FIG. 27.
LINCOLN, BASES OF COLONNADE UNDER BAILGATE
(p. 118.)
For a second example turn to a remote corner of central Spain. The town of Numantia was famous in early days for its long struggle with the armies of the Roman Republic. Under Roman rule it was wholly insignificant. Over the débris of Numantine liberty a little Roman town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of municipal status and its streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square.[[100] ]
A third example may be drawn from our own country. Lincoln, the Roman Lindum, was established as a 'colonia' about A.D. 75, and the lines of its original area, its 'Altstadt'—for it was perhaps enlarged in Roman times,—can still be traced 'Above Hill' round the Castle and Cathedral (fig. 26). It formed a rectangle just over 41 acres in extent (400 x 500 yds.). Four gates, one of which still keeps its Roman arch, gave access to the two main streets which divided the town into four symmetrical quarters and crossed at right angles in the centre. Along one of these streets, which agrees, if only roughly, with the modern Bailgate, ran a stately colonnade (fig. 27), though whether this belonged to some special building or adorned the whole extent of street is not quite certain. Beneath the same street ran, as at Timgad and Laibach and elsewhere, the town sewer (fig. 28). Of the other main street and of side streets nothing is known, but we can hardly doubt that they carried out the chess-board pattern.[[101] ]
Probably the other four municipalities in Britain were planned similarly, though the evidence is too slender to prove it. At Verulamium (for example) near St. Albans, a local archaeologist long ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks, resembling squares very slightly askew. Subsequent inquiry has shown that this scheme was merely or mostly imagination.[[102] ]
FIG. 28.
LINCOLN. SEWER UNDER BAILGATE
[ CHAPTER IX ]
ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. II
In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles 'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is, of course, closely akin to such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a 'colonia' implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the 'municipium' made town-planning appropriate to this class of town also.