HISTORY of SUSSEX
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Crawley Priory - section
b
The Excavations
The trench alongside the Palace bastion (T.1) exposed the whole of the
east side of its foundation. A further cutting (D.I) exposed about half
of the front of the foundation. The narrow trench dug by Hannah was seen
in this excavation; he apparently did not dig across the front of the bastion
and our cutting revealed some stone-work which cannot previously have been
seen since Roman times.
Hannah did not interpret correctly the remains that he saw. The present
excavation has clearly revealed the method of construction which may be
compared with the similar work found by Gordon Hills in 1885 at the Residentiary
bastion ( Jl. Brit. Arch. Assn. 42, 119-136) and by Dr. Wilson in 1956 at
the Market Avenue bastion( S.A.C. 95, 1957, 125-7). These three towers were
all built in exactly the same way and at the same time, with only minor
variations in the stonework due to the re-use of worked stones from other
buildings.
To construct the foundation, a square hole was first dug, partly into
the filling of the inner ditch, partly into the berm in front of the wall,
leaving a space of 2ft. 6in. between the wall footing and the edge of the
hole; presumably this space was left to avoid the risk of a collapse of
the wall by undermining it. This hole was dug until the solid coombe rock
was reached at a depth of about 5ft. The bottom of the hole was made firm
with a hardcore of rammed chalk rubble, edged with large flints (Plate II).
Plate II: Rammed chalk foundations of bastion.
Next, the large stone blocks were carefully laid along the front edge
of the foundation and the space behind them was filled with a nibble of
flints and chalk lumps mortared together.
The stone blocks were taken, presumably, from buildings within the town
and the rubble may also have been derived from this source(This re-use of
material from demolished buildings was particularly noticed at the Friary
Close bastion (The Archaeology of Chichester City Walls, 14) and again at
the Orchard Street bastion (S.A.C. 95, 122). The use of chalk, too, was
peculiar to the bastions ).
The semi-circular plinth of chamfered stones
was then erected on the flat top of the stone foundation. Five courses of
small dressed stones remained above the plinth, forming the curved front
face of the Roman bastion (Plate IB).
Plate IB. East side of bastion foundations.
All these facing stones were set in pink mortar, which resists the penetration
of water. The core of the bastion, as far as we could see it, was of solid
flint and chalk rubble which was carried back above ground level until it
rested against the front face of the wall. This rubble was set in yellow
mortar (i.e., without the ' pozzolana ' of crushed tile). The Roman core
of the bastion presumably exists above ground level, hidden behind the modern
facing.
By the time when the towers were built
the ditches (dug about a century and a half earlier) were silted up. The
upper part of the sides had tumbled into the bottom, thus preserving the
V-shape of the lower part of the ditch but making the upper part considerably
wider. It is for this reason that the lip of the inner ditch is to-day found
so close to the wall footing. It was here, at the lip of the silted-up ditch,
that the Roman engineers built the short retaining walls which terminate
the curved masonry front of the Roman bastion.
During excavation it became apparent that the ground between the wall
and the lip of the inner ditch was not wholly natural. When the east side
of the bastion foundation was exposed, a small V-shaped ditch was found
going under the foundation, which cut into one side of its filling; the
wall footing had been dug into the other side. A few scraps of pottery found
in the ditch appear to belong to the 1st cent. The ditch, then, had been
dug at an early date and had long been filled in and forgotten by the time
when the town received its walls.
A ditch somewhat similar to this had been
noticed some years ago at the foot of East Walls(S.A. C. 95, 1957, 124,
fig. 5 ) and this ditch also contained 1st cent. objects. Our own trench T.2, outside
the West Walls, also cut into a ditch in a similar position, as can be seen
on the section drawing. It seemed possible that we were again getting evidence
of an earlier fortification of Chichester, such as had been postulated in
1952 by Rae( S.A .C. 90, 1952, 184-7) but refuted in 1957 by Dr.Wilson( S.A.C.
95,1957,116).
However, this interpretation cannot stand
and, in any case, these ditches are barely large enough to form part of
a system of defences for the town. The ditch in T.2 may in fact not be a
ditch at all; it is a rather shallow U-shaped depression, lined with puddled
chalk. Layer 16 contained scraps of pottery which were certainly later than
mediaeval and the whole feature may have been made about the time of the Civil War.
Certainly no Roman ditch existed here. Nor was any early Roman ditch found
when the Market Avenue bastion was excavated in 1956; the sections obtained
there showed solid coombe rock alongside the bastion( S.A.C. 95, 1957, 128,
fig. 8 ).
We must conclude that the ditch near the
Palace bastion and that under the East Walls are purely local features,
connected with the early occupation of the town, before the wall was built. They provide further
evidence that the early town spread over a larger area than that subsequently
enclosed by the defences.
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History of Chichester
The Defences of Roman Chichester - Page3
By John Holmes, F.S.A.
