Although it is impossible to generalize across the empire as a whole over several hundred years, it appears that there was a growth in the number of medium-sized or large estates farmed by tenants, slaves, or free labour at the expense of smaller peasant farms, although the latter still formed the vast majority of agricultural homesteads. It was these estates which supported the most pervasive symbol of Roman influence in the provinces, the villa. The term ‘villa’ is a broad one covering both the palatial establishments of the Roman rich on the Bay of Naples and the comfortable farmhouses found throughout the provinces. (The finest literary description of a grand country villa comes in the letters of Pliny the Younger (Book II, Letter 17).)
For a farmhouse in the provinces to qualify as a villa, there has to be some evidence of Romanization, either in the design of the building or in its furnishings. This process of Romanization was often cumulative, and can sometimes be traced by excavation. A native farmhouse might originally consist of a single large room shared by animals and people (with the manure heap to keep them warm as was the custom in parts of southern Italy well into the twentieth century). The first sign of
Fig. 8 The villa at Chedworth in Britain, c. ad 300. This is a good example of a comfortable domestic home with its own secluded courtyard alongside an open courtyard where the business of the estate would be carried on.
Progress would be the segregation of the owner from his animals. Then rooms for living and sleeping would be built to separate him from his workers. If prosperity continued luxuries could follow—baths and heating systems, corridors, mosaics, and painted wall-plaster. Finally the fa9ade of a grand villa might be turned away from the farmyard and graced by a portico. A larger villa would extend its rooms so as to enclose a courtyard or garden where the family could enjoy the open air in some seclusion. These were all improvements that spread in the first instance from Italy. Field surveys are showing just how widespread the villa became in the more fertile areas of the empire. One recent survey of the Somme valley in northern France, for instance, found over a thousand examples. The process often began in the west a generation or two after conquest—in Gaul, for instance, at the end of the first century Bc, in Britain not until the end of the second century. (British villas enjoyed their finest period of prosperity only in the fourth century but even then they make up only 2 per cent of the farms surveyed.)
Villas required craftsmen, builders, plasterers, tilers, and mosaic layers. Typically the owners would also buy in all the trappings of civilized Roman living, including glass and silverware, and the fine Samian pottery (terra sigillata) with its red gloss and raised designs. (The presence of the last on a site is particularly important for the archaeologist because the styles can be dated.) This suggests links with local market centres and provides further evidence that there was a surplus of agricultural produce that could be sold to buy these skills and goods. There is no doubt that there was an economic symbiosis between villa and urban centre. It has been shown that in Britain, for instance, almost all villas are within half a day’s ride of a town. The French archaeologist Michel Ponsich has traced the varied links between villas in the valley of the Guadalquivir in Spain and local townships. The produce brought into the towns might then be taken downriver to the sea (near the Straits of Gibraltar) and shipped north to Britain and Gaul or eastwards into the Mediterranean. (Ponsich’s work is cited by Kevin Greene in his The Archaeology of the Roman Economy, London, 1986. For the British villa, see part iv of David Matting-ley’s An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, London and New York, 2006, ‘The Rural Communities’.)
World History
