What Was Life Actually Like In Ancient Roman London? | Life and Death Roman London

[Music] London was originally a Roman city join me as I tell its story from the beginning to the very end I'm going to explore the lives of everyday Roman londoners with exclusive access from some of the world's leading experts lism is about light and dark life and death and there would have been dramatic theatrical effects shining new light on the lives of London's earliest inhabitants there was no grave Goods there's just literally these few bones and they've revealed so much it's amazing this is life and death in Roman [Music] [Music] London the story of Roman London begins right here around ad50 behind me I have the Royal exchange to my right is the Bank of England and then here we have cornhill and their thread needle Street at some stage between Caesar's 55 and 54 BC incursions to Britain and the later claudian invasion in ad43 the Romans established a Mercantile Trading Post right here on a gravel Terrace On The High Ground above the river temps then it expanded probably at the beginning of the 2 Century as it grew onto Ludgate Hill where St Paul's Cathedral is today and then later as it grew again into the third Century expanded onto Tower Hill behind me the area where the city of London the Roman city of London was was built would actually have been a pretty sort of heavily wooded area and the Really distinctive and different thing was the the river temps it was it was a much much wider River there were no embankments narrowing it so at high tide we think the river would have been almost almost a kilometer wide so the water extended from 100 m more into the city than it does now and all the way to bur Tube Station that would have all been underwater under high [Music] tide one of the amazing things about this location is the fact that we're still surrounded by legacies of the Roman world to this very day in the architecture because if you look at the top of the bank of England there the lady you can see is Juno monitas now Juno manitas was the manifestation of the Goddess Juno associated with money and mertile trading and the words we use today for mint and money come from the fact that the original mint in Rome was established next to her temple on top of the capitaline hill above the forign romanum in Rome and here she is today above the bank of [Music] England [Music] first and foremost Roman London was an Emporium as we would style it today which is a Mercantile town so if you were exporting goods from anywhere in the continent it would first come into London and then it would be broken down into smaller loads and put on other boats and then sent around the entire Southeast down the river networks and around the coast Maritime trade was critical for the success really of the early Roman city and and town the reasons the Roman conquered Britain was partly for the materials that could come out those include wool metals like tin people as slaves all all of this was going out but then coming in from the continent were all the things that made Roman life possible and and a bit more pleasant so you know wine olive oil glass everything that that made Roman Life sort of special and enabled trade [Music] really if you living in Roman London one of the structures which you'll be most aware of is London Bridge and London Bridge for the Romans was broadly along the line of modern London Bridge right behind me just here the Romans built London Bridge where they did because it was the first easily accessible Crossing place where they could construct something like a really significant Bridge as you go up River on the River Town well the first Roman Bridge or the first Roman Crossing probably would have been a military pontoon Bridge Bridge soort temporary um Bridge with sort of floating kons and things but then we know from archaological evidence that a wooden bridge is constructed about 52 ad and the reason it was so so important to get a bridge in was was the whole point of the the location of London is it's the first point at the temp EST where there's enough dry ground on the S South Bank and on the North Bank to build a good road Network and it's the first place where the river can really be crossed the reason that that is so important is it's connecting all the trade that's coming in from the south coast across the temps EST linking with a port in London and then fueling the conquest of the rest of Britain to the north and west but the temps wasn't the only significant river running through Roman London the Warbrook was a vital Waterway which bisected Roman London in half on one side you had all the fine public buildings and on the other side you had all the H pooy where the normal people lived however today you wouldn't know it existed because it's been canalized and covered up the only section you can see is this right [Music] here this is a sculptured water feature designed by Christina Eng glasius to Mark the location of the war Brook stream which is now buried beneath the Monumental buildings that cover London's city center today the Warbrook however has proven vital for archaeologists wanting to learn more about the city's Roman past excav ations from this Lost River revealed a plethora of exciting Roman artifacts preserved within the water log soils to find out more I've headed to the Roman Gallery in the Bloomberg London building at the center of the city of London to meet Dr Sophie Jackson a lead archaeologist on the [Music] excavations well Sophie this is one of my favorite installations in the Hall of London reflecting the Roman city what can you tell us about the context in which all of these artifacts were found well these are artifacts are just a small selection of the thousands and thousands that we found here we had to excavate before Bloomberg put their new building up and the archaeology here is particularly deep goes down about 7 or8 meters the tablets are the most amazing and and just the best find from this site before we excavated this site there were about 19 1 n wax writing tablets from Roman London that had decipherable messages in we found 405 fragments on this site and 87 