The authors offer an exhaustive archaeological survey of the Roman town of Winchester—in Latin, Venta Belgarum ‘Marketplace of the Belgae’. This Brittonic tribe of putatively continental origin (according to Caesar) came in the first century BC to dominate much of modern central and southern Hampshire in what was to become the Roman province of Britannia Superior in the next century. The study includes what has been discovered of pre-Roman Winchester before AD 70, when the Roman town was built on the site of an Iron Age oppidum, the Latin term for a large fortified hilltop serving as a meeting place, trading post and cattle pen. However, the coverage of the two volumes extends well beyond the end of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century, after which the walled town was apparently called Venta Castrum ‘Venta Fort’, since the name was subsequently rendered in Old English as Wintanceastre when occupied by Germanic-speaking immigrants from northern Germany. These newcomers converted to Christianity in the seventh century, founding a church, later known as Old Minster, around AD 650 in what became the central place of the kingdom of the West Saxons. This date anchors the end of the two volumes’ detailed coverage, though some later Anglo-Saxon and medieval developments are included.
The first volume reviews the earliest excavations of Winchester in the nineteenth century, then fresh discoveries at fourteen sites within and just outside the walls of the town from 1961-71 and their subsequent analyses by the Winchester Excavations Committee, concluding with gazetteers of defenses, streets and buildings. Volume 2 catalogs about 4,000 artifacts found in these 1961-71 excavations, along with earlier discoveries or finds in separate Winchester collections. These include coins; pottery; industrial remains and tools; inscriptions, statuary and religious objects; personal possessions and home furnishings; equestrian and military equipment; miscellaneous objects; and (from the post-Roman period) Byzantine coins of the sixth and seventh centuries, plus early Anglo-Saxon pottery, beads, combs, vessels, glass and weapons. A “Finds Concordance” is also supplied with an appendix on “Lankhills Reconsidered,” which reviews the chronology of finds from the late Roman cemetery 500 meters north of the town, including a fresh assessment of groups who arrived c. AD 350 and those who arrived c. AD 390, just before the collapse of the town’s civic organization in the early fifth century.
The earliest record of the remains of Roman Winchester dates to 1683 when “a Brick Pavement of the tessellated Work” was discovered during Christopher Wren’s construction of the King’s House, a new palace for Charles II (7). The excavations of 1961-71 uncovered three sides of a very large Iron Age site of almost 50 acres—“the Oram’s Arbour enclosure”—not centered as usual on the crest of a hill, but rather sloping down eastwards towards the ford of the River Itchen upon which a regular grid of Roman streets was laid out. Also located during the 1960s were the south gate and western defenses, the eastern and southern limits of the Roman forum, a complex of public buildings in the center of the town, a temple and several townhouses that had been renovated from earlier timber structures into fine stone masonry dwellings with tessellated floors. After the withdrawal of the Roman government from Britain soon after AD 400, the crumbling town continued to be occupied in the fifth and sixth centuries as revealed by dark peaty soil and postholes representing the organic remains of domestic timber dwellings with thatched roofs, leaving an extensive layer of “dark earth” that effectively sealed the Roman streets below. The modern street plan was a later Anglo-Saxon and medieval overlay largely independent of the Roman grid. Anglo-Saxon pottery was found in the very center of the town, revealing its early occupation by these newcomers, and the collapsed Roman south gate was revealed to be “heavily worn and roughly patched during the post-Roman period, indicating that passage had continued through the opening, prior to the blocking of the entry in the sixth century or later” (11).
However, the walls of the late Anglo-Saxon town and medieval city followed almost precisely the line of the Roman defenses, so that Winchester continued to dominate the narrowest crossing point of the Itchen flowing from north to south below, straddling a major east-west transhumance route across the grassy chalk downs of Hampshire “from prehistoric times onwards” (25). Roman Winchester remained well-situated to control both “local and long-distance communication routes,” becoming the hub of seven Roman roads. And even though the Itchen is too shallow south of Winchester for ship-borne transport, the town is only a dozen miles or so from the head of Southampton Water with the Solent beyond, a principal access point for sea-borne trade and communication with the Continent from pre-Roman times until the later Middle Ages.
In the prehistory of the surrounding countryside—the chalk downs of Wessex—major changes began after 1500 BC as permanent settlements with post-built structures and clearly demarcated fields and territorial dikes replaced more mobile communities “who invested great energy in constructing” solar and funerary monuments like Stonehenge (38). Then, by the middle of the first century BC, smaller, newer groups began to appear in the area, issuing “a wide variety of localised uninscribed coins which were stylistically similar to those from Belgic Gaul,” apparently reflecting “the arrival and influence of powerful groups and leaders from Belgic Gaul during the course of Caesar’s Gallic wars (58-50 BC). On the basis of the coins, Winchester and the surrounding region appear from about 40 BC down to about the time of the Roman invasion to have been integrated into the southern kingdom of Commius and his successors” (48).
