Cemeteries
THE site of London by a noble tidal river, or rather at the head of a long estuary, on clean gravel ground intersected with streams, was well chosen. The ground was open heath with scrubby vegetation, except for woods here and there where the soil was suitable. Sir Thomas More planned his “Utopia” on a site similar to that of London. The buildings of London have spoilt an excellent golf course! The walled city set down in the fair land must have been beautiful indeed, as seen from the Hampstead or Surrey hills. On approaching the turreted walls by the straight and narrow roads, the traveller would have had to pass through a wide belt of cemeteries. Around Londinium in its later state, the gardens of the dead would have come right up to the city ditch, just as at Constantinople the beautiful Turkish cemeteries, with their noble cypresses, lie close beside the walls of the city.
“Around Rome was a great belt of cemeteries; the sides of the main roads issuing from the gates were especially favoured sites; the chief region of all was that crossed by the Via Appia and Via Latina” (Lanciani).
“An immense field of the dead had extended all along the north-eastern quarter of ancient London, from Wapping Marsh to the fen beyond Moorfields” (C. Knight).
Goodman’s Fields, Moorfields, Spitalfields, were all cemeteries, and it is curious that they all have in common the name of fields. In the valley of the Fleet River by Ludgate and Blackfriars on the west were also cemeteries; and others lay beyond Southwark (Battersea Fields and St. George’s Fields?). The city of the dead must have been impressive on account of its extent and the number of its population, and doubtless it was beautiful. The harsh horror of modern cemeteries is a new thing on the earth. In antiquity, cemeteries had beauty, poetry, history.
The monuments of Londinium would have been of many kinds, small and big—columns, sculptures, mausolea, altar-tombs, tomb-houses, and steles or slabs. These tombs were not cold and pale, but profusely carved, and, doubtless, in most cases, coloured. The monuments in the museum at Trèves show many traces of colour—red, green and yellow, if I remember aright. Dr. Ashby recently described a huge Roman necropolis at Syracuse in words which might apply to Londinium. “Fragments of memorials were found, varying from simple steles and columns to the chapel with rich architectural forms, the decorative portions being in soft limestone with considerable traces of polychromy.” Painting over coarse soft stone was a general tradition, and bright colour liberally applied would greatly change the aspect of rather crude carvings. At Bath an inscription mentions the repair and repainting of a building. This might be internal painting, but it was an external inscription and probably included outside work. The Corinthian temple at Bath was decorated with colour on the exterior. Mr. Irvine says of a piece of the cornice: “Considerable portions of the red paint with which it had been covered remained among the carving.”
Finds of burials are still not infrequent in London; as specimen cases I quote two recent newspaper clippings: “A workman excavating in Cannon Street Road, Stepney, has unearthed an urn containing bones at a depth of 2 ft. below the road level; Sir C. H. Read observed that it provided a link in the track of the Roman road eastward, as the custom was to deposit these urns at the sides of the roads” (December 19, 1919). “The discovery of two Roman urns in Mansell Street, Goodman’s Fields, is of considerable importance. The urns were found about 10 ft. below the garden of a house. Both contained inner cinerary urns with calcined remains. The perfect one resembles an ordinary jar with a cover; the outer urn is perfectly round, and has handles on each side by the mouth. It is believed that the site was that of a Roman villa; bricks and tiles having been discovered in other parts of the site” (1913). The urns are now in the London Museum.
The actual monuments once on the east of the City are represented by the fragments found in the Tower Hill bastion; those to the north, by the stones found in the Camomile Street and other bastions; those on the west, by the soldier’s monument found at Ludgate Hill by Wren, by later discoveries near Ludgate Hill, in 1806, and the fragment of the monument of Celsus found on the Blackfriars site.
Steles.—A memorial slab in the Guildhall Museum is particularly interesting, as it is obviously in the tradition of Hellenistic art. It is a true stele of the usual small scale, about 2 ft. wide and 2½ ft. high; it bears a relief sculpture of a soldier in a panel bordered by pilasters and finished with a pedimental top (Fig. [41]). This broken slab is in the reserve collection and is not usually visible, nor is it in the catalogue; the supposition is that it was found in one of the bastions with so many other remnants of tombs. It must, I think, be one of the earliest Roman monuments discovered in London.
Fig. 41.
At the Guildhall is shown a sculptured slab thus described: “Monumental tablet, marble, bearing in relief the figure of a man armed with a trident and sword (?), and having a shield-like protection to the upper portion of his left arm; above is a fragmentary inscription; Greek; 21¾ × 15½ × 3½ in.: Tottenham Court Road.” It was illustrated in an early volume of Archæologia (xi. p. 48). On the original drawing at the Society of Antiquaries is written: “This white marble slab was found by Mr. Miller among the ruins of a house at Islington. It is now fixed up on the front of a warehouse in High Timber Street, near Labour-in-Vain Hill.” (This was south of Thames Street in the City.) The inscription is given by Hübner. With the writer in V.C.H., we may doubt whether this slab is not an importation like the Arundel Marbles; but other works in white marble will be described in this section, and gladiators were well known in Londinium (Fig. [42]).
