Historian Uncovers The Ancient Secrets Of Richborough Roman Fort

In 43 AD, a Roman invasion army at least 40,000 strong, commanded by Aulus Plautius, landed in what is today southern England. It was the start of the Roman invasion of Britain and today I'm visiting a site that is believed to be where at least a portion of Plautius' invasion army took their first steps on British soil, Richborough Castle. Something which really strikes me with Richborough, first of all, when you look at its history, is its lifespan. It seems we've got archaeology here stretching from the initial Roman invasion of Britain, the Claudian invasion, all the way through to the Roman departure. Yeah, it's a pretty astonishing site and you have something in the region of 350 years of Roman occupation to see today, from the very first footsteps of the Romans in Britain right up until the bitter end. Today it's a site which can, at least initially, seem a little bit confusing. Of course, as you can see, the site is dominated by the imposing walls of the shore fort, but that was only built in the third century and lasted until the end of Roman Britain. But actually, in the 1920s and 30s, archaeologists conducted pioneering excavations at Richborough within the walls and they discovered that before these were built, the site had been a thriving port town for almost 200 years. So a key part of Richborough's story is this evolution, this idea that Richborough transforms in its purpose, in its duty, in what it was used for, over the three, nearly four centuries of Roman rule. Yeah, indeed, and actually one of the big mistakes people often make about Roman Britain is that it's static, the Romans are always the same, the cities that lived in it are the same, but actually over the course of the Roman Empire there is a lot of change. There's lots of change in emphasis in terms of the kind of settlements they have, lots of change in terms of their material culture, and sites like Richborough really speak to that evolution and that dynamism of the Roman Empire and particularly Roman Britain. That's remarkable, and before we go on to those earlier stitches, I first want to ask you about the geography and the topography, because Richborough 2,000 years ago, the surrounding topography looked very different to what we see today. Yeah, I think if you've been arriving here in Roman times, you'll be saying, welcome to Roman Britain, did you have a safe journey via sea? And it seems like a bit of an old thing to say, because we're almost three kilometres from the sea as it stands today. But as you said, the topography is very different, the coastline is very different in Roman times. We're actually on a small island on the edge of the Wansum Channel, which is a body of water which separates mainland Kent from what was the island of Thanet in Roman times. And it's a really important channel because it's a safe haven for ships to anchor that would have either been moving up and down the southern coast or crossing from northern Gaul. And that really shapes Richborough's importance over the next 350 years, because ships that came here could quite easily pass from the Wansum into the Thames to the north, which is one of the great highways of Roman Britain, or else go up the Stour towards Canterbury, or also unload their supplies, their people, and those people could travel inland on the Roman road network. Right, well it sounds like it's a very important part of Roman Britain, so let's go and have a look at the archaeology. So Andrew, we're starting off perhaps not at the most impressive part of Richborough Castle today, but nonetheless an integral thing to understand the early history of Richborough. Yes, absolutely. We're standing above two ditches, and although there's only a very short section of these ditches, they're on show at Richborough today. They once stretched for some 650 metres, running from the north of the island to the south, effectively sealing off the entire eastern portion of Richborough Island. Behind them would have been a rampart, on top of that would have been a wooden palisade, and just by next to where we're standing here there would have been a wooden gate and a tower above. And what effectively this is, is a protected anchorage for at least part of the Roman invasion force. So it means that they could come into the Wansum Channel, perhaps unload soldiers and supplies here, and be reasonably secure from any enemies. So this is very much related to the initial Claudian invasion of Britain. We know that these date from the Claudian invasion. The exact role that they play in that invasion is a little bit more complex, we can't be entirely sure. We do have some historical accounts of that invasion, of the campaign that Aulus Plautius conducted. Unfortunately the historians don't deign to tell us any place names, so we're a little bit in the dark as to where it happened. But Richborough really has as good a case as any for being one of the initial invasion sites. We think about Richborough's positioning just north of Dover today, it's on the shortest passage between northern France, probably where the the embarkation took place, and there's a nice safe harbour at the end of the journey. And you mentioned there the safe harbour idea. Is this crucial to understanding Richborough's importance in the Roman period, and this idea that it was a place where ships could stay the night in