Registered Charity No: 274604
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Registered Charity No: 274604 |
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Caistor St Edmund Roman Town - DetailThe Roman town of Venta Icenorum is the Romano-British predecessor of the modern county town of Norwich. Founded during the AD 60s in the valley of the River Tas, immediately to the south of its confluence with the Rivers Yare and Wensum, Venta Icenorum was the largest and most important Roman centre of northern East Anglia. The Latin name may be translated as 'market-place of the Iceni', and Venta was the administrative base for the area of Norfolk, northern Suffolk and eastern Cambridgeshire. This was the area which had been controlled in the Iron Age by the Iceni. Along with Silchester (Hants) and Wroxeter (Salop), Venta Icenorum is one of only three major Romano-British towns which have not been buried or destroyed by medieval and modern towns and cities. Although the site's upper levels have been eroded by ploughing, and some degradation of the stone defences has been recorded in recent centuries, it has otherwise escaped serious harm. The area lying immediately to the south and east of Norwich has been a major focus for human activity over the last 10,000 years. Three of Norfolk's longest east-flowing rivers - the Yare, Wensum and Tas - converge in this area, making it an important meeting-point for Norfolk's natural routeways. The river valleys offered fish, fowl and grazing to prehistoric communities who cultivated the light soils on the surrounding higher ground. Finds of pottery, flint and stone axes indicate the presence of Neolithic communities in the 5th and 4th millennia BC. During the 3rd millennium BC many round barrows were erected on the hills around the confluence of the Rivers Yare and Tas. The Arminghall Henge and its possible companion became the focal point of a major later Neolithic/Bronze Age cemetery, with some of the barrows carefully sited to permit optimum visibility from the valley bottom. Although most of the barrow mounds were flattened by ploughing long ago, the quarry-ditches surrounding them appear as 'ring-ditches' on aerial photographs. Barrows were excavated during the 1970s at Trowse and on Eaton Heath, while in 1989-91 eight ring-ditches were excavated in advance of the construction of the A47 Norwich Southern Bypass at Harford Farm. This particular project, undertaken by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit for English Heritage, led to the discovery of many inhumed and cremated prehistoric burials dating to the period c.3000 - 1500 BC (Ashwin and Bates 2000). Numerous finds of pottery and metalwork show the presence of Iron Age (c.700 BC - AD 43) communities here also, and the Norwich Southern Bypass excavations revealed two extensive settlements of the period. The fact that these were both 'accidental' discoveries - exposed by archaeologists during the process of excavating earlier prehistoric barrows - is a reminder of how many more prehistoric sites probably remain completely hidden in the area around Venta Icenorum. It is not known what kind of Iron Age settlement, if any, preceded the establishment of the Roman town. The defended central area has seen no archaeological excavation or (legal) metal-detecting for many years. The immediate surroundings, however, have yielded enough Iron Age metalwork - including approximately 100 Icenian coins so far - to suggest that this was an important centre of some kind around the time of the Roman conquest. Some scholars, notably Wacher (1995), have argued that the siting of the Roman town was not influenced by the pattern of Iron Age settlement in the surrounding area. Others, including Dr John Davies, believe that the artefact finds represent a significant late Iron Age settlement (Davies 1996). The manner in which forts and other early Roman sites in Norfolk and Suffolk tended to coincide with indigenous population centres - perhaps in part to supervise and control them - offers some support for this view. The origin of the Romano-British town The Claudian conquest of Britain began in AD 43; the (later) account of Tacitus implies that by AD 47 the Iceni were clients of the Romans. Wacher (1995) has speculated that the Icenian client king Prasutagus ruled northern East Anglia from the future Venta Icenorum in the period after the Roman take-over. A dispute with the Imperial authorities following the the death of Prasutagus (AD 61) culminating in the revolt of the Iceni led by Boudica. After its eventual defeat the Roman authorities treated the tribe with the utmost severity. It is likely that Venta Icenorum's foundation dated to this aftermath period, and that it was a military centre used during the pacification process. A series of three parallel ditches, recognised by air photography to the south and east of the standing Roman walls, may have defended an early military base. The site occupied a nodal point in the region's network of Roman roads, which were probably established by the AD 70s (although the exact routes which these roads followed in the vicinity of the town itself are often unclear). It is also possible that the River Tas was navigable, making Venta Icenorum still more important for trade and communications. The
laying-out of the gridded street plan - which covered an area larger than that
enclosed by the later stone defences - probably took place in the later 1st
century AD. It is likely that the town's subsequent development took
place slowly, with modest timber buildings predominating at first.
Over the last 70 years air photography has provided useful information
about the town plan, although a great many problems and doubts remain
unresolved. The earliest major
public buildings, including a forum and baths, were erected during the mid-2nd
century. Excavations in the 1930s
show that these complexes of buildings saw redevelopment and rebuilding in
subsequent centuries, partly due to fire damage (Frere 1971). The basilica and
two temples were also examined in the inter-war period. It
is not known when the circuit of defensive walls - the most conspicuous feature
of the town to any modern visitor - was constructed.
