18 - End of Empire

Perhaps it is apt that burial comes at the end of the Roman section. Romano-British burials like Roman burials throughout the Empire, whether pagan or christian, were made in cemeteries by the roadsides outside the towns. However, in some instances the law was broken. At Housesteads vicus the excavation of a tavern produced the skeletons of a man and a woman laid on the original floor and covered by a later one. The man still had a sword-point stuck in his ribs so perhaps the corpses were the result of a crime and the perpetrators could not risk burying them in the proper place!

During the first and second centuries, dead were usually cremated, so on arrival at the burial place the body would be placed on a funeral pyre. Cremation burials are often accompanied by grave- goods for the use of the dead while others, including clothes, were burnt with the corpse on the pyre. Such deposits are of great value to the archaeolologist as he knowns that the grave goods must all have been buried at the same time and fragile things, like glass vessels, may survive unbroken. Their age, however, can be debateable, as the objects may not be new ones and some may even be family heirlooms. Their number and quality naturally varies according to the importance of the person and the wealth or poverty of the family.

At Litlington in Cambridgeshire the cemetery was surrounded by a wall of flint and tile. The cremations lay in rows, a metre apart, parallel to the Roman road. At the south-eastern and south- western corners, heaps of wood ash was recorded, presumably the remains of funeral pyres. The cinerary urns and other grave-goods were sometimes covered with a single or several large roof-tile. Others were surrounded by little walls of flints or were placed in wooden chests.

On the roads leading out of Colchester, cemeteries have been found on the south, north and the west side of the colonia. A first-century child's cremation burial contained twenty-one toy figurines, thirteen glass and pottery vessels, coins, bone combs and the remains of caskets. During the second century a woman's ashes were placed in an urn and accompanied by a pottery beaker and a samian dish, ten dark blue and two purple beads, an enamelled silver pendant, silver armlets and a bunch of toilet implements on a ring, including tweezers, ear and nail cleaners.

In the grounds of the Royal Grammar School there is a walled cemetery measuring 11.5m by 8.2m with walls between 0.6m and 1.5m thick. Inside was an internal bay along one side which probably enclosed an important memorial. Just scraps of this remained including pieces of carved stone and painted plaster. Niches in the wall would have contained cremation urns. Tombstones probably marked the burial places of nine cremations and five inhumations and sockets of decaying wood may have held wooden memorials. The cemetery was established soon after AD100 and seemed to have been in use during most of the Roman period as a private cemetery, either of a wealthy family or of a burial club.

Burial clubs or societies were one of the few types of association allowed by the authorities during the Roman period. They were groups of people, slave or free, military or civilian who were not rich enough to be sure of being able to afford an adequate burial when the time came. They met at monthly intervals, and at festivals, paying subscriptions, performing sacrifices and eating a meal. A favourite deity would be chosen as a patron and human patrons were invited to honour the society as well. A new member would have to pay an entrance fee and contribute an amphora of wine.

A copy of the rules for such a club has survived from Lanuvium in Italy. No claim for burial was allowed for a member who did not pay his dues for six consecutive months. If a member died more than twenty miles from Lanuvium, three members were deputed to go and arrange his burial and were allowed a travel allowance. If the society had not been notified in time the funeral expanses could still be claimed from it by whoever had attended the burial if he sent an affadavit witnessed by seven Roman citizens. No claims could be entertained on behalf of anyone who committed suicide for such people were cursed and his company in the communal cemetery would not be wanted by the other residents.

Two tombstones in Britain were almost certainly erected by burial clubs. One is at Bath and is dedicated to Julius Vitalis, armourer of the Tweniteth Legion Valera Victrix. He was buried at the cost of the Guild of Armourers. The other was found at Halton Chesters on Hadrian's Wall. It commemorates the slave of Hardallo and was set up by the guild of his fellow slaves. Near Lincoln, an altar was set up by a curator who was a guilds treasurer.

