Tim Tatton-Brown
Current Archaeology, June 1978
Four major excavations took place in and around Canterbury in 1977. Although the Canterbury Archaeological Trust was one of the last of the major urban units to be established, and thus receives only a fraction of the funds from the DoE that the other major urban units receive, yet with the help of Job Creation Programmes, local government and industry, and a good deal of improvisation, it was possible to carry out a major series of excavations. Several outstanding discoveries have been made: firstly the chance discovery of an irregular burial, in which two Roman soldiers had apparently been murdered and thrown into a pit, swords and all; secondly a stretch of the Roman city wall has been located still standing up to parapet height; while a third major discovery was made, not under the ground, but 50 feet up in the air, in the roof of Canterbury Cathedral.
The year started with Stage 2 of the Canterbury Castle excavation. The castle, which was a fine royal structure in the southern part of the walled city dating back to at least 1086, suffered the indignity in the early 19th century of being turned into the gas and waterworks, and the superb Norman keep of c 1100 was used as a coke store. This meant that a great deal of the site had already been totally destroyed by large tanks, basements and concrete foundations and that, even worse, the site was extremely badly polluted with tars, phenols, cyanates, etc., which oozed into every trench and made it the smelliest site I have ever excavated. A Hymac mechanical digger was used to clear away as much rubble as possible and show what, if any, survived of the archaeology underneath. Initially we were disappointed to find that in many parts of the site only the bottoms of Roman and Saxon pits survived, together with the lower half of the Norman castle ditch.
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Later, however, we were lucky and found that in one area a complete Roman sequence had survived, overlain with black soil (Saxon agriculture?). Down the middle of this area ran a fine Roman road which had remained in use throughout the Roman period, being continuously remetalled. In the early Roman period, the road lay outside the Roman town and a cremation cemetery was laid out to one side of it. However after the area was included within the late 3rd-century city walls, timber buildings were laid out over the earlier cemetery. One of these buildings had a timber-lined well, which contained fragments of carved Roman wood painted red, possibly from a piece of furniture.
The earliest feature on the site was a long straight ditch of military type, containing a dead horse and several fragments of human corpses, including an isolated head. In two cases the bones displayed sword cuts. A fine collection of Samian, including a good number of stamps, suggests a date of around AD 60. Is this the aftermath of the Boudican revolt? If so then this is the first positive evidence from Canterbury. Or does the ditch go back to the conquest period? By far the most important find on the site, however, was an extraordinary burial of two Roman soldiers. This lay within the earlier Roman cremation cemetery and, contrary to garbled press reports, had nothing to do with the later houses laid out on top. The burial consisted of two fully grown males who had been very roughly thrown into an irregularly cut pit. The lower skeleton was face downwards with its lower limbs bent backwards, and above it was another skeleton on its side with its legs and head bent back to fit into the grave. Finally in the top of the grave were two Roman swords (perhaps auxiliary 'spathas') in their scabbards (with chapes) and associated with their bronze and iron belt fittings, which suggest an approximate date in the 2nd century AD. What does all this mean? Is this a Roman murder? Or was it the aftermath of a duel? Or even, the archaeologists' favourite, a 'ritual' burial? Whatever the explanation, Roman burials with swords are extremely rare and many explanations could be proffered.
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Our second major excavation in 1977 was a site on the city wall just west of Canterbury's Northgate and adjacent to St Mary Northgate Church. This part of Canterbury had been blighted by an inner ring-road scheme, but this threat had now been lifted and the city council is selling off various houses it acquired for demolition and is hoping to clean up the area. Virtually no archaeological work had been done on Canterbury's northern defences in the past, and this was an excellent opportunity to examine the city wall before restoration, so an excavation was carried out financed entirely by a job creation scheme.
The city ditch was sectioned and a large rectangular area immediately inside the city wall was examined. Beneath the late 3rd-century rampart, the remains of the earlier Roman town were discovered, including a fine timber-lined well. The wall and rampart proved to be contemporary, though the rampart was built in two stages. First, the lower part was thrown up, possibly the upcast from the ditch; then the massive stone wall was built, and finally the upper section of the rampart was added by scraping up a large area of ground behind the wall, including masses of occupation debris.
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Behind the city wall, a long sequence of Saxon, medieval and modern occupational layers were discovered. This began with a series of deep pits containing bun-shaped loom weights, which must surely be middle Saxon. Overlying this were the very substantial remains of the late Saxon and early medieval intra-mural street. This in turn was cut by a series of graves from the small churchyard of St Mary Northgate, and overlying this were the building levels for the reconstruction of the city wall in the late 14th century. After this the intra-mural street was moved slightly southwards and houses were built on the surface of the old street up against the city wall. These were finally destroyed in 1830 when the whole area was covered by light industrial premises.
The most remarkable discovery, however, came when we cleaned off the 19th century plaster from the outer face of St Mary Northgate Church, which incorporated the city wall surviving to its full height of 29ft. To our surprise we found that within the wall about 21ft (6.5m) above Roman ground level was a buried crenellated parapet. This is pre-12th century in date: is it Roman? If so this must be the only surviving Roman crenallation yet found in Britain.
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The final major excavation of 1977 took place within the cathedral precincts, in an area which is to be the probable site for a new classroom and dormitory for the King's School, and very properly the school asked the Trust to excavate the site (at their expense) before the building work begins. The site lay close to the main gate of the Benedictine priory, and the main structural finds dated from the mid-12th century when part of the east wall of the vaulted undercroft of the great hall – or 'Aula Nova', as it is called in the 12th century – was discovered. This great first floor hall was over 150 feet long, but sadly most of it was pulled down in 1730. Parallel to this the great 12th-century monastic drain was found which still functions after more than 800 years. It is quite possible to crawl through it for several hundred yards under the precincts!
Apart from excavations, the Trust is undertaking and organising building recording work in the city, and already several hitherto unknown medieval buildings have been 'discovered'. However the most spectacular recording work has been that taking place in the cathedral, where very large-scale restorations are now in progress. A major new 'discovery' has been the finding of a hitherto unknown fragment of an apse at Lanfranc's cathedral of the 1070s above a 15th-century fan vault. This shows that the north-west transept from which today the Lady Chapel projects, had a considerable projection in Lanfranc's cathedral instead of a small apse. Thus all the standard textbook plans of the Norman Canterbury Cathedral will have to be revised! Several other structural discoveries have been made within the fabric and the Trust hopes to initiate a series of detailed 'stone by stone' surveys of this superb building. It is incredible that this has never been done before, and the most up-to-date and detailed survey remains that done by Willis in 1844.
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