Ancient Town-Planning Part 8

_Laibach_ (fig. 25), _Numantia, Lincoln_ (fig. 26).

Three or four more ordinary examples chosen at random from provincial munic.i.p.alities may show the diffusion of town-planning in the western Roman world. One example, from the borders of Italy, may be found just outside the pleasant town of Laibach in southern Austria. Here Augustus in 34 B.C. planted a 'Colonia Iulia Augusta Emona', and recent work of Dr. W. Schmid has thrown much light on its character.

The colony was in outline a rectangle of nearly 55 acres (480 x 560 yds.), and was divided up into forty-eight blocks by five streets which ran north and south and seven which crossed them at right angles; of these forty-eight blocks some must, of course, have been taken up by public buildings. They varied in size: the largest as yet planned (II in fig. 25) measured 170 x 195 ft., or 3/4 acre; two others measured 163 x 170 ft.; while one block, which contained one large house not unlike the Silchester 'inn', was 112 x 168 ft. (Plan, II), and the block next it was a trifle smaller. None of the dimensions show any trace of the normal 120 or 240 ft. (p. 79). The streets were very broad (37-40 ft.); one, which may be the 'cardo maximus', measured as much as 47 ft. across. Beneath the main streets were sewers, in the usual fashion. Round the whole town stood strong walls, reinforced at regular intervals by square projecting towers; the four corners were not rounded but rectangular, after the fashion of Aosta and Turin (pp. 87, 90).[99]

[99] _Correspondenzblatt des Gesamtvereins der deutschen Geschichts und Altertumsvereine_, April 1912; _Bericht vi der romisch-germanischen Kommission_ 1910-11, p. 96. Mullner's _Emona_ (Laibach, 1879), p. 19, plate 2, is wholly inadequate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 25. A PART OF LAIBACH.

(From W. Schmid.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 26. LINCOLN, OUTLINE OF ROMAN WALLS.

(See p. 118.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 27. LINCOLN, BASES OF COLONNADE UNDER BAILGATE.

(p. 118).]

For a second example turn to a remote corner of central Spain. The town of Numantia was famous in early days for its long struggle with the armies of the Roman Republic. Under Roman rule it was wholly insignificant. Over the debris of Numantine liberty a little Roman town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of munic.i.p.al status and its streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square.[100]

[100] Schulten, _Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, phil.-hist. Kl._, viii. (1905), p.

61, plan 2; the evidence seems adequate though not wholly decisive. The Roman town Emporiae, now Ampurias, in the extreme north-east of Spain, seems to have had a rectangular street-plan, though its Greek predecessor was irregular, _Inst.i.tut d'estudis catalans, anuari 1908_, p. 185.

A third example may be drawn from our own country. Lincoln, the Roman Lindum, was established as a 'colonia' about A.D. 75, and the lines of its original area, its 'Altstadt'--for it was perhaps enlarged in Roman times,--can still be traced 'Above Hill' round the Castle and Cathedral (fig. 26). It formed a rectangle just over 41 acres in extent (400 x 500 yds.). Four gates, one of which still keeps its Roman arch, gave access to the two main streets which divided the town into four symmetrical quarters and crossed at right angles in the centre. Along one of these streets, which agrees, if only roughly, with the modern Bailgate, ran a stately colonnade (fig. 27), though whether this belonged to some special building or adorned the whole extent of street is not quite certain. Beneath the same street ran, as at Timgad and Laibach and elsewhere, the town sewer (fig. 28). Of the other main street and of side streets nothing is known, but we can hardly doubt that they carried out the chess-board pattern.[101]

[101] _Archaeologia_, liii. 236 and lvi. 371. The plan given by Mr. Fox in liii. 236 represents his own theory, which may be open to doubt.

Probably the other four munic.i.p.alities in Britain were planned similarly, though the evidence is too slender to prove it. At Verulamium (for example) near St. Albans, a local archaeologist long ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks, resembling squares very slightly askew. Subsequent inquiry has shown that this scheme was merely or mostly imagination.[102]

[102] J.W. Grover, _Brit. Archaeol. a.s.soc. Journal_, xxvi.

(1870), p. 45, plate 1. The theories of the late Mr. Bellows about the streets of Roman and modern Gloucester were equally astray, though in other ways.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 28. LINCOLN. SEWER UNDER BAILGATE]

CHAPTER IX

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. II

In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite munic.i.p.al rank, which bore the t.i.tles 'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is, of course, closely akin to such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a 'colonia'

implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the 'municipium' made town-planning appropriate to this cla.s.s of town also.

