The Emperor's Right Hand: The Urban Prefect of Rome

 Much attention is given to emperors, obviously, but after the changes made by Diocletian, the emperor became a distant figure and Rome ceased to be the imperial seat. If in Italy, the emperor lived mainly in Milan and Paris, Trier and Vienne were more likely to be imperial seats than ever Rome was, even if it remained the biggest city in Europe. It has been noted that Constantius II, emperor since AD337, did not enter Rome until AD356, following his defeat of Magnentius. Ammianus has a detailed description of the parades that greeted him there (Ammianus XVI, 10).

Once the emperor had left the city, the day to day administration was left to the Urban Prefect (praefectus urbis), an official who might claim the position more on his honour than on proven ability. Someone clearly thought that having writers like Quintus Symmachus (384-5), Sextus Aurelius Victor (389), Rutilius Namantianus (414) and Sidonius Apollinaris (468-9) do the job was a good idea, although Symmachus was involved in the controversial decision to remove the altar of victory; as a pagan, he was against it.

The Urban Prefect seems to have been subject to the Praetorian Prefect of Italy, who was in effect Prime Minister of the core of the Roman Empire. All Urban Prefects seem to have taken the honorific praenomen ‘Flavius’. There was no fixed term of office as there was for many such posts, such as Consul, which always ran from 1 January. We have many instances of new Urban Prefects taking on the role part way through a year, with others even returning to office for a short time as a sort of suffect prefect.  Two Urban Prefects also held the Praetorian Prefecture of Italy at the same time; as these two (Ulpius Limenius [AD347-9) and Hermogenes [AD349-51] followed one another, this may reflect the complex politics of the reigns of Constantius II and Magnentius, to ensure that Italy and Rome spoke with the same voice.

To take an example: Afranius Syagrius, a gallo-roman noble from Lyon. He was a notarius in AD369, but was sacked by Valentinian for incompetence; however he was brought back into favour under Gratian due to his friendship with Ausonius and made magister memoriae, then proconsul of Africa. In AD380 he became Pretorian Prefect of Italy, and simultaneously Urban Prefect and finally Consul for AD382. He was certainly collecting the full set of honours. We can’t trace him after that, and is is feasible that he was caught up in the rebellion of Magnus Maximus and killed. He may have been an ancestor of the Roman commander of the enclave of Soissons after the collapse of Gaul in the late fifth century. There is nothing to suggest that Afranius Syagrius was a Christian.

A certain Tanaucius Isfalangius held the role soon after and for two or three years (373-5). He certainly doesn’t sound very much like a standard Roman. Our only record of his is in re-erecting a status, of what we don’t know. He might even have been an Arab or other near-easterner, or maybe he was an Isaurian, like Tarasicodissa, later the Emperor Zeno.

The role of Urban Prefect was held by Christians in the fourth century, notably by Junius Bassus, who held the Prefecture for a few months in AD359. He clearly was Christian as his sarcophagus (see below), carved elaborately with Christian iconography (including a beardless Christ) can be seen to this day in the Vatican Museum. It’s extremely likely that Christians dominated the role after a while; Boethius held the position in AD486 just before he was made consul, something which is attested earlier, suggesting successfully holding the urban prefecture was a step towards the consulate.

Christian Sarcophagus of the Urban Prefect Bassus, 4th Century AD (Vatican Museum)

We do know something about Memmius Vetrasius Orfitius, who served two terms (December 353 to July 355 and January 357 to March 359, replaced by Bassus). Ammianus Marcellinus says of him:

Meanwhile Orfitus was governing the eternal city with the rank of Prefect, and with an arrogance beyond the limit of the power that had been conferred upon him. He was a man of wisdom, it is true, and highly skilled in legal practice, but less equipped with the adornment of the liberal arts than became a man of noble rank. During his term of office serious riots broke out because of the scarcity of wine; for the people, eager for an unrestrained use of this commodity, are roused to frequent and violent disturbances. (Ammianus XIV, 6.1). The Urban Prefect was in charge of Rome’s wine tax, according to the Notitia Dignitatum (see below), so there may have been a black market going on.

