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Updated: May 15, 2025
They were uncovering a small portion of that ancient buried city and were finding the foundations and floors and hypocausts of Silchester's public baths; also some broken pottery and trifling ornaments of bronze and bone. The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the excavations.
RESTORATION OF PAINTED PATTERN ON WALL-PLASTER AT SILCHESTER. Showing a purely conventional style based on classical models. Nor is the Roman fashion of house-fittings confined to the mansions of the wealthy. Hypocausts and painted stucco, copied, though crudely, from Roman originals, have been discovered in poor houses and in mean villages.
For these fertile acres the Romans built their cities and those villas whose mosaics and hypocausts are exposed by the plough, and formed straight roads like the radii of a wheel or the threads of a geometrical spider's web. Thus like the spider the legions from their centre marched direct and quickly conquered.
The old Roman city of Uriconium was founded in the early part of the second century, if not before this date; and it was destroyed, according to Mr. Wright, probably between the middle of the fourth and fifth century. The inhabitants were massacred, and skeletons of women were found in the hypocausts.
The old flint foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the winter room with its wide beautiful floor red and black and white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and beast and bird all to be covered up with earth so that the plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead city for so many centuries.
Many of the stones or bricks used in the buildings must have been carried away; but the hypocausts, baths, and other underground buildings were found tolerably perfect, being filled with stones, broken tiles, rubbish and soil. The old floors of various rooms were covered with rubble.
The wall-paintings and mosaics may be poorer in Britain, the hypocausts more numerous; the things themselves are those of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has ever come to light in the whole of Roman Britain which represents any local subject or contains any unclassical feature.
The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon?
Percival and Aunt Constance to lag so far behind it, and substitute their own interest in a contemporary drama for the one they had been professing, not very sincerely, in hypocausts and mosaics and terra-cottas.
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