New insights from one of Britannia’s largest urban centres
The first research excavation to take place at Wroxeter in more than 30 years has illuminated a previously unexplored area of one of the largest urban centres in Roman Britain. Peter Guest, Roger H White, and Mike Luke report.
Almost 2,000 years ago Cornoviorum – known to us as Wroxeter – was the fourth-largest public city in Roman Britain, equivalent in area to Pompeii. The Shropshire site has played an influential role in the study of urbanism in the Roman period since the first excavations took place there in the 1850s (see CA 338 for a summary of past investigations). The modern village, which lies 7.5km (4.7 miles) south-east of Shrewsbury, sits within the walls of the long-since abandoned Roman city, today a Scheduled Monument whose visible remains – which consist of its ramparts, as well as the exposed ruins of its public baths and a reconstructed townhouse – are cared for as a visitor attraction managed by English Heritage. Now new geophysical surveys and archaeological excavations at the Shropshire site have revealed stunning evidence for the earliest chapters in the history of this important urban centre.
Our project focused on the site of Wroxeter Farm, located close to the crossroads of the city’s main streets – the cardo (which ran north–south and here is formed by Watling Street) and the decumanus (which ran east–west) – and opposite the forum-basilica (marketplace and town hall) and the main public baths. Despite this prominent position, however, almost nothing was known about the buildings located in this part of the city centre, which is covered by the structures and paddocks of a disused Victorian farm that was built around 1850 and declared redundant in 1999. The work that we carried out in 2024 has completely changed this picture, identifying a monumental roadside building that once stood opposite the forum-basilica; an extensive enclosed space that seems to have been empty except for a single small masonry building, perhaps a shrine or a funerary monument; a bath-suite associated with a large townhouse (one room of which contained a beautiful mosaic); and hints of possible votive activity. Before we dig deeper into these new discoveries, however, let’s explore what was already known about the city to which they belonged.
SETTING THE SCENE
Following the explorations of 19th-century antiquarians, Wroxeter saw further archaeological campaigns before and after the First World War. Then, after the Second World War, the site was the location of two of Roman Britain’s largest and most significant excavations, when Graham Webster and Philip Barker of the University of Birmingham investigated the area of the public baths, the adjacent macellum (covered market), and the remains of the legionary fortress that lies beneath the later city (see CA 14, 25, 39, 75, and 112). These research and training excavations took place from 1955 to 1990, and hundreds of students and archaeologists (including two authors of this article) worked with these two distinguished, and presumably extraordinarily patient, scholars of Roman Britain.
To that point in time, archaeological research at Wroxeter had consisted exclusively of excavation, which is time-consuming and also relatively limited in scale when compared to the extent of the Roman city. Between 1994 and 1999, however, the University of Birmingham, together with the Ancient Monuments Laboratory (now part of Historic England) and Geophysical Surveys of Bradford (now GSB Prospection), used a variety of non-invasive geophysical techniques (primarily magnetometry) to survey the entire area of the walled town, an ambitious undertaking that produced the first complete plan of a Roman city in Britain.
The combined efforts of antiquarians and archaeologists over the past 150 years or so have given us a very good general impression of how the site developed during the Roman period. We know that Wroxeter was first occupied by the Roman army only a few years after the invasion in AD 43 when, after a short auxiliary occupation, the XIVth Legion built its fortress there during campaigns against the native peoples that lived in modern-day Wales, particularly the Ordovices and the Silures. These soldiers were replaced by the XXth Legion in the late 60s and, after the Romans’ final victory against these tribes in the later 70s, they in turn departed, moving northwards to confront and subdue new enemies. The now-abandoned fortress was refounded as the capital city of the Cornovii (the name the Romans gave to the British tribe that lived in this part of western England), from whom it took its name: Viroconium Cornoviorum. It is thought that the city’s street grid was laid out as early as about 90, but an inscription found during excavation of the forum a century ago shows that this important civic building was only completed in 129 or 130. Viroconium would become a prosperous place and it has been estimated that some 15,000 people could have lived within its walls during the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
Even though much is known about Roman Wroxeter, many mysteries remain, including what the city centre looked like. As mentioned above, previous excavations have shown that the two city blocks, or insulae, to the south of the decumanus were occupied by large public buildings: the forum-basilica (InsulaIV) and the main public baths and macellum (InsulaV). There is scant evidence, however, for the nature of the buildings that lay in the blocks north of the decumanus. Geophysics suggests that the eastern side of Insula II was the location of several strip-buildings and larger courtyard buildings, possibly with commercial and residential functions, but Insula I to the west was an almost total blank. Wroxeter Farm and its associated paddocks, which lie within this area, had not been included in the Wroxeter Hinterland Project of 1994-1997 (CA 157) and, intriguingly, the only firm evidence that we had from Insula I was a short length of a north–south colonnade, found in 1854. It consisted of several unusual square bases, some with slots cut into them as if they had held a balustrade, which ran along the west side of Watling Street. It has been suggested that the colonnade formed part of the boundary of another major public building, possibly Viroconium’s main civic temple.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 425. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
