Londinium, Architecture and the CraftsLethaby, W. R. (William Richard)
History
Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts
Lethaby, W. R. (William Richard)
England -- Antiquities, Roman; London (England) -- Antiquities, Roman; Romans -- England -- London
_Mausolea._—When the bastion of the City Wall in Camomile Street was
destroyed, many sculptured stones from small but very richly decorated
edifices were found. Price recognised that some of them must have
belonged to an important sepulchral monument comparable with the Igel
monument near Trèves. I saw, in 1912, some stones at Trèves which had a
scale pattern cut on a roof-like slope, and soon after my return I
noticed a stone of the same sort in the Guildhall Museum. Without having
Price’s words in my mind I came to the conclusion that in the cemeteries
of Londinium there must have been mausoleum-like monuments of the kind
which the Museum at Trèves had shown me were common in the neighbourhood
of that city. Several of these mausolea are now illustrated in
Espèrandieu’s great work on the Roman sculptures of Gaul. In 1913 I
offered a tentative restoration of a London monument of this type in the
_Architectural Review_.
[Illustration:
FIG. 61.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 62.
]
In Fig. 60 I have roughly sketched two stones at the Guildhall which
evidently came from a mausoleum of the Trèves type, also a course from a
fluted angle pilaster, showing part of an inscription. Compare No. 5153
in Espèrandieu’s work, where we find a similar scale pattern, angle
pilasters bonded in courses with masonry, and the lettering of an
inscription coming close up to the pilaster. Another stone at the
Guildhall has a capital of a small angle pilaster on a similar course.
This capital has heads set amongst the leaves almost exactly like the
capitals of the Igel mausoleum at Trèves (see Fig. 61). Another stone at
the Guildhall is part of a frieze in two bands, the upper one of
festoons and the lower one of trees, and dogs coursing hares (Fig. 62).
Similar hunting subjects are found on foreign monuments; the festoons
and the scale of the work are also appropriate for a structure of the
mausoleum kind, and these five stones may very well have belonged to the
same monument (Fig. 63). On another stone at the Guildhall is part of an
inscription in widely-spaced lines containing the letters ... R LXX,
doubtless part of ANNOR LXX, which actually occurs on the tall headstone
in the British Museum. At least two mausolea are probably represented by
the stones at the Guildhall. Like the Igel monument, they were probably
the tombs of rich merchants. There must have been a large number of
tombs of this type in Britain. Bruce and Roach Smith illustrated and
described foundations of three tombs by the Roman road near High
Rochester, one circular and two square; the first was possibly big
enough to have been a tomb-house. At Bath, some years ago, I noticed a
stone which could only have been part of a square monument (Fig. 64).
This had the tops of the niches cut like shells.
[Illustration:
FIG. 63.
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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