What did the Romans wear?

If you said ‘a toga’, go to the back of the class; well, part-way, anyway. Very few Romans wore togas. Women in the later Republic and Empire, for a start, and children of any sort; slaves couldn’t wear them, nor could any male who was not a Roman citizen (cives) as opposed to a Roman subject (peregrinus), until that distinction was abolished in AD212 by Caracalla. Lastly, any soldier or later in the empire, any civil servant, as they dressed like soldiers. This leaves a small group of elite males.

Horace says in one of his Satires ‘let’s face it: outside Rome, the toga is seldom worn’. Even in Rome, people were often not kitted in their toga. Suetonius tells a story about Augustus that he was on one occasion walking through the Forum Romanum, when he saw a group of men talking and all were wearing Gallic-style cloaks (braccae). He went to them and berated the group, then went home and promulgated a law  that men in the Forum must always wear a toga. In other words, you wore a toga to perform being Roman (Suetonius, Augustus 40.5).

In earlier times, Roman adult citizens of both sexes wore togas of undyed wool; this could be homespun with relative ease, and a simple warm garment fits the Roman self image of toughness and simplicity; after all, Romulus and the earliest settlers had been shepherds.

But when Roman officials came to Tarantum to demand that city’s surrender in 282BC, which led to the Pyrrhic Wars, the Tarantines thought they looked so ridiculous, they not only laughed at them, someone actually shat on one of the delegation’s toga (Cassius Dio 9.39, discussed in Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome, pp.4-6; also in Dionysius). Tarantum was the source of the best regarded wool, which was, we should assume, why Rome wanted the city and why they turned up dressed in wool. Most wars are about the control of resources.

We can see a distinction between clean and dirty in the production of clothing; wool and leather were dirty trades. Raw wool is laden with lanolin, and must be fulled, which involves soaking the fleece in noxious but effective products, notably human urine, which was taxed. This was a commercial industrial process performed in a fullonica, illustrated by the Fullonica of Veranius Hypsaeus at Pompeii, where we can see pieces of wool being hung up to dry on tenterhooks.

Fullonica of Veranius Hypsaeus, Pompeii

 Leather, used for belts, shoes and helmets, is also a dirty trade. Anciently, human faeces were used, along with brain material from animals. Both trades were therefore located away from where people lived, down wind where possible and certainly downstream from where water was extracted for clean trades and agriculture.

Roman women stopped wearing togas around 200BC and changes to the men’s toga, with denotations of social rank, also took place This seems to coincide with the moment the Greeks first paid attention to Rome, and probably for the same reason: the Battle of Zama. The defeat and annexation of mighty Carthage made many Romans very rich for the first time. Their women could afford to stop making their own clothes and buy fashionable Greek styles. The Romans at the same time stopped writing their literature in Greek and stopped wearing shapeless, styleless clothes; there was a change to both text and textiles. Cato the Elder complained (in Latin) that when he was young, women made the family’s clothes, but now they just bought them, and consequently the world was going to the dogs.

It did remain a potent symbol of citizenship marriage that a married woman (matrona) should be portrayed as someone who spun wool. Maybe some of the poorer ones still did, but the rich dropped that as soon as finances permitted. Women are regularly depicted on monuments spinning clothes as a sign on modesty and acceptance of the mos maiorum. This was clearly an ancient mode: ‘cloth’ derives from Greek ‘Klotho’, the spinner, one of the three Fates.

Klotho, one of the Fates, with her distaff

We can see the trope of woman as spinner on the tombstone of Regina, found at South Shields, County Durham. You can see she is portrayed spinning, with balls of wool by her left foot. But she probably never  did it; as the wife of a wealthy Syrian merchant she wouldn’t have considered it worthy, but it was a symbol of respectability.

Tombstone of Regina of the Catuvellauni, as a Roman matrona, spinning wool

From Carlisle comes this devotional statue group of three mother goddesses, all in short dresses and offering refreshments, including what look like half baguettes. This is from a Roman civitas capital not far from the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, and so quite marginal, but it does show alternative forms of dresses for females.

Three mother goddesses from Gaul, with short skirts 

Slaves wore loins cloths for outdoor work; most slaves worked as field hands. We can see this on a terracotta tile showing two slaves roped together around the neck and held by some kind of overseer, who from his trousers was probably a Gaul or German. Urban male and female slaves wore a tunic (tunica) to the knees with short sleeves. This was a practical garment, but by contrast, the toga, being rather impractical, was a marker of citizen rank. No doubt rich Romans dressed body servants quite well as a form of potlatch (Wow! If they dress their slaves better than I can clothe myself, how rich can they be?).

