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The Defended Vici of Roman Britain: Recent Research and New Agendas

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The Defended Vici of Roman Britain: Recent Research and New Agendas The defended Vici of Roman Britain: recent research and new agendas Article Accepted Version Smith, A. and Fulford, M. (2019) The defended Vici of Roman Britain: recent research and new agendas. Britannia, 50. pp. 109-147. ISSN 1753-5352 doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X19000151 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/84551/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X19000151 Publisher: Cambridge University Press All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online The defended vici of Roman Britain: recent research and new agendas By Alexander Smith and Michael Fulford INTRODUCTION It is almost 30 years since the publication in 1990 of Burnham and Wacher’s masterly study, The ‘Small Towns’ of Roman Britain. Coincidentally, in that same year Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 (PPG 16) was implemented in England leading to the rapid expansion of commercial archaeological work. Alongside and following an assessment of the contribution of developer-funded work to our knowledge of major towns, a major project, The Roman Rural Settlement Project (RRSP), based at the University of Reading, has been underway since 2012 to assess the impact of developer-funded archaeology on the archaeology of the countryside of Roman Britain.1 However, unlike the review of work on the major towns this project has been more far-reaching, setting the post-1990 work in the context of previous research and discoveries and extending back into the nineteenth century.2 Completed in 2018, the Roman Rural Settlement Project has collected data on over 2500 settlements dating from the late Iron Age through to the end of Roman Britain in the fifth century. These include almost 300 nucleated settlements, defined as those believed to cover more than 3 ha, although, on practical grounds determined by the sheer scale of the data, ‘small towns’ characterised by earthwork or masonry defences were initially omitted from the project.3 Due to a subsequent generous donation by Paul Chadwick, the project team was later able to collect data from a selected sample of such settlements, derived from both published and grey literature reports (Table 1), and these were used in the analyses of economy, rituals and lifestyles in volumes 2 and 3 of New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain.4 This article is intended to take these analyses a step further, to assess how our understanding of defended ‘small towns’ has changed since Burnham and Wacher’s survey and the complementary studies which have followed: on architecture and identity, and on the late and post- Roman periods.5 Primarily using a small number of case studies from central Britain (RRSP’s The Central Belt) our survey considers aspects of their material culture and other attributes in order to determine how such sites fit into the broader settlement pattern. We also discuss their role and development within the wider political and economic context of Roman Britain. Finally, ideas for new research agenda are presented that may take us forward in our understanding of such sites. [Table 1. Number of records of archaeological investigations included for selected defended ‘small towns’] TOWNS, SMALL TOWNS, VILLAGES, VICI AND ROADSIDE SETTLEMENTS: ISSUES OF TERMINOLOGY AND CLASSIFICATION The issue of whether or not a site can be classified as urban is one that has recurred in much of the literature on Romano-British settlement, particularly in discussion of minor nucleated sites, where the 1 Fulford and Holbrook 2015. 2 Smith et al. 2016; Allen et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2018; and digital resource: Allen et al. 2016. 3 Allen and Smith 2016, 38. 4 Allen et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2018. 5 Burnham and Wacher 1990; Rust 2006; Fitzpatrick-Matthews 2014. 1 term small town is often placed in parentheses or associated with the epithet ‘so-called’, primarily as there is little consensus over which sites should be included in this category.6 Further problems occur when trying to classify different types of ‘small town’, with, for example, Burnham and Wacher dividing their 54 sites into six categories: potential cities, minor towns, specialised sites (religious and industrial), minor defended settlements and undefended settlements.7 In their classification the urban descriptor is only associated with the first two categories, some 18 towns altogether, with, for example, size of the enclosed area being the principal criterion separating the potential cities and minor towns (>4 ha/10 acres) from minor defended settlements.8 These three categories account for the majority (29) of the defended settlements with Bath the only defended religious site and Brampton, Droitwich, Little