Chapter 18
Religion, Towns and Frontiers
Roman-period shrines and cult-centres, apart from the suggested 'shrine-villas' above, are easier to identify than they were in the Iron Age. Temples dedicated to classical deities and native gods appear not only in towns but also in rural situations where many were built on the sites of Iron Age shrines.
The largest classical temple so far known in Britain was constructed in the colonia at Camulodunum but there were probably examples in Londinium and in the other coloniae. At Camulodunum the temple was dedicated to the Imperial Cult like similar temples at Lyon (Rhône-Alpes) and Cologne. Good surviving examples of the classical temple in Roman Gaul are in the more Romanized south: the Maison Carrée in Nimes (Languedoc-Rousillon) and the temple of Luna and Augustus in Vienne (Rhône-Alpes).
Most temples in Britain and the Continent were Romano-Provincial in style for many native deities were conflated with Roman gods and goddesses as at Bath where the indigenous Sulis was identified with the Roman Minerva and the classical-style temple at the healing spring was dedicated to Sulis-Minerva. Around the spring at Bath, as at Grand (Lorraine) and Aix-les-Bains (Rhône-Alpes) a respectably-sized settlement grew up to cater for the pilgrims. Curiously, at the same time, certain other aspects of the Celtic religion were being destroyed or discouraged by the Romans. Both the Druids, if indeed they were religious figures. and the practice of human sacrifice that the Romans abhorred disappeared after the Conquest.
Excavations at a number of Romano-Provincial temple sites at Ribemont-sur-Ancre in Picardy, Bath in Avon and Uley and Lydney in Gloucestershire have revealed the characteristics of such establishments whose buildings, whether in stone or in other materials, owed nothing to native tradition. At Uley, pagan religious activity on the same spot stretched from c300BC through to the seventh or eighth century AD when the temple site was replaced by a church. During the Romano-British period a native deity was conflated with the Roman god Mercury. The finds from the place include inscribed lead tablets called defixiones, statuettes of Mercury and animal bones from sacrifices. At Lydney, baths, a guest house and other buildings have been identified as well as several temples, one of which, at least, was dedicated to the indigenous god Nodens. This layout is similar to that of the healing shrine at Fontaines-Salées in Burgundy.
On most sites the precinct contained a temple and ancilliary buildings and altars. Amongst these buildings was a priests' house, often accommodation for pilgrims, shops and sometimes a bath house. Finds of statuettes and the defixiones are common. These last were pleas from the worshippers to the deity scribbled on small lead sheets and deposited at the temple. Translations often reveal intimate details of the everyday concerns of ordinary people of the time.
The design of the Romano-Provincial temple was based roughly on the classical plan and incorporated a cella (a holy of holies) surrounded by a verandah-like gallery or portico of usually between 13 and 15 columns along each side. This is closer to the Greek classical temple plan than that of the Roman. A full-sized simulation of a Romano-Provincial temple can be seen in the Archéodrome at Beaune in Burgundy. The largest number of these sanctuaries have been discovered by aerial survey in the Somme region of northern France where they were often placed on the highest points of the chalk plains. The large example at Ribemont-sur-Ancre comprises a temple, a theatre accommodating between three and four thousand spectators, and baths set along an axis over 800m long and accompanied by numerous other buildings covering an area of 25 hectares.
It is important to make an effort to understand the mechanics of the phenomena we see in the past. In the case of these shrines, one can understand that originally they could have been set up by Iron Age people in a certain place to celebrate a local god. As there were no complex structures, little expense would be involved. However, during the Roman period, as we have seen, many of these sacred places were transformed by the construction of buildings which cost money. How were these paid for? By the local peasants? That seems highly unlikely. Could they have financed by some entrepreneur who saw the financial advantages of a pilgrimage site? After all, people who know how to work it have always made money out of religion. Or perhaps complexes were constructed bit by bit by the local priests as the fame of their deity spread? In any event an element of competition must have been involved as several shrines were dedicated to the same god or goddess. Of course, this could have been reduced if care was taken not to duplicate the same dedication in the same area.
The healing shrine is most easily recognized. Many are associated with water and most are romanized native sanctuaries. Examples in Gaul are at Mont-Dore in Vichy (Auvergne), Les Fontaines-Salées (salt springs) in Burgundy and Badenweiler, Aachen, all with bath complexes and accommodation for pilgrims. Eye problems seem to have been one of the commonest afflictions in Roman times; ex-votos in the form of eyes are found but there are also wooden and bronze models of afflicted parts of the human anatomy or of suffering human figures which have been found at the Sources de la Seine and at Chamalières (Auvergne) near Clermont-Ferrand.
