Roman city wall & south infirmary cloister wall

Several references contemporary references are made to an infirmary, where the ‘smaller brothers’, the sick and infirm monks were cared for. It is thought to be situated to the east of the main cloister and forming a smaller infirmary cloister itself.

Rochester's high city walls would once have formed a complete defensive circuit around the Roman town and mediaeval city, but large stretches have been lost in the 1800 years of their use. Much of what is left was substantially rebuilt (or at least re-faced) during the mediaeval period or later.

The stretch of the city wall in the Old Deanery Garden is probably the least known portion, largely because it lies in a private area of the Cathedral precinct. While this has been an advantage in protecting the masonry from development and accidental damage, it has also led to a history of neglect. Unfortunately this meant that by 2007 the wall - already a ruin - was in a precarious state of repair. With Adrian's active encouragement, we therefore started a major programme of conservation and repair. This included ground-probing radar survey and excavations carried out in 2010. We expected to find out more about the wall's Roman origins and later use — but the results far surpassed our expectations.

The Roman Wall

Elements of the Roman city wall were located or identified successfully in all of the excavations, with the best results coming from Test Pit 2.

Here the intact external (south) side of the wall was found to survive less than 0.7m below ground, with several courses of fine face masonry. Just as importantly, the rubble core behind the face was continuous and interrupted upwards into the standing portion of the masonry. This demonstrated what we had suspected before the excavation started: that the flint and mortar core above ground was original Roman work.

Unfortunately the face courses had been lost in the other pits (though the core still survived) but the reasons for this raised new and exciting questions about the later (re-)use of the wall. The radar survey, meanwhile, picked up the foundations of the wall very clearly to the east of the standing portion, where the masonry had been demolished in the 17th or 18th century to allow the establishment of a large area of orchards.

Medieval re-use, a major building

The standing section of the wall in the Old Deanery Garden is about 37.5m long. Why did this survive when the wall to the east was torn down? Our excavations gave us important clues on the likely answer.

Test pits 1 and 3 were opposite each other, on the south (external) and north (internal) sides of the wall respectively. Both pits revealed a substantial and very well built door, clearly of mediaeval date. The threshold (doorstep) and lower parts of the jambs (sides) were found in pit 3, with a deep splay (internal widening of the doorway) in pit 1. Here we also found some evidence for an earlier door entirely, though the form of this was unclear.

The materials and form of the later door are intriguing in their own right. Most of the step and sides were made from greensand quarried from the Reigate area in Surrey, but one piece — cut to exactly the same profile as the Reigate blocks — was of Caen stone from Normandy. Why was this? Careful examination of the door-frame gave us the answer. The door jambs actually continued down below the level of the step. It was clear that the threshold had been raised during the mediaeval period. While most of the Reigate step could be taken out and re-used at the higher level, the two stones running into and under the jambs could not be removed. Thus the odd piece of Caen had to be used instead. One other thing worth pointing out at this stage is that the door was obviously for a building on the south (and thus outer) side of the city wall.

When were these successive doors in use? The evidence here is, shall we say, less than exact. The earliest door (the one pre-dating the Reigate frame) involved the use of a shelly mortar that is typical of Norman work at the Cathedral, and therefore suggests an early 12th century date. This in turn implies that the first building — whatever it was — lay outside the Norman cathedral precinct, just like the Fratry on the south side of the cloister. The first of the later doors, with its fine Reigate frame, seems to date from the 13th or 14th century, on architectural grounds and from the limited dating evidence provided by pottery finds. By this time the precinct boundary had been pushed further to the south, and the building would now have been within the enclosed area. Perhaps this encouraged the use of fine new materials and details in the new door. The internal floors would only have built up at a relatively slow pace, so it may have taken another century before the door frame had to be re-set at the higher level.

These dates are only suggestions, but we are reasonably confident that they are not too far off the mark. What was the building, though? There are two main candidates. It could have been part of the reredorter (toilet bloc) attached to the south end of the dormitory on the east side of the cloister. This is quite a long way to the east, however, and so this is not our favoured interpretation. The alternative is that it formed part of the infirmary (hospital), traditionally located to the east of the monastic church (in this case, of course, the cathedral). There is some historical evidence to support this — the Chapel for Henry Vlll's short-lived palace in the cloister area, for instance, lay in this approximate area, and it was described at the time as being "late fermery", ie recently part of the infirmary.

The radar survey provided evidence for several ranges of buildings in the Old Deanery Gardens. We need to be careful not to press the interpretation too far here, but it is at least possible that the buildings identified in the survey are the Infirmary Cloister (in front of the Old Deanery, in the tea garden) with the chapel a little further to the east, in the main part of the gardens. The quality of the later mediaeval door would be consistent with the building on its south side being the residence of the Infirmarer (the senior monk in charge of the hospital).

Only one further (but important) set of questions remain. When and why did the building fall into disuse (and presumably demolition), and what happened then? We are far from certain of the answers here. The remaining portion of the Roman wall can only have survived because the building itself retained some usefulness, and thus was not demolished (for instance) when Henry Vlll's palace was abandoned in the 1550s. It does not appear on surveys dating to the middle of the 1 8th century, though it is possible that this is an accidental omission. Nevertheless it does seem likely that the building had gone by that time but the wall retained some residual value as a boundary between private spaces in the Old Deanery Garden.

One final clue about the date of the building's abandonment is worth mentioning. It was obvious even before we started digging that the standing masonry of the Roman wall included several areas of later infill and re-facing. We now know that one of these had blocked up our mediaeval doorway. The others probably marked the positions of former windows, doubtless also of high quality. Granite blocks are much in evidence in these areas of infill, and also in what remains of the coping at the top of the wall. Granite, however, only came into use in the Medway area in the early 19th century, or just possibly at the end of the previous century. Thus the door and windows were only blocked up just over 200 years ago.

Graham Keevill
Keevill Heritage LTD.

Extracts from The Friends of Rochester Cathedral Annual Report for 2011/2012.