Slaves in loincloths, with overseer in trousers

The toga could be embellished with a wide purple stripe (toga laticlava), worn only by senators and certain magistrates. Purple dye, extracted from the murex, a small mollusc found in the Levant. Its rarity and the difficulty of its extraction made it a perfect symbol of wealth. In Greek ‘Phoenicia’ meant ‘land of purple dye’, and the Punic name for the same area ‘Canaan’ meant the same. While a senator might be able to afford a toga with a wide purple stripe, all-purple togas (toga trabea) were reserved for statues of gods and emperors.

The word togatus carried connotations of civilian status as soldiers wore a sagum cloak of unwashed, lanolin-rich and thus waterproof wool, dyed red.

Some senior priests wore a toga picta, possibly of Etruscan origins (although it does seem that anything we can’t understand about the Romans is dumped in the bin marked ‘probably of Etruscan origin’). This had coloured patterns sewn on to it and seems to have resembled the ornate robes of High Church Anglican and Roman Catholic priests.

Official in a toga picta

Roman prostitutes sometimes wore togas, once respectable women dropped them. It enabled shoulders and legs to be seen and was easily removed, a sign of sexual availability. Women at toga parties in the US (dating back only to 1953 and popularised by the movie ‘Animal House’) would appear to use it for much the same purpose.

In truth, a typical Roman male would wear a tunica, with a woollen cloak (laena) over it.

Man in tunica and laena, buying a potion from a rather Chinese looking sorceress; from Pompeii

In the following scene from Pompeii of customers buying loaves at a bread shop, they appear to be wearing a longer laena and leather shoes, perhaps hobnailed boots. The boy on the right is barefoot.

Bread shop in Pompeii; note the laena and hobnail boots

Women’s dress became more complex as Roman women became less the helpmeet of their husbands or fathers and more trophies to be exhibited, with the principle that the more elaborate the clothing, the less likely the wearer was to do actual work in it. Typically over a tunica, a woman wore a floor-length stola, over which was a palla, a kind of shawl. Her only underwear would be a strophium, a breast band. Layering was very In, even then.

Underwear (induti), seems to be cognate with the Indian ‘dhoti’, which derives from Sanskrit for ‘clean’. What your mother said about going out in clean underwear seems to have been universal. Kilt-wearing soldiers regularly wore them for practical reasons (unlike the Scots regiments of the 19^th century, so took pride in not wearing underwear, an early instance of ‘going commando’).

Romans wore sandals with hobnails (solea, hence the sole of a shoe) much of the time, alternatively the soccus, a laced shoe without hobnails, which shows you how technology has hardly changed in 2000 years. The calceus was a hobnailed boot, worn only by Roman citizens. A Roman citizen would often be buried in his hobnailed boots, and so they became a marker to archaeologist that the person buried was a pagan. Heavy-duty ones worn by soldiers were called caligae, from callus, hardened skin.

Solea with hobnail soles

Egyptian socks

Calceus

Supposedly barbarian people wore trousers, and in colder climates, so did the Romans. The Roman army by the fourth century AD is described in detail by Ammianus when parading before Constantius II on one of his rare visits to Rome. They wore trousers. However, trousers were considered barbarian wear and often (as in  Persian trousers) effeminate. Honorius took time out from losing to the Goths to pass laws against men wearing trousers when in Rome (Theodosian Codex 14.10.2-3).

Sumptuary laws (Sumptuariae leges) assigning types of clothing to rank and citizenship were frequently passed and just as frequently ignored. It is always the marker of an oppressive society that laws are passed on such matters. Officially, this was to stop the numerous lower levels of society from bankrupting themselves in social competition. But when the question is how many purple stripes do you have on your toga it’s about social repression.

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus is the god who everyone almost forgot. The tile of this blog comes from Ovid, “The temple is said to have been dedicated to Summanus, whoever he may be" (quisquis is est, Summano templa feruntur): Ovid, Fasti 6, 731, translation by Sir George Frazer.

The temple in question is on the Aventine Hill, which was originally outside the Pomerium, the sacred notional bounds of the city. The cult seems to be from Gallia Cisalpina in what is now north Italy, centred on and around the Mons Summani (today’s Monte Summano) near Vicenza in the Veneto, anciently Vincentia.

Monte Summano Today

Summanus is credited as a god of nighttime thunder. Many years ago I experienced such an event while staying in Como, the loudest thunder and the heaviest rain I have ever experienced; the sudden rise of the Alps and rapid cooling of humid air seem to the reason for such electrical storms.

