Chapter 3
(xix) At _East Grimstead_, five miles south-east from Salisbury, on Maypole Farm near Churchway Copse[5], 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 foundations have 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.
[Footnote 5: The words Church, Chapel, and Chantry often form parts of the names of Roman sites, where the ruined masonry has been popularly mistaken for that of deserted ecclesiastical buildings.]
(xx) Three miles south-west of Guildford, at Limnerslease in the parish of _Compton_, 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]
[Footnote 6: I may refer to my _Romanization of Britain_ (third edition, p. 77). This does not, of course, mean that they were not also occupied earlier.]
(xxi) A third house is supplied by Kent. This was found in June about six miles south of Gravesend, near the track from _North Ash_ to 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 stamped MARTINVSF), 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.[7] That, 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 the _Victoria History of Hants_ (i. 302-3, 312), and which were perhaps rudimentary forms of the Carisbrooke type.
[Footnote 7: It has been styled the 'basilical' type, but few names could be less suitable.]
(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 (see _Sussex 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 in _Bonner 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.
B. ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS FOUND IN BRITAIN IN 1914
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:--
Possibly DIO may be for _deo_. It is by no means a common orthography, but if it be accepted, we can read _dio [s(ancto) Ma]rti_.... The reading DIIO, _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.
VICTORIAE (only bottom of final E visible) ET....IVL (ET probable, IVL fairly certain) MEIANIC (only M quite certain) II........C (erased on purpose) PVBLICO V . S . L _m_
The altar was dedicated to Victory; nothing else is certain. It is tempting to conjecture in line 2 ET N AVG, _et numinibus Augustorum_, as on some other altars to Victory, but ET is not certain, though probable, and N AVG is 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).
_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 the _vicus_ of 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 Divinity of the Emperors being practically the same thing. The formula _numinibus Aug._ is very common in Britain, though somewhat rare elsewhere; in other provinces its place is supplied by the formula _in honorem domus divinae_; it belongs mostly to the late second and third centuries. The plural _Augustorum_ does 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.
The _vicani Vindolandesses_ are 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 term _vicus_, even if it was not all that a proper _vicus_ should be. This altar was put up at the vote of their 'parish meeting' and paid for, one imagines, out of their common funds. The term _vicus_ is applied to similar settlements outside forts on the German Limes; thus we have the _vicani Murrenses_ at the fort of Benningen on the Murr (CIL. xiii. 6454) and the _vicus Aurelius_ or _Aurelianus_ at Oehringen (_ibid._ 6541).
_Vindolandesses_, which is merely a phonetic spelling or misspelling of _Vindolandenses_, 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 _-lana_ is an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination _-landa_ is 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 adjective _vindos_, '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 exhortation _lege 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 my _Romanization of Roman Britain_ (ed. 3, pp. 29-34).
The imperfectly preserved letter after Q in line 1 was perhaps an angular L or E; that after D, in line 2, may have been M or N or even A.
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':
(_a_) on the larger patera: P CIPE POLI
(_b_) on the smaller: _p_OLYBI·I
(_c_) punctate: LICINIANI
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 the _Archaeological Journal_, xlix, 1892, pp. 228-31; they have since been treated more fully by H. Willers (_Bronzeeimer von Hemmoor_, 1901, p. 213, and _Neue 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. The E in the first stamp seems clear on the rubbing; all other examples have here I· or I. In the second stamp, the conclusion might be BI·F. The _graffito_ was first read INVINDA; 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
[C]CESo NIANA
_c(enturia) C(a)esoniana_, set up by the century under Caesonius.
[Transcribers Note: The bracketed "C" above is printed reversed in the original.]
Like another centurial stone found some time ago at Holt (Eph. Epigr. ix. 1035), this was not found _in 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 | _fol_- | _iat_- IND | _ion_. ____|__________
No doubt one should prefix L to IND. 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_) [TE]C·PAGA... _and_ ..C·PA..
(_b_) CS _or_ CB
The first stamp seems to include a name in the genitive, perhaps _Pacati_, but I do not know what TEC means.
[Transcribers Note: The bracketed [TE] above is a "TE" ligature.]
(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 read O·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's _Britannia_, gen. top. 128 = MS. 17653, fol. 44 _v._--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.[8] This 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.
[Footnote 8: As to Bainbridge see my paper in the _Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological Transactions_, new series, vol. xi (1911), pp. 343-78.]
The notice lay neglected till Hübner undertook to edit the Roman inscriptions of Britain, which he issued in the seventh volume of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_ in 1873. He included the milestone as No. 1179. But, with his too frequent carelessness--a carelessness which makes the seventh volume of the _Corpus_ far 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 letters RCO in line 2, LIPPO in 3, PHILIPPO in 8, IMO in 9, and I in 10 seem to be no longer visible but depend on Gough's copy.
IMPC[lambda]C SARIMARCO IV[L]IOPHILIPPO PIOFE[L]ICI INVICTO AVGVSTO _p_ERP ETMIVLPHILIPPO NOBILISSIMO CAESARI
[Transcribers Note: The bracketed "L" above are printed with the horizontal line slanted downwards.]