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watercourses which were both wider and more
winding than a town ditch and which were apparently open in
Roman times. Perhaps, therefore, the east and south-east as
well as the north-west front of Durovernum may have been
skirted by river channels during at least some part of the
Roman period. Burials were discovered in one of the deposits
(p. 77), and this may indicate that part at least of these
channels dried up in or before Roman times. Unfortunately, no
one troubled to record precisely the position of the burials,
and arguments from them are therefore dangerous.
The manner in which this area was built over is
no better known to us than its boundaries and defences. Of the
Roman streets we are wholly ignorant. During the drainage
works many old road surfaces were noted beneath the present
streets. But none of them possessed decisively Roman features.
Even those under Beercart Lane and Watling Street, which have
been confidently styled Roman, have yet to be proved deserving
of the epithet, and most of the existing streets are plainly
not Roman, since Roman walling has been found beneath them. It
is plain that, as a whole, the present street-plan of
Canterbury bears little relation to that of Durovernum. The
plans and sizes of the Roman houses are no less obscure. The
house walls unearthed in the drainage works were in great part
of uncertain age. Even if we accept the majority of them as
Roman, they are too fragmentary and too detached to yield
either any plans of houses or any clue to frontages, streets
or roads. They prove that the site was built upon. Beyond
that, the one fact noticeable is that their direction is not
uniform. The Roman walls under High Street and the Parade run
in general north-east and south-west; others, under St.
Margaret’s Street, Butchery Lane, Sun Street, Stour Street,
run east and west. If all these represent Roman houses, the
buildings of Durovernum faced divers ways like those of
Silchester.
We can trace a few of these houses. One stood at
the lower, north-western end of High Street, near the present
County Hotel. Here masonry and fragments of mosaics indicate a
private house on the extreme north-west of the Roman area. The
chief mosaic possesses some individual interest. It is—or,
rather, was—a fragment measuring 4 ft. by 8 ft., found about
1758 on the site of the Hotel, and decorated with a noteworthy
design. In the centre is a doorway with semicircular head in
which the voussoirs are alternately dark and light coloured,
according to a not uncommon Roman fashion (p. 48). On each
side is a large conventional flower, worked carefully in
various shades of red and brown. These flowers are out of all
proportion to the size of the door if regarded as actual
blooms; but they perhaps symbolize flowering shrubs placed to
flank an entrance. A little further up the street, in front of
the Fleur-de-Lis Hotel, some oolite columns and cornices may
indicate a small temple. At the junction of High Street and
St. Margaret’s Street, Roman walls and burnt wheat and wood
point to a house or shop with a wooden loft or shed for
storing grain. A bit of plain tessellation found in front of
the Fleece Inn, in the Parade, testifies to another house, and
some remains suggestive of a hypocaust add another at the
corner of Butchery Lane and the Parade. On the south-west of
High Street we can cite a plain tessellated floor in front of
the Fountain Hotel, some vestiges of a hypocaust at the
junction of Hospital Lane and Castle Street, the floor and
painted plaster of (it may be) a half-timbered house at the
meeting-point of Rose |