Good-
morning. I think the name Caerleon will touch a chord in most people’s
minds, King Arthur, of course. Let me just refresh your memory from
Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”. The young king had
managed to conquer the whole of England, Scotland and finally Wales
“through the noble prowess of himself and his knights of the
Round Table”, as Malory puts it. “Then the king removed
into Wales, and let cry a great feast that it should be holden at
Pentecost after the incoronation of him at the city of Carlion”.
And many other feasts and tournaments he is said to have held there
in later years. Caerleon is two miles north east of Newport, in
South Wales - or rather it’s in Monmouthshire, that curious
county which is neither Wales nor England, but partly both. Although
it’s so near the big town, the second largest port in Wales,
after Cardiff, it’s remarkably unspoiled, lying there on the
silver Usk which winds about between the mercifully screening hills,
with their woods and rich green fields. If you look up Caerleon
on almost any large scale map (though not on the latest one-inch
Ordnance Survey) you’ll see a large area of dotted lines boldly
labeled “King Arthur’s Round Table” - and I wonder
what you’d expect to find if you went there:
It’s
not true, of course. The only evidence of Arthur’s court at
Caerleon is purely literary - or legendary. As a matter of fact
the evidence for his very existence is hardly stronger, though it
is coming to be thought nowadays that there probably was a Romanised
Briton, Artorius, who organised resistance against the invading
Saxons in the dark days at the beginning of the sixth century. He
must have fought a losing battle in the end, of course, but his
deeds must have been heroic enough for his name to collect round
itself all sorts of half forgotten Celtic and even continental legends,
as well as the customs of the Provencal courts of love. But why
connect him with Caerleon? Well, listen to what was written about
the place in the twelfth century. “Many traces of its former
splendour may yet be seen, immense palaces, formerly ornamented
with gilded roofs …… a town of prodigious size, remarkable
hot baths, relics of temples and theatres, all enclosed within fine
walls, parts of which remain standing. You will find on all sides,
both without and within the circuit of the walls, subterranean buildings,
aqueducts, underground passages; and, what I think worthy of notice,
stoves contrived with wonderful art to transmit the heat insensibly
through narrow tubes passing up the side of the wall”. So there
was something at Caerleon, then; and if you were writing the life
of a legendary hero, what better background could you find for his
exploits than the mysterious ruins of a city whose true history
was lost in the mists of the Dark Ages? The clue to what the ruins
really were is given by that bit about “narrow tubes insensibly
transmitting heat up the side of the walls”. The flue-tiles
of a Roman
hypocaust, of course. There s little trace of them today, nor of
most of what struck the twelfth-century historian as so magnificent
- I only wish we could see a Roman-British town as it must have
been after even eight hundred years of neglect; but there’s
still more than enough to identify the place to a trained archaeologist.
In fact Caerleon was the Roman legionary fortress of Isca Silurum
- Isca of the Silures - headquarters of the second Augusta legion
after it was moved from Gloucester. The Silures were the local Celtic
tribe of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan, and they proved a very tough
nut to crack. Ostorius Scapula had hammered them in A.D. 47 to 50
and taken their King, Caractacus, prisoner; but they retaliated
by storming his camps with some success, and then retreated into
the hills. They got quarter of a century’s respite after that;
but in the end between A.D. 74 and 80, Julius Frontinus brought
them properly to heel. It was some time in those six years that
the legionary fortress was built. The site of Caerleon shows two
things very clearly; that the Romans liked a warm sheltered place,
whenever possible, and secondly – what an eye they had for
strategic considerations! It’s a perfect spot, just where the
hills close round and shelter the valley of the Usk, accessible
from almost every side by land or water, and yet easily defended.
The fortress was the usual rectangular shape, enclosed, at first
by earth walls, replaced later by stone about fifty acres in extent
— but you’ll notice in the twelfth century description
I quoted, reference to buildings “both without and within the
circuits of the walls”. So no doubt a considerable civil settlement
grew up around the fortress, and a charming little Roman-British
town it must have made. As I said, there’s little enough of
it left to see today, except parts of the walls. One thing there
is, however, - the King Arthur’s Round Table of the maps -
in other words the Roman amphitheatre - the only amphitheatre in
this country well enough preserved to give you a real idea of what
such places must have been like. I great oval of level turf, big
enough to take perhaps four tennis Courts - the whole thing measures
about 260 by 220 feet - surrounded by stone walls still six feet
high, and rising steeply up from these the grass banks, thirty feet
high at the back, where the seats once stood. Eight gangways, each
about sixteen feet wide cut down to the arena. Some of these lead
to the sites of the rooms where the gladiators waited to go into
the ring; some of them to the dens where the wild beasts were kept,
At capacity the place could have held the full paper strength of
a legion - six thousand men. It doesn’t take much imagination
to recreate the scenes that must have been enacted there: the hot
sun beating down on the excited faces of the spectators, the sounds
of deathly struggle in the arena - the snarls pf the savage beasts
or the sudden hush as the triumphant gladiator looked up for the
fateful signal “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down”.
