Interview with Peter Davenport on Architecture of Roman Baths

Mitchell: Hi, I’m Mitchell Rocheleau. I'm an architect searching the world to learn more about the buildings and environments humans have created from the modern era, all the way back to prehistory. I believe that our buildings reflect the culture and context of the people who built them and can reveal fundamental insights about ourselves.

Using architecture as our lens, we can learn more about who we are and where we come from. With this knowledge, we can build environments for our future that will facilitate our thriving and vitality.

Today I had the privilege of speaking with Peter Davenport. Peter was a professional archeologist for 46 years, 25 of those as a senior archeologist at Bath Archeological Trust. Since 1980, he's been involved in all of the excavations carried out in the Roman Baths, and a large majority of the excavations in the city of Bath. He's a trustee on the Roman Baths Foundation, and he's the author of Roman Baths: A New History and Archeology of Aquae Sulis.

Today, Peter and I spoke about the architecture of the Roman Baths, chronology of construction technologies and the engineering, and also the wider impact on the ancient community. Peter gave us firsthand insight into his experiences and the artifacts that were uncovered while excavating at the Baths. The depth and richness of his knowledge were astonishing and helped me to obtain a much clearer picture of the life of the building and the people who used it. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Mitchell: Peter, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to start off and just ask you, can you tell us a little bit about your involvement in the baths at the Roman Baths and in the city of Baths?

Peter: Right. Well, I became a professional archeologist in the 1970s having not studied archeology at the beginning, but I did go back to university and studied, and after a few years in the field, I was fortunate enough to be offered the job of running an excavation in Bath in the Roman Baths. And a new area was being opened up. Um that was three seasons. And when I started, I thought that was going to be the work I was going to be paid off after three years, and I would find something else to do.

I ended up staying for 25 years, running excavations in Bath and around the, from baths, but also further afield.  I work for a company called Bath, a not for profit, called Bath Archeological Trust, which closed in 2005 of various reasons, and I went off to work for other companies. I retired in 2019 from full time work, but during that time I was involved in several projects at the Roman Baths because I had this experience and expertise about the archeology of the baths.

Mitchell: So, you were on site. Your hands were touching these things. You're observing these things nearly every day.

Peter:  I mean, you oh, yeah. I mean, latterly, as a lot of people, I was kicked upstairs to management, as it were, but I still visited sites almost every day when they were running. I was involved in, you know, decisions about how we're going to do the work and so on. I always enjoyed digging, and I was never completely left it alone. Um though I had a very good staff from the last few years I was there who were actually on site every day.

But, been involved, I continue to retain an interest in the Roman Baths. I'm now a trustee of the Roman Baths Foundation, which is a, a charity which is designed to try to raise money and funds for a work in the museum that, for various reasons, the local council, the local city council, can't access certain grants and funds. Might want to carry out. So, educational work in the Roman Baths museum for schools and that sort of thing. So, I’m still very much involved in the museum and, the museum is essentially the museum of the Roman Baths. So, it does spread out into, into Bath archeology a little bit as well.

Mitchell: Can you give us a bit of a brief introduction to the Roman Baths and some historical context for it?

Peter: Right. Baths is in the southwest of England and, although it's about 150 miles away from the Roman invasion point, which was in 43 A.D. The locals seem to have been fairly friendly to the Romans. They got here very quickly. There's no, as far as we can work out no battles. So the Roman’s kind of settled around this area. The army were here first. And it's probably the army that set up the baths after about 20, 30 years of the conquest and Britain being rather more settled and, we actually know that the baths and the associated temple to the goddess Sulis Minerva was underway. They were building it in the 60’s A.D. That's less than 20 years after, well, about 20 years after the invasion.

So, you've got the Romans invading the island of Britain, which was in those days divided up into tribes. It wasn't one country. The locals were threatened by their neighbors, and that's why they were happy to have the Romans here because they were protecting them. And this area's always been, sort of west of London has been, in the Britain period. It got Romanized very quickly. The Roman villas, Roman towns, Roman material and pottery and coins, all the rest of it. So it was an area that, if you like, welcomed the Roman invasion in a way.

The baths were then going and were being used probably by the army at first in this 60’s, 70’s, 80’s A.D. And then over the next 250 years or more, which is when the Romans were here. The town grew up around the baths, the baths were continually modified, extended and altered, modernized, if you like, and they were in use right up until well within a decade or two, probably of the end the Roman empire in the west, which is in Britain about 410 A.D..

Mitchell: Fantastic. So, this is a natural spring. The Romans came in they found a way to say optimize or use a natural geological feature, built the baths around it which was really it seems to be the kind of impetus for building the town around, or something that the town was built around as well.

Peter: Yeah. That's right. I mean, the Romans were here as much because it was a strategic position. There's a river crossing the road junctions, there's a valley through the hills between so slightly to the east, slightly to the west, and to the gateway to Wales in the west. But yeah, once they were here and realized what was going on, they discovered hot springs, obviously, which bubble up we know from investigations and comparisons elsewhere, it would have been just, the three springs very close together in the central is now modern baths. And the Romans basically got the plumbing in. They built drains and pools to cool the water so they could feed it into the baths, built the baths around all the hydraulics that they'd organized. On all three sites. That's the whole the kings baths is the one which the, the Roman Baths were built around. There are two other smaller springs just 50m away. They had their own little establishments.

And the hot springs are the only hot springs in Britain. That's why they're unusual in the island. And, the Romans were used to hot springs in, in Italy and in southern Germany, in parts of France where they're far more common. So, they knew what to do they saw this hot water “oh, great. You know, here we are. We can do this”. Then people started to come to it from all across Britain, all across northern Europe in fact, we know from inscriptions they left behind and tombstones and so on. And people came to service the visitors and, we know that there was a big monumental center. There were temples and baths and theaters, subsidiary buildings, all in that central area. And then the main street out of town to the north, which is actually the road to London, became a kind of a suburb with lots of houses and shops and workshops along it.

