Miscellaneous Notes
Repairs at Knole
From Ledger 1799 of May & Parsons [now Bridgman's], Stone Masons, Eaatgate Street, Lewes, Sussex.
By courtesy of Messrs. Bridgman.
Dark Age Burial on Barham Downs
THE skeletal remains hereunder described were unearthed by soldiers in constructing some trenches on the Downs just off the main Dover Road at Ileden. Canons R. U. Potts and J. W. S. Tomlin, and the writer, examined the site on July 5th, 1944, but no evidence remained of the grave which had been completely destroyed before notice of its discovery reached Canon Tomlin.
The remains appear to represent those of a single individual, namely, a middle-aged male of Saxon stock. Although the certain determination of the historic period of ancient hunian remains must rest almost entirely upon . concomitant archa!ologioal evidence, yet the general morphological characters of the BarhamDowns cranium agree better with previously examined Saxon material than with anything
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else I have examined, and the specimen may therefore reasonably be referred to the Saxon period.
The parts available comprised:
The Gold Medalet of Leudard the Bishop — The Oldest English Coin
In 1844 Mr. C. Roach Smith reported to the Royal Numismatic Society that an interesting find of gold coins, hung on a string, had been made in St. Martin's Churchyard; where exactly, we do not know, possibly on the rising ground to the S.E. corner of the church or to the S.W., where the bank has been cut away for later graves. At first he described three of them, and tl!-e following year gave a comple^ list, including three others.
Our present concern is only with one of them, the second on his list, the coin, of which, by the courtesy of the Royal Numismatic Society, we are allowed to reproduce this illustration. It is described as a gold medalet weighing, with the loop, 27 grains.
Through a misreading of the inscription by Mr. C. Roach Smith, the real meaning and value of the coin was not recognized at fir^t. The coin has on the obverse side a head surrounded by an inscription ; on the reverse a two-barred cross with a border of V's, two at the top and three at the bottom, and on either side some cha.raoters which may be only ornament or may be the name of the place or of the moneyer who struck the coin.
Mr. Roach Smith thought the first letter of the inscription on the obverse was E a,nd read it as Eupardus, and attributed it to Eupardus, [pg73]a bishop of Autun in the sixth century. The puzzling inscriptions on the other side of the coin on either side of the cross, which may be NIII:> or NIN:> , he thought might refer to Nivernum.
Though his mistake was pointed out by the Rev. Daniel Haigh in Arch. Gant., Vol. Vill, p.233, published in 1872, Roach Smith's reading was generally accepted.
But in the lately published Numismatic Chronicle for 1942, Sir Arthur Evans, in a posthumous article edited by Dr. E.T. Leeds, the Keeper of the Asbmolean ^useum at Oxford, shows quite clearly the importance of the coin, and the true reading of the inscription.
It is undoubtedly LEUDARDUS EPS (=episcopus), Leudard the Bishop, and if we want to find his story we have only to look at Bede's Ecclesiasticai History, Book I, eh. 25, where we read that "Ethelh^rt, King of Kent, had a Christian wife of the royal family of the Franks (she was the daughter of Charibert, King of Paris) called Bertha, whom he had received from her parents on condition that she should be permitted to practise her religion with the Bishop Luithard, who was sent with her to preserve her faith " ; and a little farther on, in the 26th chapter, Bede says, "There was on the east side of the city a church dedicated to the honour of St. Martin, built whilst the Romans ·were still on the island, where the Queen, who, as has been said before, was a Christian, used to pray."
This Luithard, or Letard as he was later called, was buried on the north side of the porticus of St. Martin, where Ethelbert and Bertha lay, in a corresponding position to St. Augustine in the porticus of St. Gregory, in the ·abbey church of St. Peter and St. Paul, against the inner wall of the porticus and east of the door into the church. This we know from the contemporary history of the Translation of St. Augustine by Goscelin in' 1091. Some traditions say Luithard was Bishop of Senlis, some of Soissons, but he held no English See, so far as we know, and was simply Luithard the .Bishop, the Queen's chaplain, which may be the reason for the absence of any territorial designation on the coin. Sir A. Evans points out that various Frankish bishops and other people of importance issued their own coins, and that it was [pg74]natural for them to do so, and he is of opinion that the coin, though resembling some Merovingian coins, was probably struck in England near the end of the sixth century, and possibly in the St. Martin's concession or precinct, and is the oldest English coin known. It has a loop attached to it so that it could be hung on a string or chain, and probably belonged to some Christian lady of Bertha's court who was buried with it round her neck, where it remained until it was found a hundred years ago.
The coin itself is in the Liverpool Museum with the Mayer Collection of Kentish .Antiquities found by the Rev. Bryan Godfrey Faussett on the downs between Canterbury and Doyer in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and described in Monumentum Sepulchrale.
R.U.P.
Discoveries at Dover
During the past year, through destruction and subsequent exposure, various noteworthy details of construction and decoration have come to light. Careful records are kept by the Borough authorities, to whose kindness the following notes are due. As further features in this ancient inhabited valley of the Stour may be found, it is, at this stage, sufficient to note the following. 35 Clarence Street. Part ofa :fifteenth century wall built of two courses of small red bricks set upright and divided from the. next two courses by a course set flat. Guildhall Vaults, Bench Street. A late Tudor stone fireplace on an upper floor. Milestone Cafe, Snargate Street. A recess lined with eighteenth century Delph tiles depicting many scriptural scenes ; and a curious drain recess, the back and sides lined with three Delph tiles.
The core of massive walls of St. Martin^ le Grand now stand expos^d with, to the S.W., other walls of an early character.
Recovery in Kent of Gloucestershire Manorial Rolls
MANOR OF HARTPURY, 00, GLOUCES'I'ER,
SOME ancient parchment documents, discovered in a hedge at Upper Deal roughly rolled up and showing signs of exposure to the weather for a considerable time, were recently brought by the finder to the Editor, who was able to identify them as court rolls of the manor of Hartpury, Gloucestershire.
The rolls, consisting of eight loose parchment membranes, were sent to the Public Record Office, whose staff effected such ntinor repairs as were necessary and were able to trace their rightful owner.. The parchment was found to be in fair condition ; and, though much of the writing has ilTemediably perished, enough legible entries remain to [pg75]constitute a useful record. · One of the rolls moreover supplies interesting evidence of contemporary practice in recording manorial courts. Examination of the sewing holes shows that the eight membranes originally belonged to two separate rolls :
The lordship of the manor has descended from the Compton family to Captain R. C. Gordon-Canning, M.C., of Hartpury House, to whose possession the rolls have been restored. He has now placed them in the Gloucestershire County Council's muniment room at the Shire Hall, Gloucester, one of the places approved by the Master of the Rolls under the Law of Property Acts for the deposit of manorial documents.
The Editor has to thank Captain Gordon-Canning for his sympa- hetic interest in this note.