ROMANO-BRITISH WORCESTERSHIRE one — Branogena or Brangonia, which Humphrey Lhuyd and Leland and many subsequent topographers have proclaimed to be the Roman name of Worcester.* It is one long juggle with names — interesting as charac- teristic of earlier antiquarian methods but wholly devoid of scientific value. In dealing with ancient Worcester we shall do well to leave alone Caer Guiragon or Gorangon and all names constructed out of it. The Romano-British settlement at Worcester appears to have occu- pied much the same site as the modern town, a long strip of high land above the eastern bank of the Severn. But the recorded remains give no real indication of its size or character. Roman coins have been found at many points from Barbourne on the north to Diglis on the south, and they comprise not only the usual third and fourth-century issues down to the end of the Roman period, but also a considerable proportion of first and second-century coins — one of Augustus, two of Tiberius, many of Claudius and his successors.* Other objects have been found rather less frequently over the same area. The following paragraphs contain the principal discoveries and alleged discoveries arranged from north to south. (i) At the White Ladies, the site of a medieval nunnery in the Tything, somewhat north of St. Oswald's Hospital, many coins, mostly but not wholly of the third and fourth centuries, were found in and before 1842, and with them were associated a number of Greek coins, some of pre-Roman date.' But these, both Greek and Roman, as Mr. Willis-Bund informs me, were purposely buried by a lady who afterwards admitted the act. (2) A little west of this, under the house in the centre of Britannia Square, some discoveries were made in 1829 — a circular foundation of sandstone 30 feet in diameter, general debris and coins of the late third and the fourth century. The foundations were explained as a fort built by Ostorius Scapula about a.d. 50, but they are much too small for a fort and their connection with Ostorius is a gratuitous fiction for which no shred of evidence exists ; they do not seem indeed to have been examined by any competent archsologists, and we possess no actual proof that they are of Roman date at all.^ (3) West of Britannia Square in the low riverside area called Pitch- croft, now occupied by the racecourse, a great quantity of scoria as from iron-smeltings, and among them some pottery which was taken to be Roman, were found in the eighteenth century. It was probably here that the seventeenth-century engineer, Andrew Yarranton, noted ' the hearth of a Roman footblast ' and a peck of Roman coins in an urn near it, and scoria enough for him and his friends (as one of them asserts) to take ' many thousand tons or loads ' up the Severn to their iron-furnaces to be resmelted. That these scoria date from the Roman period is a common ' Lhuyd, CommentarioR fragmentum ; Leland, refF. of preceding note.
- Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, ed. 2, 1852, pp. 1-32 ; Val. Green, Hist, of Worcester, i. 108 ;
Worcestershire 1882 Exhibition Catalogue, p. 50, mentions two coins (Vespasian and Constantine) found in Barbourne. Coins are so easily shifted amidst rubbish or even found and lost again elsewhere, that it is no use here to catalogue all the precise localities where individual specimens have been noted. 8 Allies, pp. 5-8. * Allies, pp. 1-3. Forty-nine of the coins are in the Worcester Museum. 205