Fig. 42.
Fig. 43.
In the British Museum is a small stele with a well-carved relief of a man heavily draped in a dignified pose and classical taste, and also having a Greek inscription. This stone slab is little more than 1 ft. wide by about 2½ ft. high (Fig. [43]). It was obtained in 1911, but it was drawn by Archer about eighty years ago. It was found in White’s Conduit Fields, that is, near Lamb’s Conduit Street. This, too, has a Greek inscription of which I can only make out the last word and a few other letters:
. . . . . ΟC
. . . . . ΟΥ
. . Ε ΧΑΙΡΕ
The last word is Farewell. I have felt some doubt as to this really pretty little work being a London antiquity. My sketch is given from Archer’s drawing. Although he may have restored it to some degree, it is probable that it has suffered from decay since he drew it. Other Greek inscriptions have been found in Britain.
There is another stele at the Guildhall which is so similar in several respects to the one just described that it might have been carved in the same shop. It is described in the catalogue as a “Monumental slab, limestone, on which is represented a figure of a man and child; the former is clothed in a toga, the folds of which he is holding in his left hand; 26 × 13½ × 2¼ in.” That two slabs so much alike should be discovered in one city, is a strong argument in favour of their having originated there. Notice, further, how the little pediment over the British Museum slab resembles that of the slab of the soldier first described. Again, the wide, plain margins are like those of the Gladiator slab. The evidence seems to be in favour of our accepting all the four slabs described as truly London works.
In the British Museum (the Roman corridor) is a tall inscribed slab of the headstone type, about 6½ ft. high (Fig. [44]). We may see clearly that it is a descendant of the steles by noting a few little points. It has the side pilasters and a pediment on which some lumps carry on the tradition of acroteria. An inscription occupies the field where the steles have sculptured reliefs, and a lower space is occupied by a festoon. From the inscription, NA ATIENI, it seems that it commemorated a man born in Athens. This slab is especially like a large stele at Cirencester which had two panels, the upper one having a relief and the lower an inscription. Proportions, pilasters, pediment are all like our London slab. Haverfield assigned the Cirencester slab to the end of the first century, and the London one can only be a little later. The inscription terminates with the early formula: H[IC] S[ITUS] EST.
Fig. 44.
This slab is much weathered and it stands at the Museum in a bad light, where it is difficult to make out the details. Running stems, with flowers on the pilasters, are quite pretty (Fig. [45]), and, indeed, the whole thing has dignity. The lettering was free and doubtless more elegant than the painted forms now suggest.
Several larger memorial slabs have been found in London which had big reliefs of soldiers. One at the Guildhall and another at Oxford will be described under sculpture. There are two fragments in the British Museum which may stand for the type and be discussed here. One is a head a little less than life-size, part of a standing figure in a round-topped recess. Above is an inscription naming Celsus a speculator; it was found at Blackfriars in 1876 (The Builder). This much-injured fragment appears very rude, but the others of this class were competent works of sculpture. The second is only a head now in the upper gallery at the Museum; both were probably works of the first half of the second century. Four known examples of this type must represent many—perhaps dozens which once existed.
Fig. 45.
At the Guildhall is a fragment of sepulchral sculpture, which may have been part of a larger monument rather than of a stele, but I will speak of it here. Just enough remains to allow of the restoration of the scheme. A winged Cupid at the end of a panel which doubtless bore an inscription, would have been one of a pair. The Cupid holds an ivy-leaf, symbol of the grave, and above is a festoon with a bird perched on it (Fig. [46]). Two or three grave slabs at Chester with reliefs of sepulchral banquets have similar festoons and birds which must have had symbolic reference to an after-life.
Fig. 46.
A much-battered fragment of relief sculpture at the Guildhall may, I think, be a remnant of a sepulchral banquet; it shows the upper part of a man in a recess with the point of what looks like the arm of the usual sofa-like bench behind him.
