On the morning of 2 March 1995, Anna Mercer (then the Curator of Letchworth Museum) opened an envelope containing a sale catalogue for Robert Room’s auction house in Bedford on behalf of Wilson Peacock. It detailed the contents of a sale of material from Wilson Peacock due to take place the next day. One the cover was a photograph of a rather dirty marble portrait head of obviously Roman date. It was lot 358, described as ‘9 in marble head, believed to be 1st century AD Roman’. It was among a collection of items from a house clearance at Radwell, just north of Baldock.

Anna telephoned the auctioneers to find out more about the head, wondering if it could be a local find. She learned that it had been sent to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for assessment and that they had examined it over six weeks. Their experts had suggested that it was Roman, dating from the first century AD.

Anna next rang Mark Stevenson of the Museum Service’s former Field Archaeology Section to ask for advice. Mark immediately thought of the well-known Scheduled villa site in the village and wondered if there might be a connection with it: had a farm worker uncovered the head during agricultural work such as ditch digging? Anna then rang back the auctioneers to explain that the Museum Service would be interesting in acquiring the sculpture but that it would not be possible to raise money to bid for it. The company agreed to let the buyer know of the Museum’s interest in the head, even if just to make a scientific record of it.

On the day of the sale, Mark was able to go to Bedford and inspect the sculpture, just 75 minutes before the auction was due to start. He recognised that it was undoubtedly Roman and that the paint covering it looked like types common in the inter-war years. He noted that it was damaged. There were traces of weathering on the left side and abrasion to the nose, a piece missing from the bottom of the neck, recent damage to the top of the right ear and patches of cement on the top of the head.

In the meantime, Anna contacted the Ashmolean Museum. The expert who had examined the head had recognised that it was most likely to be first-century AD Roman but had not considered that it might have been found in Britain. He instead believed that it was an eighteenth-century import, acquired during an aristocratic Grand Tour. Although he had offered to have the paint cleaned off, the auctioneers had decided against it. There was no paperwork, as all contact with Wilson Peacock had been oral.

The head sold to a private buyer for £2,860 (including the auction room’s commission). The auctioneer spoke to the buyer about the museum’s interest and it was arranged to lend the sculpture to the museum for three weeks. Mark collected it on 20 March and the next day, Anna and Jane Read (the illustrator for the Archaeology Section) took it for assessment at Verulamium Museum in St Albans. They brought it back to Letchworth on 24 March.

On 4 April, Mark and Jane took the head to the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge for advice on cleaning. Janet Huskinson examined it there and was able to confirm that it was definitely Roman. The paint covering parts of it (two shades of green, a blue, a yellow and a brown) was a type not used after the 1930s and its distribution suggested that someone had used the head as a brush cleaner! With the permission of the owner, Mark and Jane then took it back to Verulamium Museum for conservation on 6 April. The conservator, Phil Carter, kept notes on the paint and samples. He found that the patches of cement and plaster overlay paint in some places. The paint layers form a distinct sequence, with yellow at the bottom, overlain by green, then blue. The brown overlay the yellow but there was nothing to indicate its relationship with the green or blue layers. He pointed out that the staining on the base of the neck seems to be from a copper alloy, not paint, and that brown marks on either side of the neck are from contact with iron.

By 25 April, it was clean, so Mark brought it back to Letchworth. The original buyer agreed to sell it to the museum, and it then entered our collections. Although it was not displayed for some years, it went into a case at Letchworth Museum in 2007 and was chosen to be one of the objects on display in the reception area of North Hertfordshire Museum, where you can now see it.

On 6 March 1995, a member of the team who had done the house clearance telephoned Mark to explain the circumstances of the discovery. He said that the former occupant, a Mr Guest, had lived in the cottage for about twelve years (which would have been about 1982 to 1994) but had entered a retirement home. The caller’s son had found the sculpture under a pile of junk in a lean-to outhouse and thought that it must have been there for at least 30 years, well before Mr Guest began renting the property. Further enquiries in the village revealed that before Mr Guest lived there, the tenant had been a Mrs Leaves. Before that, George Calvert had lived there since the late 1920s. He had been the groom for the estate from 1917 onwards and had also worked as a ploughman with the horses he looked after.

