Roman water infrastructure in post-Roman Britain. Part 1: Roman infrastructure

Reviewing Pompeii and the astonishing engineering in the Roman water supply system serving the Bay of Naples prompted me to ferret out my notes from when I was researching Roman water supply in Britain. This was turning into a long post even by my standards, so I've split it into two. Conveniently, it more or less divides along the lines of 'evidence' (part 1) and 'interpretation' (part 2).

Roman Britain never had the magnificent aqueducts found in Roman Gaul, such as the Pont du Gard serving Nemausus (modern Nimes) (the top row of arches carry the aqueduct channel; scroll down the page for close-up photos) or the aqueducts serving Lugdunum (modern Lyon) with their sophisticated closed siphon systems for crossing deep valleys (I remember being fascinated by the models of these aqueducts when we visited the Musee Gallo-Romaine in Lyon on the way back from the Alps, and wishing I had enough French to buy the French-language survey publication. This description of the Gier aqueduct will give you an idea; the idiosyncratic English needs a little concentration but it's well worth it), or the aqueducts serving Rome itself.

This probably reflects at least three major factors: climate, terrain and degree of urbanisation. In most districts of Britain, water can be relied on to fall out of the sky on a regular basis and the water table is within reach of wells, so there would be less need to bring water long distances from mountain sources to arid plains. On the whole, Britain doesn't have the deep gorges and valleys of the Massif Central in France, so aqueducts can be routed unobtrusively round contours and don't need spectacular arcades. Roman Britain was never as urbanised as Roman Gaul or Italy, and even the largest British cities such as Londinium (modern London) and Verulamium (modern St Albans) never reached the size of major Gallic cities such as Lugdunum (modern Lyons) - which was a lot bigger than Paris at the time, as the museum in Lyon is keen to point out. Thus, there would have been less need for massive infrastructure to bring large quantities of water to major population centres.

Nevertheless, there is evidence of sophisticated water engineering from several towns in Roman Britain. Perhaps the most spectacular is the water-lifting apparatus excavated in London in 2001 (4th paragraph of the ‘City’ section in the link). Two large timber-lined wells were discovered, each containing a chain of wooden buckets that lifted water continuously from the well to a nearby cistern, from which it could have been used to supply the nearby baths and/or distributed across the city. I saw a Time Team TV programme on this discovery soon after the excavation and it was suggested that the bucket chain could have been powered by a treadmill, either human- or animal-powered, and could have supplied enough water for several thousand people. Tree-ring dating dated the first well to AD 63 and showed it had partly collapsed in AD 71. The second well was dated to the early second century (possibly a replacement for the first?) and appeared to have been damaged or destroyed by fire in the late second century.

Archaeological excavation in Colchester has shown that the Roman town had a pressurised water supply from its earliest days. Wooden water mains consisting of straight sections of bored-out log connected by iron collars have been found. A ‘water-works’ excavated in 1928 had a room (or tank?) that would have filled with water and some indication of a lifting system, perhaps a water wheel (or a bucket chain like those in London?) to raise water to a header tank for distribution. Surplus water flowed out of the tank down a large overflow drain, about 2 feet high judging from the sketch, and into the town ditch. The water source is thought to have been a timber aqueduct that came in over the city walls, but this is not known for certain (Crummy 1997).

In York, environmental analysis of the silt in the Roman sewer system excavated under modern Church Street found large amounts of tree pollen from mixed deciduous woodland, including species that generally favour limestone soils, and pollen from moorland plants such as heather and pine. This pollen is unlikely to have come from the city itself, and is consistent with a water supply brought in by aqueduct from upland areas some distance from the city (Buckland 1976). The report suggests one aqueduct coming from a well-wooded area with moorland on higher ground nearby; I wonder if there might have been two aqueducts from different locations, one from moorland and one from limestone country? No traces of an aqueduct have (yet) been found at York, but as noted above, British aqueducts don't need dramatic arches for crossing dramatic Mediterranean gorges. Where identified, Roman aqueducts in Britain were typically large ditches containing a ceramic or concrete water pipe, laid along natural contours so that the water flowed by gravity. Such a structure wouldn't be obvious above ground and is only likely to be discovered if someone happens to dig in just the right place. Lead water pipes in stone-lined trenches, and a substantial stone street fountain, show that at least some of the Roman city had a piped water supply. Timber-lined Roman wells have also been excavated in York (Ottaway 2004).

How much of this infrastructure survived into the post-Roman period and for how long? See part 2.....

