First published 13/09/2013, Updated 03/01/2024

In 2013, ULAS carried out an excavation of part of a Roman cemetery between Oxford Street and Newarke Street in Leicester. Excavation director John Thomas reports:

The site lay in the town’s south suburb, adjacent to one of the main routes into Roman Leicester, about 130m outside the town’s south gate – reflecting the prohibition in Roman law against burial inside urban centres.

The earliest evidence for activity on the site indicates early Roman occupation superseded by a Roman cemetery in the 3rd and 4th century AD. By the medieval period, the site was clearly in the backyard areas of properties fronting Oxford Street and a large number of pits were recorded across the site, including a couple of stone-lined cess-pits. A massive ditch aligned on Newarke Street may relate to the town’s Civil War defences and adds to a number of other such features found on nearby excavations.

Overlying this was an intriguing building built of re-used brick and sandstone pieces. This appears on the early maps of the area and may represent early re-occupation of the south suburb after the Civil War. Many of the sandstone blocks are curved, possibly coming from a dismantled tower, turret or circular staircase – quite where from remains a mystery but the quality of the stonework suggests it could have originated from a high status building.

In all, seventeen late Roman graves were excavated, containing the remains of men, women and children, and representing a diverse range of burial practices. The majority of the graves were arranged in orderly rows on an east-west alignment, mostly with their heads to the west, another was buried face down while one of the east-facing burials had been decapitated. One burial was north facing. Dated to the early 4th century AD, some of the individuals had been interred with personal items including hairpins, belt buckles, and hobnailed boots.

One – a female adult aged between 26 and 45 – was wearing a jet ring decorated with what may be an early Christian symbol, its enigmatic markings possibly interpreted as the letters I and X overlain in an iota-chi, a motif representing the first letters of ‘Jesus Christ’ in Greek. There are a number of examples of Christian symbols occurring on finger rings and other artefacts; however, the additional cross-hatching in the opposing segments of the motif on this ring might argue for it simply being an attractive design. The ring was found on the individual’s left hand, together with another ring, made of iron and decorated with silver, while beneath the head was a composite bone comb held together with iron rivets.

A loose arrangement of nails around the head suggested the individual had been buried in a wooden coffin and the western end of the grave closest to the head was also intermittently ‘lined’ with granite blocks.

A radiocarbon date from the burial, coupled with the jet ring and the comb suggests a burial date of cal. AD 330-455 (95% probability). The iron ring, however, was of 1st or 2nd century style, and was probably buried as an heirloom.

Could this be evidence of late Roman Christianity in Leicester?

The burial practices observed during the excavation appear to represent a considerable variety of beliefs, indicating that the community observed a wide range of beliefs and superstitions that were, perhaps, illustrated in the way they were laid to rest. Many of the burial shared a common burial practice of supine, extended burials, with few or no grave goods, laid within east-facing graves. These characteristics are common amongst late Roman urban cemeteries across the country. It has been suggested that this particular burial rite represents a predominantly Christian tradition, although it may equally be a result of a prevailing fashion that had developed by the late 4th century.

Inferring religious beliefs from funerary remains can be problematic and other factors could influence burial characteristics, such as status and community or family tradition, and the evidence recovered may be more informative of the actions of the living rather than the dead.

The common orientation of the burials, for example, appears in this case to have been dictated by the organisation of the surrounding topography, and principally influenced by the line of the Tripontium road as it entered Leicester from the south. This is not an unusual situation, and the organisation and development of other urban Roman cemeteries around the town was closely tied to elements of the built landscape such as roads, boundaries and ditches, their influence reflected in the orientation of burials located nearby.

The meaning behind the enigmatic monogram on the jet ring also remains open to debate and archaeological evidence for Christianity in Leicester, and further afield, is still generally sparse.

Find out more:
Read the full excavation report on the Archaeological Data Service here
Read the article in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society here