“Around Rome was a great belt of cemeteries; the sides of the main roads issuing from the gates were especially favoured sites; the chief region of all was that crossed by the Via Appia and Via Latina” (Lanciani).
“An immense field of the dead had extended all along the north-eastern quarter of ancient London, from Wapping Marsh to the fen beyond Moorfields” (C. Knight).
Goodman’s Fields, Moorfields, Spitalfields, were all cemeteries, and it is curious that they all have in common the name of fields. In the valley of the Fleet River by Ludgate and Blackfriars on the west were also cemeteries; and others lay beyond Southwark (Battersea Fields and St. George’s Fields?). The city of the dead must have been impressive on account of its extent and the number of its population, and doubtless it was beautiful. The harsh horror of modern cemeteries is a new thing on the earth. In antiquity, cemeteries had beauty, poetry, history.
The monuments of Londinium would have been of many kinds, small and big—columns, sculptures, mausolea, altar-tombs, tomb-houses, and steles or slabs. These tombs were not cold and pale, but profusely carved, and, doubtless, in most cases, coloured. The monuments in the museum at Trèves show many traces of colour—red, green and yellow, if I remember aright. Dr. Ashby recently described a huge Roman necropolis at Syracuse in words which might apply to Londinium. “Fragments of memorials were found, varying from simple steles and columns to the chapel with rich architectural forms, the decorative portions being in soft limestone with considerable traces of polychromy.” Painting over coarse soft stone was a general tradition, and bright colour liberally applied would greatly change the aspect of rather crude carvings. At Bath an inscription mentions the repair and repainting of a building. This might be internal painting, but it was an external inscription and probably included outside work. The Corinthian temple at Bath was decorated with colour on the exterior. Mr. Irvine says of a piece of the cornice: “Considerable portions of the red paint with which it had been covered remained among the carving.”
Finds of burials are still not infrequent in London; as specimen cases I quote two recent newspaper clippings: “A workman excavating in Cannon Street Road, Stepney, has unearthed an urn containing bones at a depth of 2 ft. below the road level; Sir C. H. Read observed that it provided a link in the track of the Roman road eastward, as the custom was to deposit these urns at the sides of the roads” (December 19, 1919). “The discovery of two Roman urns in Mansell Street, Goodman’s Fields, is of considerable importance. The urns were found about 10 ft. below the garden of a house. Both contained inner cinerary urns with calcined remains. The perfect one resembles an ordinary jar with a cover; the outer urn is perfectly round, and has handles on each side by the mouth. It is believed that the site was that of a Roman villa; bricks and tiles having been discovered in other parts of the site” (1913). The urns are now in the London Museum.
The actual monuments once on the east of the City are represented by the fragments found in the Tower Hill bastion; those to the north, by the stones found in the Camomile Street and other bastions; those on the west, by the soldier’s monument found at Ludgate Hill by Wren, by later discoveries near Ludgate Hill, in 1806, and the fragment of the monument of Celsus found on the Blackfriars site.
Steles.—A memorial slab in the Guildhall Museum is particularly interesting, as it is obviously in the tradition of Hellenistic art. It is a true stele of the usual small scale, about 2 ft. wide and 2½ ft. high; it bears a relief sculpture of a soldier in a panel bordered by pilasters and finished with a pedimental top (Fig. [41]). This broken slab is in the reserve collection and is not usually visible, nor is it in the catalogue; the supposition is that it was found in one of the bastions with so many other remnants of tombs. It must, I think, be one of the earliest Roman monuments discovered in London.
Fig. 41.
At the Guildhall is shown a sculptured slab thus described: “Monumental tablet, marble, bearing in relief the figure of a man armed with a trident and sword (?), and having a shield-like protection to the upper portion of his left arm; above is a fragmentary inscription; Greek; 21¾ × 15½ × 3½ in.: Tottenham Court Road.” It was illustrated in an early volume of Archæologia (xi. p. 48). On the original drawing at the Society of Antiquaries is written: “This white marble slab was found by Mr. Miller among the ruins of a house at Islington. It is now fixed up on the front of a warehouse in High Timber Street, near Labour-in-Vain Hill.” (This was south of Thames Street in the City.) The inscription is given by Hübner. With the writer in V.C.H., we may doubt whether this slab is not an importation like the Arundel Marbles; but other works in white marble will be described in this section, and gladiators were well known in Londinium (Fig. [42]).