Colchester Audio Tour: Unsung Hands

Colchester has been Britain's oldest recorded town since a Roman centurion named Favonius Facilis had his tombstone raised here in AD 50. This tour is not about the Romans, Normans, or earls who commissioned the monuments. It is about the legionaries who mixed the mortar, the Flemish weavers who fled Alva's army and rebuilt a cloth trade in Maidenburgh Street, the monk who told Henry VIII to his face that he would not give up his abbey, the ordinary townspeople who ate cats and dogs through eleven weeks of Civil War siege, the maidservant Mary Last who kept nine Victorians fed and dressed, and the builder's men from Hythe Hill who laid 1.2 million bricks for a water tower their rector called an elephant.