Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts

by W. R. Lethaby

Imperial Statues

Fig. 72.

A FEW broken fragments only remain to us, but they are sufficient to suggest to our imaginations the sculptures of Londinium. The finest work of sculpture found in London is the magnificent head from a bronze statue of the Emperor Hadrian, which was taken from the river near London Bridge in 1834. The head, with the neck, is 16½ in. high. It is really a masterly work of art, of Hellenistic character, and may, I think, be Alexandrian. The treatment of the head and beard is surprisingly like that of the marble Hadrian from Cyrene in the British Museum. Here we have the close-clipped beard and moustache; also the double row of curly locks of hair over the forehead from ear to ear, and the hair close cut behind, an arrangement suitable for the support of a wreath. The beard is again similar on a bronze head of a man found at Cyrene, in the British Museum. The projecting ears of the head of Hadrian are like the ears of the bronze head of Augustus in the British Museum, found in Egypt. That the bronze head of Hadrian represents a statue and an erect figure is shown by the facts that one shoulder is higher than the other and the axis of the head and neck is bent. The figure must, I think, have had the left arm uplifted. The statue must have been a splendid object in some public place—possibly the square of the Forum, or on the bridge. In a cast, when seen close by, it looks lumpy and even dull, but the original bronze as set up in the Museum is not only powerful but vivid; notice the sharp eyebrows, the way the nose is set into the brow, the line on the forehead, and the strong expressive mouth (Fig. [72], from Roach Smith). There is also in the British Museum a bronze hand, found in Thames Street, which seems similar to the head in scale and excellence of workmanship; moreover, faults in the casting have been repaired in a similar way on the neck and the wrist. Roach Smith seems to have thought that the head and the hand did not belong to the same statue. Speaking of the head he said: “It belonged to a colossal statue, two of which we may probably reckon among the public embellishments of London, for excavations in Thames Street, near the Tower, brought to light a colossal bronze hand 13 in. in length, which has been broken from a statue of about the same magnitude, and, apparently, judging from the attitude, from a statue of Hadrian also. The posture is similar to that of the marble statue in the British Museum.” Dr. Haverfield says of the head: “It appears to have belonged to a colossal statue of the emperor; the forehead is too short; the ears set out too obliquely; and the back of the head projects too strongly; the beard, too, is more closely cut than Hadrian usually wore it.” In another place he speaks of it as “a life-size head of the emperor Hadrian; whether it belonged to a colossal statue of the emperor I do not know, nor does it much matter”(!). In one aspect, Dr. Haverfield was a champion of things Roman in Britain; in another, he, as will be seen in regard to the mosaics, generally spoke slightingly of their quality.

I may now sum up my conclusions. The head belonged to a standing statue. The hand, found separately, may have belonged to the same statue; it probably drooped and held a roll. The head has the characteristics of Hellenistic art. The expression is alert and eagle-like; the close-cropped beard already appears on the head of Mausolus in the British Museum, and seems to have been maintained as an Alexandrian tradition. The statue was doubtless imported and may well have been brought from Alexandria, a chief centre of bronze casting. Notice that repairs are executed in an exactly similar way on the head of “Aphrodite,” brought from Armenia and probably an Alexandrian work, c. 200 B.C. A little silver image of Harpocrates, also found in the Thames, is, I think, certainly an Alexandrian work. The bronze statue would have been set up as a memorial of the Emperor’s visit to Britain in 121. A “big brass” was struck in honour of the same event, inscribed Adventus Augusti Britanniæ, and the profile portrait on the coin is very like our head. It has the clipped beard and bears a laurel wreath. Hadrian was the first of the emperors to wear a beard, and we may take our bronze as evidence that he began with the clipped fashion. Not much attention has been given to this head as an early portrait of the emperor, but it is important from that point of view. Compare it with a small bronze bust of a later time found at Winchester and also in the British Museum.

Other remnants of large bronze statues have been found in London. Two fragments at the Guildhall are thus described: “(19) Arm of a bronze statue broken off below the elbow, 19 in. long; (21) Left hand of a statue, bronze, of heroic size, with traces of gilding, 9½ in. long. Found in a well to the east of Seething Lane.” From a notice in The Builder (May 3, 1884), it appears that the latter was found with coins of Nero and Vespasian during the construction of the Metropolitan Railway. An article in the Journal of the Archæological Association (vol. xxiv.) discusses other fragments of bronze statues. There must be evidence for the existence of four or five large bronze statues in Londinium. A bronze leg of a horse at the Society of Antiquaries, found in Lincoln, shows that equestrian figures—probably of emperors—were also known in Britain (cf. the Marcus Aurelius in Rome).

Other Portraits.—In the Guildhall is a tomb with a relief of a soldier, larger and in higher relief than usual, which was found in the Camomile Street bastion, and probably occupied a place in the cemetery by Bishopsgate. This figure of a signifer is a little battered, and this accentuates a certain grimness of expression, but it is really a masterly work of unflattered portraiture. There cannot be many existing presentments of a Roman man more real; this has the face of a functionary, and the details of the costume are made out with careful accuracy. The mantle, or cape, partly stitched together in front, was like a chasuble. It was the pænula on which there is an excursus at the end of Becker’s Gallus. The sword had one of the ivory or bone hilts of which there is an example in the British Museum—every detail was evidently carefully studied from fact. Soldiers on the Trajan Column bear similar swords. It is probably an early second-century work. (The Colchester centurion (c. 100) has a similar sword-hilt.[^[1]]) When we learn to value and make due use of our antiquities a copy of this relief should be set up to stand for the fact of Roman rule in Londinium. I gave a restoration of the whole slab in the Architectural Review, 1913; it has been wrongly restored in Price’s volume on the Camomile Street bastion.

[1]. Cf. Daremberg and Saglio, Gladius.

The relief of the Colchester centurion, Favonius Facilis, is really a fine work, one of the most perfect representations of a centurion which exist (cf. Daremberg and Saglio). The niche in which the figure stood had a shell represented on its rounded top; only the hinge-end of the bivalve appears at the apex, and the rest may have been indicated by painting.

Fig. 73.

At Oxford there is a soldier’s memorial stone with a sculptured relief of a similar kind to the centurion of Colchester and the signifer just described. It was found at Ludgate Hill when Wren rebuilt St. Martin’s Church (Fig. [73]). According to V.C.H. the soldier carries a dagger in his right hand. This object is so long that Pennant called it “a sword of vast length like the claymore.” In fact, it is a rod held exactly as the Colchester centurion holds his stick, and I suppose it was a rod of office of some kind. The scroll the man carries in his left hand also suggests that he was more than a “private”; so also does the monument itself, which must have been costly. Roach Smith properly speaks of “stick and roll.” There is a good drawing of this monument in the Archer collection at the British Museum. I give here a sketch made from the original at Oxford. The figure is injured, but it was skilfully cut and gracefully posed. I should date it in the first half of the second century. At the Guildhall is a head larger than life-size found in the Camomile Street bastion, which, although battered, shows character (Fig. [74]). The discovery of a marble bust of a girl, near Walbrook, was recorded in The Builder of March 12, 1887.

Fig. 74.

Roman Gods and Impersonations.—It is hardly brought out in the history books that the inhabitants of Britain possessed a great classical inheritance. I would say possess, but we do not seem to have determined whether we are British or only English. For a thousand years before the Teutonic invasions of the fifth century A.D. Britain had been in touch with Greek and Roman cultures, and for centuries before that again some overflow from Mediterranean lands had reached this island, and the Celts themselves were a great European race. During five centuries from 100 B.C. to A.D. 400 Britain became fully Romanised. After that time it was probably only some small balance of forces which gave us a Teutonic language, while France under somewhat similar circumstances retained a Latin tongue. Greek gods and, doubtless, Greek stories were known here long before the Roman occupation, as the British coins (the most beautiful money ever coined in these islands) show. Already when Ptolemy wrote his geography, Hartland Point, in Devonshire, was the promontory of Herakles, and this is evidence which, together with figures of Hercules on the British coins, strongly suggests that some Hercules story became localised in Britain. Possibly, as the seas beyond the Gibraltar Straits became better known, the “Pillars of Hercules” were shifted to the headland facing the Atlantic. Hercules rescuing Hesione appears as a subject on Castor pottery. “This, and the corresponding scene of Perseus and Andromeda, were popular in Britain and Gaul,” says Dr. Haverfield, and adds: “Whether the scenes conveyed any symbolic meaning in these lands I should greatly doubt.” I incline the other way. It is to be remarked that several altars dedicated to Hercules have been found in Britain: one at Corbridge is inscribed in Greek to the Syrian Hercules—that is, the same who had the famous temple at Gades.

During the Roman rule, the Olympian gods and minor classical genii were, of course, fully adopted, and the monuments show interesting transitions of thought. Jove became a single supreme deity, while the most of the other chief gods were associated with the planets and the days of the week—1 Sol, 2 Luna, 3 Mars, 4 Mercury, 5 Jupiter, 6 Venus, 7 Saturn. This stage of thought is represented by the Jove and Giant Pillars before described.

Fig. 75.

On the fragment from Chesterford at the British Museum we have Mercury with his wand, Jupiter with bearded face, and Venus with a mirror. These figures can be completed by comparison with others. There is a relief of Mercury at Gloucester. Another, illustrated by Espèrandieu, is of the same sort; he seems always to have carried a pouch in his right hand (Fig. [75]). At the Goldsmiths’ Hall is a little altar having a relief of Diana on the front, a group of sacrificial utensils on the back, and simple reliefs of two trees on the returns. The figure is charming, graceful and well proportioned. The pose and setting in the panel are very similar to the soldier relief at Colchester, and I should date it about the same time, A.D. 100-150. The figure is very like a small bronze found near St. Paul’s, of which Allen gave an illustration; that also held a bow, and with the lifted right hand took an arrow from the quiver behind her shoulder. The objects carved on the back of the altar are a table of offerings (compare the leg of a piece of furniture in Leicester Museum), a jug and probably a dipper (Fig. [76]). Archer, who published etchings of the reliefs, thought he saw a hare here, but this was a misreading of the obscure forms. This altar must have belonged to some temple or shrine. As Dr. Haverfield says of a somewhat similar relief of Diana found near Bath: “We need not doubt that passers-by worshipped Diana of the Romans.”

Fig. 76.

At the Guildhall is the upper part of a terra-cotta image of Ceres, and fragments of a Hercules, perhaps from a tomb, were found at Ludgate in 1806. There are many small bronze figures in our museums—altogether quite a Pantheon could be made up of images found in Britain, and these, I feel, belong to us in a special way.

In the form of impersonations of the days, the seven gods might still be available in a modern art language if we had sufficient sense to construct such an Esperanto.[^[2]]

[2]. I may say here that I have made some collections for a sort of Art-language Dictionary, attempting to register such forms and symbols as might be available for modern use, but I suppose nothing will come of it.

The Roman impersonations of places and ideas are nearer to us than the gods, and they indeed belong to universal poetry. Chief of these is Britannia, the “Sacred Britain” of the inscriptions. This impersonation was “revived” (we may truly say so in this case, for it had life and reality in it) for our coins in the seventeenth century. It is astonishing evidence of the paralysis of modern architectural thought how little use has been made of this noble imagination which ultimately derives from the gold and ivory Athene of Phidias, and yet is our very own. A seated variant of the standing Athene was made to represent the goddess Rome, and this in turn was the source of our Britannia. Next in importance were the impersonations of cities, and every city and station had a representative figure which stood for its spirit, its genius, itself. Our French friends, in their images of the City of Paris or of Strasbourg, still make use of the idea, but we have ceased to know that a city is more than a congested area where landlords hire out what they call houses. I wonder if London were given an image whether it might not acquire a new sense of soul.

In the London Museum is a pretty and well-sculptured figure which is, I think, a city impersonation and may be Londinium. It is one of two sculptures in marble which seem to have been found about 1887, together with a Mithraic relief, on the bank of the Walbrook. It was at first identified as Fortune, but Dr. Haverfield objected that Fortune would have been a female figure, and he suggested “Bonus Eventus, or a genius”; at the London Museum it is entitled Bonus Eventus. It would be hardly possible to bring forward any nearly similar figure with such a designation; on the other hand, a genius of Rome having a striking resemblance to our figure is one of the commonest types of the later coinage. Our figure, a graceful youth, holds a great cornucopia against his left shoulder and pours with his right hand a libation on an altar from a patera; a serpent rising from the altar winds around his wrist; by his left leg is the prow of a ship. He has two wreaths or collars around his neck and is partially draped; his mantle seems to have fallen from his head like a veil, and this suggests that he wore a mural crown or a modius. Now the genius of the Roman people on the coins was represented with a modius on his head, a horn of abundance in his left hand, and a patera from which he pours, in his right. Such a figure occurs on several coins which bear the Mint mark of London and the legend Genio Populi Romani. It is quite possible that our statue may be the genius of Londinium itself. It is known that our British Roman towns had impersonations wearing mural crowns—a fragment of such a figure has been found at Silchester. Our figure is clearly of the nature of Fortune, and the impersonations of towns were their Fortunes. The ship and the horn of plenty, piled up with fruits, corn and articles of commerce, are especially appropriate for a busy port. I suggest that this figure might, and should be, adopted as the impersonation and image of the City of London.

I had already written this when I found a figure illustrated in Bruce’s book on the Roman Wall, which is a close parallel to our figure. It was found at Netherby, and is described thus: “The best piece of sculpture belonging to this station represents the Genius of the Castrum wearing the mural crown and engaged in the grateful task of pouring an offering to the superior powers” (Fig. [77]). The resemblance of this figure to that in the London Museum proves, I think, that that is the genius of a place, as does also the serpent which rises from the altar. An altar “To the Genius Loci,” found at Chester, represented the genius holding a cornucopia. Compare two altars figured by Lysons (Reliq., pl. lviii.) of similar figures apparently male, each with patera, altar, snake and cornucopia. Fig. [78] is one of those in the British Museum.)

Fig. 77.

Wren, in an early design for the Monument, proposed that it should be surmounted by a civic impersonation.

Fig. 78.

In Roman days every place and almost every field had its genius loci—an idea which we still timidly preserve as a “figure of speech.” Many British inscriptions and sculptures relate to Silvanus, Rivers and Fountains; to the Deities of the Fields of Britain (think of that now!), to Nymphs of the Springs (think again of ours choked with tins and old shoes), and to the God of Ways and Paths (perhaps such an image would do some good at Liverpool Street and King’s Cross).

Fig. 79.

The other marble sculpture found with the Genius is the torso of a river god of a well-known type—and very well carved. The figure reclined supported by his left arm; the right hand carried a long water reed which rested against his right shoulder (Fig. [79]). The head, with long curling hair and beard, is in a tradition which derives from the Zeus of Phidias, and the body had its prototype in the reclining figures of the Parthenon pediments. Some reliefs of similar river gods occupy the spandrels of the Arch of Constantine. Bruce illustrated a very similar figure which represented the North Tyne (Fig. [80]). We have every right to assume that the torso in the London Museum may be called the Thames. There is some reason, from the conditions of discovery, to think that this figure and the Genius before described occupied places in a Mithraic cell by the Walbrook. That a river impersonation and a genius of locality should be so found together strengthens the evidence that they represented London and Father Thames. Modern figures of the Thames and other rivers existed in seventeenth-century London.

Fig. 80.

Mithras, etc.—At the London Museum is a Mithraic relief, rough and small, but a valuable document. In the centre is Mithras and the bull, surrounded by the circle of the Zodiac. “Outside in one upper corner the Sun drives up his four-horse chariot, and in the other the Moon is driving her car downwards. Beneath are two winged heads, probably symbolising the Winds” (Haverfield). These heads are very well carved and quite pretty; so are the Zodiac signs. This is one of many cases of the similarity of monuments in London and at Trèves. On the celebrated Igel monument is found another Zodiac, the signs of which (so far as they exist) are practically identical with those on our stone. In the spandrels are “heads of wind-gods, emblematic of the four cardinal points.” These heads are winged like those on the London stone, and the comparison allows us to be sure of the interpretation of the latter: the rising Sun is East, the setting Moon is West, the bearded head is North, and the youthful one South.

A small figure found in Bevis Marks, and now in the British Museum, is usually identified as Atys. I have some doubt whether it was not rather Silvanus; but it may be a grave monument, and for such a purpose a figure of Atys would be appropriate. A small figure of Hercules at the Guildhall was also probably, as before said, a tomb sculpture.

In the London Museum is another small sculpture, this time in relief, of a figure seemingly in countryman’s costume, standing in a roughly-formed niche or rock recess. By his side is some implement like a yoke, but I cannot suggest any explanation. It has “character,” and I should like to know what it means. It was found in Drury Lane.

Fig. 81.

Bagford, in his letter to Hearne (1714), mentions a Janus head dug up at St. Thomas Watering on the Dover Road by Bermondsey, also a glass urn at Peckham, and several other Roman things at Blackheath. The Janus head was about a foot and a half high, and seemed to have been fixed to a square column or terminus. It was illustrated by Horsley. One of the two faces was Jupiter Ammon with ram’s horns, the other was female.

