The Ruins of the Roman City of Uriconium, at Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury

by Thomas Wright

It was at this latter period that the Roman buildings began to be systematically destroyed. It appears that still in the twelfth century, England was covered with the remains of Roman ruined towns and villas standing above ground, as they are still seen, though on a larger scale, in the countries which formed the Roman province in Northern Africa. We have seen the superstitious feelings which prevented people approaching these ruins in our island, and it required nothing less than the hand of the Church to interfere and break the charm which kept the rest of society aloof. We learn from the history of the abbots of St Alban’s, written in the thirteenth century by Matthew Paris, that already in the eleventh century the abbots of that great religious house had begun to break the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium, in order to use them as building materials. This practice became very general in the twelfth century, and from that time the Roman ruins were pillaged on an extensive scale whenever a monastery or a church was to be built. The ancient city at Wroxeter was probably one of the great quarries from which the builders of Haughmond Abbey were supplied, and no doubt it contributed materials to other monastic houses in this part of the country. The church of Atcham, the adjoining parish, and that of Wroxeter itself, bear evidence to this appropriation of building materials taken from ancient Uriconium. At the time when this inroad was made upon the ruins, the ground, as explained before, was already raised several feet above the Roman floors; and the mediæval builders, finding plenty of material above ground, cleared away the walls down to the surface of the ground as it then existed, and sought them no further. This accounts for the condition in which we now find these walls, that is, remaining tolerably perfect just up to the height of what was the level of the ground, at the time the rest was destroyed. The difference between the tops of the walls as they now exist under ground, and the present surface of the ground, is the accumulation of earth which has taken place since this destruction. It was the destruction of the buildings which first caused this accumulation, by scattering about the fragments of the plaster of the walls and the broken tiles and stones which were not worth carrying away. After the walls above ground disappeared, and the ground was levelled and cleared, such accumulation went on much more slowly.

The sites of the ancient towns, thus cleared, and the spell which held their invaders at bay having been broken by the ecclesiastics, became exposed to a new class of depredators. Coins and objects of some value were no doubt discovered from time to time by accident, and were greatly exaggerated by common report, during ages when the existence of hidden treasure formed a prominent article in the popular belief. Many a Salopian, doubtless, longed for the hidden treasures of the city of Geomagog, and many an attempt no doubt was made to discover and obtain them. Treasure-hunting of this description was a great pursuit with our mediæval forefathers, and the same superstitious feelings were connected with it that were attached to all the remains of more ancient peoples. The treasure-hunter rarely ventured on his search without having first secured the aid of a magician for his protection as well as for his guidance, for the same evil spirits were believed still to haunt the ruins underground, and it was hoped that by the power of the conjuror they might not only be rendered harmless, but be made to give information as to the exact spot where the treasure lay. Numerous examples might be quoted of such mediæval treasure-hunting on the Welsh border, but it will be sufficient to give one which appears to belong to the very site on which we are now seeking treasures of another description. An old manuscript chronicle of the monks of Worcester, which is printed in Warton’s Anglia Sacra, and has preserved numerous notices of events which occurred on this border, informs us that in the year 1287, at a place by Wroxeter, (that is near the village), called “Bilebury,” the fiend was compelled by a certain enchanter to appear to a certain lad and show him where lay buried “urns, and a ship, and a house, with an immense quantity of gold.” We easily recognize in the objects described by the false Geomagog, though not the material, the numerous figures in bronze which are from time to time found on Roman sites; and the arms and ship may perhaps admit of as easy an explanation. The treasure-digger had to encounter sometimes a worse opponent even than the fiend himself! Treasure-trove belonged to the feudal lord, and it was a right which he was inclined to enforce with the utmost severity; and the unfortunate individual who was caught in the act of trespassing against it found his way immediately into a feudal dungeon, from which escape was not always easy or quick. The learned historian of this county, Mr. Eyton, has met with a record from which we learn that some individuals towards the close of the thirteenth century were thus caught “digging” for a treasure at Wroxeter, and that they were thrown into prison. On their examination or trial, however, it appeared that, though they had dug for a treasure, they had not found one, and on this plea they had the good fortune to be set at liberty. This process of treasure-hunting had an effect injurious to the object of our researches. The mediæval excavator cared very little about antiquities as monuments of the past, and when, in digging a hole into the ground, he came upon a pavement, he broke it up without any scruple. It is to this cause, perhaps, that we must ascribe in many cases the damaged state in which we find the floors of the Roman houses, even when they lie at a considerable depth.

