23 
May.—The Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, Curator of Antiqui¬ 
ties, made a communication to the meeting respecting a hoard of 
coins, lately discovered in Walmgate, consisting chiefly of those 
called “Saints’” from their bearing the names of St. Peter, St. 
Martin, or St. Edmund. Those bearing the name of St. Peter, with 
the device of the sword, have been called “ Peter-pence,’^ and 
erroneously supposed to have been struck for the purpose of paying 
to Rome the tribute bearing that name. Their date, and the circum¬ 
stances under which they were struck, are matter of conjecture; but 
Mr. Wellbeloved supposes them to belong to the first-half of the 
tenth century. 
The Rev. John Kenrick read a paper “ On some Monuments of 
the Reign of Trajan.” From the discovery of a large and finely- 
executed tablet of his reign in York, near the probable site of one 
of the gates of the city (see Mr. Wellbeloved’s paper in Proceedings 
of the Y. P. S., vol. I., p. 282), it was argued by the author of the 
communication, that Eburacum was fortified with a wall in the reign 
of Trajan, consequently earlier than had been usually supposed. The 
construction of the Roman wall still remaining in the grounds of the 
Society, corresponds, very accurately, with the practice of Trajan’s 
age. In a letter from Pliny the Younger to Trajan, (Ep. x. 48,) he 
reports that the walls of the theatre of Nicaea were giving way, not¬ 
withstanding their extraordinary thickness; “ quia sine caemento medio 
farcti, nec testaceo opere praecincti“because they were filled in 
without squared stone in the middle, and had not a band of brick¬ 
work.” The architect of our walls has filled them in with rubble, and 
only faced them with squared stone; but he has not neglected the 
prcecinctio of brick-work, which, as appears from the interior of the 
Multangular Tower, went through, and gave solidity to the structure. 
An objection to the antiquity assigned to the walls may be derived 
from the circumstance, that there are inscriptions in the lower com¬ 
partment of the Multangular Tower, in which mention is made of the 
Sixth Legion, which did not come to York till the reign of Hadrian. 
These inscriptions, however, are not records of the building of the 
tower, but scratchings of their names, centuries, and legion, such as 
soldiers would naturally make, to enliven the tedium of the guard- 
room. The mode of building here described prevails generally in 
the Roman walls in the south, but has not been observed further north 
than Yorkshire. 