The cult centre on the Aventine seems to have been an attempt to keep his following confined to the margins of Rome. The Euganei that area seem to have been a pre-Italic people who merged with Gaulish Venetic tribes around 500BC.

Roman authors seem all to have viewed Summanus as a chthonic god, a god of the nighttime and underworld, a god to be propriated. They variously associated him with Jupiter (Iuppiter Summanus), with Pluto and by Martianus Capella as the greatest of the Manes, the divine ancestors (Summus Manium).

Varro in the first century BC thought he was an Etruscan god (De  Lingua Latina 5.74) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 5.23) says ‘The Tuscan books inform us, that there are nine Gods who discharge thunder-storms, that there are eleven different kinds of them, and that three of them are darted out by Jupiter. Of these the Romans retained only two, ascribing the diurnal kind to Jupiter, and the nocturnal to Summanus; this latter kind being more rare, in consequence of the heavens being colder’. Ovid, in his piece on the Fasti, comments that two black wethers (castrated rams) were the designated sacrifice to Summanus, supporting the idea of him being a chthonic god.

Allegedly a statue to Summanus

 From the little that anyone seems to know about this, Summanus seems to be an early version of Pluto. Hades/ Pluton in Greek myth, the god of the underworld, is of course connected with the abduction of Kore, daughter of Demeter. I’ve always thought this odd, as in Mycenaean Greece, Poseidon, their top god, was god of the underworld, not of the sea (that was Proteus); this would make the abduction incest. Poseidon seems to be an avatar of Hades/Pluton; from the local legends about a shepherdess vanishing in a cave on Monte Summano, it is possible that Summanus acquired some of the myth of the abduction very early, and by a landward route.

How did this cult get to Rome? The temple to Summanus on the Aventine, towards the Circus Maximus, was built in 278-6 BC, but fell into disuse after a bigger and better temple to Jupiter was built. It suggests that some of the allies of Rome in the Veneto, probably the earlier Euganei merged with the Gaulish Veneti, ended up living at the margins of Rome. The Aventine was an area under Plebeian authority, and with temples already to Ceres (the bread dole wheat was milled there) and Liber (Bacchus), so a god with an alimentary aspect would be welcomed there. On the day of his festival, 20 June, Summanus was propriated with summanalia, wheel-shaped cakes of flour, milk and honey. This suggests that this was a meal for the god who had been moved – perhaps the shepherds on the Mons Summani ate these while working, and gave some to the god.

Twin Peaks of Monte Summano

 One aspect that has not been mentioned elsewhere is that Monte Summano has twin peaks, one lower than the other, and so does the Aventine Hill in Rome; perhaps the people who chose it for a cult centre did so because it resembles their sacred mountain.

Rome and India

Someone in India forged a coin of Augustus. It was found near Pondicherry on the Bay of Bengal, which is the ‘wrong’ side of India for Romans. But the real coin must have had considerable value, because you don’t forge a coin that’s worthless. Likewise a coin from India with Greek words on one side and Sanskrit ones on the other, deriving from a Hellenistic kingdom with Greek rulers, turned up a few years ago in a field in Hampshire, England. Whoever deposited that was the last holder of a token of value which was created several cultures and many thousands of miles away.

We are too used to the medieval idea of a farm labourer who never left his manor to recognise that the world was not always as ignorant as it later became. From the time of Alexander in the 330s BC to the rise of Christianity in the 330s AD, Greeks and Romans were often well-versed and familiar in the oriental trade.

While there are several Roman bases in India, mainly in Tamil areas of the south, there are no known Indian bases on Roman territory. But since the Romans in Egypt had Red Sea shipping bases such as Berenice, there could have been entrepôt cities where exotic animals and precious cargoes could have been received for onward shipment.

We are fortunate to have a surviving guide to this trade, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. This tells us about Roman trade with India up to the second century AD. You might consider it to be a briefing note for a merchants’ guild on the prospects for successful trade in that area. Such peripli were part of a long-running tradition of Greek writing about foreigners (xenoi), who were generally to be classified by the Greeks as Dangerous Foreigners and Useful Foreigners. The Indian peoples were definitely the latter, as the text relating to India has none of the common warnings about hostile people which can be seen in the section relating to East Africa.

There is evidence for long-term contact between Europe, North Africa and India. Zeus and his Italian version Iuppiter (Jupiter) are derived from Dyaus Pita, a senior god from the Rig Veda, the father of Indra in Hindu theology. Indra has the thunderbolt later assigned to Zeus. We have no idea how the people who became Greek came across these Hindu gods, but they were worshipped in Tamil lands. It does seem that Zeus only became chief god of the Greeks after the collapse of Bronze-Age Mycenaean culture and the rise of highland people like the Dorians, the so-called ‘Sons of Heracles’.