of them so far have been deciphered even if they're tiny little bits of text they give us such amazing clues about the people of London what they were up to what Society was like and there are some really really special ones in this in this case this one is actually a deed of sale between two fredman and one is recording that um he owes him 105 dinari for goods delivered um but the brilliant thing about it it's it's dated it's got the date which you can work out is the 8th of January ad57 it's the earliest manuscript it's the earliest piece of writing from this country that absolutely astonishing and and what is brilliant about it it's been found in the city of London you can imagine what Mike Bloomberg thought when he found out that he's got the earliest piece of writing and it's a financial document and what's lovely about it it tells us just how much of the legal and financial framework was in place really only about 10 11 12 years after London is established so it's it's a really really important and early early document [Music] by 60 AD London had already risen to become the biggest settlement in Britain the city had experienced a remarkable and Rapid rise but disaster was quick to follow in ad60 the I queen buddika Leed a massive revolt against the Romans a Revolt that quickly set its sight on London it was a catastrophic attack and assault on London basically the whole town is set on fire and you can see this in the archaeological record it's one of the most amazing things there's this red layer burnt bricks burnt Timbers but you also find evidence of violence we've excavated dur pits and trenches where pottery and and possessions have been smashed and thrown in the pits and then the burnt debris has gone in on top budda's destruction of London was total victims of the onslaught numbered in the thousands the Revolt however would ultim Ely be put down and in its wake the Romans refused to abandon London and its vital trading location they established a for on modern day Fen Church Street to emphasize the point the Romans were there to stay and London's Revival was set in motion immediately after budda's Revolt probably not A lot's happening there's there's regrouping and clearing up and the the military come back in but then quite rapidly there's new investment in in London a really really massive keyside and and Port facilities are built in sort of 63 64 ad by 70 AD we've got the Roman Amphitheater being built we have the hugging Hill bars a big public bath complex so there's investment in London you know making the point that this city this town is going to survive artifacts from the Warbrook excavations only prove this especially the remarkably preserved tablets Sophie what can the tablets tell us about Roman lender's Rec recovery from the buddan Revolt oh they're really really helpful to that well first of all this one here um which dates from the sort of mid 60s late 60s this is so amazing for a couple of reasons first of all it's the the the first ever the earliest mention of London in history anywhere so there we go we see londino that's incredible and then secondly um the name maganus is actually a Celtic name so this is this is this again is an early tablet probably about 65 post buican but we have you know letters being addressed to Celtic people in London and the lovely thing about these tablets even some of them where they don't really say very much just the name can give you a clue as to who they are what they're doing it tells us that you know monus is is in London and London is reestablishing but there's there's another really good one um which is actually on loan to the BM British museum at the moment um that's dated to the 21st of October ad 62 and it's um a record of an order from one Merchant um uh requesting a delivery of 20 loads of Provisions from St orb verenium to London and that tells us it's one of these lovely Clues it tells us that both towns are back on their feet they're delivering 20 loads of stuff we don't know what the stuff is but from St Orbin to London that is [Music] amazing living alongside these merchants in a recovering London were also soldiers these spearheads are very very obviously military and we have quite quite a lot of those from here and also Arro heads and then we have what's really amazing lots of little fragments of armor those little hinges would have been fixed to to leather or metal plates and forming parts of the the sort of body armor so they're really really important really diagnostic of of the military being here which is interesting because when you go to most Roman towns and cities usually you don't get any sort of military presence within the town but here there's quite a lot so this is like your full fat Roman legionary right in the middle of Roma London yeah yeah AB absolutely and and it's often a question about was was London founded you know was it was it a was it a military Foundation was it was it a Mercantile a trading Place well it's both actually I think that's what the archaeological evidence tells us they're they're here that they're very very present um but they're not running the show so who was running the show well that would be the Roman governor who would have lived in a Monumental Palace where this Palace was located in London remains debated but it may well have been situated somewhere near modern day Canon Street railway station this Palace however was not the only Monumental building built right at the heart of a revived Roman London post budika other Hallmark structures also began to appear the remains of which can be found in some quite peculiar places beneath London's streets [Applause] today at the heart of every Roman town town and city were two structures in every single one and Roman London is no exception these are the Basilica which is the official Law Courts and the Forum which is the official market and here beneath leol Market in a barber shop is a Pier from the Basilica in Roman London this structure dates to between 807 and 8120 when the Romans really monumentalized their new provincial capital after defeating buddika the Forum is present in all Roman so it's really the key Marketplace