A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE 



these statements are probably incorrect. On the whole the finds indicate 

 a ' villa ' rather than a town or village. We may suppose that some 

 wealthy Romano-Briton pitched here his dwelling in a sheltered place, 

 and it may be that he used the salt springs for which Droitwich has long 

 been famous. Or we might imagine instead a little spa, and perhaps the 

 existence of Roman roads which seem to lead towards Worcester and 

 Alcester and Birmingham,' might make the latter hypothesis the more 

 probable. But it is idle to guess. 



(2) Kempsey. Here, 4I miles south of Worcester, various antiqui- 

 ties have been discovered between the village and the river, near the 

 church or a little north of it. The most striking of these is an inscrip- 

 tion found some years before 1818, lying in two pieces with other stones 

 4 feet deep in the west wall of the kitchen garden of the parsonage farm, 

 north-west of the church. Many of the other stones were cemented 

 together and formed some kind of ancient foundation ; whether the 

 inscription was one of these, is not recorded. It is itself a flat slab of 

 freestone, 33 inches high by 20 inches wide, and is now in the Worcester 

 Museum where I have examined it. It reads as follows : — 



\A_C o NST 



ANT, No 



PE'IN 



VICTO 



AVG 



Val[erio) Constantino P{io) fe(lici) invicto Jug{usto) 

 ' To the Emperor Valerius Constantinus, pious, fortunate, unconquerable, Augustus.' 



Probably the commencement of the inscription is lost ; it may have 

 begun IMP. CAES. fl. Imp{eratort) Cces{ari) Fl{avio). Flavins Valerius 

 Constantinus was Constantine the Great, and this stone was presumably 

 set up in his reign (a.d. 308-337). It appears to be a milestone, or rather 

 a road-stone, of the type common in the fourth century, in which the 

 mileage was often omitted — though here it might have been broken off. 

 But it might conceivably be no more than an honorary slab (see p. 213). 

 Near it were found Roman tiles indicating some building. A little 

 north, in a field called the Moors, gravel-diggers in 1835-9 found a 

 number of small pits containing ashes, the burnt bones and teeth of a 

 horse, a few fibula, a coin of Nero and many potsherds of various kinds, 

 including Samian and the ' red-earth ' ware noticed above (p. 208). Mr. 

 Allies, the chronicler of the finds, calls the pits cists or graves, but no 

 human remains seem to have been found, and the pits themselves which 

 measured 6 feet by 6 feet or 6 feet by 8 feet, are not shaped sepulchrally. 

 We may rather regard them as the rubbish-pits which regularly occur 

 near dwelling-houses. A ' camp,' now for the most part obliterated, is 

 stated to have been formerly traceable at this place, the church being 

 close to its southern end. According to the best measurements available, 

 those made by Mr. Allies fifty years ago, its east and west sides were each 

 200 yards long, its north side 180 yards, its south side 90 yards, so that 

 it formed an irregular quadrilateral of about 4 acres. It has usually been 



> There is also a curiously straight road due north to Crutch Hill. 

 210 



