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Five miles outside Norwich, Caistor St Edmund is home to the remains of what was East Anglia’s most important Roman town: the regional capital known as Venta Icenorum. Like Venta Silurum (Caerwent) and Venta Belgarum (Winchester), this name refers to the Iron Age people who had inhabited the local landscape long before the settlement was founded – in this case, the Iceni. This group is best known for their unsuccessful uprising against Roman occupation, which was led by Boudica c.AD 60/61, about a decade before Venta Icenorum began to develop. Although this rebellion was brutally suppressed, the subsequent settlement’s name indicates that the Iceni continued to be closely associated with their traditional heartlands in the Roman imagination – yet modern excavations in and around the town have historically uncovered few traces of Iron Age activity or any pre-Roman settlement where they may have lived. Our best insights into their sense of identity come from their coins, which testify to their metalworking skills and imaginative artistry (see CA 341), but this archaeologically elusive community is now beginning to come into clearer focus thanks to recent investigations by the Caistor Roman Project.
The town’s main urban area is defined by a rectangle of imposing walls and banks that still stand today (see CA 270 for more on archaeological work within the town itself), and in the last few years, the CRP have been exploring the land immediately outside these boundaries. Working in partnership with the University of Nottingham and supported by Giles Emery of Norvic Archaeology, CRP volunteers have in recent seasons documented the remains of a large Romano-Celtic temple that once stood about 800m north-east of the town, linked to its street grid by a diagonal road (see CA 344, 356, and 380), as well as evidence of occupation including an aqueduct in an adjacent field (CA 393).
When I visited the CRP’s summer excavation this year, they were still working in the unscheduled area north-east of the town walls, but had moved a short distance into the grounds of the Caistor Hall Hotel. There, their investigations were focused on a portion of the triple circuit of ditches that had served as Venta Icenorum’s main defences before the town walls were built in the 3rd century. The hotel grounds had long been recognised as archaeologically interesting, thanks to the presence of a possible Roman mausoleum that was identified in the 19th century and re-investigated by the present project (see at the end of this article), but it was only following a recent change of ownership that the CRP were able to gain permission to excavate on this land. They have since opened two trenches – one just inside the ditched area, and the other a short distance outside the town limits – to compare evidence for activity in each of these spaces. Together, their findings have illuminated both aspects of Venta Icenorum’s story, revealing the cultural impact of the Roman conquest on the local population, while also uncovering rare evidence of earlier Iron Age activity.
Outside the town
The trench that was dug outside the town’s ditches uncovered a busy area of archaeological features. Pits, post-holes, and the remains of a possible gulley (akin to that which might have surrounded a roundhouse) testified to the presence of timber buildings on this spot. These remains were accompanied by quantities of late Iron Age/early Roman pottery, and are thought to represent activity very early in the town’s history; indeed, the trench also contained hints of even older occupation on the site, in the form of a line of shallow post-holes and a beam slot.
Evidence like this feeds into ongoing discussions of how – and why – the town came to be established where it was. During the CRP’s previous excavations centred on the extramural temple, they found that this monumental building had very early origins, with the construction of its first phase beginning in the 1st century, at the start of Venta Icenorum’s history. It has been suggested that this represents the continuation of an existing Iron Age cult site (possibly focused on a natural feature like a sacred tree, as no sign of any pre-Roman structure has been found there), with the gleaming white building emphasising the importance of the site to local communities. It is plausible that some form of pre-existing local significance could have informed the siting not only of the extramural temple, but of the town itself – and signs of early activity, like those found in 2023’s external trench, add to this picture.
Mike Pinner, Chair of the Caistor Roman Project, commented: ‘The discovery of new evidence that helps to understand the origins of Venta Icenorum has been part of CRP’s aims for some time, so this year has been particularly exciting. The CRP has been a growing family of like-minded volunteers for over a decade, and we hope to build on the success of this season with plans for further research in partnership with Brasted’s Caistor Hall Hotel.’
Clues from a kiln
As for the trench opened inside the circuit of the town’s ditches, this also revealed a diverse range of archaeological remains, including a cobbled surface accompanied by a shallow gulley, which has been interpreted as part of a possible road or trackway. The most distinctive feature, however, is one that initially appeared as a marked ‘blob’ in magnetometry survey, and which, when excavated, proved to be a striking mass of soil that became increasingly blackened as the team worked further down. It has been interpreted as the stokehole for a pottery kiln whose main body lay outside the bounds of the trench, and the surrounding soil was absolutely full of traces of this industry. The team have recovered large quantities of burnt clay, pieces of kiln lining and shelving, lids from discarded vessels, and refuse from firing.
The stokehole itself, moreover, was ‘stuffed with pot sherds’, Giles said, preserving more pot than soil within its fill. At the time of my visit, the team had collected hundreds of fragments from this area of the trench. These were mainly of local grey ware pottery, indicating that the activity had been taking place when the town was already well established in the 2nd-3rd centuries. Alongside previous discoveries of pottery kilns to the north of the town, it suggests the presence of a substantial pottery industry in this area of the settlement. Indeed, it was common for polluting industries or those with attendant fire-risk to be located on the peripheries of occupied areas. The roadside gulley mentioned above was found to be full of pottery fragments, too. These were all large pieces – palm-sized fragments, complete tops of flagons – which appear to have been deliberately chosen and have been interpreted as a purposeful structured deposit.
