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Large Roman villa found in England — 17 Comments

  1. The Britons who remained after the Romans gradually left did not favor that type of housing – neither the houses themselves nor how the population was organised around them. Many of them thus were just left empty, with weather, flora, and fauna overtaking them and obscuring them. The roads that led to them were usually abandoned as well, as they no longer went anywhere that people wanted to go, unless they overlapped with some other favored route from hamlet to hamlet. Other invasions from the North and West of Europe were used to similar organisations of villages or defended areas rather than open unprotected low-lying villas, and settled in similar fashion to the previous occupants. They intermarried with them more as well. The Roman Occupation really was a superimposed society, separate from its surroundings.

  2. What once was tall and strong
    now lies in ruins, forgotten
    these many millenia.
    What once symbolized the power
    and glory that was mighty Rome,
    now but a barn’s floor.
    How transitory is youth’s arrogance
    vainly imagining itself to be eternal,
    forever in denial of its certain fate.
    Yet what choice do we have
    but to build anew, forever
    at war with time’s entropy?
    That is youth’s mission, rarely ever understood
    to renew civilization and keep barbarism
    from our hearth’s door.

  3. A LOT of the ancient structures were leveled by way of the Viking.

    Major houses // estates were magnets for Viking raiders.

    Hence, their wholesale abandonment once it became clear that the Vikings just could not be stopped.

    &&&&

    The famous Roman roads have since been revealed to be overlays of Celtic roads of ancient origin — both in France and Eastern Germany.

    Astonishingly, the Celtic road could be discovered by merely digging a further meter down into the ground.

    It’s now known that the Roman’s advance and conquest basically always followed gold mining. Germany had no gold deposits, whereas France, Spain, England and Romania all had significant gold mines in antiquity.

    The Spanish and Romanian and English works are now destinations — for the technological tourist.

  4. “In New England we’ve got some old buildings, but nothing quite like that.”

    There’s an old saying: “One of the differences between Europeans and Americans is that Americans think 200 years is old, and Europeans think 200 miles is a long way.”

  5. A metaphor for our times:
    “the remains — some of the most important to be found in decades — have now been re-buried, as Historic England cannot afford to fully excavate and preserve such an extensive site.”
    Re-buried. Right.
    And delete all references as to location, because the coming muslim hordes will dig it up and destroy anything tied to Rome.

  6. Britain doesn’t have the money to excavate this site? How about handing some of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) on the dole brooms and spades and tell them to start — carefully — digging?

  7. Not enough money? Unreal. It’s not like socialist governments aren’t frittering away trillions (UK-style) in spending on horrid things. This is like buying truckloads of scratchy brown sweaters (jumpers!) instead of a beautiful satin gown scattered with diamonds….

    The archeologists should do a few fund-raising galas and see if they can attract some well-heeled patrons of the arts. SOMEbody must have the money for this!

  8. Geoffrey Britain Says:
    April 18th, 2016 at 3:13 pm
    What once was tall and strong
    now lies in ruins, forgotten
    these many millenia.
    What once symbolized the power
    and glory that was mighty Rome,
    now but a barn’s floor.
    ..
    ****
    That was a lovely poem.
    ***
    Roy Says:
    April 18th, 2016 at 5:16 pm..

    There’s an old saying: “One of the differences between Europeans and Americans is that Americans think 200 years is old, and Europeans think 200 miles is a long way.”
    *** So true!

  9. Actually leaving Roman mosaics buried is standard archaeological practice, because it’s the best way to preserve them. But it’s customary over here to conclude every news story with the pious regret that the Government is not spending more money on something. It’s like saying “Bless you” when somebody sneezes.

  10. “Beverly Says:
    April 19th, 2016 at 12:19 am

    Not enough money? Unreal. It’s not like socialist governments aren’t frittering away trillions (UK-style) in spending on horrid things.”

    The needy! The hurting! The vulnerable! The unloved! The sexually dissatisfied and under-appreciated! And you want to spend precious social funds and capital on selfish knowledge? Our children! Our children! Make all welcome! All!! Alllllllllll!

