110 ACCOUNT OP A ROMAN SEPULCHRE
Precisely the same appearance has been observed in the uppermost extremities of oaken piles which were used to support the foundation of a Roman house, discovered about a year ago in Lower Thames Street, and these facts seem worth recording, because they clearly show, that the lapse of 1600 years is sufficient to convert the hardest oak into peat. The decayed portions of the wood found in the Geldestone sepulchre are penetrated in every direction, but chiefly in the direction of the medullary rays, by the roots of the grass and reeds which grew above them.
The glass vessel is a diota, nearly 12 inches high. It was found in a very fractured state, but by careful restoration of the broken remains, the annexed representation has been obtained, sufficing to convey an accurate notion of its form and proportions. (See cut.) The two handles are broad and strong, and are joined to the body by thick bosses. In the remarkable Roman interment, discovered in a tumulus at Rougham, near Bury St. Edmund's, in 1843, a glass ossorium, with two broad reeded handles, was found, with other objects, in a brick chamber or bustum. This vase, of pale bluish-green glass, measured 11 inches in height, with a projecting lip, the body was nearly spherical, and more than nine inches in diameter. It had contained bones, and its form presents much general resemblance to that of the Geldestone urn, the dimensions also being nearly the same, but the neck is much wider, and the handles more massive, so that the proportions are less graceful.[1] In an adjoining tumulus, a square glass ossorium was found at the same time, of the form most frequently discovered both in England and France, closely resembling those disinterred from the Bartlow Hills, in Cambridgeshire, by Mr. Gage Rokewode.[2] In a stone sepulchral chest also, at Southfleet, Kent, two cinerary glass urns were found in 1802, one of them without handles, the other being a diota, of similar form to that discovered at Geldestone, but of less elegant outline, the neck short; the height of this urn was 15 inches.[3] So far as I have been able to learn,[4] no other glass
- ↑ An interesting account of this discovery was published by the Rev. Professor Henslow, and "sold for the benefit of the Suffolk Hospital," 1843.
- ↑ Archaeologia, vol. xxvi., pl. xpxxii.; vol. xxvii., p. 3.
- ↑ Archaeologia, vol. xi v., p. 221.
- ↑ I refer to the collection in the British Museum; to some, which were found at Little Linton, Cambridgeshire, and which are at present in the library of Clare Hall, in Cambridge; to those described in the Archaeologia, vol. x., pp. 131, 345; vol. xii., p. 96; vol. xxvi., p. 300; and to that found at Caerleon, and represented in Lee's "Roman Antiquities of Caerleon."