  

No urban prefect ever became emperor, but Priscus Attalus, the puppet who Alaric ‘made’ emperor at odd times when he felt like it, had been Urban Prefect in AD409.

The most powerful holder of the Urban Prefect role was however Gordianus Gregorius (born AD540), who became Urban Prefect in 573, then entered the Church and rose rapidly through being part of the papal delegation to the emperor in Constantinople to become Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ in AD590, dying in 604.

Tomb of Gregory the Great

We do know quite a bit about the tenure of Sidonius as Urban Prefect (AD468-9), because he refers to it in letters and poems. He came to the new emperor Procopius Anthemius and composed a panegyric to him on his consulate (he had previously praised Avitus and Majorian); the emperor made him a patrician, a senator, caput senati and praefectus urbis. Quite a haul for one smarmy poem (I’ve read it). Sidonius was able to use his close contacts with the emperor to get him to commute the death penalty for treason of Arvandus, pretorian prefect of Gaul, a position held by Sidonius’ grandfather and father, as well as his father-in-law Avitus. Arvandus had allied himself with Euric, the Visigothic leader, against Rome. That caused Sidonius to resign the prefecture rather than be sucked into its complex politics.

The Urban Prefect seems to have had the Roman police force (cohortes urbis) under his command, and as there were only three cities in the empire with police forces – Rome, Carthage and Lyon – this must have been a considerable responsibility; given the short tenure of the prefects, and their erratic terms of office, the police would have had to have been professionally led. So would the vigiles, who were a mix of nightwatchmen and fire brigade.

The Notitia Dignitatum lists the following as being under the Urban Prefect:

The prefect of the grain supply,

The prefect of the watch,

The count of the aqueducts,

The count of the banks and bed of the Tiber, and of the sewers,

The count of the port,

The master of the census,

The collector of the wine-tax,

The tribune of the swine-market,

The consular of the water-supply,

The curator of the chief works,

The curator of public works,

The curator of statues,

The curator of the Galban granaries,

The centenarian of the port,

The tribune of art works

The staff of the illustrious prefect of the city:

A chief of staff,

A chief deputy,

A chief assistant,

A custodian,

A keeper of the records,

Receivers of taxes,

A chief clerk (or receiver),

Assistants,

A curator of correspondence,

A registrar,

Secretaries,

Aids,

Clerks of the census,

Ushers,

Notaries

Obviously it’s hard to work out exactly what the gradations of rank and thus authority are, or what the boundaries of given domains may be. Some titles may have been traditional or set in a law otherwise half-forgotten. What the difference is between the Prefect of the Grain Supply and the curator of the Galban Granaries, I have no idea, since the horrea Galbana were brought into public ownership by Nero as revenge against Galba’s uprising (Rickman, G.E. (1971) Roman Granaries and Store Buildings, Cambridge: CUP). Possibly the grain in them was different (barley, not wheat, for instance), or had different owners; some grain was paid in tax, and some belonged to the Emperor and could be stored separately and accounted for in a different way, being used for imperial largesse, the grain dole (annona) being an obvious candidate.

Grain was not the only resource based there. An inscription refers to Aurelia Nais, pisciatrix (fishmonger) at the Galban Warehouse (CIL 6.9801), while another refers to C. Tullius Crescens, marble merchant at the same place (CIL 6.33886). Aurelia may have been an African, since that was a frequent name there while Crescens may have been descended from a freedman of Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero). These do not seem to be high-ranking operatives.

However, the Notitia clearly indicates that the Urban Prefect was (technically) responsible for all matters to do with foodstuffs, the river and port, and the beautification of the city. This brings us to the fourteen districts of Rome and the minor officials who ran them.

