Small towns appear to have become more prominent in Britain in the late Roman period (Millett 1990: 143-56) and are useful for examining late Roman urbanism. Despite the term 'small town’, the settlements represent success and were perhaps representing more indigenous interpretations of Roman urbanism (Hingley 1997a; Millett 2001). Some small towns were actually quite large, such as Water Newton in Cambridgeshire (Fincham 2004) and Elms Farm, Heybridge, in Essex (Atkinson and Preston 1998). Some so-called specialist religious sites such as Bath also have considerable evidence of domestic occupation (Cunliffe 2000: 118),94 and at Frilford in Oxfordshire there are spreads of domestic occupation, as well as a large cemetery, probably indicating a fairly large number of inhabitants here (Hingley 1985: 208). The prominence of religious activity within many of the towns connected with temples, public buildings, and their settings in the landscape might also make such divisions of settlements problematic.
Many of the small towns show evidence of pre-Roman activity, but others began after the conquest, being associated with forts or Roman road networks. Though buildings within small towns were for the most part not monumental or stone built, the settlements were not failures or economically poor. They suggest alternative ways of living and organising space, which included central open spaces (see Chapter 6). Temples are found at many of the small towns, indicating that these were important features of the settlements (Burnham and Wacher 1990). Some bathhouses have been identified, such as at Godmanchester (H. Green 1975: 198), but these may not necessarily have been public buildings, some instead being private ventures; others may have been attached to houses or mansiones, a number of which are known within small towns. What is most important about small towns for this study is that they represent the significance and value of places in Roman Britain beyond the classical form of street-grids and public buildings. They indicate a vibrancy that was based on local circumstances and interactions with their landscape, which has important implications for how we should regard the physical changes to the so-called large towns in the later Roman period. Small towns, of course, did not have the monumentality of the early large towns and would have had different genealogies of place, but they demonstrate that the vitality of places can go beyond monumental architecture.
The use of villa sites in the later Roman period could also form a comparable study to towns (also see Gardner 2007 for a detailed study of forts in the later Roman period). Like towns, villas were monumental and highly ritualised places and in a number of cases there is evidence of the definite acknowledgement of preceding activity at the sites on which they were constructed. At Barcombe in Sussex, for example, the villa was constructed around a Bronze Age burial mound that seems to have remained a prominent feature of the site throughout the use of the villa (Gammon, Rudling, and Butler 2006). This locality may have been meaningful in the Iron Age and the use of the site certainly remained important into the post-Roman period. Excavations on villa sites are now disclosing traces of late Roman activity, including industrial activity. Recent excavations at Yarford villa near Winchester, for example, revealed changes to the decoration of some rooms during the late fourth century in addition to debris from craft activities, consisting of a burnt layer with small pieces of shale and burnt antler, over the floor (King 2004); coins of the late fourth century and pottery came from this layer. There were also post-holes from timber posts cut into the floor that may have supported part of the villa roof in the late fourth or early fifth century when more substantial structural repairs were not possible as a result of a lack of materials and funds (ibid.).
Bell’s (2005) work has explored the reuse of Roman villa sites in medieval Britain as locations for churches, suggesting that many of these sites remained important places that attracted attention. Work in Italy and Spain has examined the continuation and transformation of villas in the late Roman and medieval periods, with some becoming places for political and religious activity (e. g., Chavarria Arnau 2004; Sfameni 2004). Like public buildings within towns, the villa structures remained foci of activity within the landscape, often well into the medieval period.
World History
