groups of barrack huts. In length, Block XVII at Newstead did not differ much from the Blocks I–XII in the Praetentura, but its internal arrangements seem to have been different. Besides, were we to include it as a barrack with the blocks lying beside it on the west, the plan would present the unusual feature of seven blocks placed side by side, whereas in the Praetentura they are placed, as in other forts, in pairs. It is not improbable that the building may have been the quarters of the superior officers' commanding the troops who lay in the barracks beside it on the west.
A Workshop
Block XVIII occupied a space of fifty-one feet by sixty feet. It lay immediately to the north of the preceding, and was strongly built on a foundation of cobbles. A hedge with some large trees crossed it diagonally, and this rendered thorough examination difficult. But it may be noted that no traces of cross walls were discovered, and nothing of the interior arrangements, beyond a large flagstone on the west side, which from the burnt appearance of the clay beside it might have been a hearth. It is not easy to point to a similar building in any fort hitherto excavated elsewhere. The position is that of the Quaestorium, or office occupied by the paymaster, on the Hyginian plan. The title has been applied to buildings found in the Limes forts in Germany, but the correctness of such an attribution appears to be very doubtful.[1] The position and size of Block XVIII seem rather to indicate that it may have been a workshop.
Between Blocks XVII and XVIII lay a small building which was not in alignment with either, and which was founded at a lower level. It occupied a space of forty feet by twenty-five feet. The walls were two and a half feet thick, and seemed to have been built almost entirely of whitish yellow sandstone, and to be founded upon one foot's depth of broken chips of the same stone lying on a bed of sand. At one point the wall was fifteen inches high and showed two hammer-dressed courses The whole floor was covered with river cobbles laid in finely puddled clay. The relative level of this building as compared with that of Block XVII is shown by the fact that the highest point of its wall lay from four feet nine inches to five feet below the modern surface, while that of Block XVII, of which the same height remained, was little more than eighteen inches down. A
1 Von Domaszewski expresses the opinion that there is not the smallest proof of the provision of a quaestorium for a permanent camp. Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher, Band ix. p. 145, note 44.
69