Each of the fourteen districts (vici) of Rome had a council of sorts, comprising 48 ‘district masters’ (vicomagistri) in each. It’s not clear exactly what a vicomagister did or how he was selected. It’s easy to see each district as a bit like a Parisian arrondisment with a council and a mayor, elected from notable citizens of the district and with a clear level of local authority within its bounds, perhaps with a sense of civic pride and responsibility. It would be easy, of course, but we have no idea if it resembles the truth.

The fact that each of the fourteen districts had the same number of vicomagistri irrespective of size, population and what lay within its vicus tended to make me think the role was set out with no actual authority. If we make a comparison with the decuriones found in provincial cities across the empire, these were not positions which people sought, but to which they were assigned by virtue of their wealth and local status.

The provincial decurion was the sort of man who would have been a chieftain in earlier times, largely from inherited status. He was obliged to be on the local curia and if he did not, he could be compelled to attend. Exemption could be made for great age, current military service away from the area and such things, but the tax assessment made by the staff of the provincial governor had to be met by the decurions collectively, and they in turn were loaned the money by the publicanus in order to meet their obligation, and he in turn was given his head to extort the sum plus his staff wages and profit margin from the citizens. Decurions had the idea of joining the Church in the late empire, so they are particularly forbidden to take holy orders as a means to avoid their decurial obligations.

So were the vicomagistri in that situation? Nicholas Purcell in the Oxford Classical Dictionary gives their responsibilities as largely reactive, meeting at a crossroads (compitum), running local rites to lares and presumingly praising the emperor and running games (ludi compitalicii) in honour of the lares at set times. There is a frieze showing people carrying a lar in their hand found of a base of altar and now in the Lateran Museum. Here's view of that.

Vicomagistri carrying lares in procession

Purcell considers them to have constituted a local council, able to own property, run the vigiles in their district (mentioned in Cassius Dio) and so on; as there were seven cohorts of fire fighters with 500 men assigned to each, each cohort covered two districts, at least in theory (somehow the district with the imperial palace and great houses probably had at least one cohort of its own, while poorer neighbourhoods had to share one) .  They seems to have some authority over staff through supervisors (hepimeloton in Dio).

We have some indication as to when they took office (1 August) but none as to how they were picked, under what obligation they operated or how long they lasted. In their processions they were appointed two lictors. The Description of Rome in the Chronicle of AD354 refers to them at full strength, but the Christian terror implemented by Valentianian and Valens will have removed the pagan vestiges; indeed Theodosius in AD394 banned everyone but Christians from holding any public office.

Between the upper level of the praefectus urbis and the lower level vicomagistri seems to have been a selection of aediles, tribunes and praetors, their names drawn from the republican cursus honorum, but their functions quite mundane; Vespasian had been a district aedile and was accused by Gaius of failing to keep the streets clean (Suetonius Vespasian 5.3). Some firefighters were slaves of the local aedile, supervised on his behalf by the vicomagistri.

The Urban Prefect’s role predated the empire and outlived it, continuing under the kings and last mentioned in AD879 under later Carolingian rule; the pope may have taken on the civic responsibilities at some point. We know Alfred the Great visited Rome twice as a child with his father; the Urban Prefect was still going strong then.

There does not seem to have been much work done with regard to the Praetorian Prefects or vicarii in the Prefecture of Italy. Then there are ‘castellans’ an innovation of the later fourth century; a ‘castellan of the sacred palaces’ for the eastern and western provinces.  That will be for a later posting, I suspect.

How Did Romans Obtain Books and What Did They Read?

In a world without printing, how did the Romans obtain books? How did authors get paid? What exactly did the average Roman read? Whilst there have been countless studies of Latin literature and its most famous authors, what did people actually do to obtain and dispose of books?

Bookshops certainly existed in Rome in the centuries after empire, so we might assume that they had already existed. The Anglo-Saxon book Lives of the Abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth, anonymous but written by a fellow-monk to Bede, tells of a visit to Rome by Benedict Biscop in the 650s AD. He bought books and brought them back to Jarrow. An analysis of Bede’s sources suggest he had a book of poems by Virgil, possibly only a school primer for children to learn good Latin by emulating Virgil’s style and a copy of Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar. Most of what Biscop brought back would have been works of Christian exegesis and saints’ Vitae.