    Yeah, things are tight all over.

    There is, to paraphrase that great Canadian patriot, socialist bureaucrat and hand-wringing opportunist, the former Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, “There is soooo much human need … we have to decide what kind of people we are. Sniff sniff”

    It is with great regret that the Trustee Board took the decision for Bedes World to cease operation from Friday 12 February 2016 due to a lack of funds.

    Steps are being taken to put the company into administration through the appointment of an Insolvency Practitioner.”

  11. Sad for the property owners..

    they cant build
    they cant modify the land
    they wont get a cent for anything found
    and no one will want their property, so they cant sell

  12. When the New Islamic Party comes to power, money will be found to uncover the antiquities that they may be methodically destroyed.

  13. The funnier thing is that despite all the hoopla on how pollution is killing the planet, you can barely find traces of prior civilizations who littered more than we do… oh, you can find large piles of bones and so on, but nary much of anything else… same with us… or havent you noticed no one has found much bakelite surviving the ages.. even the pyramids are dissolving in a reality in which permanent is just a concept with no reality in reality

  14. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

    On a lighter note …an early wedding tale.

    We honeymooned at a manor in Wales (many years ago) outside Talgarth, and one of the almost visceral delights was driving around the country side (on the wrong side of the road! – an adventure on its own), and coming around a bend, and seeing …a castle, lit by the evening rays through breaking clouds. Often.

    (There was an 11th century motte and baily tower out our window – Bronllys Tower – which wasn’t as impressive as the Arthurian castles we came across, but was still pretty damn cool lol.)

    The feeling of turning a bend and seeing a structure that Man had built a thousand and more years before never got old.

    Anyways. In our travels about the Welsh country-side, we also visited the Roman era ruins at Isca …also called Caerleon.

    Yeah. Camelot. The real one (well, maybe …whatever: good enough for me).

    …pretty neat experience right there for this child of Okies (with one branch of forebears who’d walked to North America) who’d barely been anywhere at all ever before besides Cali’.

    I bring it up to say: the Brits have plenty of Roman sites that are open to the public. They’re not rare. The island is immersed in history and legend and you can be surrounded by it.

    So kudos to them for covering up a site until they have the funds to do it right. I don’t think I’d fault them o’er much about keeping the site pristine during the interim.

  15. blert Says: A LOT of the ancient structures were leveled by way of the Viking.

    not valid.. sorry…

    the area is in the wessex part, way to the west of london, and wasnt even in the danes area… though there were burhs in the area, this was not one of them

    Burghal Hidage

    an Anglo-Saxon document providing a list of over thirty fortified places (burhs), the majority being in the ancient Kingdom of Wessex, and the taxes (recorded as numbers of hides) assigned for their maintenance

    The Burghal Hidage offers a detailed picture of the network of burhs that Alfred the Great designed to defend his kingdom from the predations of Viking invaders

    After his victory over the Danes at the Battle of Edington (878) and the departure of another Viking army from Fulham in 880, Alfred the Great set about building a system of fortified towns or forts, known as burhs, in response to the Viking threat These burhs included former Roman towns (where stone walls were repaired and perimeter ditches sometimes added), temporary forts and substantial new towns

    they built UP the areas not buried them..

    and your talking 700 to 800 years apart…
    ceasar invaded england in 50BC…
    The fortifications after daneslaw were 800AD…
    by 410 they withdrew…

    The English conquest of the district now known as Wiltshire began in 552 AD with the victory of Saxon Cynric over the native Britons at Old Sarum, by which the way was opened to Salisbury Plain.

    By the 9th century the district had acquired a definite administrative and territorial organisation, Walstan, ealdorman of the Wilsaetan, being mentioned as early as 800 as repelling an attempted invasion by the Mercians. Moreover, Wiltunscire is mentioned by Asser in 878, in which year the Danes established their headquarters at Chippenham and remained there a year, plundering the surrounding country. In the time of Athelstan mints existed at Old Sarum, Malmesbury, Wilton, Cricklade and Marlborough. Wilton and Salisbury were destroyed by the Danish invaders under Sweyn I of Denmark in 1003, and in 1015 the district was harried by Canute.

