A Visitor to Caerwent in 1786
THE REVD SAMUEL SEYER,
A VISITOR TO CAERWENT IN 1786
A VISITOR TO CAERWENT IN 1786
An
antique plan of Venta Silurum or Caerwent’ drawn by Thomas Morrice
When the Bristol clergyman and schoolmaster Revd.
Samuel Seyer visited Monmouthshire in 1786, he was ‘repeatedly assured’ at
Chepstow ‘that there was nothing to see at Caerwent and that it was not even
mentioned in the guidebook’. When he got there, he found,
‘a poor miserable village, containing the parish
church, one large farmhouse, three alehouses, three shops and about a dozen
mean houses within the walls and about half a dozen against the walls outside’.
Despite this unpromising start, his account of the
Roman town, his sketch map and detailed account of the Roman walls as they then
existed, precede Coxe’s better known account and his excellent plan of Caerwent
(above) by the surveyor Thomas Morrice by almost twenty years. Seyer saw a
Roman mosaic which had been preserved under a protective shed and described Roman
roads leading from Caerwent to Sudbrook and Usk, but these had recently been
largely destroyed to repair the modern roads.
His account was reprinted by Charles Roach Smith in 1848, in his
description of his visit to Caerleon and Caerwent and his meeting with our
founder John Edward Lee. (See Charles Roach Smith, ‘Notes on Caerwent and
Caerleon’. Journal of the British Archaeological Association IV 1848,
246-264.)
In Seyer’s time, local people had a profitable trade
in selling Roman coins to visitors. (A picture of him holding a coin can be accessed below.)
‘Great quantities of Roman coins have been found here
and are found every day after opening fresh earth. All which I saw (near one
hundred) were Imperial … I bought two very perfect copper pieces of Trajan
weighing about a penny each, for half a crown and among some smaller Roman ones,
I bought a silver penny of William the Conqueror and another of one of the
Edwards.’
From Caerwent, Charles Roach Smith went on to
Caerleon. Like Tennyson eight years later, he stayed at the Hanbury Arms, where
the landlady remembered the visits of Coxe, Colt Hoare and the other early
travellers nearly fifty years before. On summer mornings Coxe and Colt Hoare
would set off on their travels at four o’clock in the morning. Roach Smith
called on Lee and they inspected Lee’s rescue excavation of the extra mural
Roman bath building which had turned up during landscaping at the Mynde.
Several Roman inscriptions had recently turned up and Lee was planning to
discuss these with the Caerleon Antiquarian Association ‘an institution recently
founded by Mr Lee and his friends’. Like Lee, Smith was not a wealthy amateur,
but ‘in business’ - a London chemist, who had rescued much Roman and Medieval
material from development sites in the City of London, and like Lee, had
founded a museum (in his case a private one). The two men would have had much
in common. After Roach Smith’s death, his collections passed to the British
Museum, where they form the foundation of its Romano British collections.
Jeremy Knight
Further
Information.
1.
This article is based on William
Seyer’s visit to Caerwent reprinted in Charles Roach Smith, ‘Notes on Caerwent and Caerleon’.
Journal of the British Archaeological Association IV 1848, 246-264.)
Charles Roach Smith (1806--1890) was
a notable amateur
archaeologist and was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London
(1836), and the London Numismatic Society (1837). Roach Smith was a founding
member of the British Archaeological Association (1843).
2.
For Samuel Seyer’s subsequent comments on Caerwent see
Samuel Seyer, 'Memoirs historical and topographical of
Bristol', Vol. One, 1757-1831. Chapter II, p. 130.
Click on Link and scroll down.
3.
For
an engraving of William Seyer holding a coin see © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D8923 , by William
Walker, stipple engraving, (1824). Click on Link
4.
For Edward Lee the founder of the Monmouthshire
Antiquarian Association see
Gwenllian V. Jones, ‘John Edward Lee, a Monmouthshire
Antiquary’, The Monmouthshire Antiquary, Vol., XIII (1997).
Gwenllian V. Jones, ‘John Edward Lee and
Antiquarianism in Nineteenth-Century Caerleon’, The Monmouthshire
Antiquary, Vol., XVII (2001).
5. For William Coxe see, Historical
Tour in Monmouthshire,
Vol. 1, Chapter 4 pp.24-29, 1995 Merton Priory Press Ltd. (original publication
1801) The
book has an introduction by Jeremy Knight. The
book is the result of three tours by the author William Coxe. On the
first, in 1798, he was accompanied by Sir Richard Colt Hoare who provided
some of the illustrations for the book and there were then two further tours on
his own, in the spring and autumn of 1799. Sir Richard Colt
Hoare (1758-1838), was a renowned antiquarian in his own right.
6. See also John
Newman, The Buildings of Wales: Gwent/Monmouthshire, p.82 and 145-152
7. Coflein: Caerwent Roman City; Venta
Silurum Click to open Coflein database.
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