The bookshop quarter of Rome seems to have been on the Vicus Tuscus, once the area in which Etruscans lived. It is tempting to think of London’s Charing Cross Road before it was taken over by coffee shops and other tat. Books were sold from a shop (horreum) and a number of horrea librorum congregated in that area. According to Horace, some books were sold in front of a statue of Vertumnus and one of Janus Geminus as well as in the Roman Forum. Perhaps we should think of stalls selling books on market days, something like the Sunday bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris today. At a guess, they sold second-hand volumines. Horace says they sacrificed to Vertumnus, suggesting that the sellers were Etruscans. The same street was also the centre for male prostitution, indicating that book selling was a marginal trade too. (Interestingly, Charing Cross Road leads up to both intellectual Bloomsbury and to the site of St Giles Rookery, once deemed the worst slum in Europe; Dickens went there with four policemen to guard him.)

Horrea Epagathiana et Epaphroditiana, Ostia

What did the bookshops of Rome sell? What, physically, was a book? Scores of Hollywood movies have portrayed emperors and others reading scrolls. These certainly existed, but weren’t read as they are shown in films. There, they are opened up from top to bottom and read left to right, starting at the top of the scroll, which is then unravelled downwards to reveal more text.

Esther Scroll in Hebrew

However, surviving Roman pictures show the scroll (volumen) was not held with hands positioned at ’12 and 6’, but at ‘9 and 3’. That is, the scroll was opened from the left, the handwritten block of text was read, and then the left side was rescrolled and the right side opened.  When the scroll was returned to its wound position, it was placed in a wooden tube or in a pigeonhole (columbarium) with a tag on it to say what it was. The volumen was often positioned on a desk with side rollers.

The Roman use of a bound book (codex) seems to date from about the time of Augustus and may have been brought back from Egypt. In basic form, it’s a block of text from a volumen, cut up and held at one side. The incipit, the nearest thing Roman books had to a title, would be written on the spine, and books were kept spin-inward on shelves and probably lying down, not upright.

If the stalls which Horace refers to sold second-hand books, they would have been volumines, not codices, as those were the latest thing. This presupposes a book trade, at least for older works, and therefore individuals who knew enough about books to know what buyers wanted and who had the means to source such works. Authors then as now went in and out of fashion, so over time the sort of books sold would change. We can imagine Benedict Biscop paying out for books in such a setting. Although, since England had no coins at that time, the payment must have been gifted locally.

If I can divert for a second, I have always been surprised that the Romans with their extensive empire and thousands of schools teaching a standardised curriculum did not feel impelled to invent printing. The principle of reverse type was well understood, since it underpins the signet ring, known for millennia, the pottery stamp, seen on billions of fragments at sites such as Monte Testaccio, and the woodcut, used for illustrations such as those which accompany the Notitia Dignitatum. We know from recent published research at Herculaneum that metal-based permanent inks existed before AD79. An extensive book trade would have been fuelled by such simple technology, but the only labour it saved would have been that of slaves, so the scriptorium endured.

How did booksellers acquire their stock? Authors, if paid at all, were sponsored, so it’s feasible that sponsors might have copies made of works, which is why so many had dedications to nobles; Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is dedicated to the emperor Titus, who probably had some copies run off after Pliny died at Pompeii! The large amount of manuscripts of the Aeneid suggests knock-off copies were made.

The proscriptions of the second Triumvirate probably led to the seizure of the offenders’ libraries, which would then be auctioned off to booksellers at so much per pound of scrolls. When rich men left half their estate to the emperor, he probably didn’t want their books, so the heirs might need to sell books in order to maintain some lifestyle. One wonders if Ovid’s books slipped back into the stockroom when (and if) he was exiled, or if they sold better for it, just as the disappearance of Agatha Christie did not harm to her sales a jot.

