Fig. 10. Holt, Stamped Ware in imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1)Fig. 10. Holt, Stamped Ware in imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1)
An even more striking piece (fig. 1) is a 'poinçon' bearing the head of Silenus in relief. It is believed to be the artist's die, from which the potters' sunk dies would be cast; from such sunk dies little casts would be made and 'applied' in relief to the outsides of the bowls, to the handles of jugs, &c. It does not seem to have been intended for any sort of ware made from a mould; indeed, moulded ware rarely occurs among the products of Holt. It is far finer work than most Samian ornamentation; probably, however, it has never been damaged by use. It was found, with one or two less remarkable dies, in the waste round kiln 3.
Interest attaches also to various vessels, two or three nearly perfect and many broken, which have been glazed with green, brown or yellow glaze; some of these pieces seem to be imitated from cut glass ware. Along with them Mr. Acton has found the containing bowls (saggars)and kiln-props used to protect and support the glazed vessels during the process of firing, and as the drip of the glaze is visible on the sides of the props and the bottoms of the saggars, he infers that the Holt potters manufactured glazed ware with success.
Fig. 11. Stamped Ware, in Imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1). (See pp. 19, 20)Fig. 11. Stamped Ware, in Imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1).(Seepp. 19, 20)
Fig. 11. Stamped Ware, in Imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1). (See pp. 19, 20)Fig. 11. Stamped Ware, in Imitation of Samian, Shape 37 (1/1).(Seepp. 19, 20)
It is obvious that Mr. Acton's detailed report on Holt will be full of important matter, and that further excavation of the site, whenever it may be possible, will also yield important results.
(xiii)Cardiff.The widening of Duke Street, which fronts the eastern half of the south side of Cardiff Castle, has revealed the south-east angle of the Roman fort, on the top of which the castle stands, and has revealed it in good preservation. Nothing, however, has come to light which seems to increase or alter our previous knowledge of the fort. Many small Roman objects are stated to have been found, Samian ware, coins, brooches, beads, in the course of the work; these may belong to the 'civil settlement' which, as I have said elsewhere, may have lain to the south of the fort (Military Aspects of Roman Wales, p. 105). When they have been sorted and dated, they should throw light on the history of Roman Cardiff.
(xiv)Richborough.This important site has been taken over by H.M. Office of Works, and some digging has been done round the central platform, but (Mr. Peers tells me) without any notable result. The theory that this platform was the base of a lighthouse is still the most probable.
(xv)Wroxeter (Viroconium).The systematic excavation of Wroxeter begun in 1912 by Mr. J. P. Bushe-Fox on behalf of the London Society of Antiquaries and the Shropshire Archaeological Society, was carried by him through its third season in 1914. The area examined lay immediately north of the temple uncovered in 1913. The main structure in it was a large dwelling-house 115 feet long, with extensions up to 200 feet, which possessed at least two courtyards, a small detached bath-house, various mosaic and cement floors, hypocausts, and so forth. It had been often altered, and its excavation and explanation were excessively difficult. Mr. Bushe-Fox thinks that it may have begun as three shops giving on to the north and south Street which bounds its eastern end. Certainly it became, in course of time, a large corridor-house with a south aspect and an eastern wing fronting the street, and as such it underwent several changes in detail. Beyond its western end lay a still more puzzling structure. An enceinte formed by two parallel walls, about 13 feet apart, enclosed a rectangular space of about 150 feet wide; the western endof it, and therefore its length, could not be ascertained; the two corners uncovered at the east end were rounded; an entrance seems to have passed through the north-east corner. It has been called a small fort, an amphitheatre, a stadium, and several other things. But a fort should be larger and would indeed be somewhat hard to account for at this spot; while a stadium should have a rounded end and, if it was of orthodox length, would have extended outside the town into or almost into the Severn. Interest attaches to a water-channel along the main (north and south) street. This was found to have at intervals slits in each side which were plainly meant for sluice-gates to be let down; Mr. Bushe-Fox thinks that the channel was a water-supply, and not an outfall, and that by the sluice-gates the water was dammed up so as, when needed, to flow along certain smaller channels into the private houses which stood beside the road. If so, the discovery has much interest; the arrangement is peculiar, but no other explanation seems forthcoming.
Small finds were many and good. Mr. Bushe-Fox gathered 571 coins ranging from three British and one or two Roman Republican issues, to three early coins of the Emperor Arcadius, over 200 Samian potters' stamps, and much Samian datable to the period about A.D. 75-130, with a few rare pieces of the pre-Flavian age. There was a noticeable scarcity of both Samian and coins of the post-Hadrianic, Antonine period; it was also observed that recognizable 'stratified deposits' did not occur after the age of Hadrian. Among individual objects attention is due to a small seal-box, with wax for the seal actually remaining in it.
