Shopping and Trading in Roman Britain

The Romans never took to the the weather. The gag from the 1960s spoof movie Carry On Cleo is quite appropriate:

Bilius: Hail, Mark Antony!

Mark Antony: Hail - snow, rain, thunder, lightning - the lot!

What the Romans wanted was business, as they still say in Soho.

Britain was well known to the ancients, not only Greeks and Romans but also Carthaginians. Long before Pytheas of Marseille wrote the (lost) On the Ocean, Chimilkat (Himilco Poenas, the Punic) had visited; his account survived until at least late imperial times, because he is referred to three time in Ora Maritima, a poem on the sea coasts of the Roman Empire, by Rufus Festus Avienus in the early fifth century AD. You can read more about Pytheas in Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Penguin 2001).

Julius Caesar would have had access to both Himilco and Pytheas, and it is quite possible that the opening parts of his description of Britain in Book IV of De Bello Gallico is based on that. There are descriptions of Britain’s distinctive shape and nature in the Getica of Jordanes, on the very first page of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and in Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum. All of those seem to draw on Caesar. There may have been other Greek and Roman peripli of Britain that we know nothing about.

As Britain was a major source of tin for bronze (still important in the Iron Age) there had been trade for a millennium and more before Rome conquered. Diodorus Siculus, a younger contemporary of Caesar, wrote in detail about Britons taking tin out to an island to be loaded onto deeper-water ships (Biblioteka Historike).

Since tin was and is mined in Cornwall and west Devon, the island may have been St Michael’s Mount. Alternative choices include Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, Dorset, which curiously was the site of the world’s first major Boy Scout jamboree; there is an Iron Age harbour at nearby Hengistbury Head , Hampshire-until-1974 (Hynesbury Head until the 19^th century and nothing to do with the Anglo-Saxon figure Hengist). Another possibility is Scilly, the island group off the west coast of Cornwall; at that time, it may have been a single island as Roman sources call it Insula Scillonia (‘Syllan’ in Cornish).

According to Diodorus, a Greek-speaking Sicilian, ships from the Veneti, a people from Gaul, living in the area near the mouth of the River Loire, collected the tin from the island and brought it over to their area. This is the area today known as the Vendée, derived from their name (as is its ancient capital Vannes). They then loaded it into shallow-draught boats and took it all the way upstream on the Loire, then down the Rhone to the Mediterranean and thence to Italy. There would have needed to have been portage from the upper Loire to the mid-Rhone, south of Lyon, as there are rapids on the Rhone at this point. The portage from Loire to Rhone takes one across the Morvan and Gévaudan. 

Evan today, Burgundy's Morvan landscape is quite daunting

This is even today a wild region and not one known for its friendliness to outsiders. Anyone who reads Robert Louis Stevenson’ Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) will be surprised at the hostility he encountered there. One of the surveyors of the map maker Jacques Cassini was murdered there because the locals assumed he was a Parisian spy, or worse, a tax collector. My point is this was a highly valued cargo and the profit must have been extremely good to warrant such long-distance trade.

Clearly the tin trade was well known in Caesar’s day. As with all trade and exchange, what did they exchange the tin for? The best guess is wine. This seems to be the case in later, Christian, times, when ships from Gaul called in to deliver wine, needed for the Christian Eucharist.

Another item to trade was hunting dogs. A letter survives from Cicero to Caesar asking him to bring him back a hunting dog. These dogs may have been known as Agassians, a breed considered to be the ancestor of the springer spaniel. This dog is also mentioned by Grattius Falliscus (Cynegeticon, time of Augustus), Strabo, Tacitus, Nemesianus (Cynegetica, 4^th century AD) and Claudian at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. Strabo (Geography IV.5.2) says the exports of Britain were ‘grain, hides, cattle, iron, silver, slaves, and clever hunting-dogs’.

We can see images of these dogs on colour-coated ware from the lower Nene Valley (modern Huntingdonshire) and in pots found at Corbridge, near Hadrian’s Wall.

Nene Valley Ware from Huntingdon, with Hunting Dogs

Hunting Dog Pot from Corbridge, Hadrian's Wall

Wool was a major export from England in the later Middle Ages. Many handsome towns with large churches in the Cotswolds and Suffolk earnt their wealth through the strong demand from Flemish weavers for high quality wool. But while Strabo knew about cattle and hides, he didn’t mention wool. It is however referred to in a letter from by Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britannia Inferior, when he sends someone a tossia Britannica, a kind of woolen blanket, while at Tampium. (See AR Birley The Roman Government of Britain, OUP (2005) pp342-4). Suetonius Paulinus was based in York and is recorded at Corbridge. Modern Yorkshire is well known for wool; the area around Bradford, Leeds and Dewsbury was until recently known as the Woolen District.

Britain was in the Roman Empire for up to 367 years (Egypt by comparison was in the Empire for 684 years); that’s fifteen generations. Since there was already a solid trade between Britain and the empire, what did the Romans win additionally from Britain that they couldn’t get through trade?

