ROMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY in Britain and the western Empire

Barker: Aspects of the topography of Wroxeter (Viroconium Cornoviorum)
Caerwent, Silchester, Verulamium, and Caistor, retain
long stretches of their walls, in spite of centuries of
robbing, as do even many continuously occupied towns.
The conclusion, that Wroxeter was never defended
with a stone wall, seems inescapable. The earlier defences
of the late 2nd century on the same alignment were
presumed to have been of timber (Webster 1975,44), and
it now appears that their late refurbishment was in the
same material.
There is a further complication in the received interpretation
of the defensive sequence. Kathleen Kenyon, in
cutting a trench across the line of the lst-century defences,
found that the ditch had been recut, probably in the 4th
century (Kenyon 1940, 178 & pl LXX, section at bottom
of plate). This must admit the possibility that the city was,
in fact, reduced to its original size before its eventual
abandonment.
Until 1975 it had been assumed that the river Severn
had eroded much of the western part of the site, but a
small excavation by Peter Brown (1975) showed that there
was a series of truncated ramparts along the present scarp
above the river, and independent work by a geographer,
David Pannett, confirmed that the river has not changed
its course significantly since Roman times. Little, if any,
of the city has therefore been lost.
The latest occupation of the city centre
The results of the excavations directed by the writer on the
site of the basilica of the baths between 1966 and 1982 have
been published in summary form elsewhere (Barker 1975;
1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1982) (Fig 81). Work since 1980 has
confirmed many of the earlier results and added further
information, particularly regarding the history of the
basilica itself. The detailed evidence will be adduced in the
eventual published report; here, the later history of this
part of the city centre can only be summarized briefly (Fig
82).
At some stage, probably c 300, the basilica apparently
became unsafe. The floors had certainly sunk dramatically
in places and most of the north aisle mosaics had been
removed in Roman times. There is no evidence that the
building collapsed: no fallen columns or fragments of
columns, no piles of roof tiles, in fact virtually no debris of
any kind lying directly on the floors. It seems, therefore,
that the roof and the colonnades were carefully and
systematically dismantled, leaving the walls standing and
the interior empty. Perhaps at this stage it was used as a
palaestra for the still-operating bath house. This would
now be almost impossible to prove. Soil eventually
accumulated on part of the nave floor, while elsewhere the
postholes and stakeholes of buildings were cut into layers
of sandy material presumably imported for the purpose.
These were swept away in turn, and hundreds of tons of
rubble were brought in and laid as foundation platforms
for the massive timber-framed rebuilding of the last
period. It is possible, in fact, that this was in two phases,
though the evidence is slight and very ambiguous.
Elsewhere, however, particularly on the southern edge of
insula 2, the evidence for at least three phases of late major
timber buildings is more certain (Fig 82) and this
strengthens the argument that the ultimate replanning of
the city centre was not a single operation, but complex and
protracted.
This last rebuilding was not confined to insula 5, the
baths insula. Short rescue excavations directed by the
writer - one in 1964 (Barker 1968) occasioned by modern
road widening in insula 6, 300ft (100m) east of the baths
insula, the other in 1980 (Barker forthcoming), on the site
of the Post Office on the modern crossroads north of the
baths at the junctions of insulae 2 and 16 - both showed
that in the final phase of occupation, massive foundations,
probably for timber sills, lay across the lines, in one case,
of a levelled stone wall and, in the other, of the street
dividing the insulae. The implications must be that the
final replanning of the city was very extensive, and not
merely the building of an imposing private house in a
ruined urban landscape.
The dating of the latest phases of development and of
the ultimate abandonment of the city centre depends on a
floating chronology, with a small number of termini post
quos and one terminus ante quem. The arguments are very
detailed, but chiefly depend on the sequences of buildings,
worn surfaces, or other clear occupation horizons.
The coin sequence ends before 400 and none of the
pottery can independently be dated to the 5th century.
There are, in fact, no objects from the site which must be
5th- (or 6th-) rather than 4th-century in date.
Some of the buildings are given termini post quos by
stratified coins and the most important of these is a
sequence of structures on the northern edge of the site.
Here a furnace with associated pits and interconnecting
gullies was succeeded by three major timber buildings,
one founded on massive post-settings of clay and cobbles,
the others on the facades of buildings fronting the
east-west street. These three buildings could have had a
life of at least 50 years each, and a century or more is
certainly possible. The collapsed clay roof of the furnace
contained a coin of Constantine I, c 320, which gives a firm
terminus post quem for the subsequent sequence. On the
assumption that the buildings lasted only 25 years each,
the occupation here will have continued until c 395. If we
concede that each may have lasted a century, the final date
is extended to 620. The date range of the abandonment,
therefore, is 395 to 620, with a point midway between the
two the most probable.
Another pointer to the length of occupation between the
dismantling of the basilica and the final abandonment of
the site is given by the sequences of worn sandstone and
cobble surfaces found within the basilica area. Detailed
discussion must await the final publication, but on the
most minimal arguments some of the worn surfaces could
hardly have taken less than a century to develop. The
problem, of course, is that we do not know how many
people walked over them daily, or whether they all wore
hobnailed shoes. However, an indication of how long it
takes even the Wroxeter sandstone to wear smooth is given
by a wall foundation on the site of the baths, which are
open to the public. This wall was capped by the Ministry
of Works in the 1950s and, despite approximately 25,000
people a year having walked over it twice each (as they
enter and leave the site) for 30 years, the stones have barely
lost their sharp edges; they are certainly not yet smooth.
Considerations such as these incline us to believe in a
longer rather than a shorter timescale for the whole
sequence; it now seems impossible to compress all these
events into a century, or even a century and a half, and a
terminal date near 500 now appears increasingly likely.
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