Again, as for people, that was the main route that people would have entered that central area. So, it would have been the words which we often use is economic engine. The baths, the hot springs, with the economic engine behind the growth of the city.

Mitchell: It's interesting to think that the Romans took a building typology that they were very familiar with in Rome. They found this location and they said, wow, this is amazing. We don't have to heat the water here. The water's already heated for us. We can save a massive amount of money, expense and, labor and just optimize this natural feature.

Peter: That's true. But the other point you need to sort of realize is just how much labor and effort it took to build the baths. There was no building, no stone building tradition in Britain at the time. There were a few dry stone walls, and some of the roundhouses that the locals lived in had low, dry stone walls. But to build what they built they had to find, timber for scaffolding and roofs. They had to find stone. Fortunately, bath is blessed with very high-quality building stone in immediate vicinity. They had to find sand and lime to make mortar. And they had to get a workforce. Yeah, was not an unusual thing for the Roman army to do is they probably were in charge of everything.

The Roman army did have an engineering corps, if you like and, they would have organized that, but it took a pretty major organization and effort to do that and money, and we don't really know who paid for it, though kind of assume it was probably the, the governor of the new province in the first century.

Because there wouldn't have been any local people with that kind of aspiration and no money. Even though some of the locals did make money after the Romans, by providing services and some had land houses nearby. But, yeah, it was a bit. It was. You're right. I mean, it was an amazing opportunity, but they really took it on.

Mitchell: So, they had to build an ecosystem, a construction industry. They had to start ground up and.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, that’s right

Mitchell: It's built pits. I can just imagine. Yeah. The upfront work, which also I think, probably shows their commitment to the area as well. I mean, this was not something we were going to and, you know, move out of there was they were committed.

Peter: That’s right. Bath’s is lucky in Roman building homes that a lot of local resources around. About 50 miles to the south there are lead mines. And there was a lot of lead to lie in the baths and probably to use in the roofs, though we can't be sure about that. Certainly for gutters and things like that. And the Roman army took over those, well exploited and used those, lead mines. Almost immediately, I mean, within in 10 or 15 years of the conquest, the Roman army were down around that area built themselves a little fort and small settlement for workers, and they were exploiting the lead very soon. And, of course, lead, we forget, was for the Romans, actually a source of silver. Lead always has a small amount of silver in it and lead in to the Romans was a byproduct of silver making. A big byproduct because you made much more lead out of the old than you did silver, the silver was valuable. It was a, it was a government monopoly.

Mitchell: Peter, what drew you initially to the. Was there something that piqued your interest or what was it that drew you to it?

Peter: You know, I could be absolutely honest and say that at that point in my career, I was very pleased to be offered a job, but nonetheless, I was still I never trained as a Romanist. I trained as a historian. But I also had a strong interest in historic building, ancient buildings, modern worlds, anything to do with architecture, really? A sort of a study. Not creatively. And the Roman Baths is not just a Roman Baths. It's also a real palimpsest of Roman remains, medieval remains, 18th and 19th century buildings, which straddle the remains. And so actually, that fascinates me that that understanding how that worked and worked together as a unit.

But having got here, I mean, Bath is a wonderful place to work. It's a beautiful city. I feel privileged to have spent so much of my career here and I still live just outside the city. The archeology was really interesting, informative. So much of the Roman Baths was excavated in the late 19th century, when techniques were not what we would like to think of now as being adequate. And, there are lots of questions which we could answer with modern excavation, which you just weren't asked at the time. But if you look really, really hard to certain areas and parts and think again about the Roman Baths, we keep discovering new sort of answers to questions we had or new questions to answers we don't have. It's a continuing study. It's really fascinating. Interesting in that way.

Mitchell: Yeah. I love how you mentioned that it's not just a Roman ruin. It has traces, of each kind of period in history, all the way back from pre-history to Romans leading up, and in that way, it's kind of a book. It allows you to unfold. Living history of the area. It’s amazing.

Peter: Having made that point. It's true that, another fascination, other aspect is when you're working in one place for a long time, really get to feel that you're getting to understand the history of that place. It's not just going to a site and digging it and publishing it and going away and doing something else or being a researcher in some specific aspect of prehistoric or Roman or medieval archeology, you're actually pulling together the story of a place.

Now, I can plug a book and say that I recently published a book called Roman Baths, which was a history and archeology of Roman Baths. What we think we know now in 2021 is when it was published. And so, putting that, putting that together was, was really only possible because of the, of my involvement in the time I spent in Bath.

Mitchell: Yeah. I think that's what initially drew me to you as I obviously read your book, but then read your biography and saw that you had been involved in the site. So, when seeing that, I’m thinking, okay, this is information coming directly from the source. In a way, your hands had been touching these things, rather than you just having researched multiple books and then kind of compiled them into, into a research paper or something. This is direct involvement, which I think is purer information, or what is the most pure source of information you can possibly get there?

Peter: Yeah. That's right.

Mitchell: I’ll move on and ask, can you tell us a little bit about the natural geological process that supplies the water for the bath?

Peter: Right. Bath, Aquae Sulis, to the Romans. Sits in a, a valley, quite a narrow valley and much of the geology around it is. Well, it's limestone on the hills either side, with various complications and faults and problems with the geology. It's very unstable in a long-term sense. It’s not about to fall on anybody.

It's surrounded by a rim or ring quite some distance away, like ten, 12, 15 miles of limestone rocks, hills. And what seems to be the case is that rain falling on those limestone hills soaks through the porous limestone down to fairly solid strata, several, 100ft down below the ground flows in, in the porous limestone above the non-porous layer.

Then it finds a fault, which happens to be where Bath is now. A fault leading up to the surface, a crack in the stonework and, the pressure of all the rock on top forces of water up through that, crevice, through that crack, or there's series, small series of cracks and crevices, and then pops up in the middle of Bath, where the River Avon, which is a river that runs through the central Bath in the bottom of the valley, seems about the end of the last ice age, maybe 10,000 years ago, to have scaled away is a river flowing through the last little bits, remaining bits of rock and stone that were stopping that water popping up and this water just threw up. Into the valley bottom and then away into the river where it was just wasted, as it were, before humans came along.

