In a recent In Our Time programme about megaliths (broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and still available via the Sounds app), the presenter Melvyn Bragg expressed a certain amount of frustration at being told ‘it is not that simple’ whenever he asked questions that he thought merited a monolithic answer – wanting to know, for example, what megaliths were built for, and expressing exasperation when told: ‘a whole range of different things’.
If you listen to the podcast through to the end, you will hear Vicki Cummings, Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire, sum the subject up by saying: ‘I think the problem here is that actually there are lots and lots of different things going on in lots and lots of different places, and we are trying to talk quite generally about what life was like in the Neolithic, and I think it’s just going to be very, very different in different parts of Britain and Ireland, and then that itself is going to change over time. So it is quite hard to come up with a general overall theme from what is clearly quite a diverse set of practices.’
Those words surely sum up not only megaliths but just about every topic in archaeology. We have moved on from the idea, based on botanical classification, that every archaeological monument can be fitted on to one branch or another of a family tree, or that each monument conforms more or less to a standard template. Monument-builders in the past were not aiming to replicate a facsimile of some prototype or standard model, but were involved in an act of creative expression. We now recognise and celebrate diversity, creativity, rivalry, experimentation, and the desire to be different – all fundamental human characteristics.
The Roman period has been considered something of an exception because of the industrial scale of the production and distribution of commodities, from coins and ceramics to olive oil, wine, and fish sauce. Buildings tend to follow standard plans as well, are constructed from similar materials, and have similar architectural details (for instance, pediments, columns, and capitals) from one corner of the empire to another. But looks can be deceptive: villas might have certain features in common – hypocausts, mosaic floors, painted wall plaster, and perhaps a suite of baths – but that does not mean that all the villas constructed, rebuilt, extended, and adapted in the first five centuries AD were alike in their function.
Role of religion?
At a very high level, villas are a sign of Romanitas. The villa complex at St Laurence School, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire (CA 230), has two almost identical buildings that follow Roman architectural fashions. They were built on the same alignment and share the same formal plan, with a pillared main entrance and double-leafed doors leading to an apsidal room, flanked by further rooms accessed by corridors. Both were built from finely dressed limestone blocks and roofed in Pennant sandstone tiles. Together they presented a grand, symmetrical pair of Roman-style façades to anyone approaching from the south. Viewers some considerable distance away to the south and east would have seen them as dominant presences in the landscape.
Building 1 featured a well-executed polychromatic mosaic with a central rosette surrounded by a knot motif and two dolphins either side of a cantharus (a ceremonial wine jar). The lower parts of the walls were decorated with plaster painted a deep red colour with cream highlights, while collapsed fragments indicated an ornate upper scheme of mock-marble designs in green, purple, and yellow, plus foliage and architectural motifs. The windows were once filled with glass.
Building 2, by contrast, was completely unadorned, with limestone cobbles and rammed limestone for flooring, laid on bedrock. One room had what might easily be taken for a clumsily built hypocaust, with pilae all askew, carved from bedrock, and arranged in a highly irregular pattern. These supported a floor of crudely cut Forest Marble flags with large gaps between the stones. There was no sign of any of the vertical flues to warm the walls that normally form an integral part of a hypocaust system, and the stokehole for the fire used to heat the room was remarkably small. Such features are difficult to reconcile with a conventionally heated domestic room, and the excavator, Mark Corney, interpreted the room as a smokehouse, designed to cure meat and other foods. Supporting this theory, the rubbish-filled voids in this room were found to contain a large assemblage of animal bone dominated by sheep and cattle, many with evidence of butchery.
Another room occupying the central space of Building 2 – which would usually be reserved as the principal reception area in a Romano-British villa house – was equipped with a large double-flue kiln and evidence of intensive heat. Mark suggests that the room was used for drying grain or for converting it to malt for beer-production. In sum, despite the grand façade that mirrored that of the adjacent building, this structure was a working building, performing a number of agro-industrial functions central to the economic base of the villa estate.
Even to use terms like ‘villa estate’ is to make assumptions about the role of a villa, though in the case of the Bradford-on-Avon villa there is a fascinating coda: the excavators found a circular structure in a dominant position in the formal entrance hall to Building 1, which they believe was the base for a brick or lead baptismal font dating from the late Roman to early post-Roman period.
The conversion of villas into churches and baptistries is paralleled in 5th-century Gaul, where aristocrats became bishops and exercised spiritual as well as secular power. Sidonius Apollinaris, writer, landowner, and Bishop of Clermont, is one celebrated example; St Patrick is another – in his Confessio, he tells us that his father was a deacon, his grandfather was a priest, and he was captured at his uillula (possibly referring to his family’s villa or estate).
The large size of the font at Bradford-on-Avon, its dominant position in the villa, and the worn character of the threshold – testifying to heavy and prolonged use by many feet – suggests that the villa became a Christian centre serving the local community. If so, it is plausible to assume that those visiting the villa church for baptism and worship were estate-workers dependent on the landowning family, one of whom might have been a bishop.
