Blestium

Blestium was a small Roman fort and an iron-working centre in the province of Britannia Superior, which was the southern part of Roman Britain. It stood at the later town of Monmouth, on a low hill where the River Monnow meets the River Wye, in the south-east of what is now Wales. The rivers gave the place a crossing, a route from the lowlands into the hills, and a supply of water and timber. A plaque on the bank at 18 Monnow Street marks the position.

The Roman ground itself has no heritage listing. The late eighteenth-century town house that carries the plaque is listed, and the plaque says that house was built over the remains.

The only name for the settlement in a Roman document is the form Blestio, entered in the Antonine Itinerary on Iter XIII, the thirteenth route. The same place is also called Blestium. That itinerary entry is the only written Roman reference to the settlement. It puts the station on the road between Isca Silurum, the legionary fortress at Caerleon, and Calleva Atrebatum, the town at Silchester.

Along that road Blestium sits midway between the fort at Usk, called Burrium, and the iron-making centre of Ariconium, placed at Weston under Penyard near Ross-on-Wye. One reading of the route gives a uniform eleven miles from Burrium to Blestium and eleven miles from Blestium to Ariconium, and those distances put the named station on the ground of Monmouth. The route is titled as the way from Isca to Calleva. The itinerary counts distance in Roman miles.

A Roman pace was two steps and was set at five Roman feet, and the mile that results is given as 1,479 metres. A transcriber omitted an entry on this route, so the stated total of paces does not equal the sum of the stages. Other explanations of shortfalls in the British distances have also been offered: lost grammatical endings that once marked a junction rather than a town, or measurement from the edge of a settlement’s administrative area rather than from centre to centre. The eleven-mile stages are therefore a strong placement, not a surveyed pin.

The Antonine Itinerary is a register of stations and distances along the roads of the Roman Empire. Its Latin title presents it as the itinerary of the emperor Antoninus. Almost nothing is known of the author. The title seems to claim the patronage of Antoninus Pius in the second century, but the surviving versions appear to go back to an original near the end of the reign of Diocletian, in the early fourth century, and the most likely imperial patron, if there was one, was Caracalla.

One account of this particular road treats the document as a late second-century list of major trade routes. The excavation summary of the Monnow Street work calls it a third-century book of roads. Those datings are not the same, and the name Blestium is attested by the register rather than by a foundation inscription. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the wider work date from somewhere between the seventh and the tenth centuries.

The British section, the Iter Britanniarum, is a set of fifteen routes, and it survives in only some of the manuscripts used for the modern critical text. A forged description of Britain, made available about 1749 and published in 1757 by Charles Bertram, invented further itineraries that overlapped the genuine ones and sometimes contradicted them. Its authenticity was not seriously challenged until 1845, and it was still treated as an authority into the late nineteenth century, long enough for false stations to enter maps. It is no longer used.

The identification of Blestium rests on the genuine thirteenth route, not on that forgery.

The name has been derived from a Greek word, blastos, meaning an offshoot, a shoot, a sprout, a scion, or offspring. On that reading Blestium would be something like the offshoot settlement. One account ties the word to Ariconium, taking Monmouth as a dependent of the main administrative centre for the iron industry of the district. That is a suggestion about the name, not a statement from the itinerary itself.

The hill was a border. To the west, in Glamorgan and Gwent, were the Silures. To the east, in what is now Gloucestershire, were the Dobunni. The Silures were a powerful people, or a confederation, of south-east Wales and perhaps some adjoining ground, with the Ordovices to the north and the Demetae to the west.

They are pictured with a dark complexion and curly hair, and that appearance was taken to imply an earlier crossing from Spain. A later picture repeats the dark features and the curly black hair, and likens them to Gauls or Spaniards. The Latin name is Celtic in origin. It may come from a root meaning seed, and words from that root in later Celtic languages mean blood-stock, descendants, lineage, and offspring as well as seed in the vegetable sense.

