3-021-686 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Town and Camp of Colchester: St. Botolph's Priory, 1869. 'The interesting town of Colchester...is, beyond all question, one of the most ancient places of historical importance in Britain, as it was the Roman colony of Camulodunum... The monastic establishment of St. Botolph's...was founded in the reign of Henry I., as a priory of Augustine Canons, by a monk of the name of Ernulph, but was dissolved, of course, at the Reformation, and the chief buildings were reduced to a premature ruin in the Civil War when the great siege of Colchester took place. Parts of the church still remain. The west front must have been originally a very magnificent work. The double series of intersecting arches that form the second and third stages of the facade and extend over the elaborately-rich Norman gateway are especially interesting. It is from such examples of the pointed arches thus accidentally obtained by the intersections of round ones, that the essential principle of the Gothic has been supposed to have been derived...The exceeding hardness of some of the materials used in the construction of this building renders it probable that they had been taken from the ruins of Roman buildings at Colchester'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.