I cannot here do more than mention the dozens of small bronzes, some of high excellence, which have been found in London; doubtless most or all of these were imported. Mr. Chaffers saw a beautiful bronze of an archer with inlaid eyes of silver taken out of the mud in Queen Street, Cheapside, in 1842. A pretty bronze relief of Hope was found in Thames Street in 1840 (V.C.H.). I must just refer to a delightful little bronze Genius, found at Brandon, and now in the British Museum, which holds a double horn of plenty. This, again, is probably a locality genius. Many of the small clay lamps found in London have pretty reliefs on them, such as a figure of Victory, a head of Luna (Fig. [81]), a bird, or an animal. Altogether we have quite a large gallery of classical imagery of our own.

Fig. 82.

Ornament.—Carved decorations were for the most part rude and rapidly cut, but they show some fresh thought and are very different from the defunct details which now pass for “classic.” At the Guildhall is part of a frieze of small scale (Fig. [62]) which has running animals alternating with trees. This suggestion of the forest was a popular motive of the time, and is found frequently on our native-made Castor pottery. Haverfield suggested that it might be a Celtic motive, but it is found on Samian pottery, and Espèrandieu illustrates a similar frieze of higher quality found at Mainz. All the Roman architectural carvings found in Britain, it may again be said, very closely resemble works found in Gaul, and especially at Trèves.

Fig. 83.

Fig. 84.

The wide pilaster at the Guildhall (Fig. [70]), also mentioned before, has a boldly designed relief of foliage arranged in a series of oval forms, one over the other. The interior of each unit is filled by the leafage being bent downwards. The same scheme occurs on a mosaic floor found in Dorsetshire, now in the British Museum (Fig. [82]). Fine Corinthian capitals have been found at Cirencester and Bath; even in these we find the spirit of experiment constantly at work. An example sketched at Angers in France is given in Fig. [a]83]. The most elegant piece of architectural decoration executed in Britain, which is known to me, is a frieze found at Bath, which is somewhat singular in bold freshness of treatment (Fig. [84]). Again, this can be explained by comparison with a mosaic pattern. At first sight it seems an ordinary piece of scroll work, but examination reveals that the alternate elements were complete circles. This frieze is broken at a point which might seem to leave room for a little doubt as to this, and my figure is slightly restored; but the border of a mosaic floor found at Frampton furnishes us with a complete example of the same treatment, and this excludes any doubt (Fig. [85]). Fig. 86 represents a more ordinary scroll frieze from Chester, but even this is brightened by the little birds set in the corner spaces. Fig. [a]87] is the soffit of a corona member from Bath, also alive and inventive.

Fig. 85.

Fig. 86.

All this is very different from the “Roman style” of books and the commentaries on Vitruvius. We may see in such provincial Roman works an early stage of Romanesque art and even the beginnings of Gothic. Again, the fragment of a column at the British Museum, carved over with a lattice pattern having foliage in the interspaces, is particularly interesting as an example of an “all-over” diaper pattern, and a prototype of Romanesque carved shafts. At Trèves there are many examples of much more elaborate diaper patterns of the same type. Such continuous surface decorations speak rather of what was to be in the romance ages than of the past of classical art. Even the series of acanthus leaves arranged like tiles on the “roof” of the sarcophagus found at Haydon Square shows adaptive invention and pleasure (that is what it comes to) in the doing (Fig. [50]).

If ever we awake to make use of our inheritance and set about civilising London, we might yet gain something of value from the Roman sculptures which have been discussed. A replica of the splendid head of Hadrian might be joined on to a bronze cast from one of the figures of the emperor in the British Museum and re-erected, resurrected, as a visible symbol of the Roman age in Britain and London. Set on a tall pedestal, it would make a noble monument. Copies of the Ludgate Hill Soldier and of the “Signifer” at the Guildhall, we might place against each side, and the reclining River God—the Thames—in front, with an enlargement of the Genius Loci at the London Museum above it. Such a monument would be something to tell the children about, and it might even move the business men to occasional thoughts outside the fluctuations of stock.

Fig. 87.

Symbolism.—Romano-British sculpture was certainly not over-refined; indeed, much of it was just the opposite. But ideas were embodied, and many of the things had simple and poetic meanings. The power of making impersonations is specially to be noted, whereby an image stood for a thing as definitely as its name—Sun, Moon and Planets, Seasons, Winds and Waters, Countries, Cities and localities, events and wishes. Fragments of a set of reliefs of seasons found at Bath, represented by nude boys carrying flowers, a reaping-hook, etc.; the winged heads of Winds; and the rising and setting Sun of the Mithraic panel at the London Museum talk a universal language.

Some study of the sepulchral monuments of Roman Britain gives many indications of the thought of the time. The coming in of the coffin, and then of the double coffin of lead and stone, suggests some concern as to an awaking after the sleep of death. The lack of late funeral inscriptions is another indication of transition. The old mythology was softened and the characters were allegorised and reinterpreted in harmony with the mystery cults. We have seen that the Jove and Giant columns suggested triumph over evil. Mrs. Strong has dealt with this subject in regard to continental monuments (J.R.S., 1911): “There is frequent preoccupation as to survival on these tombstones.” The cult of Atys was revived under Mithraism, as appears from “countless gravestones ... an expression of hope, of resurrection; so, too, his pine-cone must be symbolical of the belief; there are numerous examples in Britannia.” In the Roman corridor at the British Museum is a fragment from the North of England, described as the upper part of a niche, which can hardly be other than the top of a grave slab; on it are two peacocks between three pine-cones. Peacocks were symbols of immortality. The baskets of fruit carved on the Haydon Square tomb could only have one meaning. Compare a Gaulish tomb illustrated by Espèrandieu (iii., No. 1789), on which is carved a peacock pecking at the fruit from such a basket, which is upset towards it. The sepulchral banquet symbolises some sort of paradise. In examples of these at Chester, we find birds perched on festoons above the main subject, and we have found an example of birds and festoons in London.

The group before mentioned of a lion seizing another animal was in some way “apotropaic”—that is, it warded off evil influences like a horseshoe on a door. At Colchester is a group of a sphinx having a skull between its paws, which is much finer in style (compare Espèrandieu, No. 4675). Probably there were similar tombs in London; in the British Museum is a pretty little bone carving of such a sphinx.

A grave slab at Cirencester has a sphinx and two lions carved on it as acroteria. A somewhat similar slab, found in the north by the Roman wall, has two lions with skulls. A lead coffin of specially fine workmanship, found at Sittingbourne, but doubtless made in London, now shown at the British Museum, has pairs of lions guarding a vase (compare Espèrandieu, 4715), and little medallions of the Gorgon’s head on it (Fig. [152]). The most important example of apotropaic sculpture in Britain is the great Gorgon’s head in the pediment of the small Corinthian temple found at Bath.

The apotropaic nature of this sculpture has not, I think, been brought out. It has been explained as a symbol of Minerva, and the building has been called the Temple of Minerva; but for this there is no evidence. (I may say here that Lysons assigned to this building a fragment of an inscription which mentions repairs, but I do not think that this fragment should be separated from another which clearly belonged to a second building. Since writing this, I find that Mr. Irvine had already made a similar observation. Wonder has been expressed that this head should be bearded, but this appears to be the Italian tradition.)

In any story of life in Roman London, some of the atmosphere of mixed faiths and symbols suggested in Kingsley’s Hypatia should appear.

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CHAPTER VII
THE MOSAICS

“Here is grandeur of form, dignity of character, and great breadth of treatment which reminds me of the best Greek schools. Were I a painter I should venture to enlarge upon the quality and distribution of colour.”

—Westmacott.

SOME screen appears to be set up between us and our Roman works of art. Even the mosaics, which we might have supposed would have been interesting—even fascinating—seem to be regarded as mere museum objects and subjects for antiquarian tracts. So far as I know there is only one book which considers them as a whole (Morgan’s Romano-British Mosaics), and this is rather a full index than a discussion of their artistic qualities. An excellent chapter in Ward’s Roman Buildings should be mentioned. Even professional scholars apologise for them. Dr. Haverfield wrote: “They have the look of work imitated from patterns rather than of designs sketched by artists.”... “We admire them mainly, I think, because they are old and expensive. Few Romano-British mosaics are real works of art.”

Against such a judgment I will call three witnesses—Westmacott, the sculptor, as above, William Morris, the master pattern designer, and Mr. Alfred Powell. Morris says: “This splendid Roman scrollwork, though not very beautiful in itself, is the parent of very beautiful things. It is perhaps in the noble craft of mosaic that the foreshadowings of the new art are best seen. There is a sign in them of the coming wave of the great change which was to turn late Roman art, the last of the old, into Byzantine art, the first of the new.” Mr. Powell, who repaired the Orpheus Pavement at the Barton, Cirencester, and became thoroughly acquainted with the powerfully-drawn animals on it, says: “These creatures of the forest have been set out here in the tiny scraps of coloured stone with an ease and mastery that is remarkable. There is grace in their gesture that has seldom been reached in the art of even the highest period of the life of a nation.” The Woodchester Orpheus Pavement, which, judging from points of resemblance in design and details (a horned and bearded griffin, for instance), must have been by the same master, was a magnificent work, as, indeed, the fragment of its splendid border in the British Museum is enough to show.

Completer lists of London mosaics than I can attempt here have been given in other places (see Morgan’s Romano-British Mosaics, C. Roach Smith’s Roman London, and V.C.H.). Here and there all over the city at depths of from about 8 ft. to 20 ft. pavements have been found submerged by the rising levels of the ground. Scores have been noted, many must have been destroyed without a record, and doubtless some yet lie hidden to-day. In an old MS. Common-place Book I have is the following note: “On Wed., Aug. 15, 1733, some bricklayers digging foundations in Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, discovered a Roman pavement, which by ye inscription [?] had been laid about 1700 years ago. It appeared a very beautiful prospect, being in mosaic working, the tiles not above an inch square.”

Fig. 88.

My purpose is to record a few fresh observations, to bring out by grouping and comparison some general inferences and indications of date, to evoke, if I could, some clear idea of the buildings to which such things belonged, and to prepare the way for a full study of these remarkable works.

The Bacchus Mosaic.—The central panel and fragments of borders of this mosaic are in the British Museum. A careful original drawing of the whole is at the Society of Antiquaries, and an admirable engraving by Fisher was published in 1804 (Fig. [88]). It was found in 1803 under East India House, Leadenhall Street. The patterned part of the pavement occupied a square of about 11 ft., “the whole was environed by a margin consisting of coarse red tesseræ an inch square traced to the extent of 5½ ft. on the N.W. side—[note that it and the building it occupied was diagonal to the points of the compass]—but could not be followed further. The room could not have been less than 22 ft. square; but was in all probability considerably larger.”

Fig. 89.

The central panel of Bacchus reclining on a Tiger, at the Museum, has been restored and repolished. It may not now seem very attractive, but it is most competent in the balance of the forms and the strong, even fierce, drawing of the tiger; its bold eye, gleaming teeth, powerful paws, and the baggy skin of the legs are wonderfully truthful (Fig. [89]). Notice that Bacchus carries a wine cup; this is the essential part of the design of the mosaic which doubtless was the floor of the central hall of an important house. The brighter coloured tesseræ are of coloured glass.

Fig. 90.

The Bacchante Mosaic.—One of the finest of the London mosaics was found under the old Excise Office, Broad Street. I have an original drawing of it by Fairholt, dated March 1, 1854 (Fig. [90]). The best authorities are two large original coloured drawings, one by Archer in the British Museum and the other at the Society of Antiquaries. The central panel had a white ground and black border; the Nymph had reddish flesh and a light greenish scarf; the Panther seems to have been a grey-buff spotted black. There was much black and white in the pattern work, and some of the fillings were of black and white triangles.

Fig. 91.

It was described at the time of finding as having formed a square of 28 ft.; it was diagonally about north and south and 15 ft. below the surface. The central subject was “Ariadne or a Bacchante reclining on a panther.” In V.C.H. it was said to be “Europa on the Bull,” but the drawings agree with the former description. The composition is very similar to the Bacchus, and doubtless a wine cup was held by the Bacchante also. Notice that vases appear elsewhere in the design. The panel was about 2½ ft. square. This fine floor was taken to the Crystal Palace, where it seems to have disappeared. From its size and subject we may suppose that it was the floor of the central dining-hall of some big house. The drawing and balanced design of the central group is wonderfully skilful as space filling. Fig. [a]91] is based on original drawings of the floor at the Society of Antiquaries and the British Museum and a sketch in the Wollaston Collection at South Kensington. This mosaic should be compared with a floor found at Bignor, which is very similar in its details, and probably, I think, by the same artist. There the centre is occupied by Jove’s eagle and Ganymede, the cupbearer to the gods.

Vase-Panel Mosaic.—In his account of discoveries at Bucklersbury, Price describes a floor found in St. Mildred’s Court which must have been one of the finer kind. “A square enclosed a circle containing a vase in brown, red and white with the addition of bright green glass. Around the vase there appeared portions of a tree with foliage; also an object resembling an archway with embattled figures and other objects, the meaning of which is difficult to describe without an illustration. Around the whole were two simple bands of black tesseræ separating the circle from an elaborate scroll of foliage and flowers, analogous to that on one of the pavements at Bignor. At each corner was a flower showing eight petals of varied colours. From the centre of each sprang two branches, which united in a leaf in form like that within the scroll. The entire design is bordered by the guilloche in seven intertwining bands of black, red, brown and white tesseræ. A drawing of this interesting floor was in the possession of Mr. G. Plucknett.” The central panel must have been a formal landscape—a large wine krater backed by a tree and an arcade with figures on the parapet. In another place Price names it again amongst mosaics which had glass tesseræ; probably the tree was of green glass. This pavement also doubtless occupied a dining-hall. In an earlier account (London and Middlesex Archæol. Soc. Proceed. iii.) Price says: “When perfect it was of some extent, resembling those discovered at East India House and the Excise Office. In the centre was a vase similar to those at the Excise Office, and around it a scroll of foliage beautifully arranged. The fragments were packed in cases and sent to the workshops of Messrs. Cubitt.”

An Orpheus Mosaic (?).—Roach Smith reported the existence, below Paternoster Row, of what must have been an exceptionally fine pavement, which was broken up before any proper record of it could be made. This “superb pavement extended at least 40 ft.; towards the centre were compartments in which in variegated colours were birds and beasts surrounded by a rich guilloche border.” The wording suggests a square room, and the two former examples show that large square rooms existed in London. In the villa at Woodchester the chief central room was nearly 50 ft. square; the pavement had “a central circular compartment; within the border was a wide circular band containing representations of animals, inside was a smaller band containing birds; on the southern side was a figure of Orpheus.” The description of the London mosaic suggests that it, too, had for subject Orpheus charming the beasts. It was found about 1840 at a depth of 12 ft. In 1843 part of a mosaic floor, “with birds and beasts within a guilloche border,” was found at a depth of 12½ ft. below the offices of the Religious Tract Society at the corner of Cannon Row (V.C.H.). Is it not probable that this was another part of the pavement described by Roach Smith?

Inscribed Floor.—A mosaic pavement found in Pudding Lane as lately as 1886, and bearing an important inscription, was destroyed before any sufficient record of it was made. A printed version of the lettering was given in the Archæological Journal of the same year by Dr. Haverfield, with some comments. (Also see S.A. Proceedings, xiv. 6, and V.C.H.) In the collections of the Society of Antiquaries I find a sketch of it by Henry Hodge, a careful draughtsman of the time. This drawing is said to have been made “from a sketch by I. W. Jolly and fragments,” so that its strict accuracy is questionable. It appears that it was complete on the right but imperfect on the left-hand side. On the right some parts of the pattern covering the rest of the floor and a border are shown and some dimensions are given. It looks as if the panel was about 5 ft. across and was the centre of a strip 7 ft. or 8 ft. wide. The letters were about 3 in. high, black on a white ground; the last four seem to have been D. S. P. D.—de sua pecunia dedit—and this would imply that the mosaic belonged to a temple. The destruction of these mosaics is a sad witness to the nineteenth-century type of intelligence. Of all of them only the fragments of the Bacchus pavement are now known to exist. I should like to find out what became of the Bacchante pavement sent to the Crystal Palace, and whether the vase mosaic is still in packing cases at Messrs. Cubitt’s. I wonder, too, what became of Mr. G. Plucknett’s drawing, and wish I could get tidings of it. The great pavement in Paternoster Row seems to have been destroyed without even a drawing being made; while the sketch taken by Mr. Jolly of the inscribed floor has, so far as I know, been burnt. And this was the high age of university education!

Bucklersbury.—The most perfect of the existing mosaics is the complete and restored pavement with an apsidal end found in Bucklersbury. A good account of it while yet in its place is given in The Builder (1869): “It lies fresh and bright as when it was first put down.... It is to be hoped that some pains will be taken to trace the remaining walls of the building to which this speaking pavement belongs.” Here, again, although the apartment was not large and the ornamental mosaic was more than a central panel, there was a broad border of the coarse tesseræ. Besides having been a saving, the contrast of the plain red with the variegated central area seems to have been liked. The interlacing squares of this pavement resemble those of the Excise Office floor, and its central rose is like a panel in the same floor. An angle-filling is similar to a quarter of the central pattern filling the centre of the small India Office pavement, which, again, had interlacing squares. A single cross-like pattern filling a panel in the British Museum is again like that of the India House mosaic. Many such references could be carried much further, not only in regard to London pavements, but including the country ones also. I reach the conclusion that they are for the most part nearly of the same date, and that many were by the same artists.