I have thus endeavoured to explain the manner in which a Roman town like Uriconium was ruined; how its ruin remained several centuries untouched, while a depth of earth was accumulating on the floors; how at a later period the ruins themselves began to be cleared away, and a new accumulation of earth was formed over the lower part of the walls which had been left, until these could no longer be traced on the surface, except by the appearance of the crops in long periods of dry weather. This double accumulation of the debris of buildings has often led people to form erroneous conclusions, and in the account of a former partial excavation at Wroxeter, published by the Society of Antiquaries, the writer has fallen upon the rather odd notion that the Roman town had been burnt twice,—that he saw the layers of burnt materials from two successive burnings.

The effects of all these causes may be seen in the excavations at Wroxeter,—the floor sometimes perfect and sometimes broken up; the walls of the houses remaining to the height of two or three feet or more, as they were left by the mediæval builders, when they carried away the upper part of these walls for material; the original level of the Roman town on which its inhabitants trod, strewed with roof-tiles and slates and other material which had fallen in during the conflagration under which the town sank into ruin, and the upper part of the soil mixed up with fragments of plaster and cement, bricks and mortar, which had been scattered about when the walls were broken up.

The site of Uriconium presents one great advantage to the antiquarian explorer, that only a small and not very important portion of the area has been exposed to the most destructive of all encroachments on its sanctity, modern buildings; while the situation and nature of the ground has not required the deep draining which would have cut through the ancient floors, and these lie too far beneath the surface to be touched by the plough. It will be easily understood that the preservation of such remains depends much on the depth of soil which covers them. The Rev. T. F. More has discovered and made considerable excavations in a very extensive and most interesting Roman villa, which occupies part of his beautiful park at Linley Hall, near Bishop’s Castle, but there the position of the site, and perhaps other circumstances, have caused the earth to accumulate much less rapidly, and the floors lay so near to the surface that they have all been destroyed. Where a fragment of the concrete of the floor remained, it was hardly six inches under the ground.

Our means of observation have hitherto been so imperfect, that we can only form vague conjectures as to the internal aspect and distribution of the buildings of a Roman town in Britain. At the close of the Roman period the towns were usually, if not always, surrounded with defensive walls; but there are several reasons for believing that the Roman towns in this island were not walled until a comparatively late date, perhaps not till the domestic dissensions and foreign invasions of the fourth century. These town walls, when closely examined into, are often found to contain materials taken from older buildings of another kind, which older materials themselves present the debased style of architecture which belonged to the declining age of the Roman power. The long straggling line of wall which surrounded Uriconium as we may conclude from its very irregularity, can only have been built at a late date, after the city had gone on for ages increasing in its extent. We are naturally led to suppose that the public buildings would occupy the central, or at least the more elevated part of the town, and this has in several instances proved to be the case. The discoveries made by Sir Christopher Wren, seem to leave no doubt that a Roman temple occupied the site of the modern cathedral of St. Paul’s, in London. But buildings of all sorts would seem to have been mixed very confusedly together; for we believe that in London, more recent excavations have brought to light remains of potter’s kilns in close proximity to this temple. In one or two instances, as at Aldborough, in Yorkshire, (the Roman Isurium), and in some of the small towns on the line of Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, masses of the small houses have been uncovered, and their appearance leads us to believe that the houses of a Roman town in Britain were grouped thickly together, that they were mostly separated by narrow alleys, and that there were in general few streets of any magnitude.