So, we're looking at rainwater that fell on those hills, probably about 10,000, 5 to 10,000 years ago. We can date it very roughly. And then comes up in the springs in Bath. So, when you drink that water, or you bathe in it in the in the new private baths, you may be drinking or bathing in water that's around at least 5000 years old.

It's the pressure of the rocks above that water that keeps it hot. If you were just to jump straight into the main spring where it comes up at full temperature, you jump out again. It's very hot. But it cools down quite quickly. The Romans were quite clever at that. They built in the, the reservoir that they built around the main spring, the king's bath, they let the water flow through gravity quite slowly into great Romans swimming baths. And then into two other baths further on, cooling as it went and so, the great swimming baths, if you go in at one end where the hot water comes in, is pretty warm, pretty hot, but variable because it's cooled slightly as it's run through the channels, it gets the other end, it's lukewarm, you know, so you can choose which temperature you like.

Mitchell: Yeah. So, so it's a geological u-shaped stratum of limestone. Falls roughly I think you mentioned in Mendips and comes gets geothermal heated at the base of it. Pressurize comes back up and then yeah, you know, discharges at the, at the

Peter: Yeah. Because before the Romans came, we do have information now from excavation and various environmental studies that, it was probably these three springs came up in three pools which formed in the valley bottom. Comes up about ten, 15ft above the actual river level. So, it then it's up on the to one side and then it flows down. And you can imagine turning up before the Romans were here, where it's just these three hot steaming pools with all sorts of weird colors because there's iron in it, and the iron salts come out and make an orange color on the rocks and some of the plants like. And that grows, still some of that visible there.

What we know from various, studies of ancient seeds that survived that the area was what you call an alder carr, sort of a swampy wooded area. And so, when the Romans came along, they then had to deal not just with, containing and channeling the water, but they also had to work through this. This is bulgy area. And, they probably had some quite a lot of digging and clearing away and that sort of thing.

Mitchell: So, they had to control it now. Now with the it was the Dobunni tribe that was there before the Romans, is that right?

Peter: That’s right. Yeah, the British Isles were divided up into tribal groups which were independent, you know, countries if you like, and they were often fighting each other. At the time the Roman conquest, there were quite powerful tribes to the east of England around London. London wasn't there then, but in that area,

And they were sort of expanding westwards and southwards. They were taking over some of the smaller or less powerful tribes of whom we think the Dobunni, about 100 miles west of London, there areas, were being pressured by these powerful tribes to the, to the east and also a more bellicose tribe to the south, called the durotriges who live in modern day dorset, down towards the coast, but bordered on the southern side of the Dobunni. That's why we think the Dobunni were happy for the Romans to come along, because they offered protection against these other tribes that were pressing in and we do have a reference in a Roman history, to a tribe called the bertoni (18:00), which we think is a typo for Dobunni hurrying along to visit to meet the Roman army long before that actually reached this part of the country to offer their submission, so that gives us a clue

Mitchell: Was there a bit of evidence or work that had gone on, from the Dobunni tribe where they built a bit of outcropping or other wall near the springs?

Peter: Right. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for reminding me in these muddy pools, which are very difficult to approach because of the literally the mud and sludge around them and probably look quite scary. I mean that they would have been steaming and these bright colors and rather strange, probably stunted or old, has a small bushy trees around it. And it would have had this aura of religion and superstition because we know there was a god or god called Sulis that they worshiped. And the Romans took over and conflated with their god goddess Minerva. But what they seem to done that the Dobunni people is built on this on the south side of one of the main muddy pools, which became kings baths.

A causeway of stones and gravel, which they're obviously bucketed and burrowed in. Don't know how far it went because one of the only have the end of it in were excavated partly in the king's baths itself. An artificial gravel causeway which had sort of sediment of timber, riveting, pushed in around the edge to hold it in place. And it was actually interestingly, above that iron age causeway where we imagine the pre-Roman people came along to make their offerings into the spring. And we do have pre-Roman coins though we can't be sure when they were put in, pre Roman coins were found there.

But immediately above that causeway was where the Romans built their archway platform from which they threw their objects in. So, they probably, you know, realized that this was kind of a holy place where you approach the god or goddess and when they built the baths, the very first phase in the late first century, they built the access over the iron age causeway.

Mitchell: The Dobunni were using it for some spiritual purposes. The Romans came in, observed it, attempted to control the natural feature by building some drains. And then, I think, I believe a reservoir right. Can you tell us a little bit about the reservoir?

Peter: Yeah. The reservoir, which, basically around the spring, about 25, 30ft diameter. The Romans built a great big stone wall made of huge blocks of local bath stone. Just quickly enclosed the central part of the spring. Before they did that, they built, they dug a drain, which became one of the main drains, to, at a very low level to drain the water away temporarily while they built this, this wall, the foundations of this wall were, oak piles about nine inches in diameter, driven into the ground around the spring, because that would be at this very unstable position.

You got this water bubbling up and swirling around. Need to stabilize the ground. And so they did with hundreds of oak piles driven into the ground on which they then built the wall. Sounds odd to us these days, but oak piles and other timbers. There was a inveterate standing up to rot in the water. A very common building practice. The whole of Venice, for example, is built on timber piles. So it's very substantial. And that stone wall, it was a, an irregular polygon of 7 or 8 sides, about, 20in thick, and about three meters high. When it was complete, they built, they had, they built a sluice at a higher level than the original drain, so they could control the level of the water into the drain, which they then formally adopted, and built out better. And then it was an open-air pool, and the water rose up again within this reservoir.

And it rose to a level free plan by the, by the Roman engineers, so that the water flowed through a channel just like a bath overflow, but into the great swimming baths, which they built just to the, just to the east of the of the king's baths itself. So, the king's bath was never, in Roman times used for bathing. It was the source of the water for the baths, and it was the place where they felt the goddess dwelt when she was there. It was that was where you made your offerings, which we found in an excavation many years later. And we know from an inscription that the Romans called it the fons Sulis, the spring of Sulis, the goddess Sulis. And so there was no bathing took place in there. The bathing took place in the purpose-built baths, which were built alongside the spring and fed from it.

