A considerable number of beautifully-made leather shoes having elaborately pierced patterns are doubtless of local work. One found at South-fleet, now at the British Museum, was coloured purple and decorated with gilding, as is recorded on a drawing at the Society of Antiquaries, made when it was newly found.
The site of London is still unexhausted; even while I am writing this I see in the morning’s paper, “Recent excavations in Lothbury have brought to light relics of Roman occupation—bone bodkins, oyster shells and broken pottery. The bodkins are large, and it is thought that they were probably used in mat-making.” London must have been an art-producing centre for two thousand years.
Locally made Pottery.
CHAPTER XI
EARLY CHRISTIAN LONDON
“It was no longer thought to be Britain but a Roman island; and all their money was stamped with Cæsar’s image. Meanwhile these islands, stiff with frost, received the beams of light, the holy precepts of Christ, the true Sun, at the later part of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar.”
—Gildas.
CHRISTIAN BRITAIN.—The whole subject of Christian antiquities in Britain was for a long time clouded by mere doubt of testimony, until the comparatively recent discovery of the foundations of an early Christian basilican church at Silchester, in 1892, gradually changed the temperature and atmosphere in which facts are seen. Thomas Wright had swept the thing aside, Gildas and all. This difference of attitude is well brought out in the earlier and more recent writings of Dr. Haverfield. Compare, for instance, his over-cautious article in the English Historical Review about twenty years ago with another in Archæologia Æliana, 1917, which is written in quite a different temper. It is now clear that Britain marched with Gaul in the acceptance of Christianity, although one step behind.
In Cabrol’s great French Dictionary of Christian Antiquities we may obtain a valuable unbiased account of British Christian antiquities. The best general introduction known to me is a chapter in Sir C. Oman’s excellent England before the Norman Conquest, from which I will condense a paragraph.