College Record 2014

Cupboards and Crypts: chasing after
Roman sculpture in England
by Martin Henig (SF 1998–2009, MCR 2009–)
I am often asked what research I do, and even (very occasionally) what I am doing
in Wolfson. If I reply that I am an archaeologist, conversation immediately shifts
to the places I have excavated, generally assumed to be on some distant sun-soaked
shore. Alas, I have to disabuse them for I have virtually never worked outside
England, and the only digging I have done, apart from my garden, has been in halfderelict
museum stores, generally in search of the sculptures, tombstones, altars
and fragments of architectural moulding which once gave this country something
of the appearance of Roman Italy. Most of my research has been for the British
section of the great international project designed to record every sculpture in the
Roman Empire, grandiloquently entitled Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani.
There are not too many people working on Romano-British art and culture which
too many Classical Archaeologists regard as the Cinderella of Roman studies.
However, for me the brightest aspect of basing myself here is that most of them are
at Wolfson. Peter Stewart has published on Romano-British sculpture, while Roger
Tomlin is more than familiar with recording Roman stone in curious places. Roger
is, of course, the authority on epigraphy (inscriptions) which often graced the
same monument or other item; for example, we worked together on two important
inscribed tombstones from Gloucester, excavated by Oxford Archaeology and
taken to their rather bleak store in Abingdon. I am pleased to say they are now
proudly displayed in Gloucester Museum.
Sometimes sculptures are immediately accessible in well regulated museums, but I
found one altar discovered in restoring Uppington Church near Wroxeter in 1885,
mouldering away in the churchyard; and writing of churchyards, I recall visiting
a dingy chapel in a cemetery where Cirencester Museum had stored some of its
sculpture, and having to feel the contours of the best piece, an image of Mercury,
which was not accessible to sight. But this was as nothing compared with a Chester
store in which an amazing collection of tombstones recovered from the North Wall
of the Fortress, some of them by the young E F Benson, were consigned to a leaky
lock-up under tarpaulins and in some cases totally out of sight. Thank goodness
some excellent photographs had been taken forty years earlier. But that was not the
worst scenario: accidents can happen, and part of a London store was bulldozed;
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