Note 3427 — WHERE DID CAESAR ENCOUNTER THE BRITONS ON THE MORNING AFTER HIS SECOND LANDING IN BRITAIN?

Bryan Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale, p. 39, n. 2. See also pp. 36, n. 1, 37, 144-59. ‘That these tumuli,’ says Roach Smith (ib., p. 37), ‘were not cast up in consequence of any battle fought on the spot, is evident from ... their containing the remains not only of men ... but also of women and children.’

Hasted (Hist. of Kent, iii, 1790, p. 752, note a) says that ‘all the learned agree that Barham down was his [Caesar’s] main camp, to which from his landing in the Downs by Mongeham, Sutton, Eythorne, Barston, and Snowdown, there is a continual course of military works’, &c. (see also vol. iv, 1799, p. 163). But in the time of the ‘learned’ contemporaries and predecessors of Hasted, it was not yet understood that the question whether this or that mound was a ‘military work’, and the further question whether it had been constructed by Romans, should be settled not by imagination, but by pick and shovel.

Professor Flinders Petrie (Archaeol. Cant., xiii, 1880, p. 12) remarks that ‘the works on Barham Down, half a mile NE. of Kingston, appear to be ancient’; but, being a competent archaeologist, he does not suggest that they were made by Caesar.