If one stands in the Museum of the Guildhall and looks round upon the scanty remains of Roman London there exhibited, one feels a cold doubt as to the alleged wealth and greatness of the ancient city. Is this all that has to be shown after an occupation of nearly four hundred years? There is not much more: one may find a room at the British Museum devoted to this subject; and there are a few small private collections containing nothing of importance. Yet when we consider the length of time since Roman London fell; the long history of reconstruction, fire, and successive occupations; the fact that twice—once for more than a hundred years—London was entirely deserted, we must acknowledge that more remains of Roman London than might have been expected. What exists, for instance, of that other great Roman city now called Bordeaux? What, even, of Lutetia Parisiorum? What of Massilia, the most ancient of Gallic cities?
ROMAN ALTAR TO DIANA FOUND
IN ST. MARTIN’S-LE-GRAND
There are, however, many remains of Roman London which are not preserved in any collection. Some are above ground; some have been dug up and carried away; some have been disclosed, examined, sketched, and again covered up.
Antiquaries have been pleased to find traces of Roman relics of which no memory or tradition remains. Thus, we are assured that there was formerly a Campus Martius in London; its site is said to have been that of the Old Artillery Ground. A temple of Diana is said to have stood on the south side of St. Paul’s. There was a mysterious and extensive crypt called the Camera Dianæ, supposed to have been connected with the worship of that goddess; it was standing in the seventeenth century. Probably it was the crypt of some mediæval house. Stukeley persuaded himself that he found in Long Acre the “magnificent circus, or racecourse, founded by Eli, father of Casvelhun”; he also believed that he had found in Hedge Lane the survival of the agger or tumulus of King Eli’s grave. The same antiquary preferred to trace Julius Cæsar’s Camp in the Brill opposite old St. Pancras Church.
It is sometimes stated that excavations in London have been few and scattered over the whole area of the City; that there has been no systematic and scientific work carried on such as, for instance, was conducted, thirty years ago, at Jerusalem by Sir Charles Warren. But when we consider that there is no single house in the City which has not had half a dozen predecessors on the same site, whose foundations, therefore, have not been dug up over and over again, no one can form any estimate of the remains, Roman, British, and Saxon, which have been dug up, broken up, and carted away. During certain works at St. Mary Woolnoth, for instance, the men came upon vast remains of “rubbish,” consisting of broken pottery and other things, the whole of which were carried off to St. George’s Fields to mend or make the roads there. The only protection of the Roman remains, so long as there was no watch kept over the workmen, lay in the fact that the Roman level was in many places too deep for the ordinary foundations. Thus in Cheapside it was 18 feet below the present surface; in other places it was even more.
The collection of Roman antiquities seems to have been first undertaken by John Conyers, an apothecary, at the time of the Great Fire. The rebuilding of the City caused much digging for foundations, in the course of which a great many Roman things were brought to light. Most of these were unheeded. Conyers, however, collected many specimens, which were afterwards bought by Dr. John Woodward. After his death part of the collection was bought by the University of Cambridge; the rest was sold by auction “at Mr. Cooper’s in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden.” Three other early collectors were John Harwood, D.C.L.; John Bagford, a bookseller, who seems to have had some knowledge of coins; and Mr. Kemp, whose collection contained a few London things, especially the two terra-cotta lamps found on the site of St. Paul’s, which were supposed to prove the existence of a temple of Diana at that spot.
Burial-places and tombs have been unearthed in various parts of the City, but all outside the walls of the Roman fortress. Thus, they have been found on the site of St. Paul’s, in Bow Lane, Queen Street, Cornhill, St. Dunstan’s Hill, near Carpenter’s Hall, in Camomile Street near the west end of St. Helen’s Church, in King’s Street and Ken Street, Southwark—outside Bishopsgate in “Lollesworth,” afterwards called Spitalfields. The last named was the most extensive of the ancient cemeteries.
Stow thus describes it:—
“On the East Side of this Churchyard lyeth a large Field, of old time called Lolesworth, now Spittlefield, which about the Year 1576 was broken up for Clay to make Brick: In the digging whereof many earthen Pots called Urnæ were found full of Ashes, and burnt Bones of Men, to wit of the Romans that inhabited here. For it was the custom of the Romans, to burn their Dead, to put their Ashes in an Urn, and then to bury the same with certain Ceremonies, in some Field appointed for that purpose near unto their City.