We will now return to the spot where the visitor has halted in view of the imposing mass of Roman masonry, called the Old Wall, situated, as has been stated, in a large triangular field formed by the divergence of the two roads. The Old Wall stands not quite east and west, but sufficiently near it to allow us for sake of convenience to call it east and west. Its northern side is evidently the outside of a building, while there could be no doubt that the southern side, on which the springings of transverse walls and vaulted ceilings are visible, was the interior. The excavations were begun on the 3rd of February, 1859, on the northern side, or outside, of this wall, partly with the object of ascertaining the depth at which the floors and the foundations of the buildings lay under the present surface of the ground, which, as we have said before, was an important fact to ascertain. The bottom of the Old Wall was found at a depth of fourteen feet, the last ten feet of which were sunk in the natural substratum of sand, so that the walls of the buildings in this spot must have had originally very deep foundations. It was found that this wall was continued underground to the west, and excavations directed towards the north brought to light successively three walls running parallel, or nearly parallel, to this first wall, the first of these parallel walls being at a uniform distance of fourteen feet from the Old Wall, the next at a distance, also uniform, of thirty feet from this wall, and the third at a distance from the second of fourteen feet at the western and sixteen at the eastern end, so that, as the transverse wall at the eastern end of these walls was not quite at right angles to them, this large building was a little out of square. This building, therefore, consisted of three divisions, of which the central enclosure was 226 feet long by 30 feet wide, and appears to have been paved in its whole extent with small bricks, three inches long by one inch broad, set in zig-zags, or, as it is more technically called, herring-bone fashion. This description of pavement appears generally to have been used in passages and in open courts, and it seems probable, even from the magnitude of this enclosure, that it was not roofed. Nothing was discovered in it to throw any light on the object of so extensive a paved enclosure, but there could be little doubt that it must have been a public building of some importance. Portions of the capitals, bases, and shafts of columns were found scattered about in different parts of the area, which show that it was not wanting in architectural decoration, and on one of the pieces of wall-stucco, picked up in this part of the excavations, where three letters of what had been an inscription in large characters. Among other objects found here were a fragment of a very strong iron chain, the head of an axe, and an iron implement which appears to have been a trident, and to have been originally placed on a staff, perhaps an ensign of office. The appearance of the face of the Old Wall, which formed part of one side of the long narrow enclosure on the south of this central apartment, would lead us to suppose that this was an open alley, and this is confirmed by the other circumstances connected with it. In the continuation of the Old Wall to the westward, the lower parts of two doorways were found, which were approached from this alley each by a step formed of a single squared stone, which, therefore, may have been supposed to have led from an exterior into an interior. The corresponding long passage to the north of the central apartment presented characteristics of another kind. At the eastern end were found pavements of rather fine mosaic, of which specimens and admirable drawings, by Mr. George Maw, of Broseley, are preserved in the Museum. Mosaic of this description was not made to be exposed to the air, and the building here must not only have been roofed, but we have reason to suppose that there must have been a room or rooms of a character on which elegant ornamentation would be bestowed.

The walls of this building, as we find them under ground, present from time to time discontinuations, or breaches, caused no doubt by the breaking up of the walls for materials by the mediæval builders, who sometimes went deeper for them than usual; and it is very likely that this may have been caused, in some instances at least, by the circumstance that on the site of these breaches were doors or passages, the jambs and ornamental parts of which were formed of large stones which were more tempting to the old excavators. With the exception of these breaches, there are no traces of doorways from one apartment of this building to the other. About the middle of the northernmost wall there is a very wide breach of this kind, which perhaps represents a grand entrance from the north. Moreover, in carrying the excavations further towards the north, it was found that this northernmost wall of the building formed the side of a street, which was paved in the middle with round stones, not much unlike the pavements of some of the streets in Shrewsbury and other old towns as they remain at the present day. The northern wall just alluded to was traced eastwardly until the edge of the field in which the excavations are carried on prevented the workmen from going any further. Immediately to the east of the building we have been describing was a not quite rectangular inclosure, which, from the appearance of the walls, was probably a court-yard. A doorway, approached by a stone step within the great inclosure to the west, led into it. Beyond this, to the eastward, was a much larger inclosure, which as far as it was explored, had no tracings of walls or pavement within, and may possibly have been a garden. At the western end of the great building, about the middle of the extremity of the great central inclosure, indications were discovered which probably belonged also to an entrance. These indications consisted of two original openings in the wall, within which were found, evidently in their original position, in one a large squared stone, and in the other two similarly squared stones placed one upon another. One of these was bevelled off at the outer edge into a plain moulding, and their general appearance led to the belief that they had formed the basis of something—perhaps of large columns. Here, therefore, may perhaps have been the principal entrance into the long and extensive area which occupied the middle of this building. It faced the modern Watling Street Road, which evidently represents another street; and it thus seems to admit of no doubt that this building formed the corner of two principal streets of the Roman city of Uriconium.

