Life and Times in the The Roman-British Villa

[Faustus]

INTRODUCTION

 

FIRST; HERE is a link to Caldrail

Edited November 9, 2007 by Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

The conversion of a corridor house into a courtyard house is dictated by size of household and estate rather than by other cultural or aesthetic considerations. The courtyard house always gives an impression of great size, and it is possible nowadays to exaggerate this, when so much that would now be arranged in storeys was in Roman Britain spread out upon the ground floor. Nevertheless, the biggest of these villas, as at Bignor (Pyrrha's Roman Pages), were large indeed, for the reason that in a society based upon slavery or small tenants, even moderately wealthy folk tended to accumulate large households.

 

Britain has not furnished such scenes of daily life as grace the funeral monuments of the Moselle valley in lively variety. But there is no reason to think that the life of the wealthy in the provinces differed in its essentials. So the kitchen scenes of Gallia Belgica, with their cooks and scullions, the hunting scenes with grooms and estate lads, or the boudoir scenes with mistress and maids, might be applied to the world of the large Romano-British villas almost without observing the change of locality. What must be emphasized, however, as a social fact, upon which stress has already been laid, is that villas so large as Woodchester, where much remains unexplored, or Bignor, also with two courts, comprise both residential and workaday quarters. The inner garden court with its vast house, enormous central dining-room, and imported marble sculptures, is reached through an outer courtyard flanked by a pair of barn-dwellings of the type associated with farm-workers and farm-stock. The direct connection of this richest of houses with the development of an estate is thus demonstrated by the plan.

 

Woodchester was uncovered and published in an age when evidence for the growth or evolution of villas was not sought. To perceive such a phenomenon it is necessary to go to a later excavation at Northleigh (Oxfordshire). This great house in its final form comprised a vast courtyard house of many rooms, with servants

[Faustus]

~ ~ ~View of Bignor Villa ~ ~ ~

Artists conception of Bignor villa mentioned earlier. ~ ~ ~Mosaic Floor in Dining Suite of Bignor Villa

Note the Bath Suite with the Barrel Arched Roof

(in white)

 

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

The Development of Villas

It would be difficult in the present state of knowledge to say where villa-life began to flourish on a widespread scale, but it may be recognized that in some districts its beginnings came much later than others. A remarkable case of a late start occurs in the territory of the Parisii in east Yorkshire. Here, at the excavated villas of Langton and Rudston, the agricultural ditches which mark the first phase in the history of the site are strewn with pottery belonging to the late first century A.D. In other words, they mark the new phase of activity in cultivation stimulated by the pax Romana and by the demands of taxation or levies in kind made upon an allied community by the Roman government. But the first modest buildings in the Roman manner at both sites do not come into existence until the third century A.D. This again marks the incorporation of the tribe within the newly constituted province of Britannia Inferior and the more insistent development of the natural resources within easy range of its new capital at York. But amenities can hardly be said to exist until the forth century A.D., by which time the greater insistence upon the development of local economy and the ever growing tendency to levy taxation in kind rather than in money, caused a rise in values and prices of agricultural produce and increased the wealth of farming folk. The two villas could then be furnished with mosaic pavements and bath-houses, the latter of real luxury at Rudston. Vigorous local scools of mosaic workers, copying classical models with enthusiastic infidelity, grew up to meet the demand. A house of considerable architectural pretensions at Harpham belongs to this period, though its beginnings were earlier.

 

A second area where development came late is the north-east corner of the territory of the Brigantes,now County Durham. The villa at Old Durham has a bath-house which belongs to the fourth century A.D., and large threshing-floors of the same date. But the agricultural ditches which, as at Langton or Rudston , mark the earliest phase or activity on the site, yielded Antonine pottery. This is interesting because it marks a forward movement of Romanized property-holders in correspondence with the advance of the Roman frontier from the Tyne to the Forth.

 

There is no indication that the Old Durham site outlasted the severe troubles of A.D. 367-9, when Hadrian

Edited February 19, 2008 by Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

The Pavement of Floors

No consideration of villas as a whole is complete without some reference to the mosaic pavements which have so often indicated their existence. The most famous and most evocative are those decorated with figure-scenes from mythology. But when an attempt is made to estimate the position of the patron in the choice of pattern, it must he borne in mind that the range of patterns available will have depended upon the pattern-book of the firm which laid the pavement. Again, the execution of the work might vary sharply according to the competence of the worker. A striking example of this is furnished by the Cirencester pavement of the Four Seasons, of which, out of three surviving, two are fashioned with sensitive grace while the third is a coarse and clumsy rendering of the same subject, wholly lacking in deftness of line or subtlety of colour-blending. Entire compositions, based upon original designs of obvious breadth or delicacy, could become mere caricatures in the hands of inexperienced or over-ambitious workmen. Such are the Wolf and Twins pavement from Aldborough, now at Kirkstall Museum, Leeds, the Venus pavement at Rudston (E. Yorks), and the Apollo and Marsyas pavement, from Lenthaya Green, Sherborne (Dorset).

