The Story of England, page 5
Soon the short-lived military cantonment became a well-heeled tribal capital in the province of Britannia Secunda, its administrative functions replacing the Iron Age fort at Burrough on the Hill and the tribal mint at Old Sleaford. From the late third century, after an imperial reorganization, the province received a more grandiose title honouring the empress: Flavia Caesariensis. By then the town was walled with a forum and basilica, a huge bath house and even a small gladiatorial arena. Beyond the city a network of farms – villas – spread out across the countryside providing the food surplus for the army and the bureaucracy, and wool for export. So the Celtic ‘Land of Rivers’ became a prosperous Roman colony in the British province of Flavia Caesariensis.
To the Romans, Britain was always an alter orbis, another world (that is, situated outside the traditional tripartite division of Europe, Africa and Asia) ‘set at an angle’ to the European landmass. The island was one of the last to be annexed to the imperium and remained a peripheral place, though valuable for its raw materials: its tin, silver, gold and lead, its grain and above all its wool (which would be a staple of the economy throughout the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods). But though on the edge of the civilized world and in some sense ‘underdeveloped’ as we would say, the province took on the air of a land of milk and honey in some colonial literature: ‘How lucky you are, Britain,’ gushed one Roman panegyricist in AD 310:
more blessed than any other land, endowed by Nature with every benefit of soil and climate. Your winters not too cold, your summers not too hot; your cornfields so productive, your herds numberless, your dairy herds overflowing with milk, your sheep flocks heavy with wool: and to make life even sweeter, your days are long and your nights short, so while to us the sun may appear to go down, in Britain it merely seems to go past!
He might have been writing about the villa estates around Kibworth and Medbourne, ‘the best grazing land in Britain – if not the world’, as Kibworth farmers still describe it today.
The people of Britain thus became part of a bigger world. Even here in Leicestershire imports came from the farthest corners: a Hellenistic Greek box with fine ivory decorations showing the Egyptian god of the dead, for example. The jackal-headed Anubis found its way to Leicestershire on the same sea routes that brought pilgrim flasks from early-Christian Alexandria. The people of the Roman villa estate at Kibworth found themselves part of what the Romans called an oikoumene, a single world; and at this moment a citizen could travel from the Atlas Mountains to Hadrian’s Wall or from Syria to York (as the world traveller Demetrius of Tarsus did) and still be part of the imperium. A Greek-speaking British doctor, Hermogenes, raised his altar here in Greek to the ‘Mighty Saviour Gods’ of the mysterious oak-clad island of Samothraki in the Aegean Sea. Likewise Roman émigrés erected shrines to their ancestral deities by Celtic streams and sacred woods, like the one near Leicester at the spring of Willoughby on the Wolds which they called Vernemetum, using the old Celtic word for a sacred grove. In the ‘Land of Rivers’ water shrines were naturally especially popular among locals and colonists. No fewer than seven sacred springs have survived around Kibworth and the Langtons, where the Celtic goddess Anu is still honoured today at her ancient spring, though now in the guise of a holy well dedicated to the Christian St Anne. At Hallaton, St Helen, the mother of Constantine, has taken the place of Elena, the Celtic deity of the waters. In the thirteenth century the customary pilgrimage of the Kibworth people was to an ancient chapel above the Welland by a still more ancient sacred spring.
All this was the residue of the ancient pantheism of the Celts. Such indigenous cults were easily assimilated to the Mediterranean classical pantheon. In this part of Leicestershire figurines of Venus have been found, and clay lamps bearing her figure binding her hair. The three-horned bull deity of the Celts, Tarvas Trigaranos, was happily accepted here by the Roman colonists. The Celtic cock became a symbol of Mercury. Hercules too found his local avatar here in Leicestershire. The world before monotheism was naturally and easily ecumenical. A civic-minded Roman Briton, Aponius Rogatianus, commemorating his parents and ancestors, endowed his local mithraeum with an altar to ‘Mithras of Persia, the Greek Apollo, Anicetus of the Celts and Sol of Rome’, in his mind all names for the same god. Such syncretisms were typical of the time. The Leicester citizen who treasured his Egyptian ivory Anubis, the food dealer on Hadrian’s Wall, the merchant in Colchester or the soap maker in Aleppo, the scribe in the baking square of Timgad or the flax maker by the breezy beaches of Amorgos whose crimson-dyed cloths were exported as far as Britain along with the fine Samian found all over Kibworth, all could say, ‘Cives Romanus sum.’
Life in the villa
Roman Britain at its height was a populous land. One of the surprising recent developments in our knowledge of Roman Britain has been the enormous increase in rural settlements discovered by modern surveying techniques, by field archaeology and aerial photography. This means that old estimates of the population of Roman Britain at 2 million maximum are probably way off the mark. By the third century the population was more than 3 million – maybe even 4 million at the height of the empire, before military disasters and social conflict in the late fourth century were followed by climate change, and a series of pandemics, famines and natural catastrophes between the middle of the sixth century and the late seventh. It is an extraordinary thought that Roman Britain may have had a larger population than England at the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558.