George Calvert’s work, which included maintaining field ditches and even occasionally dredging the River Ivel, provides a plausible context for the discovery of the head. The damage to the chin, nose and left cheek suggests that it has lain low down at the bottom of ploughsoil. However, the experts who first examined this head were mostly dubious about its local origin, preferring to see it as something brought from Europe by an aristocrat who had gone on a Grand Tour. This fails on the grounds that there are no nearby country houses whose owners might have been interested in such ‘antiques’ and none of the tenants of the cottage since the 1920s worked in such a place. Catherine Johns at the British Museum and Martin Henig of the University of Oxford, though, were more open to the idea that it could have come from the nearby villa.

The head is 236 mm high, 156 mm wide and 187 mm deep, carved from Carrara marble (although not of the best quality as it has some darker veins). The carving is continental in style and involved the use of a drill in places. Several larger drilled holes in the hair may once have held a gold or bronze laurel wreath, which are most commonly found on late first-century AD sculptures. The shape of the face is wrong for that period, though, as they tend to be squatter in appearance. It is unlikely to date from after the 120s, when carvings include irises and pupils rather than the blank eyes of this piece. The closest parallels seem to be with the Julio-Claudian emperors (from Augustus to Nero, 32 BC to AD 68), specifically with the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37).

The most similar is a head from Bosham, believed to be of Germanicus (24 May 15 BC-10 October AD 17), nephew of Tiberius, father of Gaius Caligula, brother of Tiberius and grandfather of Nero. He was therefore related to all the Julio-Claudian emperors apart from Augustus. He is also a well-known character in Roman history. His name came from his father, Nero Claudius Drusus (38-9 BC), who died from an infection after falling from his horse in Germany: in recognition of his success, Augustus awarded him the title Germanicus posthumously, which his son inherited. Augustus was anxious about the succession as he had no sons (shades of the English Henry VIII!) and after the premature deaths of his grandsons Gaius (20 BC-AD 4) and Lucius (17 BC-AD 2), he adopted his stepson Tiberius as heir. Before doing so, he made Tiberius adopt Germanicus as his heir, hoping that the young man would eventually become emperor.

Germanicus married Agrippina, Augustus’s granddaughter, in AD 5 and the couple had nine children, although three died in infancy. He was appointed a quaestor in AD 7 (four years before the legal minimum age for this official post) and later that year accompanied Tiberius to Pannonia in the Balkans to put down a rebellion. A talented general, he won a significant victory in AD 9 and returned to Rome. In AD 11 he again accompanied Tiberius on campaign, this time in Germany, where they prevented an invasion of Gaul. He returned to Rome and became a Consul in AD 12. The following year, he returned to Germany, this time as commander, and was there when Augustus died the following year. On learning of the emperor’s death, the troops revolted for better pay and conditions. Germanicus was able to accede to their demands, deferring to Tiberius. Without permission, he led troops back across the Rhine and over the next two years was able to defeat Arminius (who had defeated Varus in AD 9 and captured three legionary standards) and recover two of the standards. Although this was a popular move, it was strictly illegal. As a result Tiberius recalled him to Rome at the start of AD 17, while still granting him the formal Triumph that his victories had earned.

In AD 17, Germanicus travelled to the eastern part of the empire. He started his work by reorganising the provinces and the troublesome clint kingdom of Armenia. He was supposed to work with Piso, the new governor of Syria, but the two men’s personalities evidently clashed. Piso refused to send extra troops to Armenia when Germanicus asked for them and replaced officers loyal to Germanicus with men loyal to himself. Germanicus travelled to Egypt (again breaking protocol, as senators such as himself needed the emperor’s permission), then returned to Syria, where he found that Piso had overturned many of his earlier orders. He fell ill, convinced that Piso was trying to poison him. He dismissed Piso from his post as governor (again, something he was not authorised to do), formally renounced their freindship and died shortly afterwards. Piso then returned to Syria (again, this was something a governor who had left his province was not allowed to do). The emperor was forced to investigate Piso’s disobedience and deferred the case to the Senate. Although Piso was not found guilty of the murder of Germanicus, the other accusations of insubordination, financial irregularities and fomenting civil war were upheld. Before he could be sentenced, he took his own life.

