Huddersfield in Roman Times
By Ian A. Richmond
SOCIAL CONDITIONS, A.D. 80-125.
LIFE IN THE ROMAN FORTS: CAMULODUNUM
Roman literary sources of this period even mention a native
site within the Huddersfield district. About A.D. 160 the
great formalist astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria,
compiled a geography for the use of his fellow-students
of the stars. To enable them to construct a reliable map
of the world, by which they might check observations of
the same phenomenon made from different places, he gave
a list of over eight thousand places, with their longitude
and latitude. That part of the map which deals with Britain,
however, was distorted owing to the sharp disagreement of
the two main sources upon which the work was based. These
were, first, the road-books, which gave the distance between
stages along the great roads of the Roman Empire; and, second,
the positions of places gained by astronomical observations,
too often seriously at fault. Bungled copies of manuscripts
have added to the difficulty of interpreting the map; but,
by the help of other ancient geographical sources and archaeological
evidence, it is becoming possible to offer fresh solutions.
Yet without space to discuss the problems which the map
raises it would be unprofitable to illustrate here Ptolemy’s
map of northern Britain.
Native Hill Fort, Castle Hill, Almondbury
Most of the places assigned by the geographer to the Brigantian
land are situated on the great road between York and the
Cheviot. But native sites also are included, especially
in the north-west. One of them is placed some forty-three
miles south-west of York. The Latin form of its name is
Camulodunum, but the derivation is Celtic and means “the
hill-fortress of Camulos,” who was a native deity,
equated with Mars, the Roman god of war. A Camulodunum also
is mentioned as in this district by the Ravenna Cosmography,
a mutilated list of places in the Roman Empire, compiled
at Ravenna in the sixth century A.D. from earlier sources
of varied date. There seems to be little doubt where this
place can be in the Huddersfield District. Such a name,
occurring again in Britain as the name of Colchester, can
have been given only to an important centre connected, at
one time at least, with war. This should be the hill-fort
at Castle Hill, Almondbury, the biggest of such places in
southern Yorkshire, which is described in the Handbook on
Early Man. Here it is advisable to note that there is no
evidence how long the occupation of the site lasted into
the Roman period. The main sources of sources of British
map of Ptolemy seem to belong to before A.D. 117, for a
later alteration is concerned only with the Sixth knowledge.
Thus the mention of Camulodunum implies no more than that
the hill was inhabited before the end of Trajan’s
reign in A.D. 117. evidence, however, from the place-name
Almondbury would suggest that in the seventh century Anglian
settlers found the hill inhabited by Britons, as Mr. W.G.
Collingwood has shown in the Anglian Handbook. But only
excavation would provide evidence to prove whether the hill-fort
was inhabited during the whole Roman period.
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