One idea that could be explored is debt. Pre-Roman trade was exchange, and while that entails some concept of relative value, sale and purchase were not meditated through cash. There were of course many pre-Roman coins in Britain, based on the Stater of Philip II of Macedon via Gaulish copies. They should be viewed as handy-shaped pieces of bullion, rather than as part of a complex system of trade. They were issued by rulers, but rulers have always seen controlling the safety and standard of markets as part of their functions. The use of iron rods as a form of currency is more that of standard size bullion.

The revolt of Boudicca in the reign of Nero was not spontaneous as is often suggested. Cassius Dio blames it on the introduction of debt. Rich Romans had offered to make key Britons rich, and the Britons had taken the money with no understanding of servicing a loan through repayments, dancing attendance daily as clients of the Romans, let alone the abstract idea of interest. When the Britons couldn’t repay, the loan sharks (publicani) seized property, enslaved subjects and generally ‘sent the boys round’. In a very slightly different context, they thought it was liberation when in fact, as Tacitus remarked in Agricola 21, it was part of their enslavement.

One of the recently discovered London Writing Tablets, from the Bloomberg Excavation and dated before AD53, refers to a debt. The Guardian (accessed 1 June 2016) quotes:

In the consulship of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus for the second time and of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, on the 6th day before the Ides of January (ie 8 January AD57) I Tibullus the freedman of Venustus have written and say that I owe Gratus the freedman of Spurius 105 denarii from the price of the merchandise which has been sold and delivered. This money I am due to repay him or the person whom the matter will concern

There are references to to Tertius the brewer and Junius the cooper, suggesting a kind of goldrush frontier mentality, as trade and craft specialisms flooded into the new province, which at that time had not progressed beyond the south east. One early tablet says:

… because they are boasting through the whole market that you have lent them money. Therefore I ask you in your own interest not to appear shabby … you will not thus favour your own affairs

Diodorus mentions slaves as exports, and we may ask who these slaves were. Rufus wrote to Epillicus ‘make sure that you turn that slave girl into cash’. One of them was in London and the main topic was the ‘realisation’ of an estate. (Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 1994, CUP, p.106). It reads as this was an estate acquired for cash or as settlement of a debt; maybe the slave girl had been a housekeeper or mistress of the owner and was now surplus stock.

A graveyard unearthed as part of the excavations for the Crossrail new metro system indicates that a lot of Londoners were  immigrants, voluntary or not, including a young woman from North Africa; maybe she was turned into cash once too often.

But who were the enslaved in Britain in the time of Diodorus, since the Romans were customers, not slave drivers? Could it be Germanic settlers? Although it is centuries in in the future, Angles from Deira were supposedly being sold in the slave market of Rome in the later sixth century when the future Gregory the Great asked about them there. The Britons were quite happy to enslave Roman sailors shipwrecked off the Elbe (Tacitus Annals 2).

Goods were evidently retailed in Britain and were imported and exported. The Notitia Dignitatum makes reference to the ‘procurator of the weaving house at Winchester’ [Venta Belgarum] in the Britains. This was one of the woollen weaving state monopolies; a distinction is made with linen weavers. It seems there were no imperial estates in Britain at the time the Notitia was compiled, although we do know about the estate of the millionairess-turned-ascetic Melania the Younger, who sold her massive estates including those in Britain shortly before the end of Roman rule in AD410.

The Count of the Sacred Bounties, an imperial official charged with overseeing the emperor’s business monopolies, not only ran weaving sheds in Britain, but also had a provost of the storehouses in London and an accountant of the general tax in the Britains. Under him would have been a number of junior staff to calculate who was liable to pay what. To what extent tax farmers were used is unknowable, and there is little or no evidence. The four/five provinces which made up the Vicariate of the Britains had two receivers of taxes, which doesn’t sound a lot, although there was a phrase used ‘and the rest of the staff’. They probably used publicani if the population was as high as is believed (five to eight million people).

The Roman government of the Britains was driven by cash. Roman subjects, later made citizens, farmed to make a crop or livestock surplus, which they took to market to sell for cash, then (probably while in town) paid their taxes in cash. They would have also bought items they could not create themselves, such as salt, an imperial monopoly. Many would have paid a miller to mill their grain and a specialist baker for flatbreads and rolls, similar to those in Gaul. As Britain was a place to which people were sent into exile, there would have existed a market for home comforts, such as wine, to extract income from such people.

The coins of Carausius, minted in London, show considerable skills in engraving. You can see one here. It was quite an investment in propaganda for a peripheral part of the Empire. Financial problems must have impacted his reign, because Carausius was overthrown by Allectus, his procurator, suggesting that Carausius had spent too much and taxed too little, with the whole project at risk of collapse.

