Great Britain -- Antiquities, Roman; Romans -- Great Britain
(xix) At _East Grimstead_, five miles south-east from Salisbury, on
Maypole Farm near Churchway Copse[5], a bath-house has been dug out and
planned by Mr. Heywood Sumner, to whom I owe the following details. The
building (fig. 12) measures only 14 x 28 feet and contains only four
rooms, (1) a tile-paved apartment which probably served as entrance and
dressing-room, (2) a room over a pillared hypocaust, which may be called
the tepidarium, (3) a similar smaller room, nearer the furnace and
therefore perhaps hotter, which may be the caldarium--though really it
is hardly worth while to distinguish between these two rooms--and (4) a
semicircular bath, lined with pink mortar and fine cement, warmed with
flues from rooms 3 and with box-tiles, and provided with an outfall
drain; east of rooms 3 and 4 was the furnace. Small finds included
window glass, potsherds, two to three hundred oyster-shells, and five
Third Brass coins (two Constantinian, three illegible). Large stone
foundations have been detected close by; presumably this was the
detached bath-house for a substantial residence which awaits excavation.
Such detached bath-houses are common; I may instance one found in 1845
at Wheatley (Oxon.), which had very similar internal arrangements and
stood near a substantial dwelling-house not yet explored (_Archaeol.
Journal_, ii. 350). A full description of the Grimstead bath, by Mr.
Sumner, is in the press.
[Footnote 5: The words Church, Chapel, and Chantry often form parts of
the names of Roman sites, where the ruined masonry has been popularly
mistaken for that of deserted ecclesiastical buildings.]
(xx) Three miles south-west of Guildford, at Limnerslease in the
parish of _Compton_, Mr. Mill Stephenson has helped to uncover a house
measuring 53 x 76 feet, with front and back corridors, and seven rooms,
including baths. Coins suggested that it was inhabited in the early
fourth century--a period when our evidence shows that many
Romano-British farms and country-houses were occupied.[6]
[Footnote 6: I may refer to my _Romanization of Britain_ (third edition,
p. 77). This does not, of course, mean that they were not also occupied
earlier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 13. HOUSE AT NORTH ASH, KENT]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account