Other than knock-off copies, would booksellers have any new stock to sell? According to Robert Knapp in his excellent Invisible Romans, there was a vast literature of popular subjects including proverbs, such as the Sayings of Publius Syrus, interpretation of dreams (Artemiodorus Interpretation of Dreams, the Oracles of Astrampsychus), books of fables, astrology, joke books (such as Philogelos, recently discussed by Mary Beard); the only book by Ovid mentioned in the lifetime of people who might have known him is a work on fishing, suggesting he needed to supplement fame with cash; we can imagine Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, dedicated to empress Julia Domna, was a bestseller (it’s about a wonder working conjuror of the first century AD).

Take Marius Maximus, a popular author, author of Caesares, the story of the twelve Caesars from Nerva to Elagabalus, clearly a potboiler sequel to Suetonius.. Ammianus comments of the Roman nobility of his day that ‘Some of them hate learning as they do poison, and read with attentive care only Juvenal and Marius Maximus, in their boundless idleness handling no other books than these, for what reason it is not for my humble mind to judge.’  (28.3.14). His work survived to be criticised by St Jerome, but not a word survives. We can imagine that Suetonius’ Lives of the Famous Prostitutes was a bestseller too, and that hasn’t survived, probably due to wholesale burning of books in the late 300s AD by Christian zealots.

As every new technology seems immediately to lead to a new means to produce pornography, there may well have been a trade in that too (‘Were you looking for something a little stronger, splendissimus? I might have just what you’re after.’). It might well be in Greek, so that the average Roman bigot couldn’t read it anyway. Works like Petronius Satyricon, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (the Golden Ass), novels like Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale, Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. The Myriobiblos of Photius (in ninth century Byzantium) references 279 books, most of them lost, but they would have been those worthy of a Patriarch, so thousands of works have been lost and never noted.

Where was Valentia?

Roman Britain was a single province from AD43 to sometime after Septimius Severus won control of it from Clodius Albinus, that is about AD198. Then two provinces were created: Britannia Superior (capital London) and Britannia Inferior (capital York). The use of the ranking adjective was also used for Germania and Libya. In Germania it referred to the relative height of the land, and we still use the terms High German and Low German.

However, the north of England is not lower than its south, but the reverse, so we can only suppose that the terms meant ‘better Britain’ and ‘worse Britain’. Had the terms meant ‘hither’ and ‘further’ (from Rome) they would have been citerior and ulterior. But they weren’t.

We know nothing about the boundary of the two provinces, other than each capital must have lain within its territory. It is customary to divide Britannia at the Mersey-Humber line (which runs from Liverpool on the West to Kingston upon Hull in the east), but there is no evidence to support that.

Another possibility is the approximate line of the Severn-Humber economic divide (SHED), a much more significant and ancient division. This is clear from Later Pre-Roman Iron Age (LPIRA) contrasts and remains potent to this day, as seen in the work of the Social and Spatial Inequalities Group (SASI Group) (see www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/maps/nsdivide/) at the University of Sheffield. For anyone not familiar with the geography, the Severn Estuary runs into the Bristol Channel, a wide tidal piece of sea which

In the LPRIA period, coins were used south and east of the SHED line (the Lowland Zone, or LZ) and not north and west of it (the Highland Zone, HZ). Similarly various types of pottery were made and distributed  in the LZ, and no pottery has been found in the HZ. It is also the divider for LPRIA forts versus no forts, with all forts again found in the LZ south and east of the line (Millett, 1992, various pp). Todd notes that certain architectural features such as souterrains exist only in the HZ, north west of the SHED line (Todd, 2008, p.20) North and west of the SHED line agriculture is to this day dominated by stock rearing, as opposed to the mainly agrarian nature of south and east.