Mitchell: Interesting. This is incredible that the reservoir had the sluice on top of the drain below the drain was closed, allowed the sluice to open and then channel water into the bath. Is that is.

Peter: That’s right. I mean, Roman hydrology, was hydraulics was basically about gravity feed. They could they could do siphoning. They could make water go uphill if they started higher up then down and up again. But they, they, they, they didn't really have pumps, they just for pumps like a raised water to about 20 or 30ft atmospheric pumps. But that was sort of small-scale stuff, like to feed a rich house upstairs. You might have a pump to take the water up to the tank. Some poor slave would pump away for several hours to fill the tank, you know, from wherever the supply was. But they couldn't do large scale movement of water except through gravity. And so basically it was getting the water to a level where you could run it from. Then you had sluices in various places to control the flow.

So, and if you had too much water, you could drain it off. If you had not enough, you could close up the sluice or the sluices, there are several. The main sluice, to, to two particular sluices were which were recovered during excavation in the 19th century, there in the museum, now they're made a bronze they're quite substantial metal, a frame which just like a modern gate sluice, you know. So, a framework into which you drop, the gate itself into, into grooves in the framework. And then you simply lift it up, tp let the water out or let it down again, or lift up a certain amount, to a certain amount of water out. And there are 3 or 4 places where that's the case.

Mitchell: So, they're building the sluice that that technology just seems incredible for them to implement at that time. But I think you had mentioned earlier that that was that was technology already being used in Rome. You know, they had well, in all sorts of.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, Greeks and Romans had baths too, but the Greek spells were pretty much individual, you know, tubs that you wouldn't have sat in. The Romans invented, you know, the sauna, the Turkish bath, the swimming, know, the swimming, hot tub plunge, cold plunge, all that kind of stuff. And they were building baths in the first century bc, and for 100 and more years before they came into Britain, that they were building, the first of the grand, really highly organized, architecturally grand buildings around about the time they were building this one in bath. The one at bath does reflect the technology and this design of these somewhat earlier, baths, people who visited Rome visited the huge baths of Caracalla or Diocletian, or even Titus and, they are huge, amazing, astonishing structures, very organized, very symmetrical, very architectural.

The ones in the first century were slightly less grand. They were pretty big structures. I mean, the one in Bath we'll talk about in a moment was a very substantial structure with originally a huge timber roof and later on stone and concrete vaulting. These, these weren't, small tucked away private parts or public parts, big buildings. But Roman Baths at Baths were in their beginnings were very similar to the beginnings of substantial Roman Baths in, in the center of the empire.

Mitchell: Can you tell us a little bit about what the most advanced or final phase of the bath complex would have looked like? I mean, I know all phases grew steadily. There were add-ons, but what is what would be the most kind of developed form look like?

Peter: Yeah, if you visit museum, you'll see a rather grand, rather wonderful model of what we think the baths looked like in the early fourth century, which is when it reached its height. Whole complex is centered on the hot spring, which by that period it hadn't pond I described have been enclosed in a huge rectangular building, made of brick and concrete and stone, with a brick and concrete vault, a barrel vault and a half cylinder vault over there. So, the whole thing was enclosed originally, as I said, it was open air. By the second century. And then onwards, they enclosed it, in this pretty grand building.

On one side of the building on the north, on the north side was a courtyard, which was the courtyard of the temple of Sulis Minerva. And in there, there was an open-air courtyard, and off to the west end was the temple of Sulis Minerva. A rather grand, very Roman looking building temple which I haven't mentioned, but was a temple to the goddess, was very Roman. It would have been out, it wouldn't have been out of place in Rome or in, the center of the empire. And it was built certainly by the 70s A.D. Very early for such a substantially Roman building, a Roman looking building, stone columns, carved pediment, the Keller, the central, the inside room, which people didn't go into. It was where the, where the goddess's statue was.

We don’t know much about that goddess’ statue, except we do have her head. A rather wonderful gilded bronze head of Sulis Minerva, which would have sat atop her statue in the temple. Only the priest and a few important people have ever gone into there, to make sacrifices and communicate with the goddess and bring back anything they thought she'd said to them.

Hoi polloi were in the courtyard and making offerings at the altar and walking across through a doorway to make offerings into the spring itself. On the other side of the spring on the south side, there was the center of the complex was the Roman swimming baths, the great bath, which is about 80ft long and about 25ft wide. Steel lead-lined five feet deep and still filled with spring water from the spring, fed by the Roman drains, in that building, originally timber roofed by the fourth century, had very impressive, very grand, very tall brick and concrete vault, spanning across the baths. And there were walkways around the baths with some piers and archways. Separating them from the actual pool itself. There was cold waters piped in as well. So, if you were in the hot swimming pool you've got, you could swim to the side. And there were fountains where cold water came out. And we have some of the pipework and so on for that supply. At each end of the, that's the great swimming pool, were two completely separate Roman Baths of the kind that you would find where there wasn't a hot spring. At the west end. There was a west baths, which were the original baths built, to complement the spring, the hot water in the first century, which continued to be expanded and altered, and by the fourth century had, hot and cold rooms, massage rooms, middle heat rooms, dry sauna type rooms, a small swimming pool of its own, changing rooms.

The damage that's happened to the building now, and over those 2000 years, and we don't have much information about interior fitting. But we do know that there were mosaics because we only have fragments of them. So floors were covered in probably geometric and, and or, figurative mosaics. We know that the, the, although all the rooms at that point at concrete and stone and brick vaults over there were all underfloor heating where there wasn't actually a pool, there were heated. Because the climate in this part of the country is not particularly is not like a mediterranean climate. So, you didn't have any unheated rooms. Nearly, although there were a few unheated rooms built, but later on they were given underfloor heating because almost all the rooms were heated. For obvious reasons. If those who visited Britain might know, especially in the winter. Oh, and of course, that those heated rooms required boilers and stokeholds and furnaces, which again, we have evidence for in some remains of. And that would have been where the slaves would have been stoking the fires which fed the hot air and heated the water.

