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Tracing the siegeworks

In 1998, Colchester commemorated the 350th anniversary of the Siege of Colchester, when the townspeople suffered cruelly in an eleven-week-long confrontation between the Royalist and Parliamentarian armies. The Royalists forced their way into the town against the will of the townspeople and effectively kept them hostage for the duration of the siege. Even when the Royalists eventually let them go, starved and disease-ridden, the Parliamentarians sent them back into the town thinking they were more use to them inside than out, rioting and competing with the Royalists for what little food there was in the town. And to cap it all, when it was all over and large parts of the town had been reduced to ruins, the victorious Parliamentarians levied a heavy fine on the townspeople for their supposed support of the Royalists. The Parliamentarians constructed a ring of forts around the walled town from which they bombarded it with heavy cannon. The forts on the south and west sides were joined by a continuous trench three miles long to block off all escape routes, while forts to the north and east guarded the river crossings.

Although the earthworks make up an important group of archaeological remains, they are very difficult to recognise on the ground. The sites of only two, possibly three, forts or gun emplacements have as yet been located, and the positions of the remaining 20 or so are still conjectural.

As its contribution towards the commeration of the siege, the Trust carried out a review of the evidence for the positions of the siegeworks, and incorporated a summary of the results in a special reprint of the apparently contemporary `Diary of the Siege of Colchester' which includes the famous siege map. The review was supplemented by some fieldwork on a number of sites to find out more about the siege and its earthworks.

The line of the siegeworks can be fairly well guessed at either end, ie between Lexden Road and the river Colne and between East bridge and Magdalen Street. However, the southern loop connecting these two sections is much more difficult to fix since it all depends on how close the line came to the precinct of St John's Abbey which, as a walled enclosure, was used by the Royalists as a makeshift bulwark. In a preliminary attempt to locate this part of the line, part of the Abbey Fields was surveyed with a magnetometer. Unfortun ately, the Abbey Fields has been heavily terraced over the years and many holes and trenches have been dug into it for various reasons by the army. However, some ancient features were located, although none seem likely to fit the missing line of the siegeworks. Nevertheless, the investigation did at least show that it would be worthwhile surveying a much larger area of the Abbey Fields, and it is hoped that this can be done in the not too distant future.

Elsewhere two other related investi gations took place. At Brinkley Grove, an apparently ancient earthwork has mystified archaeologists for years, and was given long-term protection by being scheduled as an ancient monument. It takes the form of a large L-shaped ditch at the side of a wood. It has always been assumed that this was probably the corner of a rectangular ditched enclosure which, everywhere else, had been filled in and flattened. The only clue as to its date is contained in an account of the earthwork written in 1922 which mentions the discovery on the site of three pieces of `apparently Bronze Age pottery'. The earthwork is placed at the top of a valley with a good view of the town centre, which is why there is a theory is was the remains of Fort Suffolk, the Parliament arian encampment shown on the siege map to the north of Ipswich Road. To test this theory, it was decided to dig two small trenches into the earthwork, one in the ditch and the other in the bank where they would cause as little disturbance as possible to the plants and trees in the wood. The excavation only lasted two days. Nothing was found to suggest that the earthwork was of much antiquity. In fact by taking test bores on the line of the ditch, it was shown that the earthwork never extended much beyond what can be seen of it now. Deeper trenches are needed to establish the date of the earthwork for certain, but these would cause unaccept able damage to the plants and trees. Until this can be done, the most likely explanation for the earthwork is that it is the remains of a clay pit connected with the manufacture of bricks and maybe tiles somewhere close by. Although not as interesting as a siege fort, the earthwork would still have some value as an example of industrial archaeology.

The best known of the siege forts lies on the Hilly Fields where, again, we have completed the first few squares of a magnetometer survey. The fort is known from aerial photography and was partly excavated in the 1930s. It is sometimes referred to as Colonel Ewer's fort, but is in fact the un-named star-shaped redoubt immediate south of it (shown on the siege map). Many of the finds from the fort are on display in Colchester Museum, and these include the head of a mattock for digging ditches, broken bits of clay pipe, and some musket balls. The fort was one of the earliest. It was built (or at least started) on the night of June 16th in 1648 on the Warren Field, the night after work started on Fort Essex which was south of the Lexden Road. The fort was well placed to bombard the town. It was built on a high piece of land overlooking the west side of town with an especially good view of the town wall. The Parliamentarians were not the first to recognise the qualities of the location. Almost two thousand years ago, the hill was a major centre for manufacturing and trade in the years leading up to the Roman conquest, and a thousand years earlier still, it was the site of an important Late Bronze Age settlement. The magnetometer survey produced encouraging results which showed that the ground conditions favour the detection of buried features by this technique. It showed all four sides of the fort as well as part of the defences and various pits of the late pre-Roman settlement. The plan is to continue the survey within the next year or so (when we have the time) in the hope of following the ditch which linked this fort with Colonel Ewer's fort to the north. If successful, this should lead us to Colonel Ewer's fort too.