the ‘great fire’ of Colchester

The Great Fire of London in 1666 raged on the 2nd-5th September and destroyed most of the City of London within the Roman town wall, including over 13,000 houses, 87 churches and the cathedral. Its anniversary is all over Twitter this week. Commemorations of the great fire include an exhibition at the Museum of London and, yesterday, the burning of a large wooden model of old London on the River Thames in London.

There have been a number of ‘great fires’ in history. In AD 64, there was the great fire of Rome, which started on the night of the 18th July and burned for six days. In AD 532, during the Nika riots, which started at the hippodrome, much of Constantinople was burned down. In 1135 and 1212, there were two great medieval fires of London. In 1675, the great fire of Northampton destroyed about 700 of its 850 buildings. In 1648, during the Civil War, the Siege of Colchester (12th June-28th August) caused a lot of damage to the town centre.

But the ‘great fire’ of Colchester was in AD 61, during the Boudican revolt, when British tribes rebelled against the Roman occupation of southern Britain. The fire of London in 1666 was started accidentally, in a bakery in Pudding Lane, whereas Roman Colchester was deliberately sacked and burned down. During the revolt, the British tribes burned the Roman towns of London and St Albans, as well as Colchester, to the ground. The evidence of the destruction is easily recognisable when excavated here in Colchester, as it survives in a dark, burnt, stratified layer below ground – this is called the ‘Boudican destruction layer’.

The Trust has excavated fascinating areas of the ‘Boudican destruction layer’ within the walled town centre of Colchester over the years, most recently on our site within the Williams & Griffin store in the High Street in 2014, where we discovered the remarkable ‘Fenwick treasure’. Paradoxically, the fire destroyed the town but carbonisation preserved the evidence, including the small details of the mass destruction. The evidence is powerful and poignant. It includes the smashed and burnt pottery from the site of a Roman shop in the High Street; the burnt remains of Roman buildings, including floors and wall-stumps on our Lion Walk and Culver Street sites; a bed or couch with fabric mattress or upholstery on our Lion Walk site; the wooden shelf in a room which seems to have fallen down onto the floor and burned, from the Williams & Griffin site; and even the very small carbonised food remains of dates and peas. It also includes, of course, the ‘Fenwick treasure’, which was hidden under a floor for safekeeping and never retrieved…

We have also excavated some really remarkable human remains showing evidence of violence, but only a very few, although the British tribes destroyed the town and massacred its inhabitants, including a large number of people who were sheltering in the Temple of Claudius (where the castle now stands).* Archaeologists are most interested in these human remains, as no human remains dating to the revolt have been found at London or St Albans. The human remains from the Boudican revolt in Colchester were retrieved from our sites within the Williams & Griffin store and at the Telephone Exchange nearby. The Trust has excavated some evidence of destruction from the Siege of Colchester, which is very interesting, but the Boudican destruction layer in Colchester is one of the many elements which make the town so archaeologically important.

Read more about the destruction of Roman Colchester in the Trust’s popular book City of Victory: the story of Colchester, Britain’s first Roman town and on this web-site.

The images show three photo.s from City of Victory, ie a stump of burnt wall and a burnt floor from our Culver Street site in 1982, and the burnt dates from our Lion Walk site in 1973; and the carbonised food remains from our Williams & Griffin site in 2014 (these are currently being analysed by a specialist). [Image to follow.]

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* ‘… The natives enjoyed plundering and thought of nothing else. By-passing forts and garrisons, they made for where loot was richest and protection weakest. Roman and provincial deaths at the places mentioned are estimated at seventy thousand. For the Britons did not take or sell prisoners, or practice war-time exchanges. They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn, and crucify–as though avenging, in advance, the retribution that was on its way …’. (Tacitus: Annals, XIV, 33).

‘… Boudica led her army against the Romans; for these chanced to be without a leader, inasmuch as Paulinus, their commander, had gone on an expedition to Mona, an island near Britain. This enabled her to sack and plunder two Roman cities, and, as I have said, to wreak indescribable slaughter. Those who were taken captive by the Britons were subjected to every known form of outrage …’. (Dio Casssius: The Roman history, LXII).

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