This month’s column comprises the latest in visited Chester and Colchester, and next up is Cirencester (Corinium). While not the most famous Romano-British town, it has fared well in the annals of Current Archaeology, first appearing in CA 29 (November 1971) and recurring regularly since then, including in multiple cover stories – most recently, CA 397 (April 2023).
UNDERSTANDING THE CITY
Issue 29 provides an exceptional ‘state of the nation’ review of what was known of Corinium at that time, by which point sustained fieldwork had been under way for 12 years, sponsored by the Society of Antiquaries of London. This work identified most of its major features, including the wall-line, amphitheatre, cemetery, forum, and basilica. The relative lack of later development (until recently the town barely spread beyond its ancient boundary) meant that the Roman town survived well – less impacted by medieval and modern settlement, and spared the worst excesses of wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction. This makes Cirencester more akin to, say, Wroxeter (see CA 338, May 2018) than other urban explorations of the era. CA 29 also introduced one of the great finds of Corinium, the ‘hare mosaic’ discovered in a house on its eastern edge in Insula XII. CA 42 (January 1974) followed up with additional detail from this site, suggesting that it lay within a farm complex on the periphery of the town.
There is more on this and other mosaic finds from Cirencester in CA 251 (February 2011), which describes Stephen Cosh and David Neal’s multivolume Mosaics in Roman Britain. They explained how, by the 2nd century AD, Corinium was at the centre of a flourishing agricultural community spanning from the Cotswolds to South Wales, second only to London in size – a growth that continued into the 3rd and early 4th centuries AD. Further news (and the city’s second cover story) came in a brief update in CA 45 (July 1974), alongside details of the then-brand-new Corinium Museum (which was not touched on again until the time of its refurbishment 30 years later in CA 194, October 2004). After this focused flurry of activity though, coverage of the town itself went quiet in the pages of Current Archaeology for 20 years. As I explain below, however, other fieldwork nearby kept up the flow of articles exploring the wider area.
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Reporting on Cirencester in Current Archaeology from the 1990s onwards took a different tone to previous decades: this comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the politics of British archaeology in this era. The great spate of ‘rescue’-led urban fieldwork that began in the 1950s/1960s had slowed – as much as anything because local communities had tired of their historic centres being scarred by new road schemes and misplaced office blocks – and a new planning regime, above all Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning (1990), enforced new approaches to the management of the past. In Cirencester this shift is reflected in a move away from large-scale surveys of the town to focused analyses.
CA 281 (August 2013) thus provided the city’s fourth cover story when it examined finds from the Tetbury Road cemetery on its western edge, explored from 2011 onwards as part of a larger redevelopment there. Three intact cremation burials and 71 inhumations were identified, dating between the mid-2nd and early 4th centuries, Corinium’s heyday, and they reflect the wealth and prestige of its inhabitants through the objects buried alongside them. One section of the cemetery included the remains of a stone funerary enclosure/mausoleum, similar to those known from Roman Southwark and Colchester. Just outside this structure lay an incredibly poignant find: the carefully interred remains of a child, aged only two or three years old, buried with a small pottery feeding cup with a little spout to drink from, and a bronze cockerel figurine (one of only eight known from the entire Roman world), most likely an offering to the god Mercury for the child’s safe passage through the underworld. The emotional attachment and struggles of the bereaved family are all too apparent in such a discovery, which speaks through the ages to our common humanity. Another child burial from the site included the remains of a distinctive jet necklace, bracelets, and bangles, and a further burial contained a string of glass and bone beads threaded on a delicate copper-alloy wire chain.
CA 302 (May 2015) returned to the cemetery near the end of this fieldwork, when a rare Roman tombstone was discovered, naming a woman called Bodicacia. CA 304 (July 2015) then reported in ‘News in brief’ that the local Corinium Brewery (based a stone’s throw from the findspot) had named an ale after her, which at the time of writing this column was still available (see www.coriniumales.co.uk). The same issue includes a feature that dives more deeply into the evidence of life – and death – in wider Roman Britain thanks to finds such as those from Cirencester’s cemetery and elsewhere. A fascinating counterpoint from CA 345 (December 2018) is the examination there of evidence for Iron Age religion and continuity of practice in the Roman world, including in and around Cirencester. Most recently, however, visits to Cirencester have focused on a different section of society: the gladiators who plied their trade in the amphitheatre on Corinium’s western outskirts. CA 396 (March 2023) and CA 397 (April 2023) delve into this murky world, with the latter issue providing the town’s most recent cover picture: a fragment of decorated Samian ware depicting gladiatorial combat.
OUTSIDE THE BOUNDARIES
A consistent theme of Current Archaeology’s reporting from Cirencester has been news from the array of Romano-British sites that are located nearby. This was a well-settled locale before, during, and after the Romans, so there are some fine villa sites: for example, at Barnsley Park just to the north-east (CA 72, July 1980); at Ditches, near Bagendon, just to the north (CA 217, April 2008); and, most famously of all, at Chedworth, further north again (see my column focused on this site in CA 356, November 2019). As the magazine has consistently demonstrated, these Roman settlements were inserted into an existing, richly populated Iron Age landscape, as evidenced by the settlements identified at Claydon/Clayden Pike to the east in CA 75 (February 1981) and CA 121 (September 1990); at Horcott Quarry in CA 224 (November 2008) and also to the east near Lechlade; and at the site of the present-day Cotswold Water Park to the south (also in CA 121). These sites were all identified due to quarrying (especially for sand and gravel) and led to extensive, multi-site, multi-period discoveries uncovering features dating well back into prehistory.
Infrastructure work around Cirencester has shed further light on settlements across the Cotswolds during this period, especially along the A417/A419 trunk roads to the north and west. CA 159 (September 1998) explored Birdlip Quarry near Cheltenham, a multi-period site on the A417 – aka Ermin Street, the Roman road that linked Glevum (Gloucester) and Corinium (Cirencester) to Calleva (Silchester). Most recently, CA 414 (September 2024) provided an update from this route, when a Roman horse-changing station – effectively, an ancient motorway service station – was discovered during works on the A417 ‘missing link’ to the north of Cirencester, not far from iconic Iron Age Crickley Hill (see my column in CA 409, April 2024). For those of you fascinated by road schemes both ancient and modern, I also flag for you CA 314 (May 2016), which discusses Roman road alignments and the skill of their surveyors. Nothing much really has changed in terms of such technicalities in 2,000 years: the machinery may be bigger and fancier, but the surveyors use most of the same skills and face many of the same challenges.
To find out more about Cirencester, the amphitheatre of the town is in the care of English Heritage (see www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/cirencester-amphitheatre) and it has an excellent museum of its Roman history: the Corinium (https://coriniummuseum.org).
