To conclude my mini-series on the towns of Roman. famous Romano-British city of all: Verulamium, modern-day St Albans. With much of the city surviving, unexcavated, beneath modern-day park- and farmland, and upstanding elements visible alongside the award-winning museum that was founded by Tessa Verney Wheeler and Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s (see CA 211 and 216, September 2007 and March 2008, for more on their work at the site, and p.42 of this issue for more on Tessa), there is much to see there and a long history of reporting by the magazine.
SAINTS AND SINNERS
Current Archaeology’s coverage of Verulamium commences in unexpected circumstances – not down in the valley amid the Roman town, but up on the hill, to the east, where the Anglo-Saxon and medieval cities grew up around the cathedral that had been constructed in the 8th century around the (as-yet undiscovered) 4th-century Romano-British shrine to the martyred Saint Alban. CA 56 (May 1976) reported on disputes at this time around a proposed new chapter house and visitor centre to be built adjacent to the cathedral, and CA 101 (August 1986) followed-up on the subsequent fieldwork, led by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, which examined the evidence for both the early cathedral and the Roman (2nd-4th-century) cemetery around which the later Christian site had evolved.
CA 120 (June 1990) offered the magazine’s first in-depth examination of the city’s archaeology thanks to Ros Niblett, one of the great names of St Albans archaeology, who rightly received her own feature on an amazing career spent digging across the east of England in CA 209 (May 2007). CA 120 offers a great state-of-the-nation review by Ros, covering what was known of Verulamium at this time, and from this date onwards, her fieldwork regularly appears in the magazine. Her excellent book on the city is reviewed in CA 180 (July 2002) and remains the definitive overview of it. Thanks to her campaigning, in the early 2000s ploughing on farmland overlying parts of the city finally ceased, as reported in CA 189 (December 2003). In retrospect, it seems amazing that such an important site was not previously better protected through mutual agreement with its landowners, but such are the vagaries of the UK’s heritage- and land-management regimes.
PRINCES AND DEVIANTS
CA 132 (January 1993) was Ros Niblett’s next feature in the magazine, reporting on fieldwork at a site to the north of the town, which identified a native princely burial made shortly after the Roman invasion. As Ros noted: ‘the importance of the burial was emphasised by the huge size of the enclosure in which it was placed – five acres [two hectares] in extent. Such rectangular burial enclosures are not uncommon in Belgic Britain, but at St Albans they are normally between 10 and 18m across and there is a rich grave at the centre surrounded by satellite burials. This new enclosure was ten times as big in all dimensions – making it one hundred times the acreage… and instead of the central burial surrounded by satellites there was only the single central burial.’
The news of a princely burial found in the north of Verulamium was reported in CA 132, while CA 182 examined the evolution of burial traditions over the 400-year history of the Roman town.
Ros returned in CA 182 (November 2002) to place this and other cemeteries around the city in context, revealing a 400-year history of change in the way that its citizens disposed of their dead – a reflection of how wider society itself was changing. For a nationwide review of such changes as evidenced by the archaeological record, see also CA 244 (July 2010) on Romano-British ‘deviant’ burials.
CLASH OF THE TITANS
CA 237 (December 2009) returned to the city – and unexpectedly ignited a smouldering archaeological dispute. Excavations at Verulamium led by Sheppard Frere in 1955-1961 had transformed ideas about late Roman towns in Britain, with Frere claiming that urban life continued well into the 5th century – but by the early 2000s new work by Neil Faulkner and David Neal, studying old records and re-dating Frere’s discoveries, challenged some of his conclusions. The authors proposed that from the later 3rd century onwards, the aristocratic ‘garden cities’ of c.AD 200 were transformed into the strong-points of a beleaguered Roman state, with the 4th century characterised by slow decline and a marked change in character (a survey of 15 urban bathhouses, for instance, revealed that only nine were still in use in c.AD 300, and none at all in c.AD 400).
While this research was fascinating, even more so was what happened next. In CA 241 (April 2010), Frere – by this point aged 94 – replied at length and with force, standing by his original hypotheses of elite continuity in a detailed rebuttal, commenting that: ‘It is, of course, legitimate to re-interpret the results of others, for this is an essential part of the development of knowledge, provided that the re-interpretation does no violence to the facts discussed. Unfortunately, Faulkner’s and Neal’s conclusions seem biased by wishful thinking’. Faulkner replied briefly in CA 242 (May 2010), but the debate – at least in the pages of Current Archaeology – then went quiet. Frere died in 2015 and sadly Faulkner, too, in 2022. But this all-too-brief flurry of debate demonstrates how much remains to be known about even Verulamium’s excavated portions – and so much of the site is still unexplored.
In CA 237, Neil Faulkner and David Neal re-examined the evidence from Verulamium and argued against Sheppard Frere’s conclusions, finding that instead of urban life continuing well into the 5th century, it instead started to slowly decline around the 4th century. Frere challenged their interpretation in CA 241.
The two most recent examples of fieldwork from the city that appear in the magazine make this point. CA 310 (January 2016) reported on surveys made across Verulamium Park by the Hertfordshire Community Archaeology Geophysics Group, providing a detailed below-ground map of the sections of the city that survive there, both excavated and unexcavated. And as the report’s author, Kris Lockyear, notes: ‘The survey, although large, encompassed only half the town. Thanks to the Earl of Verulam, we have now begun surveying a part of the town that lies within the [neighbouring] Gorhambury estate’. See this month’s ‘Context’ spread (overleaf) for more details of what was found there. Meanwhile, CA 328 (July 2017) reported on the find of a 3rd-century Roman kiln, adding a fifth member to a cluster first identified 30 years ago. Finds like this show how much remains undiscovered across the city.
Before I conclude, I must also flag fieldwork in the environs of Verulamium, for, like any Roman town, the city sat within a larger socio-economic landscape. The neighbouring Gorhambury estate, just north of the city, has already been mentioned, and fieldwork at its villa was reported in CA 56 and 87 (May 1976 and June 1983), revealing a sequence of Iron Age and Roman phases of construction as pre-existing local elites adapted to the fashions of their new Roman neighbours. CA 198 (July 2005) then reported from Turners Hall Farm, 10km (6.2 miles) north of Verulamium, a villa site that includes two of the richest Roman burials ever discovered in Britain, revealing the opulent lifestyles of the occupants. These examples speak to the complex social networks that sustained the city, and hint at how much we still have to learn about it.
Verulamium Museum is one of the finest museums of Roman Britain and will be open daily from 19 September (see stalbansmuseums.org.uk/visit/verulamium-museum); nearby is the large park beneath which lies the Roman town, open during daylight hours (see stalbans.gov.uk/verulamium-park).