 

A comparable failure in detail marred the Horkstow pavements, though in some reproductions of lost examples the copyist must bear his share of the blame. The fact that such standards of workmanship passed muster serves as a check upon the sensibility of Romano-British patrons. It is clear that many were about as far from an appreciation of classical taste as a worker of samplers from a designer of Gobelin tapestry. What is remarkable is that they should have wanted such things at all, particularly when a rich and attractive variety of conventional patterns in abstract design was also available, which native instinct might have prompted them to choose. The choice then becomes something purposeful, as deliberate as Chaucer

Edited March 31, 2008 by Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

A Manorial Precursor

Excavation at such villas as Park Street and Lockleys has revealed that Romanized buildings succeeded native farms of a primitive kind, composed of groups of rectangular or circular huts. But it is also a well-known fact that throughout the province many farms of this poorer sort retained their form little altered through the centuries and in general hardly affected by the Roman world around them. Evidence for this continuity of native habit abounds in large areas throughout the island: Salisbury Plain, the Dorset chalk-lands, parts of the North and South Downs, the Fenland, the Long Mynd, and Upper Wharfedale may be cited as typical regions of the kind.

 

It would, however, be wrong to suppose that this ubiquity of native farms represents the existence of an anti-Roman movement or the presence of a populace reluctant to avail itself of better conditions: for excavation reveals that the inhabitants of such places were as Romanized as their means permitted them to be. Some Other explanation of the state of affairs is therefore required, and the way thereto is cleared if it can be accepted that the Romanized villa and the native farm started from the same cultural level; for it then becomes necessary to suppose that the difference must lie in the social relationship of their occupants. The social framework of the Celtic tribe was explained by the Romans in terms of their own institution of patroni and clientes. This was a relationship based upon social duty: in return for the protection and personal support of a wealthy patronus Roman clientes bound themselves solemnly to further his interests and perform his requests.

 

The expression was accordingly used by Roman writers to convey Celtic clan relationship. But clan relationship also had an economic foundation, expressed in tenancy and rent. The chieftain and his principal followers lived upon their tenants

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

The Equipment

The equipment of this kind of farm in corn-growing country is worth specification. The farm-house and accessory buildings form a group of huts either round or rectangular in plan. They are never large: an average cross-dimension of twenty feet would err on the high side. It has often been stated in the past that some were furnished with rude hypocausts do not occur in huts and are in fact corn-drying ovens; for the British farmer, as Pytheas had noted in the fourth century B.C., often gathered his corn green and threshed it under cover. This demands parching of the grain to make it keep. The plan of these kilns and their flues varied considerable, now bowl-shaped, now T-shaped, now H-shaped, and now forked. But the principle of construction was always the same, to create a fire whose hot gases passed through flues and heated gently a floor never itself in direct contact with the flames. Comparable installations, of much greater size and more complicated construction, are found in the Romanized villas. Once dried, the grain was stored in basket-lined pits. Both the pits and corn-drying ovens needed frequent renewal, and a site occupied over a long period therefore yields them in bewildering multiplicity. The area of the farm us usually enclosed by a ditch and bank, and its comparative spaciousness, demanded in part at least by the room required for the various installations and their renewal, is again deceptive as an indication of either the peopling of the establishment or its capacity in output.

 

If the general social relationship of villas to small-holdings is clear, there are, however, many points upon which information is wholly lacking. It is known that in the southern area of Roman Britain the great plough, with massive coulter, was widely distributed, from Essex to Hampshire and Gloucestershire. These implements, first introduced in the Belgic area of pre-Roman Britain, are of uncertain form, but it is clear that while primitive methods of traction would enable them to be used in the smallest size of Celtic fields, 100 feet square, convenience would choose the larger sizes of field, up to 400 feet. The villas which were associated with this newer kind of agriculture may therefore be expected to have had a field system of somewhat larger scale. This however, has not yet been identified in detail, although the air-photographs of certain Oxfordshire villas, like Ditchley and Little Milton, show clear traces of a new lay-out of field boundaries to a generous scale in the immediate vicinity of the farmhouse.