It appears that it will probably not be possible to continue this excavation, even on a limited scale, next summer. Mr. Bushe-Fox's report for 1913 is noticed below,p. 52.
(xvi)Lincoln.At Lincoln an inscribed fragment found in 1906 has now come to light. It bears only three letters,IND, being the last letters of the inscription; these plainly preserve a part of the name of the town, Lindum. See below,p. 34.
(xvii)Gloucester.Here, in March 1914, a mosaic floor, 16 feet square, with a complex geometrical pattern in red, white, and blue, has been found 9 feet below the present surface, at 22 Northgate Street. Some painted wall-plaster from the walls of the room to which it belonged were found with it.
(xviii) Discoveries inLondonhave been limited to two groups of rubbish-pits in the City, (a) At the General Post Office the pits opened in 1913 (see my Report, p. 22) were further carefully explored in 1914 by Mr. F. Lambert, Mr. Thos. Wilson, and Dr. Norman;the Post Office gave full facilities. Over 100 'potholes' were detected, of which about forty yielded more or less datable rubbish, mainly potsherds. Four contained objects of about A.D. 50-80, though not in great quantity—four bits of decorated Samian and eight Samian stamps—and fourteen contained objects of about A.D. 70-100; the rest seemed to belong to the second century, with some few later items intermixed. One would infer that a little rubbish was deposited here before the Flavian period, but that after about A.D. 70 or 80 the site was freely used as a rubbish-ground for three generations or more. Two objects may be noted, a gold ring bearing the owner's initials Q.D.D. and a bit of inscribed wood from the lining of a well or pit (p. 35). (b) At the top of King William Street, between Sherborne Lane and Abchurch Lane, not so far from the Mansion House, five large pits were opened in the summer of 1914, in the course of ordinary contractors' building work. They could not be so minutely examined as the Post Office pits, but it was possible to observe that their datable potsherds fell roughly within the period A.D. 50-100, and that a good many potsherds were earlier than the Flavian age; there must have been considerable deposit of rubbish here before A.D. 70 or thereabouts, and it must have ceased about the end of the century. A full account of both groups of pits was given to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. F. Lambert on February 11, 1915; illustrated notices of the Post Office finds were contributed by Mr. Thos. Wilson to the Post Office Magazine,St. Martin-le-Grand(January and July, 1914); Mr. D. Atkinson helped with the dating of the pottery.
Much gratitude is due to those who have so skilfully collaborated to achieve these results. So far as it is permissible to argue from two sites only, they seem to throw real light on the growth of the earliest Roman London. The Post Office pits lie in the extreme north-west of the later Londinium, just inside the walls; the King William Street pits are in its eastern half, not far from the east bank of the now vanished stream of Wallbrook, which roughly bisected the whole later extent of the town. It may be assumed that, at the time when the two groups of pits were in use, the inhabited area had not yet spread over their sites, though it had come more or less close. That would imply that the earliest city lay mainly, though perhaps not wholly, on the east bank of Wallbrook; then, as the houses spread and the town west of Wallbrook developed, the King William Street pits were closed, while the Post Office pits came more into use, during and after the Flavian age.
This conclusion is tentative. It must be remembered that thestratification of rubbish-pits, ancient as well as modern, is often very peculiar. It is liable to be confused by all sorts of cross-currents. In particular, objects are constantly thrown into rubbish-pits many years, perhaps even centuries, after those objects have passed out of use. Whenever, even in a village, an old cottage is pulled down or a new one built, old rubbish gets shifted to new places and mixed with rubbish of a quite different age. At Caerwent, as Dr. T. Ashby once told me, a deep rubbish-pit yielded a coin of about A.D. 85 at a third of the way down, and at the very bottom a coin of about 315. That is, the pit was in use about or after 315; some one then shovelled into it debris of much earlier date. The London pits now in question are, however, fairly uniform in their contents, and their evidence may be utilized at least as a base for further inquiries.
(xix-xxii)Rural dwellings.Three Roman 'villas'—that is, country-houses or farms—have been explored in 1914. All are small.
