I wish to renew interest among the people of the neighbourhood in the
exploration work at Caerwent. The reason, perhaps, why some of the
interest has fallen off, is the illness and death of the late Vicar of
Caerwent, who always took the greatest possible delight in explaining
to visitors the history of the ancient city and the nature of the work
of excavation.
There is a great deal of fresh ground to be explored. I am glad to
find that there is an increasing interest in Great Britain in this
kind of work, and I hope it will continue to increase. If we expect to
find any interest at all in matters of this kind, it would be in Rome,
and yet we find that in that city it has been decided recently to pull
down some of the most valuable remains in the city, the great Roman
wall, which for so long a period kept out the Goths and the Vandals
who besieged the city. If that is possible in Rome, any indifference
to this kind of work in Great Britain is not surprising. There is a
fascination about the work of exploring, as we are always expecting to
find something which has not been found before, and which may be very
useful for historical purposes.
All this part of the world is very interesting, not only Caerwent, but
Llanvaches, where we find early Christian evidences, and Newport,
where we have a castle of the Middle Ages. I cannot help thinking,
when I look at the collection of Roman coins in the Caerwent Museum,
that it is not absolutely impossible that one of them may be the very
coin which Our Saviour took and asked whose image it bore. For all we
know, that very coin may have been in the possession of a Roman
soldier stationed in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, and
brought by him to Caerwent.
_Newport Town Hall, on the occasion of a Lecture on
"The Excavations at Caerwent,"
March 24th, 1908._