Yes, Caerleon’s a place to see, even if you won’t find
the Round Table there. But it wasn’t only by military force
that the Romans finally succeeded in subduing the intractable tribesmen.
Leave Caerleon, climb the steep hill across the river, with St.
Julian’s wood between you and. Newport, and the Usk sparkling
below, and follow the main road eastwards, along the line of the
old Roman road, for eight or nine miles till you come to the little
village of Caerwent. On your left as you go is the beautifully wooded
line of hills that run from Newport to Chepstow, on your right,
across three or four miles of rich and undulating country, is the
Bristol Channel with the hills of Somerset rising beyond.
The modern
road bypasses Caerwent a quarter of a mile to the north. The old
road goes straight through it - and straight through the old Roman
civil town of Venta Silurum — Venta of the Silures. The village
of today is built inside the line of the old walls, walls that
still stand sixteen feet high in places. But Caerwent isn’t
a patch in size or importance with what the old tribal capital
of the Silures must once have been. Forty four acres, divided
into twenty blocks of buildings by three streets parallel to the
long axis of the town and four at right angles to them, a fine
forum and basilica, at least two sets of luxurious Roman baths,
inns, town houses in the most Roman style built round three if
not four sides of a corridor, several inns with up to fifty rooms,
a temple, a water supply both from wells and by wooden pipes from
outside the walls, and a proper sewage system. It does seem extraordinary
that in this remote corner of Roman Britain such an extremely
Roman and ultra-luxurious type of town should have sprung up.
One suggestion that may have something in it is that having found
the Silures uncommonly difficult to conquer by the sword - partly
owing, no doubt, to their habit of slipping back into the hills
- the Romans found it a better policy to conquer them by luxury
- “the bath is mightier than the blade” so to speak.
Well, it evidently succeeded, because an inscription found on
the remains of a pediment shows that the statue it once carried
was dedicated to a legate of the Second Legion “by the republic
of the Silures, by order of its Senate”. That was in the
third century, and it proves that the Romans had been able to
follow their usual plan of giving a good deal of local independence.
Another inscription, a century earlier, shows that there were
established tradesmen’s guilds in Venta Silurum – which
also argues a settled and prosperous community, even if the remains
of the buildings themselves didn’t. I ought to make it clear
perhaps, that practically nothing of these buildings remains today
at Caerwent, except the walls and very fragmentary sites. The
place has now been thoroughly excavated and practically everything
of interest from it is to be seen in Newport museum - a fact that
I believe is unknown to a good many archaeologists. The great
importance of Venta Silurum is that of Roman British civil towns,
only it and Silchester, near Reading, have been thoroughly excavated.
The rich Silchester collection in Reading museum is well-known;
the Newport collection, which comes only second in Britain, seems
hardly known at all. It’s largely the fault of Monmouthshire
for being neither in England nor Wales, so that it has no Victoria
County History and yet is not under the auspices of the Welsh
National Museum. The collection at Newport is more than rich enough
to make the personal lives of those Romanised Silures come alive
to you - a Roman pocket knife, a shoemaker’s last (which
might be used today), a charming little bronze flower vase, almost
Chinese in style, manicure implements - it is things like these
which give the personal touch. There is a lot of the early history
of the Silures still awaiting the spade in Monmouthshire. Their
later history is dark, but rather less so. As to Caerleon - Isca
- it’s known that the garrison was withdrawn about 300, though
the place was inhabited at least sixty years later. Caerwent can
tell a longer story. Early in the fourth century A.D. its walls
were strengthened by the addition of bastions. This was not long
after the building of the forts of the Saxon shore, and it suggests
that just as eastern and Southern Britain were being menaced by
the attacks of the Saxons, so Venta Silurum was in danger of raids
by sea-borne Irish. Another sign is that the two smaller gates
of the town, to north and south, were deliberately blocked up
- presumably to make defence easier. What the end was, nor how
soon it came we cannot be sure. A tumbled heap of skeletons, found
in a temple outside the walls and more than a hundred shallow
burials in the town have been held to bear witness to a final
overthrow by raiding Irish or Saxons. But the buildings themselves
were never sacked, and at least some observers took the shallow
burials to be mediaeval. Again, just a few coins were found linking
Roman days with later Saxon and English - and there is a local
legend dating back to at least the 13th century and probably much
earlier, that an Irish saint named Tathan came and set t led in
Venta Silurum early in the sixth century. Perhaps the truth is
that for a time sporadic raids by land or sea made the placed
definitely unhealthy, and that then as the menace subsided, the
Silures crept down from the hills again and among the quiet rich
farmlands that encircle Caerwent, lived in a pale shadow of the
luxury they had once enjoyed, under Roman rule.
Source:
Newport Library and Information Centre
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