Russell / Rudling Bignor Roman Villa

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6478-4
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Discovered in 1811, Bignor is one of the richest and most impressive villas in Britain, its mosaics ranking among the finest in north-western Europe. Opened to the public for the first time in 1814, the site also represents one of Britain's earliest tourist attractions, remaining in the hands of the same family, the Tuppers, to this day. This book sets out to explain the villa, who built it, when, how it would have been used and what it meant within the context of the Roman province of Britannia. It also sets out to interpret the remains, as they appear today, explaining in detail the meaning of the fine mosaic pavements and describing how the villa was first found and explored and the conservation problems facing the site in the twenty-first century. Now, after 200 years, the remarkable story of Bignor Roman Villa is told in full in this beautifully illustrated book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Russell, Miles

Rudling, David

Leseproben

I

DISCOVERY AND EXCAVATION

In 1811, George, Prince of Wales, became Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, due to the incapacity (and perceived insanity) of his father, King George III. Georgian Britain was, at this time, heavily involved in a number of European wars, most notably against the armies of Napoleonic France. At home, in England, the first major Luddite uprisings against the labour-saving machines of the Industrial Revolution, were beginning in Northamptonshire whilst, across Scotland, the infamous Highland clearances resulted in the expulsion of crofting tenant families and the mass emigration of thousands. The year 1811 also saw Jane Austen publish her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, whilst on the beaches of Lyme Regis, in Dorset, Mary Anning discovered the first complete fossilised skeleton of an Ichthyosaur and in Sussex, farmer George Tupper found what was to prove to be one of the finest Roman-period villas in the country.

DISCOVERY

It was the morning of Thursday, 18 July when George Tupper hit what appeared to be a large stone whilst ploughing in ‘Berry (or Bury) Field’, near the village of Bignor in Sussex. Bringing the horse plough-team to heel, Tupper investigated the nature of the obstruction, quickly discovering that the plough-struck stone was in fact part of a larger structure, what we now know to be the edge of a piscina or water basin in room 5 of the villa. Grubbing around on his hands and knees, Tupper soon found himself staring down in amazement at the tessellated face of a young man. Subsequent energetic spoil clearance revealed the larger mosaic depicting the figure of the man, naked except for a bright red cap and fur-trimmed boots, an immense eagle and, further afield, a series of scantily clad dancing girls.

In fact the pavement comprised six dancing girls or maenads (of which five wholly or partly survive today) surrounding the stone-lined basin and, in a recessed ‘high’ end on its northern side, a circular mosaic depicting Jupiter in the guise of an eagle caught in the act of abducting the shepherd boy, Ganymede. Subsequently, to the west of this, Tupper also found parts of a second pavement, again with two compartments, this time comprising the Four Seasons, represented by a well-preserved head of Winter, and portions of mosaic containing dolphins and a triangle enclosing the letters TER. To say that he was awestruck would have been an understatement. In one short period of soil clearance, Tupper had revealed, for the first time in nearly 1,500 years, an amazing collection of high-quality Roman floors.

Close up of mosaic depicting the face of a young man, now known to be a portrait of the Trojan prince Ganymede, the first of the decorated floors pieces of Bignor Villa to be exposed by George Tupper in 1811.

Ganymede and Jupiter, in the guise of an eagle, from the mosaic of room 5 as recorded by Samuel Lysons and Richard Smirke in 1817.

The discovery of the decorated pavements was quickly communicated to John Hawkins, George Tupper’s landlord; an influential local resident, who lived nearby in Bignor Park. Hawkins, a man of considerable wealth built upon his family’s investment in Cornish mining, had purchased Bignor Park House five years earlier, in 1806. Trained as a lawyer, Hawkins had travelled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, where he had acquired an impressive collection of ancient artefacts. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was also an enthusiastic student of both science and the arts and he responded with great enthusiasm to the news that a major Roman villa had been discovered on his land.

As a gentleman with knowledge and experience of antiquities, Hawkins took over responsibility for further excavation of the Roman remains at Bignor, inviting Samuel Lysons, by trade a London lawyer but also vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society, to supervise and record the excavation work. Unfortunately, Lysons’ extensive professional and antiquarian duties, combined with rheumatism and other illnesses, meant that he could spend only a limited amount of time at Bignor, a situation which resulted in regular correspondence between himself and Hawkins until the death of Lysons in June 1819. The final season of villa examination in 1819 involved correspondence between Hawkins and Samuel Lysons’ brother Daniel, Rector of Rodmarton, Gloucestershire, who took over his late brother’s role in respect of clearance work. Fortunately the correspondence covering both the investigation and subsequent display of the villa have survived, allowing a unique insight into this early nineteenth-century archaeological ‘direction by letter’.

