ROMANO-BRITISH WORCESTERSHIRE 



one — Branogena or Brangonia, which Humphrey Lhuyd and Leland and 

 many subsequent topographers have proclaimed to be the Roman name 

 of Worcester.* It is one long juggle with names — interesting as charac- 

 teristic of earlier antiquarian methods but wholly devoid of scientific 

 value. In dealing with ancient Worcester we shall do well to leave alone 

 Caer Guiragon or Gorangon and all names constructed out of it. 



The Romano-British settlement at Worcester appears to have occu- 

 pied much the same site as the modern town, a long strip of high land 

 above the eastern bank of the Severn. But the recorded remains give no 

 real indication of its size or character. Roman coins have been found 

 at many points from Barbourne on the north to Diglis on the south, and 

 they comprise not only the usual third and fourth-century issues down 

 to the end of the Roman period, but also a considerable proportion of 

 first and second-century coins — one of Augustus, two of Tiberius, many 

 of Claudius and his successors.* Other objects have been found rather 

 less frequently over the same area. The following paragraphs contain the 

 principal discoveries and alleged discoveries arranged from north to south. 



(i) At the White Ladies, the site of a medieval nunnery in the 

 Tything, somewhat north of St. Oswald's Hospital, many coins, mostly 

 but not wholly of the third and fourth centuries, were found in and 

 before 1842, and with them were associated a number of Greek coins, 

 some of pre-Roman date.' But these, both Greek and Roman, as Mr. 

 Willis-Bund informs me, were purposely buried by a lady who afterwards 

 admitted the act. 



(2) A little west of this, under the house in the centre of Britannia 

 Square, some discoveries were made in 1829 — a circular foundation of 

 sandstone 30 feet in diameter, general debris and coins of the late third 

 and the fourth century. The foundations were explained as a fort built 

 by Ostorius Scapula about a.d. 50, but they are much too small for a 

 fort and their connection with Ostorius is a gratuitous fiction for which 

 no shred of evidence exists ; they do not seem indeed to have been 

 examined by any competent archsologists, and we possess no actual proof 

 that they are of Roman date at all.^ 



(3) West of Britannia Square in the low riverside area called Pitch- 

 croft, now occupied by the racecourse, a great quantity of scoria as from 

 iron-smeltings, and among them some pottery which was taken to be 

 Roman, were found in the eighteenth century. It was probably here that 

 the seventeenth-century engineer, Andrew Yarranton, noted ' the hearth 

 of a Roman footblast ' and a peck of Roman coins in an urn near it, and 

 scoria enough for him and his friends (as one of them asserts) to take 

 ' many thousand tons or loads ' up the Severn to their iron-furnaces to be 

 resmelted. That these scoria date from the Roman period is a common 



' Lhuyd, CommentarioR fragmentum ; Leland, refF. of preceding note. 



* Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, ed. 2, 1852, pp. 1-32 ; Val. Green, Hist, of Worcester, i. 108 ; 

 Worcestershire 1882 Exhibition Catalogue, p. 50, mentions two coins (Vespasian and Constantine) found 

 in Barbourne. Coins are so easily shifted amidst rubbish or even found and lost again elsewhere, that it 

 is no use here to catalogue all the precise localities where individual specimens have been noted. 



8 Allies, pp. 5-8. * Allies, pp. 1-3. Forty-nine of the coins are in the Worcester Museum. 



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