References:
Buckland PC, The environmental evidence from the Church Street Roman sewer system. York Archaeological Trust, 1976.
Crummy, P. City of Victory, Colchester Archaeological Trust, Colchester, 1997.
Ottaway P. Roman York. Tempus Publishing, 2004.

Ingeld's Daughter

Those of you who expressed interest earlier may like to know that the full text of Ingeld's Daughter is now available for download in PDF format on my website.

Following the discussion on place names, a map will be forthcoming in due course, but as drawing isn't my strong point it's likely to take me a few weeks.

As ever, any comments you care to make, whether on format, content or anything else, will be most welcome.

Pompeii, by Robert Harris. Book review.

Published 2003. Edition reviewed, Hutchinson 2003, ISBN 0091779251.

Pompeii is a thriller set in the Roman city of Pompeii, at the time of its destruction by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pliny the Elder features in a cameo role, and the other main characters are fictional.

Attilius is an aqueduct engineer transferred from Rome to the Bay of Naples at the height of a drought, sent as an emergency replacement for the previous engineer who has mysteriously disappeared. While trying to repair the vital aqueduct that provides drinking water to the towns around the bay, Attilius comes into conflict with a shady property tycoon, the freed slave and self-made man Ampliatus. Attilius discovers a financial scandal that puts his life in danger, and finds himself drawn to Ampliatus’ daughter Corelia. Meantime, Vesuvius is restless and the coming eruption will eclipse all previous concerns.

I liked a lot of things about this book. The central character, Attilius, is a sympathetic figure, a decent, honest, practical man whose primary concern is to keep his aqueduct working. I found it a refreshing change to have an engineer as the hero of a thriller, rather than a spy, a detective or a military type. Attilius’ job and the structure of the water system are integral to the plot and, as far as I know, historically accurate. I also liked the focus on the commercial and financial aspects of Roman society. There is a real sense of Pompeii as a bustling boom town full of people on the make. Corelia has a mind of her own, and her romance with Attilius fits within the social conventions of the time.

The thriller plot is well-constructed and rattles along with never a dull moment, but what lifts this book beyond the ordinary is the superb description of the Vesuvius eruption. Robert Harris prefaces each chapter with a quotation describing the geophysics going on in the volcano at the time, and his account of events matches what I know of the science. Unlike an earthquake, which is over in minutes, the eruption went on for over 24 hours. People had no idea what was happening or how (or, indeed, if) it would end, and had to make choices about what to do. Should they run away? How, with the roads clogged feet deep in shifting pumice? And where to? What about their property and belongings? Or should they stay and try to ride it out, with flat roofs collapsing under the weight of ash and pumice? If you’ve ever read accounts of the eruption at Pompeii and tried to imagine what it would be like in a city with the houses buried in ash to first-floor height, or tried to visualise the awesome destructive power of a pyroclastic flow, this book brings it vividly to life.

There are a few things that I thought didn’t work well. A few gratuitous sex scenes add little if anything to the plot, but are easily skipped. The volcanic cataclysm sweeps the rest of the plot aside and renders the corruption and financial scandal irrelevant, which may make some readers wonder whether there was any point to inventing the scandal in the first place. I personally didn’t mind that, because Vesuvius would have interrupted all manner of lives and events.

I found Pompeii a fast, easy read in modern prose and with modern dialogue, free of glaring anachronisms (none that annoyed me, at least). I happen to like this style, but some people may dislike it as too ‘modern’. I should perhaps also warn that there are a few uses of modern expletives. The characters are immediately recognisable as sympathetic or not, and on the whole there is not very much complexity or character development. I didn’t find this a problem, but some readers may consider the characters to be one-dimensional.

A rattling good yarn that will also painlessly teach you a lot about volcanology, first-century Pompeii and Roman water engineering.

Pompeii is the only historical novel I know of to have attracted the attention of the Guardian’s splendidly satirical Digested Read column. You can read his take on it here.

By pure chance - believe me - BBC2 is showing a one-hour documentary on Pompeii at 9pm on Friday 31st March (if you happen to live in the UK).

Place names in historical fiction

There are two basic approaches to place names in historical fiction; either use the modern names of places, or use the names from the relevant period (where known). Since many British and European place names are quite old, for novels set in the fairly recent past there may be little if any difference between the modern name and the period name and no difficulty arises. But for novels set in a more distant past, when the prevailing culture and language were different and the period names have since been replaced (sometimes more than once) and bear little resemblance to the modern names, there can be a dilemma. Which approach is better for the reader?

