15 - Building a Province

It may be that the Britons had their first taste of a market economy in the villages (vici) that grew up at the gates of the forts in southern Britain during the first few decades of the Roman occupation. There was a demand for consumables from the Roman garrisons and the inhabitants in the villages were there to supply them. The Roman way of doing business, the coinage and Mediterranean tastes were all part of the British learning curve.

This initiation into the Roman economy was the prelude to the foundation of Romano-British towns where regional markets were established. These towns were the civitatis capitals which were primarily built as administrative 'capitals' of the civitatis.

A model of a Roman town was already established at the colonia of Colchester and it may be that it was used as a prototype. Certainly the Romano-British towns shared particular characteristics: the rectilinear layout, forum and basilica complex, bath-house, water supply, amphitheatre and extra-mural cemetery. But they are not all identical. They varied in size from large towns like Colchester with over a hundred hectares down to a dwarf like Caerwent with seventeen.

Most had mansionis, walls and impressive gates or gate but they were built with local materials so there would have been no uniformity of appearance. The houses would have ranged widely in size and costliness. Most expensive would have been the houses of the tribal aristocracy who had learnt to display their wealth in impressive buildings, some in the Mediterranean style. Less elaborate were the houses of the smaller merchants, the workshops of the tradesmen and the hovels of the workmen and the slaves.

A good many of the buildings were timber-framed which was traditional in Britain but, in the towns at least, they became rectangular, a change which does not seem to have occasioned much surprise amongst archaeologists even though it was the ending of a tradition that had lasted some fifteen hundred years.

So it is probable that the British aristocracy who built these towns had a concept of what a Roman town should be like even though it was not too precise. Presumably they had visited Colchester which was the provincial capital and the centre to which they were responsible for the administration of their civitas. And there must have been architects and surveyors seconded from the military or their civilian counterparts from Gaul looking for lucrative contracts.

Certainly there was no way in which the British could have laid out and constructed the towns on their own without help. And it was probably due to the prompting of these experts that the British built their urban houses in a rectangular and vaguely classical fashion. (However, we should remember that there is some evidence for rectangular buildings in the Atrebaten stronghold at Silchester at an earlier period.)

After the Conquest the Atrebaten aristocracy like the nobles in the other tribes had the task of administering their tribal territory and redesigning their town after the Roman fashion. It is possible that they received some help from the Roman government for the name of the Emperor Nero has been found stamped on several bricks.

The buildings were put up in timber, built haphazardly at first then along street lines in blocks (insulae. Sing. insula) of regular size (either 275 Roman feet by 400 Roman feet or 400RF x 400RF). To the first phase of construction belong the Public Baths, four temples and in the central insula was the forum and basilica lying immediately south of the main road in the town, the east-west through road from London to Cirencester and Bath. A junction with the road running north-south forms the N.W. corner of the central insula. The four gates of the town were later built at the points where these roads passed through the later walls.

The forum and basilica covered nearly two acres. On three sides of the forum (the market place) there was a portico with carved Bath stone columns some 4.5m tall. A similar portico surrounded the whole block outside and the forum was entered through a monumental arch supported by columns. On one side of the entrance was a small room which may have contained a staircase leading to an upper floor. Eight rooms each about 6.7m square occupied the rest of the eastern range and may have been shops. Similar apartments were found along the north side with a small subsidiary entrance leading into them. One room was subdivided and next door to it was a room reduced in size by a semi-circular wall in front of which may have stood a statue. On the southern side the rooms are larger and two of them had apsidal (semicircular) ends. It has been suggested that these functioned as offices. The forum was built of local coursed flint with red-tile bonding courses and the 13.5m high buildings were roofed ceramic tiles or slates of Pennant or Old Red Sandstone.

