Baths in Roman culture
Baths represented an important symbolic custom in Roman daily life, and a visit to them was a daily ritual. Clients met their patrons, discussed business matters and exchanged gossip in an environment that provided confidentiality and discretion.
Date
Public bathing was a novelty in Britain, and baths complexes were less of a priority than basilicas and fora. No inscriptions recording baths - except in forts - have survived, so archaeology is our only source of information. At Exeter, for example, the magnificent midfirst-century legionary baths were demolished and replaced with a new basilica on the same site. Unfinished early baths at Wroxeter, probably from the legionary fortress, were also demolished and replaced with a forum-basilica. However, in regions where the tribal leadership had been adopting Roman culture from before the conquest, baths were introduced much earlier. Silchester, St Albans, London and Bath all had public baths by the late first century. Even so, baths remained an optional extra. The St Albans baths complex burned down by the mid-second century, and was left in ruins for at least 50 years.
Design
As physical structures, urban public baths were probably the most sophisticated examples of Roman architecture in Britain. In their first phase, the baths at Silchester consisted of a changing room (apodyterium) between the main suite of baths - warm room (tepidarium), hot room (caldarium) and cold room (frigidarium) - and the open exercise yard (palaestra), itself surrounded by a covered portico. The design clearly owed much to archetypes found in the Mediterranean, where open-air exercise areas were much more usable than in Britain. The main baths were vaulted, a necessity in an environment in which constant warm moist air wreaked havoc with conventional roof timbers. This is exactly what happened in the first phase of the baths at Bath, instigating the reinforcement of roof supports and the replacement of the timbers with a vaulted roof. The resulting massive piers are some of the most conspicuous remains on the site. Baths were expensive to operate, requiring a continuous supply of clean water and abundant fuel to maintain the appropriate temperatures in the different rooms.
Reconstruction drawing of the public baths at Viroconium Cornoviorum, which were entered from the palaestra (Pl) at left. Visitors passed through the frigidarium (F) to reach the tepidarium (T) and caldarium (C). Outside was a small, open-air swimming pool, or piscine (Ps).
The baths at Caerwent, Wroxeter and Leicester substituted exercise halls for the more unsuitable open areas. Wroxeter’s baths [ 134] were not operational until the latter part of the second century, perhaps delayed by the necessity of rebuilding the forum that was destroyed in the Antonine fire. The main sequence of baths opened off the exercise hall, with the caldarium and the frigidarium having individual plunge baths. The hall was 73 x 19.8 m (240 x 65 ft), making it easily comparable in scale to some of the administrative basilicas. Another, smaller wing of hot rooms was subsequently tacked onto the tepidarium. The baths also included a latrine and, rare for Britain, a swimming pool in the courtyard outside. The complex was so large that parts of it remain unexplored. Leicester’s baths were comparable in scale, but the design was significantly different; the baths seem to have been arranged as a separate wing from the exercise hall, and were connected by other rooms and corridors.
Later history
The massive masonry required for Roman baths resisted weathering and decay. Consequently, although its baths and basilica gradually fell into ruin during the late and post-Roman period, Wroxeter has one of the largest upstanding fragments of a Roman public building. The ‘Old Work’ is the doorway from the frigidarium into the baths-basilica. Another large remnant of a bathsbasilica is the Jewry Wall, in Leicester [135]. However, the most remarkable remains of all are at Bath (see Chapter 6, ‘Roman Bath’), where the baths complex has survived in a miraculous state, thanks not only to its scale, but also to the fact that it was buried by silt and debris when management of the hot springs had ceased.
135. Leicester (Leicestershire).
The Jewry Wall at Ratae Corieltauvorum. This massive piece of masonry formed part of the second-century town baths, and survived by being incorporated into a Saxon church.
World History
