Roman Billericay

Excavations in the courtyard at the east end of Lambeth Palace chapel, and standing fabric recording of the east elevation of the chapel and its undercroft revealed a sequence of structures. The earliest foundations, incorporating the lower levels of the chapel undercroft, probably date to 1199–1200 when the building of a Premonstratensian house of canons was started under Archbishop Hubert Walter. The remainder of the undercroft and the chapel above is part of Archbishop Stephen Langton's work undertaken in the 1220s. Alterations were made to the undercroft during subsequent centuries, including the means of access and the addition of partitions. The final major phase of work was Blore's rebuilding in the residential section of the palace in 1830.     

Roman soil and Roman sound in Irish hagiography

ABSTRACT

Irish hagiography displays considerable interest in communication between Ireland and Rome, particularly as this featured saints, popes and relics. While people and objects travel between the two places, there is also concern to circumvent the distance involved. This article discusses an episode of miraculous communication in the Irish Life of St Colmán Élo. Here messages and messengers travel from Rome, but time and space are also telescoped through aural and material means: the sound of the bell marking the death of Pope Gregory the Great and a gift from him of Roman soil to be spread on Colmán Élo’s cemetery. The article considers how the two elements function within their hagiographical context to connect Rome and Ireland, and how these places shaped the account. The roles of bell and soil both draw on their associations in Ireland and relate to papal communication as this was experienced and imagined more widely.     

Roman London

This paper discusses two fragmentary stone pillars, one decorated, which were recently discovered at Trefollwyn, near Llangefni, Anglesey. These are the first examples of their kind from Britain but they belong to a tradition of La Tène carved stone pillars from the Rhineland, Brittany, and Ireland. They may be connected with burial. In antiquarian sources an early Christian inscribed stone (fifth-sixth centuries A.D.), now lost, was reported from Capel Heilin in the same immediate vicinity and suggests that the area was used for burial in the early medieval period.