Page:VCH London 1.djvu/59

 ROMANO-BRITISH LONDON Collectanea AntiquaJ^ His sound treatment of the subject may be here reviewed in the light of subsequent discoveries, and reproductions from his plates will facilitate description and comparison. Leaden coffins have frequently been found in Roman burial-grounds within the London area, but attention should first be directed to those ornamented with the scallop-shell pattern, in combina- tion with a peculiar form of moulding in relief. Two such coffins happen to have been found just outside the limits prescribed for this volume, but the Haydon Square and Old Kent Road specimens doubtless held the remains of persons who had lived within the area, and they can only be studied in connexion with similar discoveries at Smithfield, Battersea, Stepney and East Ham (Old Ford), and still further afield in Kent and Essex. Further than this we need not go, as the districts mentioned seem to contain all the extant British specimens. Here, as elsewhere in London, the records are defective, and little is known of the circumstances of their discovery except that the Haydon Square coffin was placed with the head at the east end, contrary to the Christian usage. Indeed, there is nothing in the decoration of the coffin or the stone sarcophagus that suggests the new faith, though the coin of Valens (d. 378) found near the burial belongs to a time when there may have been many converts in London. The expensive nature of this interment finds a good parallel further east. In Radcliffe Field (then belonging to Stepney parish) there were found early in the seventeenth century a stone coffin containing the skeleton of a man, and a chest of lead, ' the upper part garnished with scallop-shells and a crotister border.' At the head and foot of the leaden coffin were two jars 3 ft. high (evidently amphorae of the kind found at Old Ford), and beside it a number of Gallo-Roman red- ware bottles (some painted) and several glass bottles, 6 in. and 8 in. square, containing a whitish liquor, though resembling those used for cinerary urns. The remains within the coffin were those of a woman, with an ivory sceptre 18 in. long on either side, and on the breast a small figure of Cupid cut in white stone. Small jet pins lay among the bones (as in St. Paul's Churchyard), and a date for the burial is suggested by various coins of Pupienus, Gordian, and other emperors of about the same date (a.d. 238-44), though these were not necessarily connected with the interment here noticed. This is clearly not identical with the coffin found imperfect 9 ft. below the surface north of the London Docks in 1858,^* which lay east and west, but the direction of the head is not stated. In September 1749 a sewer was being dug at West Smithfield near the end of Hosier Lane (Plan A, 45), when at a fairly deep level in clayey gravel was found a leaden coffin about 4 ft. long, 21 in. broad, and 18 in. deep. It lay towards the buildings behind St. Sepulchre's Church, but its direction is not stated. Inside were some bones and skulls, which pointed to its use for "Vol. iii, 4.5 (pi. xiii, xiv) ; vii, 170 (pi. xix, xxa). Charles Roach Smith (1807-90) did much for the study of Roman Britain, and London in particular, at a time when research of this kind was not encouraged ; and collected the valuable series of antiquities that now form the basis of the Romano-British collection at the British Museum. He was a zealous and accomplished antiquary, and his Retro-pections show the difficulties he encountered in noting and preserving remains of Roman London (see Diet. Nat. Biog.). '* As suggested in Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc, xiv, 357. The earlier discovery was made in the north-east of St. Paul's parish ( that is near the angle of Love Lane and Cable Street), the later north of Shadwell Basin, near the south-west corner of the churchyard. 19