At the other end of the great bath, the east baths. Conveniently, we now call these the west bars and the east baths, but we don't know what the Romans call them. At the east bath there is another complete set of baths with its own swimming pool and with heated rooms. The usual cold, warm, hot rooms that you move through. Then you move back and you plunge into cold water to close your pores. Rooms, where you could get a massage and get the dirt scraped off. With what you call a strigil, which is a curved metal, implement, which you instead of soap. You covered yourself with olive oil. You sweated like mad in these in these hot rooms. You came out, and either yourself or a slave scraped off oil and sweat along with it all the dirt and then you had a plunge in the cold water to close your pores that was their idea of keeping clean.

So, you've got that's an east bath, was slightly grander because it was built new in the early fourth century, replaced completely what was there before it was much grander and the room is much larger. And at the west bath, that was much more organic accretion. They just kept adding and changing and extending, why two baths? Well, we know that various Roman emperors passed laws saying you can't have mixed bathing. So those laws were passed so often that presumably people did do a lot of mixed bathing. But anyway, so we suspect, that one of these baths was for men and one was for women. Now, the current museum set up is that the east baths, these grander rebuilt ones were the women's baths and the other one, the west baths, which are the ones that weren't rebuilt completely, just alternated two of the years were the men's baths. If you think about history of men and women in the past, I suspect it might well have been the other way round. The men had a bit about and the women had the smaller one. But having said that, we don't strictly know. We never quite found the ages of the baths. You don't know how extensive they were. We think we know where certain ends and edges of these buildings were. But because of the limitations of the modern town, we can't just go and dig anywhere at all sorts of reasons why you. You can't. So, we've got we think we know with the southern is, but we know we're pretty sure there's more. There's more to the south. We think we know where the northern edge is for various reasons, but we don't really know where the east and west edges are. You know, so the buildings, the baths could even be bigger than we think they are. They are very extensive. I mean, they're, they're certainly the biggest, thermal baths north of the alps. There are plenty of similar ones in southern Germany in particular, there's some very grand, spa baths, Roman remains.

What's interesting about Baths is that it's the only one with actual water in it and still to some extent used, the great baths is still that's the great swimming baths in the center of the complex is still full of hot water fed from the Roman reservoir, and it drains out through the great drain, which is the Roman drain, down to the river which is still in use. So, you can you can go there and actually see the water flowing through, and you can imagine what it's like, some of the other Roman remains, you know, parts of the empire are more impressive, better preserved, but they don't have any water in them. So that is a plus. That makes it quite interesting.

Mitchell: So, this is a place where people were not only bathing, doing wellness activities or gymnasium. It was also a place of socialization. Maybe people were doing business, they were eating, they were drinking. They were

Peter: Yeah. This is that’s right,

Mitchell: Social community

Peter: Part of the reason that the Romans built baths everywhere was because they were their social centers. Sometimes you go for baths if you were wealthy enough and earn enough leisure every day you might. And baths were open to everybody, even slaves, if they were the kind of slave who had a certain amount of freedom to travel around, move around. Because not all slaves were so many of them tied down, some were trusted servants, etc. A particular status meant they were tied up to certain places. People moved into to sell food and sweetmeats and all of it to the locals. There were barbers working in the baths and to shave you and that kind of thing. There were, makeup artists for the ladies know, that kind of stuff. There were. And you just met your equals to do as you say, to do business.

The writer Seneca, the Roman writer who was writing in the mid first century a he's famous for various letters he, he sent to people. So they were real letters he sent. But he also kept them, published them because they were literary things. But one of his famous ones, he complains about the fact that he's living above the Roman Baths in a flat, as it were, and he can't do any work because of the noise of the hawkers and the and the people selling things and calling their wares, and the people screaming, and the and the people having their hair plucked from their upper lip instead of being shaved and screaming and that sort of thing. So, yeah, these are very, very, very busy places.

People coming to Bath, to the hot springs that they know that that adds an extra level, because what I’ve described just now is any, any bath in any town. But coming to the hot baths, people did come, it would appear, for, for cures and so on that we have very little evidence about directly from the Roman period about cures.

We have a couple of items which we think might be the equivalent of in a in a Roman catholic church, if someone goes to a church and praise to a saint to be cured of some ailment, they're often hang up a model of the part of their body they want fix like an eye or a leg or a breast or something like that. And we have found two breasts to an ivory breast, an ivory figurine, which is two breasts on, but no head and legs, and a piece of bronze, which appears to be the specialists say, part of a bronze statue, and it's a breast thrown into the hot spring. And we think that is a request for help with some kind of illness.

The other side of the bath social aspect, I mentioned the temple. I think you came to the baths as much to come to the temple. There’s that trite phrase that “cleanliness is next to godliness”, well, actually, in in the layout of the baths, godliness in the fact in the face of the temple is literally next to an incorporates part of the baths. And I think that visiting the temple and visiting the baths was part of the same deal. For those who came to visit, you know, for whatever reason, and we can go back and compare what we know about medieval churches and cathedrals, which were marketplaces as well. People met socially, they conducted business and so on. And every now and again, you get a religious person in that period complaining that church is being used for non-religious purposes. And that's, that's that i'm sure that there was that mix in the Roman Baths and temple. Roman religion was a bit transactional. You know, you ask the god for a favor and you and you promised them you do something in return or the other way around. You said, i'll do this. If you would do this for me. And, so many of the curses, what we call was the lead plaques that people have written on and thrown into the spring are kind of prayers, to the goddess to, to do something for them in most cases to find or return stolen goods or punish the person who stole them. And they're a treasure trove of interest.

