Calleva Atrebatum's Public Baths I

What does the Public Baths building in Calleva Atrebatum tell us about life in a Roman town of a recently conquered province, Roman Britain?


Of the known public buildings in Romano-British towns, public baths are the most frequent. 1 The Roman historian Tacitus, in his biography of the Roman Governor of Britain Gaius Julius Agricola, listed  bath-houses as one of the “temptations” that caused the aristocrats of Celtic Britain to adopt a Roman lifestyle. 2 This research will focus on the bath-house at Calleva Atrebatum as an example of an important public building in a Roman town, and attempt to discover some of what this structure might reveal about life in Roman Britain in the years after the Claudian invasion.

Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester), unlike most Roman towns in Britain, was completely abandoned, and not built over by an existing modern city, so it is possible to examine the entire extent of the town.  In the pre-Roman Iron Age there was a Celtic settlement on the site, evidenced by large defensive earthworks and traces of round houses dating back to the late first century BC. By the beginning of the first century AD the round houses had been replaced by a planned settlement with streets almost at right angles to each other, suggesting a Celtic settlement heavily under the influence of Roman culture, an interpretation supported by coinage of the period issued by Eppilus, inscribed CALLEV (Calleva) and sometimes REX, the Latin word for ‘king’.



After the Roman invasion by the emperor Claudius in 43 AD, Calleva became part of the kingdom of the pro-Roman Celtic prince Cogidubnus who ruled an area in southern Britain from his Roman-style palace at Fishbourne near Chichester.

Probably  in the 50s and 60s, a new street grid was laid out and an administrative and market building was built, probably of timber. The public baths seem to date from this period.

Calleva was probably a civitas, a tribal administrative centre based on the existing native Celtic tribe. Martin Millet’s statistical analysis of town sites and structures has shown that civitates were characterised by a series of features:

organised planning on a street grid and a suite of substantial Roman-style public buildings, notably the forum (public square and meeting place), basilica (town hall and law courts), public baths, temples, amphitheatre and theatre.” 3

G. C. Boon, who re-excavated parts of Calleva in the mid-twentieth century, emphasises the importance of public bath-houses to Roman culture, writing that “the Calleva Baths… show signs of constant alteration and improvement, showing the value set on cleanliness and the social amenities which they offered”. 4  All towns of any size boasted suites of public baths.

The building in Calleva was excavated in 1903-4. The original plan was overlaid by numerous additions which the early twentieth century excavator W. Hope rationalised into five groups 5 making six structural periods in all, showing the ongoing use and importance of the bath-house.

From the earliest period the Baths comprised:

a) an entrance portico

b) an exercise yard (palaestra)

c) an apodyterium (undressing room)

d) a warm room (tepidarium) attached to which was

e) a sudatorium (sweating room)

f) a caldarium (hot bath room)

The heating was of the hypocaust system with an outside furnace and hot gases circulated under the floor (built on brick columns) and up through flues made of box tiles embedded into the walls.

The building was set north and south, with these chambers arranged in an orderly row with one leading into the next, covering an area of about 700 square metres.

This plan (along with other evidence such as the building’s alignment to the street grid) has suggested to archaeologists that the  public bath-house was an early structure in the post-conquest town, and that its design and possibly its construction had links to the Roman military occupation force. Anthony King shows that the plan is a very common one, especially on military sites, and is found in other towns in Roman Britain as well as Gaul and Germania, 6 and Frere adds:

The utilisation of building types already introduced by the army can be traced also in the plan of public baths, where the various rooms of graded heat extended in a long line behind a palaestra or exercise courtyard, as at Calleva, instead of being grouped more compactly alongside it as for instance at Pompeii. 7

 

So perhaps there was a military hand in the construction of the Calleva bath-house consistent with the idea that the army may have been used to encourage Romanisation and urbanisation.

The earlier dating of the bath-house is supported by the design of its palaestra, which was not enclosed and roofed as usual with later British examples. The open palaestra of the Calleva baths in their first-century phase was a Mediterranean feature not often used in Roman Britain and resembles better-preserved examples still visible in Pompeii. 8


 1. as shown in Millett, M.   The Romanization of Britain, 1990, Table 5.1, p. 106
 2. Tacitus, De Vita Iulii Agricolae, XXI
 3. Millet op cit p. 69.
 4. Boon, G.C.  The Roman town Calleva Atrebatum at Silchester, 1974  p. 100.
 5. ibid. fig. 14, p. 103.
 6. King, A.   Roman Gaul and Germany, 1990, page 78.
 7. Frere, S.   Britannia: A History of Roman Britain,  1967, p.232.
 8. Bedoyere, G. de la.   Roman Towns In Britain, 1992, p 53.