RATÆ
The antiquity of Leicester is indeed undoubted. Not only are the remains of the Romans numerous, and continually discovered in the course of building operations, but it is well known to have been the station of Ratæ Coritanorum, and here the Fosse Way and the so-called “Via Devana” meet. The Jewry Wall, so named from this quarter having been that part of the mediæval town where the Jewish community lived, marks the western limit of Ratæ. It is a mass of brickwork, with a number of arched recesses, and remains to-day the chief visible relic of old Rome. The best-received opinions hold that this is a portion of the Roman West Gate, with fragments of a temple to Janus.
ST. NICHOLAS AND THE ROMAN WALL.
Ratæ, to have been so carefully and massively walled, must have been a populous and a wealthy place, facts that seem additionally evident in the many fine tesselated pavements discovered at various times. There is an example on its original site here. They call it, on a notice-board, “the most beautiful tesselated pavement in the world,” and charge you 2d. to see it, but that is an ex parte statement, and there is a better than the best a little way off, for which the appropriately higher charge of 3d. is made. Where the supremely bestest is to be seen, and at what cost, this chronicler dares not presume to say. The twopenny pavement is a private show, and the superlative example belongs, or did belong, to the Corporation. A curious modern history belongs to it. Discovered in 1832, in digging foundations for a house, it formed for many years the floor of a cellar. In 1890, the house was purchased by the Corporation, and then in 1896 came the Great Central Railway to Leicester, on its extension to London, with its embankment and arches, and abolished many things, among others a Quaker burial ground. The Quakers, therefore, lie nowadays very much deeper than those who laid them there ever contemplated; and at the same time the house with the Roman pavement was levelled. To move the pavement would have been to injure it, and in the end arrangements were made by which the railway company constructed a special room, lined with glazed white bricks; and there in this species of shrine it rests, while the trains roll overhead.
But to return to the Jewry Wall, hard by the Norman church of St. Nicholas. It is grimy with modern filth, but reverend in its age of some 2,000 years, and of giant strength, so that you cannot but smile at sight of the recent flimsy pillars of brick that “support” it, and are already themselves decrepit.
THE ROMAN MILESTONE
But the most interesting of all Leicester’s relics of Roman Britain is stored in the Museum. This is the milestone discovered so long ago as 1771, on the Fosse Way, near Thurmastone, two miles from the town; on its original site, as the inscription on it proves. It is a cylindrical block of sandstone, rudely incised with a long, highly characteristic statement in a shockingly abbreviated and ill-spaced form, which, translated, runs, “During the Emperorship of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Cæsar, Hadrian, son of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Trajan, Conqueror of Parthia, in the Fourth Year of his Tribunal Power: thrice Consul. To Ratæ, Two Miles.”