there are workshops and shops and Market activities in the in the middle and this is fact to be a large open public space and then the Basilica is where the the lawyers live the town Administration lives the the the Law Courts so it's all really about the the running of the town and that all happens in the Basilica the Romans were Master Builders and they use the same building techniques everywhere across their empire you've got Stone foundations you've got a tile wall and it's all linked together with Roman concrete that's how well this war was built it's still with us 2,000 years later Roman London had a new lease of life these Monumental buildings dotted the Eastern side of the river W Brook but what about the Ordinary People of this revived Roman Emporium those inhabitants who largely lived west of the Warbrook in a Roman town or city every townhous would have a fairly similar layout so you would come in off the street into an atum which would have an impluvium pool in the middle then in the middle of the house as you walked through the house which tended to be fairly long and thin you'd have a tabini which is where the the Master of the House would meet all the important people he wanted to meet on a given day but also trinium dining room and then at the back of the house you'd have a peristyle and behind me there's a recreation of a trinium dining room from the first century ad if you were to look at any Recreation of Roman tanel city you would assume all the buildings have built out of stone but they're not nearly all the buildings including many of the fine tow houses are actually built with stone foundations but are built from watland orb so they would be painted to look as though they had Stone exteriors and they'd have painted plaster Interiors that's exactly what we have here in this Recreation of a trinium dining room so you can tell it's early Roman London not later Roman London because the Mosaic floor is fairly primitive this particular building on which the recreation is based was burnt in the hydronic fire in the 820s this fire appears to have been one of a series of calamities that suddenly struck a revived Roman London in the early 2nd Century the evidence is far from clear but there are Clues as to what might have happened I'm standing here on Noble Street near the Museum of London next to the second phase of Roman fortification of London it's the cripplegate fort so you have the first stage which was the fort built at furch Street after the buddan Revolt this fort was built in the ad1 120s after hadrien became the emperor in 8117 now at that time because many Romans didn't expect hadrien to become the emperor there was trouble across the Empire and there was trouble in London and there were three events which marked this trouble firstly you have the finding of hundreds of beheaded skulls in the W Brook Valley secondly it looks as though there was a major fire in Roman London and the whole of Roman London was burnt down interestingly that fire seems to have been the front of the buildings burnt not the backs so it was a deliberate torching event and then thirdly you have the building of the cripplegate fort so it seems that you have an Insurrection Roman London burning down and then when the Roman military come back in the 820s they build this cripplegate fort which you can see right here behind us this is the line of the cripplegate fort it's an early Roman Fort it's plain card shaped and you can tell it's also got internal Towers because there are the foundations of the internal Towers visible today so what do I mean by a plain card-shaped Fort well Roman forts came in four sizes at the top end you have a legionary fortress for about 5,500 6,000 men so in Britain that will be at Kuran in southeast Wales that will be at Chester and that will be in York next below that you have a vexation Fort for about a th000 men which is this fort here it's always play card shaped and in Roman Britain other examples would include housers on hen's wall and binder Lander near Hadrian's Wall any troubles that London experienced during Hadrian's Reign were quickly dealt with and soon enough London once again bounced back entering a golden age in its Roman history one of its greatest attractions were the games behind me you have the the religious boundary of the original Roman city which later became the land wall built by sepia cus and because you're far away from the grand public buildings on Corn Hill we've now jumped over towards Ludgate Hill you have behind us the remains of the Roman Amphitheater in London and the arena wall is marked by the line of stones curving right behind me in 1987 the Roman Amphitheater was found in London and it was very very carefully excavated and we know there were two phases of the amphitheater the first phase built first Amphitheater was built in 70 AD and then it was expanded in in the early 2nd Century for London it was quite a big structure it could hold 7,000 people I mean compared to the Coliseum in Rome it was absolutely puny but for London it was it was a big thing and we know um from the archaeological evidence and the finds that there would have been um animal fights going on they would have let wild animals fight against each other it was probably the place rather gruesomely where prisoners were put to death either by wild animals or by execution and also as a sort of real highlight there would be gladiatorial [Music] combats one of the key experiences of living in Roman London would have been going to the public baths so the Romans being the Romans did the same everywhere across the Empire including in Roman London this is a representation of a public Baths on upper T Street in the city of London today we've got very good archaeological data which can show us exactly what this experience of going to the Roman public baths would have been like because we've actually found the wall plaster so part of your experience going to the Roman baths in London would have been to see beautifully painted artwork on the walls like this there were several bath houses that have been discovered in Roman London the main public bath was a bath house built