Page:VCH London 1.djvu/66

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A HISTORY OF LONDON as cinerary urns, and it was no doubt to the former that certain bronze and jet bracelets belonged."^ These excavations began at the west end of Great AUe Street and extended right and left along Mansell Street, thus skirting the north-west angle of Goodman's Fields. In the immediate neighbourhood much has been found of the same character but the records are defective. Thus during excavations for the Inner Circle Railway various sepulchral relics were found near Church Street, west of Haydon Square. Adjoining John Street (on the opposite side of the Minories) a large quantity of remains were found with two black urns, while Roman human remains were met with on the city side of London Wall.'"* Nor can any deductions be drawn from the discovery near Tower Hill of a large adult skeleton, lying in the gravel beneath a stratum of black earth in which numerous fragments of Roman tiles and pottery were noticed.'"' Some fresh light is thrown on burials in this vicinity by several inscribed stones that have been recorded but not always preserved. Unfor- tunately no London specimen has been found in connexion with human remains, though at Colchester the grave-slab of a centurion, bearing his effigy, lay within a foot of a cinerary urn that doubtless held his ashes ; and at Uriconium a memorial slab was found among cremated burials beside the Roman highway. A few may reasonably be held to have been discovered in situ, and of these two come from Goodman's Fields, an area outside the eastern wall of the City that was used by the Romans as a burial-ground, probably long before the Wall was built. The first was a slab erected by Albia Faustina to her incomparable husband, Flavius Agricola of the sixth legion, aged 42 years and 10 days."" This inscription is interesting as affording a limiting date for the interment, as the sixth legion arrived in Britain about a.d. 120. The other from this cemetery was erected to Julius Valius of the twentieth legion, aged 40, by his heir Flavius Attius."' This legion had its head quarters at Chester and came over with Claudius, a.d. 43. In the Tower itself a block of stone with an inscription by Ascanius to the memory of Terentius Licinius was found under the Ordnance Office in 1777 ; "^ but, like the following, this may have been brought from the adjoining cemetery and used as material for the Wall. In 1852 a group of sepulchral fragments, described as a veritable quarry, was found in close proximity to the Wall on the east side of Trinity Square, in Postern Row (now removed).'" They are said to have been found on the outer or eastern side of the Wall,"* and were the spoil of a cemetery that had contained monuments of exceptional size and grandeur. The best preserved inscription is on a tall slab with floral ornaments, set up by the heir to Aulus Alfidius Olussa (?), who hved seventy years and (according to Mommsen's conjecture) was born at Athens. It is attributed to the second century, and the double cognomen on the next of the group points to the time of Domitian or Trajan."^' The stone is "" Journ. Brit. Arch. Asm. ii, 299. ^'^Joum. Brit. Arch. Asstc. xxxviii, 448. '"' Jourv. Brit. Arch. Assoc, xiii, 239. "° Tenter Ground, 1787 : Corf. Inscr. Latin, vii. No. 25 ; Coll. Antiq. i, 141. '"Church Lane (east of Goodman's Fields), 1776 : Corp. Inscr. Latin, vii. No. 27 ; Coll. Antiq. , pi. xlvi, fig. 2. p. 135 ; Gent. Mag. 1784, ii, 672. "■ Corf. Inscr. Latin, vii. No. 32. ; Arch, v, 304 ; Coll. Antiq. i, 140. '"Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc, viii, 241 (with view) : British Museum. "* Arch. Journ. x, 3. "^Corf. Inscr. Latin, vii. No. 29. "'• Corf. Inscr. Latin, vii, No 30. 26