Mitchell: Can you tell us more about those, Peter? Those are the little lead tablets. And how many of those roughly were discovered? I think it was there's many. Yeah,

Peter: We excavated in the first phase, 130 of them. One was found during excavations in the late 19th century, kind of by chance, really in the spring, I said that some limited excavation took place there. And most of them are written in, in Latin. They're written in about 80 different hand writings, which strongly suggests that the people making the, the requests, the petition to the goddess wrote them themselves. I mean, if you went to a scribe and said, this is what I want to say, can you do it for me? You'd imagine there'd be far fewer hand writings. And handwriting, Roman handwriting specialist is quite clear there. There are many. To the extent that, one, curse is also known from about 30 miles away in another Roman site called Uley temple where a man of the same name makes a request to the god there, who's mercury, in handwriting that can be matched up to the tablet he left here, making a request to the goddess Sulis Minerva. So that's someone who wrote his own letter, as it were, to the goddess here, and also wrote a similar one up in Uley, presumably, hedging his bets to which god got a go and would help him out best.

Now these tablets, they're quite small. They're about the size of a small letter envelope or not. If they're little smaller than a postcard, they have they're actually pewter, a mixture of tin and lead, can call them lead if you like. Oh, it's a soft metal. It's gray. And when you scratch into it was a stylus appointed writing instrument. You scratch the letters into the lead and the silver underneath because it's the dark on the outside side. Shows up as a lettering it's, it's kind of magic lettering because these letters are written backwards like a mirror writing. Sometimes in mirror writing, like so. You read it from right to left, other times in mirror writing, lead from let read from left to right. But the letters were reversed. Obviously, this this is kind of magical because it means that god is can read this, but if somebody else by chance sees your letter, they can't easily see what it says.

And, it took a very specialized, highly qualified guy called Roger Tomlin, to read these, these curses over a period about two, three years after they were excavated.  And some of the inscriptions were found. There was some what we think of as temple plates. There were there were dishes and ewers and jugs and plates and bowls and little tiny saucepans that we call, paterae, in bronze and silver and pewter and were found thrown into the spring during these excavations back in 1980 and 1981.  

These pots and pans, as it were, were all somewhat worn out and damaged, and some had actually been repaired. And one of them had, have been used, been folded up. It was a flat plate and had been folded up. And then someone had written one of these, request to the goddess, on it and thrown it and we think, and, and nearly all the others had either dsm or dlsm scratched into the metalwork that's deae Sulis Minerva, which means this belongs to the goddess Sulis, Minerva, dsm or dslm and we're pretty sure that that means that this is plate that was worn out, in being used in the sacrifices and special ceremonies in the temple or in the courtyard. And then it was replaced. And of course we don’t have the replacements, they would have been long ago recycled. But these early ones were, the centerpiece of the second century date. Stylistically, so they were worn out, and they were thrown into the spring, so they were ceremonially discarded. What was thrown away. They were thrown back to the goddess, if you like, into her spring. So that's quite an interesting insight into, you know, the way things were done to return to the tablets. What were people asking for?

Mostly the return of stolen goods since they couldn't get stolen goods back. They wanted dire punishments revisited and whoever it was had stolen their objects, the objects were things like cloaks, dressing gowns, gloves, things that were probably left in the changing rooms. A purse with three silver coins, six silver coins. Quite a lot of money that six silver coins. You know, you'd be annoyed if it got stolen. And sometimes we the person writing the request of the goddess, says, I want you to punish whoever it was. I don't know whether they were free or a slave or man or woman, or in one case, pagan or Christian. Which shows the Christians were around in the, in the late, probably third century. The most bloodthirsty one, I suppose, is I think it's the one that mentions Christians. But he says, if this person can't, return the goods, I want them to never have children, I want them to be sterile, I want them to die. And another one says, if you find my stolen items I want, you to  stuff them up their nose. And all sorts of, you know, dire things in them. Internal bleeding and death forever and always kind of stuff. And, but some others are rather. I mean, that's kind of interesting insight, people are haven't changed when they get angry. Part of the reason that they get angry, I suppose, I should say, is that the there were no policemen around in, in this period in Roman Britain. You could ask the local centurion in charge of the region. That's often how it works, like a local mayor or something to, investigate. If you had something stolen from your house that was a civic, a civil matter, you had to sue someone. The police wouldn't be in, the army, wouldn't be interested, just a local authority. If it was stolen from a, a bathhouse. There was a special law or something was stolen from a bathhouse. That was a crime. And if you were caught, you could be sentenced to work and to be a slave to work in the mines, that sort of thing. And so, people saw it as something very, very serious and very angry making because they couldn't actually get at the person.

And one of the other aspects that these tablets have given us is, is the mix of names and mix of what we think of as ethnicity in Roman Baths, we have lots and lots and lots, hundreds of names on these tablets because when they complete, the person who made the request of the goddess usually put his name, her name on it. But very often they had, they had a shrewd idea who it might have been, and they give a list of names saying, these are the people I think may have done it, or one of these might have done it, and there's this list of names, and some of the names are very Roman, and some are what we recognize this as local British or Celtic names.

And some are kind of crossover names. You know, which kind of mean it could have been either, and in one family there's one famous tablet that says a family, a son, a husband and wife, daughter and son in law, son and daughter in law are all standing by the fons Sulis, so, there's the sacred spring of the goddess Sulis. And they've made an oath, saying that one of us on this group here has actually is lying. We’re pretty sure one of us is lying. We don't know who. So, we've made this oath to the goddess for you to find out who it is, who's lying. And the names, in one family are a mix of Celtic and Latin. There are three of them, almost identical there is Docilis, Docilosa, and Docilina, they are actually, the latinized names, but they also mean something in, in, in, in British language, in Celtic, something like peaceful or calm. Then there are other names that are just like Cunomaglus, which are just Celtic names and even the same family, you know so by this stage, by, you know, a couple hundred years, probably after the Roman conquest, everybody's from mixed up the language and so on

Mitchell: So, the tablets Peter, they give us insight into the daily lives of these people. I mean, and we can see in some ways, how similar these people were to us and how, you know, petty they were, just as we are.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the, you know, as an archeologist, especially in, in Bath, you're surrounded by these big structures and valves and engineering works and so on. And we have dug houses and in other parts of the city, both grand and not so grand. You’re reminded you when you do this city sort of thing that these, these houses, these monuments were populated by, by people not really very different dress, different aspect, different, you know, beliefs and ideas and ways of doing things. But deep inside, they're the same as us at the same people as us.

