Primeval Britain was mainly wooded. Forest clearance made it possible for Bronze Age peoples to start carving up the landscape into areas for cultivation, while also developing woodland management, allowing timber to be grown for a variety of structural and manufacturing purposes. In the Roman period, woodlands were used for the structural and fuel needs of forts and towns, and also for industries such as pottery and iron-smelting. The Weald of Kent, for example, was a major iron-smelting area and it remained wooded throughout the period. A piece of woodland in Kent, called Verlucionum, was the subject of a legal case heard in London in the year 118.* Villas of the region were clustered along the northern part of Kent, the River Medway, and its tributaries.
180. Distribution of villas in Britain.
Although villas arc known in all three areas, they occur predominantly in the Central Zone. (After Hingley and Miles, and lones and Mattingly).
] 81. Fast Coker (Somerset). Fragment of a mosaic panel depicting a hunting scene. Fourth century. (St>merset County Museums Service).
In the areas opened up to agriculture by forest clearance, a number of changes took place after the Roman conquest. Animal bones are ubiquitous finds at Roman settlements, showing that cattle, sheep, pigs, venison, fowl, and even horses were butchered for meat, with cattle and pigs apparently growing in popularity over the period [ 1811. The need until modern times to drive herds of animals from their homes to places of consumption means that it is impossible to know where they came from. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was commonplace for cattle to be driven to London from as far away as Wales. In antiquity, when the roads were if anything better, the same must have happened. Sheep kept for wool were likely to have been clipped with shears, one of the new tools introduced during the Roman period, possibly encouraging the apparent increase in sheep. Field systems were well established in prehistory throughout large parts of Britain, but now they were more likely to be divided up with hedges, or even stone walls, perhaps a reflection of the legal control of land tenure, enshrined in provincial and civic records. Land was reclaimed through drainage, mainly around the Wash.
The Iron Age staples of spelt, bread and emmer wheat, six-row barley, oats and beans were augmented with rye and a range of more exotic plants like coriander, plums and cherries. Working the land itself became easier with the improvement of plough technology. Asymmetric ploughshares were more effective at cutting and turning the soil, helped along by coulters (iron blades fixed in front of ploughshares to cut the soil vertically). Crops were now treated in drying-ovens, a characteristically Roman innovation and found at numerous sites, often with food traces, and stored in granaries instead of Iron Age pits. However, traditional methods remained in use, too.
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