THE ROMAN VILLA AT HEMSWORTH. II 



N.W. Hampshire. The water bath in the Hemsworth house 

 shows that there was at least time for the removal of metal 

 fittings before it was burned. Charred timber and roof tiles had 

 filled the bath flush with the floor in which it is sunk, so as to 

 effectually conceal it for fifteen centuries. But on clearing it out 

 it was seen that the tap of its waste pipe had been wrenched off 

 before the burning roof had fallen in. 



The after-history of the villa can be more certainly pictured. 

 After such double plundering the local population, which had 

 been largely supported by the " great house," would ebb away, 

 and the removal of anything still worth taking would be 

 continued by occasional passers, by. The nearness of the 

 Hemsworth site to main roads goes far to explain its remarkable 

 bareness. The hypocausts were early broken up for their useful 

 tiles, and as being likely repositories of hidden valuables. The 

 first church builders cleared off the heavier building stuff, 

 exhaustively in stoneless districts. Such quarrying would 

 disclose nearly all hoards and would complete the clearance. 

 Matthew Paris gives a graphic and probably typical account of 

 the excavations at Verulamium, early in the eleventh century, by 

 the Abbots Ealdred and Eadmar, seeking material for their great 

 new church. Vessels of fine pottery and glass, bronzes, statues, 

 and apparently even book-rolls were disclosed in the hunt for 

 stone, and all promptly destroyed as idolatrous. Almost the one 

 thing irremovable and useless to pillagers was the pavement of 

 small tesserae, and of the pavements we have what centuries of 

 ploughing, digging, and tree-grubbing have left us. 



The precise status of the builders of the villas is still a puzzle. 

 Government officials they cannot have been, except one here and 

 there. Such houses stand quite too near together in many parts 

 of England.* And, because of their frequency and size, no 



* The latest writer on the subject, Mr. A. Hadrian Allcroft (Earthwork of 

 Britain, p. 3.V-5), strangely refuses to consider them thick upon the ground, 

 though he himself instances a dozen quite close to Somertoii in Somerset, and 

 13 or 14 within a radius of five or six miles round Bath. To make a comparison, 

 as he does, with modern population, is out of place. 



