the duller hue of land that lies over the city.
We tread upon that land. From a sunk lane
between hedges, fresh with newly opened leaves,
we turn to a gate opening on a ploughed field,
called by countrymen, because of the strange
stones and wrought ware that have been always
found in it, the Old Works. As we stride over
the clods, we need not stoop an inch to perceive
that at every step we set our feet on bits of
Roman building materials that have been
inextricably blended with the soil. The dullest
ploughboy working here has on his lips a form
of the old Roman word for money. He picks up
denarii, and calls them dinders. Let him work
in what field he may within the walls of Uriconium,
it is but a common thing for the ploughman
to find six or seven dinders in a morning
before dinner. All the people hereabouts have
dinders in their cottages—may have them by the
pint—and there was a time, I believe, when the
antiquary could, without any difficulty, purchase a
handful for a shilling. It was here that one of
our best Roman antiquaries got that unique coin
with a full-faced portrait of Carausius, now in
the British Museum. I can believe it to be
true that, after it was given him, he turned aside
into a hedge to reassure himself that it was
really so choice a treasure, and brushed tears of
emotion from his eyes to look at it.

There the town lies in the clods, a treasury
of knowledge. Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Normans,
Englishmen of every age have passed over it
with plough and harrow; that is all. Strange
curiosities have come to the surface. Some time
ago the hypocaust of one of its houses happens
to have been opened, and was described to the
Society of Antiquaries; the description will be
found in the ninth volume of the Archæologia.
"There's a field there," said a labourer to me,
"where we once struck the plough on a great
stone. We dug it about, and put the plough
horses to it, and fetched more, and couldn't stir
it. So we let it be. But we do think there's
something precious underneath that stone."

The whole town lies in its ruins; sheep
have fed and corn has grown over them, but
the ploughshare penetrates not far. From the
day of its devastation until now the entire
ground plan of one of the great midland towns
of Roman Britain has lain unobserved. Of its
streets and houses, its public buildings, its
defences, there is little doubt that we may trace
the outline by uncovering foundation walls,
within which there lie heaped in ruin tens of
thousands of memorials of British Rome.

Last year Mr. Thomas Wright, the best
popular authority upon the subject, suggested
that it would be well to begin digging at
Wroxeter. A subscription was raised, and
digging was begun at once, because it was then
winter. In winter the surface ground lies fallow,
in summer it bears crops; and the farmer by
whom the commencing field is rented vows that
he would not take all Rome for his turnips.

Excavation was commenced at the most
obvious place, beside the one up-standing piece of
ruin, which is about twenty feet high and fifty
or sixty feet in length. Nobody knew to what
it had belonged; that was a problem worth
solution. It was required, however, by the
tenant of the field, as has been required
elsewhere under like circumstances, that as fast as
the ground was opened and probed it should be
closed again; all was to be without prejudice to
the turnips. By this laborious process of opening
and closing, the foundations of the Old Wall
were traced on, and it was found to have
belonged to a great structure unlike anything
yet found in England. Within massive walls
there is enclosed a space two hundred and
twenty-six feet long and thirty wide; it is paved
with small bricks set in an ordinary Roman
pattern, known as herring-bone among
antiquaries. Along its whole length it is bordered
on each side by a passage included between the
outer and an inner wall. Fourteen feet is the
breadth of one of these long passages, sixteen
feet of the other. One passage ends in a room
having a handsome tessellated pavement. Outside
this great building, and close to it, was the
pavement of a street. This was formed of small
round stones, after the fashion of which examples
still are to be seen even in Shrewsbury itself.
There was trace also of a cross street running in
the line of Watling-street,the famous Roman road
upon which Uriconium was an important halting-
place. Into one of the passages by which this great
building was bounded there were found two
doorways; of which one had been more used
than the other, for the massive square stone
forming the threshold of each was, in one case,
much worn by the feet of those who had passed
over it to worship the god, to admire the
gladiator, or to seek the presence of the judge.

To the wall of the great court-house or
basilica, temple or place of combat, important
houses were attached. On the side of the erect
fragment that does not face the present road
there are distinctly to be seen the lines of fracture
from which vaulted roofs, once joined to
them, have fallen down over the houses they
once sheltered. I do not say that it was much
to find here the outlines of a handsome
mansion, chambers with tessellated floors, a famous
drain, the principal room, with that circular
ending in a sort of alcove so characteristic of a
Roman house—a notion is, that the alcove
contained a household altar, parted by a curtain
from the room itself—and under the great room
a hypocaust, or heating-room. The chief rooms
of Roman houses were almost invariably
warmed by a furnace which communicated
with a hot-air chamber under the floor. Dozens
of hypocausts have been uncovered, all
containing the rows of little columns made of
piles of tile, with an occasional mass of stone
that supported the floor over it. Such a floor
was formed of a thick layer of cement coated
upon the surface with patterns and pictures
formed of little cubes of divers colours. The
hypocaust just opened under the old wall at
Uriconium is of the common sort. There is the
furnace chamber and there are the worn steps
down which domestics came to tend the fire.