Many elaborate tombs were planned during the occupants' lifetimes. At Harpenden in Hertfordshire a circular building, 3.4m in diameter, contained an isolated masonry base set in front of a niche. On it may have stood a life-sized statue some fragments of which were found lying about. Outside, two cremation burials were found dating from the first half of the second century and the whole area, about 30m square, was surrounded by a wall with an entrance in the middle one side and a V-shaped exterior ditch.

At Beaufront near Corbridge, there again may have been a central tower-like structure and it contained a shaft more than 1.2m deep measuring approximately 2.7m by 1.8m. Nails found at the bottom suggest a burial in a wooden coffin. Higher up, a layer of soot probably connected with burial rite contained fragments of a jar of mid-second-century date. A boundary wall surrounded the site and outside there were many more modest burials. The wall may have had groups of lions placed at each corner for a pit containing fragments of several stone lions and dressed masonry was found close by. Fragments of pots suggest that the monument was dismantled during the late-third or early-fourth century.

Roman barrows are reasonably common, about a hundred are known and they are bigger than earlier barrows, averaging over 24m in diameter and between 5.5m and 13.5m high. Some have been excavated. One at Riseholme. North of Lincoln, included a stone slab as part of a secondary burial but the primary one under the centre of the mound was a cremation in a small trench, having been cremated on the spot. The corpse seems to have been laid on the pyre fully dressed and wearing jewellery and surrounded by offerings of food, drink and oil and a lamp, perhaps used to light the pyre. This ceremony apparently took place between AD80 and 100.

The finest group of Roman barrows are the Bartlow Hills in Essex where nine barrows stand in two parallel rows. All were 'excavated' during the nineteenth century or earlier but the very exceptional finds were destroyed in a fire, However, they were recorded and published in the proceedings of the Essex Archaeological Society in 1900. Some of the barrows are over 13.5m high and most date from the second-century.

Inhumation burials become common during the second half of the second century. This change may have been encouraged later by the spread of christian ideas. The better kind of burials were in stone coffins and in some cases in eastern Britain it is clear that they were brought a good many miles from a quarry. Barnack stone was used for coffins at Colchester which must have represented a considerable expense for the family. They were carved out of a single block of stone and were provided with a lid made of the same material. In the Bath area the interiors usually have a rounded end for the head and narrow to a squared-off foot end.

At Lullingstone villa in Kent a small building was found with a small cella approached through a columned doorway with a wooden door. Fragments of wall-painting of human figures decorated the walls while the ambulatory around had walls and floors of pink cement. Inside the cella had been two lead coffins containing the skeletons of two adults but one had been removed although the grave-goods that accompanied it were still in position. Each of the two groups included a glass flask with dolphin- shaped handles, and a knife and spoon. There were two other glass bowls and two metal flagons and a gaming-board. Originally the two burials had been placed in a wooden chest with layers of chalk and gravel above which subsided and crushed the burials when the wooden chest decayed.

Lead coffins were also expensive at the time and seem to have been the posh alternative to the stone coffin. However, they can sometimes be found as an interior coffin inside the stone casket.

The Trentholme cemetery in York was mainly used by the poorer inhabitants of the city and gives us information about how they were buried. Two stone coffins have been found. One had been filled with gypsum after the body had been laid inside. The rest of the burials were in wooden coffins, 5,000 nails from which have been recovered. Grave goods were poor, only a pot or two accompanying each burial but in other, slightly more prosperous burials, trinkets included bronze bracelets and armlets.

Tombstones have been mentioned before. With the exception of London and Colchester, their erection was largely confined to those parts of the country where stone is readily available, elsewhere they may have been replaced with memorials made of wood. Up to the present, dozens have been found at York, Chester and Caerleon and demonstrate that they were usually put up by the military or by veterans.

Their inscriptions follow the well-known Roman formula which allows missing words to be filled in. They commemce with the letters DM, an abbreviation of the phrase Dis Manibus (to the spirits of the departed). Then follows the name of the dead, various information about nationality, rank, occupation and age and finally the name of whoever erected the stone. Some stones have representations of banqueting scenes with the dead reclining on couches with small tables placed in front of them. Ten examples of this occur on tombstones from Chester, perhaps all made by the same firm.