Facing the past
Even if the kiln had met with a sudden end, its stokehole produced one of the most characterful ceramic finds from this year’s dig: a fragment of a 1st- or 2nd-century ‘face pot’, possibly once part of a funerary urn. Although the vessel is only fragmentary, fortuitously the section decorated with a stylised face has survived intact, and while its surface is as heavily blackened as the surrounding soil, the wide eyes, prominent nose, and rather grumpy expression of the original pot can all still be clearly seen.
Other illuminating pottery finds included imported goods – fragments of Samian ware and amphorae – testifying to the town’s prosperity and commercial connections, while this status was also reflected by the presence of numerous fragments of glass. Some of these were decoratively twisted, while others were pieces of handle or rim from finely worked vessels. The highlight among them, though, was a stylised depiction of a dolphin, which would originally have been one of a pair adorning a tall, two-handled vessel. Similar vessels have been discovered during excavations at Lullingstone Roman Villa in Kent (where one was found in association with a burial) and at sites in Germany and the Netherlands.
Among these high-status finds, there was a more homely item that provided a tangible link to a specific individual – and, rather appropriately given the kiln that featured so prominently in this year’s investigation, this person was a potter. The find in question was a fragment of a worn and evidently well-used mortarium, a kind of grinding bowl used during food preparation. It was stamped with part of the name of its maker: the letters ‘NAT’, for Natio, an early 2nd-century potter whose work is already known in this region. Two other mortaria bearing his stamp are housed in the collections of Norwich Castle Museum, having been discovered almost a century earlier in 1929, and Kay Hartley of the Kay Hartley Mortarium Archive Project attests that at least six examples are known. The CRP team are excited to have added another such find to the records.
It is notable, Giles said, that most of the finds from this year’s dig are very urban in nature, representing objects that you would expect to be found in an established Roman town. That is not to say that Iron Age items are absent – the team have found a number of brooches, including a zoomorphic example that may have originally been enamelled and which possibly depicts a snake or a long-necked bird – but many of the artefacts represent cultural paraphernalia very much associated with new fashions, such as nail cleaners. These items are all quite early in date, suggesting early adoption of at least some of the cultural mores of the Roman world shortly after the rebellion. This is quite striking given that finds from the territory of the Iceni suggests that they showed apparently little interest in imported materials from Gaul and beyond prior to the Roman conquest.
As mentioned at the start of this article, Venta Icenorum was founded only a few years after the Boudican uprising had been suppressed. The finds uncovered by the CRP in recent years suggest that, rather than being a wholly new foundation, the town represents one phase, albeit a highly visible one, in a much longer history of occupation in the locality. Although the Roman town has often been seen as an alien imposition on a defeated people, its relationship with the temple and the earlier settlement that is emerging to the north-east suggest a much more complex and nuanced picture. As the CRP’s investigations continue, throwing more light on to Icenian interactions with their surroundings and with Rome, this picture may become clearer.
The mystery of the ‘mausoleum’
In a wooded area close to this summer’s trenches lies the overgrown outline of another structure linked to the site’s Roman past. These are the flint and stone remains of an 8m by 9m building that was first excavated in 1846 by 1st Baronet Sir John Peter Boileau (an active member of the antiquarian community and, from 1849, President of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society). His records depict a well-made building with two opposing open sides, each with three bases for columns. No floor survived, but scatters of tesserae and roof tile attest to a relatively well-built structure whose form and location (just beyond the town’s early 2nd-century triple-ditch enclosure, beside a track that branches from the road linking Venta Icenorum to its extramural temple) suggest that it might have originally been a Roman shrine or mausoleum.
The remains were subsequently turned into a Victorian folly that became swamped by laurels and largely forgotten, but in May 2022 they were re-investigated by the CRP. While the creation of a Victorian sunken garden had removed all archaeological deposits inside the building, the team were able to confirm the outline of the Roman footings. The width of the wall foundations suggests that the building might have had a second storey, and the team hope that a degree of this prominence might be restored in the future, with the installation of an interpretation board to explain the archaeology. Giles Emery commented: ‘I first visited in 2006, to carry out a small evaluation for a proposed extension to the hotel. I recall hunting for the “mausoleum” remains among the laurel bushes and nearly overlooking a jumble of stones that marked out the monument, so it is fantastic to bring the building and the many questions that surround it back into focus.’
Further information
The Caistor Roman Project (CRP) is a registered charity that encourages community involvement in archaeological research in and around the Roman town of Venta Icenorum – present-day Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk. It also provides training opportunities for students from the University of East Anglia, the University of Nottingham, and elsewhere, as well as placements for members of the Veteran’s Association.
To find out more about the CRP and its excavations, please visit their website at http://www.caistorromanproject.org.
All images: Ian Jackson, unless otherwise stated
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