The fourth side of the forum was occupied by the basilica which measured over 70m by 17m with an apse at each end with raised floors. On its western side were a range of rooms including the curia or council chamber of the town council. Two doorways led into the basilica from the forum. Inside, the building was supported on two rows of Bath stone columns, over eight metres tall. The capitals on the columns were in the Corinthian style. This earliest building had a red tesserae floor with mosaics in the apses. Walls were painted and there were areas of white marble wall veneer in the curia. Green glass was used in the clerestory windows. The building was embellished with statues. After a fire at the end of the third century, the basilica was rebuilt on a simplified plan but with the same dimensions.

Compared with what was built before in Britain, this must have seemed unimaginatively grand to the people of the civitas. Even to our eyes it would be an impressive demonstration of civic pride and prosperity. The basilica at Sichester was not alone in this. We can compare it with the basilica at Caerwent, a much smaller community, and find the same sort of monumentality.

Like Silchester's basilica it was placed in the centre of the town at a point where the two main streets intersected and it occupied a complete insula. The forum had an external portico on the south each side of the monumental entrance and inside an internal portico ran around three sides with the basilica on the fourth opposite the entrance. The colonnade was supported on dwarf columns standing on a low wall and these fronted shops on the southern and eastern side. One of these shops has been identified as a fish shop. The western colonnade sheltered government offices but later on a temple was built in the middle of this range projecting into the market place.

Mounting a flight of steps one entered a doorway on the southern side of the basilica which was smaller than that at Silchester with rectangular rooms instead of apses at each end entered through wooden screens supported on dwarf walls. One of these rooms was heated and contained the tribunal (platform). The interior of the basilica had corinthian capitals surmounting the rows of columns supporting the roof, the walls painted with bright colours and with concrete floors. The range of rooms behind the basilica probably included the curia, the registry and the treasury which had a mosaic floor and walls with painted columns and panels above an imitation marble dado. Similar basilicas and fora have been excavated at Verulamium, Wroxeter and Cirencester.

Another ubiquitous building was the Baths building. Some towns had more than one set of baths and, of course, they could be copied from the baths built by the military at their forts like the newly-excavated set at Caerleon which remains the only set in Britain which was built inside the defences of a fort.

Silchester has a good example of Baths, erected early on in the history of the town, perhaps as early as the reign of Nero. Columns of Bath stone supported the portico through which the bather entered the palaestra or sports ground. From there the bather could go through into the apodyterium or changing-room and then into the baths proper, through the cool room, the frigidarium with a water tank for those who wanted a cold plunge on the way out of the baths, the tepidarium, a slightly-warmed room and so into the caldarium or hot room with a hot-water bath. For bathers who wanted a hotter, drier room, there was the sudatorium leading off the caldarium. Having sweated sufficiently, the bather could scrape off the oil which he had anointed himself at the beginning of the operation together with the dirt with a hook-shaped implement called a strigil.

Glass containers for oils and perfumes, nail-cleaners, ear picks and tweezers have been found in the excavation. As the years went, the Baths at Silchester were steadily enlarged with the addition at different times of latrines and second caldarium.

At Caerwent, the Baths also had a long history starting in the late-first or early second century and this is probably the same at most of the civitas capitals. In the small town of Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, the baths were built immediately behind the mansio.

Of course, the Baths used a good deal of water as well as fuel. Water supply and drainage was always taken seriously in Roman towns and the Romans seemed to have passed these concerns on to the Britons. Rivers and springs were used in the Romano-British towns but the majority of such settlements depended on wells. Examples are found in every investigation and a good deal of interesting artifacts are found preserved in the anerobic conditions at their bottoms.

At Silchester, many examples were excavated, for a good supply of water could be obtained there by digging through the gravel subsoil to the underlying beds of sand and clay. Depending on the location a a well within the town, it could vary in depth from 2.5m to over 8 metres. The circular shafts were usually up to a metre wide and encased in flint near the top and made of timber further down and rested on timber collars as foundations. Sometimes, old wooden barrels were used as linings.

