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an Upchurch saucer, a red bottle-shaped
vessel and a white one, a bow fibula enamelled in red and
yellow with a ring at the top (Cant. Olden Time, 38,
pl. ix, 4), a brooch of a type intermediate between the bow
and the plate, enamelled in red and green (ibid. p1. ix, 6), a
bronze chatelaine, 3½ in. long, enamelled in yellow and blue
or purple, Consisting of six pendent implements attached to a
disk-fibula (ibid. ix, i), and, lastly, some debris from a
rather smaller wooden box than that noticed above—six or
eight bronze knobs, a bronze bolt, a bronze ‘key-hole
scutcheon’ enamelled in red and yellow and with a little
ornamental hasp (Proc. Soc. Antiq. vi, 375, with
woodcut; Cant. Olden Time, bc. cit.; hence C. R. Smith,
Coll. Ant. vii, 202, p1. xx I have seen the chatelaine
and brooches in Cant. Mus.). Finally, in January 1873, a grave
yielded Samian and other potsherds and a noteworthy vessel of
yellow glass, some 12 in. high, with a long, narrow neck, an
elaborate handle, and a saucer or stand attached to its foot
(Brent in Proc. Soc. Antiq. vi, 153, 375, and Cant.
Olden Time, 39; the vessel is now destroyed). Canterbury
Museum also contains some large buff urns, grey saucers, etc.,
from this cemetery.
3. South-eastern quarter, St. Sepulchre’s,
on the Old Dover Road. This cremation cemetery lay about a
quarter of a mile outside Riding Gate. The spot most
definitely connected with it is the junction of Oaten Hill
with the Old Dover Road, near the presumed line of the Roman
road to Dover. Here its remains have been found 5 ft.
or 6 ft. beneath the present surface and below the medieval
graveyard of St. Sepulchre’s Nunnery. But it apparently
extended beyond this, though our authorities give no precise
indications of its area and merely call it ‘extensive.’ It
has long been. known. Hasted records urns from the ground east
of the Nunnery and also from an orchard near it (Hist. of
Kent (1799), iv, 451, 452; see also his Canterbury (1801),
i, 181). In 1844 an urn was found near here, 20 ft. from the
Old Dover Road and 4½ ft. below the surface (Brit. Arch.
Assoc. Canterbury Meeting, 1845, p. 330; Arch. Journ. i,
279). In November i 86o the builders of a house for Miss Wilks
found, below some skeletons of nuns, many urns and among them
Samian, Upchurch with incised pattern, a brown or black vase
with a pattern painted in white, and a red jug (Brent in Arch.
Cant. iv, 29, pl. i, figs. 10, 11 ; Cant. Olden Time, 33,
pl. iv. 4, and Museum Catal. no. 117). In the following
April excavations were undertaken here by the Kent
Archaeological Society, and a trench 7 ft. deep was dug across
ground undisturbed by medieval burials, parallel to the Old
Dover Road. The results have been recorded, somewhat meagrely,
by Mr. J. Brent. One grave, the only one described at all
fully, comprised a ‘mortuary urn,’ holding burnt bones; a
Samian saucer, 7 in. in diameter bearing the Central Gaulish
stamp RHOGENI (now in the
Kent Archaeological Society’s Museum at Maidstone; Brent
misread it RHOGENI); a
narrow-necked jug of light-coloured clay; a black saucer and
vase, and some corroded pieces of iron with decayed wood and
bronze studs adhering to them evidence of a chest to contain
the various vessels making up the grave furniture. Of the
other burials we know little in detail. ‘Mortuary urns,’
it seems, averaged l0 in, to 12 in. in height and 24 in. to 28
in. in circumference; instead of them, amphora were found two
or three times, and once a square glass jug with bones inside.
Samian was fairly common, including embossed bowls—one
stamped outside CINNA (Cinnamus)—plain
saucers stamped ALBINVS
and OF LVCCE, an ivy-leaf
saucer, a baby’s feeding-bottle with a nipple-spout.
Upchurch and ruder wares, one or two small glass vessels,
bronze styli and tweezers, a few coins of unrecorded dates,
and many nails complete the list. At a point described as
‘the north-western corner of the cemetery close to the
road,’ the excavators met with a wall of burnt clay, 12 in.
thick, partly inclosing a rectangular floor marked by burnt
ashes, which they took to be the ustrinum or
burning-place. Some unburnt bones were noticed below the Roman
incinerations, but they were too carelessly observed to
justify guessing about a pre-Roman graveyard. For these finds
see J. Brent in Arch. Cant. iv, 28-33, and plates iv,
vi; the baby’s bottle is also noted in Brit. Arch. Assoc.
Journ. xxvi, iii. Some common pottery from this site is or
was in Canterbury Museum, Catalogue, pp. 24, 26. Many
of the things found in i86i are in the Kent Archaeological
Society’s Museum at Maidstone, including the Pottery stamps.
4. Southern quarter, the Castle, Wincheap and
Martyrs’ Field. The largest cemetery of Romano-British
Canterbury lay to the south of the town. It covered some 35
acres, stretching from the Castle and the gasworks near it,
across the line of the medieval walls and the railway to the
newer gasworks, east of Wincheap Street, and including also
much of Martyrs’ Field. We may divide it into two halves—a
northern area of mound- and urn-burials round the Castle and
Wincheap Green, lying partially within the medieval walls, and
a southern area of inhumation lying generally Outside the
walls and round the railway station.
(a) Mound- and urn- burials Reference has
already been made (p. 62) to a group of mounds lying close
within and without the south-eastern part of the medieval
defences, in or near the district of Wincheap. The most famous
of them, the Dane John, still towers above the southernmost
angle of the defences Another (that which contained the bronze
axe) was destroyed during the making of the railway
immediately east of Canterbury East station in 1860. A third
lay apparently about 100 yds. south east of the Dane John and
is, perhaps, represented to-day by the rising ground beneath |