During the latter part of the third century, threats to the peace and security of the province began to manifest themselves in the independent parts of the British Isles and across the North Sea in Holland, north Germany and Denmark. The most feared were those posed by the Saxons fron north Germany who began to raid the borders of the Empire including the coast of Britain. However, by the end of the fourth century they, together with the Franks from the Rhineland, were being recruited into the Roman military as federates or laeti (part-time soldiers or mercenary troops).

The raiders from the north were the Picts of northern Scotland and the Votadini of southern Scotland. The attitude of the latter folk to Roman Britain was ambiguous for they had always traded with the soldiery stationed south of Hadrian's Wall but at the same time they were always ready to take the opportunity to do a little raiding and looting.

Across the Irish Sea there were others who wanted closer contacts with Roman Britain either as raiders or traders or settlers. This last ambition was easier to achieve in western Britain where Roman administration was less rigid and pervasive than in the east. In the north of Ireland were the Scotti whose emigrants to north Britain were later to give their name to the area. Further south were the Deisi and the Ui Liathain whose contacts were with western Wales and the south-western peninsula.

Evidence of raiding comes from several places like Trapain Law in Scotland where a collection of hack silver (silver cut up ready for melting down) has been discovered. This silver was mainly Roman silverware and is usually thought to have the fruits of a raid. In northern Ireland, similar silver hoards have been discovered at Coleraine and Balline while to emphasise the point that plundering the Empire was a common pursuit among its immediate barbarian neighbours, we can mention the hoards at Bodingen in Germany and Høstentorp in Denmark.

The evidence of trade comes from Roman goods found in barbarian graves in all the surrounding lands. In some areas, like southern Scotland and in the Rhineland, they are so common that we can suggest that these people were living a pseudo-Roman way of life, at least, as far as the trappings go. It seems that the Roman life-style was immensely attractive to many barbarians and on the Continent when they settled in the Empire as they did during the fifth century, they abandoned to a large extent their previous ways and adopted Roman ones instead, including the Christian religion. One barbarian even became a Roman ruler, recognised by the eastern Emperor. This was Theodoric who ruled in northern Italy and built fine churches which still stand today.

In Britain when they settled, the barbarians did not have the same ambition. In fact, they ignored Roman things, and simply carried on the way of life that they had brought with them. This is true of the Irish tribes when the Scotti settled in south-western Scotland and the Deisi settled further south in Wales and also of the English whose settlement in eastern Britain was the most significant of all these immigrations.

However we are not at that point. We are dealing with the earlier phase of raiding and the measures the Roman took in trying to deal with it.

Problems with raiders began as early as the mid-third century. Coin hoards are usually thought as having been buried by their owners in times of unrest and a good number of coin hoards were buried in the 260s and 270s and many were in the eastern coastal region which suggests that the threat came from Saxon raiders.

The Roman response to this seems to have been piecemeal. Two forts were built at points along the coast which were particularly vulnerable. One was at Brancaster in Norfolk and the other at Reculver in Kent. Together with the ports that supported the patrols of the Classis Britannica, the British Fleet, which probably included Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk, Colchester, London, Rochester in Kent, and Richborough and Lympne also both in Kent, and the headquarters at Dover, they must have seemed an adequate defence for a time.

By the end of the third century, further measures needed to be taken. A number of existing harbours were developed into defended bases by building strongly walled forts on the larger river estuaries and on exposed coasts. These used the latest 'continental style' method of defensive construction which abandoned the old 'playing-card' plan of fort and adapted the design to the site which was usually not the most ideal but which was tactically the most effective.

These sites were usually rather wet and many of these forts had walls founded on timber platforms to prevent them subsiding. The walls were thick, free-standing with projecting rectangular or 'D'-shaped towers and heavily defended single gateways and posterns in the Gallic mode. Similar forts were built along the northern French coast.

In Britain these forts were Burgh Castle in Suffolk, Walton Castle and Bradwell in Essex, Richborough and Dover in Kent, Lympne in Sussex and Portchester in Hampshire. Collectively, these are known as Forts of the Saxon Shore. They were probably linked by a chain of signal stations of which one has been identified at Corton in Suffolk and another at Shadwell close to London. The fort at Pevensey in Sussex was added to the system in 337.

