Town gates will also have functioned as zones of passage and transition. They were on the town boundaries, which will have been defined through ceremony and ritual at the time of town foundation. Rykwert (1976: 136) describes the pomoerium at Rome, a strip of land used to define the town and build the town walls. This boundary had religious significance: the 'gates were bridges over a forbidden tract of earth charged with menacing power’ (ibid.: 137). Crossing the town boundary will have been an act imbued with meaning (Perring 1991b: 282). As Rykwert states (1976:139), 'to cross over such a bridge [the passage through the pomoerium] is in itself a religious act’. The gates marked the only sanctioned crossing points and the town walls would have had a symbolic as well as functional importance.
For Rome we have sources referring to gods associated with the gates and boundaries of the city - Janus was the god of the gates (ibid.: 137-9). Although this probably applied to towns across the Empire, we have no definite evidence relating to Britain. Creighton’s (2006) work has argued for the ritual foundation of towns in Roman Britain (see Chapter 4), and evidence of religious deposits also indicates that boundaries around settlements were meaningful in prehistory (e. g., J. D. Hill 1995b; Hingley 2006b). Gibbon’s impression of city gates (Chapter 2) reflects the view that they represented markers and the boundaries of civilisation, with barbarity lying outside. Knowledge of town gates in Roman Britain varies greatly. Remains of gates have survived at Silchester (Fulford 1984), Lincoln (M. Jones 2002: 59-60), and Caerwent (Ashby et al. 1904; Manning 2003), whereas those at towns such as Leicester (Cooper and Buckley 2004) have survived poorly as a result of intense later occupation.
Many of the defensive circuits around Romano-British towns were constructed earlier than in other provinces and began as earthworks, for example at Caerwent (Manning 2003: 168-73), Verulamium (Niblett 2001: 71-2), and Wroxeter (White and Barker 1998: 98). They were then replaced with stone walls that usually followed the same circuits rather than reducing the size of the enclosed area, as often occurred in late Roman Gaul. Mattingly (2006a: 332) has suggested that the continued importance of these large enclosed areas might indicate links with memories of a proto-urban past in Britain. Other authors have also raised the possibility that Roman town walls might invoke the past of oppida, with the size of the enclosed area having more to do with Iron Age notions of power and display than with the desire to be seen as Roman (e. g., White and Gaffney 2003: 231). This may also relate to the need for large open gatherings and sales of produce and livestock as part of the function of these sites.
In a few cases there is evidence from the late Roman period that town gates were blocked (Table 5.7); this has been explained in terms of increased insecurity and economic decline (e. g., Ashby et al. 1904: 92). The example of the Ridingate (or Riding Gate) at Canterbury, however, indicates that despite the blocking of part of the gateway in the late third century (P. Blockley 1989: 130), the structure continued in use, now being used for metalworking (see Chapter 7). At Caerwent and Silchester there is some structural evidence of blocked gates (e. g., Ashby 1906:111-12; Fox and St. John Hope 1894: 237), as there also is at Colchester with the Balkerne Gate (P. Crummy 1984: 122-3). Rather than being signs of the decline of order and civilisation, the alterations to gates represent changes in the organisation of space, and as such are similar to changes to monumental arches, porticoes, and
Colonnades; certainly at all of these towns there is still considerable evidence of activity at the time of the changes in the late third and fourth centuries.
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