Part 7

In the British Museum there is a carved fragment of a highly decorated column which, I have little doubt, belonged to a Jove and Giant column. This stone was found built into the lower part of the City Wall along the river bank. Roach Smith, in whose collection it was, described it first in 1844 (_Archæol. Jour._, vol. i.) as: “A portion of a decorated stone which appears to have formed part of an altar.” Later he visited the Jove and Giant column near Autun, and in describing it in _Collectanea Antiqua_ (vol. vi.) he refers to our stone. Subsequently in the Catalogue of his collection he spoke of the stone as: “Fragment in green sandstone, with a trellis pattern with leaves and fruit. It appears to have formed part of a sepulchral monument, and was taken from the foundations of a Roman wall in Thames Street.” In saying this he doubtless had the Cussy monument in his mind, for that was understood to be a sepulchral monument. Our fragment is from a circular shaft which must have been about 2½ ft. in diameter. The surface is carved over with a pattern like a trellis of laths, in the interspaces of which appear leaves and bunches of grapes Fig. 54 is restored from the fragment).

There is another stone in the British Museum which also probably formed part of a Jove and Giant column (Fig. 55). This was found at Great Chesterford, an important Roman site in Essex. It is described as a “Basin with bas-reliefs of the Roman deities.” These figures have long ago been identified as four of the seven gods of the days of the week (Thos. Wright). The fragment was made into a basin in modern times; it is really half of an octagon, and on the top surface appear the sinkings for two big cramps which linked this to an adjoining similar stone (Fig. 56). For what is known of it, see Roach Smith’s account in _Collectanea Antiqua_ and the _Journal of the Archæological Association_, vol. iii. In the latter it is said that it is irregular and not semi-octagonal; but the breaking down of the upper part into the recesses which contain the reliefs gives the appearance of irregularity—that is all. The octagon was 3¾ ft. in diameter. One of the sides was blank. One-half of this blank side remains, and also half of the opposite side, which retains enough of the sculpture to show that the figure carried a spear over the right shoulder. The next figure, going clockwise, was Mercury; he had a mantle over his left shoulder and carried his wand; points remaining by his hair show that his cap was winged. The third figure was Jove, a mature figure with broad breast, bearded head, and long hair. The fourth figure, who carried a hand-mirror, was Venus. These figures agree very closely with a set of the planets arranged in similar order on a mosaic floor found at Bramdean, and by this comparison it is evident that the one with a spear was Mars. The eighth, or blank, side followed the figure of Venus, so that the series must have begun with Saturn, in the Roman way. We may now say that the eight sides contained figures of the Deities of the Days in proper order: Saturn, Sol, Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

Espèrandieu illustrates two stones from a very similar monument found in France at D’Yzeures (iv. p. 136). These are the halves of an octagon about 3 ft. 7 in. across which was built up in courses. One of the stones comes from a lower course, the other from an upper. The vertical joints ran from an angle to an angle so that they should not cut through the sculptures on the sides. These reliefs were “possibly the Divinities of the Days of the Week.” We have also in England remnants of a similar sculptured octagon which was built up in courses. These are in Northampton Museum, and are illustrated in _V.C.H._ One of two stones shows the tops of the heads of a series of figures, the other stone has their feet. They are described as “Two fragments of an octagonal monument having figures in shallow niches, possibly the Deities of the Days of the Week” (Haverfield, vol. i. p. 181). Both these stones were of little height, the upper one only contained the crowns of the heads of the figures and flat curves forming the tops of the niches (compare Fig. 56).

We are now in a position to restore the Chesterford octagon (Fig. 56). The heads of the figures on the stone in the British Museum are not complete, for a bed joint runs just over the eyes, and the crowns of the heads must have been on another stone, as at Northampton. Two other courses, at least, beneath what is represented by the existing fragment, would have been required to complete the figures, and indeed their feet were possibly on a narrow base-course, as at Northampton. The Chesterford stone and the fragments at Northampton must represent important Jove and Giant pillars. The size of the former, it should be observed, seems most suitable for a column shaft of about 2½ ft. in diameter, the size of the lattice column represented by the fragment in the British Museum (Fig. 54), which probably, as said above, was itself part of a Jove and Giant column. There is thus high probability that there were important Jove and Giant columns, having pedestals sculptured with the Deities of the Days, at London, Chesterford and Northampton. If this is so, such columns must have been frequently erected in Britain, and we may look for evidences for the existence of others.

