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The Romanization of Roman Britain
Romanization in Material Civilization
by Haverfield, F.
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From language we pass to material civilization. Here is a far wider
field of evidence, provided by buildings, private or public, their
equipment and furniture, and the arts and small artistic or decorative
objects. On the whole this evidence is clear and consistent. The
material civilization of the province, the external fabric of its life,
was Roman, in Britain as elsewhere in the west. Native elements
succumbed almost wholesale to the conquering foreign influence. In
regard to public buildings this is natural enough. Before the Claudian
conquest the Britons can hardly have possessed large structures in
stone, and the provision of them necessarily came in with the Romans.
The fora, basilicas, and public baths, such as have been discovered at
Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, follow Roman models and resemble
similar buildings in other provinces. The temples show something more of
a local pattern (Fig. 7), which occurs also in northern Gaul and on the
Rhine, but this pattern seems merely a variation of a classical type.1
The characteristics of the private houses are more complicated. Their
ground-plans show us types which, like the temples just mentioned, recur
in northern Gaul as well as Britain, but which differ even more than the
temples from the similar buildings in Italy, or indeed in the
Mediterranean provinces of the Empire. The houses of Italy and of the
south generally were constructed to look inwards upon open impluvia,
colonnaded courts and garden plots, and, as befitted a hot climate, they
had few outer windows. Moreover, they could be easily built side by side
so as to form, as at Pompeii, the continuous streets of a town. The
houses of Britain and northern Gaul looked outwards on to the
surrounding country. Their rooms were generally arranged in straight
rows along a corridor or cloister. Sometimes they had only one row of
rooms (Corridor House, Fig. 8); sometimes they enclosed two or three
sides of a large open yard (Courtyard House, Fig. 9); a third type
somewhat resembles a yard with rooms at each end of it. In any case they
were singularly ill-suited to stand side by side in a town street. When
we find them grouped together in a town, as at Silchester and
Caerwent--the only two examples of Roman towns in Britain of which we
have real knowledge--they are dotted about more like the cottages in an
English village than anything that recalls a real town (Fig. 10).
[Footnote 1: British examples have been noted at Silchester and
Caerwent, and in many scattered sites in rural districts. For Gaulish
instances, see Léon de Vesly, Les Fana de région Normande (Rouen,
1909); for Germany, Bonner Jahrbücher, 1876, p. 57, Hettner, Drei
Tempelbezirke im Trevirerlande (Trier, 1901), and Trierer
Jahresberichte, iii. 49-66. The English writers who have published
accounts of these structures have tended to ignore their special
character.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 7. GROUND-PLANS OF ROMANO-BRITISH TEMPLES. CAERWENT
AND SILCHESTER.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 8. GROUND-PLAN OF A SMALL CORRIDOR HOUSE FROM
FRILFORD, BERKSHIRE.
(From plan by Sir A.J. Evans.)]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 9. COURTYARD HOUSE AT NORTHLEIGH, OXFORDSHIRE,
EXCAVATED IN 1815-16. (Room 1, chief mosaic with hypocaust; rooms 8-18,
mosaic floors; rooms 21-7 and 38-43, baths, &c. Recent excavations show
that this plan represents the house in its third and latest stage. See
p. 31.)]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 10. DETAILED PLAN OF PART OF SILCHESTER. Showing the
arrangement of the private houses and the Forum and Christian Church.
(From the plan issued by the Society of Antiquaries.) (See p. 31.)]
The origin of these northern house-types has been much disputed. English
writers tend to regard them as embodying a Celtic form of house;
German archaeologists try to derive them from the 'Peristyle houses'
built round colonnaded courts in Roman Africa and in the east. It may be
admitted that the influence of this class of house has not infrequently
affected builders in Roman Britain. But the differences between the
British 'Courtyard house' and that of the south are very considerable.
In particular, the amount of ground covered by the courts differs
entirely in the two kinds of houses, while for the British houses of the
plainer 'corridor' type the Mediterranean lands offer no analogies. We
cannot find in them either atrium or impluvium, tablinum or
peristyle, such as we find in Italy, and we must suppose them to be
Roman modifications of really Celtic originals. This, however, no more
implies that their occupants were mere Celts than the use of a bungalow
in India proves the inhabitant to be a native Indian.1
[Footnote 1: Vict. Hist. Somerset, i. 213-14. A few Romano-British
houses at Silchester (in insula xiv. (1), see Archaeologia, lv. 221)
and at Caerwent (house No. 3, see Arch. lvii, plate 40) do bear some
resemblance to the Mediterranean type, as I have observed in Archaeol.
Anzeiger, 1902, p. 105. But they stand alone. Similarly, parallels may
be drawn between Pompeian wall-paintings of houses and certain 'villa'
remains in western Germany, as at Nennig; see Rostowzew, Archaeol.
