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Found at Corbridge, in August 1914, fragment of a tile, 7 x 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 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.

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':

on the larger patera: P CIPE POLI

punctate: LICINIANI

Found at Holt, eight miles south of Chester , 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 inside a rude label

CESo NIANA

The centuries mentioned would of course be units from the Twentieth Legion at Chester.

Found at Holt late in 1914, a fragment of tile with parts of two lines of writing scratched on it.

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.

Found at Lincoln in 1906, on the site of the Technical Schools extensions , 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.

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.

Found in London near the General Post Office in a rubbish-pit , 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; is repeated twice.

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.

I add here a note on a Roman milestone found in 1694 near Appleby and lately refound.

C. PUBLICATIONS RELATING TO ROMAN BRITAIN IN 1914

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.

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 . 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 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.

The latter periodical also contains Mr. H. Gray's Fifth Report on the gradual exploration of the Roman amphitheatre and the underlying prehistoric remains at Maumbury Rings, Dorchester--now substantially concluded--and an interesting little note on the New Forest pottery-works by Mr. Sumner .

Mr. Karslake also notes that the outer entrenchment at Silchester, which is thought to be pre-Roman, does not coincide with the south-eastern front of the Roman town-walls, as we have all supposed, but runs as much as 300 yards outside them.

See p. 62, below.

In the same journal Mr. J. W. Jackson lists some animal remains found among the Roman remains of Manchester .

In south Lincolnshire, between Ulceby and Dexthorpe, chance excavation has revealed tiles, potsherds, iron nails, and a few late coins on a site which has previously yielded Roman scraps . The tiles point to some sort of farm or other dwelling.

I am glad, further, to have been able to illustrate this paper by what I believe to be a better illustration of the Lanx than has been published before, and also to set out in more accurate fashion the curious legal history of the object after it was found.

Mr. Bushe-Fox's second Report on his excavations at Wroxeter deserves all the praise accorded to his first Report. I can only repeat what I said of that; it is an excellent description, full and careful, minute in its account of the smaller finds, lavishly illustrated, admirably printed, and sold for half a crown. The finds which it enumerates in detail I summarized in my Report for 1913, pp. 19-20--the temple with its interesting Italian plan, the fragments of sculpture which seem to belong to it, the crowd of small objects, the masses of Samian , the 528 coins; all combine to make up an admirable pamphlet.

A Roman well has been examined near Ham Farm, between Hassocks railway station and Hurstpierpoint. It was 38 feet deep, the upper part round and lined with local blue clay, the lower part square and lined with stout oak planks. The only object recorded from it is a 'first century vase', taken out at half-way down, which suggests that the well collapsed at an early date. Another well, flint-lined, was noted near but not explored; Roman potsherds were picked up not far off . The remains probably belong to a farm detected close by in 1857 . Traces of Roman civilized life are comparatively common in this neighbourhood.

As the exploration of this site appears to be closed for the present, and indeed is nearly complete, it may be convenient to give a conspectus of the whole in a small plan .

The fourth volume issued by the Welsh Monuments Commission enumerates the few Roman remains of Denbighshire. The one important item is the group of tile and pottery kilns lately excavated by Mr. A. Acton at Holt, eight miles south of Chester, which I have described above ; the Commissioners' plan of the site seems to have an incorrect scale. Chance finds, important if not yet fully understood, have been found in British camps at Pen-y-corddin, Moel Fenlli, Moel y Gaer, and especially at Parc-y-Meirch or Dinorben . Isolated coins have been found scantily--a hoard of perhaps 6,000 Constantinian copper at Moel Fenlli, a gold coin of Nero from the same hill, another coin of Nero at Llanarmon, 200-300 Constantinian at Llanelidan. A parcel of bronze 'cooking vessels' was found near Abergele but has unfortunately disappeared. The index also mentions coins under 'No. 458', which does not appear in the volume itself. A Roman road probably ran across the county from St. Asaph to Caerhyn ; its east end is pretty certain, as far as Glascoed, though the 'Inventory' hardly makes this clear.