Chests and Coffins.—In earlier Roman Britain bodies were cremated and the ashes disposed in urns, lead boxes, and in other ways. There is in the British Museum a truly magnificent urn of hard porphyry-like stone which was found in Warwick Square. At the Guildhall is part of a sarcophagus-like chest about 2 ft. by 2½ ft. (Fig. [47]). Its discovery was recorded by Price thus: “A coped stone of a marble tomb has been discovered near to the west door of St. Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate; associated with it was a coin of Constantine Junior, A.D. 317-340” (London and Middlesex Archæol. Soc. Trans., vol. v. 413). The material has shining particles, and seems to be white marble. In this respect it should be compared with the gladiator relief already described, and the fine Clapton sarcophagus mentioned below. The association with the coin must have been accidental, for this chest cannot, I think, be later than the second century. It would have contained an urn holding burnt bones; compare a rude stone cist from Harpenden in the British Museum.
Fig. 47.
An excellent account of London graves is given in V.C.H. Stow described the finds in Spitalfields in his day thus: “Divers coffins of stone, and the bones of men without coffins, and great nails of iron were found a quarter of a yard long. I beheld the bones of a man lying, his head north, and round about some such nails, wherefore I considered them to be the nails of his coffin.” Many plain coffins of stone have been found in the City and suburbs. In an old MSS. collection which I have, is the note: “About Dec. 1717, was taken up out of ye ground near ye new church of Rotherhithe, a stone coffin of prodigious size in which was ye skeleton of a man 10 foot long” (!). A Minute of the Society of Antiquaries (July 28, 1725) reads: “An ancient glass vase of bell-shape found in a stone coffin, 14 ft. under the ground by the portico of St. Martin’s Church [in the Fields]; ’tis now in Sir Hans Sloan’s collection.” The “vase” was doubtless one of the little ⊥-shaped bottles. Price described a stone coffin found in Fleet Lane nearly 8 ft. long, containing a skeleton in lime.
The wooden coffins must have been still more common. Conyers, about 1670, recorded the finding of one in an excavation at Fleet ditch. “About ye middle of the new ditch as low as ye bottom of ye old wall there were found an oak coffin turned black, of boards with bands, a man’s length from ye old ditch wall, upon the old wharfing, or, as I suppose, natural ground wharfed upon. In this coffin was a glass vial in ye fashion ⊥ [an expanded base with long neck], and brass like a hinge, these lay amongst the bones, the glass I have by me” (Conyer’s MS.). This was evidently one of the chests described by Mr. Ward: “Wooden coffins or chests were in common use, as the presence of iron nails, iron or bronze bindings, hinges, and other mountings prove.” An oak coffin was found in Moorfields in 1873, the objects from which are now in the British Museum.
Two stone coffins are preserved in the Guildhall collection. Two containing lead coffins were found at Pie Corner, St. Bartholomew’s, in 1877 (London and Middlesex Archæol. Soc. Trans., vol. v.). Lead coffins were usually ornamented, and will be further considered. It is probable that some of the coffins of wood and of stone were Christian burials.
The coffins of stone described were roughly wrought, and they were buried in the ground. Others, however, have been found which are handsome pieces of workmanship, and bear inscriptions.
Fig. 48.
Three well-decorated stone sarcophagi found in London are at the Guildhall, the British Museum and Westminster Abbey. The sarcophagus at the Abbey is the earliest in style. It was found under the green at the angle between the north transept and the nave in 1869, and now rests by the entry to the Chapter House. On the cover is a large cross which seems to have been cut on the old stone in the twelfth century. Yet the evidence seems to have been against reuse in Christian times. It was the opinion, however, of the discoverers that it had been moved from its original site, but it was found close to the presumed Roman road to the river bank. The front has a panel with an inscription in excellent lettering, giving the name of Valerius, a superventor in the army, and beginning MEMORIAE. This form is found in two or three other British inscriptions, and was frequently used on tombs at Lyons. The Westminster inscription and the panel in which it is placed are of comparatively early style, and it is difficult to think that such work can be later than about A.D. 200. On the other hand, it is said that the new mode of burial at full length in a sarcophagus was not adopted in Britain until about A.D. 250. I do not suppose that our example is so late as this. The front may be compared with a slab in Edinburgh Museum, c. A.D. 160 (J.R.S., ii. p. 128). The Lyons inscriptions of a similar type are also of the age of the Antonines. Altogether, I cannot think that the Westminster tomb is later than A.D. 200. It is possible that it may first have contained cinerated remains and not have been a sarcophagus proper.
Fig. 49.
The sarcophagus at the British Museum was found in Haydon Square, Minories, the site of a part of a cemetery where in 1797 “many curious fragments of Roman pottery as well as glass vessels were discovered, and two complete urns with bone ashes, etc., were taken up.” This stone sarcophagus contained a lead coffin, now also in the British Museum. At the Society of Antiquaries is an accurate drawing of both made at the time of the discovery. The cover was securely clamped down with iron (Fig. [48]). At the centre of the front is a simple medallion portrait head, the rest is filled with flutes (Fig. [49]). The outer face of the cover, which slants up to a ridge, is carved with acanthus leaves (Fig. [50]), the inner slanting side is plain, and this shows that it stood in a building or against a wall. At the two ends are carved baskets of fruits, and these must be symbolical (Fig. [48]). This tomb had no inscription; it belonged to a time when inscriptions were few. Whether itself the tomb of a Christian or not, it is of a Christian type, and I should date it about A.D. 340.