Chester and Worcester the only defended industrial sites. There is little doubt that, despite their variety in form and scale, the principal towns (coloniae, municipium, civitas capitals) of Roman Britain with their public buildings and town houses were ‘urban’ in a way that would have made sense to Roman citizens from across the empire. Most developed fairly rapidly in the later first and second centuries A.D., and by the end of that century they were likely to have had a set of ‘urban’ attributes — baths, a central place (forum basilica), temples and a street grid, often alongside other facilities like a theatre, amphitheatre and defensive circuit. Through the development of their associated town houses they also have a strong association with the elite of the Roman province. Such features have been argued as a conscious re-creation of an interpretation of what it was to be Roman, linking peoples of the provinces into wider ideologies of the empire and thus creating a sense of belonging.9 Outside such towns, as is so evident in Burnham and Wacher’s study, there was a sliding continuum of what was construed by them as urban. This contrasts with the language of continental scholars who, in using terms such as ‘agglomération’, vicus, ‘station routière’ and ‘Strassensiedlung’ emphasise a sense of difference from the larger, chartered towns. This notion of an urban continuum in Roman Britain stems in large part from the economic models developed in the 1970s and a Darwinian optimism of economic growth and evolutionary, civic development through the Roman period in Britain into fourth century. In his model of urbanism in Roman Britain, published in the same year as The ‘Small Towns’ of Roman Britain and echoing its conclusions, Martin Millett argued that a high water point was reached where the ‘small towns’ were seen as prosperous economic centres, reaching the peak of their wealth in the later Empire and contrasting with the civitas capitals ‘which are not dominated by the same evidence of vibrant economic activity’.10 In support of this optimistic view was the work on pottery distributions by Hodder, who, having demonstrated the non-random spacing of Romano-British walled towns, proceeded to argue that the best explanation for the spacing of his second-level centres (‘small towns’) was their function as marketing and service providers which could be traced back to the late Iron Age.11 Empirical evidence in support of ‘small towns’ acting as market centres was found in his study of the distribution of late Iron Age and early Roman Savernake Ware, which, on the basis of the concentration of finds of this type of pottery within about 15 kilometres of the kilns, themselves some three kilometres from Mildenhall (Cunetio), he argued was marketed through this ‘small town’, the 6 Burnham and Wacher 1990, 1–3; Millett 1995, 29–30; Rust 2006, 12–14. 7 Burnham and Wacher 1990. 8 cf. Booth 1998. 9 Laurence et al. 2011, 112; Revell 2016, 767. 10 Millett 1990, 143–56. 11 Hodder and Hassall 1971; Hodder 1972. 2 distribution defining its probable market or service area.12 Yet, as Timby pointed out in her reappraisal of Savernake Ware, this type of pottery was reaching distant settlements like the late Iron Age oppidum at Bagendon, more than 60 kilometres north of the kilns, before the Roman conquest and before the establishment of the Roman road network and what, initially, would have been no more than a roadside settlement, whose existence was probably due to the establishment of a mansio.13 Indeed, by the probable late first/early second century date for the foundation of the mansio, the Savernake industry was in decline. The relationship between the Mancetter-Hartshill pottery industry and the development of the ‘small town’ at Mancetter is also more apparent than real. In so far as the distribution of stamped mortaria can be taken as representative of the market area of the industry as a whole, it is clear that, as well as local consumers in the Midlands like Wroxeter, this coincides with military establishments occupying the northern half of Britain and extending as far as the Antonine Wall; the scarcity of stamped mortaria finds to the south of the kilns being a notable feature of their distribution.14 Given the difficulty of demonstrating the market function of larger towns, such as Silchester and Wroxeter, it should not perhaps come as a surprise that it is just as difficult to define market or service areas of ‘small towns’.15 This finds support in broad perspective from the countryside, including of nucleated settlement, which, excepting the development of villas, provides no evidence for growth in Roman Britain beyond the turn of the second and third centuries.16 In challenging the assumption that ‘small towns’ fulfilled a market role, intermediate between the larger towns, we should also remind ourselves about the weakness of the case for other urban attributes associated with the ‘small towns’.
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