Fig. 68.
Several large half-round coping stones have from time to time been found in the bastions of the City Wall; they cannot have been taken from the wall itself, and so probably formed parts of monuments. Espèrandieu shows such a coping to a dwarf wall surrounding a statue, and in the little sketch (Fig. [69]) I suggest such an arrangement. Many half-round copings from monuments have been found at Chester.
Several small inscribed memorial tablets suggest that there were some buildings of the “Columbarium” type where the ashes of the dead might be placed. When after about A.D. 250 burial in coffins superseded the older way of burial, individual or family tomb-houses were erected to contain the sarcophagi, and several such would doubtless have been found outside the walls of Londinium. Tomb-houses were not uncommon in Britain; they were usually square or circular (T. Ward, Roman Era, p. 139). At Holmwood Hill, Kent, a circular buttressed building 30 ft. in diameter (Archæol. xxi., p. 336) seems to have been such a tomb-house. Of the stone sarcophagus from Haydon Square it has been observed that “as the back is quite plain it evidently stood against a wall, perhaps the back of a small tomb-house” (J. Ward). Even the back slope of the cover was left plain; and the back of the Clapton sarcophagus is also plain.
Fig. 69.
Tomb-Houses
Some of the sculptured fragments found in the Camomile Street bastion, while doubtless parts of sepulchral monuments, as Price thought, are of too large a scale to have belonged to mausolea of the Igel type. Two of the stones evidently came from angle pilasters of considerable scale. As Price said: “The size and weight of the stones indicate that the edifice was of proportions to bear comparison with the sepulchres in the vicinity of Rome: such monuments were placed near the city gates.” One of the fragments just mentioned has a nude boy or Cupid carved against a background of foliage on one face, while the return of the same stone contains similar ornament without the boy. Probably on the front face there were several little figures one over the other. This treatment for a pilaster is found on the monuments of Trèves. The boy on the stone at the Guildhall carries an object which Price thought might be a trident, but it is rather a torch; amorini and torches had a sepulchral significance. These big stones must have formed part of the angle pilasters of a large square tomb-house. They are more than 1¾ ft. wide, and one is over 3 ft. high, and contains two units of the fine carved pattern of very similar character to the carving on the Haydon Square sarcophagus. I should doubt if it is much earlier, say, c. A.D. 300 (Fig. [70]). The pattern is evidently a simplification of the scheme shown in Fig. 61 from a tomb sculpture at Trèves, illustrated by Espèrandieu.
Fig. 70.
At the Guildhall is a niche-head cut out of one stone into an arch form (Fig. [71]). It came from the Camomile Street bastion and very possibly formed part of a monument—perhaps a built-up niche surrounded a larger scale figure than the usual reliefs of the steles. Price associated this niche-head with the stele now at the Guildhall, but that was rather all in one stone (see my restoration in Arch. Rev., 1913). A man’s head of larger size than that of the stele and separate from any background was found at the same time as the niche fragments, and the figure to which it belonged may have stood in the niche. Possibly, however, the stone formed the head of a small doorway. Another monument at the Guildhall is a crude and late sculpture of a lion seizing some other animal. Many similar groups have been found in Britain and abroad. It would have had some symbolical significance. “Mythological” figures, such as Hercules and Atys, seem also to have been used for tombs.