In vol. iii. of _Collectanea_ Roach Smith illustrated a small highly decorated column found at Wroxeter, 13 in. in diameter. It was similar to the Cussy column in having a lattice pattern below and a scale pattern above. Here and there were little relief subjects—a Cupid and a youthful Bacchus with grapes. This was probably part of another Jove and Giant column, or at least of a single sepulchral column; there would hardly have been more than one so decorated.

Several pieces of small highly decorated columns have been found in London, which must, I think, have belonged to memorial pillars and not to edifices. One of these found in the Houndsditch bastion, only 9 in. in diameter, was decorated with a simple lattice pattern (Fig. 57). Another is in the London Museum, which, in the part preserved, has a scale pattern (Fig. 58). A third fragment, at the Guildhall, has again both lattice and scale patterns (Fig. 59).

Jove and Giant columns were doubtless sepulchral, but they were also religiously significant. They were intended to suggest ideas of the conquest of evil powers and of renewal. Dr. Haverfield was, I think, mistaken in the passage quoted above in speaking of the giant as a barbarian; he was rather a power of darkness, and this is brought out by a piece of British evidence. Figures of four such creatures, each terminating in two serpents, fill the corners of a mosaic floor found at Horkstow; they support a large circle divided into two rings and a centre; in the outer ring are Nereids and swimming creatures, in the inner one little genii with baskets of flowers, etc. The rings are divided into four parts by radial bands, and the general suggestion must be of the seasons and the cosmic order. The snake-legged creatures in the corners are the _Aloadæ_, the giants who attempted to scale Olympus by putting Pelion on Ossa. They are here in their proper places in the chaos outside the circle of the ordered world, “the wheel of nature.” This pavement helps to explain the general idea which led to the erection of Jove and Giant pillars, and shows that these ideas were current in Britain. The column is the world-axis set round by planets and seasons; above, the power of light and order hurls back the giant of gloom and strife (see Daremberg and Saglio, _Aloadæ_). In the foreign examples of the sculptured groups which rested on the capitals of the columns Jove sometimes had a wheel as his weapon, and wheels have been found carved in Roman altars in Britain. “The sides of two large altars to Jupiter at Walton House bear the thunderbolt for Jupiter and a wheel, which possibly equates the Jupiter of these altars with the Gaulish ‘wheel-god’” (Ward). An altar at Housesteads invokes the sun-god. The Jove and Giant pillars are evidence of a time when the old mythological names had been refitted to express ideas of good and evil, cosmic forces, and supposed planetary influences. The mosaic floors, as we shall see, provide further evidence of what was “higher thought” in third-century Roman Britain.

_Mausolea._—When the bastion of the City Wall in Camomile Street was destroyed, many sculptured stones from small but very richly decorated edifices were found. Price recognised that some of them must have belonged to an important sepulchral monument comparable with the Igel monument near Trèves. I saw, in 1912, some stones at Trèves which had a scale pattern cut on a roof-like slope, and soon after my return I noticed a stone of the same sort in the Guildhall Museum. Without having Price’s words in my mind I came to the conclusion that in the cemeteries of Londinium there must have been mausoleum-like monuments of the kind which the Museum at Trèves had shown me were common in the neighbourhood of that city. Several of these mausolea are now illustrated in Espèrandieu’s great work on the Roman sculptures of Gaul. In 1913 I offered a tentative restoration of a London monument of this type in the _Architectural Review_.

In Fig. 60 I have roughly sketched two stones at the Guildhall which evidently came from a mausoleum of the Trèves type, also a course from a fluted angle pilaster, showing part of an inscription. Compare No. 5153 in Espèrandieu’s work, where we find a similar scale pattern, angle pilasters bonded in courses with masonry, and the lettering of an inscription coming close up to the pilaster. Another stone at the Guildhall has a capital of a small angle pilaster on a similar course. This capital has heads set amongst the leaves almost exactly like the capitals of the Igel mausoleum at Trèves (see Fig. 61). Another stone at the Guildhall is part of a frieze in two bands, the upper one of festoons and the lower one of trees, and dogs coursing hares (Fig. 62). Similar hunting subjects are found on foreign monuments; the festoons and the scale of the work are also appropriate for a structure of the mausoleum kind, and these five stones may very well have belonged to the same monument (Fig. 63). On another stone at the Guildhall is part of an inscription in widely-spaced lines containing the letters ... R LXX, doubtless part of ANNOR LXX, which actually occurs on the tall headstone in the British Museum. At least two mausolea are probably represented by the stones at the Guildhall. Like the Igel monument, they were probably the tombs of rich merchants. There must have been a large number of tombs of this type in Britain. Bruce and Roach Smith illustrated and described foundations of three tombs by the Roman road near High Rochester, one circular and two square; the first was possibly big enough to have been a tomb-house. At Bath, some years ago, I noticed a stone which could only have been part of a square monument (Fig. 64). This had the tops of the niches cut like shells.