Fenchurch Street.—A fragment of what must have been a fine floor was found in 1859 and is now in the British Museum. It is part of a panel which contained a vase and two birds. An illustration given in Price’s Bucklersbury shows that there was a margin of coarse tesseræ beyond, and that the panel must have been one of a series making up a handsome border. A fragment of a floor with a wide border divided into panels has lately been found at Colchester. Roach Smith described the former as “what would seem to have been an extensive pavement,” and he calls the bird a peacock. A good coloured drawing, in the Archer collection, of the fragment shows the bird’s neck a bright blue; the blue tesseræ were of glass. Fig. [a]92] is from Price, but I have dotted in on the top right-hand corner the line of a more modern building from Roach Smith’s illustration. This is one example of many cases in which more recent walls have been carried up from the Roman level and square with a Roman building. (A in fig., and compare Fig. [90].)

Fig. 92.

Fig. 93.

Fig. 94.

Fig. 95.

Birchin Lane, etc.—In 1785 a small piece was discovered here of “a fine tesselated pavement of very small bricks and stones; of this, only one corner appeared, which is composed of black, green, and white stones and brick, forming a beautiful border.” Another account says that “the tesseræ measured about one-quarter of an inch and were of various colours.” I am particular about this, for the bright colours were doubtless of glass. I find a contemporary drawing of this fragment in the Guildhall Library, from which it appears that there was a fair blue besides the colours mentioned. (Fig. 93; compare Fig. [a]92] and a border illustrated by Mr. Ward.) Outside it were big red “brick” tesseræ. There is in the Guildhall Museum a fragment of another mosaic found in Birchin Lane. It is part of a star-shaped all-over pattern of a well-known type (the Barton Cirencester, etc.). Fig. 94 A shows the fragment, and Fig. [a]95] is a diagram of the complete pattern. Another piece at the Guildhall has a sea-monster of small scale but most skilful execution. The place of finding is not noted, but it is probably a fragment discovered in Birchin Lane in 1857, described in V.C.H. as part of a pavement “representing a sea-horse.” Two other small pieces in the same museum are very similar in colour and quality, and may have come from the same source. One of these seems to have belonged to a pavement of square panels of knot-work framed in scroll bands (Fig. 94, B), or it may have been part of a panelled border similar to Fig. [a]92]. Morsels of painted plaster were also found in Birchin Lane, where there must have been a good house.

Fig. 96.

A fragment of mosaic at the London Museum comes from another all-over star-pattern similar to that at the Guildhall, but this piece was next to the outer border of the pavement. This fragment is of particularly beautiful colouring—quite a purple floor. I give a sketch of the fragment in Fig. [a]96]; it must have come next the border of a pattern like Fig. [a]95].

Threadneedle Street.—Several pieces of London mosaic are shown in the Roman corridor at the British Museum, but not very effectively. Two are exhibited as given by Mr. E. Moxhay, but it is not added that they were found in Threadneedle Street in 1841. One is part of a passage and the other is a square from the centre of a room. (See illustrations in Roach Smith’s Roman London, from which Fig. [a]97] is taken.) Another piece found at East India House, Leadenhall Street, is not set up rightly. The pattern is of two interlacing squares; the margin should not be parallel to either of these, but it should touch two of the points of the star form. (Fig. [98]. See Sir W. Tite’s illustration in Archæologia; compare also the Bucklersbury pavement at the Guildhall.) This floor came from the same level as the Bacchus mosaic and not far away from its position; probably the small chamber to which it belonged was part of the building which contained the large square hall of the Bacchus mosaic.

FRAGMENT OF ROMAN TESSELLATED PAVEMENT DISCOVERED AT THE DEPTH OF 14 FEET UNDER THE FRENCH PROTESTANT CHURCH IN THREADNEEDLE STREET. APRIL 1841.
Fig. 97.

The Bank.—A fourth piece in the Museum is a square panel from Lothbury. Allen describes it as “An ornamental centre, measuring 4 ft. each way, of an apartment 11 ft. square; beyond this were tiles of an inch square extending to the sides of the room.” It is another example of the plan of having a comparatively small central panel liberally framed in much plain red work. The device in the centre is a cruciform pattern. I can hardly think that from, say, 250 A.D. it would not have been recognised as a cross indeed. Compare the small cruciform centres of two squares of mosaic exhibited close by.

Fig. 98.

The floor mosaics at the British Museum are dispersed in two galleries and a staircase, and even so each one is badly presented. Fragments of the Bacchus floor are shown without any key-plan of the whole. Of five on the north wall of the Roman gallery, the place where only one was found is told. The interesting little Orpheus mosaic discovered at Withington is shown by three single fragments, although an excellent restored engraving was published in Archæologia when it was found. I wish space could be found for setting them in their due relation and completing the composition in outline. The surface requires careful cleaning and some repolishing. The floor from Thruxton on the north staircase has lost its centre since it was engraved. The engraving itself is shown in the gallery a hundred yards away, without any reference from one to the other. In this case, I think, the centre should be painted in on the plaster filling of the original.

These mosaics must have been drawn out on the levelled beds prepared to receive them by the master artist and filled in by him and his assistants. The preparation for such a floor is made clear in the description of a London mosaic found in 1785: “This pavement, as well as most of the rest, was laid in three distinct beds; the lowest very coarse, about 3 in. thick, and mixed with large pebbles; the second of fine mortar, very hard and reddish in colour, from having been mixed with powdered brick; this was about 1 in. in thickness, and upon it the bricks [tesseræ] were embedded in fine white cement” (Archæol., vol. viii.). The Bacchus pavement described before “was bedded on a layer of brickdust and lime of about an inch.” Powdered brick (tile) and lime made a strong cement which would finish perfectly smoothly and provide an inviting surface to draw and work upon.

Several mosaics while not quite plain were simpler in design and perhaps coarser in execution than those already described. A star-shaped fragment found in Bishopsgate Street, illustrated by Roach Smith, was of black and white tesseræ. It was probably the central panel of a floor, as Roach Smith said. A mosaic found at Lincoln had a similar star-shaped panel at the centre. About 1840 a tessellated pavement was found in Bishopsgate-Within “of black and white tesseræ in squares and diamonds” (V.C.H.). In Bush Lane “a pavement of white tesseræ” is recorded. On the site of the Guildhall “irregular cubes of dark-grey slate and white marble” were found (Journal B.A.A. xix.).

Another pavement, found in Lombard Street in 1785, was “composed of pieces of black and white stone one-third of an inch square, probably deposited in regular order” (Archæol. viii.). These black and white mosaics were doubtless like the counter-changed patterns found at Wroxeter, Silchester, etc. At the latter the Christian church had a square space for the altar paved in this way. Several years ago I drew a fragment of an identical design at Lincoln. This was probably a fourth-century fashion. The others may be a little earlier generally, but they overlapped into the Christian period.

Many floors have been found in London which were wholly of coarse tesseræ of red, or of a few simple colours accidentally distributed. One of these is described as of irregular tesseræ about 2 in. by 1½ in., mostly red, but some black and white. A room 17½ ft. by 14 ft., in Leadenhall Street, had coarse tesseræ red, black and white, 1¼ in. square, and a similar floor “of red bricks about an inch square with a few black ones and white stones” was found in Lombard Street. Some floors found at Silchester had circular and polygonal tiles used with mosaic cubes filling up the interspaces. At Bath, if I recollect aright, there are fragments of pleasant floors in which larger irregular pieces of marble are set here and there in a floor mainly of large red tesseræ.

At Silchester a polishing tool is said to have been found, being a lump of marble with an iron socket for the attachment of a handle (Middleton’s Rome).

A general comparison of the British mosaics brings out the resemblances between the members of certain groups. The similarity of the Cirencester and Woodchester Orpheus pavements has already been mentioned. The London floor found at the Excise Office was very like the mosaics at Bignor in both the patterns and figure work. The same pavements resemble others found at Silchester, and also the Cirencester and Woodchester mosaics. A pavement found at Stonesfield, near Woodstock, had a wreath of foliage springing from a head similar to that of Woodchester. It is obvious that elaborate works in isolated villas cannot have been home-made, and it is likely that this group at least was the work of craftsmen established in some central city. No centre is so likely as Londinium, a wealthy town, the most conveniently placed for the importation of materials. We think of these works as “decadent,” but really there was a new life in them. The centre of origin of the later type seems to have been Alexandria, and similar works to our own are found in Asia Minor, North Africa and Gaul. The use of glass in these mosaics is likely to have been an Alexandrian innovation. Price gives a list of five London mosaics in which glass was used, and I may add the fragment at Birchin Lane described above. Glass was also used at Cirencester and Woodchester: the purple tesseræ in the fine border of the latter in the British Museum must be glass.

Fig. 99.

Fig. 100.

Taking into consideration the great similarity of mosaics found in the East—those from Halicarnassus, for instance, now in the British Museum—to those found in the West, the character of the patterns, the mystical nature of some of the figure designs, and the swift ability of the workmanship, I am drawn to the conclusion that the craftsmen are likely to have been Greeks. Some confirmation of this is to be found in the fact noticed by Wright, that the Greek H sometimes appears for E in the few mosaic inscriptions which exist. Mosaics must, I think, have been works of the prosperous Constantinian age. The floor at Frampton had a XP monogram on it (Fig. [99]); the Orpheus pavement at Horkstow, accepted as Christian by Cabrol, had crosses (Fig. [99]); and a second one at Winterton has a red cross by one of the animals; the pavement at Thruxton, in the British Museum, has crosses set in the border in what seems to be a significant way (Fig. [100]). The other details on this figure also have a Christian look; the top one is from Bignor, the bottom one from Frampton. Fig. 101 is from the Orpheus mosaic at Withington. If the Orpheus pavement at Frampton was Christian, the others are likely to have been so too. At least, they symbolise the Harmony of the Universe; they are not “mythological.” These pavements are evidence of the cosmopolitan nature of Romano-British culture.

Fig. 101.

Fig. 102.

Fig. 103.

Any idea of thought in decoration is difficult for us to apprehend. The records of the pavements which have been found in Britain deserve study from this point of view. The whole art of the time witnesses not only to the professional skill of artists, but to the thoughts and desires of the provincial Romans—and natives too, doubtless—who demanded such works. They speak of a time when the old beliefs had been for a large part allegorised and fitted into a sort of poetic cosmogony; the designs often dealt with the order of Nature. Many interesting details are to be found in these mosaics; Fig. [a]102] is a sundial which appears with a celestial sphere on the pavement at Bramdean. The fragment of inscription (Fig. [103]) is from Thruxton. Large square mosaics which seem to have been the floors of central halls have been mentioned. In two cases, such floors found in Britain had sunk water basins at their centres. At Woodchester four columns were placed about the central space, and there was doubtless an opening in the roof above. Such a central hall would have been an Atrium, and this helps to explain the planning of Roman houses in Britain.

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CHAPTER VIII
WALL PAINTINGS AND MARBLE LININGS

BY putting together, in our imagination, the mosaic floors, the fragments of wall paintings, and the marble linings, we can gain a fairly certain knowledge of what the finer Roman interiors in Londinium were like, and we may further add to the impression by remembering the many precious objects in silver, bronze, pottery and glass, which are in our museums. Broken remnants of wall paintings have been found in large quantities, and pieces are preserved at the British, the Guildhall, and the London Museums, also at the Society of Antiquaries. Some account of several of them was given by Roach Smith in his Illustrations of Roman London, from which Fig. [a]104] is reduced. The fragment (5, Fig. [a]104]), now with the others in the British Museum, is part of a pilaster-like strip about 8 in. wide, of foliage springing symmetrically on each side of a central vertical stem; it is on a dark ground, and marginal lines divide it off from a red space which covered the main surfaces of the wall. This “pilaster” was doubtless one of several. The morsels (6 and 7, Fig. [a]104]) evidently belonged together; the one-sided nature of the design suggests that it was next the angle of a room; and the loop in the upper part of 7 looks like the end of a festoon; 9 is somewhat similar; and the others may all have belonged to “pilaster” strips.

Fig. 104.

The method of dividing up the wall space with strips of plain colour or with “pilasters” was very general. A simpler scheme was to have marginal borders only, and these were frequently of considerable width, made up of many bands and lines of colour. Dadoes were very general, sometimes only a plain band of colour or a horizontal bar running into the margins; at other times they were fully decorated: two examples lately illustrated in Archæologia, from Caerwent and Silchester, are really fine work. The latter had a row of “panels,” alternating square and round, set with leaves and ears of corn, on a red ground between dark top and bottom bands.

Stripes and Margins.—A piece of wall of considerable height was found at Bignor, having a quadrant skirting at the bottom, a plain dark band as a low dado, and the space above divided into panels. At Cirencester a fragment was found which showed a band of fair yellow, edged with margins of white separating spaces of a cool grey-green. At the Society of Antiquaries is a piece of plaster showing fine red and green spaces, divided by a white band and a black line—very simple, but beautiful colour (Fig. [105]).

Fig. 105.

Of a great number of fragments in our museums one cannot determine if they only represent margins or whether they may have come from vertical strips. A piece of plaster from Silchester shows a broad band of red, then two white lines separated by one of black, and then a surface of grey, except for other thin black lines. A piece of plaster at the Guildhall had a dark green band, probably 3 in. or 4 in. wide, then a strip of rather transparent crimson 1½ in. wide, finished against a yellow line, then an interval of white 1 in. wide, followed by the green again 1¼ in. wide and a yellow line, then 2 in. of white and a single yellow line followed by a white area. This was certainly a margin, and here we get an example of a method of gradating the border into the general field. In 1785 “some large pieces of painted stucco” were found in Lombard Street (Archæol. viii.). Drawings made at the time are in the Guildhall library. A piece was banded green and black, with the addition of thin marginal lines. Two of the pieces were from borders having lines with additional touches. One had merely groups of comma-like hooks springing from the line

, and the other, little fleur-de-lis forms on a white band edging a bright blue space. These were, I think, coarser variants of the treatment shown in 6, Fig. [a]104]. The margins were sometimes “shaded” like mouldings; there are one or two examples of this treatment at Silchester.

Pilasters.—In some cases the ornamental vertical strips may not have been contained within pilaster-like forms. A fragment in the British Museum, which has an umbrella-like calyx to a number of springing stalks, may be one of these (Fig. [106]). It is on a brown-red ground, and there are some other small fragments with leaves on a similar colour. The cast-shadows make me think that it was independent of a pilaster. The colour and workmanship appear very similar to the festoon of foliage from Southwark, described below; probably such uprights usually upheld festoons. The head rising from a calyx illustrated by Roach Smith came from another similar vertical composition (8, Fig. [a]104]). Two small pieces at the Guildhall represent a similar upright (Fig. [107]). Again, in the British Museum is a very simple vertical upright, something like a prolonged ear of corn (9, Fig. [a]104]).

Fig. 106.

Fig. 107.

Fig. 108.

Fig. 109.

Fig. 110.

Figs. 108, 109, 110, at the British Museum, are from pilasters. Fig. [a]110] is a restoration of 3, Fig. [a]104]. Fig. 111 is a small fragment at the Society of Antiquaries; this, too, probably came from a vertical stem or a pilaster. Sometimes the pilasters imitated marble.

Dadoes.—A sketch at the Society of Antiquaries shows the walls of a plain little room found in Leadenhall Street, which had pink margin bands along the skirting and up the angles, and another pink stripe about 2 ft. above the floor. The general surface was white.

Fig. 111.

Fig. 112.

Other dadoes seem to have been divided up into small plain “panels” or diagonal lattices. At Silchester there is a fragment with a green band, about 1¼ in. wide, crossing another at right angles, having a red line parallel with the green band with a “blob” at the angle. This seems to have represented a dado treatment (Fig. [112]). At the British Museum are pieces of plaster painted with narrow red bands on a green ground, apparently parts of a plain lattice pattern. At the Guildhall is a small piece of plaster having a blue band edged by a white line and with a yellow line beyond the red ground, and another at right angles (Fig. [113]). This is probably part of a dado; there may have been little subjects or sprigs in the square spaces. This is a notable example of adding “pearling” to the edges of bands or the lines, a favourite method of the painters of Londinium, as several of the other sketches show.

Fig. 113.

A large fragment of decoration at the British Museum imitates marble. A circle of green speckled “porphyry” has a margin of red “porphyry,” with figured “marble” of pink-yellow beyond. The circle is defined by scratched lines drawn on the plaster by a compass as a guide for the decorator. This was doubtless part of a dado for which the size of the circle is entirely suitable. Further, fragments of a similar dado were found at Cirencester in position at the foot of a wall. This is described by Buckmann and Newmarch, but they did not recognise the marbling as such. One square panel contained a circle speckled “dark pink and black”; the panels on either band were yellow with wavy markings. Here, again, porphyry and marble were imitated. At Silchester, fragments of marbling have been found, and in the Rochester Museum are many other pieces. Most of these would have been from dadoes. A wall was discovered in January 1922, in the centre of Gracechurch Street, the plaster of which “still retained the lower part of square panels painted in black outline, with a simple ornamentation around, and the painted plaster gave the impression that it had been coloured in imitation of marble.”

Two fragments at the British Museum, which were illustrated by Roach Smith and Wright, are covered with a diaper arranged thus,

× × ×

× × ×

with little flowers and figures in the intervals. These must, I think, have come from a dado. The little figure on one of the pieces is now broken, but a sketch by Fairholt in the Victoria and Albert Museum shows it complete with a level band at the top. It is so engraved by Thomas Wright, and I think that part must have been broken off since it was drawn rather than that the drawing was restored. Wright says that these fragments were from a large building near Crosby Square. This pattern is on a fine red ground.

