ROMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY in Britain and the western Empire

First my previous example, Aix-en-Provence: there we
have a Roman valley settlement taking over from the
hillfort (or hill-town) of the Salluvii, destroyed by Sextius
Calvinus. Its origin lies in the geographical and military
interest Republican Rome had in protecting her route by
sea from Italy to Spain. This depended vitally on the
friendship of Marseilles and her satellites. Harassment of
Marseilles by the Salluvii brought in Rome, first in the
form of expeditions, then of settlement. But the long-term
success of Aix was strongly influenced both by the
excellent choice of the site in the local landscape and, with
the construction of the coastal highway, by a key position
in the communications system.
In the same region we can observe Arles, in whose story
there is a strong watery element. It starts with Marius’s
construction of the canal system to help solve the problems
of the Rhône delta, at least partially in the interest of
Marseilles. It continues ironically in the consequent
choice of Arles as the base from which Julius Caesar
launched his waterborne attack on that same city, which
had sided with Pompey. Its long-term economic prosperity
was closely bound up with the emergence of a powerful
guild of shippers, profiting from the location of Arles at a
point ideal for the transshipment of cargoes from river
craft or land transport to sea-going vessels. The linking of
river and sea in a navigable form was crucial. That linking
had a partially political origin; its consequences were both
military and economic.
Arles, however, also demonstrates another important
geographical factor. To the north-east lay the ridges of the
Alpilles, whence major aqueducts were to bring watersupplies,
and to the south-east was the vast open Plaine de
la Crau. The land was ideal for a veteran colony, and on
geographical grounds alone it is not surprising that Julius
Caesar chose it as a site with which to reward his Sixth
legion, nor that it was much enlarged and developed under
Augustus. But we should not forget the political point -
that the territory of Marseilles had fallen into Caesar’s
hands as that of a defeated enemy. Many years ago Sir Ian
Richmond (1946) suggested that Lincoln and Gloucester
were founded as colonies where they were because, at the
end of the 1st century, the lesson of Colchester and the
Boudican revolt had been learnt. He argued that because
both Gloucester and Lincoln lay adjacent to areas that
seemed relatively underpopulated in the late Iron Age,
they were judged by the Romans less likely to provoke
resentment at land settlement by veterans. It is certainly
true that mishandling of the once friendly local aristocracy
of the Trinovantes and expropriation of their land by
colonists had much to do with the revolt. But Arles
suggests another possibility: the conjunction of the right
sort of land with its having passed (recently or years
before) into imperial hands by right of conquest.
Remembering that the royal estates of defeated peoples
automatically passed to the emperor, we may perhaps
guess that at Colchester the fortress, first, and the colonia,
subsequently, were established on land that had belonged
to the Catuvellaunian kings. Tacitus (Annals, xii.32)
specifically states that the colony was founded in agri
captivi. It is perhaps not an unreasonable piling of
speculation on speculation to suspect that this land had
once been the domain of Trinovantian princes, was
restored to Mandubracius by Caesar, but was not allowed
to revert to Trinovantian ownership under Claudius.
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Salway: Geography and the growth of towns, with special reference to Britain
Indeed it may have been the absence of a legitimate family
claim - we hear nothing of a restored Trinovantian royal
family - that made the colonia initially acceptable. The
subsequent seizure of properties from other leading
Trinovantian families by the colonists of Colchester, one
of the principal causes of the Boudican revolt, will then
have seemed all the more intolerable than if the whole
district had been expropriated at the moment of conquest.
Ownership of land - or rights over it - is an important
element in geography. It has a particularly important
bearing on any deeper understanding of land utilization.
What sense, for example, could we make of the Highland
Clearances if we knew nothing about land ownership in
Scotland? It is therefore particularly frustrating that we
have so little information about land ownership in Roman
Britain - but this does not absolve us from being aware of
the question.
Sensitivity about the siting of colonies and the necessary
acquisition of land for the colonists was deeply engrained
in the Roman consciousness. If it had not been part of the
common currency it is difficult to understand how Vergil
could have risked being so bold as to raise the issue openly
in the dangerous days of the Second Triumvirate. The
dispossessed Italian farmer laments to his more fortunate
friend (Eclogues, i.64-6): ‘. . .the rest of us must leave -
some to suffer the parching thirst of Africa, others to
Scythia.. .yet others, almost the whole world away, to join
the Britons’.
The reality that lies behind the poetic embroidery on
the fate of the dispossessed is the reality that lies behind
the bland words of Augustus’s Res Gestae (28):
I founded colonies from my soldiers in Africa,
Sicily, Macedonia, both the Spains, Achaea, Asia,
Syria, Gallia Narbonensis, and Pisidia. And in Italy
itself I created 28 colonies on my authority.
. . colonies that have become exceedingly populous
and reached the heights of renown within my
own lifetime.
Compensation had, indeed, been paid since the late
Republic. The offence to public opinion was the loss of the
ancestral home, however humble, and the destruction of
traditional communities. Forty years or so after the event,
Augustus could perhaps afford to gloss over the acts of the
Second Triumvirate and take the credit for the good that
had come out of the colonization. But the despair
chronicled by Vergil is a feeling that cautious emperors
must have borne in mind when weighing up the advantages
in prestige and the need to provide for discharged
veterans against probable local reaction. Colchester certainly
proved that without strict control a colony founded
for the traditional purpose of deterring rebellion could
help disastrously to provoke it. And central to that control
was a clear delimitation of the territory allocated to the
colonists and subsequent supervision to prevent unauthorized
encroachment on neighbouring land. Public maps,
such as the Orange survey, were not simply an exercise in
land measurement. They made clear what the allocation
and sub-allocations were, and where the territory stopped.
To those who know Lincoln and Gloucester and their
surrounding regions in detail I leave the thought that their
foundation as colonies could have followed a pattern set by
Colchester, rather than been a reaction against it - all