Silchester Preroman town
Salon 219 reports:
Silchester: the oldest town in Britain?
The Iron Age people of Britain tended not to go in for large town-like settlements on the whole, but our Fellow Mike Fulford has reached a point in his long-running excavations at Silchester where he thinks he has found evidence for something that looks like a thriving town laid out almost a century before the Romans occupied Britain in AD 43. In an interview with our Fellow Maev Kennedy published in the Guardian (), Mike says that Calleva Atrebatum (the Roman name for Silchester, meaning ‘the place of the Atrebates in the woods') had all the characteristics of a town whose arrival in Britain is usually credited to the Roman invaders: a regular grid of streets and narrow alleys dividing plots, supplied with water from wells and springs. The town was a wealthy place, minting its own coins and trading in luxury goods with continental Europe.
Of course, the town was not exactly ‘British’. Professor Fulford believes it was founded by Commius, leader of the Gaulish Atrebates, who fled to Britain after falling out with his former Roman allies in 50 BC. ‘The site he chose, in an area where his people probably already had links, was far enough inland to be safe from Roman galleys, on a low spur of defensible land which still has remarkable views in every direction, with ample water and surrounded by forests full of game’, says Maev. The site was subsequently redeveloped and surrounded by Roman walls in the first century AD, before being abandoned in the fifth century, its wells deliberately filled in, and never again occupied by anyone.
For boudiccan destruction of Silchester
Did Boudica destroy Silchester? � ARLT Weblog
Silchester: the oldest town in Britain?
The Iron Age people of Britain tended not to go in for large town-like settlements on the whole, but our Fellow Mike Fulford has reached a point in his long-running excavations at Silchester where he thinks he has found evidence for something that looks like a thriving town laid out almost a century before the Romans occupied Britain in AD 43. In an interview with our Fellow Maev Kennedy published in the Guardian (
Of course, the town was not exactly ‘British’. Professor Fulford believes it was founded by Commius, leader of the Gaulish Atrebates, who fled to Britain after falling out with his former Roman allies in 50 BC. ‘The site he chose, in an area where his people probably already had links, was far enough inland to be safe from Roman galleys, on a low spur of defensible land which still has remarkable views in every direction, with ample water and surrounded by forests full of game’, says Maev. The site was subsequently redeveloped and surrounded by Roman walls in the first century AD, before being abandoned in the fifth century, its wells deliberately filled in, and never again occupied by anyone.
For boudiccan destruction of Silchester
Did Boudica destroy Silchester? � ARLT Weblog
Comments