Fig. 12. Bath-house, East GrimsteadFig. 12. Bath-house, East Grimstead
(xix) AtEast Grimstead, five miles south-east from Salisbury, on Maypole Farm near Churchway Copse5, a bath-house has been dug out and planned by Mr. Heywood Sumner, to whom I owe the following details. The building (fig. 12) measures only 14 × 28 feet and contains only four rooms, (1) a tile-paved apartment which probably served as entrance and dressing-room, (2) a room over a pillared hypocaust, which may be called the tepidarium, (3) a similar smaller room, nearer the furnace and therefore perhaps hotter, which may be the caldarium—though really it is hardly worth while to distinguish between these two rooms—and (4) a semicircular bath, lined with pink mortar and fine cement, warmed with flues from rooms 3 and with box-tiles, and provided with an outfall drain; east of rooms 3 and 4 was the furnace. Small finds included window glass, potsherds, two to three hundred oyster-shells, and five Third Brass coins (two Constantinian, three illegible). Large stone foundationshave been detected close by; presumably this was the detached bath-house for a substantial residence which awaits excavation. Such detached bath-houses are common; I may instance one found in 1845 at Wheatley (Oxon.), which had very similar internal arrangements and stood near a substantial dwelling-house not yet explored (Archaeol. Journal, ii. 350). A full description of the Grimstead bath, by Mr. Sumner, is in the press.
(xx) Three miles south-west of Guildford, at Limnerslease in the parish ofCompton, Mr. Mill Stephenson has helped to uncover a house measuring 53 × 76 feet, with front and back corridors, and seven rooms, including baths. Coins suggested that it was inhabited in the early fourth century—a period when our evidence shows that many Romano-British farms and country-houses were occupied.6
Fig. 13. House at North Ash, KentFig. 13. House at North Ash, Kent
(xxi) A third house is supplied by Kent. This was found in June about six miles south of Gravesend, near the track fromNorth Ashto Ash Church, on the farm of Mr. Geo. Day. Woodland was being cleared for an orchard, flint foundations were encountered, and the site was then explored by Mr. Jas. Kirk, Mr. S. Priest, and others of the Dartford Antiquarian Society, to whom I am indebted for information: the Society will in due course issue a full Report. The spade (fig. 13) revealed a rectangular walled enclosure of 53 × 104 feet. The entrance was at the east end; the dwelling-rooms (including a sunk bath, 7 feet square, lined with plaster) were, so far as traced, in the west and south-west portion; much of the walled space may have been farmyard or wooden sheds. Many bits of Samian and other pottery were found (among them a mortarium stampedMARTINVSF), and many oyster-shells. Other Romano-British foundations have been suspected close by.
The structure somewhat resembles the type of farm-house which might fairly be called, from its best-known example—the only one now uncovered to view—the Carisbrooke type.7That, however, usually has rooms at both ends, as in the Clanville example which I figure here as more perfect than the Carisbrooke one (fig. 14). One might compare the buildings at Castlefield, Finkley, and Holbury, which I have discussed in theVictoria History of Hants(i. 302-3, 312), and which were perhaps rudimentary forms of the Carisbrooke type.
Fig. 14. Farm-house at Clanville, Kent (To illustrate Fig. 13)Fig. 14. Farm-house at Clanville, Kent(To illustrate Fig. 13)
(xxii) A few kindred items may be grouped here. Digging has been attempted in a Roman 'villa' at Litlington (Cambs.) but, as Prof. McKenny Hughes tells me, with little success. The 'beautifully tiled and marbled floors' are newspaper exaggeration. A 'Roman bath' which was stated to have been found early in 1914 at Kingston-on-Thames, in the work of widening the bridge, is declared by Mr. Mill Stephenson not to be Roman at all. Lastly, an excavation of an undoubted Roman house at Broom Farm, between Hambledon and Soberton in south-east Hants, projected by Mr. A. Moray Williams, was prevented by the war, which called Mr. Williams to serve his country.
(xxiii)Lowbury.During the early summer of 1914 Mr. D. Atkinson completed his examination of the interesting site of Lowbury, high amid the east Berkshire Downs. Of the results which he won in 1913 I gave some account last year (Report for 1913, p. 22); those of 1914 confirm and develop them. We may, then, accept the site as, at first and during the Middle Empire, a summer farm or herdsmen's shelter, and in the latest Roman days a refuge from invading English. Whether the wall which he traced round the little place was reared to keep in cattle or to keep out foes, is not clear; possibly enough, it served both uses. In all, Mr. Atkinson gathered about 850 coins belonging to all periods of the Empire but especially to the latest fourth century and including Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius. He also found over fifty brooches and a great amount of pottery—3 cwt., he tells me—which was mostly rough ware: there was little Samian (some of shape '37'), less Castor, and hardly any traces of mortaria. A notable find was the skeleton of a woman of 50 (ht. about 5 feet 9 inches), which he discovered in the trench dug to receive the foundations of the enclosing wall; it lay in the line of the foundations amidst the perished cement of the wall, and its associations and position forbid us to think either that it was buried before the wall was thought of or was inserted after the wall was ruined. Mr. Atkinson formed the theory—with natural hesitation—that it might be a foundation burial, and I understand that Sir Jas. Frazer accepts this suggestion. A full report of the whole work will shortly be issued in the Reading College Research Series.
