Victoria
County History of Kent Vol. 3
1932 - Romano-British
Kent - Towns - Page 66
Of the rest of the Roman town walls we know nothing. Various pieces of old
masonry, 12 ft. thick or more, were detected under the modern
streets during the drainage, and many of them have been from time to time
explained as bits of the Roman town wall. But the principal theory, which
concerns Sun and Guildhall Streets, seems to rest on a total mistake as to
what was found beneath them (p. 73), and the remains in general are both
too
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Fig. 13.—Canterbury: Fragment of Roman
Gateway adjoining the Quenin Gate
(From a drawing by Major Gordon Home
in Arch. Journ. lxxxvi, 271)
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incoherent to fit into any theory of the Roman ramparts
and too ill-recorded to be assigned offhand to Roman builders. Nor do the
arguments based, for example, by Faussett on old Canterbury boundaries
yield any satisfactory results. We must in the meantime be content with
the three reasonably fixed points of the Worth, Riding and Quenin Gates on
the east, and the line of the river on the west. Roman Canterbury, as
walled, cannot have been very different in size from that part of the
wailed medieval town which lay to the east of the Stour—some forty or
fifty acres in extent.
From the walls we pass to the inhabited area within them. The
area in which Roman houses have actually been found measures roughly some
550 yards from north to south and 400 yards from east to west. Its
limits are, on the north St. Alphege Lane, on the east Iron Bar Lane and
Simon Langton’s Schools, on the south St. John’s Lane, and on the west
the channel of the Stour which now flows under King’s Bridge at the end
of High Street (plan, Pl. XII). It has no very definite boundaries, but it
seems to have been largely
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surrounded by water. On the west a branch of the Stour
still flows appropriately. On the other sides, deposits of silt and
mud, some of them 130 ft. across, have been found, one near the
north-western or Arundel tower of the Cathedral, one under Iron Bar Lane
and the adjacent parts of Burgate and the Parade, and one under the
eastern part of Watling Street. These indicate
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