The towns were the essential transmitters of Romanitas. Civilization after all means life in cities. The people of the Kibworth villa and its peasants and slaves, like all such places across Britain, were dependent on their local provincial capital with its market and its amenities. The civitas of Ratae was ruled by leading members of the community, probably in this part of the world descendants of the tribal aristocracy of the Corieltauvi. If our villa owner belonged to an important clan with wide estates it is possible that he was a member of the council of the colonia, a citizen of Rome but proud of his Celtic lineage and tribal identity. (Celtic royal names from such people – Maporix, for example – have turned up in graffiti in Leicester.) Such men were expected to provide for many civic amenities from their own pockets, a duty at first willingly accepted but later enforced as the economy was progressively squeezed. In the second and third centuries towns all over Britain were provided with civic buildings and other amenities. But the urban population was sustained by the countryside, by the villas. Food production was the major occupation of the population. And wool was a major part of the surplus of any landowner. So with the exception of a small mercantile class, wealth was dependent on land ownership. The economy of our villa would have been mostly in arable, and also in sheep whose fleeces might have been carted off by road to the imperial weaving mill in Winchester before being exported as ‘British woollens’. Some of the great villas were almost what we would recognize in the eighteenth century as wool mills.
The boulder clay lands of Kibworth, Glen and the Langtons were a valuable source of income to their owners back in Roman times, just as they were after 1066 to landlords like the Norman Hugh Grandmesnil, the Harcourts and Beauchamps in the Middle Ages, or Merton College, all of whom organized, regulated and exploited the labour of their workforce in much the same way. Even in Roman times it appears that a proportion of the population were free farmers. But the Roman Empire organized farming in Britain on a large scale for the first time, increasing food production to feed the army and the bureaucracy. And with a fast-growing population, the countryside was increasingly opened up to farming, as is revealed locally by the pottery scatter found in the fields around the villa site at Kibworth, and by the frequent finds of pieces of stone querns or hand-mills which were used to grind flour. From now on until the Industrial Revolution Kibworth would be a farming community.
As for the ordinary people, circular huts appear on the magnetometry surveys, where seven or eight houses can be distinguished, but no doubt more lie underneath the present village and adjacent fields. The inhabitants were of British descent (of largely the same DNA shared by Irish, Welsh, Scots and most lowland English even today). As we have seen, they were British-speaking; though perhaps with a sprinkling of people of foreign descent who spoke the Latin language too. During the empire most of the peasants lived in timber-framed houses with mud walls and thatch – the indigenous style of peasant housing till recently in south Leicestershire (in the 1860s Kibworth still had nearly twenty of these ‘mud houses’).
As for the villa itself, modern excavations of villas and town houses in the region have given us a sense of how the owners and the workforce lived. Such houses were in reality just big working farms with barns, stables and accommodation blocks for the slaves and other staff. Inside they were sparsely furnished, as farming places still tend to be. They had plastered or tiled floors, wooden furniture with simple decoration. Little bronze dolphins as table brackets (such as have been found locally) might be the only hint of city style; a locked box decorated with bone inlay to contain valuables; tripod lamp stands for the clay oil lights which were used everywhere after nightfall. In the second century, along with cheap local pottery or wooden tableware for everyday use, the Kibworth villa owner used fine orange-red Samian tableware for special occasions. In the corners of the main living room were little incense burners – tazzas – used in the ceremonies of the house, such as family commemorations and anniversaries. For domestic cults there was a shrine room with a little stone altar to the gods of springs and waters. These spirits and deities as we have seen had a very tenacious life around Kibworth and in the little valleys down to Hallaton and the Welland. And though our villa was an ordinary place, later in its existence it had a mosaic floor and plastered walls with wall paintings. In the local capital house murals have been excavated which are among the best found in Britain and which give an idea of what provincial firms of painters could achieve. In luminous colours they show shaded verandas hung with garlands and lamps, peacocks and yellow singing birds, musical instruments and the theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy. The pigments range from deep red ochre, cinnabar and lime, blue frit, terre verte, soot and charcoal, to still intense yellow ochre. They are a haunting suggestion of the good life that spread out even to the villas along the Glen and Langton Brook.
Farming
Farming was the key activity and food production the most important job in the empire. Traces of Roman farming at Kibworth may still be detected on the ground. In Kibworth Harcourt aerial photographs and old maps reveal traces of huge ancient furlongs such as are found in other parts of Celtic Britain. The crucial evidence comes from two quarters, the first being a dig by the local archaeologist Bert Aggas, who has already figured in this tale. Aggas never published his finds but left a set of detailed notes with hand-drawn maps and plans. Just outside the village at the town end on the Leicester road, as we have seen, he excavated a prehistoric burial tumulus which had been used as a windmill mound in the thirteenth century. In the same field he also found scattered fragments of Roman pottery left by ‘manuring’ (when broken pottery mixed up with the manure in the farmyard is taken out and dumped on the fields). Field-walking by villagers in 2009 picked up more sherds in a neighbouring ploughed field.