in hugan Hill in 70 AD and it actually went out of use relatively quickly which is surprising there may be another near where Canon Street railway station is and there's another Bath House in the east of the city at billing gate and all the bath houses were positioned mostly on the sort of slope down to the river presumably to use gravity to to actually get the water to run in at sudden pressure you will begin the public bathing experience by going into the tepidarium the cool room you then go into the caldarium the hot room and then you'd finish your bathing experience by closing your por because you jump into a freezing cold frigidarium plunge pool what appears to have happened with the bath houses is that there's early public investment in you know Government funding the the building of these public buildings but then later in the Roman period they become be a to become more private institutions in the backyards of people's houses or perhaps um you know for for a select few not for everyone London began to thrive like never before with people venturing to this wealthy Metropolis from all over the Roman Empire we know quite a lot about Roman London's inhabitants in the 2N century when it's a sort of peak population we think we think there were probably about 30,000 people living in London and we know that they came from a whole wide range of places and what we'd call classes now people coming in from Gaul from France what modern France from from Spain from Italy but also a lot of native British people who assimilated with the Roman civilization really so it's a really really mixed Society really mixed culture and with all different grades of people sort of mingling together one critical way through which we've been able to learn more about Roman London's population are through the burials to find out more I caught up with the Museum of London's senior curator of archaeology Dr Rebecca [Music] Redfern so Rebecca where did the Romans bury their dead in Roman London well like every other town in the Roman Empire they um were instructed by law to bury outside of the Roman walls and then we also have quite a few burials that we would call clandestine burials so there is um a man who has put head first down a well really um and there's uh lots of kind of bits of people that we find in uh rubbish heaps and in ditches and things so it's although they're supposed to be the majority of people are buried outside the the Rome walls and they're on the roads leading out of London and that links to part of the Roman fun ritual where by reading someone's Tombstone is an act of commemoration as you would have gone into Roman London you would have been going through all of the the cemeteries you know that would have been brightly painted it would have had people's names and where they came from so we can learn a lot about um the people of Roman and London from that evidence and are there any specific um sort of cemeteries that we know about sort of around ran London we've divided them um according to the compass points because there's so much development in London you have lots of individual sites actually all together for big cemeteries so we've got northern southern eastn West and they do seem to have different characteristics so the Eastern cemeteries you've got lots of people buried with things that we don't necessarily find elsewhere and and some appear to go into like the 4th Century um early fifth century and others don't that might be just because um it hasn't been excavated yet or else um that's just the nature of the settlement changing over time and Rebecca were people buried in different ways sort of throughout the chronology of Roman London yes and that's a reflection of um where people are coming from so very early on we have these incredibly wealthy High status cremations of um men and they are clearly being buried in a Mediterranean style one is buried in an Egyptian pot an Egyptian stone pot so they studied the stone and found that it came from Egypt so that would have had been brought to Britain and is clearly someone of very very high status and then you have a cremation and the thing to remember with cremation is is actually the expensive option because you need to have bought all the wood and it takes a lot of wood you know it's a whole very very very lengthy funeral tradition compared to putting someone in a coffin and burying them we have uh people in wooden coffins as well we also have some very high status burials like the SP Roman woman where they're buried in lead coffin and those lead coffins have been brought to London probably um from elsewhere in Britain and then we also have stone sarcophaguses a couple of those appear to have been imported and we know that they're made on the continent or elsewhere in Britain they've normally got like a a picture of a woman's face on them but sometimes the face isn't finished so they were kind of like made to a certain point and then obviously like you say oh yes I'll have that psychop and they'll be like okay what does this person look like and finish it off but it didn't happen in this case it's really remarkable but it just shows that that exchange of ferary traditions like with spi's Roman woman we know that she's also her body's been embed not like Egyptian ining it's where they would um rub the the body with um oils and spices and where that's been studied by colleagues at Bradford University they were able to show that these are pine resin and there's also yellow staining on some of her neckbones as well and that's again from the treatment of the body and then at the same time you have a lot of very local Customs like the traditions of where they've come from and including other parts of Britain as well so that to me speaks about this sort of Cosmopolitan nature of Roman London where a lot of the population weren't British at all but came from across the Roman Empire yeah and you can see that quite a lot through the uh inscriptions so you've got a lot of military who are recorded through tomb Stones they were being buried in a very formalized very recognizable way within the military Community we think that that London was