Roman London is a problem. It was not a civitas capital with two Roman names. Nor was it a colonia, a chartered Roman town, as Tacitus specifically says it was not. Yet it was the largest town in Roman Britain, with a very large basilica. So what was it?
Thirty years ago, I suggested that it was part of the imperial domain – that is, the emperor’s private property, a piece of property speculation that he (or, rather, his agent, the procurator) had founded as a new town that was hugely successful and provided succeeding emperors with a steady flow of income. Alas, no one really liked my idea at the time. So when I saw the publication of a splendid new book, London in the Roman World, by Dr Dominic Perring – maestro of Applied Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology – I seized it eagerly. It is a major work, surveying all the recent archaeological investigations done in the city. The past 30 years have seen an enormous amount of work done in London under commercial archaeology, and Dominic pulls it all together magnificently. Is my argument about imperial domain destroyed? Or does it survive?
An early fort
A key aspect of London’s Roman story is its origins as a legionary fort. Three separate sites have revealed a typical Roman military ditch, and if all of them are plotted together, they reveal a fortress covering 27 hectares. One of the sites, moreover, yielded very early indigenous-type pottery. During the AD 43 invasion of Britain, the Roman army advanced to the Thames, but then paused while the emperor Claudius made his way up from Rome to claim his triumph. Is this where the army waited?