(xxiv)Eastbourne, Beachy Head.The Rev. W. Budgen, of Eastbourne, tells me of a hoard of 540 coins found in 1914 in a coombe near Bullock Down, just behind Beachy Head. The coins range from Valerian (1 coin) to Quintillus (4 coins) and Probus (1 coin); 69 are attributed to Gallienus, 88 to Victorinus, 197 to the Tetrici, and 40 to Claudius Gothicus ; the hoard may have been buried about A.D. 280, but it has to be added that 130 coins have not been yet identified. Hoards of somewhat this date are exceedingly common; in 1901 I published accounts of two such hoards detected, shortly before that, at points quite close to the findspot of the present hoard (seeSussex Archaeological Collections, xliv, pp. 1-8).
Mr. Budgen has also sent me photographs of some early cinerary urns and a 'Gaulish' fibula, found together in Eastbourne in 1914. The things may belong to the middle of the first century A.D. The 'Gaulish' type of fibula has been discussed and figured by Sir Arthur Evans (Archaeologia, lv. 188-9, fig. 10; see also Dressel's note inBonner Jahrbücher, lxiv. 82). Its home appears to be Gaul. In Britain it occurs rather infrequently; east of the Rhine it is still rarer; it shows only one vestige of itself at Haltern and is wholly absent from Hofheim and the Saalburg. Its date appears to be the first century A.D., and perhaps rather the earlier two-thirds than the end of that period.
(xxv)Parc-y-Meirch(North Wales). Here Mr. Willoughby Gardner has further continued his valuable excavations (Report for 1913, p. 25). The new coin-finds seem to hint that the later fourth-century stratum may have been occupied earlier in that century than the date which I gave last year, A.D. 340. But the siege of this hill-fort is bound to be long and its full results will not be clear till the end. Then we may expect it to throw real light on an obscure corner of the history of Roman and also post-Roman Wales.
This section includes the Roman inscriptions which have been found, or (perhaps I should say) first recognized to exist, in Britain in 1914 or which have become more accurately known in that year. As in 1913, the list is short and its items are not of great importance; but the Chesterholm altar (No. 5) deserves note, and the Corbridge tile also possesses considerable interest.
I have edited them in the usual manner, first stating the origin, character, &c., of the inscription, then giving its text with a rendering in English, thirdly adding any needful notes and acknowledging obligations to those who may have communicated the items to me. In the expansions of the text, square brackets denote letters which, owing to breakage or other cause, are not now on the stone, though one may presume that they were originally there; round brackets denote expansions of Roman abbreviations. The inscriptions are printed in the same order as the finds in section A, that is, from north to south—though with so few items the order hardly matters.
(1) Found at Balmuildy (above,p. 7) in the annexe to the south-east of the fort proper, some sandstone fragments from the top of a small altar, originally perhaps about 14 inches wide. At the top, in a semicircular panel is a rude head; below are letters from the first two lines of the dedication; probably the first line had originally four letters:—
Fig. 15Fig. 15
PossiblyDIOmay be fordeo. It is by no means a common orthography, but if it be accepted, we can readdio [s(ancto) Ma]rti.... The readingDIIO,deo, is I fear impossible.
I have to thank Mr. S. N. Miller, the excavator, for photographs.
(2) At Traprain Law (above,p. 8) a small potsherd from a second-century level bore the letters scratched on it
I R I /
These letters were on the side of the potsherd which had formed the inner surface when the pot was whole; they must therefore have been inscribed after the pot had been smashed, and the size and shape of the bit give cause to think that it may have been broken intentionally for inscription—possibly for use in some game. In any case, it must have been inscribed at Traprain Law, and not brought there already written, and the occurrence of writing of any sort on such a site is noteworthy.
I am indebted to Dr. G. Macdonald for a sight of the piece.
(3) Found about three and a half miles north of the Roman fort Bremenium, High Rochester, near Horsley in north Northumberland, beside the Roman road over the Cheviots (Dere Street), close to the steading of Featherwood, in the autumn of 1914, now in the porch of Horsley Parish Church, a plain altar 51 inches high by 22 inches wide, with six lines of letters 2 inches tall. The inscription is unusually illegible. Only the first and last lines are readable with certainty; elsewhere some letters can be read or guessed, but not so as to yield coherent sense.
The altar was dedicated to Victory; nothing else is certain. It is tempting to conjecture in line 2ET N AVG,et numinibus Augustorum, as on some other altars to Victory, butETis not certain, though probable, andN AVGis definitely improbable. The fourth line seems to have been intentionally erased. I find no sign of any mention of the Cohors I Vardullorum, which garrisoned Bremenium, though it or its commander might naturally be concerned in putting up such an altar.