The later historian Cornelius Tacitus regarded Tiberius as a monster and tried to suggest that he had arranged Germanicus’s murder through Piso. This is unlikely on various grounds. After the body was brought back to Rome, Tiberius arranged numerous posthumous honours for his adopted son and delivered a formal eulogy in the Senate house. It is also more likely that Germanicus had contracted a fever while in the east: Piso and his household had left Syria some time before the illness took hold, so their was little opportunity for him to have poisoned Germanicus.

What would the portrait of a successful (if slightly insubordinate) member of the imperial family be doing in Radwell? If Germanicus had died when Britain was a province of the Roman Empire, we might be able to explain it as an imperial gift. For instance, a ‘family group’ of Claudius comes from the so-called Domus Romana, a high-status house in Rabat, Malta, possibly the official residence of the island’s governor. The group has detachable heads, suggesting that they could be replaced with more up-to-date likenesses and even discarded when family members died or fell from favour. The bronze and iron staining at the base of the neck may be indications of how it was attached to a body. If the head is an official portrait, it is unlikely to have been made or presented to anyone after Germanicus’s death in AD 19 (or, if a gift from Gaius in commemoration of his father, after the latter’s assassination in AD 41).

If it did come from one of the fields of the villa estate, as seems likely, the status of the object raises questions about the status of the site. If the portraits were an official gift, to whom might it have been made? There were no villas in Britain before the conquest of AD 43, but we know so little about the site at Radwell that we cannot rule out earlier activity there. Was it already home to an aristocratic family in the decades before the Roman conquest of AD 43 and a gift from the Emperors Augustus or Tiberius to a local ruler?

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Late in January 2023, Keeley Sparrow, a resident of Holwell and regular visitor to the museum, wrote to say that she had spotted some cropmarks while using Google Earth. A quick check with Heritage Gateway, an online portal to databases covering the historic environment, revealed that they have not previously been recognised as such. Intrigued, I had a look at Google Earth and Lidar data to see if I could spot any further details. It soon became apparent that Keeley had discovered several hitherto unknown archaeological sites. By examining Google Earth views of different dates (available as Historic Imagery through the desktop app), I was able to build up reasonably detailed views of the three areas she’s drawn my attention to.

Part of Holwell and neighbouring Ickleford is covered in cropmarks of ice wedges, formed during the Devensian glaciation (the last part of the Pleistocene Ice Age, about 115,000 to 11,700 years ago). They typically outline interconnected polygons that superficially resemble chaotic field systems. The wedges are a result of cracks forming in the ground during very cold winters that fill with water in the summer; they freeze again, and the ice makes the crack larger. Eventually, the cracks filled with soil washed into them, which show as cropmarks in the same way as buried ditches. Enhancing the images using graphics software brought out subtle details that allowed me to separate cropmarks of likely archaeological and geological origin. This problem affected the site Keeley had discovered to the north of the modern village.

The first site lies to the south of the village. Keely wrote that ‘there appear to be some track lines which head North to South from the direction of the old landfill site… but which also branch off to the NW in the direction of the older part of the village’. She attached photographs showing these parallel ditches running north to south. There are three to the south and two to the north; the westernmost of the three at the southern end of the group turns to a northwesterly bearing about halfway across the field after it and its neighbour curve slightly.

The easternmost and central ditches coincide with the edges of a very slight bank visible on Lidar. As we shall see, this is significant and ties the feature into the wider landscape. However, the westernmost and southern part of the central ditches resemble a feature discovered at St Ippollitts in 2015. This was an Iron Age monument known as a banjo enclosure, a type originating about 500 BC and continuing into the first century AD. They were probably high status farmsteads and are often associated with coaxial (rectilinear) field systems; they are often later in date than these fields and inserted into them. We know of other Iron Age sites around Holwell, including at the former quarry to the southeast of the museum and on the edge of Pirton to the southwest. If the cropmarks do represent a banjo enclosure, it sits in a landscape where contemporary remains are abundant.

Even more intriguingly, the Lidar plot shows that the bank extends north of Holwell Road into the second area that Keeley highlighted. This is the area made very complex by ice wedge polygons, but it is still possible to detect ditches flanking the bank. Intriguingly, there are also cropmarks of reverse S-shaped ridge-and-furrow running over the top of the bank. As this is the shape of strips in medieval open fields, created by ox teams pulling the plough having to turn through a semicircle at either end, these cropmarks show that the bank they partly overlie cannot be any later in date than the Middle Ages. The bank could conceivably be much earlier, perhaps even contemporary with the banjo enclosure south of the village.

