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The situation of Southampton has many geographical resemblances to that of London. Both are at the head of estuaries to which the main drainage systems of their hinterland converge. Both towns were separated from that hinterland by large tracts of forest and scrub, and both are built on hard ground near channels of deep water. Southampton has, throughout most of its history, been a Channel port, looking across the Channel to France and Spain whence came the traders and raiders of the Middle Ages, just as London looked to the Low Countries.
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- Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942
References
1 Exbury, Hamble Common, Tachbury, Toothill, Chilworth Ring, Castle Hill, the Walls (Nursling) ; bronze implements have been found in Toothill Camp and a gold tore at Moorcourt Farm ; these are now preserved at Broadlands.
2-3 About 1878 Roman remains were found ‘out towards Swaythling ‘, consisting of pottery and urns, a pot with 200 Roman coins, a ‘huge trench with at least 200 horses’ heads’, and some carbonized grain. Some of these objects found their way to the museums at Salisbury and Dorchester ; others were acquired by an old gentleman who came out from Southampton in a cab. Hampshire Independent, 22 February 1890 ; reprinted in the Hampshire Antiquary and Naturalist, 1891, 1, 48. Information about the exact site would be welcome.
4 A General History of Hampshire, by B. B. Woodward and T. C. Wilkes, 11, 146. Davies (Hist. p. 2) gives the site as ‘the high ground in front of Portswood Lawn’, which was evidently that now traversed by Lawn road. Portswood Park was broken up and built over between 1842 and 1862, and Mr Kell states definitely that the graves were found ‘when a new road was cut through Portswood Lawn’ (Hampshire Independent, 4 April 1863) ; he was himself residing at number 5 Lawn road in 1859. Probably the site is that marked ‘Roman remains found’ on the 25-inch O.S. map, on the south side of Lawn road, 1000 feet ENE. of the point where Lawn road enters Portswood road ; but there is now no means of verifying this.
5 Cerdic and the Cloven Way, ANTIQUITY, 1931, V, 442-458.
6 And later also, if we may (with Ekwall) identify Stone with Bede’s Ad Lapidem, to which the two sons of Arvald, king of the Isle of Wight, fled for refuge about the year 686. There was a ferry from here to the Isle of Wight as late as 1859 (History, Gazeteer, and Directory of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, by William White, 1859, 369-70).
7 Hamuuih is the form of MS. F. in Munich Library, written about the end of the 8th or beginning of the 9th century. See Hodoeporicon Si Willibaldi, ed. T. Tobler, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 14, 308, 321.
8 Approximately the middle of the older settlement seems to have been the road- junction known as Six Dials, where St. Mary’s road crosses the railway ; here, on the point of the angle between St. Mary’s and St. Andrew’s roads, is the Edinburgh Hotel (earlier the Star and Garter, and then, in 1856-7 the Deanery Inn) where many of the finds mentioned later were found.
In Hearnshaw and Clarke’s History of Southampton (Oxford, 1910, pp. 36, 37) the author of part 1 of that book records, on the authority of Leland and Camden, a ‘very old tradition’ that ‘the old and original Hampton clustered round the mother church of St. Mary’. That may have been a fact, but it is unsupported by archaeological evidence, nor is it what Leland says. Paraphrased, he states that the old town stood a quarter of a mile or more northeast of the new one and extended to the haven-side, and that the place where it stood then bore good corn and grass and was called St. Mary field because St. Mary’s church stood hard by it. No archaeological remains of the old town itself have been found south or east of St. Mary’s church, the nearest (excluding the Grove street cemetery) being on the site of the New Gaol, a quarter of a mile due north of it. On a map of 1842, now in the Tudor House museum, the words ‘glebe lands’ or ‘glebe’ are written over the area northeast of Six Dials, the present railway triangle (now allotments) and the land east of the present Northam station. This glebe belonged to St. Mary’s and it was no doubt the ‘St. Mary field’ of Leland. On the same map the words ‘T. Bradby, Esq.’ are written over the’ new gaol ‘ field, thus confirming the site of the earliest finds made in digging clay.
9 Keele, writing in 1855 (Coll. Ant. IV, 59), says clay-digging for bricks began here in 1839, and it is clear from his account that it continued at least to 1849. Kell, who questioned those closely concerned with the digging, states that it took place between 1825 and 1833 (JBAA, 1864, XX, 69). Probably it went on throughout the whole of the period preceding the erection of houses on the brickfield. The New Gaol (now replaced by a police station) was built there in 1854-5 > eight coins of Offa and Egbert were found in digging foundations for it (JBAA, 1857, XIII, 208-9 ‘< Davies, History of Southampton, p. 102).
10 These houses must have been south of Compton Walk, for the block of houses immediately north of that road had been built long before. It is called Charlotte Place after Princess Charlotte, who died in 1817 ; it is not marked on the map of 1802, and was therefore presumably built between those two dates. The distance from the Edinburgh Hotel to Compton Walk is 1,100 feet.
11 The site is described as ‘about a quarter of a mile east of the Roman station, Clausentum, and of the river Itchen, which separates it from Clausentum (JBAA, XXII, 1866, 455).’ East ‘is clearly a slip for’ west ‘, but the site is actually threequarters of a mile southwest of Clausentum.
12 A sceatta is said to have been found ‘at Hogsmount, about a mile from this site [near the New Gaol], and bordering Clausentum’, but there is no mention of bonepits there. I had been unable to locate Hogsmount.
13 J. S. Davies, History of Southampton, 1883, 293-4.
14 At about this time there was a monastery at Redbridge (Bede), but the Isle of Wight was still pagan, and Wilfrid was converting the people of western Sussex. It is probable that the monastery ‘at Redbridge’ was in fact that at Nursling, two miles to the north, where Boniface was ordained priest about 30 years later. There is no church at Redbridge, and no other evidence of a monastery there.
15 Coins of Athelstan (925-40) and lEthelred (presumably ‘the Unready’, 978- 1006) are also recorded, though the latter was queried in the list in Coll. Ant., IV, 61 (JBAA, XIII, 209 ; XX, 70). A coin of Otho (A.D. 69) is also mentioned in the last cited reference as the earliest found on the site. A coin of Eadgar (957-75) is mentioned in the list in Coll. Ant., IV.
16 Davies, History of Southampton, 59.
17 Maps of about 1560, and of 1771 ; nos. 2 and 7 in the Atlas published by the Southampton Record Society in 1907.
18 In 1596 the population of the borough was about 4200, of whom less than 600 lived outside the walls (Hearnshaw, Hist, of Southampton, 1911, p. 79).
19 History of Southampton (Southampton Record Society, 1909), p. 147. On his map Speed indicates the mound by the same symbol as that used for Southampton Castle.
20 The number is really five, as the Deanery, St. Mary’s, is shown by this symbol. But other houses are Bevois Mount, Grove Place, N. Stoneham, Lord Hawke’s house at Swaythling and South Stoneham House.
21 Banisters was a moated site, but the farm and seat may have been built on new sites. The exact position of the moat cannot be discovered.
22 As these just built in Kingsland Place were described in the Southampton Guide 1821,51.
23 The line of descent here suggested may be illustrated by the following examples :— (1) Bevois Mount, c. 1730 (country-house in large park) ; (2) Bellevue House, c. 1770 (country-house nearer town in ‘ornamental grounds’) ; (3) Millbrook, Waterloo and other roads on the Freemantle Estate, c. 1850-60 (detached villas with gardens and shrubberies) ; (4) Many roads in Shirley and other suburbs, late Victorian to modern (rows of houses set closely together).