We may assume that the altar belongs to Bremenium; possibly it was brought thence when Featherwood was built.
I have to thank the Rev. Thos. Stephens, vicar of Horsley, for photographs and an excellent squeeze and readings, and Mr. R. Blair for a photograph.
(4-5) Found on July 17, 1914, at Chesterholm, just south of Hadrian's Wall, lying immediately underneath the surface in a grass field 120 yards west of the fort, two altars:
(4) 32 inches tall, 15 inches broad, illegible save for the first line
IOM
I(ovi) o(ptimo) m(aximo)....
(5) 34 inches tall, 22 inches broad, with 8 lines of rather irregular letters, not quite legible at the end (fig. 16).
Fig. 16. Altar from ChesterholmFig. 16. Altar from Chesterholm
Pro domu divina et numinibus Augustorum, Volcano sacrum, vicani Vindolandesses, cu[r(am)] agente ... v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito).
'For the Divine (i.e. Imperial) House and the Divinity of the Emperors, dedicated to Vulcan by the members of thevicusof Vindolanda, under the care of ... (name illegible).'
The statement of the reason for the dedication given in the first three lines is strictly tautologous, the Divine House and the Divinityof the Emperors being practically the same thing. The formulanuminibus Aug.is very common in Britain, though somewhat rare elsewhere; in other provinces its place is supplied by the formulain honorem domus divinae; it belongs mostly to the late second and third centuries. The pluralAugustorumdoes not appear to refer to a plurality of reigning Emperors, but to the whole body of Emperors dead and living who were worshipped in the Cult of the Emperors.
Thevicani Vindolandessesare the members of the settlement—women and children, traders, old soldiers, and others—which grew up outside the fort at Chesterholm, as outside nearly all Roman forts and fortresses. In this case they formed a small self-governing community, presumably with its own 'parish council', which could be called by the Roman termvicus, even if it was not all that a propervicusshould be. This altar was put up at the vote of their 'parish meeting' and paid for, one imagines, out of their common funds. The termvicusis applied to similar settlements outside forts on the German Limes; thus we have thevicani Murrensesat the fort of Benningen on the Murr (CIL. xiii. 6454) and thevicus AureliusorAurelianusat Oehringen (ibid. 6541).
Vindolandesses, which is merely a phonetic spelling or misspelling ofVindolandenses, gives the correct name of the fort. In the Notitia it is spelt Vindolana, in the Ravennas (431. 11) Vindolanda; and as in general the Ravennas teems with errors and the Notitia is fairly correct, the spelling Vindolana has always been preferred, although (as Prof. Sir John Rhys tells me) its second part-lanais an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination-landais a Celtic word denoting a small defined space, akin to the Welsh 'llan', and also to the English 'land'; I cannot, however, find any other example in which it forms part of a place-name of Roman date.Vindo-is connected either with the adjectivevindos, 'white', or with the personal name Vindos derived from that adjective.
I have to thank Mrs. Clayton, the owner of Chesterholm, and her foreman, Mr. T. Hepple, for excellent photographs and squeezes. The altars are now in the Chesters Museum.
(6) Found at Corbridge, in August 1914, fragment of a tile, 7 × 8 inches in size, on which, before it was baked hard, some one had scratched three lines of lettering about 1-1-1/2 inches tall; the surviving letters form the beginnings of the lines of which the ends are broken off. There were never more than three lines, apparently.
O M Q L LIIND/ LEGEFEL
The inscription seems to have been a reading lesson. First the teacher scratched two lines of letters, in no particular order and making no particular sense; then he added the exhortationlege feliciter, 'read and good luck to you'. A modern teacher, even though he taught by the aid of a slate in lieu of a soft tile, might have expressed himself less gracefully. The tile may be compared with the well-known tile from Silchester, on which Maunde Thompson detected a writing lesson (Eph. Epigr. ix. 1293). A knowledge of reading and writing does not seem to have been at all uncommon in Roman Britain or in the Roman world generally, even among the working classes; I may refer to myRomanization of Roman Britain(ed. 3, pp. 29-34).
The imperfectly preserved letter afterQin line 1 was perhaps an angularLorE; that afterD, in line 2, may have beenMorNor evenA.
I am indebted to Mr. R. H. Forster for a photograph and squeeze of the tile.
