This is, I believe, the first instance which has occurred in this country, in which we have had the opportunity of ascertaining what particular coins, as being then in daily circulation, an inhabitant of a Roman town in Britain, at the moment when the Roman domination in this country was expiring, carried about with him. Mr. Roach Smith, speaking of the great majority of these coins, these of the Constantine family, remarks to me—“I suspect these coins were sent into Britain even after the time of Valens, because they are all comparatively sharp and fresh. It is not improbable that the procurators at Treves and at Lugdunum may have had large stores of these coins by them, which they sent out at intervals.” A consideration of these coins gives us an approximation, at least, towards the date at which Uriconium must have been destroyed; Mr. Roach Smith agrees in the opinion that a comparison of them points to the very latest period previous to the establishment of the Anglo-Saxons. At a later period the freshly struck coins of the Constantine family could not have been brought over. They shew us that at that time the great mass of the circulating medium consisted of coins of the Constantine family, which again explains to us why the first coinage of the Anglo-Saxons was nearly all copied from the coins of the emperors of that family. Again, the care with which these small copper coins (for only one is of plated silver) seem to have been hoarded up, and the anxiety of their possessors to preserve them in the midst of a frightful calamity, may perhaps assist us in forming an estimate of the relative value of money at this period.
The rooms which joined up to the south side of the Old Wall, and which have been more recently uncovered, were five in number, and it appears from the remains, which are distinctly visible on the face of the Old Wall, that they had vaulted roofs of the kind technically called barrel roofs. In one of these rooms was found a quantity of burnt wheat, which would lead us to suppose that this might have been a store room. The most easterly of these rooms has had the interior surface of its walls ornamented with tessellated work instead of fresco-painting; the lower edge of which, consisting of a guilloche border, still remains. The floor below has a plain pavement of small white tessellæ, and is apparently that of a bath. To the south of these rooms a long passage was discovered, which appears to have communicated at one end with the floor of the room in the hypocaust of which the skeletons were found. In this passage was a square pit of very good masonry, through which a drain runs, nearly north and south. The stucco of the southern face of the wall, forming the southern side of the passage just alluded to, presented an inscription scrawled in large straggling characters incised with some sharp pointed instrument, and closely resembling in character similar inscriptions which have been found on walls in Pompeii. When first uncovered, two lines of this inscription, perhaps the whole of it, seemed to have been perfectly well preserved, but before anybody had had the opportunity of examining it, two casual visitors, with walking sticks, amused themselves with breaking off the plaster, in order apparently to try its strength, and were not observed by the workmen until the first line had been completely destroyed, and the second, which had been a shorter one, was very much broken into, though just enough remained to show that it must have been written in Latin. Even this small remnant was nearly destroyed during the interruption of the excavations, and not a trace of it can now be seen. Thus all the advantages of a discovery which might have been singularly important for our knowledge of the state of Britain at this period, have been lost through mischievous wantonness.
During the month of May, 1859, the work of the excavators was interrupted; when it was resumed, they proceeded to explore the building to which these hypocausts belonged, beginning from the side of the field adjoining to the Watling Street Road,—that is, from the side of one of the main streets of the old Roman town,—and they found walls in the line, or nearly in the line, of the western wall of the great public building just described. Another street has since been discovered to the south, running east and west, parallel to that met with to the north of the buildings first excavated. The excavations have since that time been followed in various parts of the two acres first inclosed by the Excavation Committee, and a large extent of ruins is now laid open. But I will here interrupt my narrative, while I give an account of the general character of the buildings, the ruins of which have already been brought to light.
As yet, the excavations on the site of Uriconium have not been carried far enough to enable us to form any idea of the general distribution of the Roman town, but it is evident that the buildings on which the excavators are employed were inclosed by three main streets, crossing at right angles, forming a square mass. It has been stated that the few discoveries hitherto made as to the character of the streets in the Roman towns in Britain would lead us to think that they were little more than narrow alleys, but this was certainly not the case with these three streets of Roman Uriconium, which seem to have been fine wide streets, and in the one to the north, the pavement of small round stones appears to have occupied only the middle part of the street, designed probably for carriages and horses. A tolerably wide space on each side seems, as far as can be traced, to have been unpaved. But, although we have as yet made little advance towards discovering the general character of Uriconium as a city, and the manner in which the houses were distributed over the Roman town, we had found sufficient fragments of different kinds to give us a tolerable notion of the houses themselves.