Silures might therefore mean kindred or stock. Another proposal is that the name began as a phrase meaning rich in grain. The Iron Age hillfort at Llanmelin near Caerwent has sometimes been suggested as a pre-Roman centre, but the people who became the Silures have also been understood as a loose network of groups with shared habits rather than a single centralised society. Hillforts at Llanmelin and Sudbrook are the obvious remains.

Roundhouses are known at Gwehelog and at Thornwell near Chepstow, and there is lowland occupation at Goldcliff. Monmouth itself has not produced a structural settlement of that age.

What the hill has produced from before Rome is artefacts, and on that point the accounts differ in emphasis. The landscape account says prehistoric activity is known only from objects, with no structural evidence for a settlement. Digging on Monnow Street has produced Mesolithic microliths, a barbed and tanged arrowhead of Beaker type and other flints of New Stone Age character, and fired-clay fragments read as Iron Age briquetage from a salt container of the kind made at Droitwich. A gas-main watching brief also found Mesolithic flint and waste, and a sherd of native pottery of a form known in the late Iron Age.

A background note to that brief speaks of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement. A planning note speaks of Mesolithic worked timber, flint, pottery, and animal bone, and of Iron Age salt-container fragments, and it treats the early use of the area as likely to have been nomadic and seasonal, with temporary riverside sites. A grave fill toward the rear of 24 Monnow Street was given an Iron Age radiocarbon suggestion, but small sealed sherds of Roman amphora in that fill show that the deposit is later. The prehistoric objects are real.

A standing Iron Age settlement on this particular hill is not what the structural record shows.

The mineral wealth of Britain was known before the invasion and was one of the expected gains of conquest. In the Roman Empire mineral rights belonged to the emperor. Extraction was state-sponsored and under military control. In Wales the agents of that system found gold, copper, and lead, with some zinc and silver.

Gold had already been mined at Dolaucothi, and Roman engineering increased the output until the work was no longer practical. Iron was a different geography. Forges sat near ore. A general account of manufacture in Wales says that the right materials rarely occurred together, and that the forested mountains did not suit large-scale industry, so that production for export stayed in the south and east of Britain.

Monmouth is the exception that the same Roman period makes visible on the ground: an iron-working place on the road between the fortress and the inland iron centre, using local ore and charcoal from local woods, with one account specifying ore from the Forest of Dean. South-east Wales became the most Romanised part of the country. The only tribal towns of civitas rank in Wales were Carmarthen and Caerwent. Three small urban sites near Caerwent, and Roman Monmouth, were the only other places in Wales described as urbanised.

The conquest that eventually put a fort on this hill began in 43, when an invasion force under Aulus Plautius crossed to Britain. How many legions sailed is not certain. The Second Legion Augusta, commanded by the future emperor Vespasian, is the only one directly attested in the invasion. The Ninth Hispana, the Fourteenth Gemina, and the Twentieth are known in the province by the revolt of 60 and 61, and they were probably present from the start, though units moved.

A mutiny delayed the sailing until an imperial freedman talked the men past their fear of the Ocean. They sailed in three divisions and probably landed at Richborough in Kent, with at least part of the force perhaps landing near Fishbourne. The Catuvellauni and their allies were beaten on the Medway, if the landing was at Richborough, and again on the Thames. Togodumnus was killed.

His brother Caratacus lived to fight elsewhere. Plautius halted at the Thames and sent for the emperor Claudius, who came with reinforcements, including artillery and elephants, for the march on Camulodunum, the Catuvellaunian capital at Colchester. Vespasian subdued the south-west. Cogidubnus was set up as a friendly king, and treaties were made beyond the directly occupied zone.

The south and east could then be held. The hills of the west could not.

Publius Ostorius Scapula governed Britain from 47 until his death in 52. He was the second governor, appointed by Claudius in the winter of 47 in succession to Aulus Plautius. Nothing is known of his early career. He was suffect consul, probably in 46.

He was the son of a Publius, and he was likely the nephew of Quintus Ostorius Scapula, the first joint commander of the Praetorian Guard under Augustus and later prefect of Egypt. The Quintus Ostorius Scapula who was consul in 41 was probably a brother or cousin. A Sallustia Calvina is attested as the wife of a Publius Ostorius Scapula, who may be the governor or his father. He believed, or it has been restored from a damaged passage, that he should disarm the Britons south and east of the Trent and the Severn.

