Page:History of Manchester (1771), Volume 1, by John Whitaker.djvu/376

Chap. X. O P M A N C K E S T E R. 345 humanity as their baitings of the wolf the bull the bear and the boar. And as fome of the cities in Britain conftru&ed large amphitheaters for the latter, fo others of them would naturally ete& lefTer amphitheaters for the former. One at leaflr appears tohatfe been actually ere&ed, and many more were affuredly con-* ikrxs£ted in various parts of the kingdom. Such was plainly the' little circle of gravel and fand, the carcafe of a caftrenfian amphi- theater, as Dr. Stukeley calls it, which tradition points out as frmething remarkable, and which lies remarkably placed upon a rounded eminence, dire£Hy fronting the eye as we go from Sandwich to Rich borough Ca ft le, and looking down upon the large 1 original harbour of the Roman navy, the flat marfhy level* of Sandwich at prefent. Evidently too fmall to have been con- ftru&ed for the greater exhibitions, it muft as evidently have been, conftru&ed 'for thelefler. Gohfidered fblely by itfelf, con- ; fidered comparatively with the fimilar conftru&ions, it can have been, only a Roman cockpitl ft is not Half fo large as the am- phitheaters of Silchefter and Dorchefter, though thefe towns* were merely the capitals of fingle tribes and ftiperidiary, and 1 Rjutupta-.was actually the metropolis of Britannia Prima and a £oLohy; The arena at Dorchefter and at Silchefter, as I have remarked before, is almoft two- hundred yards in circumference. Ahd the arena- at Richborough • appears to the- eye to be only about fixtyoc feventy in- the fweep 3 ?. • 1 Strabp p* 305. — Richard p. 32-, and Ptolemy, and b* I. ch. xii* f. z.- — * Richard p. 36. — ? Richard p. 18. This wood, denopai- nated Andred, was many age? afterwards an hundred and twenty miles in length and thirty miles in breadth, commencing from the weftein boundary of Kent and running dirc&ly eaft. See Sasqa Chronicle- A.D. 893. and Richard p. 18. Anterida. — 4 PhiLTrauC N° zzj (2)* ai^d Leigh's Lancashire b. I. p. 62,. and Ware's Antiquities Harris's edit. p. 168; — 5 Pliny lib. viin c. 34^ PhiL Tranf. N° 3,68 (1), and Smith's Cork vol I. p. 139. ~ 6 ,Lhuyd under the word. And the horn of a rain deer, laid Yy by