A HISTORY OF LONDON this case there is nothing to prove that the vessels had been used as cineraries. Below a corner of the mosaic pavement found in front of the East India House, Leadenhall Street (Plan A, 34), was found part of an urn together with a jawbone and some finger-bones. This may be classed as a burnt burial, though cremation should have reduced the bones to ashes, and little is made of it in the various accounts of this excavation (see Topog. Index). The onlv definite instance seems to be that recorded by Mr. Woodward in a letter to Wren.*^ In 1707 some old houses in Camomile Street adjoining Bishopsgate (Plan A, 35) were pulled down and a tessellated pavement found 4 ft. below the surface. Under this was 2 ft. of rubbish, then a layer of clay, 2 ft. deep, in which several urns were found. Many of these fell to pieces, but all that were preserved contained ' ashes and cinders of burn'd bones.' Among other small objects recovered at about the same depth was a coin of Antoninus Pius (i 38-1 61). For the Roman period interments are but one of several sources of information, and are comparatively less valuable than those of the succeeding period, when they furnish the bulk of our extant antiquities. Much, however, is to be learnt from the incinerations and inhumations of the period, both kinds of burial indicating to some extent what kinds of antiquities were contemporary and to what period they belong. In this country inscriptions are rarely found on cinerary urns, and the inscribed stone monuments erected over many interments of the kind have become dissociated in the course of centuries and often transported to a distance, so that the coins frequently found among the ashes of the dead no longer serve to date the monuments. The association of pottery and other remains is of greater archaeological value in the case of unburnt burials, which are frequently found complete and undisturbed ; yet within the London border only one sepulchral coffin with a legible inscription is preserved, and that by a strange accident is robbed of half its significance. Other examples, plain or sculp- tured, add little to the sum of knowledge. Perhaps the most interesting problem to consider in this connexion is that of the religious beliefs held by those whose remains have come to light after the lapse of so many centuries ; and apart from inscriptions or sacred emblems on the coffin, its orientation may throw some light on a question that historical records have left without a satisfactory answer. Of the burials in coffins of stone here under notice only nine have this detail put on record, six lying east-and-west (which corresponds to the Christian orientation), and three north-and-south.*^ Of the latter group, the position of the head is noted in one case (at Notting Hill), as being to the north ; and of the former one at least (at Lower Clapton) had the feet at the east end of the grave, as in the majority of Christian burials, whereas two bodies in an east- and-west coffin found at St. Bartholomew's Hospital were laid in opposite directions. The second stone coffin found at St. Bartholomew's Hospital was also east-and-west, but the position of the head is not stated, while the body " Leland, It'in. (Heame), viii, 13. '* Two others, at Old Ford, were (according to the plan) north-east by east and south-west hy west, the head in one instance being at the east end, while the other coffin contained three bodies, two facing one way ; Lond. an J MM. Anh. Soc. Trans, iii, pi. vi, figs. 2, 3, pp. 208, 21 1. 12