That line has been discussed as a frontier along the Fosse Way, which links those rivers. The Iceni of Norfolk, allies rather than a conquered people, objected and led neighbours in a rising. Ostorius stormed a hillfort, possibly Stonea Camp in the Fens near March, in a hard fight. His son Marcus Ostorius Scapula won the civic crown for saving a citizen’s life.

The Iceni stayed independent, and Prasutagus was probably installed then as a pro-Roman ruler.

Beyond that line, in 48, he campaigned against the Deceangli of north-east Wales and the Cheshire Gap, an attack that separated the peoples of the north from those of Wales. The Roman answer to the Deceangli is placed in 48 or 49. He was called east by a fresh rising among a faction of the Brigantes, which was put down quickly but showed the risk in a client kingdom. Troops of the Fourteenth Legion were left to keep the Brigantian peace.

At that time the Second Legion Augusta held the command in the south-east, the Ninth was campaigning north-east of the Trent, the Twentieth held Colchester, and the Fourteenth was based at Wroxeter. In the safer south he founded the first veteran colony at Camulodunum in 49 and probably a municipium at Verulamium, St Albans. His brief was awkward. The Claudian lowlands were not the mineral lands.

The ore lay in the country still outside the province.

Caratacus, of the Catuvellauni, reappeared as a leader of the Silures of south-east Wales. Their rising was met by a programme of legionary fortress building that drove him north into the lands of the Ordovices. After several years of guerrilla war, Ostorius forced an open battle, probably near the River Severn and possibly near Caersws, and defeated him in 51. The Ordovices had fortified a ridge of steep hills above the river, and the ground behind them prevented an encircling move.

Ostorius hesitated at the defences. The eagerness of his troops carried the attack, and the Britons were beaten. Caratacus’s wife and daughter were captured and his brother surrendered. Caratacus fled to the Brigantes.

Their queen, Cartimandua, was loyal to Rome and handed him over in chains. He was taken to Rome, and a dignified speech during the triumph of Claudius persuaded the emperor to spare him. One account adds that, before that final battle, he had defeated two auxiliary cohorts, and that the pitched battle cost the Ordovices their territory without ending the war. Ostorius received triumphal insignia.

The Silures were not quelled. He had said publicly that they were so dangerous they should be exterminated or transplanted. The threat hardened them. They surrounded a large legionary force that was building forts in their territory, and it was rescued only with difficulty and with considerable loss.

They took Roman prisoners and distributed them among neighbouring peoples, binding those peoples into the resistance. He died unexpectedly in 52, described as worn out with care, with the frontier problem growing. It has been claimed that his burial place is at Clawdd Coch in the Vale of Glamorgan. Silurian raids continued, and they defeated a legion led by Gaius Manlius Valens before the next governor arrived.

An ancient sentence on this people says they were changed neither by cruelty nor by clemency. Whether they were in the end beaten in the field, or came to terms, is left unclear. Roman writers say, opaquely, that they were subdued by Sextus Julius Frontinus in campaigns ending about 78. Another reckoning puts the full pacification of the area twenty-five years after the death of Ostorius.

The fort at Monmouth belongs to that war, and the date is given in several ways that do not collapse into one year. It is now generally accepted that a Neronian or pre-Flavian military fort was established here, perhaps before 55, and on that view it is the earliest Roman fort in Wales. Another account puts the foundation at the very outset of the advance into Wales, around 55. Another puts it shortly after 50, and says that this makes it a quarter of a century older than the fortress at Caerleon.

A report of the gas-main digging says the fort definitely existed at least as early as 55, and that it seems to have covered most of the present town centre. The initial work has also been called a large vexillation fort, possibly of the years 54 to 68. A planning note dates the fort to the first century and says it was likely used by vexillations, detachments of a legion sent for a particular service. The pottery from the lowest levels at 24 Monnow Street could all be pre-Flavian, and the diagnostic sherds point to an early site.

