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work which can be paralleled
from Roman Kent. They occur together in the Dover Pharos (p.
48), and alternately coloured voussoirs are depicted on a
Canterbury mosaic (p. 68). These arguments look better on
paper than in fact. The walls of St. Martin’s nave are rude
work, much more suggestive of Saxon than of the simplest Roman
building. The red plaster is a Saxon as well as a Roman
material. The alternation of voussoirs occurs in early
medieval work abroad, if not in England, and at St. Martin’s
it is carried out with so little intelligence that it differs
markedly from the Roman fashion. But the decisive evidence
against a Roman date for the St. Martin’s nave seems to have
been provided by excavation; the nave is shown thereby to be
later than the Saxon brickwork of the chancel (Arch. Cant. xxii,
21; Arch Journ. liii, 279; lviii, 415).
No other structural remains seem to have been
found near St. Martin or, indeed, anywhere in this part of the
suburb. Brent, indeed, mentions a mosaic as found in ‘St.
Martin’s parish’ and gives Somner as his authority (Arch.
Cant. iv; 38; Cant. Olden Time, 28). But I can find
no such statement in Somner, and perhaps Brent has misread his
reference to the mosaic in St. Margaret’s parish. Apart from
that, only one Roman find has come to light in this
quarter—a fibula and some potsherds found in December 1864
‘in the grounds abutting on St. Martin’s churchyard’
(Brent in Proc. Soc. Antiq. Ser. II, iii, 55; vi,
377; Cant. Olden Time, 30, 46, plate; C. R. Smith, Coll.
Antiq. vii, 203, plate; fibula in Cant. Mus.). The fibula
is an interesting piece—a circular disc of pierced work,
enamelled in blue (or purple) with a red pattern in the
middle. The general character of the find, whether sepulchral
or other, is not recorded.
It would seem, according to our present
knowledge, that the general neighbourhood of St. Martin’s
Church was not occupied by any Roman building, secular or
sacred. It was, indeed, as we know (p. 79), the site of one of
the principal cemeteries of Roman Canterbury. If, therefore,
there is anything in Bede’s statement, we may perhaps take
it to imply that there stood here in Roman times a small
Christian chapel built for funerary uses or in association
with the grave of some Christian martyr. For the normal uses
of the Roman Christian congregation the site is an unlikely
one. The analogies of Silchester and, more especially, of
other towns in other provinces would lead us to look within
Durovernum itself for the conventicle of local Christianity.
It may be that Bede was entirely wrong and that the building
of St. Martin’s was due to quite different circumstances. We
may wonder whether the positions of St. Pancras and St.
Martin’s were determined rather by the existence of an early
Saxon settlement without the walls. The English do not appear
to have occupied the town itself till a comparatively late
date. Their great cemeteries lie some three or four miles off
to the south-east, and they may have lived outside the Roman
walls until intercourse with France and the introduction of
Christianity from that country brought higher civilization in
the latter half of the 6th century. It will be observed that
the distance of St. Martin’s from the town—under half a
mile—would permit the carriage of such Roman bricks as were
needed for the little church.
On the south side of Canterbury, between the
Dover Road and Wincheap, Roman remains are common, but they
are almost wholly sepulchral (p. 77). Some silver and iron
rings, bronze fibulae, a bronze ‘ligula,’ and potsherds
were discovered in 1876’ in the water of the Silver
Spring’ in excavating for the Whitehall Swimming Bath (Cant.
Olden Time, 31, 49, plates ii, 9; xviii, 5). They
may conceivably represent offerings thrown into the spring in
Romano-British times, but our accounts of the find are too
vague to do more than suggest the possibility. The structural
remains noted in this quarter are few and unsatisfactory.
Pillbrow found, 9 ft. below the Old Dover Road, the
tops of four parallel walls running directly across the line
of the Street and separated by intervals of 40 ft. to 6o ft. (Arch.
xliii, 158), but their age and use is not plain; they are
too far apart for piers of a causeway. The ‘amphitheatre’
in Martyrs’ Field, the mill near the Southern railway bridge
over the Stour, and the ‘ Roman
camp’ on the higher ground of Whitehall, though it yielded
two gold Coins of Gallienus and Valerian in 1876 (Cant.
Olden Time, 24; Arch. Cant. xi, 417), seem all
unproven, and the first two are highly improbable.
We turn now to the cemeteries of Roman
Canterbury.
1. North-western quarter: St. Dunstan’s.—A
cemetery covering some 20 acres and containing only
cremation burials existed on the north-west of Canterbury,
near the Roman road to London.
combined with opus reticulatum, on an arch of the Aqua
Claudia in the upper Anio valley; both these instances belong
to the first century A.D. For another (undatable) example,
also on an aqueduct, see Papers of the British &
School at Rome, iii, 147, fig. 14. In Gaul the
device occurs in the Imperial Palace at Trier (about A.D. 300)
and in many undatable buildings; see illustrations in de
Caumont, Abecedaire (ed. 1870), pp. 54, 170, 366, etc.;
Bonnin, Vieil-Evreaux atlas, plate x, D and E; Blanchet,
Enceintes, plate 12, etc. Its use in the later Empire
perhaps represents the same feeling which prompted the
ornamental masonry and brickwork of the Cologne Römerturm and
the Richborough walls (p. 30). In post-Roman architecture it
developed into definite Polychromy on the Continent, as in the
early churches of Lorch (near Mainz) and Andernach. But it is
very rare in England. The Saxon chapel of Stone, near
Faversham, shows a hint of it. |