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Medway, about 500 yds. west by north of All Saints’ Church (site marked
on 0.S. 6 in. map, XLII. N.E. behind the old Grammar School
in Tonbridge Road). From 25 to 30 skeletons and about 150 urns of pottery
and glass with burnt bones are estimated to have been discovered here, but
they were almost completely destroyed by the finders. The remains appear
to have been exclusively Roman (Ibid. ii, 143).
A second Roman cemetery is vaguely recorded to have been
found at Vinters rather less than a mile east-north-east of Maidstone
Market Place. Details are lacking (Hasted, op. cit. ii (1782), 131 ;
Newton, Hist. and Antiq. of Maidstone (1741), p. 5).
In 1715 Roman urns discovered in the foundations of a
warehouse in Earl Street or Bullock Lane, near the Medway, are said to
have been full of dust and ashes. By them lay a skeleton, and other human
bones were scattered about (Newton, op. cit.).
At Tovil, three-quarters of a mile south of Maidstone, human
skeletons and Roman pottery have been found on more than one occasion. No
details of these discoveries are, however, known.
Smaller ‘ finds’ from the district need not be
specifically mentioned. The coins range from Vespasian to Gratian (Arch.
xxx, 535). For other ‘small finds,’ see Journ. Brit.
Arch. Ass. iii, 262 (bronze statuette, etc., from St. Peter’s
Hospital, Newark); Arch. xxx, 535 (bronze statuette from
Lamprey’s Garden, near Wheeler Street), are such as are found on similar
Kentish sites. In short, both structurally and chronologically, Roman
Maidstone is at present sadly lacking in any distinctive feature.
9. CHARLTON (NEAR BLACKHEATH) Many of the
slighter evidences of Roman occupation in Kent doubtless represent former
hut-villages occupied by native peasantry (see above, p. 9). At Charlton,
on a low spur 100 ft. high and projecting into the marshland half a mile
north-east of the parish church, an earthwork, now almost wholly
destroyed, gave definition to such a village. The earthwork, consisting of
a bank or, in places, two banks with ditches, was of irregular contour
type and covered an area of about 17˝ acres. Excavations carried out in
1915 and 1923 indicated that the huts had been of roughly circular
form and that they had been occupied from about A.D. 60 to the 4th
century. The only masonry structure, found by workmen in 1906, is vaguely
described as a round building of about 20 sq. ft. in area, with walls of
flint standing 2˝ ft. high. There was no indication that the earthwork
differed in date from the main period of occupation.90
The excavator sought to identify the site with the mysterious
Noviomagus of the second Iter. of the Antonine Itinerary, which locates
that place at a distance of 10 miles from London.90a Charlton,
however, is no more than 7 miles from London, and it must be admitted that
no convincing explanation of this section of the Itinerary has yet been
found.
90 For a possible
pottery kiln, see Industries, p. 129.
90a Cf. p. 93, note 67b.
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