At the Guildhall Museum is a piece which is fortunately larger than ordinary, and allows for the pattern to be restored (Fig. [114]). The ground was covered with circles, small and great, the latter containing sprigs of flowers, all on a dark ground. This, I suppose, was also from a dado. The larger outer circle is made up of curious forms, which comparison shows were rose-petals. A fragment found in the Lombard Street excavations of 1785, of which there is a drawing in the Guildhall Library, shows segment of two circles, one within the other, red on bright blue, and apparently part of a powdering of small double circles. In the cloister of Lincoln Cathedral there used to be preserved, or at least kept, a large piece of a dado having a big rhombus with Amazon-shield forms at the ends, set within a long rectangular panel; this was of good workmanship and possibly of the second century.

Fig. 114.

Foliage.—In the London Museum is a morsel of pilaster, about as big as an open hand, having small leafage painted on a brown-red ground. The leaves are sharp and struck in in a masterly way; it is really beautiful (Fig. [115]). The leaves spread from a central stem or line, and it is a part of a suspended festoon, I think, rather than of a growth of foliage. This must be the fragment found in Southwark. “The débris of Roman villas, with pavements, ornamental bowls, and pieces of painted plaster have been found. One of these last, in Mr. Syers Cuming’s museum, has on it a slender stem with green leaves on a dull red field” (Mrs. E. Boger, Southwark, 1895. Mr. Cuming was a well-known antiquary).

Fig. 115.

In the British Museum are, as said above, two fragments of a scheme of decoration, which seems to have consisted of festoons hanging from slender uprights (6 and 7, Fig. [a]104]). Fig. [a]116], from the Guildhall, is, I suppose, a variety of vertical stem, but it may be part of a festoon.

Figures.—Some walls had figures in panels or set singly on the general ground. At the Guildhall is a morsel of plaster containing parts of two small dancing figures, which occupied a panel not more than 8 or 9 in. high (Fig. [117]). From the composition it appears that there would have been three figures altogether, filling a square panel (Fig. [118]). The central figure is of a darker hue than the others, and apparently the face is male; probably it is a faun with two nymphs. The painting of this is of high competence, and in full Pompeian tradition. The little panel, one of a series, would have been set at the centre of a wall division. Roach Smith illustrated the head of a figure of Mercury on a red ground; this was probably a single figure painted on a general ground and not included in a panel. Evidences for figures of full size have also been found.

Fig. 116.

A good foot on a blue ground and a piece of drapery of large scale of fine execution are in the British Museum: these are said to have come from Leadenhall Street (The Basilica?). Wright describes some fragments found at Great Chesterford, Essex. “A considerable variety of rather elegant patterns, among which were some representing portions of the human figure. The most remarkable of the latter was the foot of a female, as large as life, with drapery flowing round it. In one of the larger rooms of the villa at Combe End, in Gloucestershire, the lower part of the wall remained covered with fresco painting, on which were a row of feet, also as large as life, which had belonged to some grand paintings.”

Parts of inscriptions have also been discovered. A morsel was found on Tower Hill of “white wall painting with the letters [large capitals] S V P in reddish colour.” At Woodchester, some fragments “were painted with large capital letters which had formed part of inscriptions” (Wright, p. 195).

Cast-Shadows.—It was the practice in figure and foliage painting to boldly reinforce the forms with cast-shadows (see a fragment of a figure in Roach Smith’s Illustrations, pl. 14). A piece of a foliage tendril or festoon in the Rochester Museum, from the villa at Darenth, has cast-shadows. This is of long, delicate, grey-green olive leaves on a red ground, and the sharp shadow below forces it into prominence. Several of the ornamental patterns found in London were reinforced by shadows. A striking example is the large scroll foliage pattern from Leadenhall Market, where separate shadow lines and touches are laid almost like a secondary pattern. This, I think, from the scale of the work, must have been part of the decorations of the Civil Basilica described in Chapter II.

Fig. 117.

Provincial Roman painting is not fine as compared with the great things in either Greek or Gothic art, but we must remember, in comparing it with anything we can obtain to-day, that it was the ordinary journeyman decorator’s work of the time. It is certainly far beyond the standard of common work which we reach to-day; and Roman London, on the testimony of the arts, must have been quite a civilised place. A full study of the fragments in country museums ought to make an interesting subject for a student who is prepared to take up a definite piece of research on the history of art in Britain. Further, suggestions for enlarging the scope of work undertaken by present-day “painters and decorators” might be gathered from these ancient paintings. Our workmen are capable of much better work than is ordinarily demanded of them. Their skill in graining was noticeable; it was the last field where any freedom was left the workmen, and it was probably for that very reason (unconsciously functioning) that architects have tried to kill it. It is our duty to demand free and interesting work. A point to be thought of in regard to the Roman decorations is the character of the designs. These are not laboriously set out, transferred from a full-sized drawing, and painfully “executed”; they are swiftly painted in masterly brush strokes and varied at will for the fun of the thing.

Fig. 118.

Marble Wall-Linings.—In London, at Silchester, and elsewhere, fragments of coloured marbles, and even of porphyries, have been found, which suggest that they were parts of wall-linings, or rather of dadoes. Wright says, of the Great Villa at Woodchester: “Several slices of marble, of different sorts, but chiefly foreign, were also found. These had, perhaps, been employed to encrust the walls. Some of these pieces were not more than a quarter of an inch thick.” At Silchester pieces of porphyry have been found not more than three-sixteenths of an inch thick, and also pieces of fine white marble. At Colchester, fragments of Purbeck and white marble and porphyry have just been dug up. At the British Museum there are many small pieces of marble of various colours, and some of red and green porphyry. A piece of white marble at the British Museum has a shallow edge moulding such as I have frequently seen on dado-slabs in Rome. Such moulding is an excellent way of joining up continuous slab work. The pieces of green porphyry at the British Museum are from the site of East India House (where the Bacchus pavement was found), and they were given by Sir W. Tite in 1884, who, about that time, wrote on the mosaic pavement. These pieces are cut into forms—a part of a circular band and a triangle; they must have belonged to some handsome piece of work, like an Opus Alexandrinum pavement. It looks as if this building, close by the Forum and Basilica, was of special importance—perhaps the governor’s palace.

There must have been skilled marble workers in London. This is proved by the fact that fragments of polished native marbles have been found. Roach Smith, as before said, speaks of “native green marble.” Fragments of Purbeck are common.

At Silchester evidence has been found that mosaics were applied to the walls of a chamber in the Baths; and at Wroxeter a considerable fragment of wall mosaic was found in place many years ago.

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CHAPTER IX
LETTERING AND INSCRIPTIONS

LETTERS.—Fine lettering is the most perfect thing in the art of the Romans. For one thing, it was developed on a field where they were not obsessed with the idea of imitating Greek art; it was their very own, and it was swiftly carried to an apex of perfection in the first century A.D. It is a constant phenomenon on all the fields of Art that it is the first great flow of development which chiefly matters; all things of life and growth are like this, and, as I once heard a fine old Devonshire farmer say, “You can’t have two forenoons in one day.” The Romans, not the Greeks, had the forenoon of the day of their manner of lettering. This manner is clear, sharp, confident; it is like Greek art only in being free.

Fig. 119.—Inscription from the front of a Roman Tomb found at Westminster Abbey in 1869: now by the entrance to the Chapter House.
MEMORIAE·VALER·AMAN
DINI·VALERI·SVPERVEN
TOR·ET·MARCELLVS·PATRI·FECER·

Early inscriptions had for the most part been cut on stone. Then from about 300 B.C. came a time of writing with a pen. Rome took this over from Alexandria and Pergamon, and these written characters became the foundation of a new style of monumental inscription. In pen-written characters the thick and thin strokes make themselves without there being any design in the matter. It seems equally natural in large clear writing to finish off the strokes with a thin touch of the pen to sharpen the forms. This procedure was taken over so exactly into inscriptions cut on stone that, for the most part, it seems these must first have been written on the stone with an implement like a wide brush and cut in afterwards by a mason. The chisel, like the pen, is thin and wide, and thus perfectly fitted to develop the habit of the pen. The cut letters were themselves usually finished by painting. Whoever wishes to design inscriptions must begin on the writing basis, and I should like to advise every student who may read these words to take up the practice of writing capital and small letters with single strokes of the pen, not “touching up” or “painting” the letters, and, above all, not “designing” them with high-waisted bars, swollen loops, little-headed S curves, and other horrors of ignorance and vulgarity, but learning once for all a central standard style. Half an hour a day for one week would teach much to any one who was ready to learn and did not want to do everything by genius.

We have in England a great number of fine Roman inscriptions, and it would be an excellent piece of work to gather a selection into an example-book of illustrations based on corrected rubbings. Even the inscriptions of London carefully studied would be subject-matter for a delightful and valuable essay.

1. The finest London inscription is that on a tomb front in the British Museum (Fig. [120]). This must be a first-century work nearly contemporary with the famous inscription of the Trajan column. The letters are large, deep, clearly cut, and of quite perfect form. It is something of a puzzle that such an artist as the author of this tomb should have been working in London only a few years after the Claudian Conquest. The letters of this inscription are still wonderfully sharp; the thick strokes of the big letters are about an inch wide, and the “serifs” are light and free as the stroke of a pen. Notice especially the beautiful curve of S, the square touch at the apex of N and A, and the sharp little triangular division point after the second letter in the last line (Fig. [121]. See also Figs. [66] and [67]).

Fig. 120.

Fig. 121.

2. Another very fine inscription is on the tomb front of Valerius at Westminster Abbey. The letters are smaller, the stone is rather decayed on the surface, and it is not seen in a good light. The beauty of the lettering and spacing has consequently hardly been remarked. Here the lines are longer, and the letters seem to follow one another rhythmically, trippingly; it is an extraordinarily vivid and elegant piece of work, which, I think, should be dated in the second century A.D. The letters A M and N have cross touches at the apex of the angles, and the stops are little triangles as in the inscription before described. Here it can just be seen that lines were ruled (scored) on the stone as guides for ranging the letters (Figs. [a]119] and [a]122]).

Fig. 122.

3. In the London Museum is a small tablet of white marble, which has similar lines, lettering and stops, and must be nearly of the same age. I give in Fig. [a]123] a very rough sketch of this excellent little slab. I have felt some doubt as to whether this was a London antiquity indeed, but the many resemblances to other inscriptions have fully convinced me that it is.

4. At the Guildhall there is another small slab, having only a few letters, but these of fine early style (Fig. [124]). Both these little tablets and others probably were set on the wall of some burial chamber of the Columbarium type.

Fig. 123.

Fig. 124.

Fig. 125.

5. Another inscription of much the same character, but in smaller letters, is that on the hexagonal pedestal in the Guildhall Museum, of which a sketch was given in an earlier part. This provides an example of a group of tied letters (Fig. [125]). The writers of Roman inscriptions allowed themselves much freedom in contracting words, in setting a small letter within a big one, as in Fig. [a]119], and in combining two or three letters together. In Fig. 126 I have noted one or two other examples not all from London.

Fig. 126.

6. In a fragment of inscription from Greenwich Park at the British Museum, the letters were much compressed, and many of them were linked together (Fig. [127]).

Fig. 127.

It is difficult to draw out any general rules of form and spacing; generally o and c were very round in form, N of square proportion, and M wider than a square. The round letters were usually thickened, not where the curves would touch vertical tangents, but a little under and over, just as is natural in writing the letters. The loops of D and R do not become horizontal at top and bottom, but bend freely. A, N and M usually have square terminations at the upper angles. Initial letters are not larger than the rest.

Fig. 128.

Fig. 129.

One or two examples of rapid cursive writing have been preserved on bricks and tiles. Fig. [a]128] gives some letters of interesting form from a tile at the Guildhall. The A, G and M are on the way to be transformed into—a, g and m; apparently the hook of the “a” had its origin in the overlapping termination at the apex in the monumental inscriptions. Fig. [a]129] is from a still more rapid scribble; L, T and E here approach our modern handwriting forms. These examples are enough to show how the more cursive writing styles and our own handwriting have been developed from the Roman capitals.

Roman books and correspondence were written in such hands, and Dr. Haverfield has pointed out, as such scribblings on tiles were obviously in many cases by labourers in the brickfields, it follows that the common people in British towns had come to talk Latin. Dr. Haverfield went on to question whether town workmen even spoke Celtic. “Had they known Celtic well, it is hardly credible that they should not have sometimes written in that language. No such scrawl has been found in Britain. This total absence of Celtic cannot be mere accident” (Romanization). This argument overlooks a probability that Latin was a written language, while Celtic was not. We hardly realise our direct and full classical inheritance, and the fact that Londinium was a Roman city for three and a half centuries. Here the Latin Pantheon must have been completely absorbed into the common texture of traditional thought; here boys would have carried texts of Virgil in their satchels, and here, again, the story of the Gospel must have been brought in its first westward expansion.

Inscriptions.—In the notes which follow, I am more than ever off my proper ground, and, moreover, they are likely to be very dreary to any one who does not feel the romance of early London and Britain through all the dryasdust detail in which we have to work.

An important inscription was found in 1850 under St. Nicholas Lane. It was described in the same year (Gent. Mag. xi. p. 104): “A large slab with the following Roman inscription in well-cut letters 5 in. or 6 in. in length:

N V M C

P R O V

B R I T A

It is doubtful if the fourth letter in the first line be C or O. The stone is in fine preservation, and others ought to have been discovered, but the excavators were not permitted to turn either to the right or to the left, notwithstanding a gentleman offered to pay any expense.” This must have been Roach Smith, who, as the practical repetition of the phrases given below shows, must have been the author of the note. An MS. letter, which is in my possession, is as follows:

“Strood, Wednesday, P.M.

“My dear Fairholt,—I have given Richards £10 for you.... In the Guildhall is a fragment of a large inscription from Nicholas Lane which we should give rather large. It lay just within the lower door of the Library. The letters are deeply cut and should be shown clear. Can you see if the stone be broken? [Sketch.] Note if letter 4, line 1, be a C, and please measure it. It is most important. I suppose it is half the original length.—Yours sincerely,

“C. R. Smith.”

Fig. 130.

Fig. 131.

The stone had disappeared and has never been heard of since. The size was recorded by Birch as 2 ft. 4 in. high, and 3 ft. wide on the face. V.C.H. says 6 ft. long, but this is a mistake. Fortunately a careful drawing of the stone was made by Archer, which is preserved in the British Museum (Fig. [130]). Archer’s drawing confirms Roach Smith’s reading of C at the end of the first line next a vertical joint. My sketch by Roach Smith seems to be the only other record (Fig. [131]). In Illustrations of Roman London, he says: “It was found close to a wall, and there is reason to think other stones having the remainder of the inscription were not far off from the one excavated. In the present year (1859), being desirous to compare it with my sketch, I ascertained it was not to be found. The stone was between 2 and 3 ft. in length. The fourth letter in the first line appeared to me when I made the sketch more like a C (which I considered it to be) than it seems to be in the woodcut. From the magnitude of the stone and the character of the letters it is clear that the inscription surmounted the entrance of some public edifice, apparently a temple. It is probably the commencement of a dedication which occupied two or four stones. The wider distance from the top than of the third line from the bottom weighs in favour of the belief that we have only the first quarter. There can be no doubt that NVM should read Numini, and that PROV BRITA should be read Provincia Britannia; the supposed equal length of the second stone and the number of letters required, render this reading obvious. Seneca and Tacitus concur as to a temple having been erected in Britain to the Emperor Claudius; the latter locates it at Camuludunum. This temple was probably erected soon after the subjugation of the Trinobantes. It may be readily conceived that Londinium possessed some edifice dedicated to that emperor. Although it is impossible to decide positively, we cannot avoid associating the historical evidence with an inscription which must have been of an early period, of a rare class, and almost unique in this country.” This idea that there were formerly four stones is now much strengthened by the fact that a curiously similar temple dedication is illustrated by Espèrandieu (iv. p. 126) from D’Yzeures. This inscription begins Numinibus Augustorum and is on four equal stones with joints meeting at the centre, thus +. Hübner (C.I.L. vii. No. 22) gives the boundary to the right of the London stone as a fracture, and restored the inscription with Num. Caes. et Genio in the top line. It is at once apparent that this would not space out properly with the single words of second and third lines. Haverfield leaves out Genio and reads, “To the Divinity of the Emperor and to the Province of Britain.” This, I suppose, might be possible in a contracted inscription, but I am drawn back to Roach Smith’s view, and would venture to suggest the possibility of some such restoration as:

NVM·C|L·AVG·

PROV|INCIA

BRITA|NNIAE

etc. etc.

I am ignorant whether it would be possible to have a dedication from the Province of Britain to Claudius in such a form, but if so it would be a record of great significance. The fourth letter was certainly C, because an O would not have avoided the joint. The letters in the top line were about 6 in. high, and the whole was of fine style. As Hübner says, it is doubtless of the first century. It was certainly affixed to a temple dedicated to an Emperor-divinity. The complete inscription probably occupied four stones.

