Chapter 4

THE PART WHICH WORMS HAVE PLAYED IN THE BURIAL OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS.

The accumulation of rubbish on the sites of great cities independent of the action of worms--The burial of a Roman villa at Abinger--The floors and walls penetrated by worms--Subsidence of a modern pavement--The buried pavement at Beaulieu Abbey--Roman villas at Chedworth and Brading--The remains of the Roman town at Silchester--The nature of the debris by which the remains are covered--The penetration of the tesselated floors and walls by worms--Subsidence of the floors--Thickness of the mould--The old Roman city of Wroxeter--Thickness of the mould--Depth of the foundations of some of the Buildings--Conclusion.

Archaeologists are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects. Coins, gold ornaments, stone implements, &c., if dropped on the surface of the ground, will infallibly be buried by the castings of worms in a few years, and will thus be safely preserved, until the land at some future time is turned up. For instance, many years ago a grass- field was ploughed on the northern side of the Severn, not far from Shrewsbury; and a surprising number of iron arrow-heads were found at the bottom of the furrows, which, as Mr. Blakeway, a local antiquary, believed, were relics of the battle of Shrewsbury in the year 1403, and no doubt had been originally left strewed on the battle-field. In the present chapter I shall show that not only implements, &c., are thus preserved, but that the floors and the remains of many ancient buildings in England have been buried so effectually, in large part through the action of worms, that they have been discovered in recent times solely through various accidents. The enormous beds of rubbish, several yards in thickness, which underlie many cities, such as Rome, Paris, and London, the lower ones being of great antiquity, are not here referred to, as they have not been in any way acted on by worms. When we consider how much matter is daily brought into a great city for building, fuel, clothing and food, and that in old times when the roads were bad and the work of the scavenger was neglected, a comparatively small amount was carried away, we may agree with Elie de Beaumont, who, in discussing this subject, says, "pour une voiture de materiaux qui en sort, on y en fait entrer cent." [53] Nor should we overlook the effects of fires, the demolition of old buildings, and the removal of rubbish to the nearest vacant space,

Abinger, Surrey.--Late in the autumn of 1876, the ground in an old farm-yard at this place was dug to a depth of 2 to 2.5 feet, and the workmen found various ancient remains. This led Mr. T. H. Farrer of Abinger Hall to have an adjoining ploughed field searched. On a trench being dug, a layer of concrete, still partly covered with tesserae (small red tiles), and surrounded on two sides by broken-down walls, was soon discovered. It is