The Faussett Pavilion

THE FAUSSETT PAVILION of more than five thousand British and Roman coins, the duplicates and indecipherable members of which he had melted and cast into a bell for the roof of his house at Heppington.1 He made still further progress in adapting objects from his collection to the outdoor ornament of Heppington. Already Faussett had brought home from Sibertswold Down and fixed in the garden wall the cover of a Roman urn. An account of it is given in Inventorium Sepulchrale under the date of 27th July, 1772. A local farmer had recounted the discovery of burial urns full of human bones which his men had set up and pelted with pieces of stone ploughed up at the same time. " On hearing this dismal revelation," writes Faussett, " I immediately went to the spot, where a vast number of sherds of paterae of fine coralline earth, and other vessels of different materials, colours, and sizes, which lay dispersed on the very surface of the ground, too well convinced me of the truth of the honest farmer's account. Among these sherds we found a piece of the bottom of a coralline patera, on which is impressed the name of its maker, namely, PRIMITIVI. There also we saw the fatal stones which had served these more than brutes as instruments to knock these precious remains of venerable antiquity in pieces with. And there were the very covers with which the mouths of these two fine and very curious and scarce family urns . . . had been closed." The covers, rather than the Samian pottery, interested Faussett. He noted that they had been broken by the ploughmen, but that each was a round flat heavy stone of coarse grit, about ten inches in diameter and nearly three inches thick, not unlike a small grindstone. In the centre of each was " an infundibuli form foramen " through which, he thought, were perhaps poured the burial bones of persons of the same family or libations of milk or wine according to the practice of those times. It was one of these covers which he carried home and fixed in the garden wall. The stones were clearly from a quern or hand-mill, and were perhaps used as covers for burial urns only when they were worn out, but nevertheless it is possible that these crudely arranged burials were the poor downland peasant's version of the classical tomb with its opening to enable libations to be poured among the ashes of the dead. It remains an interesting speculation. The stone in the garden wall has a particular concern here, for it was later to be placed in the garden pavilion with which Faussett was still engaged the year before he died. We shall digress a moment to 1 An impression of the house at this time may be gained from an engraving in the Kentish Register for July, 1795. The medieval house with its Tudor additions had been pulled down about sixty years earlier by Bryan Faussett's father. 2