I.—Description of a Statue of Minerva Custos, and other Roman Antiquities, recently discovered on the estate of the Duke of Bedford, at Sibson and Bedford Purlieus, in the county of Northampton: in a Communication from the Rev. Charles Henry Hartshorne, M.A., to Thomas Amyot, Esq., F.R.S., Treasurer

Extract

The antiquities I have the honour, by the Duke of Bedford's permission, of transmitting an account of to the Society of Antiquaries, were found on two different parts of his Grace's estate during the spring of the years 1844 and 1845. Those to which the attention will be directed first are two small statues, with a sepulchral amphora and its contents, discovered together at the earlier period, by some labourers whilst they were engaged in cutting a drain betwixt Wansford and King's Cliffe, and upon the western side of an extensive wood, called Bedford Purlieus. From the proximity of this spot to the Ermine Street, to Castor, Alwalton, and Chesterton, places whose names alone are indicative of Roman possession, and whose soil has at various times disclosed abundant memorials of this early occupation, it might not unreasonably be expected that similar evidences would be extensively scattered throughout the district. The direct trending of the road by the side of which these remains were discovered, renders it far from improbable that it was one of those vicinal ways that fed the great military one traversing this part of England; and that funeral memorials should have been placed in such a locality is a circumstance far from unusual.