In some cases, water supplies from wells were inadequate and water had to be brought in by aqueducts. At Lincoln, earthenware pipes were laid underground for at least a mile outside the town. They were sheathed in very hard pink concrete on top of a foundation of limestone slabs. Sand-filled holes beneath this were intended for sighting-posts for setting out the line of the aqueduct and for determining the gradient. The course of the pipeline was traced to a stream which had been dammed to produce a reservoir. From there the pipe was carried across rough ground on stone piers rising some 2.5m high, then on a solid banks and then underground. The remains of a double-action force pump suggest that it was used to lift the water from the pool into the pipe-line.

There were cisterns in Lincoln to store the water before it was distributed to the consumers and a third- century example has been found. It was built of large limestone blocks waterproofed with opus signinum (a mixture of cement and crushed red tile) and surrounded by a pavement of orange-coloured Lias slabs and was probably part of a public fountain. The daily delivery of water by aqueduct into Lincoln has been estimated at some 5,000 gallons, not a great deal, but presumably the supply was amplified by water from wells in the town.

Another way of bringing water into a town was by an open conduit or canal. The best investigated example is that which leads from a source in neighbouring high ground down into the Romano-British town at Dorchester. It is at least eight miles long. In the town it ran in a channel some 1.2m wide lined with masonry walls and with a tiled floor and was probably covered. It dates from the end of the first century AD and was used for about a century. As Dorchester could easily have been supplied by wells, the aqueduct probably was allowed to fall into disuse when the update of it became too expensive.

Other sites with aqueducts were probably Leicester, Wall and Wroxeter.

Sewers have been discovered at Lincoln. Investigations of a large one from the bath house latrine demonstrates that it led into a considerable drainage system underlying the main streets. Similar examples of large sewers have been found at York and in London while there is a private one running down to the river at Wroxeter.

Wooden pipes were used to conduct water around towns. They were usually joined end-to-end with wooden collars. London has examples while lead pipes were often used as well. Examples of these come from Caerwent and Chester. Colchester has a fine vaulted tiled drain probably used as a storm drain.

Another building common in towns was mentioned above, the mansio or posting station where messengers of the imperial post changed horses. The Antonine Itinerary, a third-century road- book, gives details of the locations of these throughout the Empire and in Britain, at least along the road from Chichester to London, they seem to have been placed at intervals of some twelve miles. The best example is Britain is probably at Silchester but an example at Caerwent had over forty rooms and stood near the south gate.

The second half of the second century seems to have been the chief period for building defences around Romano-British towns. They were constructed in earth dug out of a surrounding ditch and the banks were probably surmounted with a sentry-path and a wooden palisade. In contrast with these ramparts, the gateways could often be monumental in scale. At Cirencester the eastern gate was slung between two 'D'-shaped towers with passages for pedestrians and two carriageways. Stone-built gates have also been found at Verulamium and were probably constructed at Silchester and Lincoln.

During the third century most of these earthen ramparts were reinforced with a stone wall along their frontages. The most imposing were the walls and gates at the colonia of Colchester where they have a circumference of some two miles and are built of septaria stone with red-tile bonding courses. Over 2.5m thick, thicker at foundation level, they stood some 4.5m tall at their highest points. At least six gates and two postern entrances have been identified as well as small internal towers which may have contained steps that led up to the ramparts. The Balkerne or West Gate was the most imposing with two footways and carriageways flanked by towers with a first-floor gate-house overall.

Walls have been investigated at Brough-on-Humber, Lincoln, Cirencester or Exeter. At Caerwent extensive stretches still stand and gates of this period are at Verulamium, Silchester, London anmd Chester.

During the fourth century, bastions were added to many stone walls, turning the towns into medieval- style 'castles'. New wider ditches were dug outside. Places with this modification were London, Aldborough, Brough-on-Humber, Cirencester, Kenchester and Chichester. At Caerwent the bastions were hollow and probably had timber flooring at the level of the rampart-walk. Ballistae were mounted on these bastions. Apparently the bastions had to be roofed to keep the ballista cords dry so we must imagine a timber structure on the top.

