TIER DEFORMED SKULLS AT WROXF,TER. * BEFORE attempting to see the
curiously misshapen skulls just dug up at Wroxeter, charter a phioton at the Raven Hotel, Shrews- bury, and give yourself on:e of the pleasantest five-mile drives imaginable. Go to Wroxeter and see where the skulls were found. All Shropshire scenery has its beauties, but there are few which surpass in quiet loveliness the drive to Wroxeter. The Wrekin frowns on you from the east, and the silvery Severn winds placidly along on the left hand side of the road among beautiful fields, till you cross it at Atchatu Bridge,--a bridge of the olden type, gable fashion,—with steep ascent and descent. The fine obd church of Atcham, with its bold, broad, ivy- mantled tower, and the rich foliage of the noble trees and the deep verdure of the fields, with the river bending suddenly south- ward, form a most striking group. tStop a few minutes here to examine one of those open splayed slits in the chancel wall, behind where the high altar used to stand ; by means of which a glimpse might have been obtained from outside of the host when elevated, or of the crucifix on the table. These apertures elsewhere have been variously accounted for ; and it has been asserted that their use was to allow the priest to administer the holy elements to the Cagots, and other proscribed people, without admitting them within the building. It seems here to have been designed to give a view into the in- terior, and possibly for no other purpose.
The road now leads you past the richly wooded park of Atting- ham : crossing the little river Tern, a narrower road to the right, a little further on, takes you direct to Wroxeter, formerly Uri- conium, where, for many a long year, a mass of Roman brick- work has skirted the road, towering above the wayfarer, defiant of pickaxe and storm, for a good thirteen hundred years, at least, and in the longest of our lifetimes without visible diminution. Close to it are the recent excavations. They were begun at the instance of the Local Natural History and Antiquarian Society, at Shrewsbury, only last February, and the basements of some houses, two or three hypocausts, several pieces of pavement, and manifold tiles, bases, &e., have been exhumed already ; but as the outer mound which marks the boundary of the whole city runs three miles in completing its oval course,—labour as they may, the zealous archeologists at work will never exhaust the possible discoveries to be made, or bring to light the whole of this capacious city. The general character of the brick-work both in the outside block and the part exhumed is of a very rough cha- racter. Nor do any of the pavements or fragments of pottery indicate the attainment of so high a degree of art or household luxury as the relics at Cirencester.
There is unmistakeable evidence that the place was finally sacked and burned. The soil all around is of a peculiarly black rich loam ; the action of fire is obvious on the walls ; and in one place a quanta:, of charred wheat has been discovered.
Mr. Thomas 'Wright, who has just published this interesting little book on this branch of the discoveries, and under whose
• Guide to the ruins of n*0,1111111 at Wroreter. By Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A. Published by J. 0. Sandford.
skilfnl management the excavations are proceeding, thus describes the hypocausts and their contents :
" To the east of the entrance to the hypocausts, a small room only eight feet square was found, which had a herring-bone pavement like that of the great inclosure to the north of the Old Wall. A rather wide passage through the eastern wall of this small room led into another room with a hypocaust, the floor of which is also gone. The pillars of this hypocaust were rather more neatly constructed, but they seem to have been consider- ably lower than those of the hypocausts previously opened. This hypo- caust was the scene of a very interesting discovery. Abundant traces of burning in all parts of the site leave no doubt that the city of Uriconium was plundered, and afterwards burnt, by some of the barbarian invaders of Roman Britain at the close of the Romano-British period, that is, towards the middle of the fifth century. The human remains which have been met with in different parts bear testimony to a frightful massacre of the inha- bitants. It would seem that a number of persons had been pursued to the buildings immediately to the south of the line of the Old Wall, and slaughtered there ; for in trenching across what were perhaps open courts to the south and south-east of the door through the continuation of the Old Wall, remains of at least four or five skeletons were found ; and in what appears to have been the corner of a yard, outside the semicircular end of the hypocaust first discovered, lay the skull and some of the bones of a very young child. In the last of the hypocausts we have been describing, three skeletons were found, that of a person who appears to have died in a crouching position in one of the corners, and two others stretched on the ground by the side of the wall. An examination of the skull of the person in the corner leaves no room for doubting that he was a very old man. One at least of the others was a female. Near the old man lay a little heap of Roman coins, in such a manner as to show that they must have been con- tained in a confined receptacle, and a number of small iron nails scattered among them, with traces of decomposed wood, proved that this was a little box or coffer. The remains of the wood are still attached to two or three of the coins. We are justified, from all these circumstances, in concluding that, in the midst of the massacre of Roman Uriconium. these three persons —perhaps an old man and two terrified women—had sought to conceal themselves by creeping into the hypocaust; and perhaps they were suffo- cated there, or, when the house was delivered to the flames, the falling rubbish may have blocked up the outlet so as to make it impossible for them to escape. It is not likely that they would have been followed into such a place as this hypocaust. These coins were 132 in number."