Incubation, the practice of sleeping in sacred chambers in order to receive messages from the gods, was carried on at Grand (Lorraine) in eastern Gaul where the Romano-Provincial god, Apollo Grannus, was a particular visitant to human dreams. One feature of many rural sites was a theatre for sacred performances and rituals. They can be found at Trier (Rhineland Palatinate), in Picardy in the colossal sanctuary at Ribemont-sur-Ancre, for example, and will be, in time, perhaps, at Bath. Those excavated on the continent have very small stages and represent a special type similar to the theatres of classical Greek times rather than the standard Roman secular variety.
Various cults were brought into the western Empire from the eastern Mediterranean or even beyond. Presumably they were introduced by merchants and soldiers. Some of them featured Egyptian deities or gods from Syria and other parts of the Levant. One of the best known in Britain was the Mithras military cult with soldiers' temples built at Carrowburgh, Rudchester and Housesteads close to Hadrian's Wall and another, catering for military staff officers and metropolitan merchants, in Londinium. Another temple has been found at Caernarvon. The creed was a mystery religion with membership by initiation that offered life after death. In Gaul there is less evidence for the eastern cults apart from the area of the Rhône-Saône corridor and the Rhine frontier.
Christianity was another mystery religion which gained widespread support throughout the Empire and from the fourth century onwards was adopted by the authorities as the official Roman religion so that its survival was ensured and its bureaucratic character established. The first cathedral in Gaul was built in the form of a double church in Trier (Rhineland Palatinate) in AD321. Later in the fourth century, many smaller churches were built throughout Gaul and Germany. In Trier in AD380 a pagan shrine was desecrated which seems to suggest that by that time Christianity was gaining the upper hand over its rivals. Another cathedral was in existence in Lyon (Rhône-Alpes) by the end of the fourth century while baptisteries appeared in Aix-en-Provence, Riez, Fréjus (all Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur) and Poitiers (Poitou-Charentes).
In Britain, a cathedral has been identified in London and a building near the forum at the Roman town of Silchester in Berkshire has been suggested as a church with an exterior baptistery. This last is one of a number of structures that have been provisionally identified as places of early Christian worship in Britain. Some villas may have functioned as house churches (domus ecclesiae) as was probably the case at Lullingstone in Kent with its Christian wall-paintings. Christian finds in Britain including lead tanks used for baptism, some inscribed with the chi-rho symbol, and inscriptions like the word-square from Cirencester suggest that the Christian belief was fairly common. Mosaics with Christian motifs in villas together with the discovery of the earliest silver Christian hoard in the Roman Empire at Water Newton near Peterborough imply that a number or perhaps the majority of these adherents in the fourth century were people of wealth.
Many of the towns in southern Gaul contained stone buildings. To some extent this was the result of the previous hellenistic influence. Several of these towns were the colonies which aided the romanisation of the area. Glanum (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur), originally a Greek settlement, was rebuilt in Roman style by its colonists. The Romans realized the value of colonies as exemplars of their life-style and founded them in most newly-conquered areas. Further north in Gaul, Autun (Burgogne) is an example, and later, as we have seen, there are the examples in Britain.
On the Continent, as in Britain, the Romans rarely developed Iron Age strongholds into Roman towns. In Gaul, if they did survive, they did so usually as insignificant settlements. In Britain, one can point to a few examples at Silchester and Camulodunum which were founded on or close to the Iron Age sites but they nowhere utilised the earlier defences.
Roman towns in northern Gaul do not as a rule compare favourably with those in the south. Their buildings do not approach the magnificence of the amphitheatre and the aqueduct of Nimes (Languedoc-Rousillon), the theatre at Orange (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur), the circus at Vienne (Rhône-Alpes) and temples like the Maison Carrée in Nimes (Languedoc-Rousillon). The exceptions to the rule are the northern cities that grew to importance in the later Roman period. Trier (Rhineland Palatinate) became the chief city of the north-west in the third century and colonies like Lyon (Rhône-Alpes) and Cologne (Rhineland) became imposing towns. Cologne also gained wealth from a variety of manufacturing activities and its position on the Rhine enabled it to trade widely in Gaul and Germany.
An assessment of the prosperity of the Gaulish cities puts Lyon at the top, then, in order, Narbonne (Languedoc-Rousillon), Nimes (Languedoc-Rousillon), Vienne (Rhône-Alpes), Trier (Rhineland Palatinate), Arles (Languedoc-Rousillon), Bordeaux, Autun (Burgogne) and Reims (Champagne-Ardennes) followed by a third group of Vaison (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur), Saintes (Poitou-Charentes), Avenches (Vaud, Switzerland), Beziers (Languedoc-Rousillon) and Orange (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur). As far as size is concerned, we can compare the Gaulish towns with those in Britain. Nimes and Autun were both larger than London, the biggest British town, as were Lyon and Vienne. But none of them compare with the great capital cities of the Empire: Rome was ten times the size of London, Constantinople half as much again and Antioch twice the size of Rome. Even these places pale in comparison with capitals outside the Empire like Baghdad and Samarra, both of which covered an area nine times that of Rome. Even Teotihuacán in Mayan Central America contained some 200,000 inhabitants and was the sixth largest city in the world cAD500.
