In October 2014, Phil Kirk was metal detecting on a field at Kelshall in the hills south-west of Royston, when he encountered a strong signal. Digging down about 15 inches, he found the top of something bronze. Thinking initially that it might be nothing more than a modern filter from a car, it turned out to be a complete Roman jug, missing its handle. On lifting it, he spotted the handle and bowl of a bronze patera (or trulleum). Next to this lay the battered bottom half of a large jug and last of all a third jug with a trefoil mouth in four or five pieces, apparently crushed by a large flint. All four vessels came out from a hole no more than 50 cm across. Quite by chance, the broken base of the third vessel matched a bronze object found a few months earlier and about ten metres away, which had been discarded under a nearby hedge as probably a twentieth century oil funnel, but which was the top half of the jug.

Phil recognised the importance of his find and contacted Julian Watters, who at the time was Finds Liaison Officer for Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. He then contacted the museum to see if it would be worth investigating the site further. So, on a cold morning later that month, a group went up to the site and expanded the original hole to a one metre square. Early in the digging, the missing jug hand turned up, but no sign of the edge of the pit into which they had been put could be found, so we needed a larger excavation trench.

We returned to the site in November, when the farmer scraped the topsoil from an area three metres square. During the initial cleaning, the rim of a glass bottle became visible, then more shards of glass. Next, an iron lamp-holder and suspension bar turned up. Two layers of hobnails were the remains of shoes placed one on top of the other. Next, a bronze corner binding from a wooden box or tray turned up, followed by the other three.

On top of the decayed tray stood a shattered but otherwise complete shallow dish, about the size of a saucer, 14.5 cm in diameter. When first exposed, it seemed to be iridescent from decay, but as the excavator exposed more, it became obvious that it was multicoloured millefiori. The pattern was made from lozenges of fused dark purple, white, yellow, blue and red glass rods. Then a second dish with the same basic pattern turned up next to it. Both were covered with a thin fibrous carbonised deposit, perhaps the remains of a delicate cloth wrapping. Along with these were two shattered glass cups and a pair of blue glass handles, fragments of a lava object and a silver denarius of the emperor Trajan (reigned AD 98-117).

Next to the box stood a collection of glass bottles. The largest was hexagonal, 23 cm across, and contained the cremated bone of a probably middle-aged (40+) man and three worn second-century coins. A second bottle was octagonal, with two long sides, a type rarely found in Britain, and two square bottles. One has the letters IΛƧ (IAS) on its base, a type exactly paralleled at the Roman fort at Cramond, near Edinburgh, in a ditch dated AD 208-212. There was also a rectangular bottle. All these bottles were typical Romano-British products and represent the complete range available at the start of the third century. All were shattered because the pit – a grave – lay beneath a mound of large flint nodules that had collapsed onto them, but which had also protected them from the effects of ploughing.

The grave probably dates from a few years either side of AD 210, and all the finds apart from the millefiori dishes are typical of this period. The dishes are more unusual. Tests by the British Museum show that the glass was made in Alexandria, and the colours are right for a date around 200. Archaeologists have found sherds from similar vessels at Carlisle, Wroxeter, Inveresk, Frocester Court, Eccles (Kent) and London. The importance of the Kelshall examples is that they are the only complete vessels made from this mosaic glass so far discovered.

Each dish is about 14.5 cm in diameter, with straight sides rising at 30°-40° from a small flat base. The rim edges are plain and a little uneven, suggesting that the excess glass was sheared off while the vessels were still hot. They were not blown, but perhaps pressed into a mould. The pressing distorted the lozenge design, and one of the dishes appears to have been made by combining two or more sheets of the patterned glass. Millefiori consists of rods of different coloured glass arranged in a pattern, which are then heated to fuse them together. While still hot, the fused rods – about the size of a baked bean tin – are stretched into a long rod. This can then be cut into shorter lengths, which are then fused in the same way to create a pattern. With the final pattern created, the cylinder of glass can be cut into slices, ready to be reheated and pressed into moulds to make vessels. Some brooches also have millefiori decoration, often much finer than that used to make vessels.