2. Several brick inscriptions are of special interest, as most of them contain the name London. There are two varieties: (a) P.PR.BR. in a label; and (b) P.P.BR.LON (Figs. [a]132] and [a]133]). The former (a) has large letters, and they are enclosed in a tablet: it seems of earlier style than the other. Wright says of the second: “The most probable interpretation is Proprætor Britanniæ Londinii; this has a peculiar interest as showing that London was the seat of government of the province.” When Wright wrote only a roof tile of variety (a) seems to have been known, but now there are several plain tiles at the Guildhall and one at the British Museum which have the same mark. All these are alike in having four notches in their long edges, and one flat side of each is scored over with lines to give better hold for plastering. It seems that these tiles must have been used for lining walls, nails being driven in at the notches; their size is 16 in. by 11 in.

Fig. 132.

Fig. 133.

The explanation of Hübner adopted in the new British Museum Guide is that P. in (a) and (b) both “represent the publicani who farmed the taxes (the ‘publicans’ of the Gospels) of the province of Britain in London.”

Nothing is so expert a matter as Latin inscriptions, and it would be absurd for one who is entirely ignorant to pretend to a difference of opinion. I may, however, venture to point out that Hübner himself does not seem very certain, and that the difference of the two forms seems to coincide with the historical fact that earlier Britain was one province and that later it was subdivided. Variety (a), I have little doubt, is a second-century inscription (similar labels are found on pigs of lead of the time); while form (b) is quite late (probably end of fourth century). The first variety I should like to suggest represents the governor of the undivided province, and the second the subdivided province with its centre at London. If I am not entirely outside the possibilities of the case there is some confirmation of Wright’s view in the fact that other tiles bear the stamps of high authorities; thus a tile at Silchester has the name of the Emperor Nero in a circle, and other tiles are known stamped with the marks of army and navy commands.

3. At the British Museum is a silver ingot (found on the site of the Tower of London), stamped with an inscription given as

EXOFFL

HONORINI

and described thus: “Ex Of[ficina] Fl[avii ?] Honorini: found with gold coins of the Emperors Arcadius and Honorius.” The reading FL at the end of the first line is probably adopted because the Emperor Honorius had also the name Flavius; but to my eyes the letters look more like FE. Other similar marks on silver show that we need not expect an emperor’s name. (One in the British Museum reads EX OF PATRICI.) Roach Smith read the London inscription, EX OFFI, and explained the whole “From the workshop of Honorinus.” I may suggest Felix Honorinus.

4. Lying in the grass in front of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, is a large white stone, bearing only T II in what appears to be Roman work and style. It was found near its present site about forty years ago, and was accepted as Roman and explained as a boundary (terminus) mark. It may be noted that it lies close to the line of the presumed Roman road along Tothill Street to the river. The nearest parallel I have seen is a stone found near Falkirk, described in Haverfield’s addition to the C.I.L. (No. 1264): T III (turma tertia).

5. An inscription at the Guildhall

MATR ...

VICINIA-DESVO-RES ........

is, as has been pointed out, a record of the restoration of some edifice or sculpture dedicated to the mother goddesses. The lettering is on the half of the crowning member of a cornice which may have been over a narrow door, and Roach Smith was probably right in assuming the existence of a small temple.

6. A sketch of the inscription found on a mosaic floor near Pudding Lane is preserved at the Society of Antiquaries: it has indications not brought out by printing it in type, and an expert could probably gather more from it than has been made out.

7. The sarcophagus from Clapton at the Guildhall has a much-defaced inscription on the front panel ending apparently, as the catalogue says, with the name MARITIMIVS. Here, again, it is possible that careful examination by experts would bring out further facts.

These inadequate, indeed incompetent, notes on a few selected inscriptions are at least enough to show that the inscriptions of Londinium are worth the attention of properly equipped scholars. A carefully illustrated account of them might be made interesting to all intelligent citizens and help them to get really into their minds an idea of the Roman age in London.

From a Relief at Bath.

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CHAPTER X
THE CRAFTS

IN his account of Roman London, the late Dr. Haverfield writes (J.R.S., vol. i.): “The citizens appear to have been Roman or definitely Romanised. Of Roman speech in London we have an isolated but sufficient proof. A tile dug up in Warwick Lane, in 1886, bore an inscription, meaning, apparently, ‘Austalis (Augustalis) goes off on his own every day for a fortnight.’ It seems to follow that some of the bricklayers [makers] of Londinium could write Latin. In the lands ruled by Rome, education was better under the Empire than at any time since until about 1848. The occupations of these Roman or Romanised civilians are unknown to us. Articles manufactured on the Continent were certainly imported. There were also exports of grain, cloth (or wool), and lead, and so forth. We may believe that Roman London devoted its time to financial rather than industrial activity.”

Evidence for the practice of arts in Londinium is really considerable. It was doubtless first of all a port, and probably originated as the seaport of the pre-Roman city of Verulamium; but it became the largest city in Britain, the chief distributing centre and the artistic capital. We are apt to think of Dover, or rather Richborough, as the chief port of the country, but London itself was the largest consumer, and the line of traffic was rather to the mouth of the Rhine than to Boulogne. Londinium was a little Alexandria in the West, and represented Britain as the other did Egypt. The building of such a city called together many able craftsmen—builders, sculptors, painters and mosaic workers. There must also have been shipbuilders and a due proportion of craftsmen-producers, potters, bone- and metal-workers, shoemakers, clothiers and the rest. An enormous quantity of pottery has been found, much of fine imported wares, but the most part varieties of native fabric, of which a large proportion was doubtless made of local clay. The site of St. Paul’s Cathedral was covered with “pot-earth,” and the town potteries seem to have been here.

Fig. 134.

Native Pottery.—In the British Museum are some valuable MS. notes made in the years 1674-79, “by Mr. John Conyers, apothecary, at the ‘White Lion,’ in Fleet Street” (Sloane, 958, 816, 937). In mentioning St. Faith’s Chapel, at St. Paul’s, he says that his father and mother were there married forty-five years since (from 1677). Incidentally, he speaks of two brothers, and of being “at Epping Forest hunting ye hare, but ye frost prevented the scent.” This is a late example of the sporting customs of ancient London. His observations refer to excavations on the site of St. Paul’s and along the Fleet. In regard to the former it appears certain that there were a number of Roman rubbish pits on the site, similar to those recently excavated on the Post Office site. Here also were found pottery-kilns and glass furnaces with pottery, bone and other objects. This seems to have been a manufacturing quarter of the city unoccupied by dwellings. Some sketches show that the pottery kilns were circles of small diameter, having a raised floor supported on a central post, like a table, all of clay and broken stuff roughly formed; the lower stage or fire chamber was thus a ring around the central prop, and in the raised “floor” were several small holes. There must have been an external pit with a stoke-hole, and also a flue from the fire chamber. Four such kilns were found close together, forming a quatrefoil group. The dome of the kiln seems to have been roughly new formed over the pottery to be fired (Fig. [134]). Conyers, in the account of finds on the site of St. Paul’s, gives sketches of the kilns found at St. Paul’s with several kinds of pots: “Figures of two kinds of kilns or furnaces of various pots, jugs, etc., of different kinds of earth and pottery. One kiln in loamy ground about 26 ft. deep, near the place where the Mercat-house stood in Oliver’s time. The discovery made in 1677 on digging the foundation of the north-east cross part of St. Paul’s amongst gravel-pits and loam-pits.... Coffins lay over this loamy kiln, the lowest coffins made of chalk, and this supposed to be about Domitian’s time. This kiln was full of ye worst sort of pots, lamps, urns, and not many were saved whole. Four of these [kilns] had been made in the sandy-loam in the fashion of a cross on the ground; the foundations of these left standing 5 ft. from top to bottom, and better, and as many feet in breadth, and had no other matter for its form or building but the outward loam crusted hardish by the heat burning the loam red like brick. The flooring in the middle, supported by and cut out of loam and helped with old-fashioned Roman tiles, sherds, but very few, and such as I have seen used for repositories for urns in ye fashion of little ovens, and they plastered within with a reddish mortar; but here was no mortar, but only ye sandy loam for cement.... A censer or lamp, whitish earth; one great earthen dish; earthen lamp gilded with electrum,” etc. etc.

Again, Conyers says the labourers under part of the place where St. Paul’s Cross stood, 25 ft. or 30 ft. deep, as the earth ceased to be black and came to the yellow sand, found earthen potsherds as red and fine as sealing-wax, and upon some inscriptions, “De Ovimini,” “De Parici,” “De Quintimani,” “Victor,” “Janus Ricino.” [These were Samian, but he goes on to describe very accurately native pottery.] “And pots like broken urns, which were curiously laid on the outside with like thornpricks of rose trees, in the manner of raised work. Other were of cinnamon colour, urn fashion, and as if gilded with gold but faded. Some of strange fashion, jugs bent in so as to be six-square, raised work upon them pricked as curious raisers of paste may imitate; some like black earth for pudding pans, on ye outside indented and crossed quincunx fashion. They had some odd colours (not blue) in these times and a way of glazing different to what now; the red earth bare away the bell.”

“Now, besides red pots,” says Conyers, “such as have inscriptions in the bottoms [i.e. Samian], there were black pots with inscriptions and part of white earth and the glazing black, and both these might be made in ye places, as well as a gilded sort of earthenware. There was a brownish sort inclining to yellow, and the gilding easily coming off. Now, whether this was a thin wash of gold colour or foliated, I know not, yet I think foliated [really mica]. Other pots and urns of a whitish yellow and a soft kind of earth and shells strewed at the bottom inside. Now, other pots as thin as glass with raised work, and these as of a silvered or bell-metal coloured glazing. The imagery, hounds, hares, stags, thorns, trees and branching, flourishings—all raised work. Then I have lamps of gilded British-work [local] and coarse whitish-yellow colours, and bottles and pots for dropping, of the same colours.” In one of his repetitions, Conyers mentions “great potsherds and ears of six-gallon pots.” He also gives sketches of many of the vessels. Doubtless those drawn were in most cases whole vessels and they are of the coarser wares, other than Samian. It is probable, therefore, that they were pottery made on the spot. Dr. Harwood, describing the excavations in the site of St. Mary Woolnoth in 1724, says that “Roman foundations were found made of offal of brick kilns and furnaces” (Soc. Antiq. Minutes).

It would be an easy thing to identify in our collections vessels which conform to the types sketched by Conyers and then to form a group of actual pots which presumably were made in London. This coarse and ordinary ware is usually classed as “Roman,” but it was in a large degree a Celtic inheritance. The black wares of “carinated” profile (Figs. [a]135] and [a]136]) and more or less “cordonned” decorations are very like Marne pottery of the Celtic period. It seems quite likely that the potteries of Londinium may have existed before the Roman Conquest.

Fig. 135.

Fig. 136.

Fig. 137.

Many of the decorated pots in our museums are so clearly described by Conyers that they, too, can be identified. It is evident, for instance, that Castor-ware vessels with hunting scenes in slip were as well represented in the finds as they are in our museums to-day. Hunting itself must have been much in the people’s minds, with chariot races and the gladiator “matches.”

Fig. 138.

Sporting subjects, such as are mentioned by Conyers, are plentifully represented in our museums. In Fairholt’s sketch-book I find a drawing of a pot found in Cateaton Street (Fig. [137]). There is also a sketch of a fragment of a similar urn found at Chesterford (Fig. [138]). Compare the sculpture, Fig. [62]. The piece engraved in Wright’s book as an example of a British hunting dog was also from a sketch by Fairholt of a London fragment. He also drew a piece found in Bishopsgate Street, which shows the heads of four horses, one over the other. This is explained by a complete pot at the British Museum, from Colchester, which has reliefs of racing chariots as mentioned before (p. 51). On another Colchester vase are Gladiators with their names scratched above. The eagle (Fig. [139]) is from a fragment at Silchester.

Fig. 139.

Fig. 140.

After having identified the pottery actually made in London, and the other native sources from which other wares were brought, we might go on to determine how far this native pottery is Celtic and how far Roman. Fig. [a]140], restored from a large fragment of very coarse make in the London Museum, and said to have been found at Mortlake, must have been made long before the Roman invasion. Figs. 135 and 136 are urns of Upchurch ware, carefully made and of lustrous black surface. The forms of these are not Roman. The “spirit” of all is of Bronze Age and Mycenæan character. The black pottery with “carinated” profiles found in London, and now in our museums, may be Upchurch ware, but from Conyers’ account and sketches it seems probable that black and grey pottery was made locally. In the museums, there are a few examples which seem to be clearly Celtic, as, for example, a large fragment at the British Museum with white stripes over a grey fabric. There seems, however, to have been a curious disinclination to recognise Celtic art, and a desire to call all Roman.

Samian.—The early prosperity of London is well shown by the great quantity of Samian ware which has been found of the period about 60-85, and by the examples of the work of the best makers, such as Vitalis, Rubricius, Saturnus and Rufinus. Of the first-named there are some excellent vases in the collection at South Kensington; he distributed his pottery from Carthage to Carlisle, and from Pompeii to London. Saturnus has half a chapter to himself in a big book on the Roman pottery found in Trier. The Samian question is too vast for me to attempt to deal with it here, and I can merely note one or two details. In Fairholt’s sketch-books at the Victoria and Albert Museum there are several drawings of Samian fragments. One of these, which I have not seen elsewhere, is an excellent example of animals running under trees—a scheme taken over into our Castor-ware, which Dr. Haverfield thought might be a Celtic tradition (Romanization). (Fig. 141, and compare Fig. [138].) At the Guildhall are nearly a dozen fragments of a rare kind of Samian vase, in which the ornament of figures and foliage was applied in separate units, the leaves, etc., being linked up by stalks skilfully done by the “barbotine” method. Three larger and some smaller fragments come from a vase of rather globular shape which was very similar to a vase found at Cornhill, one of the chief treasures of the Roman Room at the British Museum. The latter is well described in Mr. Walter’s Catalogue of Roman Pottery, which is the best account available of pottery found in London. It is not observed that the Guildhall fragments contain a figure which is half lost in the restored vase at the British Museum. On the other hand, comparison with the latter would make it easy to restore the Guildhall example. The details of both were formed by the same stamps. I give in Figs. 142 and 143 the scheme of the decoration: B was the general shape of the pot.

Fig. 141.

Fig. 142.

Two or three other sherds at the Guildhall belonged to a somewhat similar but smaller urn which had Bacchic subjects—a satyr with goat legs, and a faun before whom is a wine jar into which he seems to be dropping grape juice. These figures were evidently also set between scrolls of vegetation, and this also can be restored. Again there is a sherd of a vine pattern similar to Fig. [a]142], but, I think, from a third pot. There is also a figure from a dark-grey pot, which must have been yet another of the same kind. (For the last word on Samian pottery, see Oswald and Price’s Terra Sigillata.)

A volume on the pottery found in London by a specialist, like that on Silchester, would be certain to bring out valuable historical results on the existence and persistence of Celtic wares, on importations before the Claudian Conquest, and on the large quantity of imports in early Roman days.

Fig. 143.

Glass.—Much broken glass is usually found on Roman sites, vessels, window-panes, etc., and it was probably wrought, in many centres, from imported material. Evidence of this has been found at Silchester and elsewhere (see Mr. T. May’s Warrington). Some window glass was described by Price as “plate polished on one side and ground on the other”; this probably means that it was cast and that the rough side came next the mould.

Conyers, describing the finds on the side of St. Paul’s in 1675, says: “The labourers told me of some remains that were found up and down near the place of the other pot-kilns, and these had a funnel to convey the smoke, which might serve for glass furnaces. For though not any pots with glass in them whole in the furnaces were there found, yet broken crucibles, or tests for molting of glasses, together with boltered glasses such as are to be seen remaining at glass-houses amongst the broken glass, which were glasses spoilt in the making, were there found, but not plenty, and especially coloured and prepared for jewel-like ornament, but mostly such as for cruets or glasses with a lip to drop withal of a greenish light blue colour. Of any sort of glass there was but little; so that the glasswork might be scarce, for I think a hundred times more of pots was found to one of glass....

“Now doth appear the Romans had excellent mechanics, pot makers, stampers of coins, and excellent workers in glass, for amongst those Roman pots were found glass beads as big as could be put on your little finger, and these hollow within and of blue glass wrought or enamelled with yellow glass, and blue beads of the colour of a Turkoise stone. Divided were these beads with threads as big as pack thread. Amongst the rest, great pins made of bone or ivory, etc., heads of many like the great brass-pins, and others vermicular or screw-head, others like the Pope’s triple crown; of these fell to my share as many as a pint-pot would hold.... Taken up a speculum of metal to show the face, of fine bell-metal. There were also found brass embossments with glass set instead of better jewels, which I keep, and glass drops that were loose, and the bottom of an old-fashioned crucible which had glass melted in it, and there were also pieces of necks of glass cruets to pour out by.”

Much of the large number of plainer glass vessels in our museums was doubtless made in the London glass works from imported metal, and probably some ornamental pieces were also manufactured. Thomas Wright thought that glass itself was made in Roman days on the coast near Brighton where “pebbles of glass” have been found; but from comparatively late records of glass making about Rye, etc., the Roman origin of the “pebbles” seems unlikely.