(7) Found in a peat-bog in Upper Weardale, in August 1913, two bronze skillets or 'paterae', of the usual saucepan shape, the larger weighing 15-1/2 oz., the smaller 8-1/2 oz. Each bore a stamp on the handle; the smaller had also a graffito on the rim of the bottom made by a succession of little dots. An uninscribed bronze ladle was found with the 'paterae':
The stamps of the Campanian bronze-worker Cipius Polybius are well known. Upwards of forty have been found, rather curiously distributed (in the main) between Pompeii and places on or near the Rhenish and Danubian frontiers, in northern Britain, and in German and Danish lands outside the Roman Empire. The stamped 'paterae' of other Cipii and other bronze-workers have a somewhat similar distribution; it seems that the objects were made in the first century A.D., in or near Pompeii, and were chiefly exported to or beyond the borders of the Empire. Their exact use is still uncertain, I have discussed them in theArchaeological Journal, xlix, 1892, pp. 228-31; they have since been treated more fully by H. Willers (Bronzeeimer von Hemmoor, 1901, p. 213, andNeue Untersuchungen über die römische Bronzeindustrie, 1907, p. 69).
I have to thank Mr. W. M. Egglestone, of Stanhope, for information and for rubbings of the stamps. TheEin the first stamp seems clear on the rubbing; all other examples have hereI·orI. In the second stamp, the conclusion might beBI·F. Thegraffitowas first readINVINDA; it is, however, certainly as given above.
(8) Found at Holt, eight miles south of Chester (see above,p. 15), in the autumn of 1914, built upside down into the outer wall of a kiln, a centurial stone of the usual size and character, 10 inches long, 7-8 inches high, with letters (3/4-1 inch tall) inside a rude label
cCESo NIANA
c(enturia) C(a)esoniana, set up by the century under Caesonius.
Like another centurial stone found some time ago at Holt (Eph. Epigr. ix. 1035), this was not foundin situ; the kiln or other structure into the wall of which it was originally inserted must have been pulled down and its stones used up again.
The centuries mentioned would of course be units from the Twentieth Legion at Chester.
(9) Found at Holt late in 1914, a fragment of tile (about 7 × 7 inches) with parts of two (or three) lines of writing scratched on it.
...LIVITILI.. ..IT TAL.. .........
I can offer no guess at the sense of this. The third line may be mere scratches. I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Acton for sending Nos. 8 and 9 to me for examination.
(10) Found at Lincoln in 1906, on the site of the Technical Schools extensions (outside the east wall of the lower Roman town), a fragment from the lower right-hand corner of an inscribed slab flanked with foliation, 13 inches tall, 19 inches wide, with 2-inch lettering.
G IND fol- iat- ion
No doubt one should prefixLtoIND. That is, the inscription ended with some part of the Romano-British name of Lincoln, Lindum, or of its adjective Lindensis. From the findspot it seems probable that the inscription may have been sepulchral.
I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Smith, Curator of the City and County Museum at Lincoln, for a squeeze. The stone is now in the Museum.
(11) Found in London near the General Post Office in a rubbish-pit (see above,p. 23), two pieces of wood from the staves of a barrel which seems to have served as lining to a pit or well. They bear faint impressions of a metal stamp; (a) is repeated twice.
(a)TEC.PAGAand..C·PA..†
(b)CSorCB
The first stamp seems to include a name in the genitive, perhapsPacati, but I do not know whatTECmeans.
(12) Found in another rubbish-pit of the same site as No. 11, a plain gold ring with three sunk letters on the bezel:
Q . D . D
Presumably the initials of an owner. The letters were at first readO·D·D, but the tail of the Q is discernible.
I am indebted to the Post Office authorities and to Mr. F. Lambert for a sight of Nos. 11 and 12. The objects are preserved at the General Post Office.
(13) I add here a note on a Roman milestone found in 1694 near Appleby and lately refound.
Among the papers of the antiquary Richard Gough in the Bodleian Library—more exactly, in his copy of Horsley'sBritannia, gen. top. 128 = MS. 17653, fol. 44v.—is recorded the text of a milestone of the Emperor Philip and his son, 'dug out of ye military way 1694, now at Hangingshaw'. The entry is written in Gough's own hand on the last page of a list of Roman and other inscriptions once belonging to Reginald Bainbridge, who was schoolmaster in Appleby in Elizabeth's reign and died there in 1606.8This list had been drawn up by one Hayton, under-schoolmaster at Appleby, in 1722 and had been copied out by Gough. There is, however, nothing to show whether the milestone, found eighty-eight years after the death of Bainbridge and plainly none of his collection, was added by Hayton, or was otherwise obtained by Gough and copied by him on a casually blank page; there is nothing even to connect either the stone or Hangingshaw with Appleby.
