XX. Account of the Remains of a Roman Villa, discovered at Bignor, in Sussex, in the Years 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814, and 1815. By Samuel Lysons, Esq. V.P. F.R.S.

Extract

The village of Bignor, in Sussex, is pleasantly situated on the north side of the South Downs, at the distance of about nine miles from the sea, six miles from Petworth, and about the same distance from Arundel. Within half a mile of the village runs a Roman road very distinctly marked, leading from Chichester by way of Pulborough (where it crosses the river Arun) to Dorking, and from thence to London. On this road there was great reason to expect some traces of a Roman station about Bignor, as Richard of Cirencester, in his fifteenth Iter, next after Regnum, proceeding eastward, introduces a station which he terms “Ad decimum,” not noticed in the Itinerary of Antonine; and Bignor is, by the Roman road, about ten miles disstant from Chichester, the Regnum of the Romans. No Roman remains had however been noticed near this place till the year 1811, when a mosaic pavement was discovered by the plough in the month of July, in a field called the Deny, about a quarter of a mile east of the church, part of a copyhold estate held under the Earl of Newburgh by Mr. George Tupper, a respectable farmer, by whom it is also occupied. The inhabitants of the village have a tradition, that Bignor formerly stood in this field, and the common field adjoining, on the east, called the Town-Field.