Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts

by W. R. Lethaby

Jove and Giant Columns

A FEW of the more important sepulchral monuments have been reserved for special consideration. First among these I wish to discuss the fragments of what I suppose to have been examples of Jove and Giant columns, a class of monument frequently found on the Continent. These columns, it has been thought, were not naturalised in Britain. In Archæologia, lxix., Professor Haverfield, calling attention to an inscription at Cirencester, which seems to have formed part of a small column of the kind, said that except for this inscription no other evidence had been found in Britain for the existence of such columns. Again, in another place, after speaking of figures of the Mother Goddesses, he added, “We may ascribe to another immigrant the Colonne au géant found at Cirencester” (Romanization). A large number of these monuments has been found in north-east Gaul. The main element was a decorated column the capital of which supported a sculptured group of “Juppiter and a fallen barbarian giant.” Such a column usually stood on a pedestal having an inscription to the god; around the pedestal were relief sculptures of several figures, and there were four busts on the capital. Professor Haverfield, whose description I have been condensing, agreed with a suggestion made by Mrs. Strong that a fine Corinthian capital at Cirencester, which has four busts set among the acanthus leafage, may have belonged to the Jove and Giant pillar. This, however, is negatived by the scale of the capital as compared with the inscribed stone, which is only about 1½ ft. square. Further, as he himself allowed, a second capital similar to the other exists, except for its upper part. Both the complete capital and the fragment were found on the site of the Basilica, and we may hardly doubt that both belonged to that building.

Fig. 53.

Jove and Giant pillars, as I have called them, have been exhaustively treated in a German work (Hertlein, 1910). Espèrandieu, in his volumes on Roman sculptures in Gaul, very fully illustrates two of these monuments, one at Cussy-la-Colonne, near Autun (2032), and another at Merten (4425), also a large number of fragments. He describes the Cussy column as having been about 44 ft. high (including the sculptured group) and 2 ft. in diameter; the bottom of the pillar was carved in a trellis pattern (Fig. [53]). The column at Merten was about 48 ft. high with a diameter of 2¼ ft. Under the number 4130, Espèrandieu says of a square sculptured stone: “It is generally agreed that these ‘four-god stones’ are not altars but pedestals. They supported a second stone, usually of octagonal form, with representations of the Gods of the Week upon it. From this rose a column and capital, and, crowning all, a god riding and crushing under the hoofs of his steed a giant who terminates in two snakes.” Such columns had a religious significance, and “their frequency, above all on the banks of the Rhine, is surprising” (No. 4425). A good résumé of what had been said of these monuments was given by Mrs. Strong in 1911 (J.R.S.); the general conclusion was that the Jove of the pillar was a sun and thunder divinity, “A Romanised sun-god”; the columns embodied “a whole allegory of times and seasons.” “Hertlein interprets the columns as Irmin-säulen, symbols of the universe; columns such as, according to Teutonic mythology, supported the heavens, here typified by Juppiter as lord of the skies.” Some writers had preferred to see a Roman emperor riding over a barbarian.

In the British Museum there is a carved fragment of a highly decorated column which, I have little doubt, belonged to a Jove and Giant column. This stone was found built into the lower part of the City Wall along the river bank. Roach Smith, in whose collection it was, described it first in 1844 (Archæol. Jour., vol. i.) as: “A portion of a decorated stone which appears to have formed part of an altar.” Later he visited the Jove and Giant column near Autun, and in describing it in Collectanea Antiqua (vol. vi.) he refers to our stone. Subsequently in the Catalogue of his collection he spoke of the stone as: “Fragment in green sandstone, with a trellis pattern with leaves and fruit. It appears to have formed part of a sepulchral monument, and was taken from the foundations of a Roman wall in Thames Street.” In saying this he doubtless had the Cussy monument in his mind, for that was understood to be a sepulchral monument. Our fragment is from a circular shaft which must have been about 2½ ft. in diameter. The surface is carved over with a pattern like a trellis of laths, in the interspaces of which appear leaves and bunches of grapes Fig. [54] is restored from the fragment).

Fig. 54.

Fig. 55.