For example, there's a rather sad tombstone that was found in the 18th century, which is now in the Roman Baths museum. And it's a little girl who died age, I think it's four years, three months, four days. That actually says to that extent, basically it says this, this, this tombstone was erected by her loving, grieving parents. You know, so, you know, there's this little girl who died, children died a lot. I mean, I mean, infant mortality in Roman, in a Roman period and what was high, infectious diseases couldn't be treated if you, if a child got any of the diseases. Now that we either vaccinate against or can treat, you like, you die in unless were very lucky and fought it off.

Mitchell: And so, what was the most revealing discovery? Of the Roman Baths? During your time in excavation?

Peter: Digging in the king's baths, I should say, as a human being was fascinated because of the wonderful things we were digging up. Lots of coins. Fragments of giant crossbows and, of, metalwork and pottery and all sorts of jewelry and everything, things that people had fallen in. Nobody's interesting to see. But in terms of and the tablets themselves also told us about those people. Lots about those people, as do the tombstones, which as it away from Roman tombstones out generally that, full of information about the person they're referring to.

But I think for me, one of the, the most important and revealing thing I found out during my time was actually where the Roman town was, because, in the second century, the central area around the monumental baths, the temple, other baths, other buildings, other grand buildings, was enclosed by a bank and a ditch, and later on by a wall about 24 acres in size, which is very small for a town. And people looked at this think, is that really the town? Well, we found very few remains of actual houses inside that enclosure. We think that was the monumental religious enclosure of the spring, the temple, the baths. This is where people came a bit like, you know, a cathedral precinct or, you know, it's, the holy area and excavations all through the 1990s along the road that runs from the north gate of that enclosure for about a kilometer towards where it goes northwards. But it swings around and it's the road to London and, along that road, we now know that there that the Romans really built their town. That's where the houses, shops, workshops, shops and houses or houses, all sorts of quality. Which then actually some of the rather grander houses went down in over the under 200 years, became workshops and that sort of thing all the way along that kilometer. We haven't all of it, of course, but sampling everywhere we sampled along the road, we found dense occupation on the street front because that, that that modern road is the Roman road out of town, out of the central area, and also running back towards the river because the river runs about 100 yards back from this road I’ve been describing. This area is fairly densely occupied by Roman buildings. Whenever we've looked, we found Roman buildings, from the first century, from very early period, right up until the end of the Roman period. So, this is a very busy part of town. So, if you were coming in from London or anywhere from the north, east and north, rather you would then come in along that road and that and it would be lined with, with houses, shops and so on. And some of it looking rather grand because two buildings we excavated, had a covered portico, a covered walkway over the pavement that said there was a road and there was the pavement and then the building behind along the pavement. So you had a covered walkway, a portico, along the road to how far that extended, we don't know that, probably more than just those two houses.

What we've done is in that those excavations over about 10 or 12 years in the 1990s, early, early noughties, we we've kind of redesigned our idea of what, what Roman Baths aquae Sulis was like. Yeah. And also, more recent excavations by other organizations have shown that there is even more occupation of Roman building and housing on the other side of the river. So, it's up to this, high street, as I call it. Is this road running out to the center of the bath, from the north of the baths. Okay.

Mitchell: So, it's giving us more of an insight into the daily life and kind of the humdrum of the normal person in this area.

Peter: Well, yeah. I mean, if you were, we, I think we generally just, you know, extrapolate from what, you know, elsewhere, but, it would we know that, for example, some of the people who stayed here who settled here were expired military veterans, we know that there was a Roman military presence here in the late first century. We still haven't found a fort or a base, but we have found them lots of military items that would have been dropped or lost our soldiers. And also, lots. We're pretty sure that the Roman army in that early period set up their own pottery workshop. Again, we haven't found the pottery workshop, but we found pottery that was had that had failed in the kiln, ensuring that there was a kiln nearby and the kind of pottery is very specifically what the Roman army used to make for itself or by if you couldn't make it itself, specific kinds of shapes and fabrics. So, when the if they, if they survived their term of

Term service, especially the troops of all the auxiliaries, there was legionaries who were normally the legionaries were the main part of the army. And they were they were already citizens. If you joined as an auxiliary, you weren't a citizen, a Roman citizen. After 25 years, if you lived that long, you'd get citizenship and your family will get citizenship, which was a valuable thing to have. And you got a diploma. Actually, cast in bronze. You’d get in a paper version as well, but a permanent thing explaining why and how that you had these rights to citizenship. And we found one of these diplomas this area, this, this a republic of walker where this high street is, showing that a guy had retired in the late in the early second century and, presumably had lost this many years later when it was no longer value. And we don't know his name, unfortunately, but we have which cavalry regiment he served in and who's, who the commanding officer was and this was his sign off. We have evidence of, in one place of, of a probably a pottery kiln and not the one I was talking about earlier, but the one army set up. But we actually found, what looks like a kiln, which was set up in the early fourth century in, in a building that was built in the second century and had been, a rather grand house, but had fallen into disrepair and changed around a lot and had a workshop in it.

And, and another part we, another excavation of a building. We were able to show that it was a, a blacksmith's workshop. There's a, a lot of there, a lot of blacksmiths workshops known in Roman Britain because, iron was a very basic material, and anything that was made out of metal was will be made that was made of iron will be made in a blacksmith's workshop.

We've actually found two. One in the fourth well both dating to the fourth century actually. One in this area. I call the town north of the central area, and one that had been set up in the late fourth century in in what seems to be a very grand, substantial building, not very far from the baths, possibly at a time when the baths and this grand Roman building weren't in use anymore as such that later on in the Roman period.

