Saxon finds in a triangle between London, Colchester, and St Albans might indicate a zone where British rule continued after the Anglo-Saxon arrival, what he called a sub-Roman triangle. Later excavations found some early Saxon occupation, including a fifth-century wooden hut built on the ruins of a Roman house at what is now Lion Walk. By the sixth century, the city may have ceased to function as a recognisable urban settlement at all.

  The ninth-century Historia Brittonum, attributed to Nennius, still listed the town, which it called Cair Colun, among the thirty most important cities in Britain. Colchester was assigned to the Danelaw around 880 and stayed in Danish hands until 917, when the army of Edward the Elder besieged and recaptured it. The late Saxon tower of Holy Trinity Church stands as a physical remnant of the period that followed.

• 5. Wool, Refugees, and Martyrs

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  In 1189 King Richard I granted Colchester its first known royal charter, giving its burgesses the right to elect bailiffs and a justice. The borough celebrated the eight hundredth anniversary of that charter in 1989, eight hundred years after the document was sealed.

  Medieval Colchester's prosperity rested on cloth. During the later fourteenth century it became a European centre for woollen russets, grey-brown fabrics that circulated widely across the continent. The trade recovered the population so effectively after the Black Death that it grew faster than many comparable English towns. By 1524 Colchester ranked twelfth among England's wealthiest towns by lay subsidy assessment. A century earlier, in 1334, it would not have made the top fifty.

  Between 1550 and 1600 large numbers of Flemish weavers and clothmakers arrived in Colchester, driven out of Flanders by religious persecution. They produced the textiles known as Bays and Says, woven from wool in ways associated with baize and serge. The area they settled in Colchester's centre is still called the Dutch Quarter, and many Tudor-period buildings survive there. Flemish refugees in the 1560s established the Dutch Bay Hall to control the quality of the textiles for which Colchester became famous.

  Under Mary I, who reigned from 1553 to 1558, the town paid a heavy price for its Protestant sympathies. At least nineteen local people were burned at the stake at the castle, first in front of the walls and later within them. They are commemorated on a tablet near the altar of St Peter's Church. The events were documented by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs.

• 6. Siege, Plague, and War

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  The Stour Valley riots of 1642 had their opening act in Colchester, when the town house of John Lucas, 1st Baron Lucas of Shenfield was attacked by a large crowd. Six years later, in 1648, during the Second English Civil War, a Royalist army under Lord Goring entered the town. Thomas Fairfax and Henry Ireton led the Parliamentary force that surrounded them, and for eleven and a half weeks the Siege of Colchester held the town in a stranglehold. It began on the 13th of June. On the 27th of August Lord Goring signed the surrender document inside the Kings Head Inn. Charles Lucas and George Lisle were executed in the grounds of Colchester Castle. A small obelisk still marks where they fell.

  Daniel Defoe, writing in 1722 in A Tour Through England and Wales, recorded that the town lost 5,259 people to the plague in 1665, more in proportion, he noted, than any of its neighbours or than the city of London. By the time he wrote, he estimated the population including surrounding villages at around forty thousand.

  In the Second World War, Colchester's Paxman factory supplied a large proportion of the engines for British submarines and landing craft. On the 11th of August 1942, a Luftwaffe raid bombed Severalls Hospital and killed thirty-eight elderly patients. In February 1944 a single raider caused a huge fire in the St Botolph's area, gutting warehouses, shops, and part of Paxman's Britannia Works. The total wartime death toll in the borough from bombing reached fifty-five. Then, on the 18th of November 1989, a booby-trap bomb exploded under a car in Goojerat barracks inside the Garrison, injuring Staff Sergeant Andy Mudd of the Royal Military Police. He lost both legs and two fingers. His wife Maggie received facial injuries. The Provisional IRA claimed responsibility the following day, and in June 1998 the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority awarded Mr Mudd £819,000 in damages.

• 7. Legends and Notable Lives

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  Colchester claims, with varying degrees of seriousness, a remarkable collection of legends. Local tradition holds that King Cole, the merry old soul of the nursery rhyme, was actually Coel, a legendary ancient king of Britain whose seat was here. The legend extends further: his daughter Helena is said to have married the Roman senator Constantius Chlorus, and her son became Emperor Constantine I. Helena was later canonised as Saint Helena of Constantinople and is credited in tradition with finding the True Cross. She became the patron saint of Colchester, and her cross and three crowns appear in the city's emblem. The Victoria Tower of the Town Hall carries a large bronze figure of Saint Helena at its summit.

  The Humpty Dumpty connection was promoted by the local tourist board for a time, though the source is clear that no evidence supports it. The Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star claim is on much firmer ground. Jane Taylor, who lived in the Dutch Quarter, published the poem in 1806 under the title "The Star". In 2024 a statue sculpted by Mandy Pratt, showing Taylor and her sister Ann, was unveiled in Colchester High Street following a campaign by Sir Bob Russell.

  The city's list of notable former residents is genuinely wide. William Gilbert, born in 1544, was a pioneer in the study of magnetism and served as physician to both Elizabeth I and James I. Margaret Cavendish, born in 1623, was a poet, philosopher, and early writer of science fiction. Charles Spurgeon, born in 1834, drew enormous crowds as the Particular Baptist preacher known as the Prince of Preachers. Archibald Wavell, born in 1883, became a senior army officer and the penultimate Viceroy of India. Roger Penrose, born in 1931, is a mathematical physicist whose work later earned him a Nobel Prize. Graham Coxon, born in 1969, and Dave Rowntree, born in 1964, both came from Colchester to become core members of Blur.

• 8. City at Last

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  The Paxman diesels business has been part of Colchester's economic story since 1865, when James Noah Paxman founded a partnership with the brothers Henry and Charles Davey and opened the Standard Ironworks. The same Paxman donated the funds for the Victoria Tower that rises 192 feet above the High Street and dominates the Town Hall, opened in 1902 to a design by John Belcher in the Edwardian Baroque style.

  The University of Essex was established at Wivenhoe Park in 1961, extending the city's educational reach into the wider landscape. The Firstsite contemporary art organisation opened its Rafael Viñoly-designed Visual Arts Facility in September 2011 at a total cost of approximately £25.5 million, some £9 million over the original estimate.

  On the 20th of May 2022, as part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, the Borough of Colchester was announced as a recipient of city status. The formal letters patent were prepared for the 12th of September 2022, but following the death of Queen Elizabeth II the ceremony was postponed. The letters patent were made public on the 29th of September 2022, with Colchester's city status dated the 5th of September 2022 by the late Queen. The official ceremony took place on the 23rd of November 2022. King Charles III visited on the 7th of March 2023 to mark the occasion. Colchester's Roman walls, built between AD 65 and AD 80, had been standing for nearly two thousand years before the title caught up with the place.