The amphitheatre at Silchester was built outside the wall as most amphitheatres were. At first it was constructed in timber at the very early date of AD50-AD70. During the third century it was refurbished and the timber revetment replaced by a wall of flint and brown ironstone. The banks of seats, which were still of timber, could accommodate between 4500 and 9000 spectators watching various blood- sports with animals and public executions. The capacity of the amphitheatre is rather surprising since the population of the town could not have been more than 1200. Presumably the shows attracted people from a wide area around the civitas capital.

The only amphitheatre extensively explored so far is the military example outside the Second Legion fortress at Caerleon. The civilian amphitheatre at Dorchester is bigger with an arena measuring 70m by 56m and like the early phase at Silchester was timber-built. The earliest amphitheatre at Cirencester was also timber-built but later phases of the structure were in stone, The amphitheatre at Caerleon is inside the walls which is rather unusual. Two small amphitheatres can be found at Charterhouse-on- Mendip in Somerset and at Woodcuts in Dorset.

Some of the earliest examples of shops discovered at Verulamium were built during the reign of Claudius. Each shop consisted of a room about 5m by 6m with a slightly smaller room behind. The shops were arranged in blocks of four and in front of them was a colonnade with wooden columns supporting a sloping roof that provided the passers-by with a covered walk. These were destroyed by Boudicca in AD60. They were replaced on a similar plan but with more rooms behind the shops. The walls were based on sleeper-beams laid horizontally in trenches. Alleys were left between each shop. In front of them were postholes that may have been the foundations for counters. One shop may have been a bakery and another with many broken wine-jars may have been a wine-shop.

Houses in Verulamium were also usually built in timber. One example was oblong in plan with the gable end on the street line. Along one long side an open-fronted verandah may have looked out on to a gravelled yard. The majority of the rooms had floors of opus signinum. This house was replaced with a later one of an L-shaped plan. Clearly standards were rising for one of the rooms had a mosaic floor and painted walls. Another room in the house was also painted.

Unfortunately, this second house was burnt down. Its site became part of a gravelled yard belonging to a much grander house. Like most buildings of this later period, it was constructed with foundations of flint-and-mortar. Although a grand house, it was originally intended to be much bigger for there were two entrances, each with a porter's lodge. Even so, it was still larger than most buildings in Verulamium. It may well have been two-storied with an internal staircase. Three rooms had underfloor heating. An underground shrine approached by a corridor at the bottom of a ramp is an unusual feature in a town house in Britain as far as we are aware. The rooms along the street line appear to have been rented out as shops with a large and small latrine included in this range. Water for the establishments was provided by lead pipes.

Many of these town buildings were not houses in our modern, suburban sense, that is, being entirely devoted to housing a family. In Romano-British houses, like Roman houses, a business of some sort was carried on - manufacture, usually combined with a shop, or some service activity or, in the case of the aristocracy, meetings concerned with local government. So, one must be careful when labelling a building in a Romano-British town simply as a 'house' or a 'shop'.

It is quite clear that Romano-British towns were manufacturing centres. Winchester, for example, is mentioned in an official Roman document as one of the towns in the Empire responsible for producing cloth for the army.

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that mosaics were being made in Cirencester in a workshop where scraps of the raw materials were found. They included coloured stones like sandstones, brick, coloured glass and pieces of samian pottery. Apparently the mosaic panels were made up to order in the workshop, carried to the site of the floor, laid down and then surrounded with the decorative borders.

In London an hour-glass shaped stone, imported from the Rhineland, was the topstone of a large mill presumably turned by animal power and producing flour for sale to the townsfolk. At Springhead in Kent a building has been identified as a bakery facing onto the street. Apart from the shop, two other rooms were also work rooms for they each had an oven. Such bakeries probably existed in all Romano- British towns but so far no samples of carbonised bread, cakes and pies have come to light.

