ABSTRACT
The foregoing paragraphs on the London bastions were written some time ago. In many respects they have been rendered obsolete by the recent dis covery (in 1965: Plate 18) of a hitherto unrecorded bastion in Cripplegate churchyard. The original account has been retained unaltered because with what follows it well illustrates the manner in which a situation may be resolved by fresh evidence; and reiterates the point already made that in times of doubt it may be misleading to rely on the latest object in a particular deposit for the date of that deposit. The ‘new’ bastion is situated about half-way between Cripplegate and the
north-western corner of the fort (Bastion 12): it was exposed during the lowering of the surface of the churchyard of St. Giles Cripplegate as part of the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme. The bastion survives as two curving stumps built against the city wall (Fig. 17): the outer part has been cut away by the seventeenth-century sewer which follows the line of the city ditch in this area. The existing masonry is all foundation work: grave-digging has probably been the chief cause of the destruction of the superstructure, but late re-cutting of the ditch may also have had something to do with it. It is remarkable that in spite of all the activity and disturbance not only the wall but also the internal features of the bastion should have survived. The indi cations are that throughout the length of the churchyard on this side the Roman berm at 7-8 feet below the modern surface was not broken by burials, though further out, over the city ditch, burials went to depths of as much as 1 4 feet. It is possible that the zone before the wall may have been avoided to begin with because burials too close to it may have been thought to threaten its stability. Later on, burials were actually made close to the wall-face, but by this time the surface had built up quite considerably. The deepest of these burials were about 6 feet down. As remarkable as its survival is the fact that the bastion does not figure
on the sixteenth-century panoramic maps which are one of the sources of
information on features of London’s defences that no longer survive. This presumably means that it had vanished from view by about the middle of the sixteenth century; but there has been no opportunity of checking the possibility that it may be shown on unpublished manuscript maps, which might enable the date of its disappearance to be more closely fixed. In the numerical sequence by which the bastions of London are identified this bastion stands between Bastion 1 1 at All-Hallows-on-the-wall on the east and Bastion 1 2 on the Cripplegate corner. It has seemed better at this stage to call it 1 1 a , rather than to disturb the long-established numbering of the bastions that follow it westwards, at any rate until it is certain that no fur ther bastions remain to be discovered. In the condition in which the bastion was made available for archaeo
logical investigation the remains consisted of the stumps of the wall already mentioned with between them the full depth of the deposit from the modern surface of the churchyard to the Roman berm, here a matter of about 7 J feet. In the western (internal) angle of the bastion there was a large brick-built inspection chamber which penetrated the natural gravel and had destroyed everything in that corner. The removal of burials in the surrounding area had left a more or less
vertical section face, east to west along a chord of the bastion and about 4 feet out from the city wall. The most noticeable feature of the section was a layer of tightly packed gravel about 9 inches thick and 18 inches above the feature that appeared to mark the original berm. There was a break about half-way along it which indicated a small pit of some kind. The gravel layer was exactly like that in Bastion 14 (Plates 2 1, 22) and its potential signifi cance for dating purposes was therefore considerable. Above the gravel surface the very mixed accumulation of soil and other
materials showed no burials on the face though there was a number of relatively shallow ones nearer the city wall. All this material can be dismissed very briefly for it produced fragments of bellarmine and even later pottery, to show that it had been disturbed certainly down to some time well into the nineteenth century. The break in the face of the gravel proved as expected to be a small pit.