There is another stone in the British Museum which also probably formed part of a Jove and Giant column (Fig. [55]). This was found at Great Chesterford, an important Roman site in Essex. It is described as a “Basin with bas-reliefs of the Roman deities.” These figures have long ago been identified as four of the seven gods of the days of the week (Thos. Wright). The fragment was made into a basin in modern times; it is really half of an octagon, and on the top surface appear the sinkings for two big cramps which linked this to an adjoining similar stone (Fig. [56]). For what is known of it, see Roach Smith’s account in Collectanea Antiqua and the Journal of the Archæological Association, vol. iii. In the latter it is said that it is irregular and not semi-octagonal; but the breaking down of the upper part into the recesses which contain the reliefs gives the appearance of irregularity—that is all. The octagon was 3¾ ft. in diameter. One of the sides was blank. One-half of this blank side remains, and also half of the opposite side, which retains enough of the sculpture to show that the figure carried a spear over the right shoulder. The next figure, going clockwise, was Mercury; he had a mantle over his left shoulder and carried his wand; points remaining by his hair show that his cap was winged. The third figure was Jove, a mature figure with broad breast, bearded head, and long hair. The fourth figure, who carried a hand-mirror, was Venus. These figures agree very closely with a set of the planets arranged in similar order on a mosaic floor found at Bramdean, and by this comparison it is evident that the one with a spear was Mars. The eighth, or blank, side followed the figure of Venus, so that the series must have begun with Saturn, in the Roman way. We may now say that the eight sides contained figures of the Deities of the Days in proper order: Saturn, Sol, Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

Fig. 56.

Espèrandieu illustrates two stones from a very similar monument found in France at D’Yzeures (iv. p. 136). These are the halves of an octagon about 3 ft. 7 in. across which was built up in courses. One of the stones comes from a lower course, the other from an upper. The vertical joints ran from an angle to an angle so that they should not cut through the sculptures on the sides. These reliefs were “possibly the Divinities of the Days of the Week.” We have also in England remnants of a similar sculptured octagon which was built up in courses. These are in Northampton Museum, and are illustrated in V.C.H. One of two stones shows the tops of the heads of a series of figures, the other stone has their feet. They are described as “Two fragments of an octagonal monument having figures in shallow niches, possibly the Deities of the Days of the Week” (Haverfield, vol. i. p. 181). Both these stones were of little height, the upper one only contained the crowns of the heads of the figures and flat curves forming the tops of the niches (compare Fig. [56]).

We are now in a position to restore the Chesterford octagon (Fig. [56]). The heads of the figures on the stone in the British Museum are not complete, for a bed joint runs just over the eyes, and the crowns of the heads must have been on another stone, as at Northampton. Two other courses, at least, beneath what is represented by the existing fragment, would have been required to complete the figures, and indeed their feet were possibly on a narrow base-course, as at Northampton. The Chesterford stone and the fragments at Northampton must represent important Jove and Giant pillars. The size of the former, it should be observed, seems most suitable for a column shaft of about 2½ ft. in diameter, the size of the lattice column represented by the fragment in the British Museum (Fig. [54]), which probably, as said above, was itself part of a Jove and Giant column. There is thus high probability that there were important Jove and Giant columns, having pedestals sculptured with the Deities of the Days, at London, Chesterford and Northampton. If this is so, such columns must have been frequently erected in Britain, and we may look for evidences for the existence of others.

Fig. 57.

In vol. iii. of Collectanea Roach Smith illustrated a small highly decorated column found at Wroxeter, 13 in. in diameter. It was similar to the Cussy column in having a lattice pattern below and a scale pattern above. Here and there were little relief subjects—a Cupid and a youthful Bacchus with grapes. This was probably part of another Jove and Giant column, or at least of a single sepulchral column; there would hardly have been more than one so decorated.

Several pieces of small highly decorated columns have been found in London, which must, I think, have belonged to memorial pillars and not to edifices. One of these found in the Houndsditch bastion, only 9 in. in diameter, was decorated with a simple lattice pattern (Fig. [57]). Another is in the London Museum, which, in the part preserved, has a scale pattern (Fig. [58]). A third fragment, at the Guildhall, has again both lattice and scale patterns (Fig. [59]).

Fig. 58.

Fig. 59.