    List of Roman villas in England
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_villas_in_England

    usually people just built over them… often taking parts of them for local housing once abandoned long enough. nothing more complicated than that… in this case, they were probably buried for aesthetic reasons given that prior to the modern era people had little respect for ancient grounds and areas of rubble.

    heck… want to know where the missing parts of the collesium are? they are all around the area as people took marble and stone and used that as part of their foundations.

    under london and other cities are huge vaults of properties that they just built over… this is expecially so in france where these ways used to be used. WWII forced lots of them to be boarded up and separated rather than connected as they were, often with bars and warehouses so that deliveries happened underground privately and were harder to rob.

    The Britons, within a few generations, had been exposed to urban institutions and facilities that would have been unthinkable before the invasion. For rural people in parts of the remote north their world had now become overrun with forts and roads that carved up the landscape and transformed it into a part of an economic and social system that stretched to Egypt, and even further beyond. Even Chinese silk made it to Colchester. The most obscure locations had access to the Roman economic system. In parts of the southwest, Scotland, Northumberland and Cumbria there would be nothing like this again until the arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century.
    This is absolutely no exaggeration. The Roman ‘achievement’ was unparalleled in the ancient world and would have been remarkable by any historical standards until electricity and mechanization arrived. Britain in many respects is where the results were most dramatic, simply because there was so little to build on in the first place

    The Boudican Revolt offered only chaos and disorder. (so much for being a feminist hero)

    the bulk of the population found it easy enough to accept an alternative that offered stability, security and economic well-being. Most people prefer governments that protect them from violent deaths and which create a sense of stability in an uncertain world. It is easy to say the Britons had no choice, but this credits Rome with the ability to impose and sustain brutal oppression without quarter. This is simply not true. The Roman army was not big enough to do that, however large the garrison of Britain, and nor did the Roman government consider this a desirable way to rule. Inclusion through patronage, however insidious and cynical, was the way Rome maintained her power, not by the sword.

    When the theatre at St Albans fell out of use and became a rubbish dump in the late fourth century, it did so probably because the outlawing of paganism made it a redundant part of town life and not because town life had fallen apart.

  16. Lullingstone is a perfect example. What had been a house where someone in the late fourth century had been prepared to spend money on remodelling the structure, installing mosaics and then the house church, had burnt down by the early fifth century. Houses had always been susceptible to fire, but they were usually rebuilt. Now here, as just about everywhere else, the house was abandoned. Portable villa wealth either found its way into hoards like Hoxne, or was spirited away. Some was appropriated by whatever remained of the provincial government to buy off barbarians, or was simply stolen. The Traprain Law (East Lothian) and the Coleraine (Ballinrees) hoards from Scotland and Ireland respectively are ‘Hacksilber’ hoards, meaning that the treasure they contained had been accumulated purely as bullion. Chopped up, crushed and damaged silver plate seems to have been gathered by weight, with no interest or concern for aesthetics unlike Hoxne, Mildenhall or Thetford where the pieces were clearly individually treasured. Traprain and Coleraine, the latter datable to post-410 by coins, represent either booty or bribes.

    coinage in Britain ended with the reign of Constantine III (407-11). The coins bearing his name in the Hoxne hoard were amongst the very last official supplies to arrive before the end. No coins were manufactured in Britain to make good the shortfall. The silver siliquae coins that remained available, including some of the Hoxne coins, were often clipped. It was both a reflection of the breakdown in law and order, and that bullion was hard to come by. The only Roman coins that came in now did so in tiny quantities, probably with individuals. The Patching (West Sussex) hoard was made up mostly of coins dating to between 337 and 411. But the hoarder had also been able to get hold of later material. The latest coin was of Libius Severus (461-5), showing that the hoard had not been buried before then. But the hoard is so exceptional that it only emphasizes how the everyday small-change cash economy had ceased to function. The Libius Severus coin is one that would never have entered Britain by any normal route. Either the hoarder was a trader passing through, or someone who had continental contacts. All the base-metal coins that made casual day-to-day transactions had disappeared.