Two Roman-set books I’ve recently reviewed, The Little Emperors and Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, take the latter approach and use Roman place names, with conjectural place names invented by the author where the actual period name is not known. Conversely, Julia by William Napier (review forthcoming in due course), also set in Roman Britain, uses modern place names throughout. In his introductory note William Napier says he chose to use modern names because a modern reader would not know where the places are if he used period names, and would therefore have to stop and look them up on a map.

Which interested me. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped reading a story to look up a place name on a map, unless I was already getting bored. I trust the author and/or the characters to tell me what I need to know about the geography to follow the story; e.g. if the place is a strategic fortification, or a long way away, or over difficult terrain, etc. I may well go and look up the places on a modern map later, but for me a strange name doesn’t break into the flow of the story at all. Whereas a modern name really throws me. Whenever a modern name like London, York or Boulogne appears, the picture I get in my head is always modern City office blocks, York Minster, or the Speed Ferries cross-channel ferry dock, respectively. I have to consciously stop and think ‘No, no, this is Roman, it looked different then’. Period names like Londinium, Eboracum or Gesoriacum at least keep me in the right time period and don’t jolt me out of the story, even if I don’t recognise their location.

Which approach do you prefer? Are unfamiliar period names an unecessary barrier to the reader? Do modern names jar you out of the story?

The warrior heroine in cover art

In the comment thread, Susan Higginbotham said, "The Boudica novels I see in the bookstore here (Scott?) all have a minimally clothed hot-looking babe on them who seems to be pondering a modeling career rather than rebellion."

This comment reminded me irresistibly of Terry Pratchett's observations on the warrior heroine in a certain kind of novel, so I went and looked up the quote. Here it is:

....this particular hero was a heroine. A red-headed one.

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades.

Words like 'full', 'round' and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.

Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialised buyer.

Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots and a short sword.

All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.

Riding with her were a number of swarthy men that will certainly be killed before too long anyway, so a description is probably not essential. There was absolutely nothing pert about any of them.

Look, they can wear leather if you like.

--The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett.

If anyone else is a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, or is curious about it, you might like to know that BBC Radio 4 has just finished a 4-part dramatic adaptation of Small Gods and made it available on the Listen Again service. Small Gods is one of my favourite Discworld novels and the adapter has done a good job.

Testers wanted

The first four chapters of Ingeld's Daughter are now available for download on my website. I've put them up in PDF format, so you have the option to read online, save the file to your computer and read offline at your leisure, or print out a hard copy if you don't like reading on screen.

I've put up two PDF files in different layouts. The print-friendly layout is intended to minimise the amount of paper you need and will print out with two pages of the book side by side, approximately like the layout of a double-page spread in a standard paperback. The screen friendly layout is optimised for screen reading; if printed out it will print with one page per sheet approximately like the layout of a large print book.

I'd be grateful if some of you could try it out and tell me how it works. What I need to know is:
1) Which layout is most useful to you?
2) Does the print-friendly layout print out neatly on North American Letter paper? (I've tested it on A4)
3) Is the download time acceptable over a dialup connection? I expect the later sections of the book to be longer, about 2-3 times the size, and would that also be acceptable over a dialup connection?

And any other comments you care to make, on format or content, are always gratefully received.

Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, by Joseph E Roesch. Book review

Robert Hale, London, 2006, ISBN 0-7090-7958-3
Website at www.boudica-roesch.com for more information and to contact the author.

Boudica, Queen of the Iceni is set in Britain in AD 33–62 and tells the story of the historical British queen Boudica and her rebellion against the Roman government of Britain.

Boudica’s story is well known, so there is no need to worry about giving away the plot. In AD 43 the Roman army successfully invaded Britain. The Iceni, a tribe based in what is now Norfolk and north Suffolk, voluntarily allied with Rome. In AD 60 or 61, Prasutagus, client-king of the Iceni, died and left his kingdom half to the then Emperor Nero and half to his two daughters. The tribe chose his widow Boudica (variously spelled Boudicca or Boadicea) as their leader. However, the Roman procurator, one Decianus, ignored the will, seized the Iceni kingdom for Rome and had Boudica flogged and her two daughters raped. This triggered a destructive revolt against Roman rule, in the course of which the Roman towns of Londinium (London), Camulodunum (Colchester) and Verulamium (St Albans) were burned to the ground and many of their inhabitants killed. The legacy of this destruction turns up regularly in archaeological digs in the three towns, visible as a dense red layer of burned debris. The revolt was bloodily suppressed by the Roman governor Suetonius in a pitched battle, and Boudica died or was killed. The main sources are accounts written by the Roman historian Tacitus about 40 years after the event and believed to be based in large part on the recollections of Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola who was a junior army officer in Britain at the time. A second Roman historian, Dio Cassius, wrote another account in about 200 AD. Curiously (to my mind), there appears to be no mention of Boudica or the revolt in later Welsh sources such as the Triads, although there are references that can plausibly be connected to Caratacus (Caradoc), the British warrior who fought a guerilla war against the Roman army in the years after the AD 43 invasion. So the Roman records are the only documentation extant.