What are these remarkable dishes doing in a grave on an exposed hilltop in Kelshall? Who had owned them? Where did that person live? One thing we can easily guess is that they were wealthy. Most Roman graves of this date might contain some pottery vessels and perhaps one or two glass vessels. Wealthier families could afford to put more things into the ground and some graves could be very ostentatious. This is the case here. Not only could they put in nine glass vessels (five bottles, two cups and two rare dishes), but also four bronze vessels (three jugs and a patera, a libation-pouring dish) and four coins.

Perhaps most significantly, the family did not put any ceramics into the grave. There was a distinct hierarchy to vessel use in the Roman world. Only the imperial family could use gold; other high-ranking families could have silver. Rich people would use bronze, which is what we see here. Aspiring families would use pewter. The silly idea promoted by so many popular works and television series that samian ware is ‘high status’ is nonsense: people who used pottery were rather low down in the pecking order. Yes, samian was more expensive than other earthenwares, but it was definitely not something that the rich would use, much less put in the graves of their loved ones.

The Kelshall family made a definite statement about its position in society during the funeral. They could afford the best quality bronze and glassware to put in the grave; perhaps not putting ceramics in was part of their ostentatious show of wealth. Some of the items were imported, and we can speculate that the cloth covering of the millefiori dishes was something expensive (fine linen or silk, perhaps). Large parts of the grave appear ‘empty’, but probably held items that have since decayed (clothing, wooden items and so on). After the contents of the burial were in the ground and the pit filled in, it was covered with a low cairn of carefully interlocking flint nodules.

Where might the family have lived? The closest Roman settlement of any size is the town at Baldock, only 8 km to the west and visible from the hilltop. There was also a settlement between Kelshall and Baldock, at Slip End, and villas at Steeple Morden, Litlington and elsewhere. The nearness of these places does not mean that the man buried here lived in any of them, though. The grave is in an area where aerial photographs, geophysics and random discoveries show that there was a lot going on in the past and specifically the Roman period.

Kris Lockyear of University College London used a cart-based magnetometer to survey part of the field where the burial was found. It showed that the burial lies inside a large, almost square ditched area about 90 m across, with ditches up to 4 m wide on three sides and open to the east, with hints of a fence on this side. There are other, smaller and irregular enclosures to both west and east of it, as well as buildings composed of postholes and rammed clay floors, pits and at least one well. There are traces of ditched roadways around the site. The scale of the enclosure does not look domestic, nor is it military or a cemetery type. Instead, the most likely explanation is that it is religious.

Unlike medieval churchyards, Roman temple sites are not often associated with human burials. At a temple in Wynn Close, Baldock, the precinct held the graves of several new-born babies, but this is unusual. Late Roman Christian graves often clustered around what were believed to be the graves of martyrs, which could then develop a religious building such as a chapel or church, as happened at St Albans.

The contents of the Kelshall grave include a bronze patera, used in religious rituals. Might the man buried in the grave have been an important patron of the temple or even its chief priest? In the Roman world, this was not necessarily a professional post, and local dignitaries would often serve as the priests in their communities. Perhaps the man buried with the costly goods was just such a priest, perhaps even a major patron of the temple who paid for its refurbishment or rebuilding.

The range of glassware is as remarkable as the dish pictured here. It includes every type that was available at the time the grave was dug. Some of the vessels were new, but the hexagonal bottle containing the owner’s ashes shows extensive wear on the base, where it has been taken on and off a shelf over some years. Does the range hint that the owner had made his wealth as a merchant trading in glassware? This is going beyond what we can reasonably infer from the contents of the grave. Even so, we ought to be able to speculate about such things, always acknowledging that they are merely guesswork.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

People have been fascinated by placenames for centuries. Although they tend to start out as meaningful (Newtown, anyone?), they often change more slowly than languages and preserve old-fashioned forms whose meaning is lost. Who could guess that York comes from a Celtic original, Eburacon? And that it refers to a yew tree (eburos)? Or, for that matter, that the present name of #Baldock comes from the medieval French name for Baghdad, Baudac?

