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Victoria County History of Kent Vol. 3  1932 - Romano-British Kent - Towns - Page 95

and Arcadius have been picked up by the gardeners. Although no Roman structures have been recorded within the area, there can be little doubt that the inclosure, whatever its purpose—whether a fortified village or a large posting-station—dates from Roman times.
   But the most ample evidences of Roman occupation in this vicinity have been recovered in recent years. Since 1913 nine sites in the neighbourhood of Ospringe and Judd’s Hill have yielded more or less extensive Roman remains. These sites are marked A to K on the map, Fig.17.  In 1913, in a gravel pit at site A, about 700 yds. west of Syndale Camp, six Roman cremation-burials with pottery dating from about 70 to 110 A.D. were found and carefully preserved.81  At site B, about  120 yds. north-west of the front door of Syndale House, a 1st-century Samian plate of form 15 was found on the edge of the embankment of the earthwork; whilst C indicates the spot where the alteration of the line of the road in the 19th century led to the discovery of Roman remains. At D, about 700 yds. east of the earthwork and about 8 yds. east-north-east from the 46th milestone (from London) on the main road, a further group of more than twenty cremation-burials was found within a space of about 20 ft. by 30 ft., and the pottery with them seems to have dated from the 2nd and early 3rd centuries (P1. XIV, No. 2; see also XIII, No.1).82
   In the following year, about 285 yds. west of this spot (E on plan), further burials of about the same date were located 83 and in 1922—3 excavations were carried out at the spot marked F, where several cremation and two or three inhumation burials were found. In the following year considerably more than 172 cremation burials and 74 inhumation burials were carefully unearthed by the Society of Antiquaries, and these with many of the previous finds are now preserved in the Maison Dieu at Ospringe. A long trench was also dug within the park at G, and two others at H, where a rubbish heap containing potsherds of the 1st to 3rd centuries A.D., pieces of burnt wattle— and-daub, a coin of Commodus, and many animal bones were found. Lastly, in the vicinity of the Saxon and medieval chapel of Stone, to the north-west of Syndale House, a hearth and chalk walling, found by Colonel Hawley in 1926, seem to represent Roman cottages alongside the Watling Street.
   Regarded as a whole, these various relics obviously represent a considerable, if straggling, population, centring, perhaps, on the earthwork at Syndale House, but extending far both to the east and the west of this spot. The backbone of the settlement must have been the Watling Street, alongside of which lay extensive cemeteries for a distance of half a mile or more to the west of Ospringe. The chronological limits of the occupation are not very clearly defined, but there is sufficient evidence to show that it was already fairly extensive in the Flavian period and lasted to the end of the 4th century.84   The presence of a great Jutish cemetery associated with Roman remains in Kingsfield, immediately to the east of Ospringe,85  may be thought to indicate something of a continuity of occupation in early post-Roman times, such as has been suspected at Frilford in Berkshire and on three or four other Roman and Saxon sites.
   81  Arch Cant. xxxi, 284; xxxix, 38.               82  Ibid. xxxv, 1 ; 65.   83  Ibid. xxxvi, 74.
   84  The rather scanty coin-lists begin with one of Claudius and end with two of Arcadius. See especially Arch. Cant. ix, lxxii, and xli, 197.
   85  Reliquary, iii, 141; Arch. Cant. i, 42 ; ii, 22.  C. R. Smith, Anglo-Saxon and other Antiquities found at Faversham and bequeathed to the S. Kensington Museum

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