ROMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY in Britain and the western Empire

Structures in such ribbon developments are simple ‘strip
buildings’ of the rectangular shop/workshop type familiar
from most Romano-British towns, sometimes interspersed
with humbler structures. At the ‘small’ towns the
picture is different. Here the extramural occupation can
cover an area as large as, or in some cases larger than, that
enclosed within the defences. In addition the building
types and functions present in the extramural areas are
scarcely to be distinguished from those in the intramural.
The latter usually has the main concentration of buildings
of above-average elaboration, but for the great generality
of buildings there is a consistency between the two areas.
This distinction is related certainly to morphology and
quite probably to status. The morphological point is that
the ‘large’ towns were provided with street grids; thus the
occupied area tended towards the square, rectangular, or
ovoid. These shapes can comfortably be completely
circumscribed by a defensive circuit, as the ratio of area
defended to length of perimeter is favourable. The ‘small’
towns had almost all developed at and along the junctions
of roads and/or other routes. Their plans were thus of a
simple linear type or an agglomeration of linear elements.
To attempt to enclose all the occupied area would be a
military let alone a financial nonsense. Accordingly one
finds the relatively restricted defended area at the nucleus
of the town, probably designed to encompass amongst
other things installations of governmental interest such as
a mansion. This difference in policy in the laying-out of the
defences must have had a significant effect on the
relationship of the intra- and extramural areas in the two
categories of town. In the ‘large’ towns it means that the
areas excluded from the defences were generally ones
already peripheral to the main inhabited area, and it is to
these that one may if one wishes apply the term ‘suburb’ in
something approaching its modern usage. Obviously in
the ‘small’ towns the relationship is very different. Here
substantial portions of the existing settlement, integral to
the town as a whole, were excluded. These were
economically and socially indistinguishable from the
defended area, and should therefore be considered in
parallel with it rather than in any subordinate role. For the
‘small’ towns this means that any attempt to view the
urban topography or economy or society solely from the
standpoint of the defended area ignores evidence of such
importance as to result in a distorted and blinkered view of
the town.
The location of urban cemeteries has also received
inadequate attention. Apart from the general if fuzzy
recognition that because of the Roman legal prohibition
on burial within towns they must in some way define the
inhabited area, they have been little used in topographical
analysis of Romano-British towns. Yet they were extensive
areas with a distinctive function which must be
related to the rest of the town.
If, then, previous studies of Romano-British urban
topography can be seen to be deficient, and if a large and
vital body of evidence can now be called upon, how may
we proceed to refashion our view of Romano-British
towns and, moreover, the ways in which we should look at
them in the future? A particular advantage of studying
suburbs and cemeteries is that instead of concentrating on
particular building types or features one is considering
whole zones or areas of the town. These are identifiable
geographically or functionally, and, moreover, were rec-
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Esmonde Cleary: The quick and the dead: suburbs, cemetries, and the town
ognizable as such to the inhabitants of the town at the
time. We are therefore looking at entities which make
sense not only now but also then, and which would have
interacted in some way. In studying the contribution of
these zones to our knowledge it would seem appropriate to
adopt a roughly chronological approach, helping to bring
out another important point, that these zones and their
relationships were not static across 400 years.
The term ‘extramural’ of course carries the implication
that one may deal only with evidence from outside a set of
defences (sensu stricto walls). Accordingly before the mid
to later 2nd century there is only a handful of sites which
qualify for such analysis, namely the coloniae at Colchester,
Gloucester, and Lincoln, the municipium of Verulamium,
and the civitas capitals of Winchester, Silchester
(briefly), and possibly Exeter. At all but the last two there
is evidence from the later 1st century onwards of extramural
occupation, that at Gloucester and Lincoln being
particularly extensive. At the latter, indeed, the area
between the southern defences of the ‘upper’ colonia and
the river seems from the start to have been reserved for
building and kept free of burials (see Jones, this volume,
p 90). It may even have been provided with elements of a
street grid before its importance was formalized by the
construction round it of an extension of the defences,
creating the ‘lower’ colonia. At the other towns the
occupation is relatively sparse, usually ribbon development
along approach roads. At the undefended majority
of formally laid-out towns it is nevertheless possible to
identify areas of occupation which are in an analogous
location to truly extramural occupation. Usually these are
divided from the main part of the town by a physical
feature, generally a river, as at Leicester or at London,
where the large and early settlement at Southwark is the
classic example of this type. A rather different state of
affairs occurred at Aldborough, where settlement developed
at the junctions of the roads from the north and
east sides of the town with the main through-road, Dere
Street, which does not pass through the town itself.
Clearly this occupation is to be associated with the town,
but equally clearly the stimulus was the opportunity of
attracting trade from those travelling along Dere Street as
well as from those entering or leaving the town. Once the
defences of Aldborough were constructed these areas of
settlement satisfy the requirements of what geographical
town-plan analysis would term the ‘distal extramural’ (cf
Conzen 1960, 61). The siting of the occupation at
Aldborough, as well as at places such as Southwark on the
approaches to London Bridge, emphasizes the essentially
mercantile nature of these developments, confirmed by
the form and function of the buildings.
It would be useful to know more of the location of
cemeteries at this period, since in the absence of defences
their value in defining the area zoned for occupation,
though not, of course, necessarily built up, is considerable.
The location of the St Dunstan’s, St Martin’s Hill,
and St Sepulchre’s lst- and 2nd-century cremation
cemeteries at Canterbury, lying as they do at a distance
from the later defences, may suggest that the original
zoning of the town allowed for more occupied area than
was achieved. A similar situation may have obtained at
Chichester. At Silchester the pattern is reversed. Traces of
the street grid can be detected outside the later defences
and are truncated by them; unfortunately the location and