Ambrosia, the food or sometimes drink of the gods, the substance which gives them immortality, is a word taken from the Sanskrit ‘Amrita’ which is the same substance and the same word, essentially a- (non-) mer (death, the same root as ‘mort’ and ‘murder’). It has been claimed as a survival in Indo-European religion, in which case it survived remarkably well. Amrita also appears in the Rig Veda.

We have here two of many links between Europe and India. This points not to chance religious survivals but towards enduring cultural contacts. The Roman priests known as Flamines (singular Flamen) have a title that is etymologically and functionally close to Brahmins, a high-status priesthood forming part of the Rig Veda culture.

The third had been the invasion of western India by the army of Alexander the Great, and the subsequent Indo-Greek kingdoms, which endured for centuries, helped by the relative weakness of Persia after his destruction of  the Shahs. It took Persia some 450 years to recover its status, so until the recovery, the Romans had land routes to India and beyond. The Periplus dates from the second century AD, the time when sea routes to the east had become more useful.

Rome was familiar with the east during the Principate; after all, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia had written extensively about Brahmins. Pliny’s great interest in minerals served him well too.

One very definite reason to otherwise invisible Indians in the Roman world is the use of elephants in warfare. Hannibal used elephants against Rome in 218BC as everyone knows, and African elephants are impossible to train. The only elephant to survive Hannibal’s attack was his own mount, Surus, ‘the Syrian’, suggesting it was an Indian elephant brought via Syria. Claudius arrived to mark his conquest of (some of) Britain in AD43 with elephants. An elephant eats 400 pounds of food a day, presumably more when in a cold climate. It requires careful handling, which does suggest a squad of trained Indian mahouts, with some men to spare, in case of injury or death, as well as a team dedicated to providing its diet, and a mobile latrine team to prevent animal-borne diseases spreading to the army. Just as a medieval knight needed his support team of squires and grooms, the mounted Indian war elephant must have required a strong support base.

What did the Romans trade with India? They had plenty of things to buy from the East, but what did they sell? There was it seems an export market for gold and silver coin, as well as copper, cloth, wine, and of slightly darker impact, singing boys and young women for the harems of Indian lords. Beasts for the amphitheatre and arena seem to have been a Roman import. Trajan is recorded as importing large numbers of beasts, including tigers, something not seen before in Europe.

Why did the trade decline? It seems to have flourished under Augustus, as heir to the Ptolemies; he sent 120 ships a year from one Egyptian port alone to India, a huge increase on the Hellenistic kings’ levels of trade. Indian political visits became more frequent, and continued into the reign of Justinian; however the revival of Persia and later that of Islam seem to have closed that route for good.

  

Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

We can identify two sorts of secret agents within the Roman world, with some specialist groups alongside them. These are the frumentarii, created by Hadrian, and the agentes in rebus created by Diocletian and particularly active after AD357, when their purpose was modified by Constantius II. Among the agentes were an investigative branch, the curiosi.

Rome had no police force and no prisons for most of the classical period. When L. Sergius Catilina was arrested and charged with treason, in 63BC, he was lodged in a private house of a friend, a sort of bail bond. The lawyers for and against him no doubt used whatever means they could to secure information. We have Cicero’s speeches In Catilinam, but of course not the defence side. The whole process was handled by magistrates. Rome had only two cells, used for lodging accused persons who didn’t have the benefit of rich friends.

Since imprisonment was not used as a punishment, only to hold prisoners before trial, all our information relates to holding, not punishment. For the most part, unless an accused person was cleared, probably due to a bribe, the outcome was a fine for minor offences, execution and exile (social death to anyone who lived in Rome where the right contacts made all the difference). The only quasi-imprisonment available was hard labour in the mines, which was a type of death sentence, since few survived such heavy, dangerous and often poisonous work, and such sentences were reserved for slaves and low-status citizens.

As republican law broke down, anyone could kill almost anyone else with impunity. Julius Caesar had forbidden people in Rome to carry weapons (Lex Julia de vi privata). But he was after all the one who had crossed the Rubicon under arms to conquer Rome in the first place. Under the second triumvirate, anybody could denounce anyone and have them put on the proscription list.

The ‘prison’ at Rome was the Tullianum, originally a spring house, later the site of the medieval Mamertine prison and sometimes referred to as the Carcer (hence ‘incarcerate’), which seems to have included an oubliette from which it was hard to escape and inconvenient captives could be quietly starved to death. There were quarries nearby used to pen prisoners and to one side a long staircase, the Gemonian Stairs (Scalae Gemoniae) down which captives were hurled to their deaths as a form of public execution. It is notable that the Tullianum was across the street from the Senate House and at the top was the Tabularium, where accounts were lodged, suggesting that this was a zone of punishment and death for political and financial crimes.

