Durotriges

The Durotriges held Dorset and south Somerset and are the British people most visible in the ground rather than in the sources, because they built hillforts on a scale nobody else matched. Maiden Castle, with its multiple ramparts enclosing forty-seven acres, is the largest in Britain and among the largest in Europe. They were a coin-using society trading across the Channel through the port at Hengistbury Head, and unusually they seem to have had no single king: their coinage carries no rulers' names, which suggests government by a confederation of chiefs rather than a monarchy, and may explain why they could not negotiate. When the legions arrived in AD 43 the Durotriges fought. Vespasian, then commanding the Second Legion and thirty years from the throne, is recorded by Suetonius as having captured more than twenty towns and subdued two powerful tribes in the south-west, and the archaeology at Maiden Castle, Hod Hill and Spettisbury corroborates the campaign - ballista bolts in the ramparts, burned gates, and at Maiden Castle a war cemetery of bodies buried hastily with weapon wounds, one with an iron bolt in the spine. The interpretation of that cemetery as a single massacre has been revised since Mortimer Wheeler excavated it in the 1930s, and it is now read as burials accumulated over some years, but the violence is not in doubt. The hillforts were abandoned and the population moved to a new Roman town at Durnovaria, now Dorchester, and the territory was among the least prosperous parts of Roman Britain. Hengistbury Head handled Italian wine before the conquest. Maiden Castle was occupied for four thousand years before the ramparts were built. A Roman temple was raised inside it in the fourth century. The hillfort was never reoccupied afterwards.

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