Iron Age and Roman Era Earl Shilton
Shilton Hill, the site where the village of Earl Shilton would evolve, was a well-known landmark to the Celtic Iron Age tribes of South Leicestershire. Below the hill ran an ancient trackway known as the Salt Road, which began at Croft, Leicestershire and ran into the northwest over Ambion Hill and onto the Mease Valley, connecting east and west Leicestershire.
A tribe known as the Corieltauvi constructed this ancient road, running along the southern edge of the Great Leicester Forest, a vast tract of impenetrable woodland which entirely covered west Leicestershire and stretched up into Nottingham and Derbyshire. The Salt Road would prove to be a major artery of trade and passage for many centuries to come. Indeed Richard III used this route to move his army to Bosworth Field in 1485. (Foss) The Corieltauvi tribe had moved to Britain from continental Europe some time after 100 BC.
The Corieltauvi were a confederation of Belgic warriors who came over from the continent and carved out a kingdom, which stretched from the Humber to south of Leicestershire. These ancient Britons were not really a unified tribe, but a collection of like-minded peoples sharing the same outlook and way of life. The tribe generally did not rely on hill forts for their protection. It appears that the Corieltauvi were better farmers than warriors, for they lived in lowland settlements, usually beside streams, frequently surrounded, or even hidden, by areas of thick forest.
Read more about this topic: Ancient And Medieval Earl Shilton
Famous quotes containing the words iron, age, roman, era and/or earl:
“We are told that every American boy has the chance of being president. I tell you that these little boys in the iron cages would sell their chance any day for good square meals and a chance to play.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“No such sermons have come to us here out of England, in late years, as those of this preacher,—sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. It is in vain that John Bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them: nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. There are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but none so impossible for this age not to hear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“In short, let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the informations of others.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)