The SHED line was also the line of the Fosse Way, for a generation the effective border of the Roman Empire in Britain, so the earliest Roman province was the LZ, or a part of it.. Naturally it formed the tribal borders of a number of Brythonic political units. Consequently it also forms an isogloss, because the people to the north and west of that line would operate in different discourse communities to those south and east of it. They would not talk of minting coins, how to make or sell ceramics, or techniques for building or rebuilding earthworks.

The line itself runs approximately along the Jurassic Ridge, which is a watershed for local rivers. It may have had a negative impact on settlements, as here is the highest level of the natural radioactive gas Boron. This runs along the SHED/ Jurassic Ridge line and it is likely that fewer settlements would be made along that line, since the gas permeates through floorboards and has a long-term adverse effect on health, even today. Gas, river access and proximity to potentially hostile neighbours would have reinforced the divide.

All of this leaves me in no doubt that this was the border between Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior, as overseen by Septimius Severus after beating Clodius Albinus. He stripped the governors of the power to command armies and stripped the armies of the power to levy taxes, thus creating checks and balances.

At some point between AD198 and AD305, the term ‘Britannia’ came to be applied to Britannia Inferior only, and the LZ became known as ‘Caesariensis’. Birley suggests this may have coincided with the reception of the Caesar Constantius Chlorus in London in AD296 (Birley); at some point London was renamed Augusta and this may have followed the split. During the reign of the Tetrarchy Caesariensis was split into Flavia Caesariensis (FC, capital Lincoln) and Maxima Caesariensis (MC, capital London), while Britannia split into Britannia Prima (BP, capital Cirencester) and Britannia Secunda (BS, capital York). We can see this in operation at the Council of Arles, where there were bishops from London, York and Lincoln and clergy from Cirencester present; perhaps the bishop was too old or too ill to travel. It was normal for the church to have a bishop in every provincial capital and a metropolitan for every diocese, and London doubled as the seat of the vicarius, so perhaps the bishop of London was a metropolitan (Verona List).

Maxima Caesariensis was the only province of the four to be a consular province; such provinces were held by ex-consuls and were therefore a privileged set. It may be that its tax income was allocated to Maximian and that of FC to Flavius Constantius Chlorus, which is why it was clearly a lot smaller. Because there was a bishop at Lincoln, I would propose that the basic shape of Flavia Caesariensis was that of the medieval See of Lincoln. Since an Anglo-Saxon king could have multiple bishops, but a bishop could serve only one king, this large bishopric which runs from the Thames to the Humber to me represents the original Mercia of the Tribal Hidage and Flavia Caesariensis.

There is a mystery later in the fourth century, and that is Valentia. Its name suggests it cannot predate the reigns of Valentinian (imp. 363-375) and Valens (imp. 363-378). Ammianus Marcellinus says that the province was created after the suppression of the Barbarian Conspiracy (AD 367). We know that this is true because the province exists in the Notitia Dignitatum and (after the event) in the calendar of Polemius Silvius. It too is a consular province, indicating its importance. It is unlikely that a consular province would be a part removed from an ordinary province; more likely is that it would have been a part of Maxima Caesariensis. If MC is south-eastern Britain and FC is the area around Lincoln, I propose that the there is only rational place for Valentia.

I cannot see any reason why a new province would be established in the north west as a subdivision of Britannia Secunda. The provincial governor did not command troops, he only raised the funds to pay for them. A north-western province, roughly modern Cumbria, would have been quite poor and have no other function other than as a military base. Nor can I see an ex-consul traipsing up to Carlisle (Luguvallum) as a civilian leader in what Peter Heather would call the ‘middle of bloody nowhere’.

My argument is that Valentia was a reward, not an imposition. As such, I can only see it as a subdivision of Maxima Caesariensis. My best guess is that it comprised what are now Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Middlesex, with a small area of what is now East Sussex. The coastal areas of this match the reach of the Count of the Saxon Shore. This was a special military command designed to ensure the orderly settlement of ‘Saxons’ in Britain following the events of AD367. I completely refute the idea that it was called the Saxon Shore (Litus Saxonum) because it was the shore from which the Saxons were forbidden, because they were generally forbidden to be on any shore!

