The Lexden Lady: Examining a rare lead coffin burial from Roman Colchester

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 438

Subscribe now for full access and no adverts

Around 1,700 years ago, a funeral took place on the outskirts of Roman Colchester. A young woman had been laid to rest in nested lead and wooden coffins, her hair fashionably styled with gleaming jet pins and her body sprinkled with costly perfumes and preservative substances. An array of food offerings and objects drawn from across Britain, continental Europe, and even further afield were carefully arranged within her grave, highlighting the far-reaching cultural and commercial networks that her family were able to access, and the wealth that they were willing to part with to give her a suitable send-off. 

This was not an isolated grave. The woman had been interred outside the settlement’s walls, in accordance with Roman law, within a large area of burial grounds lining both sides of the main road running west towards London. Previous excavations within this area (today known as the Lexden Cemetery after the modern area of Colchester in which it lies) have revealed hundreds of other graves, and some of their occupants were also clearly of high social status, with discoveries like the finely sculpted Lexden Sphinx (now in Colchester Castle museum) testifying to elaborate funerary monuments. 

As the centuries passed and Colchester evolved and expanded, the cemetery was eventually built over, and in 1820 the area of the young woman’s grave and the Lexden Sphinx became the site of the Essex County Hospital. While the aforementioned sculpture was found during this construction, the woman’s grave lay undetected for another 200 years, until the area was transformed once more. Plans for a new housing development on the now-defunct hospital site prompted excavations by Colchester Archaeological Trust (CAT), and in the summer of 2024 the woman’s burial was brought to light once more. The story of her rediscovery, and what has been learned about her life, is told in a thoughtful new exhibition which recently opened at the Roman Circus Visitor Centre in Colchester (see ‘Further information’ below).

CAT’s investigations uncovered a number of burials on both sides of the Roman road, including a large, rectangular feature which, careful exploration revealed, was a grave containing a decorated lead coffin with a fitted lid. Lead coffins are rare finds in Roman Britain, representing around 2% of excavated inhumations from this period. They were expensive, high status items, though cost seems to have been the only restriction on their use: excavated examples have been found to contain the remains of men, women, and children (including very young babies) alike, and they are associated with both pagan and Christian burial rites. Despite their scarcity, the distribution of lead coffins within Roman Britain is also fairly wide, with documented discoveries of plain examples scattered across south-eastern, south-western, and northern England, and south Wales. Decorated lead coffins appear to have been more concentrated in the south-east, though, particularly around Colchester, London, and Kent. While the example recently excavated by CAT had warped a little during its long period of burial and showed some patches of corrosion, it was impressively intact and well preserved, offering a rare opportunity to examine this distinctive burial rite in detail.

Intricate designs

Following painstaking excavation over a period of several weeks, the coffin underwent months of careful investigation by CAT, as well as expert conservation by York Archaeology. The presence of iron nails within the grave hints that it was originally nestled inside an outer wooden coffin of which no other trace has survived, but the inner lead casket was essentially complete. Its lid and sides are decorated with a ‘bead and double reel’ design (as well as one triple reel), with decorative lines forming a widely spaced diamond pattern. The gaps within these lines are filled with images of scallop shells (possibly representing the soul’s final journey to the Blessed Isles), as well as circles that might depict the sun or moon.

This attractive object was created using a technique called ‘open sand casting’, in which large wooden frames are filled with fine but compacted damp sand. The desired patterns were then added – probably by pressing a decorative wooden baton into the sand to make the diagonal lines, along with real scallop shells and possibly the rim of a pot – and, when the design was complete, molten lead would have been poured into the frame, spreading to make a large, rectangular sheet that took on the underlying motifs. Once cool but still malleable, this sheet could be cut and folded to create the main body of the coffin, and a similar process would have been followed to make and shape a smaller sheet for the lid. 

The specialist craftworkers, or plumbarii, who made the Lexden example have left us a pleasingly tactile record of their presence: while bending the lead into place, they left their fingerprints behind. Traces like these remind us of the real people behind the production process – and, as I stood beside Laura Pooley (CAT’s Post-excavation Manager and Small Find Specialist, and the curatorial lead for the exhibition), to examine the lid more closely, she described its design as ‘beautifully imperfect’. Although skilfully executed, the pattern as a whole is slightly wonky (even allowing for post burial warping), and in one place Laura pointed out an obvious error: a scallop and a ring superimposed on the same spot – perhaps reflecting someone working in haste to prepare the pattern before the lead was ready to pour. The plumbarii were most likely based in Colchester: lead coffins are extremely heavy – even when empty, an average-sized example weighs as much as two men – so they would probably have been made close to where they were needed. Their raw materials were rather easier to transport, though, and the lead for the Lexden example is thought to have been mined in the Mendip Hills of Somerset.