Simon Esmonde Cleary - Chedworth: Life in a Roman Villa

This book is published to coincide with the completion of the multi-million-pound redevelopment of Chedworth Roman Villa. For anyone who has penetrated the depths of the Cotswolds and got to know the villa at Chedworth over the years, the transformation that has taken place recently is astonishing. From a much-loved little place in a sorry state, it has been transformed by the National Trust into one of the best archaeological sites to visit in Britain. A trip to Chedworth is no lonely stroll among mute walls and faded information panels, but now a journey into the exotic and surprising Golden Age of Roman Britain.

The stories from Chedworth Roman Villa are fascinating, and not immediately obvious. When we think of Romans, our immediate thoughts are drawn to film and TV interpretations from The Life of Brian via Gladiator to I Claudius , Rome or even Up Pompeii!

Many of these ideas of ancient Rome and its empire relate to a different period, an earlier time, in the centuries either side of the birth of Christ. Chedworth flourished during the fourth century AD, some 300 years and many generations after the Roman invasion of Britain or the Rome of our collective imaginations. The fourth century AD was a different and more settled time in Roman Britain, which seems quite obvious once we think that 300 years ago from today, in the reign of Queen Anne, things were very different to how they now are, and we dont think of ourselves as being the same as people then.

By the fourth century even the poorest inhabitants in the Roman provinces of Britannia were aware they were citizens of an empire that was master of nearly all the known world. They were not a subjugated mass under an oppressive foreign yoke, but more an integral part of a Roman Empire that spread across much of the known world. Most inhabitants still led harsh and poor lives as peasant farmers, herdsmen, servants, labourers. But Roman society did allow some social mobility, through the army or through crafts and trade. Its long-established stability encouraged the arts, culture and religious diversity: so especially for the social elites, such as the owners of great villas like Chedworth, it was a Golden Age.

Please visit Chedworth and experience this Golden Age for yourself. The stones are re-animated! Gone are the inadequate Victorian sheds which covered some of the remains but made it almost impossible to see anything. Suspended walkways allow us to walk the rooms as Romans, to see the full range of mod-cons, such as the luxurious underfloor heating. You can now see the mosaics in all their glory, including the whole length of the magnificent newly excavated 30m-long front gallery mosaic. And people have returned to the villa. You can watch a fine banquet in the grand dining room, the appetite whetted by spicy aromas and the sound of wine being poured. A trip to the bath house feels almost as hot and fuggy as it must have when the aromas of scented oils filled the air and the groans of sweating Romans echoed around.

This book by Simon Esmonde Cleary is a much needed and eloquent introduction to this fascinating period in history. The complete story of Chedworth is fully told, from the archaeological evidence to where Chedworths place is in the wider Roman world. For anyone who is interested in archaeology, intrigued by Roman Britain, or has not even heard of the Golden Age, this book is for you.

For many of the general public who thought they knew something of the Romans, and of Roman Britain in particular, a visit to Chedworth Roman Villa contains a series of surprises. As Tony Robinson has pointed out in the Foreword, this is not the Rome of white togas, marble columns and soldiers resembling lobsters, of Julius Caesar, Augustus and Nero, of Christians and lions. Nor is it the Roman Britain of Claudius, Boudicca and Hadrians Wall. Here the National Trust has chosen to concentrate for the visitor on the Late Roman period. In the context of Britain this roughly spans the fourth century AD with a few years on either side, with the villa at its height three centuries after the Roman Conquest. The Trusts decision is in spite of evidence for some Roman occupation on the site in the second and third centuries AD. The reason is because this is the time when the size and magnificence reached by the villa marks it out from all but a dozen or so other villas in Roman Britain and is the era to which its famous mosaics are assigned. It is a period little presented to the public in the UK, yet spectacularly full of colour and interest. It has frequently been described as the Golden Age of Roman Britain. To historians of the wider Roman world particularly medievalists it is often seen as the first phase of the Byzantine Empire, starting from the founding of Constantinople in AD 324 or the legalisation of Christianity in 312 by the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Indeed, a fundamental difference between the fourth century and earlier times is that religion was now a dominating issue in politics, and the conflicts between Christianity as promoted by almost every emperor and the traditional faiths of gods and goddesses and between differing interpretations of Christianity itself were centre stage. Persecuted viciously at the beginning of the century, by the end Christians saw the practice of the traditional religions outlawed, even in the home, and the sad history of the suppression of Christian heresies by the State was beginning. Chedworth is one of the few places in Britain where it is possible to detect echoes of those religious conflicts. Nor is this the only aspect in which the villa takes its place in the context of the wider late Roman world. In 1995 the archaeologist Simon Ellis wrote that by the late Empire the British elite had deepened their understanding of classical culture to the extent of adopting complex social behaviour and symbolic expression that would not have been out of place in the residences of the chief citizens of the Empire.

I entirely concur with Simon Esmonde Cleary in accepting this opinion as it is the best fit with the archaeological evidence, but it is important to note that it does not meet with universal assent. There is quite a strong current of opinion that likes to see Britain as resistant to Roman culture, and explores features previously regarded as revealing Romanisation to identify specifically regional or British variations. This partly comes out of a welcome trend towards studying regional differences whether as regards different provinces of the empire or parts of Roman Britain itself and differences between the various sectors within the population itself, and at different points in time. There seem, however, to be other less-helpful threads running through some of the current attitudes among archaeologists.

One of these is an attempt to see Britain under Roman rule as an evanescent phase of foreign occupation that had little effect on a native Britishness, temporarily interrupting a claimed natural trajectory of the islands culture. A second (not always separated from this) is characterised every so often by presenters of TV programmes declaring I dont much like the Romans. Behind that, I suspect, are feelings hostile to aggressive militarist societies and sympathetic to the prevailing mood of anti-colonialism. Admirable though these sentiments may be, they are distractingly anachronistic when applied to Roman Britain, especially to the Late Roman period. There is a fundamental difference from the empires of European states in modern times. Like them, the Roman Empire started as a power ruling conquered peoples. Unlike them it evolved largely by accident by absorbing the conquered into a single state. Indeed, from the end of the first century, most emperors themselves came from the provinces, from the early third there was a single common citizenship, and from then on one could say that effectively the provinces had taken over the centre. Ironically, the modern anti-colonialist feelings are the mirror image of what Victorian British themselves thought about the Roman Empire and their own. While it may be fair to see Britain in the first century as conquered and occupied, by the fourth more or less every permanent resident within the Roman frontiers who was not a slave was a Roman citizen. Differences now were not between citizen and the rest but of an increasingly polarised and formalised class system.