Fig. 50.
The sarcophagus now at the Guildhall was found at Clapton in 1867; it resembles that last described, and must be very nearly of the same date. It lay east and west, “the Christian orientation,” as Mr. Reginald Smith notes. The cover was attached to the lower part by strong iron straps (cf. Fig. [48]). It is described as white marble or oolitic limestone, and there are many sparkling particles in the material. The front, which is 80 in. long, has a portrait bust at the centre in a circle, above a panel in which is the inscription, and the rest is filled with vertical flutings (Fig. [51]).
Fig. 51.
The cover is lost, the back and ends are plain, and it probably stood in a building. The portrait relief is curiously early Christian in character. The fluting is exceptionally refined and effective. This is a truly beautiful work, and doubtless if it were in an Italian museum it would be much better known to Englishmen than it is. A full and excellent account of it is given by Price (London and Middlesex Archæol. Soc. Proceed., vol. iii.), in which he compared it with some tombs in the Lateran Museum, showing that it is in the style of early Christian monuments c. 340-50. (The same paper contains descriptions of several plain stone coffins.)
The inscription on the Clapton tomb was very short, hardly more than names, and it does not seem to have contained any expression of faith. The Haydon Square tomb had no inscription. This reticence is characteristic. “The historical inscriptions of this age can be counted on the fingers of one hand.... It is curious to find a noteworthy lack of ordinary sepulchral inscriptions of private persons in the fourth century; there are very few Christian tombs, but it is much more surprising to find a lack of those of the ordinary heathen type. Conceivably fourth-century tombs were handiest for the Saxon invader” (Sir C. Oman, England before the Norman Conquest). Christian inscriptions are very few in France also; there are not, I believe, half a dozen of the fourth century existing.
This tomb and the other are good examples of the skilful way in which forms were obtained in a block of stone without cutting to waste; observe how the mouldings in Figs. 49 and 50 lie just on the surfaces. This is a lesson for our own days.
I have felt that this able work in fine material could hardly have had its origin in Britain, but further consideration suggests that the balance of evidence is in our favour. We have seen that other works are in white marble; there are in the British Museum two or three fragments of white marble slabs, while in the London Museum there is a complete one. Several fragments of dado linings are also known. In the heyday of the mosaic pavements there must have been some “firm” of marble importers in London. The general resemblance of the Clapton sarcophagus to that found at Haydon Square is strongly in favour of their common origin. The cover was attached to the receptacle in a similar way with iron straps in both; in each case the flutes are separated by a sunk line. The man’s bust is very similar to the upper parts of the figures on the third and fourth steles above described. Altogether, I could suppose that both sarcophagi came from one shop, and that they were both the resting-places of Christians.
Fig. 52.
A number of tablets which have been found must have been fixed in buildings or against walls. At the British Museum is a small fragment with a part of an animal incised, probably one of a pair facing a central object. (Compare the griffins on the enamelled plate found in London, in the British Museum.) Some of these tablets are of Purbeck and other native marbles, and this shows that we had competent marble masons settled here—probably the same as the mosaic workers.
A small tablet, found in Goodman’s Fields, about 12 in. by 15 in., now at the Society of Antiquaries, was described by Roach Smith as of native green marble; and a fragment in the British Museum, found in Philpot Lane, is of green marble. The former (Fig. [52]), judging by the wording of the inscription and style of the lettering, may be dated about A.D. 100.
On the whole, these Roman tombs had dignity and beauty, and a study of picked examples throughout Britain would be worth making. The lettering is admirable, and the inscriptions often have a quite human sound which is touching. The portrait reliefs are competent common work. We should now have to go to an R.A. for such things, and come away again without getting them. Some of the symbolic decoration speaks a universal language; the flowering scroll border and festoon of the slab, and the baskets of fruits on the sarcophagus, both in the British Museum, are more than ornaments. A stele at Colchester having a relief of a seated woman putting away her spinning into her work-box is really poetical. The sculpture is crude, but the idea is as fresh and beautiful as any tomb in the world can show.
CHAPTER V
SOME LARGER MONUMENTS
“The Cemetery had for years been overcrowded with burned and unburned burials; rains had caused the mounds to settle and the ground had resumed its even surface.... I beg you to see that the earth is raised to a mound again, and to have a smooth slab placed upon it.”
—Sidonius, A.D. 467.