ROMAN COINS. present occupied by the Tower, is now past doubt, since the discovery of a silver ingot, and three golden coins; one of the emperor Honorius, the others of Arcadius. These were found in 1777, in digging for the foundation of a new office for the Board of Ordnance, through the foundation of certain antient buildings, beneath which they were met with on the natural ground. The ingot was in form of a double wedge, four inches long, and two and three quarters broad in the broadest part, and three-eighths of an inch thick in the middle; it appears to have been cast first, and then beaten into form by a hammer; its weight is ten ounces eight grains of the troy pound. In the middle is struck, in Roman letters, EX OFFIC This is supposed to have come from the royal mint, then at Constantinople, and intended to ascertain the purity of the silver coin, that might have been sent over with it, Honorius reigning over the empire of the west, as Arcadius did over that of the east. This was at the expiration of the Roman power in Britain. The coins were supposed to have been part of the money sent to pay the last legion which was ever sent to the assistance of the Britons. The Tower was the 12 TOWERS. treasury in which the public money was deposited. The coins are in fine preservation. On the reverse is an armed man treading on a captive, with the legend VICTORIA AVGGG, and at the bottom CONOB. The first alludes to the success of the legion against the Picts and Scots. CONOB. may intend Constantinopoli obsignata.* TOWERS. THE walls were three miles a hundred and sixty-five feet in circumference, guarded at proper distances, on the land side, with fifteen lofty towers; some of them were remaining within these few years, and possibly may be so still. Maitland mentions one, twenty-six feet high, near Gravel-lane, on the west side of Houndsditch; another, about eighty paces south-east towards Aldgate; and the bases of another, supporting a modern house, at the lower end of the street called the Vineyard, south of Aldgate. But since his publication, they have been demolished, so that there is not a trace of them left. The walls, when perfect, are supposed to have been twentytwo feet high, the towers forty. These, with the remnants of the wall, proved the structure to be Roman, by the tiles and disposition of the masonry. London-wall, near Moorfields, is now the most entire part left of that antient precinct. A SPECULA. I MUST not omit the Barbican, the Specula or * See the learned Dean Milles's essay on these subjects in the Archæologia, v. p. 291. tab. xxv. THE GATES. ANTIQUITIES. Watch-tower belonging to every fortified place. This stood a little without the walls, to the northwest of Cripplegate. 13 THE gates, which received the great military The Gates. roads, were four. The Prætorian way, the Saxon Watling-street, passed under one, on the site of the late Newgate; vestiges having been discovered of the road in digging above Holborn-bridge: it turned down to Dow-gate, or more properly Dar-gate or Water-gate, where there was a Trajectus or Ferry, to join it to the Watling-street, which was continued to Dover. The Erminstreet passed under Cripplegate; and a vicinal way went under Aldgate, by Bethnal Green, towards Oldford, a pass over the river Lee to Duroleiton, the modern Leyton, in Essex. TIES. In most parts of antient London, Roman anti- ANTIQUIquities have been found, whenever it has been thought necessary to dig to any considerable depth. Beneath the old Saint Mary le Bow were found the walls, windows, and pavement of a Roman Temple; and not far from it, eighteen feet deep in adventitious soil, was the Roman causeway. The great elevation of the present ground above its former state, will be taken notice of in another place. IN digging the foundation for rebuilding St. Paul's, was found a vast cœmetery: first lay the Sarons, in graves lined with masses of chalk, or in |