Such a hypothesis is difficult to prove, and we know very little about landowning in Roman Britain: how did one acquire land, from whom, at what cost, was it rented or owned outright, for a period of time or in perpetuity, leased or purchased from the state or through a market-based system? The longevity of many villas does suggest an element of continuity, however, implying that land could be bequeathed or inherited, and the lavishly decorated interiors of many villas, with their mosaics and plastered walls, suggest that significant wealth could be accumulated.
Agrarian or arcane?
The traditional definition of Romano-British villas has labelled them as part of an agricultural establishment. For example, A L F Rivet’s classic definition (in The Roman Villa in Britain, 1969) describes the villa as ‘a farm which is integrated into the social and economic organisation of the Roman world’. Several villas could, however, be better understood as temples or as places with some kind of religious, spiritual, or philosophical function.
Chedworth Roman villa in the Cotswolds is one of the UK’s best-known villas, in part because it has remained exposed for public display since it was first uncovered in 1864. In 1924, it passed to the benign ownership of the National Trust, and since then great efforts have been made to conserve the remains and understand them better.
Reviewing the various accounts of the villa found in successive guidebooks and academic papers, Bryn Walters and David Rider show that the idea that Chedworth was the residence of a wealthy Romanised family, making money from sheep-farming and processing wool, has ‘survived in the collective consciousness of visitors’ and ‘is unfortunately now inextricably bonded into the archaeological literature’. This may well be true at a popular level, though there has been no lack of alternative interpretations, not least recently by Simon Esmonde Cleary (CA 284), who has suggested that the villa was a seasonally occupied hunting lodge.
In this volume, Bryn Walters and David Ryder argue that Chedworth resembles the kind of sanctuary associated with healing that is well-documented on the Continent: they quote Fontaines-Salées in Gaul and Heckenmünster in Germany as examples of communal spa-complexes with baths, hotels, and temples. They say the elegant mosaic-floored rooms are large for a residential villa, and were probably public function rooms. The west and north wings, each containing a bath suite and kitchens, could represent accommodation for visitors rather than separate residential wings for two branches of the same family.
Chedworth has a sophisticated water-management system (which still supplies the National Trust café and toilets), based on an octagonal building with eight cisterns located in the woods above the villa, as well as an elegant octagonal nymphaeum – a spring-fed shrine to the local water-nymphs – prominently sited on a terrace alongside the north-wing baths. Rather than being aligned to the south, as many villas are, this one faces due east to the rising sun. This is not by accident, for a considerable amount of landscape modification is evident at the site, cutting the valley back to create a series of terraces on which the villa was constructed.
Chedworth’s builders were more successful in this than the builders of the villa at Great Witcombe, another Cotswolds villa that the same authors reinterpret as a temple rather than a farmhouse in villa form ‘at the heart of a large country estate’ (according to the website of English Heritage, who manage the site). Anyone who has visited this villa will testify that it sits close to a number of springs, which make the surrounding landscape a haven for water-loving flora and fauna, but that has undermined the villa. The question is: ‘why build here when there are better sites higher up the same slope?’. Elsie Clifford, who excavated the villa in 1938-1939, observed that the abundance of water ‘must have added to the difficulties of the architect called upon to design so large a house on a sloping clay site’.
Large as the villa at Great Witcombe is, those who have studied the site have struggled to explain the plan: J T Smith commented (Roman Villas, 1997) that ‘the way the rooms were used has never been worked out’, and the Historic England website comments that the ‘wealthy owners’ might have lived on an upper floor. Like Chedworth, this villa has two bath suites built on a scale more suited to social gatherings than the use of one family. Heated rooms are lacking, and the H-shaped plan has no counterpart among conventional Romano-British villas.
The same case could be argued for several other villas described in this volume, and the contributors propose a number of possible uses for structures described as villas. Stephen Upex asks whether the cluster of Roman villas in the lower Nene Valley represents accommodation built for elite local families, who were involved in the administration of an imperial estate previously based at Stonea but transferred to the Nene around AD 240.
Roy and Diana Friendship-Taylor ask whether the very large and opulent Piddington Roman villa, in Northamptonshire, excavated by the Upper Nene Archaeological Society (CA 297 and 356), is best understood as the trophy home of a ‘local boy made good’ or of an imperial official (or was part of it used as a mansio, a hostel used by travelling officials, given that part of the site has now been identified as a stable block?). Whoever built it could afford the costly and rare cinnabar (mercuric sulphide) imported from Anatolia that was used for the villa’s bright scarlet wall plaster, which required constant hot waxing to prevent it from turning black when exposed to bright light. And who owned the copper-alloy penknife, ‘of a quality unparalleled elsewhere in Roman Britain’, in the shape of a gladiator? It was probably used to sharpen quill pens for keeping records, which may have been written on the tabletop made from costly coloured marbles imported from the eastern Mediterranean, all of which were found during the excavations.