When we look at the wider landscape on Lidar, we can see that this very slight bank is part of an extensive system. They continue across much of the Bedfordshire lowlands and into North Hertfordshire north of the Chiltern scarp. In some places they coincide with modern field boundaries, but in others, such as the Pirton-Holwell-Ickleford area, they often do not. Even where present-day boundaries follow them, there are others that do not follow the grain of the current field systems. It looks as if at least some of them are part of a more ancient landscape, which the evidence from Holwell suggests is pre-medieval. It could well be traces of the sort of Iron Age coaxial field systems associated with banjo enclosures.

According to the Historic Environment Record, the field north of Holwell contains two ring ditches (usually the remains of a Bronze Age burial mound or round barrow) and ‘a complex of cropmarks here, apparently of enclosures but possibly geological’. My analysis indicates that most of the cropmarks are indeed geological, but that they are overlain by enclosures with straight boundaries. These do not appear to be part of the coaxial layout, but nor do they impinge on it. One ditch to the west runs at right angles to and crosses the denuded bank of the larger field system, but this could be part of it. It is also possible that the enclosures to the east are contemporary with it and belong to a settlement that developed within this organised landscape. If they are settlement enclosures, they are more likely to be Roman than Iron Age in date, as Iron Age settlements generally have curving boundaries.

Keeley’s third discovery lies to the southwest of the village. It consists of a very regular rectangle 38 by 63 m in size, with a subdivision cutting off the southern third. In the southwestern corner is a disused quarry. I initially suspected that the two features are related. The pit appears on the 1899 OS map as ‘Gravel Pit’ with an ‘Old Gravel Pit’ to its south, suggesting that it was in use in the 1890s. Its western and southern edges seem to match up with the edges of the enclosure. However, a thinner ditch on the same alignment extends both the northern and southern edges of this enclosure.

They are all on the same alignment as the ridges of the coaxial field system visible on Lidar, although they are not themselves visible as earthworks. The regularity of the rectangular feature suggests that it is either Roman or from the past two centuries. As it aligns perfectly with the earlier field system, it is likely to be Roman. It is plausibly an enclosure that contained a small villa of the type sometimes disparagingly called a ‘cottage house’. It would easily contain a building of the same dimensions as that excavated on the line of the Little Wymondley Bypass in 1991, 14.5 by 6.7 m. To put this into perspective, the Little Wymondly ‘cottage house’ is the same size as a large detached inter-war three- or four-bedroomed house: calling it a ‘cottage’ gives the wrong impression of small, cramped accommodation rather than a substantial family home!
This likely villa is only two or three hundred metres southwest from the possible banjo enclosure. Is it possible that after the Iron Age site fell out of use, the local landowning family that had lived there set themselves up in a new home nearby? In some cases – such as the Lockleys villa in Welwyn or the Park Street villa near St Albans – the late Roman villa sat on exactly the same site as the earlier roundhouse. In other cases, the location of the house moved. It may be significant that neither Lockleys nor Park Street are in banjo enclosures, while the banjo enclosure at St Ippollitts did not contain a later villa. Indeed, although about 250 banjo enclosures are known in Britain, none seems to be replaced by a Roman villa. Why should this be the case?

Barry Cunliffe has argued that banjo enclosures originated as large holding pens for livestock and later gained a ritual function, with evidence for feasting. This is contradicted by most excavated examples, which have found storage pits and houses inside them. Some contain evidence for metalworking and many have cooked animal bone and high quality pottery in their ditches. The ditches were often inside the banks, making it unlikely that they were defensive. In contrast to Cunliffe, Mark Corney suggested that they were ‘centres of power’ in the Middle and Late Iron Age. In other words, they were farms belonging to local chieftains and their families. The later Roman villas had the same function: they were the homes of wealthy landowners and government officials.

Perhaps what Keeley has discovered is evidence for a shifting pattern of high status dwellings around Holwell. Would it be going too far to suggest that the medieval manor originated in the estate controlled by their owners? Archaeology can only reveal the physical remains of the past, not the legal issues of land ownership and tenure, which we can try to infer from them. Trying to make these inferences is well worth the attempt as it helps us to understand what life was like for people in the past.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews