During the month of May, 1859, the work of the excavators was interrupted; when it was resumed, they proceeded to explore the building to which these hypocausts belonged, beginning from the side of the field adjoining to the Watling Street Road,—that is, from the side of one of the main streets of the old Roman town,—and they found walls in the line, or nearly in the line, of the western wall of the great public building just described. Another street has since been discovered to the south, running east and west, parallel to that met with to the north of the buildings first excavated. The excavations have since that time been followed in various parts of the two acres first inclosed by the Excavation Committee, and a large extent of ruins is now laid open. But I will here interrupt my narrative, while I give an account of the general character of the buildings, the ruins of which have already been brought to light.
As yet, the excavations on the site of Uriconium have not been carried far enough to enable us to form any idea of the general distribution of the Roman town, but it is evident that the buildings on which the excavators are employed were inclosed by three main streets, crossing at right angles, forming a square mass. It has been stated that the few discoveries hitherto made as to the character of the streets in the Roman towns in Britain would lead us to think that they were little more than narrow alleys, but this was certainly not the case with these three streets of Roman Uriconium, which seem to have been fine wide streets, and in the one to the north, the pavement of small round stones appears to have occupied only the middle part of the street, designed probably for carriages and horses. A tolerably wide space on each side seems, as far as can be traced, to have been unpaved. But, although we have as yet made little advance towards discovering the general character of Uriconium as a city, and the manner in which the houses were distributed over the Roman town, we had found sufficient fragments of different kinds to give us a tolerable notion of the houses themselves.
The average thickness of the walls of a house, even where they only separated one small room from another, was three feet. They are rarely less than this, and it is only in one or two cases of what appeared to be very important walls that they exceed it, when they reach the thickness of four feet. This measure of three feet was no doubt a well understood one for the wall of a house, and it was continued in the middle ages, when, in ordinary dwellings, only the division walls between house and house were of solid masonry. Municipal regulations then fixed these partition walls at a minimum of three feet in thickness, the cause of which limitation was probably the fear of fires; and in these mediæval municipal regulations, it was further ordered, that closets or cupboards in the wall should in no case be made more than one foot deep, so that if your own cupboard and your neighbour’s happened to back each other, there would still be a foot of solid masonry between the two houses. And the masonry of the Romans may well be called solid. Its character may be seen perhaps to most advantage in the Old Wall above ground. The process of building seems to have been to raise first, gradually, the facings of neatly-squared stones, supported no doubt between frames of woodwork, the supports of which left holes which are still seen in the face of the wall. The interior was then filled up with rubble mixed with liquid and apparently hot cement, which formed the mass of the wall, and in setting has become in course of time harder than the stones themselves. After a certain number of rows of facing-stones, the Roman builders almost invariably placed a string-course of broad thin bricks, the object of which is not at all evident, for they do not go through the wall so as to form real bonding-courses. The Old Wall still standing in probably nearly its original height, will also give us a notion of the elevation of the principal houses of the Roman towns.