Excavation in advance of redevelopment within St Bartholomew’s Hospital, West Smithfield, in 1979, revealed evidence of at least 20 inhumation burials from a Roman cemetery in use during the 3rd and 4th centuries. The burials were arranged in three clusters, with up to five successive burials in each cluster, and six further individual graves. This implies marked plots and an ordered layout. Evidence for the reinterment of casually disturbed bones was also found. It is possible that as many as eight individuals were buried in wooden coffins, and two of these were accompanied by grave goods. The skeletons were of adult and juvenile men and women, together with children, which in the case of the clusters probably indicate family plots. In two of the three clusters the final burial showed a relaxation of the previous, formal arrangement; the cemetery deposit was thereafter overlain by ‘dark earth’.

The discoveries can be set in context by re-examining the chronological and topographical distribution of other recorded evidence for cemeteries to the west and north-west of the Roman city. This reveals a distinction between mid 1st to mid 2nd-century cremations arranged in a ‘linear’ fashion along the main western road to the city, and late 2nd to early 3rd-century cremations – and 3rd to 4th-century inhumations – concentrated in a ‘nuclear’ pattern around the city walls. The early Roman cremations extend, moreover, as far east as St Martin’s le Grand, implying that the boundary of the 1st to 2nd-century city must have been near here, some 400m within (to the east of) the city wall built c AD 200.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the grave goods, both from the present site and from other sites in the area, and with an illustrated catalogue of complete pottery vessels that are likely to have formed part of burial groups.

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