safety? Yeah it's absolutely crucial. Richborough is all about location. You have this confluence of the sea routes, the different river routes, and of course the road, which means that Richborough is going to continue to be important for the next 350 years. And Andrew, I love what you were saying about the length of these ditches, they must have looked really impressive at the time of the Claudian invasion. Yes they were, and it's actually even more impressive when you think that this area could only have contained a mere fraction of the invasion fleet at the time, so it's quite a considerable enterprise. But the Roman army of course, they didn't just come prepared to fight, they came prepared to build, and they would have built quite spectacular imposing structures in order to facilitate the invasion. But once they were done with it, they just quite happily knock it down and go somewhere else. And that's pretty much what happens at Richborough, because as soon as the army is operating further inland, they don't need this anymore. And Richborough evolves from being a protected anchorage into being a supply base. So the protected anchorage is replaced quite quickly by a supply base, which was there to keep the considerable forces of the Romans supplied throughout the first phase of the conquest. But the southern area of Britain is quite quickly subdued by the Romans, and so Richborough is not really needed for that purpose after the first decade or so of the invasion. And so Richborough then takes on a new character, it starts to develop into a civilian port. Where we're standing, we would have been on the high street essentially, and there would have been shops either side of it. And it's not any ordinary high street either, this is actually what we know as Watling Street, which is one of the major routeways of Roman Britain. And that's again very crucial to the story of Richborough, because it's a place where these important sea routes meet these important land routes, and part of the reason why Richborough becomes so significant during the period of Roman Britain. So I love that, so we're walking along what would have been the Roman high street of Richborough, and as you were saying, shops either side. But also this would have been either the beginning or the terminus, depending on which way you were walking, of one of the most famous Roman roads in Britain, Watling Street. Yes, so Richborough is very much plugged into this network of rivers and sea travel and of course roads, and so the Romans wanted to mark that by building quite an extraordinary monument just to our right here. Well I'm dying to see this monument, let's go! So Andrew, we're approaching the heart of Richborough Castle now, and the place where this great monument was constructed. Yeah, so for some hundreds of years this was the great enigma at the centre of Richborough, what was known as the monument. And so antiquarians, early archaeologists, in the 19th century, when they came to Richborough, they found between the walls of the shorefort this really large piece of stone, and you can see it's about 40 metres long and about 20 metres deep. And in the centre was this rather curious raised cross, and for some decades it was something of a mystery, there's lots of sort of attempts to figure out what it was. So what they discovered was that it was also very deep, it's about 10 metres deep, and so initially they assumed that this was some kind of subterranean building, maybe it was some kind of repository for a great treasure, and one archaeologist in fact dug down and then tried to dig in to the monument in order to try and get inside. He got about five or so metres into solid masonry before he gave up and realised that far from being a building, what this is, is a massive foundation for a colossal building above. And what kind of colossal structure was it? Well initially there was some speculation as to what it might have been, some people thought it might have been a lighthouse, or even the basis of a church because of the cross shape, but actually careful study of the stones that were found during the 1920s and 30s excavation reveals that this was actually a rare and elaborate form of Roman triumphal arch, what we call a quadriforms, and the raised pavement that we see today would have been the four openings of that arch. It's a bit like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it was particularly impressive and elaborate, it was covered in Carrara marble imported especially from the imperial quarries in Italy, and it would have stood at a quite astonishing height of 25 metres. This is not only one of the largest monuments in Britain, this is one of the if not the largest monuments anywhere in the Roman world. So why do you think they decided to build this arch here at Richborough? Well it's to really mark the special status of Richborough, so generally speaking arches like this are used to celebrate military victories, but also to mark important boundaries, and Richborough is significant for both reasons. So when the arch was built in the mid 80s AD, it was shortly after the Romans under the Emperor Domitian had won a great victory at the Battle of Mons Graupius, which is near Inverness in modern day Scotland, and at this point the Emperor could quite reasonably claim to have completed the conquest of the island of Britain. They didn't actually go on to consolidate it, but