During the early fourth-century a variety of reconstructions and remedial works was undertaken in the northern forts perhaps because of a new threat from the north from the Picts.

Some form of protection was obviously called for along the western British shores but it is a difficult coast to defend, full of inlets in which raiders could come ashore and shelter their boats. The best that could be done was to build some forts and strengthen the fortifications of the few towns in the area.

Carmarthen, a walled town, was linked to the sea along its river by a series of signal stations. There were probably Roman bases at Loughor and Pembroke. At Cardiff a fort, whose walls were reconstructed in Victorian times, was probably built at the end of the third century for it had the projecting towers (still there in the reconstruction) that are typical of the Gallic style. Projecting towers were added to the town of Caerwent and one of its postern gates blocked up.

It may be that a fleet was operating in the Bristol Channel, for a mosaic at the sanctuary of Lydney was dedicated by soldier whose rank was abbreviated to PR.REL. which perhaps means that he was in charge of the fleet's supply base which probably was built not far away.

At Caernarvon the fort was occupied during the fourth century and an enclosure, perhaps for stores, was built nearby. On the island of Holyhead, a defended harbour was at Anglesey with walls running down to the shore.

Further north in Lancashire the fort at Lancaster was built during the 330s. This carried the chain of defences up to the north-west to link with the line of outpost forts built down the Cumberland coast from the western end of Hadrian's Wall.

Within Britain small fortified posts were made out of the posting stations along some trunk roads. Examples include a line along Watling Street and along the Fosse Way and other roads in the Midlands and the south-west. But there were other minor walled sites like Margidunum on the Fosse Way north of Leicester. Some of them housed police posts: an inscription from Dorchester-on-Thames records the commander of such a unit there.

A re-organisation of city defences was undertaken during the mid-fourth century by the civitatis. Encircling ditches were widened and towers were added to provide platforms for artillery. This meant that garrisons had to be provided for the towns. These forces were the laeti, forces independent of the regular military, recruited probably as mercenaries by the civitatis from barbarian immigrants.

It has been suggested that military belt-equipment and other fittings found in graves outside towns which had these modern defences are likely to be parts of the uniforms of these irregular troops. If this is so, then they seem to have been recruited as 'security guards' by other civilian establishments including a number of villas since their equipment has been found in these places as well. North Wraxall in Somerset is an example.

New measures to protect the coasts from Pictish raids included the construction of a series of towers along the north-eastern coast. They were designed inside a wall with projecting corner towers and an outer ditch. They must have looked like small castles and were part of a system which may have involved the signalling of warnings of Picts on the horizon back to a central command at York.

Further south at Brough-on-Humber, a strongly-walled settlement by the harbour may have had some place in the defensive scheme of the area while in the Fen District where a number of waterways gave access from the sea for a considerable distance inland, small walled towns like Caistor and Horncastle were used as strongpoints with Lincoln perhaps acting as the command centre.

In the year 383, Magnus Maximus, a Roman commander in Britain, took a substantial portion of British garrison across the Channel to set himself up as ruler of a combined Britain and Gaul. Another legion was withdrawn in 401 and 402 and most of the rest of the Roman forces were withdrawn to fight against barbarians in Gaul in 407. Thus the gradual diminution of the defensive capability of the province. But what interests the archaeologist more is what happened in the economic and social spheres during this period.

As far as the economy is concerned there were definite changes in all the areas which archaeologists have investigated. What brought about these changes?

The army had always been an important customer for agricultural produce. Perhaps the major customer. But the withdrawal of the army also meant that the soldiers were no longer present to spend their pay so there was a good deal less cash in circulation.

Another factor was probably the settlement of barbarians in the province. There were probably a good number in eastern England where there is some cemetery evidence for their presence. Also they probably formed the garrisons of the defended towns and cities. And in south Wales there was a settlement of the Deisi from Ireland. Unlike the barbarians on the Continent who were anxious to acquire the Roman life-style, these people in Britain were content to follow their own traditions and they were uninterested in Romano-British mores. Probably, too, they were not prepared to participate in the economic system.