Another stone at the Guildhall, found like the others in the Camomile Street bastion, has a short length of a decorated angle column recessed as a “nook-shaft” and about a foot in diameter (Fig. 65). This, I think, must have formed part of a similar monument. (This stone is not, I think, given by Price, but it appears in an illustration in _J.B.A.A._)

The mausolea of Londinium must have been very similar to the monuments at Trèves, and it may not be doubted that they would have been coloured as some of those were coloured. (I have a note that sculpture, as well as the decorative carving, was coloured.) The braided work of Early Saxon monuments would have been “picked out” in colour in a similar way, and I believe that fragments which have been found prove this.

ALTAR-TOMBS

Another type of tomb, of which many examples exist in the Museum at Trèves, is an altar-like structure having a square body surmounted by a slab ending in two big bolster-like rolls covered with scale or leaf ornament (see Espèrandieu). Tombs of this type have been found in Pompeii. We have in the British Museum parts of a very fine monument of this class. One of two stones is a great roll, and another has an inscription in handsome letters. These were found together in the foundations of one of the bastions of the City Wall at Tower Hill, as described in _The Builder_, September 4, 1852. In the illustration which was reproduced before (Fig. 33), a pile of other stones is shown, one of which, a moulding with a return, may have been the base of the same monument. The inscribed stone in the British Museum shows that the body of the monument was made up of four stones arranged as in the plan (Fig. 66), and cramped together; the size of this part was probably 7 by 5 Roman feet. It was not a sarcophagus, as the form seems to suggest, but a chest in which an urn containing ashes was placed. The examples at Trèves show that it was lifted on a high base. The covering part of our monument was made up of three stones of which one of the two end-pieces is in the Museum. The two end-pieces had large volute-like rolls similar to those on altars—for example, the little altar of Diana at Goldsmiths’ Hall. On these altars the central part usually rises again between the rolls into a gable-like shape, and that this type was followed in our tomb is shown by several examples at Trèves, as well as by the existing end stone which was evidently one of three; the little relief decoration on the remaining edge is suitable to have followed from relief carving in the central stone (Figs. 66 and 67). This tomb was a work of high quality, but it is badly shown; the two stones could be set up together so as to show the size and importance of the monument. If this were done and the Haydon Square and Clapton sarcophagi were shown with it, we should obtain a better understanding of the monuments of Londinium.

Other memorials had sculptured figures. The hexagonal base of one of these found at Ludgate in 1806 (see before p. 71), and now at the Guildhall, bears an inscription in memory of Claudia Martina, aged nineteen years. A much-injured female head found with it is accepted as having belonged to the same monument, and a dowel hole on the pedestal confirms the idea that it supported a figure which was probably a portrait statue. It may be observed that the capping of the pedestal is cut with rolls in the tradition of the altar-tombs. The good form of the letters, and the formula beginning D.M. and ending H.S.E., date this monument about A.D. 100. I give in Fig. 68 a sketch from a careful etching published by Thos. Fisher in 1807. The ornamentation of the altar-like top can hardly be made out now, and even the inscription cannot be read in the imperfect light of the Guildhall Museum. A careful copy based on a rubbing should be put on record, for the surfaces of such stones are all the time falling away in dust.

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.

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.

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.

This examination of the few broken remnants of monuments that have been accidentally preserved, which obviously represent but a small percentage of those once existing in the cemeteries of Londinium, brings out a new criterion for an estimate of the dignity and opulence of the Roman city. To this evidence we may add the extent of the walls and the importance of the port, and the fact that the city was the key of the road system of the country. It was probably a seat of the Governor; in the Constantinian age it became a bishopric and a mint town. Then we have the quantity and costly nature of the imports which are known to us from objects in our museums—an immense quantity of Samian pottery, decorated glassware, silver, fine bronzes, etc. We also see how closely the monuments of London resembled those of Trèves, the later capital of Western Europe. Altogether I get the impression that Londinium must have been one of the most important commercial cities in the West. In the rote education of our schools, the great facts of our history are too much buried under an avalanche of minor details, and mere dates and names. If we can get a story written about Roman London, one scene must be set among the Tombs.

+CHAPTER VI+

SCULPTURE

“Fantastic and even grotesque, it possesses a wholly unclassical fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked that it recalls not the Roman world, but the Middle Ages.”

—HAVERFIELD on the Corbridge lion.

IMPERIAL STATUES