We know then that the windmill field and its neighbours were under cultivation during Roman rule. Running away from the windmill mound across today’s pasture there is still a prominent rise in the ground which from tithe maps can be identified as the former edge of a huge ancient field whose hedge has long since been grubbed out. The old field divisions here have mainly gone since the last strips of the medieval open fields were broken up after enclosure in 1789; but the ridge and furrow still visible on the ground show the older pattern. With the seventeenth-century estate maps in Merton College we can see what was once here. In an arc round the northern edge of the village was a large field more than a kilometre long and known as the Banwell Furlong. The prehistoric windmill mound was at its western end, the newly discovered villa close by. Then on the other side of the A6 (which was evidently already a track in prehistory) there was another huge curving furlong precisely lined up with the Banwell. This furlong was of the same dimensions – a thousand yards long – and was also ploughed in strips across its width. In the Middle Ages this second great field was called Peasehill or Peas Sik Furlong (an Old English word, ‘peas’ is first recorded in the eighth century – its meaning was wider than modern ‘pea’, covering a variety of green legumes and describing one of the staple crops of the Dark Ages and of the medieval three-field system). The Roman pottery sherds under the plough ridges indicate that these furlongs were cleared in Roman times or earlier, and that they had never gone out of cultivation for any long period of time between the later fourth century and the high Middle Ages in the heyday of the open-field system.
Banwell Furlong then and its companion Peasehill are perhaps fields from the late Iron Age or the time of the Roman villa. The peasants grew grain and legumes in these fields, which they ploughed with the improved Roman heavy plough. They kept pigs and cattle. On the streams they grew osier beds, in the meadow flax for clothing, dye plants, woad and madder in their cottage gardens. Their basic food in addition to meat consisted of the vegetables which have been the staple diet in Britain ever since: peas, beans, onions, garlic, white carrots and cabbage. Beyond the big fields they opened up grazing land on the clays for the sheep flocks that must have provided the commercial wealth of the estate. With the villa then, the pattern of the manorial economy, which would last until the eighteenth century, or even later, was set.
Kibworth in the late-Roman world
With such scattered evidence – field finds, surveys, metal detectors, chance coin finds – we can build our first tentative picture of the village. It was a classic Romano-Celtic tribal settlement of huts and farm protected by an outer ditch and hedge. We can imagine a few hundred acres of arable, some woodland, sheep pasture and several ox teams kept in the villa barns. The workforce would have been mainly dependent peasants, coloni, and their families, with some hired labour and some slaves, servi, who lived in a workers’ block among the farm buildings. But there were also free tenants farming their own fields with their own oxen and their own flocks.
That is as far as we can go in building up a picture from the fragmentary finds in the soil. To endow the early people of the village with the warmth of life we must turn to the fragmentary inscriptional material from Leicestershire (including vivid curse graffiti scratched on pot-sherds), supplemented by Roman texts discovered in recent years elsewhere in Britain. Fragments of letters from elsewhere in second-century Roman Britain are from garrison communities but vividly convey a flavour of the civic life of the provinces: grouses about deferred promotion, birthday invitations, grocers’ orders, the weather and for some émigrés, Romans like Marcus Novantico for example, the irritatingly provincial customs of the natives – the Brittunculi, ‘the little Brits’.
Some texts were written by native British-speakers whose day-to-day speech was Celtic and whose Latin was plainly tentative (as might be expected in a countryside only lightly Romanized), but the letters reveal the everyday life of real people whose concerns were no different in many ways from those of today: news, shopping, charitable donations, family connections, the mess, the club, ordering luxuries from London – Massic wine for birthday parties and festivals of the goddess, ‘Celtic beer’ for daily consumption (British drinking habits have not changed). Virilis the vet writing to his academy chums ends with a flourish: vale Londini, ‘farewell, deliver this at London’. In Leicester there is Primus, the tile maker, the women Atica and Martina; and one of the more delightful couples from anywhere in Roman Britain, Lucius the gladiator and his actress lover Verecunda, his scratched love token telling of a match surely made for the Roman tabloids: in short, the stuff of civic life of any time.
Such letters and the supplies they describe, with news of the outside world, came from the city to the villa by horse or ox-drawn carts past milestones set by the deified Hadrian with their comforting sense of measure and order and permanence. And with them a last glimpse of late-Roman Kibworth. In the veranda round the villa courtyard the stores are unloaded from the wagon; as the lamps are lit the coloni are bringing the oxen in, while slaves scurry about their tasks. For the dinner party fairy lights are strung out into the open air. The kitchen is busy. Tonight there will be food on the tables, Samian wine, Italian fish paste and Colchester oysters. In the corner of the shrine room terracotta tazzas spiral incense in front of the altar to Mercury as the owner and his family pour a libation to the ancestors, around them even here, as a classical poet said, the ‘soft breeze of wealth’. The luxuries bought by civilization. For the elites at least, the gifts of Romanitas.