attractive or people were coming to London from all over the Empire because it offered Economic Opportunity it's a new market for you to sell your goods or to take goods from this country into the rest of the Roman Empire there's Economic Opportunity but also people whose job is to administer and enforce Roman civilization so this is somebody of African descent who grew up in Roman London yeah which is fantastic because this is the type of evidence that we don't get in the um inscriptions that we don't get in the letters so the only evidence we have of different population affiliations is how we would describe it forensically is by looking at their skeleton and then adding kind of that DNA and that isotope evidence in to create a picture because there was no grave Goods there's just literally these few bones all jumbled up and they've revealed so much it's amazing and one thing I actually noticed is how warm those teeth are there so that must have been very painful inside your tooth so you've got a hard white crown and that's really tough but it gets uh worn out because the grain they're eating you get bits of stone Incorporated in it so it's like a sandpaper on your tooth because of how they're grinding it and then that exposes the Brown soft dentine and that's like really that would be really sensitive goodness me and what what they've taken for sort of pain relief for that there's lots of recommendations in the medical literature written in the Mediterranean and they're saying you know things like puppy syrup to kind of relieve pain and all sorts of other various crazy medical concussions so poppy syrup yeah which is an opiate yes so basically they're taking opx for toothache victorians did stranger things so why not from early foundations on cornhill to budd's Reckoning and then to a remarkable Revival the rise of London is a fascinating topic to learn about within a century this Roman Foundation had risen to become the new capital of Britannia but tough tests lay ahead for Roman London its story has only just begun in the last episode we covered the rise of Roman London up to the end of the 2 Century from the city's earliest piece of preserved writing it's the earliest mention of London in history anywhere we' see londino that's incredible to some bizarre Roman medicine in the medical literature they're saying things like puppy syrup to relieve pain they're taking OPI for toothache now we're going to look at Roman London's later history and what ultimately happens to this Beating Heart of ancient [Music] Britannia traces of London's Roman roots can be found tucked away in Peculiar places beneath London streets but other features are hiding in plain sight we're standing here outside one of the few surviving sections of the L wall of Roman London and the story of this wall begins in ad1 93 the year of the five Emperors the Roman Empire was convulsed by a series of civil wars and at the end of the year the last standing the emperor was septimia seus born in North Africa in lepus Magna died in ad211 in York in Britain but at the beginning of his Reign he found that he had a number of usurpers potentially challenging him for the throne so therefore he talked to them one by one and the key one the most difficult for him to beat was the British Governor based here in London called Clodius albinus and clodus albinus actually made a power play for the throne and seus had to bring his armies all the way to Gaul to fight a Titanic Civil War battle at lunham modern leyon in ad1 197 which cus only just won and having beaten albinus he had him beheaded he mounted his Stallion and then trampled ceremoniously over albus's body and then he decided that he need to send a message to the people in London who' supported albinus the usura so he sent his generals to London and he told them to build the First wall in Roman London not to keep the bad guys out but to tell the people of London what would happen to them if they misbehaved again and he built this 3.2 km lall circuit and here it is still today still the ran facing Stone that's ragstone which came from quaries 127 km away in the Medway Valley sent to London then built with an outer face and innerface and then you have five levels of stone built and then at the end of five levels of Stone you have a tile bonding layer and the tile bonding layer actually is used by the Romans everywhere across their empire and that tile bonding layer because it's from the Mediterranean it designed to give the wall Flex if there's an earthquake now clearly you don't get many earthquakes in London but the Romans did the same everywhere across their empire and here it is to send a message to the londoners to behave on this map behind me you can actually see the outline of the route used to build the s lall in London so it's 3.2 km long it's this blue line here starts here where we're standing now at tow Hill Tube Station and then goes all the way around up to London Wall then goes to the guilt hall and then goes to where the Museum of London is today which is there and then it goes down to the line of the Old Bailey and then back down to the river so that's 3.2 km long built by septimia seus about ad1 199 thanks to seus London was now surrounded by this Monumental City wall and as the third Century progressed more and more structures will be built within one such building was a mysterious Subterranean Temple constructed under what is today the Bloomberg European headquarters in the center of the city of London to find out more I'm meeting up with the Museum of London archaeologies Dr Sophie Jackson so Sophie were in this incredible space near the W Brook and it's myth R isn't it now what can you tell us about how it was actually found well it was a bit of a miracle it was found actually this part of the city was really badly bombed during the blitz a small group of archaeologists would got together just after the war to to investigate these bomb sites and just to make a record of the archaeology before reconstruction started and so they came here because they wanted to record the the wallbrook the the deposits in the wallbrook river and they put the trenches in just a