The whole of the coins range from the reigns of Galba and Domitian to Theodosius. One or two more recent are said to have been found. The destruction of the city doubtless took place towards the middle of the fifth century.
A more curious discovery was made a week or two ago, briefly mentioned by Mr. Wright. Far from the excavations, but still within the city walls, in an orchard skirting a shallow part of the Severn, were dug up at a depth of about two feet or less from the surface, fragments of twenty human skeletons, without any remnants or appearance of coffins or covering : nor were there any coins save one of Claudius Gothicus near to them. Most of these bodies lay in a direction nearly east and west, but not all of them ; one or two were across others. This, however, is the great peculiarity of these bones :—out of the twenty found, eleven ' have skulls strangely contorted and deformed. Nor are there any two exactly similar. In most of them one side of the whole fore- ' head both above and round the eyeball is violently depressed. Some have one eyeball larger than the other. Others have them equal in size, but so much out of a right angle with the line of the centre of the cranium that one eye must have projected far before the other. These frontal deformities appear to have been or- ganic curvatures. Mr. Wright seems to disbelieve that the bones ' of the cranium are capable of ilexature after death. There are, it is true, evident marks of pressure : parts of some of the skulls are beaten in, but these are obvious fractures. And the fractures, ' even where they coexist with the curvatures, are distinct from, and cannot possibly have caused them. One of them is stuffed full of fine mould, which has passed through the foramen at the base of the skull, and probably owing to the action of successive frosts, has burst the skull open, the coronal suture having given way. But these effects of violence and the elements, must be perfectly distinguishable from the deflexions and deformities in the shape of the skulls. Unless the lime, which forms an integral part of all bone, be got rid of by muriatic acid or some chemical agent, no bone not in a growing state can be bent. It may be reduced to a pulpy subsistence, like soaked biscuit, and broken like it with ease ; but it is equally incapable of flexature. Yet writers are not wanting who attribute these singularities in the Wroxeter skulls to pressure on the surface of the ground. An examination of them ought surely to precede all theories as to the causes of these phenomena. It appears that in some where there was no obliquity of face or forehead, that the skull was frightfully flat- tened, and in others very narrow. One has an immense width across the (malar) cheek bones. Now none of these deformities exist iu the skulls found in the hypocausts, which appear to be of the Roman type. It is difficult to hazard a guess how these de- formed beings came where they are found ; and where they must have perished in a group and been buried, or rather covered with soil only two feet deep where they dropped: for no one was buried
within the walls of a Roman city. Did they meet the death there from which they were fleeing, in their way to the ford in the river,
where Mr. Wright presumes there was a bridge ? But how came the deformities ? It is well known that both in China and Ame- rica these contortions were and are artificially created from infancy : and has not Longinus an account somewhere of the partiality of the ancients to human monsters, after the subsequent fashion of dwarfs and giants as essential appendages to the retinue of Saxon Prince and Norman Baron ? Possibly these people inhabited a given suburb of the city ; or in the mêlée of the sack and carnage, naturally herded and fled together. The skulls and all the other objects of interest are collected by the care of Dr. Henry Johnson in the Shrewsbury Museum. The ordinary relics of a Roman city are there—coins, specimens of Samian ware, and Romano Salopian ware, cinerary urns, orna- ments of bronze, fibulw, hair-pins, combs, amphorte, Upchurch pottery, tiles, concrete, a medicine stamp, and all the customary remnants of these ruined cities. The surrounding scenery, the site of the city, and especially the mystery attaching to the group of Gothic deformities, render a visit to Uriconium doubt- less an attractive summer trip, not unworthy- of a halt by the way for our North Wales tourists, the Raven Hotel affording, as we can testify, good accommodation.
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