The scientific study of placenames began only about 1900. Before this, people often made wild guesses that involved just about any language (Hebrew and Phoenician were popular) rather than those known to have been used in a particular area. There are five that we know to have been spoken in Britain from prehistory to the present day: a dialect of Celtic known as Brittonic (the ancestor of modern Welsh and Cornish), Latin, Old English (the basis for the English spoken today), Old East Norse (the language of the Vikings, and ancestor of modern Danish and Swedish) and Old French. All these languages have left traces in our English placenames.

When it comes to researching placenames from Roman times, we depend on a limited number of documents and a few inscriptions. The documents include the Γεωγραφικὴ Ύφήγησις (‘World-drawing Guide’, generally referred to as the Geography) by Klaudios Ptolemaios (usually Latinised as Claudius Ptolemaeus and Anglicised as Ptolemy), the Itinerarium prouinciarum Antonini Augusti, better known in English as the Antonine Itinerary, a map known as the Peutinger Table, an anonymous Cosmographia produced in Ravenna around 700 (hence known as the Ravenna Cosmography), and an untitled late Roman administrative text known as the Notitia Dignitatum (‘List of Offical Posts’).

Ptolemy lists a people whom he calls Κατυευχλανοὶ (Catyeuchlani, a misspelling of Catuu̯ellauni), the people of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire), and names two of their towns. They are Σαλῖναι (Salinae, literally ‘salt-works’, so probably somewhere near the Wash) and Οὐρολάνιον (U̯rolani̯um, a misspelling of U̯erolami̯um), St Albans. Several of the routes in the Antonine Itinerary also name U̯erolami̯um and a place twelve Roman miles to the north, Durocobriu̯is, which can be identified with Dunstable. The Ravenna Cosmography gives the spelling Virolanium for St Albans.

Literary works from the Classical world rarely mention placenames (other than the name of Britain). The historian Tacitus mentions how Boudica sacked U̯erulami̯um and Gildas, a British writer who lived about AD 500, describes St Alban as uerolamiensem, ‘from St Albans’. There is a famous but broken inscription from the Roman forum at St Albans, published in The Roman Inscriptions of Britain volume 3 as 3123. Two alternative readings of the two-letter fragment VE could be CATV]VE[LLAVNORVM (‘of the Catuu̯ellauni’) or …]VE[ROLAMIVM (‘St Albans’). A wooden writing-tablet from London refers to uerolamio, while a drinking vessel from a burial at Dunstable was donated by DINDROFORVM VE(rolamiensium) (‘the St Albans carpenters’). In terms of Hertfordshire, that is the total as currently recognised.

However, there is another piece of evidence that has hitherto been overlooked. It was published in The Roman Inscriptions of Britain volume 2 as numbers 2411.261 to 2411.263. It consists of three identical lead sealings, stamped on two faces using the same die, reading C·VIC on one face and SPVS on the other. The dot, better called a medial point or interpunct, was a typical word separator used until the second century. All three were found at Clothall Common in Baldock, two of them in the same pit. They have a hole running through the length and another from one face to the other, perhaps for string or twine used to tie documents into a bundle or to keep wood-and-wax writing tablets closed.

The reverse of one of the lead seals, reading SPVS

The publication suggests that meaning of the seals is obscure, although the C might stand for Latin cohors, a military unit. Given the lack of Roman military activity in Baldock (as in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire generally), this is a very unlikely explanation. The American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy lists over 250 words that C can represent! VIC has ‘only’ twenty-nine possible expansions, while SPVS seems to be meaningless. This is not going to be an easy riddle to solve.

