But to return to the Jewry Wall, hard by the Norman church of St. Nicholas. It is grimy with modern filth, but reverend in its age of some 2,000 years, and of giant strength, so that you cannot but smile at sight of the recent flimsy pillars of brick that “support” it, and are already themselves decrepit.
But the most interesting of all Leicester’s relics of Roman Britain is stored in the Museum. This is the milestone discovered so long ago as 1771, on the Fosse Way, near Thurmastone, two miles from the town; on its original site, as the inscription on it proves. It is a cylindrical block of sandstone, rudely incised with a long, highly characteristic statement in a shockingly abbreviated and ill-spaced form, which, translated, runs, “During the Emperorship of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Cæsar, Hadrian, son of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Trajan, Conqueror of Parthia, in the Fourth Year of his Tribunal Power: thrice Consul. To Ratæ, Two Miles.”
I cannot withhold my astonishment, either at the miracles of condensed information displayed in this inscription, which outvies Pitman’s, or any other, shorthand system; or at the diabolic cleverness of whoever first solved the problem it must have presented. It must have puzzled even a good many Roman travellers, and to-day looks very like a “Bill / Stumps his mark” order of monument. The Romans evidently did not understand the first function of a milestone: to present clear and concise information. A modern milestone made in like manner, and inscribed: “During the Kingship of His Most Gracious Majesty Edward the Seventh, son of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, Conqueror of the Boer Republics, in the seventh year of his reign, Emperor of India. To Leicester, Two Miles”—would, it may be suspected, be the subject of unfavourable criticism.
It is not a little wonderful that this relic of an earlier civilisation has survived the rough usage that followed its discovery. It was removed to a garden close at hand, and would have been converted into a garden-roller, had it not been for the timeous intervention of Dr. Percy. A little later it narrowly escaped a worse fate, for it was claimed by one of the road commissioners, who would have had it broken up for road metal, had not public interest become aroused; with the odd result that this hoary relic was placed on a pedestal in midst of the town, crowned with a conical-shaped stone, and surmounted by—of all things—a lamp-post! Thus it remained until 1844, when, having been nearly ruined by exposure to the elements, and to wanton mischief, it was removed to its present home.