Roman
The story of this burial, excavated in Baldock in 1989, is one of a real person who was a child when the Roman invasion of Britain happened and who died around AD 70. It shows how we can engage with the humanity of the distant past and why excavating burials is not just ‘grave robbing’ but an important way of learning about people.
The woman’s family lived in the Roman town of Baldock, where she had been born; we don’t know what it was called just as we don’t know the woman’s name. It was a prosperous market town, where farmers from nearby villages could bring their produce to sell and buy manufactured goods. Some were made locally, in the town itself, but others were traded across the whole of the Roman Empire. The townspeople were comfortably off and had a good standard of living. The town had an unusually large number of cemeteries, though not all of them were in use at the same time. Some graves contained people’s skeletons while others held the ashes that are left after a cremation, sometimes in a container or sometimes in a pile at the bottom of the grave pit. Some of the cemeteries were formal affairs, with fences or hedges, paths and memorial buildings. Others were just collections of graves in a corner of land or next to a roadside.
During the building of the Clothall Common estate in Baldock from 1980 onward, several of these cemeteries were discovered and excavated by archaeologists from Letchworth Museum, including the writer. The oldest date from about 50 BC and some continued to be used after AD 500. One of these cemeteries was excavated before Stane Street was built in 1989. It was a triangular cemetery that lay between two roads. It contained almost 100 graves, dating from about 10 BC to AD 100.
All but one of the burials consisted of skeletons. Most of them were laid on their backs in the grave, their heads at the north-eastern end. A few were in more unusual positions, laid on their sides with their knees bent or carefully arranged in very large graves. One grave contained the skeleton of a woman who had been laid to rest on her right side with her left arm bent at the elbow and her hand in front of her. Her head lay at the south end. Early on in excavating her grave, the tiny bones of a newborn baby became visible behind her right shoulder.
This made those of us working on site that day think that both she and her baby might have died during childbirth, which happened to a lot of women before modern medicine was available. Then, in cleaning between her hips, the bones of a second baby were found. It was stuck inside the mother’s birth canal the wrong way round; this is known as a ‘breach birth’ and was obviously the reason she had died. At this point, we began to think that she was the mother of twins. It was only when the archaeologists excavating the grave cleaned around her left hip bone that the bones of a third baby were found, still inside the woman’s body so no-one would have known that she was expecting triplets.
Later examination of the bones showed that she died when she was 40 years old, give or take a year or two. This was old for a Romano-British woman to be having children, as most became mothers when they were in their late teens. She was in good health and strong, although she had recently suffered an ankle sprain, and it was a problem with childbirth that caused her early death. All three babies were about a month premature, so she may have gone into labour unexpectedly. She certainly had no help from a doctor or midwife during the birth, as they had tools that would have helped her and probably saved her life. A few years later, a man in his 50s or 60s was buried across the top, his head resting above her outstretched left hand. Was he her husband and the father of the babies?
We know that there were doctors and midwives in Roman Britain who could have saved the mother, though probably not the babies. Unfortunately, good doctors in the Roman world were expensive and in days before there was anything like a National Health Service, only the very wealthy could afford decent medical treatment. Although the woman’s family was comfortably off, it wasn’t rich enough to afford a doctor. It’s more puzzling that she seems not to have been helped by a midwife and we can try to think of reasons why she wasn’t. Was she perhaps stuck out in a farmhouse a long way from town, with her family doing business in the market, so that when they returned, it was too late to get help? The babies weren’t expected for another month, after all. Or perhaps the midwives were busy with other people’s babies. We will never know the answer to these questions.
In 2010-2011, Shine TV made a documentary about this burial, broadcast as part of BBC 2’s History Cold Case series. You can watch it on YouTube.
Her sad death is the first recorded case of triplets from anywhere in the world and we only know about them because all four died at the same time. Her reconstructed face is the first time we have been able to see what an ancient inhabitant of Baldock looked like. This is one of those cases where archaeology brings us into the stories of everyday life and death in the past.
Excavating the burial at Kelshall in November 2014
Unusual archaeological finds dating back to AD 200 have been discovered in a field near Royston. The artefacts, which form part of a burial, probably of a wealthy and cosmopolitan individual, are a unique find in Britain and experts in ancient finds are already clamouring to study these rare objects.
Discovered late last year by a local metal detectorist in a field in Kelshall, a complete Roman jug was the first thing to be found. A bronze dish, a larger jug and then a third jug were soon uncovered. Realising this was an important find it was reported and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, North Hertfordshire District Council’s (NHDC) Archaeology and Outreach Officer, decided that it would be a good idea to investigate further.