Again, the tax demands on the civitatis from the central provincial government ceased. No doubt the local authorities continued to collect the tax where they could but they now had the money to dispose of for themselves. What did they spend it on? Defensive measures? Administration? Themselves? Can the archaeological evidence help us to answer these questions?

After AD402, according to the excavation evidence, the supply of copper coins seems to have died up. Silver and gold coins, comparatively rare at any period, were arriving in Britain down to about AD406 or a little later in the case of the silver. This meant that, increasingly, taxes would have to be collected in goods. And in the market-places, barter would inceasingly take the place of money transactions. So the lack of coins would effectively have put a brake on the free movement of trade and slowed up the economy.

If we look at the production side, we find changes too. By about AD360 a considerable number of villa houses had ceased to be occupied but, of course, this does not mean that the estates were being abandoned. When plotted on a map the desertions are found to be spread evenly over the whole distribution area of villas and suggests that, in general throughout Britain, times were becoming harder. Whether this was part of a slow-down in the economy that was related to the incursions of the barbarians and the resulting unrest we cannot be sure but there does seem to be an unevenness in the economy after this date.

The greatest concentration of fine villas were in the Cotswolds and suggests that this was the most prosperous part of the civilian zone. Another similar group was in Yorkshire. Perhaps there was increasing independence for the civitatis which resulted in some being more economically successful than others. Some of the villa houses continued to be occupied into the fifth century but in reduced circumstances. It could be that the money was not available to keep them up because there was no longer a market for the large quantities of agricultural products that the villas were accustomed to produce.

When we turn to the towns we find that they survived better. Civitatis capitals, of course, may have done so simply because they were the centres of power within the region but they had been undergoing a process of change for years. For example, at Silchester and Wroxeter the basilica buildings went out of use cAD350. This cannot mean that the administration of the civitatis had broken down but perhaps the business that was usually conducted there was now being conducted in the private houses of the officials as was happening in other parts of the Empire.

We have already seen how several towns had been refortified during the fourth century and there is evidence of building inside the towns at later dates. At Verulamium a large courtyard house with mosaics was built after AD370. At Exeter there was construction after AD400 and there is probably the same evidence in Gloucester. Certainly there was continuing construction at Wroxeter where a large and elaborate timber-framed building was erected round about AD367.

More evidence is being found in other towns that suggests they survived, although perhaps in an inceasingly less prosperous way, to at least AD410 and that the civitatis system was operating until that date as well as the letter from the civitatis to the western emperor Honorius demonstrates. Shortly before, Constantine, the usurper who had removed the bulk of the remaining garrison from Britain, had been discredited by Honorious and the historian Zosimus repeats a tradition that, as a result, the officials Constantine had left behind in Britain were expelled by the civitatis, presumably as a preliminary to writing to Honorious to re-establish relations with the legitimate emperor.

Roman power in Britain gradually slipped away to be replaced by local administrators who, in time, became the 'tyrants' who owed allegiance only to themselves.

More than in other archaeological periods, it is possible in the Roman period for the archaeologist to use the many artifacts discovered in excavation to recreate the way of life of the people of Roman Britain. They include objects from graves, from domestic sites and from industrial places and after excavation require various methods of treatment to conserve them. Religion, recreations, medicine, agriculture, trades, family life, trading and the activities of the military have all been illuminated by these discoveries and it is important that one knows how to interpret them correctly.

The most important thing to know about them is their context. The complaint that archaeologists have against metal-detectorists who dig objects out of the ground is that they divorce artifacts from their contexts. Without the context, the dating potential of the objects are wasted. At the same time, the information that the context could give about the objects is not available. Conversely, the context could help to date the objects. It could suggest an identity for the object; it could suggest how it was used and by whom, it could demonstrate what contemporaneous objects existed, it could show how it fitted into a sequence of similar objects, it could help to identify other associated objects and allow the artifact to take its place in an assemblage of objects in a meaningful way.

 

17 - Spiritual Life
Contents
19 - A Search for Identity