For the Whitley Grange villa, in Shropshire, Roger White offers yet another explanation. Like the villas mentioned above, this villa complex does not fit the standard model, lacking the buildings expected of an agricultural estate and ‘deficient’ as the status-oriented rural retreat of an elite owner. A study of the landscape around Whitley Grange, based on the distribution of -leah/-ley place-name elements (meaning a woodland clearing), suggests that the villa occupied a semi-wooded landscape, more like that of a medieval park than farmland. That leads the author to propose that this unusual villa was (like Chedworth, in Simon Esmonde Cleary’s thesis) a hunting lodge rather than a residence, a place from which to embark on a stag hunt and to return to bathe aching limbs and dine with the day’s companions. Abundant evidence exists in wall-paintings, silver vessels, and mosaics to show that hunting was a popular elite activity in the later Roman period.
Answers in the artistry?
Might we ask different questions about the meaning of the subjects depicted on mosaic floors and on decorated wall-plaster if we accept that some villas were used for hunting, competitive entertaining, or spa-based rest and recuperation; as hotels, country retreats, or centres of imperial administration? Is it more likely that the motifs might have a religious, philosophical, or imperial message, rather than reflecting the personal taste of an owner? Perhaps, but Patricia Witts’ essay on ‘Villa mosaics’ demonstrates that there is no simple way of distinguishing between different types of establishment on the basis of the mosaic subjects.
For example, Whitley Grange may well have been a hunting lodge, but the subject of its mosaic – the head of Medusa – most commonly appears in mosaics of the Four Seasons. If you were to try to make a direct connection between mosaic subject and villa function, you might think that the patron’s interests lay in yearly farming cycles and the productivity of an agricultural estate rather than stag hunting.
The fact that there is something unusual or interesting about a mosaic’s iconography does not provide proof that there is also something unusual or interesting about the building – though it can help to build up a persuasive case. Much mosaic imagery boils down to the simple themes of hospitality, beauty, and good luck in a variety of different guises: Ganymede, the cup-bearer to the gods, Bacchus and the maenads, Venus, and Cupid are among the more common images, as well as ceremonial vessels for mixing and serving wine. Sea creatures abound as a decorative theme for bath suites.
Some decorative elements can give us an insight into a building’s use, however. A paper by the late Anthony Beeson looks in depth at several distinctive pieces of decorative stonework from Chedworth and Great Witcombe that support the idea that both villas were sanctuaries devoted to the healing properties of water. Anthony says he first saw the stonework in 1969 and that, over subsequent years, he sought other examples to elucidate their original purpose. One of these consists of the base of a cantharus-shaped fountain: a subject often depicted in Roman wall-painting and mosaic, but here represented by a physical object, unique in Roman Britain, of the wine goblet associated with the cult of Bacchus and the transformation of water into wine, which Christians later adopted into their own sacred imagery.
The other pieces of stonework analysed by Anthony consist of several parts of large, pierced panels carved to resemble what has been described as a lyre shape, but which is more properly described as a double volute scroll, consisting of confronted ‘S’ shapes, with the scroll, or ‘S’, on the left-hand side being the mirror image of the one on the right. They are ultimately derived from the anthemion motif, based on the honeysuckle flower, borrowed from early Eastern civilisations by the Ionian Greeks. There is a fine example from 1st-century BC Italy in painted terracotta on display at the British Museum, and the important point that Anthony makes is that there is a very long tradition in the Graeco-Roman world of using this motif as part of the standard decorative repertoire for the roof cresting of temples and sacred buildings. The Chedworth example is gently curved, indicating that it once adorned a circular or apsidal structure – in this case it would fit well with the apse of the nymphaeum. Together these fragments, easily overlooked, are further proof of the sacred nature of the water, and perhaps of the villas, at both sites.
Whatever differences there might have been in the use of villa-style constructions in Roman Britain, they seemed to share a similar afterlife. There are hints here and there that some villas continued to be occupied by the elite of Romano-British society into the 5th century – such as the Chedworth mosaic floor, radiocarbon dated to c.AD 424 (CA 371) – but society’s needs were changing in the early medieval period: subsistence farming became the norm, and hypocausts and mosaics gained utilitarian value as corn-drying floors at the expense of aesthetics. Masonry, timber and tiles, iron, bronze, and glass were all recycled as villa remains slowly decayed.
Historians have speculated that the estate attached to a villa might have survived with its boundaries intact, to be acquired in time by the Church and feudal lords. In the final essay of this volume, Anthony King reports on the excavation and survey work at the site of a medium-sized villa in Mola di Monte Gelato, Lazio, Italy – charting the building’s abandonment and decay, but also finding evidence for the continuity of agricultural production. It would be nice to think that this was a time of opportunity for the local community, living a self-sufficient peasant lifestyle elsewhere in the same valley and leaving little archaeological trace other than mended roads and occasional burials. Perhaps more likely is that an owner (whether a wealthy seigneur or an institution, such as the Church) is no longer resident – and that the fruits of the community’s labours were being enjoyed elsewhere.
Further reading
Martin Henig, Grahame Soffe, Kate Adcock, and Anthony King (eds) Villas, Sanctuaries and Settlements in the Romano-British Countryside (Archaeopress Roman Archaeology vol.95, ISBN 978-1803273808, £58).