 

On the other hand, it may be regarded as equally certain that not a few conservative villa owners will have derived their wealth from customary tenants engaged in farming in the old style, and will therefore be in close touch, as are certain villas north of Winchester, with unchanged field-systems of the old type. How much there was of a new style in agriculture, and in what relationship it stood to the old, are thus questions which can be asked but which must for the time being remain unanswered. Still less has there been detected any trace of the Roman fashion of centuriated fields, systematically laid out in large standard rectangles enclosed by a grid of accommodation roads. Such systems might be expected to occur in the vicinity of the coloniae at Lindum (Lincoln) or Glevum (Gloucester), and Haverfield went so far as to indicated a parallel but non-rectangular system of roads west of Camulodunum (Colchester). But no unimpeachable example of centuriation has yet rewarded either the field-student or the air-photographer. It seems evident that in the British province Roman fields of the regular agrimensorial patterns were, to say the least, extremely rare, though their identification has proved a will o

Edited December 10, 2007 by Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

Field Drainage Canals as a Transport System

The foundations of the system has been shown by excavation to belong to the later years of Nero; a date which has an important bearing upon the original design of the scheme and upon the origin of the labour force required both for the canals or drains and for the subsequent farming. At the time the Roman northern frontier was based upon Lincoln, and there was no reason for basic military supplies to proceed further. The construction of the Fossdyke canal to the Trent may well be an addition to the scheme, after the advance of the legionary base from Lindum (Lincoln) to Eburacum (York) in A.D. 71.

 

As for the labour required to make them, the works are situated in land immediately adjacent to the territory of the Iceni, and their construction belongs to the period just after the revolt of A.D. 61, which the Iceni had led. There can be little doubt that the conquered rebels were condemned to labor at the new works and were thereafter drafted to the new agricultural reserve thus created, working it upon terms much more favourable to Rome than to themselves. It might, then, be thought that the Romans would have imposed here their own system of field-planning.

 

But when the new fields and farms made possible by the drainage are scrutinized upon the vast mosaic of air-photographs by which the late Major Allen, the Fenland Research Committee, and Dr. St. Joseph have revealed them, it becomes clear that, while the canals and the main roads across the area bear the systematic imprint of the Roman engineer, the farms, fields, and lanes are no less characteristically native. The conclusion is inevitable that the native

Edited December 16, 2007 by Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

Opportunities Based on Some Geographical Conditions

If in southern Britain there is some evidence of expansion of pastoralism at the expense of agriculture, in northern Britain the process was probably reversed. There is little evidence for agriculture on any scale but the smallest in the north in pre-Roman days. Indeed, it is noteworthy how the decorators of prized artistic objects choose either horses or cattle as their theme, both in pre-Roman and Roman days, and how cauldrons, for seething meat, continue to be one of the principal manufactures of the area. These facts imply a Homeric type of society or, if this be thought too sophisticated, a state of civilization akin to that of the Irish Celtic sagas, in which wealth is reckoned not in broad acres but in heads of cattle. Many of the upland native farms of Cumberland and Westmorland plainly continued to reflect these conditions. If they have any field-system, it comprises a limited number of tiny paddocs or crofts, unequal to supporting a family through the year.

 

Their wealth and support lay in the adjacent hill-pastures, with valley feeding for winter. But most of the cattle, as in medieval times, must have been killed off when the winter came, the most valuable risings then being their hides and horns, convertible to leather and a variety of horn objects. The Roman tax-collector had a first interest in the herds, which were counted and taxed by heads: but his second and no less important interest lay in the hides. The consumption of hides by the Roman army must have been enormous. The jerkins and breeches of the soldiery, their shield-coverings and their tents, not to mention their massive boots, were all made of leather, and a tribute of hides will have been an obvious alternative to a tribute of corn. Excavation has suggested that leather was officially collected and tanned or tawed at Catterick. Thirdly, there was an interest in the carcass: for lard was part of the staple diet provided by the Roman government for its troops: and this too could be extracted from pastoral communities, whether cattle or pigs provided it.

 

One of the effects of the pax Romana, which stopped cattle-raiding between the different local groups, was to encourage an increase of population among the upland herdsmen of Westmorland and doubtless elsewhere. There came a time when the main settlements swarmed and minor farms grew up not far away, so that all the available land in the neighborhood must have been pastured to the full. This is particularly evident in such a valley as that of the Lyvennet, south of Penrith, and other areas tell the same story. The increase did not necessarily spell prosperity for the individual: it may in fact have meant the reverse. But it did mean a rise in the amount of taxable property, when it came to counting animals, not to mention the possibilities of army recruitment.

 

There were, however, areas amid the fells and forests which show undeniable traces of a spreading agriculture. An outstanding example is Upper Wharfedale, where many miles of native field systems exist, studded with native farms yielding Roman pottery and coins down to the close of the fourth century A.D. The Air Gap was even opened to the villa system, though it must be significant that the single known example, at Gargrave in Craven, lies on the margin of an old glacial lake-bed, whose especially fertile land must have caught the eye of a wealthy man bent upon profitable farm development. Similarly the sole villa yet known in County Durham, at Old Durham, lies upon the magnesium limestone belt, which still carries the biggest farming land in the area. Whether these establishments belonged to native landowners or to Roman ex-soldier settlers must remain uncertain.

