Archaeology

The place we call Chester has been lived in for a very long time.

When the first Roman soldiers marched on to this hill they found a place that was already old, a village probably, that had existed for perhaps five hundred years. We can only guess how many people lived here and what they called themselves or what happened to them when their world changed forever. The remains that lie beneath The Deva Roman Discovery Centre tell a story that begins nearly fifty years after the arrival of the first Roman soldiers at a time when the legionary fortress of Deva Victrix was under new management. The fortress was being rebuilt on a smaller scale than originally planned. The walls still enclosed an area larger than any other military base of it’s kind in Britannia, but areas within the walls were empty or still incomplete. The Flavian dream of a “Greater Britannia” that would have included all of Britain and Ireland with Deva as it’s capital had passed. Vespasian’s second son, Domitian, had other ambitions and Trajan had other scores to settle.

The “new management” was the twentieth legion “Valeria Victrix” (“Brave and Conquering” is one translation of their title). Here at least, they were engaged on an improvement to what had gone before. A small excavation outside the building discovered traces of the original wooden building on this site. It had been used long enough and was important enough to be significantly upgraded with a fine plaster floor but now this building was being rebuilt in stone. We guess that it was the hospital (valetudinarium) because at Caerleon (Isca Augusta), a legionary fortress built at the same time and probably designed by the same architect (The Governor of the province, Julius Frontinus), the hospital is next to the bath house. The legionary bath house at Deva was on the other side of Bridge Street. The new stone building might have been bounded by what is now Pierpoint Lane to the south, Bridge Street to the east, Commonhall Street to the north and the west edge somewhere on the other side of the road that runs behind the Deva Roman Discovery Centre.

A century later this building and much of the rest of the fortress was significantly rebuilt and improved. There is evidence here of that and of changes to the internal plan. There is the possibility that the building was extended to the north, to the backs of the properties facing Watergate Street (the Roman “Via Principalis”) and that the building south of Pierpoint Lane was also incorporated to create a structure bigger than Chester cathedral (but not the biggest building in third century Roman Chester).

In the fourth century there may have been further changes. The fourth century CE is a very different place from the first. Legions were smaller and the soldiers were allowed to marry and live with their families within the fortress. We know that there were soldiers in Deva but the last reference to the twentieth legion is at the end of the third century and a new or reconstructed unit may have been in residence. Craftsmen who would formerly have practised their trades outside were now within. Temples could be built within fortresses and there is the possibility suggested by excavations in the nineteenth century that at least part of our building became shrine to the Anatolian Mother Goddess Cybele.

As to the end, we are in much the same place as everywhere else in Roman Britain, that is, in the dark. Just across the road in the bath house a thick layer of “dark earth” caused by human occupation lies between the bath house floor and the collapsed roof. We have that here in places

too. Somebody may have been here doing something, that is the best we can say. Roman Chester does not end it slips into the “void of confusion” that is the sub-Roman Dark Age.