The notice lay neglected till Hübner undertook to edit the Roman inscriptions of Britain, which he issued in the seventh volume of theCorpus Inscriptionum Latinarumin 1873. He included the milestone as No. 1179. But, with his too frequent carelessness—a carelessness which makes the seventh volume of theCorpusfar less valuable than the rest of the series—he christened the stone, in defiance of dates,No. 17 in Bainbridge's collection; he also added the statement (which we shall see to be wrong) that Hangingshaw was near Old Carlisle. Fortunately, in the autumn of 1914, Mr. Percival Ross, the Yorkshire archaeologist, sent me a photograph of an inscription which he had come upon, built into the wall of a farm called Hangingshaw, about 200 yards from the Roman road which runs along the high ground a little east of Appleby. It then became plain—despite Hübner's errors—that this stone was that recorded in Gough's papers, although his copy was in one point faulty and on the other hand some letters which were visible in 1694 have now apparently perished. A rubbing sent me by the late Rev. A. Warren of Old Appleby helped further; I now give from the three sources—Gough's copy, the photograph, and the rubbing—what I hope may be a fairly accurate text. I premise that the lettersRCOin line 2,LIPPOin 3,PHILIPPOin 8,IMOin 9, andIin 10 seem to be no longer visible but depend on Gough's copy.
transcription
The chief fault in Gough's copy is the omission of line 6,Augusto. This misled Hübner into treating line 7 (ERP) as a blundered reading of that necessary word. In reality, line 7 is the most interesting item in the inscription. It shows that the Emperor Philip was, here at least, styledperpetuus Augustus. That is an appellation to which I find no exact parallel in Philip's other inscriptions or indeed in any other imperial inscriptions till half a century after his death. It fits, however, into a definite development of the Roman imperial titles. In the earliest Empire, phrases occur, mostly on coins, such asAeternitas imperiiorAeternitas populi romani. Soon the notion of the stability of the Empire was transferred to its rulers. As early as Vespasian, coins bear the legendaeternitas Augusti, and in the first years of the second century Pliny, writing to Trajan, speaks of petitions addressedper salutem tuam aeternitatemqueand of 'works worthy of the emperor's eternity,'(opera aeternitate tua digna). Late in the second century such phrases become commoner. With Severus Alexander (A.D. 221-35) coins begin to show the legendPerpetuitas Aug., and before very long the indirect and abstract language changes into direct epithets which are incorporated in the emperors' titulature. The first case which I can find of this is that before us, of Philip (A.D. 244-9); a little later, Aurelian (A.D. 270-5) is styledsemper Augustusand, from Diocletian onwards,aeternus,perpetuus, andsemper Augustusbelong to the customary titulature. Constantine I, for example, is called on one stoneinvictus et perpetuus ... semper Augustus, on anotherperpetuus imperator, semper Augustus. That Philip should have been the first to have applied to him, even once, the direct epithet, is probably a mere accident. One might have wished to connect it with his Secular Games, celebrated in 248. But by that time his son was no longer Caesar but full Augustus (since 246), and our stone must fall into the years 244-6.
The ideas underlying these epithets were perhaps mixed. Notions of or prayers for the long life of the Empire, the stability of the reigning house, the long reign of the current emperor, may have jostled with notions of the immortality of the emperors and their deification, and with the eastern ideas which poured into Rome as the second century ended and the third century began.9The hardening despotism of the imperial constitution, growing more and more autocratic every decade, also helped. As the emperor became unchecked and unqualified monarch, his appellations grew more emphatic;perpetuus Augustus, semper Augustusconnoted that unchecked and autocratic rule.
The following summary of the books and articles on Roman Britain which appeared in 1914 is grouped under two heads, first, those few which deal with general aspects of the subject, and secondly, the far larger number which concern special sites or areas. In this second class, those which belong to England are placed under their counties in alphabetical order, while those which belong to Wales and Scotland are grouped under these two headings. I have in general admitted only matter which was published in 1914, or which bears that date.
(1) Mr. G. L. Cheesman'sAuxilia of the Roman Imperial Army(Oxford University Press) does not deal especially with Roman Britain, but it deserves brief notice here. It is an excellent and up-to-date sketch of an important section of the Roman army, with which British archaeologists are much concerned. It also contains valuable lists, which can be found nowhere else, of the 'auxiliary' regiments stationed in Britain (pp. 146-9 and 170-1). It is full, cheap, compact; every historical and archaeological library should get it.