Jahrbuch, 1904, p. 103. But these again seem to me the exception.]
The point is made clearer by the character of the internal fittings, for
these are wholly borrowed from Italian sources. If we cannot find in the
Romano-British house either atrium or impluvium, tablinum or
peristyle, such as we find regularly in Italy, we have none the less the
painted wall-plaster (Fig. 11) and mosaic floors, the hypocausts and
bath-rooms of Italy. The wall-paintings and mosaics may be poorer in
Britain, the hypocausts more numerous; the things themselves are those
of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has ever come to light in the whole
of Roman Britain which represents any local subject or contains any
unclassical feature. The usual ornamentation consists either of
mythological scenes, such as Orpheus charming the animals, or Apollo
chasing Daphne, or Actaeon rent by his hounds, or of geometrical
devices like the so-called Asiatic shields which are purely of classical
origin.1 Perhaps we may detect in Britain a special fondness for the
cable or guilloche pattern, and we may conjecture that from
Romano-British mosaics it passed in a modified form into Later Celtic
art. But the ornament itself, whether in single border or in
many-stranded panels of plaitwork, occurs not rarely in Italy as well as
in thoroughly Romanized lands like southern Spain and southern Gaul and
Africa, and also in Greece and Asia Minor. It is a classical, not a
British pattern.
[Footnote 1: It has been suggested that these mosaics were principally
laid by itinerant Italians. The idea is, of course, due to modern
analogies. It does not seem quite impossible, since the work is in a
sense that of an artist, and the pay might have been high enough to
attract stray decorators of good standing from the Continent. However,
no evidence exists to prove this or even to make it probable. The
mosaics of Roman Britain, with hardly an exception, are such as might
easily be made in a province which was capable of exporting skilled
workmen to Gaul (p. 57). They have also the appearance of imitative work
copied from patterns rather than of designs sketched by artists. It is
most natural to suppose that, like the Gaulish Samian ware--which is
imitative in just the same fashion--they are local products.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 11. RESTORATION OF PAINTED PATTERN ON WALL-PLASTER
AT SILCHESTER. Showing a purely conventional style based on classical
models. (P. 34.) (From Archaeologia.)]
Nor is the Roman fashion of house-fittings confined to the mansions of
the wealthy. Hypocausts and painted stucco, copied, though crudely, from
Roman originals, have been discovered in poor houses and in mean
villages.1 They formed part, even there, of the ordinary environment
of life. They were not, as an eminent writer2 calls them, 'a delicate
exotic varnish.' Indeed, I cannot recognize in our Romano-British
remains the contrast alleged by this writer 'between an exotic culture
of a higher order and a vernacular culture of a primitive kind'. There
were in Britain splendid houses and poor ones. But a continuous
gradation of all sorts of houses and all degrees of comfort connects
them, and there is no discernible breach in the scale. Throughout, the
dominant element is the Roman provincial fashion which is borrowed from
Italy.
[Footnote 1: R.C. Hoare, Ancient Wilts, Roman Aera, p. 127: 'On some
of the highest of our downs I have found stuccoed and painted walls, as
well as hypocausts, introduced into the rude settlements of the
Britons.' This is fully borne out by General Pitt-Rivers' discoveries
near Rushmore, to be mentioned below. Similar rude hypocausts were
opened some years ago in my presence at Eastbourne.]
[Footnote 2: Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 39.]
We find Roman influence even in the most secluded villages of the upland
region. At Din Lligwy, on the northeast coast of Anglesea, recent
excavation (Fig. 12) has uncovered the ruins of a village enclosure
about three-quarters of an acre in extent, containing round and square
huts or rooms, with walls of roughly coursed masonry and roofs of tile.
Scattered up and down in it lay hundreds of fragments of Samian and
other Roman or Romano-British pottery and a far smaller quantity of
ruder pieces, a few bits of Roman glass, some Roman coins of the period
A.D. 250-350, various iron nails and hooks, querns, bones, and so
forth.1 The place lies on the extreme edge of the British province
and on an island where no proper Roman occupation can be detected, while
its ground-plan shows little sign of a Roman influence. Yet the smaller
objects and perhaps also the squareness of one or two rooms show that
even here, in the later days of the Empire, the products of Roman
civilization and the external fabric of Roman provincial life were
present and almost predominant.
[Footnote 1: E. Neil Baynes, Arch. Cambrensis, 1908, pp. 183-210.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 12. NATIVE VILLAGE AT DIN LLIGWY, ANGLESEA.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 13. LATE CELTIC METAL WORK, NOW IN THE BRITISH
MUSEUM (1/3).
(Boss of shield, of perhaps first century B.C., found in the Thames at
Wandsworth, a little before 1850.)]
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