The average thickness of the walls of a house, even where they only separated one small room from another, was three feet. They are rarely less than this, and it is only in one or two cases of what appeared to be very important walls that they exceed it, when they reach the thickness of four feet. This measure of three feet was no doubt a well understood one for the wall of a house, and it was continued in the middle ages, when, in ordinary dwellings, only the division walls between house and house were of solid masonry. Municipal regulations then fixed these partition walls at a minimum of three feet in thickness, the cause of which limitation was probably the fear of fires; and in these mediæval municipal regulations, it was further ordered, that closets or cupboards in the wall should in no case be made more than one foot deep, so that if your own cupboard and your neighbour’s happened to back each other, there would still be a foot of solid masonry between the two houses. And the masonry of the Romans may well be called solid. Its character may be seen perhaps to most advantage in the Old Wall above ground. The process of building seems to have been to raise first, gradually, the facings of neatly-squared stones, supported no doubt between frames of woodwork, the supports of which left holes which are still seen in the face of the wall. The interior was then filled up with rubble mixed with liquid and apparently hot cement, which formed the mass of the wall, and in setting has become in course of time harder than the stones themselves. After a certain number of rows of facing-stones, the Roman builders almost invariably placed a string-course of broad thin bricks, the object of which is not at all evident, for they do not go through the wall so as to form real bonding-courses. The Old Wall still standing in probably nearly its original height, will also give us a notion of the elevation of the principal houses of the Roman towns.
In spite, however, of this rather considerable elevation, which, reckoning for dilapidation at the top and the portion buried under ground, cannot have been much less than thirty feet, it seems nearly certain that the Roman houses in Britain had no upper stories, and that all the rooms were on the ground floor. No traces of a staircase have ever been found, and all the fragments which are met with, indicate that the rooms were open to the roof. These roofs appear to have been of substantial construction, and were probably supported on a strong frame of woodwork. The common coverings of the Roman houses of this island consisted of large square tiles with strongly flanged edges, and these tiles being joined side to side, a curved tile forming the half of a cylinder was placed over the flanges of the two tiles which joined, thus holding them together, and at the same time protecting the juncture so that rain could not pass through it. These tiles, and the manner in which they were arranged, will be understood by our figures, (pl. IV., figs. 1, 2, 3). The Roman houses were also very commonly roofed with slates, or rather flags, and this appears to have been the more usual description of roofing in Uriconium. These roof-flags are found scattered about abundantly on the floors, sometimes unbroken. They are formed of a micaceous laminated sandstone, which is found on the edge of the north Staffordshire and Shropshire coalfield, at no great distance from Wroxeter, and must have produced a glittering appearance in the sunshine. Their form is represented in our cut, (pl. IV., fig. 5); it was that of an elongated hexagon, with a hole at one end, through which an iron nail was passed to fix it to the wooden frame-work. The nail is often found still remaining in the hole. These flags, which are very thick and heavy, were placed to lap over each other, and thus formed a roof in lozenges or diamonds, as represented in fig. 6. Slates forming one half of the hexagon (fig. 4), were placed at the top of the roof, so as to make a strictly horizontal line. It is a curious circumstance, that in the illuminations of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts we find roofs of houses which evidently represent both these methods, and which appear, therefore, to have been continued long after the Roman period. In fact they are still used in Yorkshire, and perhaps in other counties, and have been used very recently on the Welsh border. In the towns which were the head-quarters of a legion, as at Caerleon, Chester, and York, or which had been occupied for some length of time by legionary detachments, we often find the name and number of the legion stamped on the roof-tiles. These roof-tiles were frequently used for other purposes. They are sometimes employed in the string-courses in walls, when the builders appear to have run short of the ordinary square tiles or flat bricks; and they are still more frequently used to form the beds of drains and aqueducts, when the flanged edges were turned up and, set in the cement, formed the side of the water-course. A very good example of this use of the roof-tiles may be seen in the drain at Wroxeter mentioned above.