(2) A learned and scholarly attempt to settle the obscure chronology of the north British frontiers in the fourth century has been made by Mr. H. Craster, Fellow of All Souls, and one of the excavators of Corbridge, in theArchaeological Journal(lxxi. 25-44). His conclusions are novel and, though to some extent disputable, are well worth printing. Starting from the known fact that, during much of the third century, the north frontier of Roman Britain coincided roughly with the line of Cheviot and was then withdrawn to the line of Hadrian's Wall, he distinguishes five stages in the subsequent history. (1) At or just before the outset of the fourth century, in the reign of Diocletian, the Wall was reorganized in some ill-recorded fashion. (2) Thirty years later, towards the end of Constantine's reign, about A.D. 320-30, it was (he thinks) further reorganized; perhaps its mile-castles were then discarded. (3) Thirty or forty years later still,after disturbances which (he conjectures) included the temporary loss of Hadrian's Wall and the destruction of its garrisons, Theodosius carried out in 369 a fuller reorganization. This garrison had consisted of the regiments known to us by various evidence as posted 'per lineam valli' in the third and early fourth centuries; their places were now filled by soldiers of whom we know absolutely nothing. (4) In 383 Maximus withdrew these unknown troops for his continental wars. Now perhaps the line of the Wall had to be given up, but Tyne and Solway, South Shields, Corbridge, and Carlisle were still held. (5) Finally, about 395-9, Stilicho ordered a last reorganization; he withdrew the frontier from the Tyne to the Tees, from Carlisle to Lancaster, and garrisoned the new line with new soldiery—those, namely, which are listed in the Notitia as serving under the Dux Britanniarum, save only the regiments 'per lineam valli'; these last the compiler of the Notitia borrowed from the older order to disguise the loss of the Wall. Even this did not last. In 402 Stilicho had to summon troops to Italy for home defence—among them, Mr. Craster suggests, the Sixth Legion—and in 407 the remaining Roman soldiers, including the Second Legion, were taken to the continent by Constantine III.
Every one who handles this difficult period must indulge in conjecture; Mr. Craster has, perhaps, indulged rather much. It might be simpler to connect the abandonment of the mile-castles—his stage 2—with the recorded troubles which called Constans to Britain in 343, rather than invent an unrecorded action by Constantine I. I hesitate also to assume for the period 369-83 an otherwise unknown frontier garrison, which has left no trace of itself. I feel still greater doubt respecting the years 383-99. Here Mr. Craster argues from coin-finds. No coins have been found on the line of the Wall which were minted later than 383, and none at Corbridge, Carlisle, and South Shields which were minted later than 395; therefore, he infers, the Wall was abandoned soon after 383, and the other sites soon after 395. This is too rigid an argument. It may be a mere accident that the Wall has as yet yielded no coin which was minted between 383 and 395. At Wroxeter, for example, two small hoards were found some years ago which had clearly been lost at the moment when the town was sacked. By these hoards we should be able to date the catastrophe. Now the latest coin in one hoard was minted in or before 377, and the latest in the other in or before 383. But newer finds show that Wroxeter was not destroyed at earliest till after 390. Again, as Mr. Craster himself says, the coining of Roman copper practically stopped in 395; after that year the older copperissues appear to have remained in use for many a long day. That is clear in Gaul, where coins later than 395 seem to be rare, although Roman armies and influences were present for another fifty years. When Mr. Craster states that 'archaeology gives no support to the theory that the Tyne-Solway line was held after 395', he might add that it gives equally little support to the theory that it was not held after 395.
Incidentally, he offers a new theory of the two chapters in the Notitia Dignitatum which describe the forces commanded by the Comes Litoris Saxonici and the Dux Britanniarum (Occ.28 and 40). It is agreed that these chapters do not exhibit the garrison of Britain at the moment when the Notitia was substantially completed, about A.D. 425, for the good reason that there was then no garrison left in the island; they exhibit some garrison which had then ceased to exist, and which is mentioned, apparently, to disguise the loss of the province. The question is, to what date do they refer? Mommsen long ago pointed out that the regiments enumerated in one part of them (the 'per lineam valli' section) are very much the same as existed in the third century. Seeck added the suggestion that these regiments remained in garrison till 383, when Maximus marched them off to the continent. According to him, the garrison of the Wall through the first eighty years of the fourth century was much the same as it had been in the third century, with certain changes and additions. Mr. Craster holds a different view. He thinks that most of the troops named in these chapters were due to Stilicho's reorganization in 395-9, but that one section, headed 'per lineam valli', records troops who had been in Britain in the third century and had been destroyed before 369. I cannot feel that he has proved his case. One would have thought that, when the compiler of the Notitia in 425 wanted to fill the gap left by the loss of the Wall, he would have gone back to the last garrison of the Wall, that is, on Mr. Craster's view, the garrison of 369-83, not to arrangements which had vanished some years earlier. But the problems of this obscure period are not to be solved without many attacks. We must be glad that Mr. Craster has delivered a serious attack; even if he has not succeeded, his scholarly discussion may make things easier for the next assailants.
(3) TheAntiquaryfor 1914 contains an attempt by Mr. W. J. Kaye to catalogue all the examples of triple vases of Roman date found in Britain. It also prints a note by myself (p. 439) on the topography of the campaign of Suetonius against Boudicca, which argues that the defeat of the British warrior queen occurred somewhere on Watling Street between Chester (or Wroxeter) and London.