74 THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
camp. And on turning to the Saxon Chronicle itself my doubts are
incidentally increased. For in the year 920 we read that King
Edward went to Maldon and built and established the town, though
we also gather that the king encamped there in 913 while the camp
at Witham was being wrought. Thus Maldon, though "built" in
920, had some sort of existence in the year 913 And from its Celtic
name and advantageous position at the head of the estuary of the
Blackwater, we can have little doubt, I think, that the necessity of
occupying the site with a hill fort or fortified town must have been
recognised by Briton and Roman many centuries before the time of
Edward the Elder.
In Essex we have no ancient stone monuments like Kits Coty,
south of the Thames, but the number of earthworks we possess is
very considerable indeed. Morant was certainly guilty of a rash
statement when he wrote in the introduction to his history : "There
are but few antiquities in the county." Mr. W. Cole, who has been
engaged in the task, not yet completed, of drawing up a catalogue of
the prehistoric and doubtful or non-historic remains of Essex, tells
me that he has already noted a very considerable number. And in
addition to camps and mounds of the ordinary type we have the
singular red mounds of the marshes and the deneholes. But the
red mounds and the deneholes are by no means prominent objects,
and the camps, though necessarily in the most commanding situa-
tions in their neighbourhoods, cannot, in gently undulating, thickly
wooded Essex stand out like Cissbury or Old Sarum. And as Essex
has never been much visited by tourists, its wealth in this depart-
ment is even now but little recognised. The writer of so modern a
work as Murray's "Handbook to the Eastern Counties "is at least
as discouraging, in his introduction, to the student of prehistoric
archaeology as Morant himself. The reader, indeed, gathers from it
that the deneholes are the only British remains in Essex worthy of
mention, and almost the only ones that exist. Hence a catalogue of
the prehistoric remains of the county is a list of things not generally
known.
It is, besides, a list of things specially needing all the protection
our Club can afford, as Prof. Meldola has already pointed out to us
in his paper on "Local Scientific Societies and the Minor Prehistoric
Remains of Britain." (Trans., vol. iv., p. 116.) Mediaeval antiqui-
ties, as a general rule, need no special protection, and, even if
destroyed, some documentary evidence usually remains to show the