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Chapter 18

Spiritual and Artistic Life

Religion in Roman Britain as in the rest of the Roman Empire was taken very seriously indeed and a variety of beliefs were introduced into the provinces during their history. This was still true during the upheavals of the fourth century when the partially Christianised empire was split in two with one Emperor and administration hiving off the eastern half with a new capital established at Constantinople, leaving the western rump as a subordinate appendage with an ‘Augustus’ as ruler in Rome acting as deputy to the senior emperor and as a result Christian heresies abounded.  

A preoccupation with religion, of course, had been characteristic of previous ages and was to continue in Europe until modern times. To a large extent it was due to a lack of scientific knowledge of the world which led to the compulsion to attribute events to the work of deities outside humankind’s everyday experience. Romans were fascinated by other people’s religions as well as their own and were very ready to accept fresh extra beliefs if they seemed to be at all plausible. This accounts for the steady stream of new cults that arose in the east and spread westwards through the Empire.

One of the cults that particularly interested them were the indigenous beliefs of continental Europe that we usually refer to as the Celtic religion, already described in its British varieties in chapters on the Iron Age. So fascinated were the Romans that they made a serious study of them and identified many of the celtic deities with the gods and goddesses in their own pantheon and sometimes conflated them. Hence, for example, Sulis (celtic goddess)-Minerva (equivalent classical goddess) at the Romano-British cult shrine of Aquae Sulis (Bath).

In Britain one can detect not only this strong interest but a more practical involvement in the Celtic religion. How the re-fashioned religion operated it is difficult to understand but the result was that the druids disappeared and it became more visible to the archaeologist. Roman-style temples were erected on the sites of Iron Age shrines, Roman-style buildings formed complexes on some sites which were clearly aimed at attracting pilgrims, statues of celtic deities appeared for the first time and written requests to deities became a common way of addressing them. One finds it difficult not to feel that a new commercial attitude to religion was manifested in Britain due perhaps to the business acumen of Roman entrepreneurs.  The same thing happened on the Continent. At Les Fontaines Salées at Saint-Père-Sous-Vezelay in Burgundy, the saline springs, famous in the Iron Age, were converted into a large Gallo-Roman thermal establishment on a similar scale to Bath.

Basically, however, the religion was the same as it was in the Iron Age but stripped of its traditional druidic priests who had been the epitome of the British spirit of resistance to the Romans and had been wiped out by the military as a consequence. No doubt the men who replaced them as religious leaders were more acceptable to the Roman authorities and may have been instrumental in introducing the changes described above.

We know nothing of the organisation of Romano-Celtic religion. Little is known of British priests or of the financiers who must have provided the means to build the temple-complexes which in Picardy in France are of monumental proportions complete with theatres, temples and a large number of anciliary buildings only approached in grandeur in Britain by sanctuaries like Bath and Lydney. In Picardy there is also a variety of lesser religious establisments including those associated with settlements, fana (sanctuaries) that are accompanied by fairly extensive buildings that French archaeologists suggest are perhaps for local pilgrimage, isolated enclosed fana and very small unenclosed sanctuaries. So far in Britain not enough sites are known or fully planned or excavated to provide the data to make this sort of classification although it is being recognised that some of the large villas in western Britain may be the British equivalent of the fana.

If we start with the largest examples we have in Britain we can consider Bath and Lydney, one of which is well-preserved and the other fully excavated and both open to inspection today. From contemporary documentary evidence we know that Bath was visited by people from both abroad and from Britain and at Lydney accommodation for pilgrims has been excavated.

At Bath part of the attraction was the healing water but we also have numbers of defixiones, written requests inscribed on lead strips to the deity for favours in exchange for gifts presented to the shrine, which deal with all manner of everyday problems and which show that not all visitors were concerned with their health. An example of such a defixione from Bath begins ‘May he who carried off Vilbia from me become as liquid as water.’ This is followed by a list of names. The inscription was written, as is often the case, with each word reversed. Apparently the author was in love with Vilbia and wished the goddess(es) to remove his rivals from the contest. It was inscribed on one of the lead plaques and deposited in the sacred spring.

