Grand_
(January and July, 1914); Mr. D. Atkinson helped with the dating of the
pottery.

Much gratitude is due to those who have so skilfully collaborated to
achieve these results. So far as it is permissible to argue from two
sites only, they seem to throw real light on the growth of the earliest
Roman London. The Post Office pits lie in the extreme north-west of the
later Londinium, just inside the walls; the King William Street pits
are in its eastern half, not far from the east bank of the now vanished
stream of Wallbrook, which roughly bisected the whole later extent of
the town. It may be assumed that, at the time when the two groups of
pits were in use, the inhabited area had not yet spread over their
sites, though it had come more or less close. That would imply that the
earliest city lay mainly, though perhaps not wholly, on the east bank
of Wallbrook; then, as the houses spread and the town west of Wallbrook
developed, the King William Street pits were closed, while the Post
Office pits came more into use, during and after the Flavian age.

This conclusion is tentative. It must be remembered that the
stratification of rubbish-pits, ancient as well as modern, is often very
peculiar. It is liable to be confused by all sorts of cross-currents.
In particular, objects are constantly thrown into rubbish-pits many
years, perhaps even centuries, after those objects have passed out of
use. Whenever, even in a village, an old cottage is pulled down or a new
one built, old rubbish gets shifted to new places and mixed with rubbish
of a quite different age. At Caerwent, as Dr. T. Ashby once told me, a
deep rubbish-pit yielded a coin of about A.D. 85 at a third of the way
down, and at the very bottom a coin of about 315. That is, the pit was
in use about or after 315; some one then shovelled into it debris of
much earlier date. The London pits now in question are, however, fairly
uniform in their contents, and their evidence may be utilized at least
as a base for further inquiries.

(xix-xxii) _Rural dwellings._ Three Roman 'villas'--that is,
country-houses or farms--have been explored in 1914. All are small.

[Illustration: FIG. 12. BATH-HOUSE, EAST GRIMSTEAD]

(xix) At _East Grimstead_, five miles south-east from Salisbury, on
Maypole Farm near Churchway Copse[5], a bath-house has been dug out and
planned by Mr. Heywood Sumner, to whom I owe the following details. The
building (fig. 12) measures only 14 x 28 feet and