A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE these statements are probably incorrect. On the whole the finds indicate a ' villa ' rather than a town or village. We may suppose that some wealthy Romano-Briton pitched here his dwelling in a sheltered place, and it may be that he used the salt springs for which Droitwich has long been famous. Or we might imagine instead a little spa, and perhaps the existence of Roman roads which seem to lead towards Worcester and Alcester and Birmingham,' might make the latter hypothesis the more probable. But it is idle to guess. (2) Kempsey. Here, 4I miles south of Worcester, various antiqui- ties have been discovered between the village and the river, near the church or a little north of it. The most striking of these is an inscrip- tion found some years before 1818, lying in two pieces with other stones 4 feet deep in the west wall of the kitchen garden of the parsonage farm, north-west of the church. Many of the other stones were cemented together and formed some kind of ancient foundation ; whether the inscription was one of these, is not recorded. It is itself a flat slab of freestone, 33 inches high by 20 inches wide, and is now in the Worcester Museum where I have examined it. It reads as follows : — A_C o NST ANT, No PE'IN VICTO AVG Val[erio) Constantino P{io) fe(lici) invicto Jug{usto) ' To the Emperor Valerius Constantinus, pious, fortunate, unconquerable, Augustus.' Probably the commencement of the inscription is lost ; it may have begun IMP. CAES. fl. Imp{eratort) Cces{ari) Fl{avio). Flavins Valerius Constantinus was Constantine the Great, and this stone was presumably set up in his reign (a.d. 308-337). It appears to be a milestone, or rather a road-stone, of the type common in the fourth century, in which the mileage was often omitted — though here it might have been broken off. But it might conceivably be no more than an honorary slab (see p. 213). Near it were found Roman tiles indicating some building. A little north, in a field called the Moors, gravel-diggers in 1835-9 found a number of small pits containing ashes, the burnt bones and teeth of a horse, a few fibula, a coin of Nero and many potsherds of various kinds, including Samian and the ' red-earth ' ware noticed above (p. 208). Mr. Allies, the chronicler of the finds, calls the pits cists or graves, but no human remains seem to have been found, and the pits themselves which measured 6 feet by 6 feet or 6 feet by 8 feet, are not shaped sepulchrally. We may rather regard them as the rubbish-pits which regularly occur near dwelling-houses. A ' camp,' now for the most part obliterated, is stated to have been formerly traceable at this place, the church being close to its southern end. According to the best measurements available, those made by Mr. Allies fifty years ago, its east and west sides were each 200 yards long, its north side 180 yards, its south side 90 yards, so that it formed an irregular quadrilateral of about 4 acres. It has usually been > There is also a curiously straight road due north to Crutch Hill. 210