Eighty whetstones were excavated in the remains of a shop at Wroxeter, indicating the widespread use of edged metal tools. A tombstone from York shows a smith from the town and hoards of metal have been found in Silchester, Great Chesterford and Caerwent. At Great Chesterford a hammer, an anvil and pincers were part of a smith's tool-kit together with chains, hooks, handcuffs and a large door-lock.

Wroxeter has produced evidence of a bronzesmith's shop with a small furnace and little objects like hairpins scattered around. It is likely that pewter was made in or close to Bath using lead from the Mendip mines and a hoard of flagons has turned up in the town. Gold was being worked in small quantities in some towns, presumably used for gilding or the manufacture of small trinkets.

Carpenters' tools regularly turn up in excavations in Romano-British towns. These include saws from Great Chesterford and Silchester together with chisels and hammers with planes coming from Silchester, Caerwent and Verulamium. Barrel staves are commonly found. Barrels were used for transporting a number of commodities apart from wine or beer. Exidence of their manufacture comes from London and Silchester.

Leather was used for a variety of purposes which included underwear as well as footwear. Examples of shoes are common and are occasionally stamped with the maker's name.

Pottery shops existed in towns. At Wroxeter, a heap of mortaria indicated a pottery stall and, in Colchester, a shop seems to have supplied glass as well as samian ware and a variety of other types. The pottery was not often made in towns but there is evidence for the manufacture of samian ware at Colchester. The undecorated type was being made by a dozen potters and has been found together with fragments of moulds used for decorated bowls. The business was in operation from the late-first century to the end of the second century which suggests a steady and long-lasting demand for the ware.

In one case at least a town grew up around a flourishing pottery industry. This was at Water Newton which was established alongside the River Nene. No doubt the river and the main road that passed nearby from London to the north explain the country-wide distribution of the Nene Valley pottery products. Water Newton was a small town that grew up around a manufacturing location. Other small towns did the same thing - Verlucio in Wiltshire around an iron industry, Camerton in Somerset around pewter and Charterhouse around the Mendip lead-mining and processing.

Glass-making may well have been carried on in many major towns for glass is fragile and could not be carried far. Furnaces are known at Mancetter and Wroxeter but the best evidence comes from Caistor- by-Norwich where a workshop has been excavated. The furnaces were outside in a partially-enclosed yard. We know that the main glass products were bottles, flasks, cups and bowls and these are more likely to have found a market in towns than amongst the peasants in the countryside.

An example of a service industry is shown by the discovery of oculists' stamps which have been found in Chester and Kenchester. They were used for stamping the oculist's name and instructions for use on cakes of the remedy which was either rubbed on directly or dissolved in vinegar or wine and applied. It seems that eye troubles were very common in Roman Britain.

Evidence of trading in towns can sometimes be provided by balances or steelyards. The balance closely resembled a modern pair of scales with two scale-pans and was known as a libra. The steelyard or statera worked on the lever principle with a graduated arm or beam suspended from a hook placed at one end. Several hooks or scale-pans to contain the objects being weighed could be suspended from the beam at the same end and used in turn and the weight would be moved along the beam until it balanced them. The scale-beam was marked on its several faces to correspond to the use of different suspension hooks. A steelyard has been found in London.

For measuring corn a measure of volume was used in the shape of a bucket called a modius. Folding bronze rules were used for length and there is one in the London Museum.

Evidence for overseas trade comes from Europe in the form of inscriptions on altars set up as thank- offerings by merchants or sometimes on tombstones. M. Aurelius Lunaria of Bordeaux traded in York: on a tombstone from Bordeaux we hear of another who traded with Britain: M. Secundus Silvanus traded in pottery across the North Sea with Britain and set up an altar in Domburg. And occasionally we have more dramatic evidence like the wreck of a ship on Pudding Pan Rock off Whitstable which was carrying a cargo of samian pottery to Britain.

Of course a good deal of industry and manufacturing was rurally based and the products only arrived in town markets after production like grain and hides and minerals, fuel and timber.