Bronze jug with decorated handle
Once the dig was underway, glass bottles, an iron lamp and wall mounting bracket, two layers of hobnails from a pair of shoes and a box with bronze corner bindings were uncovered. Two shattered, but otherwise complete, mosaic glass dishes stood on top of a decayed wooden box which held two broken clear glass cups and a pair of blue glass handles. The largest glass bottle was hexagonal, and contained cremated bone and a worn bronze coin dating from AD 174-5. A rare octagonal bottle stood next to it. A major find was mosaic glass dishes likely made in Alexandria, Egypt, around AD 200
Glass millefiori dish, made in Alexandria
Currently owned by the farmer and the finder, the North Hertfordshire Museum Service hopes to raise the money to buy the finds, so they can be displayed when the new museum opens later in the year.
After 1800 years, finds like these still impress us with their workmanship. Working together with the metal detectorist, NHDC’s archaeologist and the Finds Liaison Officer, were able to uncover the past and find out and understand so much more about the lives of people in Roman North Herts.
A Roman marble head, found in a shed in Radwell; it is a portrait of Germanicus, who died in AD 19, twenty-four years before the Roman conquest
This is the title of a talk I gave last night for the Hitchin Society as part of the Hitchin Festival. I have given a talk every year since 2004, when I started in my post with North Hertfordshire Museums, and each time I try to highlight a different aspect of Hitchin’s fascinating past. As the years have gone by, I have widened the scope to include the rest of North Hertfordshire, focusing on the buried sites and standing buildings that contribute to understanding our history. This year, though, I decided to do something different.
As my work is now much more focused on the objects in our collections, as we prepare for the displays in the new museum, I decided that this is what I would talk about. These are the “small things” of my title, a term inspired by the pioneering work of American historical archaeology, In Small Things Forgotten, by James Deetz, originally published in 1977. James Deetz used the often overlooked details of archaeological finds to piece together narratives to cover gaps in the story of how the Thirteen English Colonies became the United States of America.
A Dressel 1A amphora, dating to before 100 BC, found in a chieftain’s grave in Baldock: it is the oldest Roman amphora found in Britain
I wanted to look at a longer chronological sweep, from the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55 BC through to the present day. This is a period when we think we understand how and why things changed, when we slice history up into over-neat categories such as Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, Norman England and so on. Worse, from my point of view, is when we talk about these periods as if each one is populated by a different ‘people’: “the Romans”, “the Anglo-Saxons”, “the Normans”, “the Tudors”. Using labels in this way can make it seem as if there was a discrete time from 1485 to 1603 when everyone thought of themselves as “Tudor”, for instance: know that they did not.
Life doesn’t work like that. For the most part, the world changes slowly and imperceptibly. Things that can seem like dramatic events – the Roman invasion of AD 43, the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 – because they figure so prominently in our histories rarely affect the lives of ordinary people. This is where the “small things” help to correct the picture we get if we rely on documents alone.
Looking at the objects in our collections, we can see how the changes that really do affect people take place gradually, over many years. In other words, they are processes that transform lives almost without being noticed. During the ninety-eight years between Julius Caesar and Claudius’s conquest, North Hertfordshire was in no sense part of the Roman Empire, yet people began to use Roman style objects, importing goods from places that were inside the Empire. Our kings issued coins with legends in Latin, people began to use samian ware for dining, they drank wine that they served in pottery flagons. By the time that the Roman “conquest” occurred, local people were so thoroughly “Romanised” that we can’t detect the conquest archaeologically. Our region has no forts and no military remains because there was no need to coerce people into being “Roman”: to a large extent they already were and they may even have welcomed the conquest.
A Roman cogwheel bracelet; popular in the fourth century, the type is found along the Danube and Rhine frontiers as well as in Britain
The same story can be seen at the other end of the Roman period, when trade with the Empire shifted from across the English Channel to across the North Sea, initially to the Rhineland. During the fourth century, there was increasing trade with Free Germany, outside the Empire. Mercenaries recruited from this area served in the army in Britain (the largest standing army in the Roman world by that time) and some may have brought families with them who settled permanently in Britain. By the fifth century, when Roman rule came to an end, germanic decoration was commonplace on a whole range of objects and this process continued as more settlers (whom we would call Anglo-Saxons at this period) arrived to join those already here.
The “small things” of our collections show that our neat period labels may be convenient – as human beings, we love to categorise the world around us – but they don’t reflect historical reality all that well. This is part of the challenge we face for telling the story of our District in the new museum: choosing appropriate and interesting “small things” that will engage and challenge our visitors.