In the British Museum are some fragments of glass vessels having moulded reliefs of chariot races and combats, with the names of the competitors above them. T. Wright illustrates “a fragment of a very remarkable cup in green glass found in the Roman Villa at Hartlip in Kent.... Roach Smith possessed two similar fragments found in London, one of which is identical with the Hartlip fragment in its design and appears to be from the same mould; the other is from a vessel of a different shape and has a quadriga in bas-relief. We have before had occasion to observe how popular gladiatorial contests and the games of the circus were among the Roman inhabitants of this island, and how often we find them represented on the pottery as on the glass.” If a glass vessel found in Kent is exactly like another found in London, it is probable that the former was itself obtained in London, where both may have been made. One of the fragments in the British Museum is from Colchester. We have seen before how that some of the Castor-ware pots were decorated with similar racing chariots, and one of these was found in London and the other in Colchester. Racing chariots also decorate a leaden box found in London and described below.

Glass vessels having reliefs of racing chariots have been found on the Continent, and in the British Museum Guide it is said that our examples “probably came from a Belgian workshop, as a glass of the same kind has been found at Couvin, in the province of Namur, bearing two of the same competitors’ names in a four-horse chariot race. Race cups of this kind date about A.D. 100, and have been found in France, Belgium and Germany. The six cups or fragments found in Britain were no doubt imported across the Channel.” There is, I think, room for some doubt. In any case there seems to be ample evidence that glassware was made in Britain and in Londinium.

Fig. 144.

Fig. 145.

Much glass of finer quality was imported. There is in the Guildhall Museum a fragment signed by a maker of Sidon, and fragments of several small plaques in the British Museum having patterns wrought in the substance are of a kind found in Egypt. At the Egyptian exhibition of the Burlington Club, 1921, similar plaques were shown, some having sprigs of flowers, and one a single rose petal pattern in yellow, white and red on the dark ground (cf. Fig. [a]145]). The three pieces at the British Museum are all different and all can be restored. Fig. [a]144] is from Roach Smith. Fig. [a]145] is a rough indication of the pattern of another, and the third is a variant of Fig. [a]144]. These interesting and beautiful little fragments are obscure from age; they might with great advantage be partially repolished, laid out on restored drawings, and be made much of. The recent rearrangement of the contents of the Roman Room at the British Museum, and the admirable new Guide, have so greatly increased the interest of the objects that I want still more. I also wish that the London things in the collection could be shown together. Roach Smith never intended his objects to be separated.

Enamels.—Conyers’ phrases about coloured glass “prepared for jewel-like ornament,” and “the brass embossments with glass set instead of jewels,” apparently refer to enamels and seem to imply that enamelled objects were made at the London glass works.

Fig. 146.

Fig. 147.

A large number of small enamelled objects, from little bowls to brooches, have been found in Britain. The art of enamelling was known here before the Roman age, but objects having several colours seem to be “Roman,” although there are Celtic characteristics in the patterns, and it is agreed that there was a native manufacture (British Museum Guide, p. 95) of such enamels. The finest piece is a “casket” in the form of a little vase with a handle. This handle has turned-up ends of a kind frequently found in Alexandrian silverwork. One of the bands of enamel is a meandering stem and vine leaves. This beautiful object was found in Essex, and there is in the British Museum another little enamelled bowl also found not far from London, at Braughing, Hertfordshire. The details in these two pieces are very similar, so are those of a little enamelled cock found near the Royal Exchange. Notice the use of long triangular forms and narrow saw-edged fillets. It seems probable that all were made in London, and further evidence is found in a remarkable enamelled plate taken out of the Thames (Fig. [146]). This “being an unfinished piece, was probably made in this country”—and city, I would add. In colouring and technique this plate (probably part of a memorial) is very like the objects already mentioned. A leaf form on it which ends in a tendril is found also on the Braughing bowl; both these pieces might have come from one shop. The type of ornament is remarkably Celtic. In the Guide it is said that “debased Amazon shields can be recognised, and Riegel has pointed out that the panel is not a unit, but belongs to a larger all-over pattern which could be repeated indefinitely, and reveals an artistic tendency of the later Roman Empire.” I do not agree with either of these statements. The pattern seems to me to have been designed as a reversed scroll pattern, subdivided by setting down oval forms in the spaces to counterchange the colour in a typically Celtic manner. In the diagram (Fig. [147]), A is the pattern type; B is the application to the space; C is the subdivision of the spaces completing the design. In D and E, I have made an original design on the same principle. Other details in the filling of the space at the top are Celtic. Notice again a heart-shaped form at X. This form is frequent in small seal-boxes, several of which have been found in London, of which F is from one lately added to the Guildhall collection. It is probable, I think, that such enamels were made in London by Celtic artists. An enamelled harness plate found in London and illustrated by Roach Smith is like others found in Somersetshire (see G). A small brooch in the form of a fish at the London Museum may be early Christian.

Leadwork.—Britain was the chief source for lead in the later Roman era. Of about a hundred and twenty Roman pigs of lead in the museums of Europe, about half were of British origin, as appears from the inscriptions. Cast sheet lead was used for coverings. Some actually in position was found lining the bottom of the hot bath at Bath in 1864. It was afterwards sold for £70! Mr. Irvine, in an article on the Corinthian temple at Bath, assumes that the roof was covered with lead. He says that the sheet lead found in Bath was about three-eighths of an inch thick and showed that it was cast on a sand-bed. Melted lead was found at St. Albans under conditions which suggested that it had come from the roof of the Basilica. We may be satisfied that lead was used for important roofs. Lead pipes are also found.

Many lead coffins have been found in and about London—about a dozen in all—and they were doubtless made in the city. The fashion of using lead coffins seems to have originated in the Romanised East about the time of the recognition of Christianity, and those found in London follow the general type very closely. I give in Fig. [a]148] a rough sketch made in Constantinople twenty-five years ago of a lead coffin found at Sidon. Another coffin from Sidon has recently been acquired by the British Museum. Figs. 149, 150 and 151 are from coffins found in London.

Fig. 148.

Fig. 149.

One discovered many years ago in South London, illustrated in Archæologia, vol. xvii., had on it two little figures like Minerva—probably Britannia. Another found at Sittingbourne, recently set out for exhibition at the British Museum, has little Medusa heads and pairs of lions watching a vase (Fig. [152]).

Fig. 150.

Fig. 151

A round lead box, for the reception of burnt bones, found in London and now in the British Museum, has repeated on it a relief of a four-horse chariot. This is described in the Guide as the chariot of the Sun; but comparison with other chariot-racing groups on the pottery and glass vessels shows that these reliefs must also represent a chariot race (Fig. [153]). This fact adds to the probability that the glass vessels with reliefs of racing chariots were also made in Londinium. Fig. 154 is from a simpler lead box found in London; compare the rings with the painted pattern described at the bottom of p. 169.

Fig. 152.

Fig. 153. Fig. 154.

Pewter.—A large quantity of pewter ware, vessels and dishes, has been discovered in Britain. Many ingots of the metal were found in the last century at Battersea in the river. Lysons figured a fragment of “lead” found at Lydney stamped with a name, and this may have been pewter. The ingots of pewter were doubtless of British origin, and it is very probable that the finished objects of this metal were manufactured here. Many of the dishes have engraved centres of a type of design which can hardly be earlier than the fourth century. This engraving was filled with black composition imitating niello. The ingots bear marks which show that they belong to a time when Christianity was recognised.

In the London Museum is a dish with an engraved centre, and at the British Museum are some plain dishes signed with the name of the owner or maker, Martinus, which were found in Southwark. Most of the finds of pewter ware have been made in south-east England, and London is the most likely place of origin. Lysons illustrates a dish found at Manchester (it is now in the British Museum) with an engraved centre so like those found in the south of England that it is probable it also was made in the south. These dishes were finished in a lathe; at the back they have traces of three projections by which they were held in turning but afterwards cut away.

Bone, Leatherwork, etc.—We have seen above that Conyers speaks of the large quantity of bone objects found in excavations. Of the St. Paul’s site he says: “And amongst ye heap or mixture of rubbish, hartshorn sawed into pieces, old heifers’ horns, and abundance of boars’ tusks—some in their jaw bones which shows that they did often hunt ye wild boar.... It is very remarkable that ivory-work and great pins made of bone and bodkins of great numbers was found buried together with store of boars’ teeth, of oysters and other shells, Roman coins and ornamental beads, of blue like enamel and the fibulæ they used to fasten their garments, earthenware with inscriptions and glass was found in gravel pits near St. Paul’s School.” Several carved pieces of similar style in the London Museum—notably little reliefs of gladiators—suggest that there were expert bone carvers in London. A bone pin with a figure of Fortuna found in London, and a carving of a sphinx from Colchester—both in the British Museum—are really beautiful work. The admirable fragments of an ivory scabbard found in Greenwich Park in 1906 can hardly be London work.

A considerable number of beautifully-made leather shoes having elaborately pierced patterns are doubtless of local work. One found at South-fleet, now at the British Museum, was coloured purple and decorated with gilding, as is recorded on a drawing at the Society of Antiquaries, made when it was newly found.

The site of London is still unexhausted; even while I am writing this I see in the morning’s paper, “Recent excavations in Lothbury have brought to light relics of Roman occupation—bone bodkins, oyster shells and broken pottery. The bodkins are large, and it is thought that they were probably used in mat-making.” London must have been an art-producing centre for two thousand years.

Locally made Pottery.

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CHAPTER XI
EARLY CHRISTIAN LONDON

“It was no longer thought to be Britain but a Roman island; and all their money was stamped with Cæsar’s image. Meanwhile these islands, stiff with frost, received the beams of light, the holy precepts of Christ, the true Sun, at the later part of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar.”

—Gildas.

CHRISTIAN BRITAIN.—The whole subject of Christian antiquities in Britain was for a long time clouded by mere doubt of testimony, until the comparatively recent discovery of the foundations of an early Christian basilican church at Silchester, in 1892, gradually changed the temperature and atmosphere in which facts are seen. Thomas Wright had swept the thing aside, Gildas and all. This difference of attitude is well brought out in the earlier and more recent writings of Dr. Haverfield. Compare, for instance, his over-cautious article in the English Historical Review about twenty years ago with another in Archæologia Æliana, 1917, which is written in quite a different temper. It is now clear that Britain marched with Gaul in the acceptance of Christianity, although one step behind.

In Cabrol’s great French Dictionary of Christian Antiquities we may obtain a valuable unbiased account of British Christian antiquities. The best general introduction known to me is a chapter in Sir C. Oman’s excellent England before the Norman Conquest, from which I will condense a paragraph.

“There is no doubt that individual Christians, perhaps even small communities, were to be found in Britain as early as the second century. There is no reason to doubt Tertullian writing in about A.D. 208, or Origen writing about A.D. 230, that the Christian religion had converts in the province of the extreme north-west.... In the long peace which followed the persecution of Severus the new religion pushed northward and westward with greater power. There seems no reason to doubt the small number of British martyrs whose names appear in the earliest martyrologies. The very early martyrology gives three names drawn from Britain—the latest St. Patrick (obiit c. 461), the other two are Augulus, bishop of Augusta (London), and Alban. We know nothing of Augulus, but the fact that his See is called Augusta shows that the name was taken down between 340 and 410, for London was only known as Augusta in the second half of the fourth century. Of Alban’s existence our knowledge is more certain, since Germanus visited his grave in 429; his cult, therefore, was well established in the early fifth century.... As early as 314, three bishops from Britain appeared at the Council of Arles—Eborius of York, Restitutus of London and Adelphius of Lincoln. There seems reason to think that the bulk of the population remained pagan till a later date than was the case elsewhere. If the Christians of Calleva found the diminutive church lately discovered sufficient for their needs they must have been but a few hundreds. In that same town a temple to Mars was found, which must have been used down to the end. If Calleva had become completely Christian before its evacuation the image of Mars would not have been left. The small number of Christian sepulchral inscriptions is notable, though such have been found at Carlisle, Lincoln and elsewhere. It is very strange that a religion which was first publicly tolerated, and later encouraged for nearly a hundred years before A.D. 410, should have left so few records. The existence of a vigorous British Christendom in the fourth century is sufficiently proved by literary evidence. Without that evidence we should have gathered little from archæological research. Secular inscriptions and buildings of the fourth century are rare, no less than ecclesiastical ones. The British Church produced, in the last days of the Romans, a heresiarch, the celebrated Pelagius, a monk. Born about 370-80, he taught in Rome itself. The earliest recorded works written by Britons are those of the heresiarch and of a British bishop named Fastidius.”

In an excellent short account of British Christian antiquities in the new Guide to the Christian Collection at the British Museum (1921), Mr. Dalton remarks that “the statement of the sixth-century British historian, Gildas, that in Roman times Britain had many churches was always credible, but positive proof was not forthcoming until the excavations on the site of Calleva (Silchester) brought to light the foundations of a church, the Roman origin of which is beyond dispute.” Gildas, again, is confirmed by Bede’s account of ruined Christian churches existing in the sixth century. According to Cabrol’s Dictionary even some of the greater country villas, like Chedworth, were occupied by Christian proprietors. On a mosaic pavement at Frampton the monogram of Christ appears in the central space of a border. It has been argued that the monogram might be later than the pavement, but the design of the border itself shows that it had a central feature from the first. It seems probable to me, as before said, that several other mosaic pavements were Christian.

Fig. 155.

Fig. 156.

Fig. 157.

A British Church.—The little church at Silchester is extraordinarily interesting in many ways. It was probably built not later than the middle of the fourth century and is thus one of the earliest churches known. It occupied an important position in the city close to the Forum, and it is probable from this and from the importance of the city that it was a bishop’s church. Moreover, it is evident that if there was such a church at Silchester there must have been others in Canterbury, Verulam, London and other cities. This church was only about 30 ft. square, exclusive of the narthex (Fig. 155). Some day, when we reverence our antiquities more, it might be excavated once again and, having a decent roof erected over it, be made a place of pilgrimage. I should like to see a copy of it put up somewhere for use—it might cost half as much as a poor stained-glass window. As I have just said, the plan, exclusive of the narthex, was square, so also is the plan of an early church in Asia Minor which I give for comparison (Fig. [156]). This squareness was, I believe, intended as a symbol of the Ark. I also give the altar end of an early church in Greece, Fig. [a]157] (Nichopoleos: see Athenian Ephemeris, 1916).

The plan of the Silchester church seems to be of an Eastern rather than Roman type; and small as it is, it has slight transeptal projections which, when compared with the other plans, show that the form of the cross was intended to be suggested. The altar was not regarded as being in the apse, but rather in front of it (compare Fig. [a]157]). The apse was to the west and the entrance at the east, following the early custom. In front was a court with a water basin in the centre. In regard to the non-Roman character of the plan, it may be noted that the late Mr. Edmund Bishop, a great liturgical authority, showed that early Irish Christianity was of an Iberian type.

London Saints.—Bishop Augulus and Restitutus of London ought to be commemorated in some way in the City. We are singularly wasteful of the power there is in the antiquities of a nation when sympathetically understood. If, for instance, Patrick had been recognised for the great British personage he was—the son and grandson of Christian parents captured to be a slave in Ireland—the magnanimous missionary might have been a mediator between the Irish and ourselves, a mixed race, part English, part British and part Roman. St. Augulus is included in the Roman Catholic Menology of the British Church. “Feb. 7.—In London the Passion of St. Augulus, Bishop and Martyr (A.D. 300 c.). Named on this day in the Roman Martyrology and in all the ancient calendars as a bishop who suffered martyrdom in London. The conjecture of historians is that he suffered in the persecution of Diocletian about the same time as St. Alban.” He is given a place in the paintings of the English College, Rome. It is curious that of two contemporary martyrs, St. Alban should have been taken up by fame and the other left. Confirmation of the point made by Sir C. Oman in regard to the name Augusta applied to London has appeared in the recent identification by Sir A. Evans of a late fourth-century coin with the Mint mark AVG.

Fig. 158.

Early Christian Objects.—The earliest existing “monument” of Christian Londinium is dated only a little later than the year in which Restitutus attended the Council of Arles. This is the reverse of a coin of Constantine, recently discovered (1909) at Poltross Burn, on the great Roman Wall, and thus described: “Mint mark PLN; of the London Mint and bearing the Christian emblem; A.D. 317-324; variety of Cohen 638. Two Victories placing on an altar a shield inscribed VOT. PR.; on the face of the altar a cross within a wreath. This is a London-minted coin bearing upon its reverse the Christian emblem of such rarity that the use of Christian emblems in the London Mint has been called in question. The only recorded specimens are a coin of Constantine II. in the British Museum, one of Crispus, found in 1909 at Corstopitum, and the present example. All have the same reverse” (Fig. [158]). This is in every way a very remarkable coin; the Victories placing the shield on a Christian altar is obviously a record of the official recognition of Christianity. From this moment when the Cross appeared on what Sir C. Oman calls “the public gazette of the Roman Empire,” every one in Londinium must have known what the Cross stood for. “In an issue of money between 317 and 324, Constantine used Christian signs in such a way as to solemnly affirm his Christian faith, and thus by universal custom made known the imperial will. The coins of London hardly make the same affirmation of Christianity by the Emperor as that of Siscia, but they testify to the intentions of certain officers of the Mint” (Maurice, Numis. Constant.). On the coin of Crispus mentioned above, the Classical Year Book, 1911, remarked: “This is a novelty, as hitherto it has been supposed that Christian symbols did not occur on London coins of the Constantinian epoch.” “It is curious that the London Mint put Christian emblems on its coins before those of Trier, Lyons or Arles” (Oman).

Fig. 159.

