Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and PresentTimbs, John
History
Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present
Timbs, John
England -- Social life and customs
small silver Harpocrates, now in the British Museum.
Nowhere has the pottery of antiquity been so abundantly discovered as at
London. Roman kilns were brought to light in digging the foundations of
St. Paul's, in 1677; specimens of the Castor pottery have been found
here; Samian ware is abundant, as have been potters' stamps which
present 300 varieties, fragments of clay statuettes, terra-cotta lamps,
tiles, and glass; and among the Roman glass discovered in London are
several fragments of a flat and semi-transparent kind, which have every
appearance of having been used as window-glass. And still more curious
it is to find that specimens of a glass manufacture termed
pillar-moulding, and for which Mr. James Green took out a patent, have
also turned up among the _débris_ of the Roman city. Mr. Green's patent
had been worked for some years under the full belief that it was a
modern invention, until Mr. Apsley Pellatt recognised in the fragments
evidence of the antiquity of the supposed discovery.[10] Among the
personal ornaments and implements of the toilet are the gold armillæ dug
up in Cheapside in 1837; the tweezers, nail-cleaners, mirrors, and
strigils of the city dames of Londinium; the worn-out sandals thrown
upon the dust-heaps; the sporls, spindles, fishhooks, bucket-handles,
bells, balances, cocks, millstones, mortars, and other utensils which
show the resources of an opulent city in the enjoyment of ancient
luxury, and of the choicest appliances of ancient civilization. Of
Roman coins found in London, in the bed of the Thames, Mr. Roach Smith
enumerates 2,000; from gravel dredged from the Thames, 600 were picked
out; a hoard of denarii of the Higher Empire was found in the city; and
vast quantities were found in removing the piers of old London Bridge.
In excavating for the foundations of the new Royal Exchange, in 1841,
was discovered a gravel pit, supposed by Mr. Tite, the architect, to
have been dug during the earliest Roman occupation of London; and then
to have been a pond, gradually filled with rubbish. In it were found
Roman work, stuccoed and painted; fragments of elegant Samian ware; an
amphora, and terra-cotta lamps, seventeen feet below the surface; also
pine-wood table-books and metal styles, sandals and soldiers' shoes, a
Roman strigil, coins of Vespasian, Domitian, &c.; and almost the very
footmarks of the Roman soldier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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