Coins of Carausius, Emperor of Britain

There is considerable evidence across the western empire of the collapse of a cash economy in the fourth century, following hyper-inflation in the third. In Britain this can be seen in several ways: first the rise of great houses, termed ‘villae’ in conventional history, but more like manors in truth. Sharecroppers (Coloni adscripticii) on landed estates were close to the classic high medieval idea of a serf, unable to leave the land or sell possessions without the lord’s permission.

The lifestyle of such farms developed. The one at Shakenoak Farm, near Witney, Oxon is a good example.  It is the only known example of an inland fish farm (vivarium) from Roman Britain. Its lords lived a highly Romanised lifestyle, even buying an eye ointment, stamped. The site is discussed in Martin Henig and Paul Booth’s Roman Oxfordshire (2001). The vivarium seems to have been converted into a barn c.200 and the Romanised building converted into an Iron Age roundhouse. By the fifth century, the estate was fortified, and remains have been found of young men in Germanic clothes, presumed to be guards, buried aligned east-west in the Christian manner around the main building. Elsewhere on the estate remains of Germanic style women’s clothing has been found. The Ashmolean Museum’s website claims these point to the arrival of Germanic women from the continent. However, it could merely indicate a change of lifestyle, with local women adopting styles favoured by their husbands (just as in Britain, local women who marry immigrant or even local Muslim men are known to adopt Muslim women’s styles). The Germanic people may have exported women’s clothes to Britain. As Guy Halsall points out (Worlds of Arthur), the trip from Germania was not necessarily a single one way trip. As men’s clothing styles are those of the 420s, not 450s, they came across when markets were probably still working.

What we do see in the late imperial period is the steep decline of housing and possessions requiring specialist labour. In the immediate post-imperial period – within about thirty years – many Roman period buildings were deliberately and carefully demolished. We can see this very clearly in Wroxeter (Viroconium), where the lower courses of houses have been maintained, in order to pen livestock (White, R. and Barker, P. (1998) Wroxeter: Life and Death of a Roman City, Stroud: Tempus). 

View of Levelled-Off Buildings at Viroconium (Wroxeter)

There was no more specialist labour to maintain the upper floors and rooves. Some had been removed to Gaul by order of the Caesar Constantius Chlorus (recorded in a Latin Panegyric). Remaining craft labour would no doubt have worked on the expanding major villa complexes of the fourth century, but away from the towns, which were in major decline, and thus from the craft guilds.

The decline of towns, trade and money is well discussed by Simon Esmonde-Cleary in Esmonde-Cleary, A.S. (1989) The Ending of Roman Britain, London: B.T. Batsford. Money seems to be in confusion, with short supplies of coins in the London mint, and overstriking by coin forgers, something mainly seen in Britain (Numismatic Society website, consulted 20/8/16); perhaps the forgers were former mint employees. The existence of forgeries supposes a market for cash and therefore a cash market for goods. Maximus reopened the London mint for a while, minting solidi and siliquae, but otherwise the coinage came from Trier. Few coins were imported from Trier after AD404, and while Constantine III minted coins, that was only in Gaul and few have ever been found here. A number of low-value Roman coins continued in Britain till AD435.

The writings of St Patrick in the fifth century AD give his birthplace as Bannaventem Taburniae; the Shops at Bannaventa. Bannaventa (which means ‘white market’ in Brythonic) is probably the site near Whilton Lodge, Northants. (The Bannaventa page in Wikipedia is full of mistakes.) Bannaventa sits on Watling Street. There were many attempts by Irish raiders and settlers to invade Roman in the fifth century. There is no reason why Bannaventem Taburniae needs to be in the west. The church run by Patrick’s father, the deacon Calpurnius, was at the local shops, where people still came in a market economy; Calpurnius was rich enough to have a small villa nearby, possibly inherited from his father, Potitus, also a priest and maybe part of Britain’s first Christian generation; Potitus is likely to have been a local nobleman (Confessio 1). The collapse of that market economy can be seen in the same source, where Patrick, returning to Britain in about AD420 found a land so denuded of people that he and the sailors who accompanied him saw nobody for a month, and within that time encountered a herd of pigs loose on the road and abandoned beehives (Confessio 19).

Within a decade or so of Patrick’s captivity in Ireland, there was a visit to Britain by Germanus of Auxerre to negotiate with religious dissidents, who were said to be dressed in magnificent robes, including a man called Agricola (Vita Sancti Germani). Magnificent robes are rarely off-the-peg items and would need high-quality dyes, which needed to be imported.

Recent archaeology, such as that at West Heslerton, East Riding, (notably the work of Dominic Powlesland) does indicate the survival of some urbanism, with a ‘ladder community’ gradually migrating in space. Recent work has also found that early medieval Britain had plots of land allocated along Roman roads, containing houses, smallholdings and, we may assume, some craft specialisation. Ken Dark has written about the survival of Romano-British polities as Dark-Age kingdoms (Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity, 300-800, Leicester University Press, 1999), and that presumes a survival of farming, trades and loyalty.

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.

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.