Agriculture in Roman Britain
Applebaum, Shimon
Agricultural History Review, Volume 6:2 (1958)
Abstract: If we consider that agriculture employed a majority of the population in non-industrial societies and is still man’s staple occupation, we must admit that the agriculture of Roman Britain has concerned archaeologists and historians much less than it should, for on its vicissitudes depended to no small degree the well-being and decline of the province. The existence of Roman ‘villas’ was first recognized in this country in the age of Elizabeth, and they began to be excavated in the eighteenth century. The mosaics of the Stonesfield house, Oxfordshire, were found in 1711; Lysons published his handsome account of the Woodchester villa, Gloucestershire, in 1797. But it took a long time before antiquaries understood these remains to be those of farms. The gentlemanly outlook of the Victorian antiquaries, projected upon these relics, saw them as the country residences of Roman officers and gentry; gay mosaics and Horatian banquets were more attractive than cow-houses. In a new epoch (19oo) Professor Haverfield, writing his introduction to the Romano-British section of the Victoria County Histories; revealed a clear theoretical realization that the normal ‘villa’ “was the property of a great landowner who.., cultivated the ground close to i t . . . ” ; ” . . . the blocks (sc. of the villa’s buildings) may consist of corridor house, barns, outhouses, and farm-buildings.” But Haverfield never reached the point of attempting to identify such buildings in the villa-plans he knew. John Ward, to whom Romano-British archaeology owes so much on the practical side, also grasped the villas’ agricultural role, particularly where the ‘basilical’ house was concerned. His work was published in 1911.
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