at this point they thought well that's going to follow in short order, and so it seems as what Domitian wanted to do was to commemorate this event by putting an arch at the place where it all started under Claudius in AD 43. But at the same time, given Richborough's important position as the port of Roman Britain, the arch also is marking the fact that we are at the official gateway to the province, the newly conquered province of Britannia, the excessus Britannia, and so what it is doing is marking that transition between sea and land. So Andrew, I'm standing in one of the most impressive Roman ditches I've ever seen. Yeah, so this is only a small part of what must have been one of the great engineering projects of Roman Britain. So why don't you come up and join me, we'll have a closer look. Don't mind if I do. Actually that was easier said than done. So Andrew, when you get to the top of that ditch you now have this really impressive Roman wall. Exactly, and today it stands at about eight meters tall, but back when it was built it would have been over 10 and a half meters tall we think. So pretty imposing set of defences if you put it in combination with the rather large ditch that you just ran up. And they're not just imposing defences, they're also quite aesthetically pleasing as well. You can see here some of the facing stones between these rather distinctive red bands here. So the facing stones were of sort of local sandstone and limestone and then the band, these ceramic bands, are there to bind the whole structure together. So it keys into the underlying core which is made out of local flint and also probably, well certainly, some of the remnants of the arch inside. So that huge monumental arch we saw inside was recycled as part of this wall. Indeed, and the not necessarily going to go out of their way to find resources when there are resources ready to hand. And of course by this point the arch is no longer the most important thing, so it can be kind of ground up and reused in order to create these impressive defences. Well it begs the question then, why do we think Richborough transforms into this military fort? Well it's very much an open question. Traditionally, Richborough was part of a network of fortifications that are built in the third century. So we've got Richborough here at the south of the Wansum Channel, there's also Reculver to the north of the Wansum Channel, we have Dover, there's also Pevensey, Portchester and many more others. One view, the traditional view, is that they are built in order to protect the south coast and the southeast coast from raiding from the safe, from the Saxons and from the Franks. And this is a very good theory, but we don't have any direct evidence of attacks on Roman Britain and in fact it's a bit odd because these forts are built to withstand a siege and you'd imagine that if you're trying to defeat raiders you'd probably want a more sort of an agile force that would maybe go out and hunt them down. An alternative view is that they're actually built to defend Britain from Rome itself. So in the third century there's a couple of attempts to try and secure parts of the northern empire, including Britain, as an almost an independent kingdom. And so potentially these forts would have been seen as part of a defensive system to stop the main bit of the empire taking back control. So Andrew, we get to this very definitive bump in the wall here. Yeah, so this is one of the definitive design features of this era. It's a projecting tower. What I mean by that is that it sticks out from the line of the curtain wall. And this is what makes Richborough and other forts of its ilk quite different to what's gone before. What we're seeing here are innovations coming from the south and the east of the empire. And what this basically allows is defenders on top to be able to rain down flanking fire on anyone attacking the curtain wall. So it makes it a far more imposing defense to try and besiege. But it has a few surprises which aren't just about defense. We have this statue here in this little niche which is there to make it look a bit more aesthetically pleasing, perhaps as a little symbol of the fort. It doesn't look like a lion, but I can assure you that it was once originally a lion. Unfortunately it's been somewhat weathered, but you can just about see the sort of back legs. And it's another example of the Romans recycling things. So it wasn't made especially for this purpose. What's probably happened is this has been taken from a monument that once stood inside the town, or maybe a nice townhouse belonging to somebody, some of the wealthy citizens. That's been reused here in the defences. So begs the question then, what exactly was this? Well it's a tower, but it's also a gateway. It's what we call a posten gate. And so you have to come all the way around under the lee of the walls here, risking if you're an attacker, you're risking missiles being rained down onto you. But if you are a friend then you can actually enter into the fort itself. Wow. So Andrew, as we walk into the interior of the 3rd century Roman fort, what would the interior have looked like? Well I'm going to have to disappoint you a little bit here, because the excavators of the 1920s and 30s, although they tried, couldn't really establish what the interior really looked like. And their conclusions were that there are probably a lot of buildings