The discovery of Roman Baldock happened after Mr Hart, the farmer of Walls Field, ploughed up a human skull just before Easter in 1925. Over the next five years, Percival Westell of Letchworth Museum and his assistants excavated over 450 burials from a cemetery, or possibly two adjacent cemeteries. The burials were mostly undamaged by later ploughing, as they lay towards the bottom of a slope and soil washed downhill had protected them for many centuries.
Because of the excellent preservation, they provided Westell with a vast haul of objects to put into the growing Letchworth Museum. Although he published his results promptly, as a result of which the cemetery is well known among archaeologists, his standards were poor and his record keeping almost non-existent. We don’t even have a plan of the cemetery showing the locations of individual burials, let alone plans of the graves themselves. He did keep everything from a single burial together most of the time, though, so we can reconstruct from his ‘burial groups’ the contents if not the layout of each one.
Most of the burials in the cemetery were of cremated remains, which can be dated from the mid first century AD through to the late third because most of them contained datable pots. There were also inhumation burials, represented by skeletons; although Westell kept their skulls and sent them to the Royal College of Surgeons, they were destroyed by bombing during the Blitz along with the rest of the College’s collection. They are less easy to date than the cremations, although some contained pottery disturbed from earlier graves. Westell’s initial dating of the pottery was often wrong, and a 1985 dissertation by Maria Fabrizi, an undergraduate of the University of Bradford, was able to suggest more accurate dates.
Westell did not excavate the entire cemetery, as trenches by his assistant Erik Applebaum in the early 1930s uncovered more inhumation graves. It is also evident from his inadequate plan that the burials concentrated in two principal groups: one to the north-east and one to the south-west of the area he excavated. Using Fabrizi’s dating, we can see that the earliest burials in the southwestern group date from about AD 50-70, while the latest belong to the early third century. The 53 inhumation burials in this part of the site cannot be dated, unfortunately. The earliest burials in the northeastern are later, about AD 75-100, and deposition here continued into the fourth century. These distinct but overlapping date ranges make it likely that we are indeed looking at two separate burial grounds.
Westell retained very few cremated human remains: there is an account by his assistant J Peat Young of them tipping the remains out onto the field surface as being of no value! Nor did he record the positions of vessels in cremation pits or the alignments of bodies in individual inhumations. The majority were aligned with head to the west, although some had heads to the south; most were extended, but some seem to have been crouched.
One of the burials in the northeastern group (Westell’s Group 89), excavated in spring 1928, contained cremated bone inside a decorated samian bowl of form Dragendorff 37. The bowl came from the potteries at Lezoux in Central Gaul (Puy-de-Dôme, France), and bears the stamps SACRILLIM (Sacrillus’s Manufactory) and DOECCVS (Doeccus, the name of the artist who created the decoration). Doeccus’s decoration consists of an image of Silenus with a basket of fruit on his head, a dancer with scarf, hares and flames. Sacrillus was making pottery between about AD 165 and 200, while Doeccus was active about AD 160-190, meaning that this bowl probably dates 165-190.
As well as the decorated bowl, there were a colour-coated globular beaker and the lower part of a flagon. The beaker is probably of much the same date as the samian, while the flagon, probably from the kilns outside Verolamium, is not easy to date as the most easily dated features are towards the top of these vessels. Nevertheless, all three vessels indicate that the burial was probably deposited in the later second century (say AD 170-200).
Glass beads
The most remarkable aspect of this already unusual grave – it is uncommon to find the cremated bone put into a samian bowl – is its collection of beads. Westell recorded forty-four of them, but some apparently disintegrated during excavation, so we are left with the forty-one shown in the picture. Westell described them as ‘gilded’, but they are technically gold-in-glass or gold-glass. Such beads have an unusual distribution: they are found in Britain but rarely in other western provinces of the empire, and from central Europe southeastwards. This led George Boon to suggest in 1977 that they came to Britain with the 5500 Iazyges cavalry sent here in AD 175 by Marcus Aurelius, according to Cassius Dio’s Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἱστορία (‘Roman History’) Book 72.
The Iazyges were a tribe of Sarmatians, a group of people from southern Russia who began migrating westwards into Ukraine during the fourth century BC. They had expanded into the Balkans, north of the Lower Danube and into the Carpathian basin, by the first century AD. The Iazyges were the Sarmatian group between the Danube and Dacia (which became a Roman province after Trajan’s conquest in AD 106, covering much of modern Romania). Marcus Aurelius fought a series of wars on the Danube frontier between AD 166 and his death in 180; to Roman historians, it was Bellum Germanicum et Sarmaticum (‘the German and Sarmatian War’), but historians today usually call it the Marcomannic War, after the main German enemies of Rome involved in the conflict.
Marcus defeated the Iazyges in 175, their king Zanticus surrendering in person to the emperor. As part of the peace treaty, they supplied 8,000 cavalry troops to the Roman army, of whom 5,500 were sent to Britain. Although numbers cited by ancient authors are often suspect and probably exaggerated (Dio’s 5,500 is a legion-sized body of men), we know that Sarmatians did arrive in Britain in the later 170s. The best evidence is from Bremetennacum Veteranorum (Ribchester), a cavalry fort in northwest England. It was home to a unit known at first as the
Much of the supposed evidence for Sarmatians in Britain is less clear-cut than the inscriptions. A tombstone from Chester said to show a Sarmatian cavalryman almost certainly does not: it is too early (it dates from the first half of the second century) and probably depicts a Dacian. Some enthusiasts have seen almost every bead from Roman Britain as evidence for them, even the ubiquitous melon beads!
What has been described as ‘an imaginative and controversial theory’ links these Sarmatians with the Arthurian legends. Why? A tombstone from Podstrana in Croatia commemorates a Lucius Artorius Castus, who late in his military career served as Praefectus Legionis for Legio VI Victrix, based in York. His next post was as Dux Legionum adversus Arm… (‘Commander of legions against the Arm…’). Unfortunately, the slab is broken at this key point. The most reasonable restoration is Armenios (‘the Armenians’), which is perhaps the war of AD 163. Supporters of the ‘controversial theory’ would rather read Armatos (‘armed men’), a term too vague ever to appear in an outline of a military career.
However, those who want to see Castus as a prototype of King Arthur propose that while Praefectus Legionis at York, he led Sarmatian troops against these ill-defined Armatos, identified as barbarians from north of Hadrian’s Wall. The descendants of the Sarmatians then conflated him with a folk-hero Batradz, remembered in the Ossetian Nart Sagas. Needless to say, this is the stuff of fantasy. A Praefectus Legionis was a late-career soldier, usually in his 50s, who acted as quartermaster for a legion. In other words, someone in charge of logistics rather than a fighting or even commanding soldier. Nothing links Castus with Sarmatians, and the Nart Sagas were first recorded in the nineteenth century.
The use of gold-glass beads to identify Sarmatians has also been called into question. Maud Spaer’s 1993 reassessment of the type has shown that far from being a type from the Balkans, they originated in Ptolemaic Egypt in the third century BC. They were probably made in the Roman period and later at several places around the eastern Mediterranean; the only chemical analysis of a British bead (one from Caerleon in Wales) indicated that it was an import from Egypt. Given that we have local evidence for Alexandrian glass (the mosaic glass dishes discussed a few weeks ago), an Egyptian origin seems likely for these beads from Baldock.
These beads are yet another example of the many layers of meaning than can be extracted from apparently ordinary objects. Even if some of them are dead ends – the idea that a supposed commander of Sarmatians in Britain was the original King Arthur – they add interesting digressions to understanding the past.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
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