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The Small Towns of Roman Britain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Malcolm Todd
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Abstract

Those loosely planned road-side settlements, Strassensiedlungen, or ‘small towns’ and minor settlements as they are generally known in Britain, are a phenomenon common to all the provinces of the Roman Empire, but perhaps because of their very familiarity, and the difficulties attending study of their remains, they have never been systematically examined, even in a single province. The large-scale attention accorded by excavators to some major Roman towns has never been directed towards humbler settlements. A brief study of those in Germania Inferior and eastern Gallia Belgica was attempted by the late Franz Oelmann in 1922. Oelmann tried to demonstrate, on evidence that has not been greatly enlarged since 1922, that the Strassensiedlungen of northern Gaul, the Germanies and Raetia were principally settlements of traders, and not agricultural villages.

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Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 1 , November 1970 , pp. 114 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © Malcolm Todd 1970. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

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5 Irchester: RIB, 233. It is true that this strator's only link with Irchester may be the fact that he died there. On the other hand, the distribution of the staff of provincial governors on special duties in other provinces suggests that stationing of this man here is a distinct possibility.

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80 See note 13, p. 117 above.

81 And close to cities too: e.g. Wroxeter, : JRS, lv (1965), 87. Excavation has not yet demonstrated whether these are contemporary with the city or earlier.Google Scholar

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85 Possibly this view has come to general notice through the writings of geographers who were compelled to rely upon out-of-date archaeological information: e.g. H. C. Darby, ‘The Clearing of the English Woodlands’, Geography 1951, 71 ff., and Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape (London 1955), 35Google Scholar ff. It is worth remembering that these two writers did not have the advantage of using the third edition of the O.S. Map of Roman Britain. On the progress and difficulties of clearance in the early Medieval period: Hoskins, in Poole, A. L. (ed.) Mediaeval England2 (Oxford, 1958), 9 ff.Google Scholar

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99 But several others may prove on further examination to have been industrial centres. Kettering (Northants.) probably had some connexion with the nearby iron-stone deposits (VCH, Northants., i, 194). Ancaster presumably was a centre for quarrymen, and for craftsmen dependent upon the excellent Ancaster limestone. Norton (Yorks. E.R.) was a site where pottery-making rose to great importance in the late third and fourth centuries. This settlement is distinct from the vicus of the fort at Malton, which lies three miles away to the east (Clark, Kitson, Gazetteer of Roman Remains in East Yorkshire (Leeds, 1935), 113Google Scholar). Wilderspool (Lanes.) was certainly preoccupled with industry, but its history was peculiar, in that all the large-scale activity dates from the second cent., and most of it from the Antonine period. (T. May, Warrington's Roman Remains (1904), corrected in Northern History, iii (1968), 13–16).Google Scholar

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