To conclude my mini-series on the towns of Roman Britain, I will head to what may be the most famous Romano-British city of all: Verulamium, modern-day St Albans. With much of the city surviving, unexcavated, beneath modern-day park- and farmland, and upstanding elements visible alongside the award-winning museum that was founded by Tessa Verney Wheeler and Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s (see CA 211 and 216, September 2007 and March 2008, for more on their work at the site, and here of this issue for more on Tessa), there is much to see there and a long history of reporting by the magazine.
Saints and Sinners
Current Archaeology’s coverage of Verulamium commences in unexpected circumstances – not down in the valley amid the Roman town, but up on the hill, to the east, where the Anglo-Saxon and medieval cities grew up around the cathedral that had been constructed in the 8th century around the (as-yet undiscovered) 4th-century Romano-British shrine to the martyred Saint Alban. CA 56 (May 1976) reported on disputes at this time around a proposed new chapter house and visitor centre to be built adjacent to the cathedral, and CA 101 (August 1986) followed-up on the subsequent fieldwork, led by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, which examined the evidence for both the early cathedral and the Roman (2nd-4th-century) cemetery around which the later Christian site had evolved.
CA 120 (June 1990) offered the magazine’s first in-depth examination of the city’s archaeology thanks to Ros Niblett, one of the great names of St Albans archaeology, who rightly received her own feature on an amazing career spent digging across the east of England in CA 209 (May 2007). CA 120 offers a great state-of-the-nation review by Ros, covering what was known of Verulamium at this time, and from this date onwards, her fieldwork regularly appears in the magazine. Her excellent book on the city is reviewed in CA 180 (July 2002) and remains the definitive overview of it. Thanks to her campaigning, in the early 2000s ploughing on farmland overlying parts of the city finally ceased, as reported in CA 189 (December 2003). In retrospect, it seems amazing that such an important site was not previously better protected through mutual agreement with its landowners, but such are the vagaries of the UK’s heritage- and land-management regimes.
