Great Britain -- Antiquities, Roman; Romans -- Great Britain
(34) In his handsome volume, _Wookey Hole, its caves and cave-dwellers_
(London, 1914), Mr. H. E. Balch collects for general antiquarian readers
the results of his long exploration of this Mendip cave; some of these
results were noted in my Report for 1913, p. 47. The cave, as a whole,
contained--besides copious prehistoric remains--two well-defined Roman
layers, with many potsherds, including a little Samian and one Samian
stamp given as PIIR PIIT OFII (apparently a new variety of Perpetuus),
broken glass, a few fibulae and other bronze and iron objects, and
106 coins. These coins are:--1 Republican (124-103 B.C., Marcia),
1 Vespasian, 1 Titus, 1 Trajan, 2 Hadrian, 2 Pius; then, 3 Gallienus,
1 Salonina, 1 Carausius, 2 Chlorus, 1 Theodora, 6 Constantinopolis,
1 Crispus, 4 Constantine II, 4 Magnentius, 4 Constantius II, with 20
Valentinian I, 14 Valens, 21 Gratian, 7 Valentinian II, and 6 illegible.
Just two-thirds of the coins are later than A.D. 364; they may be set
beside the late hoard found at Wookey Hole in 1852, which Mr. Balch
might well have mentioned. Plainly, the later Roman layer in the cave
belongs to the end of the fourth century. The date of the other layer is
harder to fix, since we are not told how the coins and potsherds were
distributed between the layers. Probably the cave was long inhabited
casually but in the troubled time of the latest Empire became a place of
refuge or otherwise attracted more numerous occupants. That, if true, is
a more interesting result that Mr. Balch realizes. For in general the
cave-life of Roman Britain belonged to the first two or three centuries
of our era; it is only rarely, and mostly in the west country, that the
caves contain among their Roman relics objects of the late fourth
century (see _Victoria Hist. Derbyshire_, i. 233-42). I must add that
Mr. Balch repeats on pp. 57-8 the error about the significance of the
Republican coin which was noted in my Report for 1915.
(35) The _Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural
History Society_ for 1913 (vol. lix, Taunton, 1914) record small Roman
finds at Bratton and Barrington (part i, pp. 24, 65, 76, and part ii, p.
79), and describe in detail Mr. Gray's trial excavations at Cadbury
Castle. Cadbury, it seems, was occupied mainly in the Celtic period,
before the Roman conquest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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