few trenches and one of them miraculously clipped the curved abidal end they couldn't investigate it immediately that was in 1952 so so they came back in 1954 just before construction of this big new office development started and during the summer of 1954 they uncovered the ground plan all of this got the full extent of it but they didn't know what it was they thought it was a Roman Temple didn't know who it was dedicated to and it was actually the last day of excavation September the 18th 1954 that the diagnostic piece came up it was the head of mithas was found perhaps by a Workman and that was it on the last possible moment of the the excavation they worked out that this was a temple to myth and what does the finding of this head tell us about the date when the Mian was built the excavation was really really well done and there's lots of very good dating evidence from coins and so on on here so we know this building was built in about 250 ad so quite late on you know 200 years nearly after the founding of of London so what do we know about the religious worship which would have taken place in this space well we know a bit about what went on in this building but not very much and that's because mithraism was a secretive it was a mystery cult U members of The Cult were initiated in and and sworn to secrecy so there's no liturgy or written description of what actually happened in here we have to piece together the archaeological evidence we know from other myrea that these buildings are often sunken and this one was there was three steps down into it it was probably windowless just lit by candles it would have been quite a sort of spooky and scary experience there would have been columns there were actually seven pairs of columns in here and seven is a significant number we know from a a famous myth in AA in in Italy that there were seven grades and we think the seven s here are obviously indicative referencing those grades so if you're a beginner the lowest grade was a was a raven you probably sat near the door and the parter or the father of the cult would have been at the the business end with with the Altar and the mithraic sculpture this is the threshold the entrance way and amazingly the cast iron fitting for the doors where the doors would have swiveled is still there they're still surviving and and what do we know about the individuals who have actually woried in this building that have all been men um we know the cult was really really popular with uh men in the Army civil servants and and Merchants these are people who are moving around the Roman empire being posted to different places and PR obviously offered a spiritual power and special knowledge but also a great networking opportunity so if you probably wanted to get on in the Army it was good to be invited to be a mythra and and to uh to join this particular Club in this space is there one area which would have been the center of the worship yes well the center would have been directed towards the the altar in this case it's the is the West End and you can see in here we've we've reconstructed or given the impression of the cult statue which would have been at this end it would have been really really dramatic the the head of mithras which was the sculpture which was found on the last day of excavation would have been on this statue the rest of it would have probably been made of plaster of Paris and the hands might have been marble the head was marble but the rest was a bit fake right it would all been painted of course mithraism is about light and dark life and death and there would have been dramatic IC theatrical effects you know we know from other myraa there would have been spaces for curtains to be withdrawn or pulled and there are four sort of sockets behind the cult statue here for lamps for for lighting that sort ofu sort of like religious theater it is you can imagine this would have been very dark there would been smells of incense um candle lit the lights behind there with the part a leading the leading the whole business at the front for the Romans religion could operate on two levels firstly you have the worship of the classical Gods so here represented by for example minura and Neptune and if you're worshiping the classical Gods you're not participating in the worship the actual altar is outside of the classical Temple and the priests do the service but you do not participate what you're asking there in terms of transacting with the deity is for them not to interfere with the your everyday life the last thing you want is to have this monstrous deity Jupiter for example twanging the thread of your life because anything could go wrong but then you have another level of religion as well these are the congreg religions from the East so for example Christianity Judaism and the worship of mithas mithraism so in this space it's clearly associated with the worship of Mithra but is is there any other evidence whatsoever that other religions were also celebrated here yes there there is it looks like the building was remodeled in about 320 ad The Columns disappeared and we think it was rededicated to bacus so it became a temple to bacus when the ceased to be a Mithra somebody dug a pit which would have been just around here and they actually buried all of the cult statues associated with mithas and the other statues which had been associated with the mithraic phase and they buried them there in other buildings where ever been replaced by Churches often the statues are smashed up but here they were treated with respect and thank goodness they were because they are the finest Roman sculptures that ever been found in this country these were objects which had real power and real meaning but also wanting to sort of almost purify the space and clear out the past religion before starting to worship Aus and here we have the actual objects themselves so all these heads of deities were buried in the ground reverentially almost to draw a close on the previous worship but obviously there were other religions at the same time which also fell out of use as it were for example behind me you can see this amazing marble bust of CPUs