A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE which, as a Roman road, there seems to be no proper evidence. The conclusion of the whole matter is that the road by Birmingham and Alcester to Bourton and the Foss is a genuine Roman road, but that its titles Icknield or Rycknield Street are in all probability the invention of medieval antiquaries.^ Part of the road had however a genuine Anglo-Saxon name, Buggilde Straet or Bucgan Straet, which appears to be older than the Norman Conquest. This name was used between Bidford and Weston Subedge, and seems to be derived from an English personal name of the feminine gender.^ It is of course English, and concerns us merely as showing that the road was recognized as an old one very early in English history. It is still in use, as I am assured, between Bidford and Weston, in the form of ' Buckle Street.' (7) It remains briefly to notice the Foss Way. This traverses only two outlying portions of south-eastern Worcestershire, the parishes of Tredington near Shipston-on-Stour and of Blockley. It forms a modern high-road and its course its unmistakable. At Dorn, in Blockley, some noteworthy remains have been found close to its course (see Index). M ISCELLANEOUS Towns, villas, roads indicate some form or other of settled occupa- tion. We pass on to notice scattered finds, coins, pottery and the like, which we cannot refer to any definite place in the civilization of Roman Worcestershire. Some of these probably are so imperfectly known to us that we fail to catch their significance ; others certainly seem to be due to chance, and neither class can be used to assist materially our ideas of the Romano-British life in our county. We shall therefore summarize such sporadic discoveries in the alphabetical list with which our article concludes, without wasting words in what must be idle speculation. There is however one of these scattered finds which, though most in- adequately recorded, nevertheless deserves the compliment of a special mention. This is the large hoard of gold and silver coins, principally of the late fourth century, which was found at Cleeve Prior in 181 1. In October, 181 1, a workman named Thomas Sheppey, while dig- ging stone in a quarry, found two urns of ' red earthenware ' which had been carefully buried in a stratum of clay and protected by stones laid above and below them. One of these urns contained gold coins and the other silver coins. Unfortunately the hoard was rapidly dispersed. The finder utilized some of the coins as current money, and sold the rest or most of the rest in small parcels to residents in the neighbourhood and others, and the coins were thus scattered among many owners. Some details have however been preserved concerning them. The bulk of
- See the references in Allies, pp. 340-53 ; Guest, Origines Celtics, ii. 220. The Rykeneld
Street which Gale, Allies and others find in a deed of a.d. 1223 near Stoke-upon-Trent seems, accord- ing to Guest, to be due to a misreading. Guest tries to defend the antiquity of the name Rycknield against Thorpe, but without meeting the real points of the case. 2 A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson, Crawford Charters (Oxford, 1895), p. 56. 216
