56 Report on the excavation of the Earthwork
might be under such circumstances, by losing some of his
notes and misinterpreting others, even in these days of
developed intellect, with all the means of accuracy at com-
mand in writing, printing, mapping, lithographing, photo-
graphing, &c., to produce something which would have a
strong affinity for nonsense concerning the matter in hand.
Let him then suppose himself to be an ancient Briton
deriving his information solely from oral sources. Let him
assume that he has to tell his story not to the members of
the Essex Field Club, but to a band of armed and painted
fanatics strongly fortified with preconceived opinions, and
determined to hear nothing which shall not accord with
what they knew before. Let him then suppose his story has
to be handed on by them to other savages furiously predis-
posed to different views, and that after that it has to serve
its time for eighteen centuries as subject-matter for nursery
and supper-table tales, each successive narrator clothing it,
as the painters of the Middle Ages did the characters repre-
sented in their pictures, in vestments of their own particular
time and place; he will see that the evidence afforded by
tradition for any event of prehistoric or non-historic times
having occurred in the particular locality attributed to it is
unfit to hold any but a place of very secondary importance as
an element of scientific investigation. I shall, therefore, make
my apologies to Queen Boadicea for saying no more about her
connection with this locality than has been said by others in
papers that have been written upon these camps. There is no
objection whatever, that I am aware of, to the supposition
that Queen Boadicea made her last stand here against
Suetonius, if anyone desires that such a theory should be
held; but in this paper I have to deal solely with the
materials unearthed from beneath the ramparts.
Two papers, both by Mr. B. H. Cowper, have been sent to
me for perusal; one published by the Epping Forest Fund
in 1876, the other read before the meeting of the Royal
Archaeological Institute at Colchester in the same year,
The former is accompanied by plans of both camps by
Mr. W. D'Oyley, of Loughton. To these I would refer the