On the 23rd of February 1859, the Reverend Lambert Larking recorded in his journal "a letter from Major Luard announcing the discovery of a Roman villa on the identical spot which I had indicated at Plaxtol - and falling in with my view that it is a [?]gniacum."
Luard, who lived at Ightham Mote, had been keeping a careful eye open for chance discoveries at Allen's Farm in Plaxtol since 1857 when the farmer, a Mr. Martin, had deep-ploughed a field and discovered the stone foundations of buildings. The farmer had at the same time found a quantity of Romano-British tile and pottery, but what must have particularly attracted the Major's attention was a 190mm high bronze statuette of the goddess Minerva. He exhibited this at the second Annual General Meeting of the recently formed Kent Archaeological Society in Rochester in July 1859.
Farmer Martin had meanwhile begun further improvements on his land and had encountered more foundations when grubbing up tree stumps in a plantation just south of the previous site. This time Major Luard was permitted to undertake an excavation and in due course found a building measuring 16m by 12m and containing at least six rooms, one with an apsidal end. He recognized that one room could have been a bath and noted indications of a pillared hypocaust in another. In retrospect, the building seems to have been a bath house which would have been attached to a larger Romano-British house, with the usual arrangement of hot, tepid and cold rooms and a series of plunge baths. Judging from recent aerial photography and soil resistivity surveys, the "Villa Minervae" was and hopefully still is, much more extensive than Luard imagined and may have measured some 80m by 90m overall. It may have been arranged in a courtyard plan. Unstratified pottery from the site ranges in date from AD 70 to AD 250.
The 1859 report on the site was vague as to the exact location of the building and exploratory work was done by George Payne in 1893, by Cliff Ward in 1970, and by the writer in 1986. We can now be fairly confident as to the location, but the years of uncertainty have probably been a protection from the treasure seekers who have been visiting the site and carrying away Roman materials since at least the 1950s.
Major Luard was never to find another bronze at Plaxtol. The Martin family retained possession of the Minerva - as they had every right to do - for nearly a hundred years, until one day in November 1954 a descendant of the farmer brought the statuette into the museum office at Maidstone and presented it to an astonished Allen Grove, then the Society's curator. Minerva, besides being the goddess of wisdom, war, and the liberal arts, is said to have had a zeal for navigation. She must have been pleased with her move to Maidstone, for it was clearly she, who about a year later guided the plough of another Plaxtol farmer, John Cannon, into a substantial buried structure at Sedgebrook Field, half a mile north of Villa Minervae.
Little was done at the new site beyond establishing its Roman date until June 1986, when it was learned that the field was to be subjected to deep excavation. The landowners, Fairlawne Estate, planned to cut a drain trench across the field and to begin mechanical subsoiling. Exploratory excavation had to begin at once. As the site lay outside the working territories of local archaeological groups in this part of Kent, Council was persuaded that the Society itself should undertake the work and provide the necessary funding. The writer agreed to direct the excavation and work began on 7th July 1986.
The initial plan was to carry out three weekends' trial excavations at Sedgebrook and establish what was to be found on the site. Almost immediately substantial ragstone walls were discovered at a shallow depth and the plan of a second Plaxtol villa started to emerge. Before the trial period had ended the landowners, impressed by the discovery, had offered to resite their drain and to postpone subsoiling until the following spring. So began a fairly leisurely rescue excavation of the complete building. The work was not finished that year and it was covered for the winter and resumed in 1987. At the end of 1988, most of the villa was backfilled but work on the margins of the site continued until November 1989.
The villa at Sedgebrook proved to be of winged corridor type, larger, at 26m by 14m, than Major Luard's building, but probably much smaller than the overall size of the Allen's Farm site. It had been built after AD 125-150 and occupation had continued at least until the early fourth century.
The central room had been built on foundations set deep in the clays of the hillside. It was floored with ragstone and mortar, mostly eroded away by plowing and it had been divided into three chambers. Each wing consisted of a square room with later extensions. Much of the mortar floor of the corridor survived, but plow damage had left only a single shattered ragstone block to indicate the central entrance to the villa. The south wing had been extended for the construction of a channelled hypocaust for a small bath suite. The north wing extension was much deeper than the general floor level and was lined with thin wooden planks; these had been completely burned before a mass of building debris and clay fell into the room some time after AD 180. Included in the fall was a silver rat-tail spoon of 2nd-century date bearing the graffito "APRIL". Doubtless one Aprilis was the owner of the spoon and perhaps for a time, of the Sedgebrook villa.
The spoon and a small selection of other finds from the "Villa Aprilis" are being retained by the Fairlawne Estate for a permanent display cabinet in the 18th-century mansion formerly owned by the Cazalet family.
R. A C. Cockett
Fawkham & Ash Arch. Group
