Excavations

The Museum of London Archaeology Service has been carrying out excavations at St Martin-in-the-Fields since 2005. But these are only the most recent in a long series of discoveries on the site.

Early discoveries

In the 1200s rumours of rich pickings at St Martin-in-the-Fields sparked off a chaotic gold rush. As one source puts it: 

' ... men of London wenten and sercheden the chirche of Seynt Martyns in the feld for tresoure of gold ...'

Things got so bad that the Dean of St Pauls had to intervene, denouncing and cursing all the gold-diggers.

We shall never know what was found at that time, but the treasure hunters may well have unearthed some Saxon graves with fine gold jewellery. Certainly in the 1720s, when digging the foundations of the present church, the architect James Gibbs encountered burials, which he carefully recorded. His discoveries included stone coffins, a spear and two glass 'palm' cups – one of which is in the Museum of London's Medieval Gallery. There was also a 'Roman brick arch ... laid in a strong cement of unusual composition'.

Recent work

The Museum of London Archaeology Service has been carrying out excavations in three areas: beneath the church, in the courtyard on the north side (formerly occupied by a market), and in the range of buildings north of the courtyard. The work has been carefully synchronised with the redevelopment project that is transforming the church undercroft and courtyard.

Beneath the church, one of the most significant discoveries was part of a Roman tile kiln - undoubtedly part of the 'brick arch' observed by Gibbs. It has an archaeomagnetic date – the date when the clay structure was fired for the last time – of AD 400-450. Whether the kiln was producing tiles for use in Londinium or for a villa near the St Martin-in-the-Fields site itself, we do not know - but it shows that the Roman way of life was continuing in some form far later than previously believed.

It was beneath the courtyard that the archaeologists discovered the Roman sarcophagus and the Saxon graves. Most of the graves were on a roughly west-east alignment, as would be expected in a cemetery of the period AD 650-700. By this time, Christianity was well established in south-east England, though many people continued the earlier tradition of placing valuable items in the graves of the well-to-do.