A South Gaulish samian bowl of form 29 from those levels is given a probable date of 55 to 75, and that form is not generally found in production after about 85. South Gaulish samian of form 15/17 from the same ground is mid to late first century. The historical guesses and the pots overlap in the middle of the first century, and they do not pick a single season.

The founder is likewise left as one of two governors. The fort was probably established either by Publius Ostorius Scapula or by his successor Aulus Didius Gallus, during the first advances against the Silures. The invading force planted a series of auxiliary forts along the Monnow valley into mid Wales, and it advanced toward Usk and established Burrium. One account of the same years says that a fortress at Usk then housed some five or six thousand soldiers, a quarter of a century before the stone fortress at Caerleon, and that the Romans took very heavy casualties while the early Welsh held out in a guerrilla war for thirty years.

The thirty years and the campaigns ending about 78 describe one long resistance. They are not a second war.

Aulus Didius Gallus governed Britain from 52 to 57. He was a senator and a general, suffect consul in the last months of 39 as colleague of Domitius Afer, and later proconsul of Asia. An inscription from Olympia reconstructs part of his career up to 51. He is attested as quaestor in a senatorial decree of 19 that forbade senators, equestrians, and their descendants to fight as gladiators.

If that inscription is correctly restored, he had the unusual honour, for a new man, of being quaestor to Tiberius, and if he held the office at the usual age of about 25 he was born around 8 or 7 BC. He was legate to a proconsul of Asia and prefect of cavalry. The cavalry command has been placed by some in the invasion of Britain, and more probably in a Thracian campaign, which would explain his command of the Moesian army about 44 or 45. He was proconsul of Sicily under Tiberius, perhaps for more than a year.

He was curator of the aqueducts from 38 to 49, and one of the septemviri epulonum, a priesthood that would have been prominent at the Secular Games of 47. He received triumphal ornaments as an imperial legate under Claudius, probably in the Bosporus, where he commanded forces that were withdrawn in 49. The lot then gave him Asia, dated to 49 or 50. In 52 he was sent to Britain because Ostorius had died in office and the province was deteriorating.

The south-east was secure. The defeat of Caratacus the year before had not ended resistance, above all among the Silures. During his governorship Venutius rebelled for the first time against Cartimandua, and Didius sent Caesius Nasica to help her. Tacitus is critical of Didius for being reactive.

Another reading is that he was doing what Claudius wanted: further conquest in difficult country was not judged worth the risk, and a provincial legate was chosen and briefed for the task required. He built roads and forts on the borders, including those at Usk, to contain the population rather than to enlarge the empire. He stayed five years, the last two of Claudius and the first three of Nero, and he was replaced by Quintus Veranius. Quintilian says that after years of seeking a province Didius complained about the one he was offered, whether Sicily or Britain, and that Domitius Afer told him to think of his country.

The tombstone of Veranius says that Veranius took the post although he did not seek it, which has been read as a jab at Didius. Whom Didius married is unknown. Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento, praetor in 62, is related to him. Some took Veiento for a son or grandson.

It is more likely that Didius adopted him before the praetorship. A less certain relative is Gaius Pomponius Gallus Didius Rufus, proconsul of Crete and Cyrenaica in 88 or 89. Cardiff has often been said to take its name from Didius, from an antiquarian form Caer-Didi, Didius’s fort, on the belief that he built the Roman fort there before Frontinus arrived. Most modern linguists reject that derivation.

The Welsh name Caerdyf joins caer, fort, with a second element that is uncertain, and the fort at Cardiff is placed around 75, not in Didius’s governorship.

The size of the Monmouth fort is described in figures that cannot all be the plan of one ditch. The fort is believed to have housed around two thousand soldiers in the opening campaign, and later to have remained as a small fortlet, or to have been retained as a minor fort after the first campaign. It is also called very large, extending eastwards from 20 Monnow Street. A second fort, or the south-east corner of one, was found on a building site beside the medieval town wall near Dixton Gate.