which is also an Eastern deity but which was also buried at the same time as these objects from the worship of mithas so how did the worship of mithras this Eastern cult end up being practiced in London the first myrea sort of appear in the first century ad and it used to be thought that this was the Persian religion which had traveled sort of um westwards but actually we think now that the Romans somebody borrows the iconography of this earlier religion to give it a a sense of mystery and gravitas or whatever um but it appears first in places like modern turkey and then into Rome and then it takes a few hundred years to get AC cross the Empire but there are four myraa known in the UK and they're all obviously later there at the sort of second third Century are there any other elements of building structure near here which are associated with the mithan but which aren't on display yes we were absolutely blown away when we were doing the early investigations here because we did a trench just out there beyond the entrance here to where the Myra was and we found um surviving remains of a sort of vestibule of a could be called a narx officially um which could have been effectively the changing room where you got dressed up for what was going on in here a few years ago we did an excavation on the other side of wallbrook right and we found remains of a large Roman building and we think that that may have been the house the residence of perhaps the person who built this this mitham so This is actually a private building in the back Garden of somebody's big house there's an inscription on What's called the tootan panel this bull sliding scene which references Opia Sylvanas who's a veteran of the second Augustine Legion and it says he built this and fulfilled his vow so it's possible that this is opio sylvanas's house on the other side of the modern Walbrook Street and he may have been the person who built this so it's another fantastic link to a real person and you can see here this classic mythra scene with mithas killing the bull but also these other animals attacking the bull as well there's a dog there there's a scorpion there's a snake this is all associated with the iconography of the worship of Metras also the graffiti on the side so it's seus and then it says there he's from liio to Augusta it's amazing to think that if not for this inscription we would never have known of severinus the man was one of many well of Romans who opted to settle in this thriving City and live rather luxurious Lifestyles clues about which have been revealed through the archaeology to this Recreation of a trinum which dates to around ad300 if you look at the quality of the Mosaic this is a really fine mosaic the story of Roman London has moved on it's now this very successful Mercantile City we can see here we're recreating the Box flu tiles from inside the walls which means this house has a hyper coost it's got central heating but also if you move this way we can see some evidence of everyday life in this house around ad300 one of the key things for me are these lamps it's worth remembering that glass is very expensive in the Roman world so windows are going to be very small so therefore to give you light ins inside this amazing Roman townhouse you're going to need lamps all over the place tucked away around this corner is one of my favorite artifacts from the whole of Roman London and it's this it's a metal makeup canister it was found with the makeup still in it and so we could analyze what Roman makeup was made of and this makeup comprised animal fat starch from ground bulbs and tincture of tin so just imagine the person wearing this makeup they will be glowing this tincture of tin making them almost Sparkle but very few things speak to me like this makeup pot because the makeup pot tells me who was using it in Roman London and it even has their finger marks in it that is absolutely incredible another way that we can learn more about these high status individuals are through their bials to find out more I meeting the Museum of London's senior curator of archaeology Dr Rebecca Redfern looking at the skeleton actually provides us with a huge amount of information about this person they're female they've got really wide stic notches and also the shape of their Cranium tells me that as well her upper leg bone has been cut and that's her femur and we took a bit of bone out of the femur in order to date her burial because she's one of the very late Roman burials that we have so we wanted to kind of see exactly when she was being buried and that came out as um the early 400s late 300s we also looked at areas of her pelvis so this bit here and that can tell us how old she was when she died so she was um about 36 to 45 okay we don't know what she died from because nothing came back in the in the DNA analysis about that but what it did tell us was that she actually has light brown hair fortunately didn't work for um her eye color or her skin color um but it worked for the hair color so we know that she's got light brown hair you may have noticed that on her jaw there it's a little bit of green staining right and that's because she was buried with these enormous broaches that are like these huge pepper pots um that were joined together by these really beautiful um chain of uh glass beads and she's also then had this bone comb which was placed behind her head these are what are called um Germanic objects so they're found in uh Roman Germany across Continental Europe where we know that people from Germany are being stationed with the military by looking at your dental enamel the white hard Dental enamel we were able to show that she was actually born outside of Britain so she's probably spent her early childhood in the in the German area of of Europe so she's someone who grew up on the continent had a very visible expression of her community came to London then she was B bued with all of her cultural signifi which is really nice cuz then we see that elsewhere in Roman Britain towards the end there's this very clear expression of German identity so which of the cemeteries in Ran London was she actually buried in she