It was, however, not limited to these towns. It appears not seldom in provincial towns of lower legal status, such as were not uncommon in Britain, in Gaul, and in some other districts. Four instances may be quoted from the two provinces just named. In the first, Autun, the town-planning is explained by the establishment of the town full-grown under Roman official influence. Unfortunately, however, little is known of the buildings, and it is difficult to judge of the actual character of the place. In the second case, Trier, we may conjecture a similar official origin. At Silchester, official influence seems also to have been at work, and it is not impossible that the fourth case, Caerwent, may be explained by the same cause. In these two latter, however, it is more important to observe the nature of the towns, which is better known than that of any others in western Europe. For they embody a type of urban life which is distinct from any that occurs in Italy or in the better civilized districts of the Empire, and which ill.u.s.trates strikingly one stratum of provincial culture.

_Autun_ (fig. 29).

Caesar won northern and central Gaul for the Roman Empire; it fell to Augustus to organize the conquered but as yet unromanized lands. Among many steps to that end, he seems to have planted new native towns which should take the places of old native tribal capitals and should drive out local Celtic traditions by new Roman munic.i.p.al interests.

These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman munic.i.p.al status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that. But they were plainly devised to help Romanization forward, and their object is declared by their half-Roman, half-Celtic names--Augustodunum (now Autun), Caesaromagus (Beauvais), Augusta Suessionum (Soissons), Augusta Treverorum (Trier), and the like.[103] Of two of these, Autun and Trier, we chance to know the town-plans. The reader will notice a certain similarity between them.

[103] Hirschfeld, _Haeduer und Arverner_ (_Sitzungsber. der preuss. Akademie_, 1897, p. 1102). Similar hybrid names have been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited sites--Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the like. But these are almost all small places or forts, and their names represent no policy of Anglicization.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 29. AUTUN.

After H. de Fontenay, 1889.]

Autun stands on the site and contains the stately ruins of the Roman Augustodunum, built by Augustus about 12 B.C. He, as it seems, brought down the Gaulish dwellers in the old native hill-fortress of Bibracte, on Mont-Beuvray, and planted them twelve miles away on an unoccupied site beside the river Arroux. The new town covered an area of something like 490 acres--that is, if the now traceable walls and gates are, as is generally thought, the work of Augustus. The town within the walls must have been laid out all at once. Quite a large part of it, perhaps has much as three-quarters, have revealed to the careful inquiries of French archaeologists a regular system of quadrangular street-planning, which may very likely have extended even through the unexplored quarter. The Roman street which ran through the town from south to north, from the Porte de Rome to the Porte d'Arroux, was fronted by at least thirteen 'insulae', and one of the streets which crossed it at right angles was fronted by eleven such blocks. They vary somewhat in size. The larger 'insulae', which lie west of the main north and south street, are oblong and measure about 150 x 100 yds. (say, 3 acres); many smaller ones are more nearly square (98 x 98 or 109 yds., about 2 acres).

But the regularity of the plan is plainly the work of civilized man.

When the Celts were brought to live in a Roman city, care was taken that it should be really Roman.[104] Only we may perhaps wonder whether the plan may not have been drawn by Augustus with an eye more to the future than to the present and may have included more 'insulae'

than there were actually inhabitants to occupy at once. That was the case certainly in the mediaeval English town of Winchelsea, where the rectangular building-plots laid out by Edward I have in great measure lain empty and untenanted to the present day.

[104] H. de Fontenay, _Autun et ses monuments_ (Autun, 1889), pp.

49 foll. and map (1:6,250). The existence of a town-plan was first noticed by J. de Fontenay, _Bulletin monumental_, 1852, p.

365, but his map appears to be incorrect and his views generally are based too much on _a priori_ a.s.sumptions.

_Trier_ (fig. 30).

We may take another example from a northern city, Trier on the Mosel, in north-eastern Gaul (Augusta Treverorum). It was in its later days a large city, perhaps the largest Roman city in western Europe. When its walls were built and its famous north gate, the Porta Nigra, was erected, probably towards the end of the third century, they included a s.p.a.ce of 704 acres, twenty-five times as much as the original Timgad, though, it must be added, this area may not have been wholly covered with houses. But it was then an old city. Its earliest remains date from the earliest days of the Roman Empire (A.D. 2), when it was founded, like Autun, on a spot which had (as it seems) never been inhabited before.[105] Of this first beginning we possess vestiges which concern us here. Eight or nine years ago, when the modern town was provided with drainage, the engineers of the work and the Trier archaeologists, headed by the late Dr. Graven, combined to note the points where the drainage trenches cut through pieces of Roman roadway.[106]

[105] Ademeit, _Siedelungsgeographie des Moselgebiets_, pp. 367, 431.