Most of the manufacturing work was done by human or animal muscle; there does not seem to have been a shortage of labour in the province that would necessitate the use of much machinery. The principal source of artificial power was water. We have some knowledge of watermills on Hadrian's Wall.

At Haltwhistle Burn large millstones and part of a wooden watermill have been found. Close by Chesters fort where the wall crosses the Tyne on a bridge, a channel or mill-race is set into the northern side. At Chollerford where the wall crosses the River Irthing a paved mill-race was discovered together with an stone spindle used as a bearing. These were presumably mills belonging to the army and date from the third century AD.

Further south an iron spindle was discovered in excavations at Great Chesterford and there were possibly two sawmills at Lincoln on the River Witham. There were probably others but the technology was Roman and is likely to have been the inspiration of a foreign entrepreneur or the army.

Pottery manufacture was probably Britain's most important industry. It was organised on a more commercial basis than in the Iron Age with the potter's wheel as the basic tool of the industry. Many of the pottery forms were either traditionally British or copies of the samian forms.

Manufacturing locations depended on the supply of clay, fuel and water, all of which are required in large quantities in pottery-making. Once such a location had been identified and the pottery proved to be popular it attracted other potters to the location and in some cases a very large industry developed by the second century. A good example of this is in the Nene Valley in Northamptonshire mentioned earlier. Some of the biggest pottery kilns recorded were found there like the one excavated in 1828 (sic) which is said to have had a capacity of between five and six hundred pots at one time. Smaller kilns in the same area could hold two to three hundred. Not all firings were successful and large numbers of wasters (spoiled pots) are found in excavation. Nene Valley ware (at one time called Castor Ware) included both grey and buff wares for local markets and mortaria (food processing bowls) for wider distribution.

The characteristic Nene Valley pottery, however, consists of beakers of various sizes made in a light-coloured body which was covered with a slip which varies in colour from red, through brown to black. (This slipped ware is sometimes referred to as 'colour-coated ware') Rouletting, done with a toothed wheel, was one form of decoration and another was barbotine decoration, done through a nozzle, like a cake-icing nozzle. Simple scale patterns, leaf and scroll patterns, scenes with figures like mythological events, hunts and gladiatorial combats are also found. Some beakers are decorated with white slip with leaves, berries and figures. Boxes and lids are rouletted, flagons, plates and bowls decorated with circles or leaf designs in red paint on buff slip.

New Forest pottery was probably made by large numbers of small potters working in the forest during the third and fourth centuries and distributed in southern Britain but was not so widely as the Nene Valley ware. Its characteristic feature is a hard, metallic, purple-slipped surface on indented beakers but the jugs and flasks are decorated with stamped rosettes and white slip used as a paint. Other colours are grey or white bodies. Another 'forest' pottery area was that of Savernake in north Wiltshire.

From about AD120, Black-burnished Ware, manufactured in Dorset, began to be distributed in the forms of cooking-pots, dishes and bowls made in a dense black, granular body which is usually burnished. Cooking-pots were decorated with latticing, with wavy or looped lines and with arcs. There are many imitations produced in various parts of the province but the best-quality ware from Dorset was supplied to the army in the north and is common on Hadrian's Wall.

Another burnished ware is Severn Valley Ware (Glevum ware). Kilns are known at Malvern, Birmingham and Shepton Mallet in Somerset producing bowls, jars and tankards in a colour- range from creamy-buff to orange-red. It is common all over the Severn valley.

The iron industry was widespread because of the wide distribution of native iron. The ores or ironstones, after preliminary roasting, were smelted with charcoal in either a bowl or a shaft furnace. Bowl furnaces had been used during the Iron Age, producing between one and two kilograms or iron, and were not as efficient as the shaft furnace.

Shaft furnaces could have been up to 1.5m tall and some 0.30m in diameter and were built in clay. The shaft was loaded from the top with alternate layers of iron ore and charcoal. Molten slag was drawn off through an arched opening at the bottom and ran away in channels in which it solidified. The arched opening allowed air to be drawn into the shaft but bellows could also be used. Shaft furnaces achieved a higher temperature, so increasing the carbon content of the iron and also could produce larger amounts of iron. Characteristic finds from shaft-furnace sites are pieces of slag that have solidified in the channels and so have a rounded bottom and a contorted upper surface.

