3.
if less than 8, it is a BRICK. Tiles, when
moulded, must be left to dry lying "flat" on
a large face. In the traditional process,
bricks were generally allowed to dry to
leather-hardness lying on one side before
being fired. So, the early British post-
Roman attempts to make ceramic building
materials followed the Roman techniques and
produced those fine tiles (somewhat smaller
than the standard Roman size of 1 x 11/2 feet)
used to build the twelfth and thirteenth
century Norman Abbeys and Priories.
The making of building tile was comple-
mented by the Norman direct re-use of Roman
tile, although there is some evidence from
Suffolk to show that fragmentary Roman tile
was regarded by the Norman architects rightly
with suspicion. They would re-use perfect
Roman tile, as long as this was avilable for
the taking, but were later driven to making
their own, locally, as in Polstead Church
(c.ll6o), or perhaps even at St. Botolph's
Priory in Colchester or Copford Church where
some of the tiles look to me to be non-Roman.
A flint wall of about 1300 A.D. well known
to me in Stoke-by-Nayland, has incorporated
in it some fragments of undoubted Roman tile,
but a chapel built on to the same church in
1318 has none. I conclude that the wall of
1300 used, perhaps at third-hand, Roman
material from the smaller pre-existent Norman
church, built when there still remained Roman
ruins easily accessible above ground. This
supply, ample in the 11th and 12th centuries,
had come to an end by the time, for example,
Little Wenham castle was built of, probably,
local brick c. 1280. It seems true to say
that the Normans used good Roman tile when it
was readily available up to the accession of
Henry II (1154) but had started to make