With the coins may be associated a small silver disc mounted as the head of a pin, now in the Roach Smith collection at the British Museum. My figure is from a drawing by Fairholt, according to whom it was found in Lothbury with several other small Roman objects. It seems quite certainly to represent, as Roach Smith supposed, Constantine’s vision of the Cross in the heavens (Fig. [159]).

A small equal-armed cross forms the clasp of a Roman bronze chain-bracelet found in London, now in the British Museum, which can hardly be other than Christian (Fig. [160]). There has been some reluctance in accepting crosses of Roman date as Christian, but the evidence of the coins should modify this.

Fig. 160.

Fig. 161.

Fig. 162.

In 1862 several ingots of pewter were dredged up from the Thames near Battersea Bridge, and in 1890 more were discovered. Two are in the York Museum and the rest are in the British Museum (Archæol. Journal, 48). They are stamped with the monogram of Christ in two forms, with one of which is associated the words, “Spes in Deo” (Fig. 161), and the name “Syagrius” also appears. Silver and copper ingots discovered in this country have official stamps (non-Christian), and it may not be doubted that the pewter marks were also official. A lead seal in the Reading Museum, found in the Civil Basilica at Silchester, has an XP monogram, which is very similar (Fig. 162), and this, too, was probably official. The most interesting parallel known to me of the stamps on the pewter ingots is a seal from a wine jar found at Naucratis, in Egypt (Nau. ii. pl. 22), where we find “Spes in Deo” in a circle around a cross (Fig. [163]). The circular form had long been used for official stamps (cf. a brick stamp with the name of Nero in Reading Museum). Pewter ware was popular at the end of the fourth century, and this is probably the date of our ingots. The name which appears on them was in use at a late time. One Syagrius, “last of the Romans,” was driven from his kingdom of Soissons by the Franks in A.D. 480.

Fig. 163.

Fig. 164.

At the Guildhall Museum are two small terra-cotta lamps (Nos. 17 and 18), each having the Christian monogram in the centre (Fig. [164]). These are not of British make, but they may have been imported in the Roman age. (A lamp which Sir L. Gomme made much of, with a little view of a city on it, was also of foreign origin, and there is no reason to think that the view had any connection with London.) Two other lamps in the Guildhall collection (Nos. 54 and 117) are described as having “limbs of cross on body, perhaps early Christian,” but I have not found these and some other objects which it is said may possibly be Christian.

In the description of Wren’s finds on the site of St. Paul’s, given in Parentalia, is mentioned “a sepulchral earthen lamp figured with two branches of palms, supposed Christian.” Comparing the description with Figs. 165 and 166 there cannot be any doubt that Wren’s lamp was Christian. In the British Museum is a little rough lamp found at Tidworth, Wilts, which has a pair of palm branches, and I think that there is another in Canterbury Museum; the former is so like others from Syria in the Early Christian Room at the British Museum that there cannot be a doubt that it is not a native work; possibly it was brought back by a pilgrim from the Holy Land. Fig. [a]165] illustrates the seal of a ring found at Fifehead Neville, Dorset, now in the British Museum; on it we find the sign of Christ in the later form (in which the X has become a cross) surmounted by a dove, and between two palms. It means something like “the Believer resting on the victorious Cross of Christ.” The earlier form of the monogram was made of the first two letters of the name Christ, XP; the later form was formed by a cross and XP or P, and this seems to have meant the Crucifixion.

Fig. 165.

These comparisons will help to interpret a fascinating fragment of a symbolical design engraved on a glass cup found at Silchester. Here, instead of the sign for Christ, we find the upper part of a letter, which can hardly have been anything else than T, for nothing else would be central in the design, and in place of the dove we have a fish. T was the early form of the sign of the cross, and is found several times in the Catacombs; the fish is a rebus for the words Jesus Christ, God’s Son Saviour (ΙΧΘΎΣ); the palms are again signs of victory. It seems to be an early symbolical representation of Christ on the cross, and one of the most interesting which exists (compare Figs. 46 and 47 in the British Museum Guide to Christian Antiquities). Another tiny fragment of the same glass has the letter O on it, and there must have been some short inscription as well as the fish symbol and palms (Fig. [166]).

Fig. 166.

Figs. 167, 168, 169.

In the London Museum is an enamelled brooch in the form of a fish (Fig. [167]). As the fish was a well-known Christian symbol, we may hardly doubt that this brooch must be counted among our Christian antiquities. It is exactly similar to a brooch illustrated by Mr. Ward (Roman Era, Fig. 75) as having been found in Rotherley. They are duplicates, and must have come from the same “shop.” In V.C.H. it is recorded that a fish-shaped enamelled fibula was found in excavations at London Wall in 1901-5 (compare Builder, December 13, 1902). This may be the same piece. At Silchester a plain bronze brooch in fish form was found (Fig. [168]). The fish symbol in an almost identical form is found engraved on a pewter dish, one of a set found at Appleshaw (Hants) and now in the British Museum (Fig. [169]); the dish itself on which it appears is sometimes described as fish-shaped, but it was rather a long oval with projections at the ends. Another of the same set of pewter pieces has the XP monogram engraved on it (Fig. 170). As a third of the pieces is of the form of a chalice, there seems to be every reason to regard the whole set as church plate, and I find this definitely asserted in an article in the Athenæum (August 11, 1906): “In 1890 a body was found at Reading lying east and west, together with Roman British relics, and a lead plate bearing three crosses; near by was another skeleton with a small pewter chalice. This may be accepted as the grave of a Christian priest. This chalice should be compared with that of a Roman altar set of pewter recently found at Appleshaw.”

Fig. 170.

As said before, when tombs and coffins were discussed, it is probable that some of these represent Christian burials. A coin of the Emperor Gratian bearing the monogram of Christ was found at Smithfield, together with some wooden coffins, and it was probably buried as a sign of faith (V.C.H.). Two or three rough stone coffins found in Kent seem to have been Christian. The first bishops of the Saxon church at Canterbury were interred in stone coffins of a Roman type.

St. Peters, Cornhill.—Ancient tradition, which may be traced back to the twelfth century, claimed that the Church of St. Peter on Cornhill was older than St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a church of Roman foundation. The site is important, being close to (as I suppose) or within the boundary of the Forum and Civil Basilica of Londinium. The main walls of the present church are neither parallel with Cornhill nor square with Gracechurch Street, and Roman foundations have recently been found in the neighbourhood of the church. Until all the lines of the walls which have been discovered have been carefully laid down on a large-scale plan, it would be rash to offer any opinion as to a possible Roman foundation of the church; but if the church should prove to have been near, but outside the Forum, the position of the church at Silchester would be significant evidence. If, on the other hand, the church site proves to have been within the boundary of the Forum, its Roman foundation would be improbable.

Recent records of finds near the church mention “an old piece of Roman wall passing through the present wall of the church at a slight angle under demolished buildings [along the north front].... This may possibly belong to the original church” (March 2, 1922). From an article in The Times of September 29, 1922, I condense the following account of discoveries made at the end of the year 1921 on the north side of St. Peter’s Church: “A magnificent wall went down about 20 ft., but at 15 ft. were the footings. The wall was here 5 ft. wide; above the footings were three courses of tiles four abreast, each 13 in. wide, making 52 in. wide. This wall had been plastered on the south side, and at some subsequent date [?] rooms had been made by other walls, on the plastering of which was still to be seen a pattern of imitation marble or alabaster. There were two layers of plaster and then a layer of white cement almost as thin as paper, on which designs had been painted by a skilful artist. This wall had been broken down, and at a level 5½ ft. higher, a tessellated pavement had been laid. Later, at 56 and 57 Cornhill, a similar wall was uncovered. The mortar joints between the tiles were wide. The wall was found on the south [afterwards corrected to north] side of the church wall, so that the ancient Church of St. Peter was probably built inside what was a Roman fortress.” For fortress I would read the Forum. The church can hardly have been founded in such a position until the Forum had gone out of use and the Roman age in Londinium had passed, but it might then very well have been constructed within old Roman walls or on their foundations. We saw before that wall tiles of exceptional size had been used in the Civil Basilica of the Forum, and the tiles, 13 in. wide, mentioned above would seem to be of the same size. Twenty-five years ago a Roman wall was found, described as “very close to St. Peter’s upon Cornhill, of immense thickness, proceeding in a westerly direction from Leadenhall Market, under the Woolpack Tavern in Gracechurch Street, along St. Peter’s Alley, a few feet on the south side of St. Peter’s, continuing under the banking-house of Messrs. Prescott, Dimsdale & Co. (50 Cornhill), supposed to continue under the roadway of Cornhill, and appearing again in the foundations of the new building now being erected on the north side of Cornhill (No. 70) for the Union Bank of Australia.” (Middlesex and Herts Notes and Queries, 1897.) This wall, if one may guess, appears to have been parallel to the 5 ft. wall on the north of the church, and between them seem to have been important chambers of the Forum buildings.

Dr. Bury has lately given reasons for thinking that the Romans did not finally evacuate Britain until 442 (J.R.S., vol. x.).

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CHAPTER XII
THE ORIGIN OF LONDON[^[3]]

“There Thames runs by beneath the wall,

Where pass the merchant vessels all,

From every land, both high and low,

Where Christian merchants come and go.”

Tristram, c. 1175.

[3]. The substance of this chapter was read at the Society of Antiquaries about 1917, but it has not been printed before.

FIRST BRITISH CITIES.—Ancient cities were not planted down by an act of will, they sprang up on lines of communication as centres of control and commerce. On a geological map it appears that a chalk belt passes from Kent to Hampshire towards the south bank of the Thames. From the north bank another wide belt diverges to the north-east. The backbones of these chalk regions are the North Downs of Kent and the Chiltern Hills; they contain between them a long triangle of gravel drift and marsh flats through which the Thames flows to the sea. These downs, as we know to-day, when we find ourselves on them, are pre-eminently walking grounds, and they must have been the prehistoric ways of communication. “Primitive man traversed the ranges lengthways: in the valleys were forests almost impenetrable, whereas the backbone of each ridge would stand bald above the ocean of trees.” The oldest roads were “Ridge-ways.” On the high Wiltshire downs at, or near, a point where the southern system of downs converge, stands Stonehenge, and I cannot doubt that it was in some way conceived as being a centre and “capital” of the country. The Gauls recognised such a centre, or “omphalos,” near Chartres. Since writing this, I find that Sir C. Oman has said, “Britain must have had some focus corresponding to that for Gaul; possibly among the prehistoric monuments of Salisbury Plain.” Stonehenge, I may say in passing, is a monument of wrought stone set out with precision, and I cannot see how it can be earlier than about 500-700 B.C.

The ancient trackway along the Chilterns, known as the Ickneld Way, reached the Thames near Wallingford. Travellers going south and east from this point struck across the narrow space of low broken ground between the two chalk ranges by a short linking road. Silchester, the capital of an important Brito-Belgic tribe, lies on or near the course of such a road in a corn-bearing region. Silchester was the key of the old road system over the Thames fords. It is known to have been one of three most important pre-Roman British centres, and we may, I think, look on it as the first British city.

The British city of Verulamium lay to the south of the Ickneld Way, in the same great triangle between the two chalk regions which is here much wider. The rise of this centre suggests that a road linking the two chalk ranges had been found across the river valley much lower than Silchester. The later Roman Watling Street, directed straight on Verulam, formed such a link, and there are many reasons which suggests that some underlying British trackway must have been the cause why Verulam became important. Later, again, Colchester came to be the chief city. Possibly it was favoured as being more remote when the Romans should make an attack. It seems to have been named after the Celtic war-god, and this may be significant. (In Roman days as in mediæval, there was probably a ferry from Gravesend to Tilbury for direct access to Colchester from Kent. This seems to be suggested by the Peutinger roadmap.)

Origin of London.—By origin I mean the beginning of a development which led to the establishment of a port and commercial town. Doubtless the site may have been occupied by some dwellers in the Stone Age. For many centuries before the Roman conquest Britain had been in commercial relations with the Continent. Just before the conquest Verulam was the capital of the leading Celtic kingdom. This Brito-Belgic kingdom had its southern boundary along the Thames and its eastern at the Lea, and these are still boundaries of Middlesex. If this kingdom, with its capital some twenty miles inland, had any sea-borne trade, its port must have been on or near the site of London. It is even probable that this port was the cause of the pre-eminence of the little kingdom to which it belonged. The port was to Verulam what the Piræus was to Athens, Ostia to Rome, Dover to Canterbury, and Southampton to Winchester. London was doubtless the source of the wealth of King Cymbeline, and we might very well look on him as the founder.

Dr. Guest argued that London was founded as a Roman camp at the time of the Claudian conquest; but it is now agreed that the name is Celtic; and it must not be forgotten that London is and always was a port. When we first hear of London only seventeen years after the Claudian conquest, it was already, as Tacitus says, famous for the number of its merchants, and this must imply that it was a principal port. Dr. Haverfield, while admitting that the name is Celtic, went on to say: “The name Londinium, the place of Londinos, witnesses at most to nothing more than one wigwam or one barn.” This “at most” can only mean that every town presumably begins with one building; in London, however, the building is not likely to have been a barn amid the bare gravels, but rather a boatman’s house. Further evidence for the existence of a pre-Roman town is brought out by the large number of Celtic objects found on the site and in the neighbourhood, but they have never been properly catalogued as a group. Dr. Haverfield allowed that three pieces of imported Samian ware in the British Museum might belong to the period A.D. 10-40. “We might then conclude that through the influx of Roman traders London had been noted as a suitable trading centre a few years previous to the Roman conquest; but the minute dating of these potsherds is not easy, and we must leave the question of pre-Roman London unsettled. Either there was no pre-Roman London, or it was an undeveloped settlement, which may have been on the south bank of the Thames” (Journ. Rom. Studies, vol. i. p. 146). The evidence of such early imports is greatly strengthened by other discoveries at Silchester. Mr. May, speaking of the early “Samian” ware, says: “The Silchester examples are of much significance. Together with the contemporary Belgic imitations they prove that the inhabitants of the capital of the Atrebati were importing costly luxuries in considerable quantities from Italy and Northern Gaul at the beginning of the Christian era.” Early Belgic pottery has been found in London as well as “Samian,” and there is in the British Museum a wine jar of an early type found in Southwark. Some British pottery was doubtless made in Londinium itself before the Roman conquest. Mr. Lambert has described specimens of coarse wares in Archæologia. Of one of these he writes: “Bead-rimmed pot, coarse grey ware, irregularly burnt. A pre-Roman type, surviving into the Roman period.” He dates it A.D. 50-80, I suppose thinking that it cannot have really been pre-Roman.

London above bridge is an inland city, the English capital; below bridge it is a great seaport. In a description of England, published in 1753, I find this: “That part of the Thames, which is properly the harbour, is called the Pool, and begins at the turning out of Limehouse Reach and extends to the Custom House quays. In this compass I had the curiosity to count the ships, and I have found about 2000 sail of all sorts of vessels that really go to sea.” In a twelfth-century rhyme on English towns are the words, “London for ships most.” Bede describes London as a great ship port. The city is placed just where the Thames widened into an estuary. At Battersea the river was little wider two thousand years ago than at present; it overflowed wide spaces of marsh about Westminster and again contracted by London. Her high ground came close to the water on the north, and on the Southwark side there was only a narrow margin of low ground. Directly to the east of London was the low land called in the Middle Ages “Wapping Marsh” (Middlesex Feet of Fines). In the Pepys collection at Cambridge I have seen an engraved plan of “Lands by Wall or Wapping Marsh, 1683: seven acres of land in which the millponds and ditches did all over dispersedly lie.” Stow tells of Limehouse marshes being “drowned.” Before the lower Thames was embanked the river must have been two or three miles wide, at every tide, a little below London, where the considerable little river, the Lea, runs into it. The higher ground of the site of London is in the angle formed by the Thames and Lea, and is the extremity of the northern hills, Highgate and Islington. From the hills several streams flowed through deeply excavated beds into the Thames. The most considerable of these was the Fleet; the smaller Walbrook intersected the site of the city. Conyers in his MS. at the British Museum noted how the Fleet was embanked in 1675 with material taken from old St. Paul’s, “to narrow-in the spreading breadth of Fleet River.... The waters overflowed these parts in the old times.” The general topographical conditions were well observed by Drayton in Polyolbion—The city was built on a rising bank of gravel and sand, surrounded by lower ground: the tide flowing up the Lea and Fleet prevented the town from growing too long: to the north and south of the Thames were ranges of hills: “And such a road for ships scarce all the world commands.”

Way to the Port.—The men who first came to the site of London must have come from the higher ground of Islington and Highgate; they did not cross the Lea or the Fleet. Before some engineering was done the natural way was from the direction of Verulam. Now, an ancient road lies along this course from St. Albans to Aldersgate. As it approaches London it passes between the Walbrook and the Fleet, pointing towards what the old tablet near St. Paul’s says is the highest land in the city. The Walbrook where it fell into the Thames must have had steep clean gravel banks containing a tidal inlet—a perfect landing-place where small ancient ships could be brought alongside. This creek, afterwards known as Dowgate, must have been the original port of London. Along the old road wine, pottery and bronzes were carried into the interior, and corn was brought for export. Dowgate is known as a port for foreign ships from Saxon days (Round’s Commune of London). It is especially interesting to find from Stow that in the fifteenth century the Abbot of St. Albans had a quay by Dowgate. (Old writers supposed that “Dow” represented the British word for water; recent scholars equate it with Dove; but even so there is the curious analogy with Dover and such like place-names.) The Roman gates of London, of course, opened on important routes, and “the street from Aldersgate to Islington” is mentioned in the twelfth century (Middlesex Feet of Fines). Stow says: “From the further end of Aldersgate Street straight north to the Bar is called Goswell Street. Beyond leaving the Charterhouse on the left hand the way stretcheth up towards Iseldon.” Again on the old woodcut, usually called Aggas’s map, the street out of Aldersgate is inscribed “the way to St. Albans.” That excellent old book, John Nelson’s History of Islington, carries the account of this road forward, and he thought that it was Roman. He quotes a passage from Norden, to the effect that it passed east of Highgate through Tollington Lane to Crouch End, Hornsey Park, Muswell Hill, etc. “Tolentone,” he points out, is mentioned in Domesday. This road is laid down on old maps. Recent modifications at Islington may be made out by comparing maps given by Nelson and by Lewis in 1842.