They are likely to date to the mid-later 3rd century, a period when many
towns all over Roman Britain were walled in response to increasing problems of
security. Only about a half of the
area covered by Venta Icenorum'sstreet-grid was enclosed by the defences, although it is quite possible that the
extra-mural areas remained in use into the 4th century.
The most visible section of the wall is the eastern half of the north
face, where it is exposed to its full height of c.7m and parts of the original wall-top walkway survive (Davies
1992). A single gate lay in the
centre of each side. The south gate was temporarily exposed during Professor
Donald Atkinson's pre-War excavation campaign, but not published. Substantial
areas of Roman occupation also lie both to the east of the
Norwich to Stoke Holy Cross road in an area where the extra-mural street
pattern is clearly visible on aerial photographs and to the west across the
river on the cultivated land between the river and the railway line. Other
major Roman buildings have been recorded at a slight remove from the core of Venta Icenorum. The
oval outline of a probable amphitheatre was identified on aerial photographs c.200m
to the south of the defences, and more recently has been plotted by geophysical
survey. Approximately
1km to the north-east of the town lay a major religious complex, a 3rd-century
temple being surrounded by a temenoswall with a monumental entrance gate (Gurney 1986).
Many years of metal-detecting at this site, which unfortunately is still
ploughed, have produced very large quantities of finds.
Much illegal metal detecting here goes unrecorded. Numismatic
and other evidence from East Anglia shows that the Roman way of life was
disrupted during the latter part of the 4th century by economic recession and
the impact of Germanic raiding. The
formal withdrawal of Roman government in the early 5th century led, among other
things, to the collapse of the coin-based economy which had been central to the life of Roman towns (Esmond Cleary
1989). Although no evidence for
Anglo-Saxon settlement has ever been found within the walled area, there is much
evidence for their presence in the immediate surroundings. Two large Early Saxon (5th-6th century) cemeteries have been located very close by (Myres and Green 1973). One of them, located on a hilltop c. 300m to the east of the defended area, saw excavation in the 1930s; another, to the west of the River Tas at Markshall, was largely destroyed in the 19th century. Activity at Venta Icenorum in the 7th and 8th centuries is represented by the discovery of many coins and other metal items, along with concentrations of pottery, in the area across the river opposite the west gate. These discoveries may indicate that Venta Icenorum was once again an important regional centre in the Middle Saxon period . In 1990, excavations at Harford Farm, carried out in advance of the construction of the Norwich Southern Bypass, revealed 46 burials of the period. A small number of these were interred with jewellery and other valuable items. Perhaps the cemetery was used by members of the community who lived or traded at Caistor (Penn 2000). It is difficult to draw conclusions from the lack of Anglo-Saxon evidence from the defended area itself. By analogy with other sites of the period it has been suggested that the Roman defences were used to enclose an early church or monastic community, and that the walled area was somehow put apart from secular life which persisted outside. The siting of the medieval parish church of St Edmund - which might perpetuate that of an earlier Saxon church in its south-eastern corner of the town offers some support for this idea. The
earliest recorded scholarly interest in the site dates to the 16th century, when
it was described by the antiquarian William Camden.
The local scholars Kirkpatrick and Blomefield visited the site in the
18th century, while by 1831 Samuel Woodward was able to state that the
identification of the site with the documented place-name Venta
Icenorum was by now universally accepted.
Antiquarian interest grew during the 19th century, and with it concern
about damage to the bastions, gates and other visible features recorded in
earlier times by Kirkpatrick and others. Clearance
of the similarly-unobscured town at Silchester (1890-1909) was publicised widely
and stimulated interest further.
The total area of the Roman town excavated during these campaigns was not large, with work focussing mostly upon important features visible on the ground or from aerial photographs. Unfortunately Atkinson left nearly all of his work unpublished; although Professor Shepherd Frere was able to piece together an account of his excavation of the forum and baths after his death, this was not possible in the case of his works elsewhere within the walled area or with the south gate (Atkinson 1929; Frere 1971). The
defended core of the Roman town has been in the ownership of the Norfolk
Archaeological Trust since 1984, when it was vested in the Trust following the
death of Mrs F.H. Hawkins the
previous year. Much of the site,
however, lay outside this area, and there was no provision for vehicular access
to the monument. The Trust's subsequent purchase in 1992 of additional land
had the widest possible support - from the public and local news media as well
as from conservation and other bodies concerned with archaeology and the Norfolk
Archaeological Trustural heritage.
It was funded with the aid of a package of grants from English Heritage,
Norfolk County Council and South Norfolk Council.
A programme of site management was promptly established, both to permit
public access and presentation and to ensure the highest possible standards of
conservation of the monument from the standpoints of both archaeology and
wildlife. Subsequently the Norfolk Archaeological Trust succeeded in
purchasing two other significant Norfolk sites, the hillfort at Tasburgh and the
late Roman Saxon Shore fort at Burgh Castle.
This widely acclaimed programme of acquisition has been
recounted in some detail by
Peter Wade-Martins in English Heritage's Conservation
Bulletin 29 (1996). Caistor further reading
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