The Carcer or Tullianum at the foot of the Capitoline Hill

Frumentarii were also used by Balbinus and Pupienus to warn cities across the empire not to support Maximinus Thrax (Hist Aug ‘Balbinus’ 10) 

Maximinus Thrax, emperor AD235- 238

and Gallienus to pick up rumours against him (‘Claudius’ (Gothicus) 17). These had originated as grain buyers for the army, hence the name. Everyone needs to eat, so what could be less conspicuous than a grain merchant? Since the poor of Rome lived for centuries on grain handouts, the frumentarii were a good way to pick up news and gossip.

The system of spies was clearly not very successful, since in the third century many emperors faced rebellions and conspiracies, with the average reign of an emperor being 2 years and 6 months. It is reasonable to assume that everyone knew who the legion’s frumentarius was and to feed him false information.

Diocletian of course reformed much else, so the invention of a system of agentes in rebus would be a priority for him to retain his throne unchallenged. 

Diocletian

In border regions there seems also to have been a system of double agents; these are known from two sources from Britain. The first is a reference in Vindolanda Tablet 162 to a ‘Miles Arcanus’, a secret soldier. As Vindolanda was abandoned before the creation of Hadrian’s Wall, the system of secret soldiers may have been replaced by the frumentarii, or merely supplemented by it. The idea of a secret soldier is, we assume, to remain secret.


During these outstanding events the areani, who had gradually become corrupt, were removed by him [Count Theodosius, father of the later emperor] from their positions. This was an organization founded in early times, of which I have already said something in the history of Constans [Note: that reference did not survive]. It was clearly proved against them that they had been bribed with quantities of plunder, or promises of it, to reveal to the enemy from time to time what was happening on our side. Their official duty was to range backwards and forwards over long distances with information for our generals about disturbances among neighbouring nations (Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 28.3.8)

Since Latin has no definite article and was not punctuated by commas, it might be that the Latin means ‘areani who had gradually become corrupt’. Areani may be a misreading in the surviving MSS for ‘arcani’; the two seem too alike.

In certain places law and order were maintained by urban cohorts (cohortes urbanae), under the control of the urban prefect, the mayor. Only three places in the western empire seem to have received them, and perhaps they were the ones that needed them: Rome itself, with three cohorts, Carthage and Lyon. Since there were no such bodies in Spain or Britain, it is possible that Carthage (the leading city of Roman North Africa) and Lyon (the capital of Gaul) were headquarters for the Praetorian Prefect and that they relied on the security systems handled by the various frumentarii, later agentes in rebus, the curiosi and arcani, which taken together were probably deemed to be sufficient.

We do not know if the three urban cohorts in Rome were organised by area, by function, or both. There would need to be some idea of ‘the patch’ in which cohort operated, as it would need a building; the urban cohorts were considered to be soldiers and would need to store arms and captives, and possibly recovered loot. The urban prefect would allocate tasks at the highest level and make sure each of the three cohorts knew the others were conducting operations which might cross into the others’ patches.

Operationally, the functions would be catching thieves, stopping disorder and attempted coups, as well as dealing with internal matters such as fraud and unauthorised murder. The one thing they didn’t do was patrol the streets, which was the job of the vigiles, the ‘vigilant ones’, who doubled as nightwatchmen and a fire brigade. Presumably paid fire fighters with a financial incentive to be loyal were preferred to amateurs; Trajan forbade Pliny the Younger from allowing the citizens of Nikopolis (in Bithynia-Pontus) from starting a volunteer firemen’s department on the grounds that such things led to uprisings (Letters of the Younger Pliny, Book 10). 

Trajan

At that time (early second century AD) control over such groups was maintained by the provincial governor, but after Septimius Severus or Caracalla stopped governors having operational control over the army, presumably the same applied to all such groups and the vigiles were controlled by the local army commander.

Local jails did exist; St Paul was arrested and locked up in one on Malta (See Acts 27 and 28; also for his shipwrecks 2 Corinthians 25, which also speaks of him being beaten with iron rods). Acts 28.21 has the Roman authorities say to him ‘We neither received letters out of Judæa concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed or spake any harm of thee’. This suggests that a system existed for people to condemn criminals discreetly, either by direct testimony or by letter.

This has been a brief exposition of the role of secret agents in the Roman world. I would welcome any comments.

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.