But most British and Gaulish people in Roman times were country-dwellers and the annual round of tasks for them would have been very much as it had been in the past. The town phenomenon was a new departure and people who moved into the unaccustomed urban setting had to learn a new way of life. Towns, surrounded by walls in the second century, were a different world to that outside in the countryside. In Britain, the most extensively but not the best excavated of all Roman towns is Silchester. However, in recent years this is being remedied by an up-to-date series of excavations. Its plan can be seen from the air clearly outlined in favourable circumstances as a crop mark and with its aid, the complete street layout and almost all the buildings have been located and identified.
Country people would want to visit the towns on market days and they would become familiar with the forum (market-place). No doubt they would pay taxes or transact other business in the basilica (administrative building) but whether they would get to know much more of the town is a moot point – whether, for instance, they would patronise retailers other than the stallholders in the forum. Would they be habitues of the bath-house or pay their devotions at the temples?
The forum would have been the heart of the town especially on market days when stalls were set up and all sorts of travelling people - entertainers, fortune-tellers, tinkers would appear. In the civitates capitals the basilica alongside the forum would house the local authority clerks, officials and law courts and contain a hall where regional business would be discussed and proclamations read out. A complete list of civitates capitals in Britain is Canterbury, St Albans, Chelmsford, Caistor-by-Norwich, Chichester, Winchester, Silchester , Cirencester, Dorchester, Exeter, Leicester, Wroxeter, Caerwent, Carmarthen, Brough-on-Humber and Aldborough.
Most buildings in British towns were 'strip houses' set endways onto the street and stretching back from it in a narrow range that accommodated either or both a residence and/or a retail outlet and in many cases a workshop as well. These buildings are common in northern Gaul as well as Britain and in both places the timber-framed structures were placed on top of stone foundations. Shops or workshops, which were the same thing, since many goods were manufactured on the spot, stood beside wine-shops and brothels. The baths would be busy with keep-fit enthusiasts working-out in the open or in a covered exercise yard before entering the bath-house and progressing through the cold and warm rooms to the hot room nearest the hypocaust furnace where they would sweat and scrape off the dirt and the oil before plunging into the cold bath. Snack- and drink-sellers would have wandered through the building while vendors of oil and other toiletries would have touted for custom in the vestibule. Such public bath suites were either given to the community by a rich patron or run by entrepreneurs as a profit-making business.
During the third century the basilica buildings in at least two towns, London and Silchester, fell out of use and at the latter place was given over to industrial activities. This may perhaps suggest a burgeoning of urban industry, a tendency to copy the industrial activity already apparent in small towns, but it certainly also suggests that the administration had moved elsewhere and perhaps had become less formal. We know from classical sources that important officials in Italian towns held meetings in their own houses and this trend may have been followed in Britain and elsewhere with a consequent 'privatisation' of municipal and civatas business. This practice probably hastened the decay of towns in the post-Roman period.
How many of the larger British towns developed major industries we do not know. The Notitia Dignitatum, a document of around AD400, lists state factories set up in towns throughout the Empire to supply the military. Winchester is mentioned as a manufacturer of woollen cloth but it is the sole British producer in the catalogue. Unless manufacturing in Britain was restricted to the small towns, future excavation should produce the archaeological evidence of industries in the civitates capitals.
Vici or small towns seem to have been established in order to exploit a particular resource or to facilitate the journeys of travellers and carriers of goods. No doubt many small towns along the main roads would have provided accommodation for officials in mansios (government hotels) or ordinary wayfarers in lodging houses and served the horse and waggon traffic but some along the rivers were involved in waterborne trade. Sea Mills, west of Bristol, was a small port on the Bristol Channel, Lausanne on Lake Geneva was a lakeside port and Pommeroeul (Hainaut, Belgium) a harbour on the River Sambre. Specialisations that have been recognised include pottery (Rheinzabern on the Rhine), bronzeworking (Alésia in Burgundy), saltmaking (Ardres in Nord-Pas-de-Calais), stone quarrying (Tournai, Hainaut, Belgium), ironworking (Verlucio in Wiltshire), lead-mining (Charterhouse-on-Mendip, Somerset) and pewter (Camerton in the same county). These small towns were often without regular layout and usually lacked both forum and basilica while stone-built houses were rare.
Perhaps spas could be included in the category of small towns for they were set up for a single purpose but because they catered for visitors they were usually equipped with good quality buildings in the way of lodging houses, baths, theatre and temple. Bath is the best example in Britain, Grand (Lorraine), Aix-les-Bains (Rhône-Alpes) and Ribemont-sur-Ancre (Picardie) were similar settlements in France.
