Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts

by W. R. Lethaby

Altar-Tombs

Another type of tomb, of which many examples exist in the Museum at Trèves, is an altar-like structure having a square body surmounted by a slab ending in two big bolster-like rolls covered with scale or leaf ornament (see Espèrandieu). Tombs of this type have been found in Pompeii. We have in the British Museum parts of a very fine monument of this class. One of two stones is a great roll, and another has an inscription in handsome letters. These were found together in the foundations of one of the bastions of the City Wall at Tower Hill, as described in The Builder, September 4, 1852. In the illustration which was reproduced before (Fig. [33]), a pile of other stones is shown, one of which, a moulding with a return, may have been the base of the same monument. The inscribed stone in the British Museum shows that the body of the monument was made up of four stones arranged as in the plan (Fig. [66]), and cramped together; the size of this part was probably 7 by 5 Roman feet. It was not a sarcophagus, as the form seems to suggest, but a chest in which an urn containing ashes was placed. The examples at Trèves show that it was lifted on a high base. The covering part of our monument was made up of three stones of which one of the two end-pieces is in the Museum. The two end-pieces had large volute-like rolls similar to those on altars—for example, the little altar of Diana at Goldsmiths’ Hall. On these altars the central part usually rises again between the rolls into a gable-like shape, and that this type was followed in our tomb is shown by several examples at Trèves, as well as by the existing end stone which was evidently one of three; the little relief decoration on the remaining edge is suitable to have followed from relief carving in the central stone (Figs. [66] and [67]). This tomb was a work of high quality, but it is badly shown; the two stones could be set up together so as to show the size and importance of the monument. If this were done and the Haydon Square and Clapton sarcophagi were shown with it, we should obtain a better understanding of the monuments of Londinium.

Fig. 67.

Other memorials had sculptured figures. The hexagonal base of one of these found at Ludgate in 1806 (see before p. [71]), and now at the Guildhall, bears an inscription in memory of Claudia Martina, aged nineteen years. A much-injured female head found with it is accepted as having belonged to the same monument, and a dowel hole on the pedestal confirms the idea that it supported a figure which was probably a portrait statue. It may be observed that the capping of the pedestal is cut with rolls in the tradition of the altar-tombs. The good form of the letters, and the formula beginning D.M. and ending H.S.E., date this monument about A.D. 100. I give in Fig. [a]68] a sketch from a careful etching published by Thos. Fisher in 1807. The ornamentation of the altar-like top can hardly be made out now, and even the inscription cannot be read in the imperfect light of the Guildhall Museum. A careful copy based on a rubbing should be put on record, for the surfaces of such stones are all the time falling away in dust.

Fig. 68.

Several large half-round coping stones have from time to time been found in the bastions of the City Wall; they cannot have been taken from the wall itself, and so probably formed parts of monuments. Espèrandieu shows such a coping to a dwarf wall surrounding a statue, and in the little sketch (Fig. [69]) I suggest such an arrangement. Many half-round copings from monuments have been found at Chester.

Several small inscribed memorial tablets suggest that there were some buildings of the “Columbarium” type where the ashes of the dead might be placed. When after about A.D. 250 burial in coffins superseded the older way of burial, individual or family tomb-houses were erected to contain the sarcophagi, and several such would doubtless have been found outside the walls of Londinium. Tomb-houses were not uncommon in Britain; they were usually square or circular (T. Ward, Roman Era, p. 139). At Holmwood Hill, Kent, a circular buttressed building 30 ft. in diameter (Archæol. xxi., p. 336) seems to have been such a tomb-house. Of the stone sarcophagus from Haydon Square it has been observed that “as the back is quite plain it evidently stood against a wall, perhaps the back of a small tomb-house” (J. Ward). Even the back slope of the cover was left plain; and the back of the Clapton sarcophagus is also plain.

Fig. 69.