here. We have a lot of evidence of material culture from the 3rd and 4th centuries, but they were probably wooden. And that's very difficult to record with fairly early archaeological techniques. We do however know that there were three stone buildings here, and one of them is quite easy to discern what it is, and that's what we're going to go and have a look at now. So Andrew, this looks a very complicated structure, a microcosm of Richmond's evolution. Yes, so we're standing amidst a whole series of stone remains, and most of this belongs to the town phase of Richborough. We're actually standing amidst what was called the Mansio, which was essentially an official hotel for travellers that were on the business of government. So there'd be a structure like this, normally built around a courtyard, with facilities to sleep, to bathe, to get fresh horses for anyone who's carrying official messages to, for example, the governor, say, in London. But this was all demolished when the 3rd century fort was built. However, on top of its foundations was constructed a much smaller building. We're in one of the three chambers of that building, and this was the garrison's bathhouse, so a very Roman building. The Romans loved to bathe, it was one of the things that they did as part of their daily routine, and any town, fort, city, even large houses would have a bathhouse in order to enable them to do that. So Andrew, we've just come across from the main Richborough castle over there, and we're in this field, but this field would still have been part of the Roman town at its height. Yes, so we're right on the outskirts of the town of Richborough. We think the town would have been something in the region of 21 hectares, so from where we've just walked to the northeast over to there, where the modern building's here. And we're on the site of probably the second most important building in Richborough after the monumental arch. And if you look closely, what you can see here is the unmistakable oval shape of a Roman amphitheatre buried beneath the ground. And so this is still, I guess, one of the most outstanding mysteries of Richborough, exactly what this building looked like. It was excavated in the 1840s on very small scale excavations, and they discovered some parts of the amphitheatre, the walls of the arena. But actually, about 20 years or so ago, archaeologists returned to the site to do some remote sensing, so scanning beneath the ground without actually doing any digging. And what they discovered is that the amphitheatre is much, much bigger than the archaeologists discovered in the 1840s. But they could be forgiven for getting it slightly wrong because they were actually doing the first ever excavation of an amphitheatre in Roman Britain. And so what we have is quite a considerable arena with potentially room for up to three or four thousand people from the town to come and enjoy one of the great spectacles of Roman life, the games. Indeed, and it might be a bit difficult to visualise today with how it looks now, but back then, at the Roman period, this may have been able to house 3,000 to 4,000 visitors. Yes, and they would have been crammed in here to see one of the great pleasures of Roman society, the games. The Romans loved the spectacle. They particularly liked to see a bit of blood, so you probably would have quite reasonably expect them to have shown fights between wild beasts and possibly some public executions. And then the highlight was always the gladiatorial contests that would have pitted different gladiators in a test of skill and survival. It's extraordinary to think how visitors to the amphitheatre may have been able to see that monumental arch over there in the distance. Yes, assuming that they were in existence at the same time, one of the things that we don't really know and we'd like to know about the amphitheatre is exactly when it was built. The original excavators found a lot of evidence for later occupation, so that might mean that it was built in the later phase of Richborough, perhaps after the arch had been knocked down. And if indeed that was the case, then the amphitheatre almost takes on some of the role of the arch because it's in quite a prominent spot up on the high ground, and so it would be an interesting visual for any who's sailing up the Wansum or coming to Richborough via the roads. So Andrew, we've looked through Richborough's remarkable evolution, its remarkable history during the Roman period. What happens as the Roman departure nears? What happens to Richborough? Well, the fort that was built in the 3rd century continues right up until the end of Roman occupation of Britain, and while we can't be sure exactly the purpose it was built for, certainly by the end of the 4th century, Richborough comes under control of an official called the Count of the Saxon Shore, so it seems as though it's playing an important role in defending Roman Britain from any seaborne invaders. And we know, thanks to discoveries of something in the region of 20,000 coins from the site, that it was being used right up until the end of Roman Britain in around about 410 AD, and that gives us such a great span of occupation. So we've gone from the very beginning with the invasion of Claudius right until the last vestiges of Roman control of the province. That longevity is absolutely fascinating. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you.