Bath itself was a settlement of some five hectares that grew up around the sanctuary. Whether it was true town or not is open to question. It certainly was not laid out like a normal Romano-British town with central basilica and forum insula and there is doubt about walls despite loud protestations to the contrary. A substantial suburb developed to the east of the spa along the London road. Excavation has always been difficult in Bath because of the presence of the Georgian town built on top of the Roman settlement so that, although the arrangements of the bathing establishment and temple are known, details of the rest of the complex are still unclear.

Originally, the baths consisted of three deep plunge baths built at the end of the first century AD. The Lucas Bath, on the east, measured some nine metres by four and a half and was about one and a half metres deep and entered down three large steps. Its bottom was covered with sheets of lead over a centimetre in thickness that were looted by Victorian antiquaries. At each end were apsidal plunge baths, one a metre in depth, the other deeper, with a cement seat running round it.

On the west of the Lucas Bath was the Great Bath, situated like the Lucas Bath, in a large space which measured some 35 by 20.5 metres that was later roofed with a tunnel vault composed of hollow bricks. On one side of the bath was a cold-water fountain and further west a small rectangular room housed a circular swimming bath. Heated smaller baths lay further to the west and on the north is the reservoir that received the healing water from the hot spring. At a later time, Roman bath suites of the traditional kind with hypocaust rooms were built both at the east and west ends of the complex.

Outside the complex to the north are the remains of the classical temple dedicated to Sulis Minerva and one of the altars from this area still exists. There were probably other altars and statues dotted around the precinct and it is known that to the east underneath the medieval abbey lay another large Roman building, possibly a theatre for religious performances as is found in the great sanctuaries of Picardy.

At Bath the temple was of the classical type and stood on a podium approached by a flight of steps up to a portico fronted by columns.  Behind the portico is the entrance to the cella, the holy of holies which had no windows and contained the cult statue of the gods. Sometimes, as in Greek-style temples, exterior walls of a temple were surrounded by rows of columns placed at the edge of the podium. This left a corridor between the columns, known as a peristyle, and the cella. In most Roman temples like the magnificently preserved one at Nimes in France, half columns were placed against the walls of rhe cella that were flush with the edge of the podium.

In the settlement that surrounded the complex a tombstone has been found that was set up for a priest who served in the temple. It was to Gaius Calpurnius Receptus who died at the age of seventy-five and was erected by his wife and freedwoman (formerly his slave) Calpurnia Petronia. She followed the custom of freed slaves in adding the name of her patron to her own.

Altars set up in the town and mainly dedicated to Sulis-Minerva also record the people who had visited the town and received a blessing of some sort. These altars are expressions of their gratitude. They include soldiers and a stonemason from near Chartres in France. Tombstones provide us with the same sort of evidence and record a variety of civilian visitors as well. One could suggest that the settlement around the sanctuary provided lodgings, entertainment, food and drink for the visitors in much the same way as in eighteenth-century Bath though whether it was as much of a ‘sin city’ is something we can only imagine for ourselves.

Lydney was a sanctuary built within an earlier Iron Age hillfort shortly after AD364 and so perhaps symbolised something of the ancestral traditions of the local people. A temple, measuring 25.9m by 20.4m is entered by a flight of steps that lead up through a wide encircling passage containing five alcoves or niches for altars. In the centre of the building is the central cella or ‘holy of holies’. At the north-western end facing the visitor is a triple, longitudinal sanctuary. The temple is dedicated to Nodens, a British god of healing. A lead defixione found there reads ‘To the god Nodens, Silvanus has lost a ring, he hereby gives half of it (half its value) to Nodens, Among those who are called Senicianus do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens.’ How these curses were supposed to work is difficult to understand.  Did the ‘cursee’ tell the ‘cursed’ that he had approached the god and hope that the fear of the god’s wrath would bring about a reformation in the culprit?

