Basic HTML Version
18
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Carausius is Britain’s lost emperor. Not heard of him?
Few have because he didn’t make it into the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicles but in 293 AD Carausius, a
rebel-pirate chancer, declared himself Emperor of an
independent Britain without the authority or approval
of Rome. Of humble Belgian birth, Carausius was a
merchant sailor who rose to be a Roman Admiral.
Commissioned to patrol the waters of Northern
Europe, protecting the Empire from the earliest of the
Vikings, (buccaneers from the off!) Carausius
secretly enriched himself with his plunder and when
Rome called him to account (which would probably
have led to his execution) he put into Britain and
declared himself to be Emperor. Along the
South-Eastern coast the Pirate Emperor built ten forts
from Brancaster in today’s Norfolk to Portchester
in Hampshire which occupied a commanding position
at the head of the sheltered natural harbour of
Portsmouth, to protect himself against Rome,
the Vikings and the early Saxons who were also
beginning to get interested in this sceptr’d isle.
It couldn’t last of course. Carausius’s decade of rule
came to end when he was assassinated and in the
years ahead his string of forts were powerless to stop
the incomers: this coastline became known as the
Saxon Shore and it earned a fearsome reputation for
it’s rowdy pubs and inhabitants.
Naval Gazing in Portsmouth
The importance of Portsmouth as a strategic sea port
was established and it would continue to be
recognised by all the Kings to come from Alfred the
Great, founder of the first English Navy, to King
Henry VII, who founded the Royal Dockyard, and
beyond. Portsmouth is still the home of the British
Royal Navy.
Old Portsmouth
, also known as Spice
Island,
refers to the original town of Portsmouth first
built at the harbour entrance in the 1180s. Jean de
Gisors, a wealthy Norman merchant founded a chapel
here to
“the glorious honour of the martyr Thomas
of Canterbury”
when the town was still new
.
This
little chapel would become a parish church in the
14
th
century and a cathedral in the 20
th
century.