The face of Winter as recorded from a mosaic in room 26 in an engraving by Samuel Lysons and Richard Smirke.

A rather fierce-looking dolphin from a panel of mosaics (now lost) in room 26 in an engraving by Samuel Lysons and Richard Smirke.

John Hawkins of Bignor Park.

Samuel Lysons.

EXCAVATION STRATEGY

The main aim of Samuel Lysons’ initial work was ‘laying open the foundations of the walls’ in order to ‘trace the plan of the building’. Such a practice of wall chasing was fairly common for the period, trenches being cut by labourers across a buried site until masonry was located, then changing direction in order to follow the line of the walls and complete the outline of individual rooms. The dangers in adopting such an approach were, of course, a general lack of contextual understanding, dateable artefacts being removed from the layers in which they had been deposited without full understanding of their meaning or significance.

It is the responsibility of the modern archaeologist to record everything recovered from an excavation in an equal amount of objective detail. On an ideal site, everything is carefully dug by hand, all defined features, such as pits and postholes, being half sectioned so as to observe and record the backfill, whilst ditches and other large linear cuts are sampled or emptied at fixed intervals so as to establish the complete nature of the depositional sequence. Today all layers, fills, cuts and structures are allocated unique and individual ‘context’ numbers and everything is recorded in equal detail on pre-printed sheets. Plans and sections are drawn; photographs, spot heights and environmental samples taken. Sadly, it has not always been like this.

Most antiquarian and early archaeological excavations were largely motivated by the desire to examine structures and accumulate collections of artefacts, mostly metalwork and pots. Earthworks were often thought of as little more than the surface indicators of buried treasure, with the result that many prehistoric barrow mounds and Roman-period structural remains were identified, dug into and destroyed. A ditty composed by Martin Tupper (no relation to the Bignor Tuppers) during the exploration of a Romano-Celtic temple at Farley Heath in Surrey, around 1848, typifies the approach of many of these earliest of investigators:

Many a day have I whiled away

Upon hopeful Farley Heath

In its antique soil

Digging for spoil

Of possible treasure beneath

The bathhouse of the southern wing under excavation, from an engraving accompanying Lysons’ 1815 account published in the Reliquiae Britannico-Romanae.

Ironically, then, at exactly the same time that Europeans were becoming aware of the ancient past, especially in the writings, teachings, art and general philosophy of their Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman forebears, a large number of archaeological sites were being irrevocably damaged.

For the majority of those engaged in antiquarian pursuits, the ends justified the means, and the end in most cases was represented by the artefact. Context was, in this case, largely irrelevant, as long as some new piece of the past could be located and curated. Excavations were, in some instances, designed purely to find things as quickly and efficiently as possible. A visit to any regional museum in Britain will often demonstrate the relative success of these early diggers, funerary pots, coins, bronze axes, stone tools, brooches and the like being the ultimate prize. Unfortunately data surrounding such artefacts, where and when they were found, was often only recorded, if it were recorded at all, in the memories and random notebook jottings of those engaged in the excavation.

Samuel Lysons was different from most of his contemporaries; part of a small group of antiquarian researchers considered today to represent the founding fathers of British archaeology. Although the revelation that an understanding of specific layers of soil, rather than just the location of walls and the quantity of artefacts, could clarify the sequence and chronology of ancient sites was arguably not fully appreciated until the final decades of the nineteenth century, Lysons believed that the key to any archaeological examination was the accurate recording of masonry walls, floors and buildings (but generally not cut features such as pits, postholes and ditches – which were then probably not recognised nor fully understood) through plans and elevations and the swift dissemination of the results. Accordingly, together with Hawkins and Tupper, the excavation of the villa at Bignor was undertaken with due seriousness, great attention being paid to the methodical recording of remains, trenches being cut in order to expose layers and walls and examine the relationship between structural features.

Close up of a coloured engraving by Richard Smirke from the Reliquiae Britannico-Romanae showing...