That smaller auxiliary fort occupies ground bounded by Monk Street, St James’ Square, the Burgage, and the south side of New Dixton Road, and it was probably built in the later first century or the early second. A further account says the large pre-Flavian fort was succeeded by a smaller fortlet whose pottery is of the second and third centuries and which seems to lie to the north of the earlier fort. In 2007 a ditch found while a bungalow was being built had the sharp angle of a military ditch, and a second similar edge on the west converged toward it. That ditch is thought to join a deep ditch found in the front gardens of the Royal George in 1982, which produced a coin of the emperor Gallienus dated 260 to 268.

The distance from the town-wall corner of the fort to the Pitman’s Court corner, some 120 metres, together with the known limits of the Monk Street ditch, is read as the playing-card outline of a small auxiliary fort. Separately, the front ditch of the pre-Flavian fort at 24 Monnow Street lies under the boundary with number 20, at right angles to the street, and it is of military form, with pottery associated with the first-century Neronian campaigns. A planning note puts the fort on the plateau at the top of what is now Monnow Street. A 2010 account says the fort covered most of the town centre.

Two thousand men, a vexillation fortress, a small playing-card fort of about 120 metres on one side, a large work running east from 20 Monnow Street, and a later smaller fort on the Monk Street side, are all in the record. They may be successive forts. They are not one measurement repeated.

Nero’s accession changed the pace. Claudius died in 54 and Nero succeeded him. Rome then concentrated on holding Britain rather than on extending it, and the forts of that moment include vexillation fortresses, small forts of detachments. Didius was still governor into 57.

After a short lull Quintus Veranius decided to conquer the rest of the island. He campaigned against the Silures and died in 58, one year after his appointment. Suetonius Paulinus succeeded him. Veranius seems to have had enough success in the south that Paulinus could turn north.

By 60 Paulinus had reached the Irish Sea and was preparing to take Anglesey, which was crowded with people who had fled the army and which was a stronghold of the druids. The army crossed and the sacred groves were burned. The victory was immediately cut short. On Nero’s accession the province already reached as far north as Lindum.

While Paulinus was on Anglesey the south-east rose under Boudica, widow of Prasutagus of the Iceni. One account places his death and the denial of his will in 59. Another places Paulinus’s attack on Anglesey, and the revolt, in 60 and 61. Prasutagus had left half his kingdom to Nero and hoped the rest would be left alone.

The will was not honoured. The procurator Catus Decianus had Boudica flogged and her daughters raped. The Iceni, joined by the Trinovantes, burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium. Between seventy and eighty thousand people are said to have been killed in the three cities.

A part of the Ninth Legion sent to relieve Colchester was routed. Paulinus judged London indefensible, abandoned it, and then, with two of the three legions still available and outnumbered by more than twenty to one, defeated the rebels at the battle on Watling Street. Boudica died soon after, by poison she took herself or by illness. Nero considered withdrawing from Britain altogether.

Julius Classicianus replaced Catus Decianus and advised Nero to remove Paulinus, who went on punishing people after the rising. Nero chose a milder course and appointed Petronius Turpilianus. The war in the west waited. In the same reign Nero was also committed in Armenia and, from 66, in Judea, where the revolt outlasted him and the Second Temple was destroyed in 70, after his death.

Those eastern wars are not the story of this hill, but they are why a governor on the Wye was not given a free hand to finish the Silures in the later 50s.

The Year of the Four Emperors, 69, shook the province again. Weak governors could not control the legions, and Venutius took the north. Cartimandua, whom Rome had defended before, was evacuated, and Venutius was left in control. After Vespasian secured the empire, his first governors took up the unfinished conquests.

Quintus Petillius Cerialis dealt with the Brigantes. Sextus Julius Frontinus dealt with the Silures. Frontinus, born about 40 and dead in 103 or 104, was a soldier, a senator, a civil engineer, and a writer, a new man who held the consulship three times. In 70 he took part in suppressing the revolt on the Rhine and later said that he received the surrender of seventy thousand Lingones.