Jove and Giant columns were doubtless sepulchral, but they were also religiously significant. They were intended to suggest ideas of the conquest of evil powers and of renewal. Dr. Haverfield was, I think, mistaken in the passage quoted above in speaking of the giant as a barbarian; he was rather a power of darkness, and this is brought out by a piece of British evidence. Figures of four such creatures, each terminating in two serpents, fill the corners of a mosaic floor found at Horkstow; they support a large circle divided into two rings and a centre; in the outer ring are Nereids and swimming creatures, in the inner one little genii with baskets of flowers, etc. The rings are divided into four parts by radial bands, and the general suggestion must be of the seasons and the cosmic order. The snake-legged creatures in the corners are the Aloadæ, the giants who attempted to scale Olympus by putting Pelion on Ossa. They are here in their proper places in the chaos outside the circle of the ordered world, “the wheel of nature.” This pavement helps to explain the general idea which led to the erection of Jove and Giant pillars, and shows that these ideas were current in Britain. The column is the world-axis set round by planets and seasons; above, the power of light and order hurls back the giant of gloom and strife (see Daremberg and Saglio, Aloadæ). In the foreign examples of the sculptured groups which rested on the capitals of the columns Jove sometimes had a wheel as his weapon, and wheels have been found carved in Roman altars in Britain. “The sides of two large altars to Jupiter at Walton House bear the thunderbolt for Jupiter and a wheel, which possibly equates the Jupiter of these altars with the Gaulish ‘wheel-god’” (Ward). An altar at Housesteads invokes the sun-god. The Jove and Giant pillars are evidence of a time when the old mythological names had been refitted to express ideas of good and evil, cosmic forces, and supposed planetary influences. The mosaic floors, as we shall see, provide further evidence of what was “higher thought” in third-century Roman Britain.

Fig. 60.

Mausolea.—When the bastion of the City Wall in Camomile Street was destroyed, many sculptured stones from small but very richly decorated edifices were found. Price recognised that some of them must have belonged to an important sepulchral monument comparable with the Igel monument near Trèves. I saw, in 1912, some stones at Trèves which had a scale pattern cut on a roof-like slope, and soon after my return I noticed a stone of the same sort in the Guildhall Museum. Without having Price’s words in my mind I came to the conclusion that in the cemeteries of Londinium there must have been mausoleum-like monuments of the kind which the Museum at Trèves had shown me were common in the neighbourhood of that city. Several of these mausolea are now illustrated in Espèrandieu’s great work on the Roman sculptures of Gaul. In 1913 I offered a tentative restoration of a London monument of this type in the Architectural Review.

Fig. 61.

Fig. 62.

In Fig. [a]60] I have roughly sketched two stones at the Guildhall which evidently came from a mausoleum of the Trèves type, also a course from a fluted angle pilaster, showing part of an inscription. Compare No. 5153 in Espèrandieu’s work, where we find a similar scale pattern, angle pilasters bonded in courses with masonry, and the lettering of an inscription coming close up to the pilaster. Another stone at the Guildhall has a capital of a small angle pilaster on a similar course. This capital has heads set amongst the leaves almost exactly like the capitals of the Igel mausoleum at Trèves (see Fig. [61]). Another stone at the Guildhall is part of a frieze in two bands, the upper one of festoons and the lower one of trees, and dogs coursing hares (Fig. [62]). Similar hunting subjects are found on foreign monuments; the festoons and the scale of the work are also appropriate for a structure of the mausoleum kind, and these five stones may very well have belonged to the same monument (Fig. [63]). On another stone at the Guildhall is part of an inscription in widely-spaced lines containing the letters ... R LXX, doubtless part of ANNOR LXX, which actually occurs on the tall headstone in the British Museum. At least two mausolea are probably represented by the stones at the Guildhall. Like the Igel monument, they were probably the tombs of rich merchants. There must have been a large number of tombs of this type in Britain. Bruce and Roach Smith illustrated and described foundations of three tombs by the Roman road near High Rochester, one circular and two square; the first was possibly big enough to have been a tomb-house. At Bath, some years ago, I noticed a stone which could only have been part of a square monument (Fig. [64]). This had the tops of the niches cut like shells.

Fig. 63.

Another stone at the Guildhall, found like the others in the Camomile Street bastion, has a short length of a decorated angle column recessed as a “nook-shaft” and about a foot in diameter (Fig. [65]). This, I think, must have formed part of a similar monument. (This stone is not, I think, given by Price, but it appears in an illustration in J.B.A.A.)

The mausolea of Londinium must have been very similar to the monuments at Trèves, and it may not be doubted that they would have been coloured as some of those were coloured. (I have a note that sculpture, as well as the decorative carving, was coloured.) The braided work of Early Saxon monuments would have been “picked out” in colour in a similar way, and I believe that fragments which have been found prove this.

Fig. 64.

Fig. 65.

Fig. 66.