The only known goldmine was at Dolaucothi in south Wales which still can be entered today. Higher up the slope a reservoir was placed so that water could be 'hushed' down the slope to expose new working surfaces and also be channelled to work a crushing mill or through panning cradles. The gold was melted into blocks or ingots and would have been used by the numerous goldsmiths in towns for manufacture into trinkets for sale.

Lead-silver mines appear to have been open-cast and the extraction process was like quarrying. After the ore was crushed, it was roasted and then smelted to give an alloy of lead with a small percentage of silver. A cupellation furnace was employed in which the metal was re-melted in a bowl-shaped container lined with a thick layer of crushed bone ash. A blast of air was directed at the surface of the molten metal so as to oxidise the lead which was absorbed by the bone ash, leaving behind a small pellet of silver. The lead was retrieved by re-smelting the bone ash mixture with more charcoal.

It was used by plumbers for water-pipes, coffins, bath-linings and roofing. Alloyed with tin, it made pewter. Although pewter was produced in the west, most pewter artifacts are found in East Anglia. Lead 'pigs' or ingots have been found in Somerset and in Derbyshire.

Copper ores could be mined in Shropshire, Wales and on Anglesey. Alloyed with tin, the copper produced bronze which was very widely used in Roman Britain for ornaments, pins, brooches, harness and fittings. The tin was mined on Dartmoor and in Cornwall.

Salt was produced by evaporation of sea-water or of brine from mineral springs and so would usually have to be carried considerable distances to customers. It was light enough for this to be done and was probably transported in the panniers of pack-horses.

Outcrops of coal were exploited in many parts of the country and, like the salt, sometimes it was carried considerable distances. Recent work on farm-sites in the Fenland suggests that the barges which carried grain or Nene Valley pottery up the canals, the rivers or along the coast in eastern England came back with coal for the ovens that were used for drying grain. Coal was mined by the army in the north and carted to some of the forts on the Antonine Wall or Hadrian's Wall where it was used in the baths and in the ironworks.

There is a documentary reference to 'stony masses' burning in the temple of Minerva in Bath which were probably coals mined in the Somersetshire coalfield. Villas in the west used coal from this coalfield and from the coalfield in the Forest of Dean. Coal was used for smelting lead in North Wales and for heating the baths in Wroxeter.

Simple jewellery was made from Kimmeridge shale and jet. The shale from the Dorset coast was worked during the Iron Age and was used in both periods for making armlets. During the Roman period table legs were made out of the material. Jet, however, is shinier and altogether more attractive. It was collected from the beaches at Whitby in Yorkshire and workshops for its processing must have existed a York. Hairpins, finger-rings, bangles, bead necklaces, bracelets and pendants were produced.

Some settlements had a range of industrial occupations. Wilderspool, in Cheshire, at different times: pottery between AD90 and 160, furnaces for iron smelting and smithing, traces of lead-working, crucibles for making bronze and glass-making. At Tiddington in Warwickshire was another such site, engaged in tile-making, iron smithing and lead working.

An important extractive industry was the quarrying of stone which was widely used for building and statuary as well as road-building. In Kent, the limestone from the Lower Greensand known as Kentish Ragstone, was used. In Sussex, Pulborough sandstone and limestone were quarried. Green sandstone was employed for several buildings along the coast while the Cornish site of Camborne was built of local slate and granite.

The limestones of the Jurassic ridge were employed in Somerset and Dorset, in north Wiltshire, and in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Stones for roofing and floors travelled greater distance. Pennant roofing stone was distributed by the Avon from Bristol up into Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and has even found at a villa at Ely and there are other examples of similar long-distance carriage which in most cases must have been by water.

14 - A New World
Contents
16 - Rural Prosperity