ROMAN LONDON

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 110, 7 February 1928, Page 10

ROMAN LONDON

CEMETERY’ DISCOVERED. The remains of Roman London lie about 18 feet below the present level of the city; roughly one foot of debris has accumulated every 100 vears since the Roman legions left Britain in A.D. 408 (says the correspondent of the “Argus”). The great business premises which are being built in all the chief thoroughfares necessitate foundations which not onlv cut through the Roman stratum, but reach the undisturbed clay below. During the last few days a deep cutting in Shoe Lane revealed a most interesting discovery on the site of the new office of the “Daily Express.” Excavating a deep pit in which to bed printing presses, navvies came upon the remains of a Roman cemetery, about 19 feet below the ground level. Twentv’ burial urns were unearthed, each contiining the bones of a Roman. The urns were of grey-brown clay, and many were broken by earth pressure, but eight were recovered uninjured. They are from 10 to 15 inches high, and are decorated with a familiar criss-cross pattern. It would seem that a funeral pyre was lighted nearby, upon which bodies of Hie Roman dead were placed. In several cases, however,-the heat was not sufficient to destroy the bones. They were thrust into the urns intact, and they can still be rocognised. Finally the urns were placed in rows and buried. The eight urns have been given to the London Museum They will supplement a number of sepulchral urns found in other parts of Old London, most of which are in the Guild Hall Museum. Earlier, a Roman burial ground was found when the foundations of Charing Cross Hospital were being dug; another was excavated in the Strand, close by the Church of St. Martin’s in the Fields, Trafalgar Square. It would seem, therefore, that burials at the side of the highway running westward to Westminster were relatively early in London history. The date of the Shoe Lane burials seems to be the first part of the second century, so that there must have bten a cemetcrv on the London-Bath road, even before London Wall was built, the Roman Wall beiny usually dated late in the Roman occupation. Several sections of the Roman Wall have been excavated, and they can be seen to-day, notablv in a garden attached to the General Post Office, and in the churchyard of St. Giles, Crinplegate. It is possible to follow the whole course of the wall merely by goimr round the route of the Underground railway, which chances to lie just outside the Citv wall, as is shown bv -the names of the stations—• Aidgate, Bishopsgate, and Cripplegate.