In 1970, Peter Salway published his account of The Fenland in Roman Times, arguing that this part of East Anglia had been an imperial estate. How do his ideas stand up to scrutiny four decades later? The Cambridge Archaeological Unit might have some answers after excavating a huge swathe of Fenland near Earith, as Chris Catling now reports.
He also pointed to the existence of numerous salt-production sites in the Fens, arguing that salt production elsewhere in the Roman Empire was an imperial monopoly. The lack of military posts in the Fenland implied a compliant population and few problems with law and order. Equally, there was a marked lack of evidence for an aristocratic class of landowners and officials, and no villa estates – just ‘a very large district occupied by farms and villages of a simple type’. The villas that did exist could be explained as parts of estates that existed before the area became imperial land, and that were
Beginning in June 1996, Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) spent ten years excavating a huge area of Fenland in advance of gravel quarrying close to the village of Earith, in Cambridgeshire. In all, 62ha were subjected to evaluation along a 2km strip of gravel terrace bordering the Fens. Two huge volumes have just been published reporting on this work, one devoted to prehistoric communities and one to the Romano-British period and after. The main author, CAU’s co-founder and director Christopher Evans, ends with a long list of potential research topics that arise out of the fieldwork. This article will look at just one of them: the question of whether the Roman Fenland was established and run as an imperial estate.
belOw Camp Ground lies to the top of the area depicted on this plan. Sedimentation studies have shown that Rhee Lake was deliberately drained in the Early Roman period, perhaps as part of a centrally planned land-reclamation project. Investigations of this swathe of Fen edge by CAU suggest that the surplus produce from a series of small farms along the gravel terrace was brought to the Camp Ground for storage, and then shipped in barges to the East Anglian coast at Brancaster, before being taken by sea to supply the soldiers manning the Saxon Shore forts.
That idea was first fully researched and articulated when Peter Salway was appointed by the Royal Geographical Society in 1960 to consider the evidence from aerial photography, field survey, and mapping. The resulting monograph, The Fenland in Roman Times, published in 1970, argued that certain aspects of the Roman Fenland landscape could best be explained as the consequence of centralised planning.
Evidence for imperial administration
Salway’s research pointed to a sudden explosion of new settlements in the Fens after 100 AD, many consisting of nucleated groups of farms in contrast to the single farmsteads that are the norm in the Roman countryside elsewhere. The close association of these new settlements with what appeared to be a planned system of canals, roads, and droveways led Salway to interpret the whole system as ‘constituting the first signs in the Fenland of large-scale planning’.
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