THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 198

The Roman-British Town and Villa

13-4. The Roman-British Town and Villa

In the social fabric of Romano-British life, the two chief elements were the town and the country house, or villa. Both are mainly Roman importations. The Kelts do not appear to have reached any definite urban life, either in Gaul or in Britain, before the coming of the Romans, though they no doubt had, even in Britain, agglomerations of houses which came near to being towns. But with the Roman conquest a real town life arose. In part, this was directly created by the government under the Roman forms of municipium and colonia, noticed above. Colchester (Camulodunum), Lincoln (Lindum), Gloucester (Glevum), York (Eburacum), were coloniae; the first three were founded in the first century by drafts of time-expired soldiers and the fourth, York, probably grew out of the civil settlement on the west bank of the Ouse which confronted the legionary fortress under the present Cathedral and its precincts. One town Verulamium (St Albans) was a municipium, ranking with the four coloniae in privilege and standing but different in origin. All these five towns attained considerable prosperity, and in particular Camulodunum, Eburacum, and Verulamium, but none can vie with the more splendid municipalities of other provinces.

Besides them, Roman Britain could shew a larger number — some ten or fifteen, according to the standard adopted — of country-towns which varied much in size but possessed in their own way the essential features of urban life. The chief of these seem to be the following. (1) Isurium Brigantum, captial or chef-lieu of the Brigantes, now Aldborough, some twelve miles N.W. of York and the most northerly Romano-British town, properly so called, (2) Ratae, capital of the Coritani, now Leicester, (3) Viroconium — so best spelt, not Uriconium — capital of the Cornovii, now Wroxeter, on the Severn, five miles below Shrewsbury, (4) Corinium, capital of the Dobuni, now Cirencester, (5) Venta Silurum, already mentioned, (6) Isca Dumnoniorum, capital of the Dumnonii, now Exeter, (7) Durnovaria, capital of the Durotriges, now Dorchester in Dorsetshire, (8) Venta Belgarum, capital of the Belgae, now Winchester, (9) Calleva Atrebatum, capital of the Atrebates, close to Silchester, (10) Durovernum Cantiacorum, capital of the Cantii, now Canterbury, (11) Venta Icenorum, capital of the Iceni, now Caister by Norwich, and perhaps — for the limits of the list are not easily drawn with rigidity — Chesterford (Roman name unknown) in Essex, Kenchester (Magna) in Herefordshire, Chesterton (Durobrivae) on the Nen, Rochester (also Durobrivae) in Kent, and even one or two which have perhaps less right to inclusion. Many of these town are indicated by the Ravenna Geographer as holding some special rank and nearly all are declared by their remains to be the sites of really Romanised townlife. What exactly their status or government was, has yet to be defined. But it is fairly probable — especially from the Caerwent monument erected by the ordo civitatis Silurum — that the authorities of town and tribe were one.

The general fashion of these towns has been revealed to us by excavations at Silchester and Caerwent. At Silchester, the whole 100 acres within the walls have been systematically uncovered during the last twenty years and the buildings studied with especial care. At Caerwent, a smaller area of 39 acres has been excavated so far as the buildings of the present village permit. Both shew much the same features, with certain differences in detail which are both natural and instructive: Both have been planned according to the Roman method, which obtained in many parts of the Empire: that is, the streets run at right angles, so as to form a chessboard pattern with square plots for the houses. At Silchester, where space was obviously abundant, the sanctity of the street frontages seems to have been in general observed: at Caerwent, which is of smaller size and more thickly crowded with buildings, the street plan has suffered some encroachments, but not so much as to obliterate its character.

Both towns had near their centre the Town Buildings known as Forum and Basilica, At Silchester the Forum was a rectangular plot of two acres, with streets running along all its four sides. It contained a central open court, nearly 140 feet square, surrounded on three sides by corridors or cloisters with rooms — presumably shops and lounges — opening into them; on the fourth side was a pillared hall, 270 by 58 feet in floor space, decorated with Corinthian columns, marble-lined walls, statues, and the like, and behind this hall a row of rooms which probably served as offices for the town authorities and the like. The Caerwent Municipal Buildings were very similar: so, as far as we can tell from imperfect finds, were those at Cirencester and Wroxeter. They are indeed examples of a type which was represented in most large towns of the western Empire and in Italy itself. Both towns had in addition small temples in different quarters within the walls and at Silchester a small building close to the Forum is so similar in every detail to the early Christian church of the western basilican type, that we can hardly hesitate to call it a church.

Both towns, again, seem to have had Public Baths: those at Silchester covered an area of 80 by 160 feet in their earliest form and in later times were much extended. Both again had more direct provision for amusements. At Silchester an earthen amphitheatre stood outside the walls: at Caerwent there are traces of the stone walls of one inside the ramparts. Of dwelling-houses and shops and the like both towns had naturally no lack. The private houses are built like most of the private houses in the Keltic part of the Empire, in fashions very dissimilar from anything at Pompeii or Rome, but are fitted in Roman style with mosaics, hypocausts, painted wall-plaster, and the like. They are specially noteworthy as being properly country houses, brought together to form a town perforce, and not town houses such as could be used to compose regular rows or terraces or streets. Even the architecture thus declares that the town life of these cantonal chef-lieux, though real, was incomplete.

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