At 143 acres, Winchester within the walls had become the fifth largest town in late Roman Britain by the mid-third to the mid-fourth centuries AD, following London, Cirencester, St Albans and Wroxeter. The stone construction of its town walls during the third century may have been intended as much to express civic pride as to provide protection against potential enemies. Britannia Superior in general saw an economic boom during this period, developing large-scale pottery industries and producing fine tableware in nearby New Forest, as well as substantial minting of coins, cloth production and the construction of many luxurious country villas on an imperial model. Much of this new wealth was apparently generated by strong economic contacts with the Continent through “state-contracted and also possibly private trade in British goods, a trade that would principally have been in agricultural products and textiles, which are not usually archaeologically detectable. Britannia was also relatively stable and secure by comparison with other provinces in north-west Europe, parts of which were suffering barbarian invasions and economic decline. The British garrison had also apparently been heavily reduced during the third century, presumably reducing the burden on British producers of the need to meet its demands, probably through ‘tax in kind’” (74).
However, things changed quickly in the second half of the fourth century. Building in stone ceased; the standard of living declined; homes were demolished and not replaced, just as elsewhere in the Roman diocese of Britannia, even while the urban population of Winchester remained the same or even swelled. It appears that some of these new townspeople crowded into “ephemeral structures such as tents or wooden or cob huts, amongst destroyed or decaying stone buildings” (81), perhaps as job-seekers or refugees in troubled times. Streets were still repaved, however, and as many as twenty bastions built around the defensive perimeter, while coins “continued to reach the town in significant quantities until 402, the latest date at which Roman coins were regularly supplied to Britain” (81).
The authors conclude: “This change in urban conditions can perhaps be related to military problems attested in historical sources, such as the invasion of Britannia by Scots, or Attacotti, and Picts in 360, and the so-called ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367, when Britannia was attacked by the Picts, Scots, Attacotti, and Saxons, and Count Theodosius arrived from the Continent with a field army of 2000 troops to deal with the problem. Venta may have become a major military centre, perhaps serving as a base for the late Roman field army; indeed, there is some evidence from the Lankhills cemetery and elsewhere for a continental military presence at Winchester around this time … The insecurity caused by barbarian invasions and the potential opportunities afforded by an increased military and/or state presence might have attracted substantial numbers of immigrants from the countryside, a development which may also have contributed to a breakdown in urban social order” (81). In particular, the “Roman cemetery at Lankhills outside the north gate at Venta provides the clearest evidence for the end of organised life inside the walled town” (87), since burials within intramural cemeteries soon petered out, testifying “to the abandonment of the organised treatment of the dead and thus to the ending of town life within the wall. No graves have yet been found within the walled town or its near surroundings of any survivors or immediate newcomers, whoever they might have been” (87). The late Roman population boom in Winchester was thus not a sign of urban health, but premonitory of the town’s imminent demise in the early fifth century. And, the authors somberly note that it was not until four and a half centuries later, in the mid- to late-ninth century, “that Winchester again became a recognisable urban centre” (82). By the first decade of the fifth century, Romano-British Winchester had already become more like an armed camp fending for itself than a strong and prosperous outpost of empire. In 407 the usurper Constantine III took the remaining Roman field army back to the Continent and in 409, according to the Greek historian Zosimus (Historia Nova 6.5.3), the Romano-Britons were forced to take up arms in their own defense, hoping to protect their cities (Greek póleis) from the barbarian threat (94).
For the defense of Winchester their efforts were unsuccessful, and newcomers came to occupy a shell of the old town which soon began to deteriorate. “During the fifth century the gates of Venta began to collapse. The south gate fell down over its forecourt, leaving traffic to continue over the rubble, wearing smooth the upper surfaces of the fallen masonry … before the passage was closed” (88). The Roman east gate was lost as well and the walls and bastions continued to decay until they were refurbished in the mid- to late-ninth century by the West Saxon kings. The “Roman water-management system also broke down, resulting in a significant and lasting rise in the water-table, and allowing natural water-channels to re-establish themselves in the eastern parts of the town,” flowing to the river below (89).
In the intervening centuries, however, some sort of authority seems to have emerged from this decaying central place, as suggested “by a notable concentration of settlements and cemeteries in the surrounding countryside” (87), many within a radius of only three miles. And this murky period of time comes to an end with the arrival of a Roman missionary Birinus in 635, first bishop of the West Saxons. Birinus died in Dorchester, but his body was later translated to Winchester and interred in the Old Minster around 650, the first church built there by Cenwalh, king of Wessex 642-72, shortly after that king’s conversion to Christianity. The city’s first bishop Wine was consecrated in the early 660s, the first of an unbroken line of episcopal successors until the present day.
These two volumes reveal a remarkable depth and detail of discovery, covering a breathtaking expanse of time. They are a definitive achievement, even though precise locations of some key structures of Roman and Anglo-Saxon Winchester remain to be discovered. The volumes represent six decades of patient, assiduous and careful excavation, as well as thoughtful analysis, on the part of its two authors and 62 other contributors, plus over 50 staff and volunteers. The result is a model of its kind, beautifully produced, illustrated and indexed by Archaeopress.