[106] H. Graven, _Stadtplan des romischen Triers_ in _Die Denkmalpflege_, 14 Dec. 1904 (1:10,000); the plan has been often copied, as by Cramer, _Das rom. Trier_ (Gutersloh, 1911), and Von Behr, _Trierer Jahresberichte_, i. 1908. Compare Barthel, _Bonner Jahrbucher_, cxx. 106. Trier at some time or other became a 'colonia'. When this occurred, is hotly disputed; the evidence seems to me to suggest that it was founded without colonial status and became a 'colonia latina' in the course of the first century (see Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 153). I have therefore inserted Trier in this chapter with Autun and not in Chapter VIII with Orange and Timgad.

These points yielded a regular plan of streets crossing at right angles, which in many of its features much resembles that of Autun.

Thirteen streets were traced running east and west, and eight (Dr.

Graven says seven but his plan shows eight) running north and south.

The east and west streets, with two exceptions, lay some 320 ft. from one another. The north and south streets varied, some observing that distance, others being no more than 260 ft. apart. As a result, the rectangular house-blocks varied also in size. The largest seem to be those which fronted a street that crossed the town from east to west, from the Imperial Palace to the Baths and the West Gate, and corresponds roughly with the present Kaiserstra.s.se. This may well have been the _dec.u.ma.n.u.s_, the main east and west street of the 'colonia', and hence the house-blocks fronting it may have been unusually large (p. 77). One of them, near the Neumarkt, reached the awkward size of nearly 3-1/2 acres (320 x 460 ft.). Others elsewhere were smaller, many measuring 320 x 320 ft., and others again 320 x 245 ft., rather less than 2 acres. In general, the 'insulae' on the east and west sides of the town were larger than those in the centre. The whole has a resemblance to Autun, and is more irregular than writers on Trier are ready to allow.[107]

[107] Graven estimated that, except in the central street, all the 'insulae' measured 300 Roman ft. (290 English ft., 88 metres), but his plan suggests rather 100 metres. We need in reality that larger plan which he did not live to complete.

How many houses may have occupied either a large or a small 'insula'

is uncertain; indeed, we know next to nothing of the private houses of Roman Trier. Nor can we fix the number of the 'insulae'. On the west, and still more on the east and south-east of the town, much of the area was not touched by the drainage works and therefore went unexplored. We have proof only of streets and buildings for a mile in length and half a mile in breadth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 30. TRIER.

From plan by the late Dr. Graven.]

Nevertheless we may make some guess at the original area. The streetage itself plainly dates from the original foundation of the Romano-Gaulish town by Augustus. There is, indeed, no other epoch in its history, so far as we know it, when a complete laying out could have been carried through. On the other hand, it is not probable that the first town was a mile long and half a mile wide. Possibly, as an acute German archaeologist has suggested, the small 'insulae' in the south of the town may indicate the line of an original wall and ditch which, like the first walls of Timgad, were overrun later by an expanding town. Certainly, early graves found hereabouts show that this s.p.a.ce lay once outside the inhabited area, and similar evidence has been noted both on the north of the town in the Simeonstra.s.se, and on the west near the Mosel Bridge. If this be so, Augusta Treverorum may have at first covered only 120 or 130 acres; then, as the place spread beyond its original limits, its builders followed more or less closely the lines of the first streets, and, save near the Porta Nigra, continued the chess-board pattern as it was continued at Turin.

_Silchester_ (figs. 31, 32).

Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum (fig. 31), shows a different picture, which is the more interesting because the excavations carried out in 1890-1909 have given us a fuller knowledge of the town than of any other Roman site in the western provinces.[108] It was, apparently, the old tribal capital of the Atrebates and the county-town of its district in Roman days; though not possessing the full munic.i.p.al status, it was probably the seat of local government for a considerable neighbourhood. In outline it was an irregular eight-sided area of 100 acres, defended by a strong stone wall, which was added long after the original foundation. Internally it was divided up by streets which, except near the east gate, run parallel or at right angles to one another. Its buildings are: a Forum and Basilica, a suite of public baths, four small temples, a small Christian church, a hotel, and a large number of private houses. Its area is by no means filled with buildings. Garden ground must have been common and cheap, and the buildings themselves do not form continuous streets; they do not even front the roadway in the manner of houses in Italian towns.

In these respects Silchester differs widely from any of the examples which we have already considered, so far as their internal buildings are known to us. I will not call it a 'garden city', for a garden city represents an attempt to add some of the features of the country to a town. Silchester, I fancy, represents the exact opposite. It is an attempt to insert urban features into a country-side.

[108] For accounts of the Silchester excavations, see _Archaeologia_, vols. lii-lxii, and _Victoria Hist. of Hampshire_, i. 271, 350; large plan by W.H. St. John Hope (1:1,800) in _Archaeol._ lxi.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 31. SILCHESTER.