was buried in the Eastern Cemetery that area seems to be used in later in late London as well um whereas other areas seem to kind of go out of use a bit more this time in London we're getting these very very high status barrels like spi's Roman woman CU she's quite late on in the chronology so and although London seems to be becoming smaller in size actually you still have these people who have these Continental connections who are very wealthy and they're still expressing their community and traditions in a way that would be recognizable to people from other parts of the Roman Empire it is burials like this one that can reveal so much about those that lived in later Roman London many evidently prospered but the overarching story of London between the late thir and early fifth centuries is one of gradual decline one key event in this diminishing occurred near the end of the 3D Century orchestrated by a Roman usurper a pirate king corus the year is 8286 the emperor max Simon in the west decides that because there's no Roman Navy in Britain anymore the North Sea is being overrun by piracy Germanic piracy and therefore the emperor gets one of his best Admirals corus to mount a naval operation to clear the North Sea piracy but he does such a good job that the emperor accuses him of actually siding with the Pirates being a traitor and he orders his execution so corus usurps and he comes to Britain and corus decides that he wants to keep the Romans out so he actually starts minting coins he creates the first mint minting proper coins in Roman Britain sometime around 8290 on the coins he has his own face and then he has the face of maximian who's the emperor in the west and also the emperor in the East D cian so he's trying to say I'm just as powerful an Emperor as the other two existing Emperors in the Imperial Center but he knows they're going to come for him so therefore he builds a series of forts around the coast of Britain some of which later become the Saxon Shore forts but also he builds the river wall to close the land circuit built by sep seus when the river wall is built there are no more ragstone quars operating in the Medway Valley so there's no new stone to use so therefore cuz he builds this wall in the hurry to keep roams out he knocks down all the Grand mosia and all the grand funerary monuments outside the town he knocks down many of the fine public buildings in London itself and he reuses the stone many of those stones have got inscriptions naming the governors the procurators the key people of earlier Roman London and we only know their name because they were later reused building the Corian River wall so behind me you actually get a sense of three of the phases of the fortification of Roman London firstly the cripplegate for secondly built on top of it the San Land wall and finally when corus built the river wall he also built a series of bastions bolted on to the outside of the original sever L wall That's one of them right there much of that stone is original Roman Stone corus invested heavily in defenses to protect his Breakaway Empire but things didn't turn well for the Sho serer in 8293 corus was assassinated by his chancellor who was called electus and then you have three years the final three years of what was called their North Sea Empire before this recalcitrant part of the Roman Empire was drag Kicking and Screaming back into the Roman Imperial fold and that was carried out by constantius Cloris who was the junior Emperor the Caesar in the west now constantius clor celebrated his victory by minting a coin which tells an amazing story about Roman London because he arrived just in the nick of time to save London from being sacked by the Germanic Frankish mercenaries who were fighting for electus here we can see the earliest ever pictural representation of London and it's called the Aris Medallion London returned to the Imperial fold but there will be no new golden age for this Roman city instead over the next few decades London would experienced a gradual decline it's actually much harder for archaeologists to tell what was going on because the later part part of Roman London's history is often the bit that's chopped Away by Victorian basements and things so we have less of it but also we have less of it because there was less of it we know that London is really thriving in the first and early 2nd centuries ad and then gradually there's a sort of slow period of decline the port disappears bigstone buildings become abandoned we've got archaological evidence that they start sort of falling down and collapsing and presumably people are moving away either into the countryside where they perceive it safer or perhaps returning to the where they may have originally come from their families origin come from the Roman Administration ceases in ad410 right across the Western Roman Empire essentially London is on its own there's no government to protect anyone there's no military and that is the end effectively of Roman London Roman London had met its end its Legacy however lives on it's so important to learn about London's Roman history because London was founded by the Romans just understanding what they built where what their lives were like it gives us a different perspective of a really exciting perspective on on why the city is how it is and also changes your view on what it is to be British or English or whatever this was a this was a very diverse different population which created our city I think it's amazing to learn more about that and to find it and it's just exciting as well thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel History hit. TV you're going to love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 905,838

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, roman britain, roman republic, roman london documentary, roman london bridge, roman london tour, roman london reconstruction, roman london history, london roman wall, londons roman amphitheatre, london roman ruins, roman wall london car park, life in roman empire, life in roman britain

Id: MDhk2kAclVc

Length: 51min 34sec (3094 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024