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The lower part of the above deposit is inclined to be
clean and loose in composition but soon alters to a dark stiff earth
which dries very hard. From the blocks of chalk, pieces of Folkestone
Stone and broken tiles there is some evidence of buildings. A layer of
tiles in one place seemed to indicate a paved floor, but no walling has
as yet been exposed. The soil is full of decayed material, animal bones,
shells of oyster, whelk, periwinkle, mussel and cockle (the first two
far the most plentiful) although some handfuls of periwinkles at one
spot showed the discarded remains of a feast. With these are wall
plaster, ashes, charcoal and burnt flints, worn pot-sherds which had
been lying about, and cleanly broken sherds of cooking pots and various
coloured and decorated glazed wares. This material and other finds are
referred to more fully later.
Proof of the Roman occupation of Stonor seems clear by the
recovery of various fragments of brick and tile, Niedermendig-lava
querns, a 4 in. section of a white marble shaft, 3 in. in dia., with a
drilled hole , and a part of a turned Purbeck-marble bowl. It seems
unlikely that these scraps were carted from the Roman site at
Richborough, especially as the 6 in. Ordnance Survey marks site of Roman
remains round and about Stonar House.
From the occurance of the course of bricks and of sherds of
stoneware, the deposit which lies above the medieval layer, seems to be
of sixteenth and early seventeenth century date, but with the little
that has been found so far |
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and the evidence that has been adduced the place must
have been deserted. It was certainly not a profitable cure for a parson,
few of whom from the fifteenth century are likely to have been resident.
From the high class of much of the pottery in use at Stonar
(it has been considered that the polychrome ware was "the finest of
the period and acquired for the tables of the great")1
we may gather that people of some wealth dwelt there in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, but like so many near sea-level settlements on
the south-east and south coasts it suffered through the instability of
the coast line (see Pt. II of this paper, LIV, 55). This was inclined to
decrease its value as a port and in the Calendar of Miscellaneous
Inquisitions, quoted by Miss Murray under the date 12802
it is declared "that the King would lose nothing if Stonar were
submerged or destroyed; five ships were owned by the Barons of the Head
Port of Sandwich, and they alone were responsible in case of
default." Rather later, apparently of the closing years of this
century, we have a full rental of Stonar.3
The list includes
1 Fox and Radford. "Kidwilly
Castle, Carmarthenshire, and Polychrome Pottery found in Britain," Archaeologia,
Vol. 83 (1933), p. 115.
2 Miss K. M. E. Murray. The
Constitutional History of the Cinque Ports, 1935, p. 50.
3 "The Black Book" Register of
St. Augustine's Abbey. British Academy Records, Vol. 2, Pt. I
(1915), p. 17. |