 

Cameo British Bear ~ County Durham

 

But veteran settlers are known elsewhere in the north and it would be wrong to suppose that all the land-development was due to native enterprise. The fort of Bremetennacum Veteranorum (Ribchester, Lancashire) was the administrative center of an enclave of veterans important enough to figure in a Roman geographical list. The Calder basin, from above Huddersfield to Castleford, has yielded altars dedicated to the tutelary deity of the Brigantes by roman citizens whose names strongly suggest that they too were veteran settlers. Nothing, however, is known of what form their settlements took or what kind of production was connected with them. If they were veterans then a land-settlement is most likely; and it should be observed that the Middle Gritstone, which the river Calder here cuts, supports good and comparatively light agricultural land.

 

Tombstone of Thracian Cavalry Man from Gloucester

Riding Down a Western Briton ~ An episode of the early days of conquest

 

Wharfedale and its upper basin are intimately related to an exceptional form of habitation, namely, the limestone cave-dwellings which are a feature of the Pennines and Peak District wherever geological conditions permit their existence. These dwellings have in the past been variously interpreted, but nearly always through the eyes of a civilized mentality which could conceive of them only as a refuge and not as a permanent dwelling. This, however, is not the view taken of such accommodation by peasant communities, to whom they offer a residence drier and more permanent than a hut, much warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

 

It is therefore not surprising that many of the caves, villages, and field-systems are intimately connected and that there is no real distinction to be drawn between the one and the other. They certainly do not represent the habitations of refugees from Roman rule, for most of them show a long continuity of habitation and they are not difficult either to find or to smoke out, as was the practice in Roman Africa when they were used by outlaws in this way. They represent rather the readied adaptation by man of advantages provided by Nature: an extra possibility in housing as opposed to an emergency measure.

 

(continued in next posting)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edited April 19, 2008 by Faustus

[Melvadius]

This may be a silly question but isn't this book still in copyright?

[Faustus]

It is believed by the poster that the posting of this text conforms to copyright law as it pertains to brevity (not more than a chapter), and use (educational) as well as any affect as a result of its posting would tend to increase interest in the full text rather than diminish it, and would likewise not devalue the book itself, but would add to its value.

 

 

Faustus

[Faustus]

THE COUNTRYSIDE (From: Roman Britain- ch. three)

 

Lake Dwellings, Markets, Fairs, and Sanctuaries

Lake-dwellings are another specialized form of settlement which owe their existence to human adaptation of a natural feature. These are little known in Britain south of Hadrian

[Melvadius]

It is believed by the poster that the posting of this text conforms to copyright law as it pertains to brevity (not more than a chapter), and use (educational) as well as any affect as a result of its posting would tend to increase interest in the full text rather than diminish it, and would likewise not devalue the book itself, but would add to its value.

 

 

Faustus

 

I'm sorry to disagree but under UK copyright Law, where the book was first published, I can find no law of 'Fair use' which mentions 'brevity' allowing the publication of complete chapters. Works remain in full copyright for 70 years from the year in which the author died - in Richmond's case 1965 +70 years. Is only 70 years from publication where the author is unknown i.e. 2035.

 

It may be different within the US where 'Fair use' is acceptable; however in the UK, as far as I am aware only 'Fair Dealing' is allowed and this is much more restrictive. It also appears to take precedence in International Law where the UK is the country of first publication before 1957 and effectively only allows inclusion of a small amount of text as part of making a critical point about a complete book.

 

As part of personal research copying sections for your own personal use, for as long as you needed would of course be different but placing non-temporary copies into the public domain without the author's consent does appear to be in breach of 'Fair Dealing'. Unless a UK copyright lawyer can tell me differently.

 

c/f

 

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law...ther_exceptions

[Gaius Octavius]

I don't mean to play lawyer, (which I am not), here, but let me present two situations:

 

'A' buys the book, and then passes ownership to 'B', who then passes it on to 'C', and so on.

 

A library purchases the book, and lends it out to all comers.

The point of copyright laws being not to cheat the author (or his assigns) out of royalties.

 

Another question would be: Is the Forum, (technically), in the 'public domain'?

I believe that Faustus credited the book.

 

I HOPE THAT NO ONE RELIES ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF MY QUIBBLES!

[Ursus]

Hmmm, for prudence sake I shall lock the thread until we determine if UNRV can be held liable for possible breach of copyright law.

[Ursus]

The site admin has cleared Faustus to post. It will be removed if and when the publisher objects.