He was suffect consul before he succeeded Cerialis in Britain. As governor he subdued the Silures of South Wales and is thought to have campaigned against the Brigantes as well. He extended Roman rule across South Wales and began the working of mineral resources, including the gold mines at Dolaucothi. The campaigns against Wales resumed in 74.

By the end of his term in 77 he had subdued most of Wales. He was succeeded by Gnaeus Julius Agricola in 77. Agricola conquered the Ordovices in 78. The Demetae of the south-west were the one people left largely intact.

They had not opposed Rome, and they kept their tribal name. A legionary fortress, Isca, later Caerleon, was planted in the middle of Silurian territory to hold the region. The town of Venta Silurum at Caerwent, six miles west of Chepstow, was established in 75. It became a Romanised town, smaller than Silchester, with a local council, and an inscription shows it was the capital of the Silures.

In the late first and early second centuries the Silures were given a degree of local administration. Their god Ocelus was identified with Mars. The territory later fed the fifth-century kingdoms of Gwent, Brycheiniog, and Gwynllwg, and leaders in Gwent used the name Caradoc in remembrance of Caratacus. Frontinus left Britain for a later career that made him famous for other reasons.

He was proconsul of Asia in 86. In 97 Nerva made him curator of the aqueducts of Rome. He held a second consulship in 98, with Trajan, and a third as ordinary consul with Trajan two years later. He died in 103 or 104, the date taken from Pliny writing that he himself had been elected to the augurs to fill the vacancy.

His treatise on the aqueducts describes nine channels then supplying the city. None of that later work was done at Monmouth. What he did here was to close a war that had run since the late 40s, and to leave a road and an iron settlement where the fort had been.

After the military phase the place was an industrial settlement. The smaller fort or fortlet may have continued, with second- and third-century pottery, to the north of the first fort. The civil occupation lay on the higher ground inside the later medieval town. Between the second and the fourth century the settlement is likely to have been primarily civilian, with iron working as the base of the economy.

It flourished in the third and fourth centuries. Hearths and waste slag occur in the town centre and in Overmonnow. Stone buildings associated with iron working of the second and third centuries have been excavated near the crossing of the Monnow. The ore was local, the charcoal came from local forests, and one account links the ore to the Forest of Dean.

Other iron sites of the district lay to the south-east at the Scowles and near the villa and temple complex at Lydney, both in Gloucestershire, at Whitchurch near the Huntsham villa to the north-east, and at Peterstow near Ariconium. One account judges the lack of Roman building stone at Monmouth, and the timber construction, as a sign of very poor living conditions, more fitting a compound of forced labour than an ordinary civil town, and it treats the place as under military jurisdiction rather than as a settlement of either the Silures or the Dobunni. The stone buildings by the river crossing, and the civilian industrial town of the second to fourth centuries, stand against that judgment. Both are in the written record of the site.

A layer of bloomery slag on the ancient riverbank at Wyebridge Street produced a samian rim of form 33 from Central Gaul, a form made through the Central Gaulish export period of about 120 to 200 and most popular in the Antonine period. Coins from the town date mainly from the third and fourth centuries, which is the evidence for a continuing civilian settlement. Late Roman remains are frequent and include coins up to the reign of Gratian, 367 to 383, and late Roman pottery. The Gallienus coin of 260 to 268 from the 1982 ditch sits inside that same late span.

Britannia Superior is the province named for this settlement, and it did not exist when the fort was built. It was created after the civil war between Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus. After the murder of Commodus on the last day of 192, the year 193 produced five emperors. Albinus held Britain, Severus the Danube, and Pescennius Niger Syria.

Severus and Albinus allied, and Severus then defeated Albinus at Lugdunum, modern Lyon, on 19 February 197. One historian, Herodian, says Severus divided Britain into Britannia Inferior in the north and Britannia Superior in the south soon after that battle. Modern argument finds too little evidence for a division in 197, notes that an inscription of Lucius Julius Julianus between 198 and 209 still places his legions at Caerleon in what would become Upper Britain, and concludes that the split is more likely the work of Caracalla, Severus’s son and co-emperor, sometime between 211 and 220. The official boundary remains unclear.