The Governor of Valentia would have ruled the province from London, which was part of the tribal area of the Cantii; the four kings of Kent referred to by Caesar ruled were East Kent, West Kent, Surrey and Middlesex. The Saxon kingdom of Kent seems too to have held overlordship over Essex. It will have been noted that the governor of Maxima Caesariensis also worked in London, as did the vicarius who coordinated the whole island, plus, I would guess, officers who reported to the Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls. In addition, now that Britain had a metropolitan, an archbishop of London, he and his clergy would have worked there too.

London in the fourth century was rather different from the vigorous city of previous centuries. At some point it built a fourth wall along the river side, an area which had previously been open land lined with wharves, thus cutting the city off from its own riverfront and landing places, both military and civilian. This wall survived till Norman times, when it was demolished, trapping a coin of that time under its rubble. Late Roman London ought to have been a secure place, although it failed to stop Pictish ships from slipping past the watchtower at Shadwell and seizing the city.

At some point, as I have said above, London was renamed Augusta, the city of the Augustus. This was a singular honour, although it cannot have been taken as such too widely, because the name didn’t stick, unlike similar names in Gaul and Germany, for example (Autun was Augustodunum and Augsburg was Augusta Vindelicorum). I suggest that the reason for the change in name was first to assure the importance of the city to the Empire, and second because it was the base for the consular governors of two provinces, for the vicarius who reported directly to the emperor, for the bishop of London, for the staff of the Pretorian Prefect of the Gauls and probably the headquarters staff of the Count of the Saxon Shore. As there was a mint in London until after the reign of Magnus Maximus (d. 388), this may be associated with the enclosed site. The later location of the royal mint within the Tower of London may reflect an earlier industrial site in that area, as the Normans built the White Tower on top of the Roman citadel, clearing away the strata which had built up in the interim.

London’s soil was cleared of rubbish and relaid over older demolished buildings as ‘black earth’. This has sometimes been interpreted as rotted timber buildings, but if so, the residents of such buildings were so careful they never dropped a chicken bone or a small coin. I think that within the walls the normal inhabitants were moved out (to the extramural settlement later known as Lundunbyrig, perhaps) and an imperial-divine precinct created for the great and the good and their crews. They even built a very large church, probably a cathedral, dedicated it is believed to St Paul, which was discovered on Tower Hill in 1995. The church of Allhallows by the Tower dates from 675 and contains Roman material. It seems likely that St Martin in the Fields, now in Trafalgar Square was a Roman church, and if so its dedication must postdate St Martin of Tours (d. 8 November 397) and may predate AD410. Maybe that was for people displaced from Augusta. The dedication of St Pancras Old Church to an obscure Roman saint may suggest that, as legend insists, it was an old church just outside the walls for local residents, its its later boundaries were from Oxford Street to Highgate, suggesting that a local noble with a sizeable retinue patronised it.

It is notable that there were churches to St Pancras and St Martin at Canterbury when St Augustine arrived in AD597. Augustine brought relics of St Pancras with him to Britain, and since his task was to reopen the See of London (rather than starting a new one at Canterbury), he had presumably intended them for the extramural church near London.

In summary, I see Valentia as the fifth province usually cited, subdivided from Maxima Caesariensis to include the territories bounded by the Saxon Shore forts and run from an imperial precinct set within the walls of what had been London.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ammianus Marcellinus

Notitia Dignitatum

Secondary Sources

Haselegrove, C. (2008) ‘Central and Atlantic Britain’ in Todd, M. (ed.) A Companion to Roman Britain, London: Wiley.

Hind, J. (1975) ‘The British 'Provinces' of Valentia and Orcades (Tacitean Echoes in Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian)’ Historia Bd. 24, H. 1 (1st Qtr., 1975), pp. 101-111.

Millett, M (1992) The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation, Cambridge: CUP.