In the British highland zone, outside the lowland zone where most of the villas and towns were situated, life would have been very different. The economy was still that of the Iron Age. The major exotic presence in the region was the Roman army whose establishments would have generated extra economic stimuli. In particular, the military frontier area in the north of Britain, situated at different times at the Antonine and Hadrian's Walls with its large garrisons, forts and supply bases, could well have offered a good deal of employment to local people as well as being a captive market for all kind of products from food through beer to prostitutes.
The northern British walls themselves were extraordinary constructions. The Antonine Wall, built of turf on a stone foundation fitted with drainage channels and with wooden towers at intervals, contrasted markedly with Hadrian's Wall. It was put up in AD143 by Lollius Urbicus, Governor of Britain, after a victory over the tribes in the Scottish lowlands. Hadrian's Wall was completely built of stone after some early shilly-shallying about the design and completed between AD122 and AD126 as both a barrier and a frontier strip between the Roman province and the Caledonians to the north. There were some Roman posts to the north of Hadrian's wall and some treaty arrangements with the tribes in that area. The wall itself was built by detachments from the legions and the Roman fleet and had turrets, milecastles and forts all constructed in local stone. The military land-strip of which the wall was the major feature functioned more as a border control than as a barrier. During its history it was damaged on several occasions by barbarians who were able to evade the Roman surveillance forts north of the Wall and swarm through the frontier itself.
Nothing like Hadrian's Wall can be found in Europe. The Germanic tribes threatening incursion were the Alemanni from the upper Rhine, who crossed the frontier into Gaul on two occasions in AD215 and in AD259-60, the Burgundians who settled in an area north of the Alemanni and the Franks from the lower and middle Rhine who ravaged Gaul in the 270s. In Germany, the frontier, even at its most developed after AD213, consisted only of a bank and ditch behind a palisade with a line of watchtowers at the rear. As in northern Britain, there was a permanent army presence in Germany. The later defensive strategy meant that the area behind the limes (fortified frontier) became a zone liable to attack at any time. Towns became strongpoints together with fortified road stations while hilltops were defended with burgi (strongly-built towers). Some towns and the Saxon Shore forts were like medieval castles with projecting bastions. In northern Gaul, peasant militia (laeti) composed mainly of Germanic families were settled on vacant land.
Saxon Shore forts with projecting bastions can be found in Britain along the eastern and southern shores of the province where the Roman army had to fend off attacks by raiders from across the North Sea. A line of forts along this Saxon shore and also along the coast of northern France were built at points which were particularly susceptible to hostile landings. Garrisoned by mounted troops who were in touch with sea patrols, they were in the charge of an official known as the 'Duke of the Saxon Shore'. Signal stations on other coasts like Yorkshire and north Devon seem to indicate a sophisticated defensive communication system for signalling to patrolling units of the British fleet.
Bastions were added to some British towns during the mid-fourth century which in effect turned them into forts. Presumably they would have been supplied with military garrisons too for the townsfolk were not allowed to bear arms. A good example of such a town is Caerwent in Gwent which stands just north of the narrowing Severn estuary and together with the late-built fort at Cardiff would have shared in the defence of that vulnerable route leading into the heart of western Britain.
Roman finds in Ireland have been known since the nineteenth century. Burials on Bray Head in Co. Wicklow, coins and an imported 20-kilo copper ingot further north in Co. Dublin have not been thought to be of great significance but a recent discovery in the huge coastal promontory fort at Drumanagh of numerous Roman finds of the late-first and early- second centuries and a large number of buildings has suggested the existence of a town-sized manufacturing settlement importing high-quality goods and raw materials from Roman Britain for the Irish aristocracy in exchange for exports like Irish wolf-hounds and leather for the Roman army.
During the later Roman period in Germany, Trier became the capital of the north-western province with much the same role as York in northern Britain. Fine new buildings and villas in the neighbouring countryside appeared and the appearance of prosperity continued until the Roman troops began to be withdrawn from the Rhineland in AD395 but by that time many Germans from beyond the frontier had been settled inside the borders as federates, farmers who in exchange for land were willing to defend the area against their cousins across the river.
A settlement of such a group of Frankish warriors has been excavated at Gennep (Limburg) on the River Meuse. It consisted of a few large buildings, 120 sunken-floored buildings and a small cemetery. There was an abundance of finds connected with metalworking in bronze, silver and gold. Quantities of Roman pottery and hundreds of glass drinking vessels suggest more of an aristocratic way of life than peasant and there was little evidence of farming so that this group, at least, seem to have been supported at government expense rather than producing their own subsistence. The settlement lasted from cAD380 to cAD500. There seems to have been similar settlement in eastern Britain
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