Boudica, Queen of the Iceni tells the story of Boudica’s life from early childhood to death, concentrating mainly on the period of the revolt. For me, one of its key strengths is its historical accuracy and attention to detail. The events in the story follow the accounts of Tacitus and Dio, with minor variations that are detailed in the Historical Note, and the imaginative infilling appears plausible to me. The material culture of Romans and Britons fits what I know of the archaeology, with some vignettes recreated in considerable detail. For example, the remains of a glass and pottery shop have been excavated on what was the main street of Roman Camulodunum. The glass had been stored on a shelf above the pottery and the heat from the fire was so intense that the shattered pottery was covered in drips of melted glass. In Boudica, Queen of the Iceni this shop (or one remarkably like it) is kept by a retired centurion. A few minor niggles; a Roman lady is described as wearing a toga, whereas I understand that the toga was a male garment; the Britons are regularly referred to as ‘Celts’ although the term was not used of British people at the time; and I’m not convinced that “one farm wagon, sawn in half and modified, would yield two war chariots”. The reconstructed chariots I’ve seen look purpose-built as two-wheeled vehicles and the British Museum reconstruction of the Wetwang (Yorkshire) chariot burial is a dual-purpose vehicle without the need for major surgery.

The novel presents a British religion centred on the worship of a central mother goddess, and makes Boudica the High Priestess of this religion for the Iceni, without drowning the story in New Age mysticism. It also shows feuding and rivalry between the British tribes, especially in the early part of the book, and makes a creditable attempt to show some of the Roman point of view as well as the British point of view. Some of the Roman soldiers in particular are presented as sympathetic characters, doing an unpleasant duty with strict military discipline, though the Roman politicians tend to come off rather less well (see below). The plot moves along at a fair clip and doesn’t meander or get bogged down, and there is some humour (it happens not to match my sense of humour, but that is a personal taste). The battles are quickly covered; if you don’t like lengthy battle scenes this will suit you very well. And although the book features both a warrior queen and a warrior princess, there are thankfully none of the sub-erotic undertones that are sometimes associated with such characters.

Very much to the author’s credit is the presence of a Historical Note, a character list and a glossary of place names indicating what is documented and what is invented. A website adds further information.

There were some aspects of the novel that didn’t work so well for me. Although, as noted above, the novel does avoid painting all the Romans as evil bad guys, there were scenes when the portrayal seemed to me a little heavy-handed. Decianus the procurator is shown as a greedy, violent, arrogant creep who richly deserves a sticky end - I had no problem with this, as it is consistent with Tacitus’ account. However, when Emperor Claudius is made to deliberately stop his triumphal procession to gloat over a little British girl who has just been trampled to death by a stampeding elephant, this is a little too much of the stage villain for me. It seemed to me that Boudica’s revolt could be amply justified without having to resort to this invented tableau. In places the writing felt a little ‘flat’ to me, despite the stirring events, and I found it hard to relate to some of the characters. This is a matter of personal preference.

I could also have done without the references to prophecies foretelling the coming of King Arthur. I figured out on page 3 that the heirloom sword Calabrenn was going to morph into Caliburn=Excalibur and really didn’t need it explained to me. Some character sensibilities seemed rather modern to me. The grisly human sacrifice described by Dio Cassius is presented as the work of a handful of violent drunks and is quickly stopped by an appalled Boudica, and a little Roman boy is horrified by a bear-baiting in the arena. Both these are possible; we do not know if Dio’s account of human sacrifice is accurate or what Boudica’s reaction was, and no doubt individuals varied in their reaction to blood sports then as they do now. I’m also not entirely convinced that the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age was really a utopia of equal rights for women as presented; though again, I don’t think there’s incontrovertible evidence that it wasn’t.

A well-crafted retelling of Boudica’s story with commendable attention to historical detail.