Epigraphy shows that Upper Britain covered roughly what is now Wales, southern England, and East Anglia. Londinium stayed the centre of Britannia Superior. Eboracum, York, was the capital of the northern province. The governor of the upper province is thought to have been of consular rank, and the governor of the lower province of praetorian rank, because the legions were divided, two in the south and one in the north.

The point of the split was to stop one governor on the edge of the Roman Empire from holding an army large enough to march on Rome, as Albinus had done. Even after the split, staff of the southern governor are found on duty in the north, and for a time the island could still be governed as one when war required it. In the upper province, town walls were built through the second century and until at least 270, not because a peasant revolt was expected. Smaller villas were left unfortified.

Londinium received a new wall, nine feet thick at the ground including an eight-foot plinth, not finished before 190 and perhaps as late as 220, and not built in haste. From 260, Britain adhered for a time to the separate empire of the Gallic provinces. Alectus took control of Roman Britain in the autumn of 293. In September 296 Constantius invaded, and Alectus was defeated inland near Silchester.

Constantius then revised the provinces. Britannia Superior and Inferior were broken into smaller units. The coins of the Monmouth settlement, running into the reign of Gratian, belong to this later province and to the century after it was reorganised, not to the Neronian fort.

Scholars argued for a fort here before the ditches were seen. Graham Webster classed Monmouth as a possible fort near a later settlement, and he pointed to a possible military use of a track running north-west to a postulated fort at Pontrilas, a site for which no evidence was stated. A. L.

F. Rivet also argued for a Roman fort at Monmouth. One account, repeating that argument, adds that apart from a few coins no Roman remains had been found to substantiate it. That sentence cannot stand beside the ditches, the pottery, the bone, the slag, and the roads found since.

It records an earlier state of knowledge, not the ground as it has been dug.

The excavations that replaced that earlier doubt are spread over several decades and several streets. At 24 Monnow Street, work mostly in the 1990s found the front ditch of the pre-Flavian fort under the boundary with number 20, foundation slots and sleeper beams of a wooden building later cut by ploughing, a cremation, and a Roman ditch on the frontage, both the cremation and the frontage ditch truncated by later gardening. A deep grave at the rear is also Roman. All that remained of the body was a dark stain, submitted for radiocarbon dating and of no use.

The total decay of that body, against the survival of many later bones on the same site, was taken to support a Roman rather than a medieval date. The early pottery, examined by Peter Webster, includes Dressel 20 amphora fragments, South Gaulish samian of form 15/17 of the mid to late first century, one rim carrying a mark that may be a graffito, a form 29 bowl of about 55 to 75 whose leaf frond has been compared with the decoration of a bowl stamped SEMONA, and a further form 29 sherd of a shape not generally made after about 85. There is Severn Valley ware, a highly fired grey ware usual in the first or early second century, and whiteware flagons of first-century date. Later Roman material on the same plots belongs to the industrial settlement named in the third century as Blestium.

The specialists named for that excavation include Stephen Green for the flints, Peter Webster and Janet Webster and A. L. Sockett for the Roman pottery, Alan Vince and Paul Courtney for the medieval ceramics, and Felicity Taylor for the bones.

In 2007 the Monmouth Archaeological Society found the first reported ditch of the fort behind properties on Monnow Street, in the town centre. The same year’s bungalow foundation produced the sharp-angled ditch and the converging western edge already described, the one tied to the 1982 Royal George ditch and the Gallienus coin. In August 2009 archaeologists watched the trenches for electrical services to the Shire Hall during a refurbishment. At the junction of Agincourt Street and the Square the trench reached a medieval road less than a metre under the tarmac, over a layer with Norman pottery of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and under that a fairly sterile layer that merged into the Roman town, called Blestium in the third century.

The trench was inside the fort. Stephen Clarke, chairman of the Monmouth Archaeological Society, described an assemblage of pottery including decorated samian from Gaul and the base of an amphora thought to be Spanish, and he called it some of the earliest Roman pottery from Wales. He placed the fort shortly after 50. The society covered the street trenches as volunteers, while inside the hoardings the professional arm of the society worked as the council’s archaeological contractors.