We will now return to the long alley, as we have ventured to call it, on the southern side of the building we have been describing. It has been already stated that there were found in this alley two steps, formed each of a large squared stone, attached to two doorways in the western continuation of the Old Wall. The more western of these two steps was very much worn by the feet of the people who had passed over it, as though it had led to some place of public resort. It was at the more easterly of these doorways that the excavations were carried to the southward of the Old Wall. This doorway apparently led into some open court which communicated with domestic apartments. A trench carried directly southward from the doorway, brought the excavators to the semicircular end of a hypocaust, which had warmed a considerable room thirty-seven feet long, by twenty-five feet wide, and which was in a state of very perfect preservation when opened, although the floor which once covered it had entirely disappeared. The pillars, which were formed of Roman square bricks, placed one upon another without mortar, and of which 120 were counted, were above three feet high. This room has now been completely laid open, and on the western side has a complicated arrangement of walls, which evidently served some purpose connected with the heating of the hypocausts. A considerable quantity of unburnt coal was found here. The northern end of this hypocaust, the wall of which remained to the height of several feet, presents an imposing mass of masonry, and we learn from it the interesting fact that the Roman houses were plastered and painted externally as well as internally. The exterior of the semicircular wall at the north end of this hypocaust was painted red, with stripes of yellow. Near it lay an immense stone, hewn into the shape to fit the semicircular wall of the hypocaust, which had evidently formed part of a massive band of such stones at some height in the wall. A strong piece of iron is soldered into it with lead, for the purpose of attaching something to the building externally. A little alley, considerably wider than the spaces between the pillars of bricks, ran across this hypocaust, and through an opening in the wall, into another hypocaust, which was entered from without by a large archway, and this again was approached by a flight of three steps, each step composed of one large well-squared stone, descending from a square platform, which was apparently on a level with the original floors of the rooms. When the steps were uncovered, a broken shaft of a large column was found lying across them. The platform at the bottom of the steps, or at least the corner of it farthest from the arched entrance to the hypocaust, seems to have been used by the last occupiers of this building as a receptacle for the dust swept from floors and passages, for the earth, for about a foot deep on the floor, was literally filled with coins, hair-pins, fibulæ, broken pottery and glass, bones of birds and animals which had been eaten, and a variety of other such objects.

To the east of the entrance to the hypocausts, a small room only eight feet square was found, which had a herring-bone pavement like that of the great inclosure to the north of the Old Wall. A rather wide passage through the eastern wall of this small room led into another room with a hypocaust, the floor of which is also gone. The pillars of this hypocaust were rather more neatly constructed, but they seem to have been considerably lower than those of the hypocausts previously opened. This hypocaust was the scene of a very interesting discovery. Abundant traces of burning in all parts of the site leave no doubt that the city of Uriconium was plundered, and afterwards burnt by some of the barbarian invaders of Roman Britain at the close of the Romano-British period, that is, towards the middle of the fifth century. The human remains which have been met with in different parts, bear testimony to a frightful massacre of the inhabitants. It would seem that a number of persons had been pursued to the buildings immediately to the south of the line of the Old Wall, and slaughtered there; for in trenching across what were perhaps open courts to the south and south-east of the door through the continuation of the Old Wall, remains of at least four or five skeletons were found, and in what appears to have been a corner of a yard, outside the semicircular end of the hypocaust first discovered, lay the skull and some of the bones of a very young child. In the last of the hypocausts we have been describing, three skeletons were found, that of a person who appears to have died in a crouching position in one of the corners, and two others stretched on the ground by the side of the wall. An examination of the skull of the person in the corner leaves no room for doubting that he was a very old man. One at least of the others was a female. Near the old man lay a little heap of Roman coins, in such a manner as to show that they must have been contained in a confined receptacle, and a number of small iron nails scattered among them, with traces of decomposed wood, prove that this was a little box, or coffer. The remains of the wood are still attached to two or three of the coins. We are justified from all these circumstances in concluding that, in the midst of the massacre of Roman Uriconium, these three persons—perhaps an old man and two terrified women—had sought to conceal themselves by creeping into the hypocaust; and perhaps they were suffocated there, or, when the house was delivered to the flames, the falling rubbish may have blocked up the outlet so as to make it impossible for them to escape. It is not likely that they would have been followed into such a place as this hypocaust. These coins were 132 in number, and the following description of them has been given by Mr. C. Roach Smith:—