How luxurious was life in a Roman villa？

Tucked away in a secluded valley in the Cotswolds, just 10 miles from Sirenfester, the Roman town of Carinium, is one of the most impressive Roman villas ever discovered in Britain. This sprawling archaeological site offers a glimpse into the grandeur of everyday living of Roman Britain's upper classes, from opulent dining halls and elaborate mosaics, to the luxury of two bathhouses. This is Chedworth Roman Villa. Today we're going to find out what life was really like here at the start of the 4th century AD, the golden age of Roman Britain. The people who lived at Chedworth were part of the elites of Roman Britain. They were powerful and they were wealthy and the villa itself was a statement of their status and their taste. This was a real family home. We know that women and children lived here based on archaeological finds, but there also would have been servants, both free and enslaved, and possibly tenant farmers who worked the surrounding land. The villa's layout reflected this social order, with grand dining rooms and private family quarters separated from the bustling service areas. The proximity to Carinium, one of Roman Britain's largest towns, meant that Chedworth's owners were never far from trade, politics and even the fashions of the wider empire. Now, one of the great fashions of elite Roman homes were the mosaics and Chedworth has some of the best preserved mosaics remaining in Britain. So let's go find some. I am in the villa's west range, in a space known as the Long Corridor. This gallery runs all the way from the dining room, right at this side of the range, and goes all the way through to the larger of the two bathhouses. I can't believe I'm saying this, but the mosaic I'm standing on was laid down in the 2nd century AD. It is more than 1900 years old, and that's why I have to wear socks to stand on it today. Now, this gallery is 30 metres long. It is incredible, and the mosaic runs the entire stretch of it. It is one of the longest in-situ mosaics remaining in Britain. Now, mosaics are more than just floors. They're an expression of the owner's wealth and education, something we'll see in a minute in the dining room. The patterns were made for thousands of tiny cubes of coloured stone, pottery, or glass, known as tesserae. These were mostly sourced locally. The whites and off-whites from the Cotswolds, the blues and greys from Somerset, purples from the Forest of Dean, and reds a broken brick or tile. Now, it might sound easy to make a mosaic, but creating one was a skilled process. First, a thick bed of mortar was prepared as the base. Then, a thin layer of finer mortar was applied on top, and into that, the tesserae were pressed, either individually, or perhaps, we think, in prefabricated sections. Here at Chedworth, mosaics adorn many of the most important rooms, including this reception space, the bathhouse. Don't worry, we're coming back here later. There's even one under this patch of grass, excavated in 2017, and then reburied to protect it from the elements. Now, the special thing about this mosaic is when it was created. The way you date a mosaic is by testing the soil underneath it for charcoal, bits of bone, that sort of thing. You're not looking to say a mosaic is a specific age, but you can say it is no older than a certain date. And what archaeologists found here was the mosaic could not have been laid prior to AD 424. Now, the reason that is significant is that the Roman army left Britannia, as it was then, at the beginning of the 5th century. So, this mosaic tells us there was someone living here, keeping the Roman way of life alive, in the decades after the Roman army departed these shores. But for my money, the best mosaic at Chedworth is in the Grand Dining Room. This would have been the villa's primary entertaining and dining space. The main part of the mosaic in here, which was likely a conversation topic for the villa's guests, shows the Roman god Bacchus embracing his lover, the princess Ariadne, in an octagonal arrangement, surrounded by panels depicting the seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter. You can really imagine what it must have been like. The walls painted a luxurious red, the mosaic in front of me illuminated by flickering candlelight. It really would have been the most impressive space in the The Romans called it the triclinium, which translates, very literally, as three couches. And that's what you'd have had behind me, arranged in a u-shape. Now, at a Roman dinner, no one would have sat down to dine. Instead, guests would have lounged forwards on plush cushions, propping themselves up on their elbows. It may not sound like a particularly comfortable way of eating for us today, but in Roman times, sitting down to eat as we do, well, that would have been a sign of the lower classes. Now, the really interesting thing is, if you'd been here in the colder months and you'd leant down to touch the mosaic, well, it would have felt warm. And that's because of where Kev is standing. Yes, I'm underneath the triclinium floor, amid an incredible piece of Roman era engineering. This is the hypercaust, and essentially, it is underfloor heating. The way it works is, outside this room, there is a furnace. Hot air and smoke from the fire that's kept there rushes into this maze, heating up the stones and the floor above it. And in some cases, there will even be hollow tiles that allow this hot air to reach up even further into the room. Now, it's hard to explain just how narrow the space is down here. These channels I'm among, they're barely a foot wide. And don't forget, you'd be completely in the dark. There should be a floor right above my head. You would be completely closed in. And people did have to come down into this space. All that smoke, all