What are we then to make of these seals? The first thing to note is that a lead seal, made using the same die in all three instances, was probably an official issue of some sort. We have already ruled out the military explanation, so in what circumstances would a government department or similar entity put out a document needing to be sealed? How we might explain them depends on how we choose to expand the abbreviation C·VIC.

Some years ago, I suggested in print (always a hostage to fortune!) that it might stand for C[uria] Vic[…], ‘the assembly of Vic…’, with Vic… as the lost name of Roman Baldock. Alternatively, we might expand C… Vic[anorum], ‘of the townspeople of C…’, where C… is the town’s name. Both these solutions leave SPVS unexplained. For this reason, I have given up on that explanation.

Might it be that SPVS contains the ancient name of Baldock? Although this seems plausible at first sight, we need to think of what language that name would have first been coined in. The answer has to be Brittonic, as the settlement was founded in the decades around 100 BC, when the locals spoke that branch of the Celtic language group. In that case we have a problem. Although the Proto-Indo-European language had words beginning sp-, it developed into f– in Brittonic. No words beginning in sp– exist in any of the ancient Celtic dialects, so SPVS cannot be an abbreviation for the Brittonic name of Baldock.

The clue came quite serendipitously, in realising that the modern name Hitchin is not Germanic, and thus not from old English. Place-name experts have been puzzling over its meaning for centuries. The Swedish scholar Eilert Ekwall suggested almost a century ago that the name of the River Hiz is the clue. He compared it with the Modern Welsh sych, which means ‘dry’, and suggested that the town was named from the river, pointing out that some Celtic words beginning with s– now begin with h-. Unfortunately for his argument, sych (from Brittonic *siccos) is not one of them. If the river really had derived from this word, the town would now be called Sitchin. We also know that the name, first recorded in the seventh century as the name of a people, not a town or a river.

In Brittonic, there was a special grade of s that did develop over time into h. Thus the ancient name of the River Severn, Sabrina, became Hafren in Welsh. So to explain Hitchin, we need to find a word that originally had initial s– that became h-, and which also had –cc– in the middle. There is indeed such a word, *succos in Brittonic, hwch in Welsh. It means ‘pig’. While this doesn’t sound like a name that people would want, we need to look at how other Iron Age peoples in the British Isles gave themselves names.
Thus we find that the people of the Lleyn Peninsula in Gwynedd, the Cancani, were the ‘pony people’ and the Caireni of Sutherland were the ‘sheep people’. These people perhaps prided themselves on their breeds of these animals, so why not the people of the Hitchin area? The archaeology of Baldock bears this out. In most places in southern Britain, the emphasis on animal husbandry was on cattle, but in northern Hertfordshire, it was on pigs. Far from being an insult, being known as the Succi̯i, ‘the pig people’ or ‘the pig-breeders’, was an expression of local pride.

In this roundabout way, it becomes possible to understand what SPVS means. We can divide it S(ucci̯orum) Pus(…), ‘Pus… of the Succi̯i’. There are records of several Celtic names beginning Pus…, and many Brittonic placenames incorporate personal names. Names such as Pusa, Pusilla, Pusinna, Pusintulus and Pusio (not all necessarily Celtic, as some could be Latin in origin) could underly the ancient name of Baldock. We could be looking at something like *Pusinni̯on, *Pusi̯onacon or something like that. While we haven’t got the full name, it’s almost within reach.

What the seals tell us is that the Curia Vicanorum Succi̯orum Pus…ensis, ‘the council of the townspeople of Pus… of the Succi̯i’, issued the documents that these seals attached to. They show that the vicus – the lowest grade of self-governing settlement – had its own curia – a citizen assembly – representing the local people – the Succi̯i – based in their principal market town. They fell within the larger unit of the Catuu̯ellauni, based at U̯erolami̯um, but maintained their self-identity past the collapse of Roman rule in the fifth century and into the early medieval period as the Hicce. In a way, that identity remains with the fiercely proud ‘Hitchinites’ of today.