Along the west side of the enclosure behind the temple is a narrow range of eleven rooms with a corridor in front from which each of the rooms could be accessed. There is some argument as to the use of these chambers. It has been suggested that they were occupied by patients coming to the health-complex for cures, perhaps as wards for patients with contagious diseases, or they may have been a row of shops for scribes who wrote out the defixiones and for entrepreneurs who sold votive offerings, trinkets or souvenirs.

Abutting them to the north is a large and elaborate bath-suite with caldaria (hot rooms) and sudatoria (sweating-rooms) heated by three furnaces and a frigidarium (cold room) with its plastered walls painted with bands of red and yellow. Floors were paved with stone slabs and one room, perhaps another frigidarium, had a floor of opus signinum (red coloured cement). At a later period, a stone bench was built around its walls and the central area filled with a geometric mosaic. A pelta pattern was used (a pelta is a crescent-shaped shield) in yellow, red, white and blue. A small mosaic for the apse of one of the heated rooms shows a two-handled vase in a border of guilloche (cable pattern). The exterior of the bath-suite was painted a deep crimson with a partial later redecoration in greenish-yellow. To the north lay a water tank that provided the water for the baths through a conduit.

East of the baths was a large house with rooms surrounding a central courtyard that was entered through a reception hall on the south-western side. Measuring nearly forty metres by forty-nine, it must have been an imposing building, presenting an impressive facade to the visitors as they toiled up the steep path to the complex. It was probably used as a reception building and hotel. From the hall visitors could proceed into the courtyard to relax in the open air or be ushered along the corridors surrounding the courtyard to suites of rooms in the north and western wings. Some rooms had mosaic floors and decorated walls. On the eastern side of the courtyard was a stable and carriage-shed.

Numerous votive offerings were found in the excavation including several models of dogs that probably had some special significance in the cult of Nodens. Cult animals figure in most religions and are still prominent in many religions of the present day.

There are many variations on the basic temple plan. At Lydney, the ambulatory between where the peristyle would be in a classical temple and the cella is part of the enclosed building and is divided up into alcoves. There was a triangular temple in St Albans and examples of circular classical temples are known on the Continent. A temple that closely resembles a classical temple was one in Wroxeter but the best example in Britain was the temple of Claudius in Colchester on whose podium a Norman castle now stands.

Most Romano-Celtic temples put up on local cult-sites were small with a central cella (holy place) set on a podium surrounded by an ambulatory that was bounded by a low wall that supported a verandah-type roof over the ambulatory. (Romano-British temple  ). A temple in insula (pl. insulae, block of buildings in a town) xxxv in Silchester is a good example, square in plan; octagonal examples are known from Weycock (Berkshire) and Caerwent and in the building at Pagan’s Hill in Somerset, the octagonal outer colonnade was replaced with a solid wall; and a circular temple was uncovered at Lullingstone. 

All these stood on the sites of Iron Age shrines and are an example of how the Roman influence on the native religion resulted in a formalisation of its practice. Each temple stood in a precinct in which altars and statues were placed. In this area worshippers made their sacrifices while the priest officiated in the cella. There are a considerable number of these temples in Roman Britain, reflecting the ubiquity of the celtic shrines of the Iron Age. Some inscriptions mention the local deities. In the north we have the water-nymph Coventina, guardian of the sacred spring at Carrowburgh.  Altars in the same area record the names of Antenociticus and Maponus while seventeen carvings of the Genii Cucullati, three hooded deities, have been found both in this area and in the south in Gloucestershire. Mother goddesses were also revered, sometimes as triads.

Roman authorities respected all sorts of religions but they did expect every Roman citizen to make an annual sacrifice to the gods of the Roman state.  Howerver, this state religion, in the words of Michael Grant, ‘although continuously effective in canalizing patriotic emotions, did little or nothing to soothe the care and tedium accompanying an almost universal belief in oppressive Fate or Chance – it could not fill the vacuum in the soul.’ So, in the first three centuries AD, various Mystery religions originating in the eastern half of the Roman Empire spread westwards,  each with a Saviour God with whom the believer’s soul could achieve personal union and with ceremonies that gave the initiate ‘comforting promises of immortality’ (Graves).   In London there was a temple dedicated to Isis, the Egyptian god, and another for the cult popular amongst the military that was the worship of the Persian god Mithras who brought salvation to the human race by the slaying of a huge bull and was closely asscociated with the sun In his cult there were seven grades of initiation, each with its revelations, ceremonies and ordeals. 

Mithraea are known from about half a dozen places in Britain with the examples that can be viewed are in London and at Carrowburgh on Hadrian’s Wall. The London example was found at Walbrook and consists of a rectangular building, 7.6m by 18.28 with an apse at the west end and a narthex (entrance chamber) at the east. Its interior was divided into nave and two aisles like a church and lit by a few small windows. Benches were placed in the aisles where worshippers reclined. In the apse is a raised platform and a representation of Mithras slaying a bull and altars and a timber-lined well were placed at the entrance to the sanctuary. A very large amount of statuary was found in or near the temple including scenes of Mithras and the bull, a bust of Mithras wearing a Phrygian  (Persian) cap and statues of the gods Serapis, Bacchus and Mercury.

At Carrowburgh the temple is similar in shape but rather smaller than the one in London. In its final form there was a square apse at the north-western end and a probable ordeal pit and a hearth beside the entrance in the narthex at the other end. Three altars were discovered in the excavation and evidence shows that the floor of the nave was carpeted with heather. There were signs suggesting that the temple was destroyed during the fourth century perhaps by Christians after Christianity had been adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians were particularly enraged with Mithraism because it bore embarrassing resemblances to their own beliefs.

Beside the mithraeum at Carrowburgh was an open-air shrine dedicated to the Nymphs and the Genius of the Place consisting of a paved area bounded on the southern side by an apsidal wall with a low bench built against it. An altar stood in the paved area and was dedicated by the Prefect (commanding officer) of the garrison of a nearby fort. Close by was a well. Shrines of this sort may well have been common during the Roman period.

It was in AD312 that the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But places of Christian worship existed before this time. The earliest Christian meeting-places were domus ecclesiae (house churches) known as tituli in Rome and were buildings acquired by a congregation and converted for worship. They could be quite spacious places. Some included a meeting-room, a classroom for postulants (converts), a baptistery, offices, quarters for the clergy, closets to store food and clothing for the poor and, sometimes, a reception room for a bishop.

An example of such a place is a town house in Dura Europos on the Euphrates in Syria but there were a variety of similar locations in Rome. One was a hall in the garden of an elegant mansion that is now below the church of S Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Another was a large room in a villa below S Sabina in the same city and another a tenement now incorporated in the foundations and a side wall of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Rome. They were private places of worship as were all other sites of mystery religions.

Emperor Constantine built the first churches near Rome. Even he could not overcome the hostility of the traditional establishment to the new religion and so these churches were constructed on his estates away from the pagan centre of the city. The first was the Lateran basilica started perhaps as early as c313. Later came the basilica on the Vatican hill that is now the site of St Peter’s. Martyr’s and cemetery churches were built on burial grounds that, of course, in Roman times, were always situated outside the city walls. But, by between AD380 and 440, prejudice was dying away and nearly half of the domus ecclesiae in the city were being replaced with named purpose-built churches.

Outside Rome, in the Imperial residence of Milan, S Lorenzo was built cAD370 and one of the Milan churches put up by Bishop Ambrose, the Church of the Apostles (begun AD382), became the model for a large number of churches built all over northern Italy and the Alpine regions. Constantine took over the city of Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople in AD330 and made it the eastern capital of the Roman Empire It was a Christian city from that moment on with Christian basilican churches, remains of one which can still be seen in the ancient city now known as Istanbul in Turkey. In AD476, after Rome fell to the Ostrogoths it became the capital of the Empire.

Perhaps a similar sequence of events occurred elsewhere than Rome. In Britain domus ecclesiae have been identified in villas. Lullingstone had an upper room with wall-paintings depicting figures some of whom stand with outstretched arms as if in prayer. On another wall was a chi-rho symbol painted red on a white background. This monogram includes the first two letters of the Greek word ‘cristos’ meaning Christ. Other colours used in the room were pink, red and purple.  Elsewhere, the villas at Hinton St Mary and Frampton in Dorset have mosaic floors incorporating Christian symbols. At Hinton St Mary is a bust of Christ with a chi-rho symbol in the background and at Frampton one of the mosaics in an apsidal room shows a chalice and a chi-rho. Again, these rooms could have been parts of domus ecclesiae.

Excavations on Tower Hill in London have uncovered the foundations of a late-fourth-century church even larger than the fourth-century cathedral of S Tecla in Milan, the capital at that time of the Western Roman Empire.  It was built out of re-used stone, including black marble, with opus signinum floors and walls painted in red, white, grey, pink and yellow. The date of construction was between AD 350-400, contemporary with S. Tecla, and built perhaps by the usurper Magnus Maximus. It was burnt down during the fifth century.

A church has been identified at Silchester with a possible baptistery outside it to the east. It consisted of a nave with aisles alongside it entered through a narthex at the eastern end with a semi-circular apse at the west. No finds were made inside the building which prove conclusively that it was a church but the probability is very strong. At Richborough inside the Saxon Shore Fort was a timber-framed building with an external baptistery containing a font that was sunk into the ground and lined with waterproof cement.  This structure is thought to have been a church. Another possibility is a building at Caerwent while there may have been cemetery churches at Verulamium and Icklingham in Suffolk.

Outside the Roman town of Dorchester is the late-Roman cemetery of Poundbury that has been identified as Christian. Apparently it grew out of a private graveyard belonging to a courtyard house in the town.  It contains a number of mausolea of which one was decorated with a wall-painting depicting human figures. Some burials were in lead-lined or stone coffins and some were ‘plaster’ burials in which attempts were made to preserve the body by encasing it in plaster. There were some 4000 burials in the cemetery which must represent a sizable Christian community that included the firm of mosaicists who laid the Hinton St Mary and Frampton christian mosaics.

Other evidence for Christianity occurs as isolated finds of objects with christian associations or marked with Christian symbols. A hoard of silver and gold vessels was found at Chesterton in Cambridgeshire some years back. Many of the thirty pieces were marked with the chi-rho symbol and it seems likely that it was the property of a Christian community.

At Cirencester the discovery of an acrostic or word-square:

                     R O T A S

                     O P E R A

                     T E N E T

                     A R E P O

                     S A T O R

provides evidence for christianity. If the letters of this nonsensical message are re-arranged, they form a cross with a common N, each arm being made up of the words PATERNOSTER, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer with A and O left over which represent the ‘beginning and the end’ in the Revelation of St John.

Objects with Christian inscriptions are quite often found like gold rings marked with the chi-rho or silver spoons which may have been baptismal presents. They can be inscribed with phrases like PASCENTIA VIVAS (from the Mildenhall treasure) or AVGVSTINE VIVAS (from Dorset) ‘so-and-so’ lives.

Large round lead tanks are sometimes marked with the chi-rho and were used for the novitiate to stand in while being baptised by having water poured over their head. Some pewter bowls adorned with Christian emblems are suggested as church plate. So evidence for Christian activity in the later Roman period is by no means lacking. However, the quality of the objects found and the location of the Christian gathering-places does suggest that membership of the church was mainly confined to people of some wealth and standing in the community and their families.  (Thomas)

Literary evidence tells us that in AD 314 three British bishops attended the Council of Arles from York, London and, probably, Colchester but their cathedrals have not yet been uncovered apart from the possibility in London of the large church on Tower Hill mentioned above. However, Bede tells us that a ‘church of wondrous workmanship’ was erected on the hill-top site of the martyrdom of St Alban outside the Roman town of present-day St Albans. It became a centre of miraculous cures and was restored by the English in the eighth century. Bede also mentions two churches in Canterbury that he says had survived from the Roman period.

Except in families of strong tradition, Christianity usually died out at the end of the Roman period in eastern Britain but remained strong in western Britain amongst the aristocracy and was taken by one member of that group who had become a bishop to Ireland during the fifth century. The standard work on Christianity in Roman Britain is that by Charles Thomas.

When one considers how the sites of what are now ruined buildings or simply marks in the soil are to be presented in a meaningful way to the general public, one can suggest drawn reconstructions or actual full-scale simulations but modern technology offers another way in virtual heritage reconstructions on computers. Because these graphical reconstructions of heritage sites are simply blocks of digital data they can be stored on computer disks or made available via computer networks like the internet on which a reconstruction of Stonehenge is already available.

At the moment virtual reality is associated in the popular mind with headmounted displays (HMDs). In practice, however, there are other ways in which people can enter and move around in virtual environments. One benefit of an HMD is an enhanced sense of scale and the wearer can look up or down or can turn around and look behind and the virtual walls and ceiling are where they should be.

The same scene, viewed through a computer display, or projected onto a screen may not provide the right sense of scale. On the other hand, the visual quality of typical HMDs, though improving, is inferior to that of a computer display. In some situations it might make sense to offer both methods. A computer display that offers a brief visit to a virtual reality reconstruction of the Roman site in Bath can be seen the museum there.

Virtual heritage reconstructions will cover a wide spectrum of authenticity. If a pile of ancient stones or a line of excvated postholes is to be transformed into a credible facsimile of a fort or a settlement, imaginative reconstruction will often be needed and this can offend the purist.

Some of the most effective virtual heritage reconstructions were produced using animation rather than VR techniques. As with computer-generated cartoons, each frame - and there are typically 30-60 frames per second - takes minutes or hours to compute on a powerful graphics computer. The result is a ‘flythrough’ of a heritage site, permanently restricted to a predetermined path. Where the audience comprises numbers of people - perhaps in a theatre or cinema - the choice between a ‘go-anywhere-you-like’ VR exploration and a fixed path tour may be irrelevant for it is obviously impossible for an audience collectively to navigate at will through a site.

Until recently, serious virtual reality projects needed big budgets. Huge computing power is needed to create high quality three-dimensional graphical worlds in which people can move around as they choose. It seems incongruous to mention PCs in this context and yet now for the first time the modern generations of PCs, equipped with 3D graphic accelerators, have crossed a crucial performance threshold. Virtual worlds of acceptable detail and quality for many simple applications can now be produced on systems costing thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds. This will open up the field of virtual heritage to a much wider range of projects and audiences.

In Britain, as well as the Roman baths at Bath, work is now underway on a VR reconstruction of Hadrian’s Wall and in Italy on a virtual Pompeii. In Montenegro the development of Split from Diocletian’s Palace up to the present day is being produced in VR. Elsewhere, and in other archaeological periods, interactive virtual worlds are being built using archaeological evidence from sites in Egypt (Buhen), Greece, Nubia, and Turkey. In France the cave of prehistoric art at Lascaux which is closed to the public permanently for conservation reasons is now an interactive 3D reconstruction and this is perhaps the most imaginative and stimulating piece of work so far produced. At Cluny in Burgundy the abbey church, vandalised and almost completely destroyed in 1793 during the French Revolution, has been reconstructed in a brilliant manner as a piece of virtual heritage.

Apart from these reconstructions, VR is also being used in Canada to develop a laser imaging system for the rapid, three-dimensional digital recording of museum objects. This system, the most advanced in the world, enables highly accurate images of museum objects to be examined in full colour and minute detail. Viewers can zoom in and study such intricate details as tool-marks on an archaeological find or the impasto effect of brush-strokes on a painting. The scanned images can be made available worldwide via CD-ROM or the internet or other communication links and will be invaluable for comparison of widel;y-separated museum objects and archaeological finds and also for providing culturally and historically accurate furnishings and details for virtual heritage reconstructions.

As can be imagined, once these systems become widely available they will revolutionise methods of displaying delicate ancient monuments and ones that are impossible of access for large numbers of people. At the moment, more people pass through the baths in Bath in a year than did during the whole of the 350-odd years of the Roman period and the wear-and-tear on the monument threatens to destroy it in the forseeable future. In fact, it will not be necessary to travel. Those of a sedentary nature will be able to visit historic worlds from the comfort of their armchair in front of the computer.

The art of Roman Britain is not distinguished which is a disappointment after the flowering of the celtic art style during the second half of the preceding Iron Age. Celtic art rarely appears in the archaeological record during the Roman period. It probably continued to some extent amongst ordinary people who were making wooden objects and textiles in their own homes, but it certainly didn’t amongst the upper classes who enthusiastically embraced the classical fashions in all areas. It is the wall paintings that they commissioned and the mosaics that they laid on their dining-room floors that survive.

Most, if not all of this work was in the hands of native craftsmen who originally learnt their trades from Roman or Continental entrepreneurs and their work is best represented by fourth-century walls and floors in the large villas of that period. Their best mosaics like those at Lullingstone, approach the standard of mosaics of the Mediterranean, but there is a good deal of mediocre work in other villas. It would be unfair to make the same sort of comparison with the wall-painting since so little of it survives but the fragments that we have so far found do not match up to the standard of work at, for example, the provincial city of Pompeii.

We do have a few busts and a number of statuettes of gods that vary a good deal in quality. Some busts, like that of Mithras from the London mithraeum, are of fine workmanship and a few of other religious carvings like that of Mithras slaying the bull are too but many of the statuettes of gods are extremely poor. Some students suggest that the high standard work is imported and the poorer quality of native workmanship but this may be too simplistic a judgement.

A more popular taste is represented by the many brooches that are discovered in excavation. They can be used for dating purposes since they have been classified into a typological sequence. Many are British products, others made on the Continent. They are all derived from the simple safety-pin brooch or fibula that was developed during the Iron Age. By the first century AD there were many variations on this theme: spring-pins, hinge-pins, bow-brooches and plate-brooches. Many disc brooches are of continental origin and can be enamelled or use coloured glass to imitate semi-precious jewels. The same is true of the plate-brooches which can have designs of recognisable objects on them like axes, horseriders and so on or are decorated with symbols like the swastika. Others are zoomorphic representing a dog, fish, bird or a fly or are modelled in the round and enamelled. Penannular brooches were also popular and together with the cross-bow, common during the fourth-century, developed into elaborate decorative articles during the post-Roman and Medieval periods. None of these designs have much to do with celtic art or even with classical art and perhaps simply represent the common taste of the period that succeeds the Iron Age in Europe.

Jewellery was very popular during the period but again does not suggest a very high standard of artistic endeavour even though the craftsmanship may be adequate. Rich women possessed bracelets, armlets, rings, necklaces and ear-rings made in gold occasionally adorned with stones like sapphires. Very often they are made from gold wire and necklaces seem to have been used as a convenient device for suspending pendants.

Bead necklaces were commonly worn, the beads being made of glass, coral, amber, jet, ivory, bone, shell, pottery or stone. Sometimes the ‘melon bead’ is used which was made of glass frit, covered with turquoise glaze and ridged like a cantelupe. Bracelets are also frequently found and range from plain armlets of shale, jet, bone or ivory to various bronze types. More expensive ones, of course, are made of silver or gold and can be massive. Very often they are engraved with serpent or snake designs. Some are decorated with semi-precious stones or made of twisted gold or silver wire.

Rings occur in endless varieties. They are by far the most popular type of jewellery for all ages and both sexes. Well-to-do people wore a ring on every finger. A few rings were produced simply to fit over the upper joint of the finger. They are made of gold, silver, gilded bronze, bronze, bronze wire, iron, jet and glass and sometimes set with intaglios of glass or semi-precious stones. These intaglios are sometimes found without the rings that presumably were re-used or melted down. Integlios very often show figures of gods or portraits and these are inevitably done in the classical style but not always very skilfully.

Pins, too, were used in large quantities. For fastening clothes there were simple bone and bronze pins with round heads that could be made of a different material like jet, silver or pearls. Decorative pins were probably used as hairpins to fasten together the rather elaborate hair-dos that seem to have been popular at the time. Sometimes the heads of these pins are shaped like a pair of hands or a hand holding fruit but often they are busts of goddesses or empresses who were fashion icons during the Roman period who inevitably are pictured with elaborate head- or hair-pieces.

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