that soot from the furnace clogged up the hypercaust. And when that happened, it was the job of a servant to come clean it out. It's definitely not a job I would want, because some of the spiders down here, they look like they should have come out of Lord of the Rings. There's only one place for me to go after a physically demanding task like this, and that's somewhere else there's a hypercaust. We're going to the bathhouse. Bathing was central to Roman life. It made you a member of civilized society and shared with both, not one, but two bathhouses. We're going to be heading inside the bathhouse in the West Range, which is fairly typical of bathhouses in the Roman world, in that it has a series of rooms that you'd move through for the complete bathing experience. Now, time in the bathhouse was more than just getting clean. It was a real social ritual, and Cedric's owner likely would have brought important guests here, perhaps after a day's hunting or business. Politics, gossip, relaxation all mingled in the steamy rooms with servants on Now, Kev and I wouldn't have been in here together, as mixed bathing was generally frowned upon in Roman society. So that's my cue to head off to another part of the villa, and I'm going to show you what's inside. Your first stop would be the apodotarium, the changing room, where here we have another incredible mosaic. Here you'd undress and perhaps be offered some light refreshment by a servant, perhaps a cup of wine or a stuffed door mouse. From the changing rooms, you'd pass through this space, the frigidarium, or the cold room, and come into this space. This is the tepidarium, the warm room, and it's much nicer than the word tepid implies. The gentle heat from this room, rising from the hypercourse beneath, would loosen your muscles and open your pores, and it's here that a servant would massage you with oils. From here, it's on to the caldarium, the hot room. This is the hottest part of the bathhouse. You could take a soak in the tub, but without modern soap, you would definitely have a servant scrape your body clean of dirt and oils with this, a strickle. And your final stop would be to come back into the frigidarium, the cold room, where you'd leap into this huge plunge pool, where the freezing waters would close your pores again. Water. It's something we probably all take for granted today. You turn on a tap and there it is. But in Roman times, it wasn't quite that simple. Now, Chedworth Roman Villa was built right next to this natural spring, which is still providing the site with water today. And without this spring, the villa would never have been built at all. The Roman inhabitants designed the villa so that fresh water flows through a hole in the bottom of the wall, along the stone channel, and into the pool. It then flows downhill, along more channels and lead pipes, to the rest of the villa. The spring here meant the villa was always supplied with water, and people didn't have to carry it. The Romans appreciated it so much, they built a shrine around it called the Nymphaeum. This would have looked like a miniature temple, with a triangular roof and a brightly painted curved back wall. Between the wall and the eight-sided pool in the middle would have been a stone altar, a kind of table on which religious ceremonies are performed. The temple would have been popular with guests. They may have even thrown coins into it, an offering to the gods. And my favourite detail is this bit, a carved board that may well have been used to play games. We know this because stone counters have been found at Chedworth. Now this part of the site is also one of the best places to find a rather unusual feature of Chedworth, snails. So they belong to a species that you can only find here at Chedworth and the surrounding areas. Their Latin name is Helix permatia, and they aren't native to Britain. These large snails were introduced around 1800 years ago by the Romans themselves, who brought them along to be eaten. They'd be fattened up with milk, bran, bay leaves and wine, to the point they couldn't retreat back into their shells. And then they would be cooked. And if you ate a bad snail, well, there was one place you were ending up. The latrine. This is a small room in the south wing, just adjacent to the kitchen. Now that may seem odd to us, but for the Romans, hygiene was about the presence of running water. You can see there's a small drainage channel here that just bends round to the right. It was not about separating personal ablutions from food preparation. The Romans had no idea of germ theory or how infections spread. Now you have to imagine that along one of these walls, there'd be a communal bench with round holes in it. And it would have looked something like this. Now, clearly, privacy was not a priority here. People would have sat side by side, perhaps chatting as they went about their business. Oh, hi, Rach. Hi, Kev. Did you have a nice time in the baths? I'm having a great time, but it's about to get worse because there's no toilet paper. Well, what you would have had in Roman times is this. A xylospongium. Basically, a sponge on a stick. What you'd have done is you'd used it and then rinsed it in water and, well, given it to the next person. Because after all, this was a communal activity. What a treat. Now, you may be wondering, did the Lord and Lady of the villa share toilet time with their servants? The answer is probably not. The owners themselves may have preferred to have used chamber pots, and it would have been the servant's job to empty and clean those. A reminder of the strict social hierarchy that underpinned villa life. So there you have it. Life at a Roman villa. We hope you've enjoyed exploring the home of this elite Roman family. And if you liked today's video, don't forget to like and subscribe.