342 



Some twelve coins from Blackwardine were pronounced by Mr. Ready, of 

 the coin and jewellery department of the British Museum (in 1883), to be all very 

 late Roman. Amongst them were — Constantino Urbs Roma, Agrippina s.c. 

 (2nd brass), Crispus Caesar,* Honorius, Constantine III., Tetricus, &c. 



Other coins in the possession of Mr. Wadeley, grocer. Stoke Prior, were 

 identified by Mr. Ready, jun., at the British Museum on June 10th, 1884, as: 

 silver. Denarius of Vespasian ; copper, Constans. Two Constantinus iun (ior) 

 Nob (ilis) C(8esar), and others were too much injured to decipher. 



Mr. Franks, M.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., &c., of the British 

 Museum, at the same time remarked upon the unusual shape of a flower-pot-like 

 piece of pottery with a handle, which he sketched. I have since seen examples 

 from Uriconium in the Shrewsbury Museum exactly similar. Mr. Franks also 

 copied the inscription, or potter's mark, on the handle of the Amphora : — 



QICSEG, 

 as he thought it was unrecordedf ; and he suggested that the large jar in the 

 photo-sketch exhibited must have been made upon the spot, as the neck is im- 

 perfect — i.e., has fallen in, and is not straight round the top, like perfect Roman 

 pottery, and therefore would not have been considered worth transport ; and he 

 thought the " thirty ovens " discovered were probably for baking the pottery, and 

 not a hypocaust. He also remarked upon an Annulet of Kimmeridge coal from 

 Blackwardine. 



Dr. Bull, in his paper on Credenhill Camp, draws the inference that after the 

 battle of Deorham (577) and the taking of Uriconium by Ceawlin (583), the 

 West Saxons, under Crida, or Creoda (583 to 606), destroyed the Roman towns in 

 Herefordshire. The Mercians, we are told, were here in 658, when Merewald, 

 brother of Wulphei-e (whose name the hundred we are now in still bears) and son 

 of Penda, founded a monastery at Leominster, and lived at Cwm fort — vulgarly 

 at Comfort, there — as I hope we may do now. 



^Crispus, eldest son of Constantine the Great, was given the title of Cssar in 317 AD. at 

 the same time as his brother Constantine (afterwards the Second), and was put to death 326 A.D. 



t This mark is unrecorded in the British Volume of the Corfius Inscr'Mionum Latinarum. 

 (Edd.) 