    Even pottery skills were apparently lost within a few decades. The massive industries like the Alice Holt potteries were simply abandoned, presumably because the collapse of a broader town-based economy made them unsustainable. It is of course inconceivable that people ceased to need bowls and dishes, but they either made use of what was left or turned to making vessels out of wood, which of course does not survive. There are exceptions.

    Every Roman settlement of consequence saw its buildings deteriorating and eventually falling into ruin. The villa at Frocester Court (Gloucs) remained in use but in reduced circumstances, until it too fell down. The villa at Orton Hall Farm, near Peterborough, was apparently abandoned, but Saxon-type timber buildings were erected in and around the old villa buildings suggesting the estate itself continued in use. A good case has been made for the survival of the villa estate boundaries at Withington (Gloucs) into the seventh century. Here the present parish boundaries preserve an estate granted to a convent in 690 by Aethelred, king of Mercia (675-704), which quite possibly included the same land once farmed from the villa. The headquarters building of the legionary fortress at York may have survived until the ninth century when it collapsed, and buried evidence that it had been used for agricultural purposes.

    Wroxeter has become the classic modern excavation where nearly thirty years of work on the baths-basilica site recovered an accumulation of evidence for disintegration of the main structure by the fifth century, but not its abandonment. Instead, several timber buildings were erected within the ruins of the old baths basilica and remained in use until some indeterminate time in the sixth century. Then much of what remained of the old Roman building was cleared away and a new series of timber buildings erected. This has been used to argue for the maintenance of some sort of centralized authority, very probably ecclesiastical. Since the church is the one organization we have evidence for in the fifth century the case is a good one but is, as yet, unsubstantiated.

    At Birdoswald the same pattern of physical degeneration of masonry structures, followed by replacement with two successive timber halls on the footings of one of the granaries, was uncovered. Accurate dating is impossible but occupation stretching into the sixth century is feasible. If so, this may be evidence for continuity of occupation. However, strictly speaking it is also possible that the timber buildings were actually built somewhat later, following a hiatus.

    Those who lived at Birdoswald were unable or unwilling to repair the fort structures, whether or not they erected timber halls in the fifth century or much later. Villas with evidence of continued occupation always show that the people living there were unable to maintain the buildings properly or to care for mosaics, baths or anything else that required effort or skills beyond that needed for subsistence. All the support crafts and the labour needed to maintain towns with complex public buildings, or villa houses and their attendant facilities had disappeared. We never have conclusive evidence about who these later occupants were. They could just as easily have been the descendants of wealthy fourth-century villa owners or people who had simply moved into vacant premises and made of them what they could. Generally described in excavation reports as ‘squatters’, these spectral figures lit fires on mosaic floors, executed ham-fisted repairs where absolutely essential and otherwise let the dilapidation continue unabated until the houses were finally abandoned.

    Owners run out of money, people run out of skills, property is abandoned, pieces are taken for other things, dirt is put on them to form a new foundation for new buildings, and so on and so forth…

    not as romantic as viking seiges, but this is how it is ALL over the world mostly… even the great roman and greek buildings were not destroyed by even WWI or WWII… they just sat around and rotted… their stones being taken for foundations, others being cut up for gravestones… others left to sit

    in fact, you might notice that the things that survived tended to be too big to fill in, or on hills, in which you had to dismantle and level the land, not heap crap on it to level it then rebuild.

    its all economic… to cover something and rebuild is cheap and the prior edifices often add a strength to the new… whole cities have done this.. (heck, a few egyptian cities were wholly moved)… however, when on a hill, you now had to remove stuff. that took money and resources away from what was being built and it was easier just to build someplace else without that cost.

    same in newark or detroit.. an empty cleared lot will more likely have something rebuilt on it than one with a rotting building that requires expense before you can even start.

    the way the palestinians destroyed the green houses that israel left them is a great example… the new residents could not operate or maintain, so they just tore them apart… left the crap in place then whined how they didnt live as well as the isrealis.

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