The well-known and remarkable earthworks at Birrenswark, near Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire, have long been explained as a Roman circumvallation or at least as siege-works round a native hill-fort. In 1913 they were visited by Prof. Schulten, of Erlangen, the excavator of a Roman circumvallation round the Spanish fortress of Numantia; they naturally interested him, and he has now described them for German readers and added some remarks on their date. His description is clear and readable; his chronological arguments are less satisfactory. He adopts the view generally adopted by English archaeologists for the last two centuries, that these camps date from Agricola; he supports this old conclusion by reasons which are in part novel. I may summarize his position thus: Two Roman roads led from the Tyne and the Solway to Caledonia, an eastern road by Corbridge and Newstead, and a western one by Annandale and Upper Clydesdale. On the eastern road, a little north of Newstead, is the camp of Channelkirk; on the western are the three camps of Torwood Moor , Tassie's Holm , and Cleghorn in Clydesdale, near Carstairs. These four camps are--so far as preserved--of the same size, 1,250 x 1,800 feet; they all have six gates ; they all have traverses in front of the gates; lastly, Torwood Moor is fourteen Roman miles, a day's march, from Tassie's Holm, and that is twenty-eight miles from Cleghorn. Plainly they belong to the same date. Further, Agricola is the only Roman general who used both eastern and western routes together; accordingly, these camps date from him. Finally, as Birrenswark is near Torwood Moor, it too must be Agricolan.

Dr. Schulten has not advanced matters by this speculation. His first point, that the four camps are coeval, and his reasons for that idea, are mainly taken from Roy--he does not make this clear in his paper. But he has not heeded Roy's warnings that the reasons are not cogent. Actually, they are very weak. At Channelkirk, only two sides of a camp remained in Roy's time; they measured not 1,250 x 1,800 feet but 1,330 x 1,660 feet, and the longer side had one gate in the middle, not two; to-day, next to nothing is visible. At Tassie's Holm there was only a corner of a perhaps quite small earthwork--not necessarily Roman--and the distance to Torwood Moor is nearer twenty than fourteen Roman miles. At Torwood Moor only one side, 1,780 feet long with two gates, was clear in Roy's time; the width of the camp is unknown. Cleghorn seems to have been fairly complete, but modern measurers give its size as 1,000 x 1,700 feet. Dr. Schulten builds on imaginary foundations when he calls these four camps coeval. He has not even proof that there were four camps.

Nor is his reason any more convincing for assigning these camps, and Birrenswark with them, to Agricola. Here he parts company from Roy and adduces an argument of his own--that Agricola was the only general who used both eastern and western routes. That is a mere assertion, unproven and improbable. Roman generals were operating in Scotland in the reigns of Pius and Marcus and Septimius Severus; if there were two routes, it is merely arbitrary to limit these men to the eastern route. As a matter of fact, the history of the western route is rather obscure; doubts have been thrown on its very existence north of Birrens. But if it did exist, the sites most obviously connected with it are the second-century sites of Birrens, Lyne, and Carstairs; at Birrenswark itself the only definitely datable finds, four coins, include two issues of Trajan.

The truth is that the question is more complex than Dr. Schulten has realized. Possibly it is not ripe for solution. I have myself ventured, in previous publications, to date Birrenswark to Agricola--for reasons quite different from those of Dr. Schulten. But I would emphasize that we need, both there and at many earth-camps, full archaeological use of the spade. The circumstances of the hour are unfavourable to that altogether.

POSTSCRIPT

The following list enumerates the archaeological and other periodicals published in these islands which sometimes or often contain noteworthy articles relating to Roman Britain. Those which contained such articles in 1914 are marked by an asterisk, and references are given in square brackets to the numbered paragraphs in the preceding section .

BERKSHIRE.

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.

CAMBRIDGESHIRE.

CHESHIRE.

See also Lancashire.

CORNWALL.

See also Devon.

CUMBERLAND.

DERBYSHIRE.

DEVON.

DORSET.

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