A four-month watching brief on the renewal of gas mains, reported in December 2010 and centred at grid reference SO 509 128, recorded material from the Middle Stone Age to the nineteenth century: Mesolithic flint, an Iron Age sherd, first-century military pottery and bone, and the Roman town of Blestium in the form of pottery, roads, and iron working. Along Glendower Street and St John’s Street to the junction with Monnow Street, an old road appeared at an average depth of about 0.90 metres. It was about 0.30 metres thick and made of solid iron slag, fused, which turned completely black when it met the air, with some stones and pebbles. At the junction with Monnow Street that surface was slightly higher, at 0.75 metres.

A few metres from one trench that found nothing of the period, earlier service digging had already exposed a surface with pre-Flavian pottery, believed to be inside the fort, at 1.07 metres below the road. On the river side, at the junction toward Wyebridge Street, Mesolithic flints in the upper alluvial sands were sealed by iron slag from bloomery furnaces working in Roman and medieval times, and the Central Gaulish samian of form 33 came from that slag. Another account of the 2010 gas-main work says that hundreds of pieces of pottery and bone were recovered before construction went on, and that the digging uncovered a Roman road on the line of St John’s Street. Excavations in 2010 in Agincourt Square uncovered pottery and bones which appear to confirm a fort.

The 2009 electrical trenches and the 2010 gas trenches are not the same contract. Both cut the Roman town under the modern streets.

The industrial waste outlived the Roman town. Bloomery slag lies under medieval and later road makeup. Overmonnow is bounded by the ditch called Clawdd Du, named for the black iron slag in the earth, and used as a defence. The medieval town was not the Roman street plan.

Monnow Street in its present line is understood to have been laid out after the Norman settlement, across the flood plain, with burgage plots. William FitzOsbern established castles at Monmouth and Chepstow. The dates given for that work are not identical: by 1067; before his death in 1071, and at some point prior to 1071; and, for one of the first stone castles, approximately 1080. The castle occupied the high point of the same hill, overlooking both rivers, close to the Forest of Dean.

A church of St Cadoc is known from documentary sources in the eighth century, on the site of the later St Mary’s. Information for the centuries between the late Roman coins and the Normans is scarce. One background note speaks of a Celtic settlement of the post-Roman centuries overrun by the Normans. The kingdom of Ergin, or Archenfield, later occupied the land between the Monnow and the Wye.

None of that later history is a description of the fort. It is the reason the fort survives only as ditches and slag under houses, roads, and a castle. The later town was also the home of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his history of the British people there in the early twelfth century. That book is not evidence for the Roman station.

The blue plaque of the Monmouth Heritage Trail on 18 Monnow Street is the public mark of the fort. The Roman site itself is not a listed monument. Keith Kissack, a historian of Monmouth who was curator of the Monmouth Museum, a magistrate, and headmaster of Priory Street School, and who was described as the doyen among historians of Monmouth, wrote the history of the lordship, the parish, and the borough. The coins he placed mainly in the third and fourth centuries are the numismatic case for the civilian town that followed the fort.

He was not a witness of the Roman occupation. He is the modern local historian through whom that coin evidence entered the account of the place.

What remains unsettled is the exact year, the exact governor, and which ditch belongs to which fort. Perhaps before 55, around 55, shortly after 50, at least as early as 55, and possibly between 54 and 68, are all current descriptions of one foundation. Publius Ostorius Scapula and Aulus Didius Gallus are both possible founders, and both were on this frontier while the Silures were unbeaten. Two thousand soldiers, a large vexillation fort, a small auxiliary fort about 120 metres on a side, and a later fortlet north or east of the first, may be a sequence or may be rival readings of incomplete ditches.

The iron working is not in the same doubt. Hearths, slag, a slag road, stone buildings of the second and third centuries, and coins through the reign of Gratian show a working settlement that lasted long after Sextus Julius Frontinus had ended the war, and long after the province that contained it had been renamed Britannia Superior.