I now quote the passage relating to this old ridgeway road to Verulam from Norden’s MS. (British Museum, 570). He begins at Clerkenwell instead of from the City: “It is not to be omitted to declare the old and ancient highways heretofore used by our fathers though the new be of greater regard and account for that they yield more ease unto the travellers. There was an old way that passed from Clerkenwell as also from Portpoole [Gray’s Inn] towards Barnet and so to St. Albans. From Clerkenwell it extended as the way now is unto a bridge or brooke between Gray’s Inn Lane and Pancras Church, near which brooke it entered into an old lane leaving Pancras Church on the west. It is called Longwich Lane, through which lane it passed along leaving also Highgate on the west and passed through Tollington Lane, whence it extended to Crouch End and thence through the Park to Muswell Hill near by Colney Hatch and so to Friern Barnet, from thence to Whetstone and there meeteth the new way. The cause why travellers left this old and ancient way was the deep and dirty passage in the winter.”

The road is well described in Pennant’s Tour (1782): “On quitting St. Albans I passed the wall of Sopwell Nunnery mixed with quantities of Roman tiles. After London Colney on the Colne I reached Ridgehill (!), a most extensive view. At South Mimms enter Middlesex and about a mile farther made Barnet; in Saxon times a vast wood filled this tract. From this town is a quick descent. Just beyond Whetstone the road passes over Finchley Common, infamous for robberies, and often planted with gibbets. About a mile beyond stands Highgate, a large village seated on a lofty eminence overlooking the smoky extent beneath. Here, in my memory, stood a gateway at which in old time a toll was paid to the Bishop of London for liberty, granted between four and five hundred years ago, for passing from Whetstone along the present road instead of the old miry way by Friern Barnet, Colnie Hatch, Muswell Hill, Crouch End, and leaving Highgate to the west by the Church of St. Pancras. After resting for a small space over the busy prospect, I descended into the plain, reached the metropolis, and disappeared in the crowd.”

The old miry way by Crouch End is, I cannot doubt, the original British road from Verulam to Londinium. (St. Pancras, it may be mentioned here, must be a very old settlement; near by was a bridge over the Fleet River, at a later time called “Battle Bridge,” on which name theories have been founded, but I think the bridge may have taken the place of “Bradford in the Parish of St. Pancras,” mentioned in the Feet of Fines, 23 H. viii.)

A summer’s day journey to London, such as Matthew Paris would have known it, must have been of beauty unimaginable when the miry lane was not too wet. Mention is made in the time of Henry VIII. of “a capital messuage called Muswell Farm in the parish of Clerkenwell and Hornsey, and the site of a certain chapel in the said parish, now dissolved, lately called Muswell Chapel” (Middlesex Feet of Fines, 35 H. viii.). A memory of the view of St. Paul’s rising from the midst of the walled city is given in a little sketch by Matthew Paris himself. I find this of Highgate in 1753: “On the summit of the hill a view over the whole vale to the city, and that so eminently that they see the ships passing up and down the river for twelve or fifteen miles below London.” Of Hampstead: “The Heath affords a most beautiful prospect, for we see within eight miles of Northampton, and the prospect to London and beyond it to Banstead Downs, Shooter’s Hill, Red Hill, and Windsor Castle is uninterrupted.”

A note of Camden speaks of another old road striking across to Edgware. “Hampstead Heath, from which you have a most pleasant prospect of the most beautiful city of London and the lovely country about it, over which the ancient Roman military way led to Verulam by Edgworth and not by Highgate as now, which new way was opened by the Bishop of London about 300 years since.”

Drayton showed remarkable perception when, describing the hills about London, he wrote of Highgate:

“Appointed for a gate of London to have been

When first the mighty Brute that city did begin;

Its holts to the east stand to look

Upon the winding course of Lea’s delightful Brook.”

When Walbrook Creek was a landing-place having a road connecting it with the interior, we may be sure that boating passages across the Thames would be common, and very soon a link with the road to Dover would be formed on this line. Thus, the road through Southwark must have followed the foundation of London immediately. As is well known, Ptolemy put Londinium in Kent, but he—as Dr. Bradley pointed out—was frequently very wrong in regard to inland places.

Fig. 171.

Fig. 172.

An ancient bronze mace-head was discovered in the gravel taken from under old London Bridge, which, I believe, has never been illustrated (Fig. [171]). It was one of the mace-heads which are classed in the British Museum as of the Bronze Age, but they are, I think, early British. I have found a drawing of the mace-head in question in some interesting volumes of sketches by Fairholt at the South Kensington Museum. Fairholt’s note reads: “Bronze mace found at Barnes, November 10, 1841, amongst the gravel taken from old London Bridge.” Fig. [a]172] is an early bronze mace-head from Italy, in the British Museum, given for comparison.

The conditions were favourable for establishing a way in the line of London Bridge, for hard ground here approaches near to the south bank of the river. That the Roman city spread from Walbrook Creek as a centre is now generally agreed. Mr. Lambert’s plan of the finding-places of Claudian and pre-Claudian coins shows them distributed near the primitive port. Again, the city Watling Street is probably the beginning of the old road from the port. Wren found traces of an old street running aslant under the end of old St. Paul’s, and this probably formed part of the way towards Aldersgate. The acceptance of such a route as the main street of the oldest London would solve the difficulty of the “fault” in the lines of Newgate Street and Cheapside. I suppose that the Roman street through Newgate (which all would agree was formed at a late time when the walls and gates were built) branched westward from the old Verulam road I have been describing. In a similar way, the Roman road on the course of Old Street probably branched to the east out of the same ancient Verulam road. Mr. Codrington and others have supposed that the road to the east was continued also westward, but no evidence of this has been found. Stow, in his account of Aldersgate Street, says: “On the east side at a Red Cross turneth the Ealde Street, so called for that it was the old highway from Aldersgate Street for the north-east parts of England before Bishopsgate was builded.”

Fig. 173.

The Westminster Crossing.—It was remarked above that the emergence of Verulam into importance probably followed on the use of a river crossing at Westminster and a trackway in the course of Edgware Road, which is known to have been part of a later Roman highway—the Great Watling Street. It is generally allowed, as by Dr. Rice Holmes, that a British trackway underlies the general course of this great Roman highway from Dover to St. Albans and beyond. The monk Higden, writing about 1360, said that Watling Street passed to the west of Westminster, but it has been objected that what the monk thought was not evidence. However, in his time and until about two centuries ago, an important river crossing was maintained at the Horse-Ferry. The Horse-Ferry Road appears to have been made to divert a direct passage at Westminster when the great hall of the new Palace was built, about 1100. Sighting the line of Tothill Street, we see that it would have passed by the old Palace, but that the Hall blocks the way. The Abbey lies at the side of this line, which seems to mark the boundary of St. Margaret’s churchyard. Here, too, were found the Roman tomb and what appears to be a terminus mark (T II). The Horse-ferry is mentioned in an order of 1246: “The Bailiff of Kennington is to cause a barge to be made to carry people and horses over the Thames” (Hudson Turner’s Domestic Architecture, vol. i.). Canterbury documents show that the ferry was later in the charge of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and doubtless Lambeth Palace exists here as being on the great road. In the more direct line there still exists a short street called Stangate, which is an old name for a paved way. When Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VII., died at Eltham, “her body was conveyed to Stangate over against Westminster” (Sandford). A way to the river also was long maintained through New Palace Yard to a landing-place (see Fig. [173]), from Norden’s map, c. 1600). Matthew Paris, in his route map of the way to Jerusalem, shows London Bridge and also the Westminster and Lambeth route, because these were alternative crossings. Tothill Street is mentioned in mediæval documents. It is possible that in early days there was a ford at Westminster, for Mr. Lambert has given reasons for thinking that formerly the tide did not rise so high as at present by 6 ft. Testimony on the course of the way from Westminster to Edgware Road is given in Ogilvie’s Road Book, 1675: “Piccadilly ... on the left falls in the way from Westminster by Tuttle Street; four poles from this corner, you have a way on the right by the side of Hyde Park into the other road at Tyburn.” The ancient road from Westminster would have crossed what is now Green Park in the direction of Tyburn Lane, now Park Lane. Here, in Tyburn Lane, was “Osulstone,” which gave its name to the Hundred in which London city is situated (see map recently reproduced by London Topographical Society). Tyburn, close by, was the place of execution, and doubtless the place of meeting of the old folk-mote of the Hundred, because it was at the cross roads. I have more detail establishing the continuity of this route (on which Dr. Haverfield expressed doubt), but I will pass to a few general final considerations.

The primitive road in Kent as far as Greenwich was on high ground, but beyond was the wide river valley. By bending to the left on the edge of higher ground, through Camberwell where Roman objects have been found, the river might be more nearly approached opposite Westminster, and there was solid land on the opposite bank also. Beyond, at Park Lane, the higher firm ground pushed down towards Westminster, between two little streams—the road here, indeed, was a low ridgeway. All evidence suggests that a British road to Verulam passed the Thames at Westminster. In Allen’s Lambeth, it is said that three “Celts” were found in digging the foundations of Westminster Bridge. Now, in Fairholt’s Albums of Sketches, at South Kensington, are drawings of three bronze weapons thus described: “Swords and spear found August 1847, under Westminster Bridge by a ballast heaver.” The swords (Fig. [174]) were 28½ in. and 23½ in. long, the spear-head or dagger was 16½ in. long. Other pieces of British bronze work have been found in the river in the neighbourhood of the Westminster crossing. Westminster Bridge itself still carries on the tradition by crossing the river at this point, and it is interesting to find recorded that the building of the bridge in the line of the Horse-ferry was the first intention. The importance of the Horse-ferry about 1700 is shown by the list of charges given in Hatton’s New View (1708).

Fig. 174.

My general results in regard to the British and Roman road systems may be summarised thus:

1. A primitive trackway along the North Downs near the south bank of the river.

2. An ancient river-crossing by a ford at Westminster and thence north-west through Britain.

3. The growth of Verulam on this road, and the rise of London as a port in connection with it.

4. A direct London-Verulam road made over Islington—a ridgeway.

5. Hardly two or three persons possessing a boat could have been settled on the site of London before a direct path across Southwark would be taken to reach the Kentish road; thus the route marked by London Bridge must be of pre-Roman origin.

6. Other ways were thrown out; along the Strand to the Westminster crossing; along the comparatively high ground of Piccadilly to the west, and by Old Street and Old Ford to the east.

7. The British road system was rectified by Roman engineers. The chief route was now over London Bridge; the Roman road along Oxford Street was made in connection with the enlarged Londinium issuing from it at Newgate; it was continued to Brentford, where it met the older road by Piccadilly; the old track from Westminster to Verulam was improved only from this new road, and the link across the river became of secondary importance; Mile End Road superseded the route by Old Ford. There were thus older and newer roads—British ways following the higher and harder ground; and Roman roads laid down in straight lines.

In saying that London had its origin as the port of Verulam, I would not necessarily imply more than this: each may so have reacted on the other that it would be impossible to say which was the first cause. It is possible, indeed, that the Belgic kingdoms of south-east England were founded by invasions striking up the river, and that a landing at the site of London was earlier than settling down about St. Albans. It is remarkable that the Cattivellauni and Atrabates occupied much the same relative places in Britain as they did in their continental homes about Chalons and Arras. In this case, however, London would be none the less the port of Verulam.

Camden clearly saw that London began as a port. Discussing its name, he suggested as one possibility that “It might have had its name from the same original that it had its growth and glory; I mean ships, called by the British Lhong; so that London is a Harbour or City of Ships. For several cities have had their name from shipping, none of which can lay better claim to the name of harbour than our London. For ’tis admirably accommodated with both elements, and the river Thames brings it in the riches of the world. Moreover, it is such a sure and complete station for ships that one may liken it to a groved wood, so shaded it is with masts and sails.”

Conyers, the old antiquary apothecary, two centuries and a half ago, said: “Verulam was a kingly seat of the Britons, and the principal trade they had was between Verulam and London. So that on Watling or Verulam road there was a communication backward and forward.”

THE END

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INDEX

• Alexandria, [8].
• Alignment, [46], [53], [145], [152].
• Altar, [128].
• Ante-fix, [29].
• Apotropaic sculpture, [140].
• Apse, [33], [35], [42], [44], [47].
• Arches, [12], [17], [18].
• Atys, [139].
• Augusta (Londinium), [219].
• Bacchus, [144].
• Barbican, [80].
• Basilica, [16], [33].
• Bastions, [62].
• Baths, [49].
• Bone objects, [203], [212].
• Bricks, [10], [15], [37].
• Bridge, [41], [44], [54], [80].
• Britannia, [129].
• Bronzes, [121], [139].
• Buildings, [32], [33].
• Capitals, [11].
• Carpentry, [21], [30], [43].
• Cemeteries, [84].
• Chariot races, [51], [199], [204], [210].
• Chimney, [24].
• Christianity, [94], [96], [158], [160], [208], [212], [214], [217], [225].
• City (the), [55], [83], [119], [129], [184].
• Coffins, [92], [208].
• Coins, [220].
• Colour, [85], [112].
• Columns, [11], [16], [28], [34], [35], [39], [135].
• Commerce, [193], [202], [215], [230], [234].
• Concrete, [10], [12], [27], [37].
• Constantine, [220].
• Copings, [11], [116].
• Crosses, [156], [219].
• Cymbeline, [230].
• Dadoes, [167].
• Decoration, [161].
• Diana, [128].
• Ditches, [79].
• Education, [191].
• Enamels, [206], [224].
• Figure painting, [171].
• Floors, [27], [158].
• Flues, [15], [23], [43].
• Foot-rule, [8].
• Ford, [241].
• Forum, [33].
• Friezes, [136].
• Gates, [76].
• Gladiators, [199], [204].
• Glass, [31], [148], [159], [194], [202].
• Gods, [103], [127], [132].
• Greek workmen, [160].
• Hadrian, [121].
• Hercules, [127].
• Hinges, locks, etc., [30].
• Houses, [23], [42], [44].
• Hunting, [198].
• Hypocausts, [23].
• Imperial statues, [121].
• Impersonations, [126].
• Inscriptions, [42], [110], [115], [149], [161], [176].
• Jove and giant columns, [101], [139].
• Lamps, [222].
• Latin, [20], [184], [193].
• Leadwork, [32], [140], [208].
• Leather work, [212].
• Lettering, [176].
• Lions, [140].
• Londinium (origin of), [228].
• Mace (bronze), [238].
• Marbles, [42], [99], [174], [194].
• Masonry, [9].
• Mausolea, [109].
• Mirror, [203].
• Mithras, [133].
• Monograms, [221], [225].
• Mortar, [12].
• Mosaics, [42], [142], [175].
• Mouldings, [11].
• Opus signinum, [17], [27].
• Ornament, [135].
• Orpheus, [149], [160].
• Osulstone, [242].
• Painting, [29], [33], [35], [42], [162].
• Peacocks, [139], [151].
• Pewter, [211], [225].
• Piling, [14], [21], [43].
• Pine-cones, [139].
• Plastering, [23], [28], [35], [226].
• Porphyry, [174].
• Port, [28], [80], [193], [230].
• Portraits, [124].
• Pottery, [194], [200], [232].
• Roads, [243].
• Romanesque art, [30], [137], [143], [159].
• Roofs, [10], [16], [25], [29], [39].
• Saints of London, [218].
• Sarcophagi, [94].
• Sculpture, [85], [100], [114], [119].
• Sewers and drains, [21], [37].
• Site and soil, [84].
• Skirtings, [29].
• Statues, [42].
• Streets, [33], [40], [43], [52].
• Style, [7], [11].
• Sun-dial, [161].
• Symbolism, [138].
• Tablets, [99].
• Temples, [49], [150], [187], [191].
• Thames impersonation, [132].
• Thatch, [23].
• Theatre, [51].
• Tomb-houses, [116].
• Tombs, [84], [100], [112].
• Tools, [8], [30].
• Turning, [30].
• Vaults, [17], [35].
• Walbrook, [61].
• Wall (the City), [16], [57].
• Wall tiles, [25].
• Walling, [9], [13], [22], [33], [37].
• Water-pipes, [21], [32].
• Wattle and daub, [10], [22].
• Wells, [44].
• Westminster, [19], [240].
• Windows, [29], [31].
• Winds, [133].
• Zodiac, [133].

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• Transcriber’s Notes:
  • This book uses the mid dot “·” to separate the integer part of a number from the decimal fraction.
  • Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
  • Typographical errors were silently corrected.
  • Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.