Internally, the walls of the Roman houses were covered with fine hard cement, which was painted in fresco, that is, the colours were laid on the cement while it was wet, and they thus set with it, and became almost imperishable. In some of the houses in Roman Britain, and especially in the large villas, the internal walls were covered with fine historical subjects as in the walls at Pompeii, and sufficient remains have been found in this island to show that they were here also executed in no mean style of art. Nothing of this kind has yet been discovered in Uriconium; but numerous fragments are picked up in the diggings, on which the colouring is perfectly fresh, and which exhibit portions of designs which are always elegant and in good taste. In one case a piece of the stucco from the internal surface of a wall contained some letters of an inscription. One of the walls near the hypocaust where the three skeletons were found presented a singular and rather laborious method of ornamenting its interior surface. Instead of being painted, it was tessellated, the surface being covered with tessellæ, one half of an inch by three-fifths in dimension, set in the cement, alternately of dark and light colours, in horizontal lines, so as to produce somewhat the appearance of chequer-work. Perhaps, when entire, it presented an ornamental pattern. I have already stated that a similarly tessellated wall was found in the easternmost part of this line of rooms. Circumstances have come to light which show that the exterior of the walls of houses were also plastered and painted. The exterior of the semicircular end of the largest hypocaust yet opened was thus plastered over, and painted red with stripes of yellow.
It is worthy of remark that in the walls, to the certainly not very great elevation they now generally reach, few doorways are discovered, a circumstance which is by no means easily explained. Small rooms are found without any apparent means of access. Perhaps, in such cases, the doorway was at a certain elevation in the wall, and was approached on both sides by wooden steps, which have long perished, and left no traces of the means of entrance. Of course none of the walls of the houses remain sufficiently high to enable us to judge of the manner in which light was admitted into the rooms, whether from side windows, or from openings in the roof. Probability, however, is in favour of roof-windows being in common use, and an interesting circumstance connected with the excavations at Wroxeter seems decisive as to the material of the windows. Considerable quantities of fine window glass have been found scattered over the floors of the houses, of an average thickness of full one-eighth of an inch, which have been duly deposited in the Museum at Shrewsbury. It is the more curious as it has been the common opinion, until recently, that the Romans, especially in this distant province, did not use window-glass; and the fragments of window-glass which have been found more recently in the excavations on the sites of Roman villas have been much thinner than that found at Wroxeter, and of very inferior quality. It is evident, that some of the rooms, all the walls of which were only walls of separation from other rooms, must have received light from above, or have been quite dark.
I must now describe a peculiar characteristic of the domestic economy of a Roman house in Britain, and in the other western and northern provinces of the empire. The Romans did not warm their apartments by fire lighted in them, as was the case in the middle ages, and in modern times, but by hot air circulated in the walls. The floor of the house, formed of a considerable thickness of cement, was laid upon a number of short pillars, formed usually of square Roman tiles placed one upon another, and from two to three feet high. Those of the largest of the hypocausts yet found at Wroxeter were rather more than three feet high. Sometimes these supports were of stone, and in one or two cases in discoveries made in this country, they were round. They were placed near to each other, and in rows, and upon them were lain first larger tiles, and over these a thick mass of cement, which formed the floor, and upon the surface of which the tessellated pavements were set. Sometimes small parallel walls, forming flues instead of rows of columns, supported the floors, of which an example has already been found in the excavations at Wroxeter. Flue-tiles,—that is, square tubes made of baked clay, with a hole on one side, or sometimes on two sides,—were placed against the walls end-ways, one upon another, so as to run up the walls. These arrangements,—which were called hypocausts, from two Greek words, signifying heat underneath, and were used in Italy and Greece chiefly for warming baths, are represented in plate IV., fig. 7, where AA is the floor of cement, BB the pillars supporting it, and CC the flue-tiles running up the wall of the room. They had an entrance from the outside, somewhat like the mouth of an oven, and fires being lighted here, the hot air was driven inward, and not only filled the space under the floor, but entered the flue-tiles by the holes in the sides, was carried by them up the inside of the wall, and no doubt had some way of escape at the roof. The ashes and soot of the fires have been found in the hypocausts at Uriconium, just as they were left when the city was overthrown and ruined by the barbarians. The ashes are chiefly those of wood, but considerable remains of mineral coal have been discovered. These hypocausts must sometimes have become clogged and out of order, and it would be necessary to cleanse them, as people in aftertimes cleansed chimneys. A sort of alley across the middle of the large hypocaust last-mentioned was probably intended for this purpose. It communicated with another hypocaust adjoining it to the north by a doorway, and this other hypocaust was entered by a rather large archway at the foot of the steps already mentioned. People appear to have been sometimes satisfied with having the hot air merely under the floor, and the flue-tiles were not always used. Comparatively few of them, indeed, have been yet found in the hypocausts of Uriconium.