So, we've got blacksmiths working, we've got potters, we've got well, we certainly got engineers, builders, we got slaves doing all sorts of stuff. We've got scribes, we've got oh, there is the priest of the temple we know of one of them whose tombstone was recovered. His name was receptus, he was 75 when he died and he he'd married his slave. Which meant that she was freed. We don't really know much about her except her name. And she set up his tombstone, and we can only imagine her mixed feelings, because when he died, she became a fully free lady. And we don't know how much consent she'd given to being married to this priest as a former slave. But nonetheless, you know that that's the kind of thing you've got. We know that one guy. We dug up two burials near this, pottery workshop I was talking about. One was a man in his middle age, obviously very well well-off. We could tell from his bones what his diet had been in his last years. Extremely meat rich. He had a lot of meat. And which kind of implies a sense. And this guy for other things we can find out from the bones, was born in the middle east and had come to Britain, even buried in a lead-lined coffin, which again is an expression of wealth. Next to him was buried a young woman. She died in a very late 20s, probably was buried in a plain wooden coffin. She had no sort of. Neither of these two burials had goods with them, which suggests they might have been Christian, just the very late Roman who the end of the Roman period and certainly were Christians around. And as a rough rule, Christian burials have no good with them, whereas Roman burials often have, pagan burials often have pottery or other offerings with the individual. And this young woman had broken a leg and had been it healed, but badly. She had arthritis from hobbling around on this poorly heeled leg and died of some disease. We don't know what her in her late 20s. So this is a contrast to two different kinds of lives, if you like.

Poor and rich did live cheek by jowl. If you had a grand house and you had slaves, the slave next lived in the slave quarters, maybe separated by a wall from your rather grand, places. If you were just a retired legionary without maybe too much money, you still probably have a slave or two. Rather like a Victorian, a 19th century middle class lawyer might have a cook and a housemaid, and there would be slaves, obviously, at that point, that's what that's how you would you would you've seen them.

Most of the people visiting the town were literate because we talked about writing on the, on these tablets. They were all obviously serious, they believe seriously in the power of the goddess to help otherwise, why come, it’s like going to lord today, you know, for help. If you're Roman catholic. Weren't much point in going if you didn't believe it.

Mitchell: So, you were studying. You have access to uncovers and excavations on individual people, which I think it is incredible. It gives you insight into, their individual lives and not just, kind of allowing us to make broad scale generalizations on the, you know, society. You're looking at these individual people, and from that you can gain a more kind of full, rich, deeper picture of this whole city.

Peter: Yeah, that's right. And there'll be more to come, because the Roman Baths museum have just started a, a research program which will involve a PhD student, using all the latest, techniques of DNA, ancient DNA analysis, molecular studies on, the isotopes you find in teeth and bones, which will tell you where people lived before they died, where they were born, what the relationships are, did they suffer from certain diseases and so on.

If you're lucky. You're better with that person. That brown hair or blonde hair or blue eyes or brown eyes. Where the links are back to their, their ancestors and origins that that program is just beginning on a collection of about 20 or 30 human individuals remains which have been curated in the Rome Baths museum over the last 20, 30 years. Because unfortunately, lots of burials were discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the human remains were usually either discarded or reburied. They didn't think there's any particular interest where now we can learn so much. So, but we don't dig that many Roman individuals. In the last 20 years, I think we've excavated about 5 or 6 some of these are the ones who turned up, in the store in the Rome Baths museum. And we also have and we concentrating on the Roman ones. But there will be Anglo-Saxon burials and medieval burials. That'd be somewhere down the line to see what some, what we can learn about those individuals.

I mean, just some skeletal remains. You can learn about things like TB and VD, venereal disease, injuries, and so on. Just by looking, arthritis, all these sorts of diseases. Oh, and there's a disease called, which causes pretty major changes to your vertebrae, which is due to eating too much meat and too much fat. Often the case, actually, with monks in Middle Ages, but anyway, that that's another story the, what we don't know about is, is, we don't have a big, a big picture of many people. We have snapshots of individuals. We know, we know in the early period when we have the Roman army and their tombstones, they usually say where they're from, and we have people from who came over here and died here because they're tombstones here who came from Switzerland, northern Italy, possibly Belgium, France, Spain. This is this is typical the Roman army, people coming from all over the place. But those individuals usually, well, either they were wounded in that they came for recreational care and didn't work, or they caught the same diseases that everybody else suffered from and died. It doesn't usually say it just says they died at age 25 or 30 or 40 or whatever and this is their career and this is their name and this is what they were. One tombstone shows us that we have, a young armorer, a guy who made the armor for his coat, for his comrades. And his tombstone was paid for by the guild of armorers. So, you know, we get these insights into individuals. This is a guy who was probably from Belgium, but he might be local as a reason for that but the conventional view was from what we now, modern day Belgium.

Mitchell: It seems like this place Bath was it was somewhat of a destination, spot people came from all around, you know, Europe.

Peter: Yeah. They did. Yeah, yeah. Apart from the soldiers, we have a sculptor who came from modern day Shrop[shire] and, a lady who came, we don't think much about her, except she was middle-aged, and she was, the name was Rusonia Aventina, she came from Trier, modern Trier in Germany, Southern Germany, to the baths and, again, these people who came from a distance about died here presumably came forum for the cure and it didn't work. But there was a possibility that people came to retire here because it was a nice place. You know, we just don't know that we don't have that information.

Mitchell: I want to kind of round it out, Peter and, of ask you to talk a little bit about the decline of the baths. What was that slow, gradual process that, eventually kind of decommissioned the structure.

Peter: It's an area of mystery to some extent, because we have these ruins that we can look at. We have a very limited amount of archeology of that late period layers and structures that belong to that late period. And so, it's difficult to, to, to be sure what was going on. To put it in the broader framework, well, just to jump ahead, the Roman administration, the Roman army left Britain in 407. I'll come back to that to 407 A.D., the fourth century, the three hundreds leading up to that period, after about 320 was actually a period of quite substantial, wealth and, and, economic activity and the good times, if you like, in this in the western part of the British Isles.

Buildings were going up with new villas, new houses, new baths. There was a lot of investment in the Roman Baths in the, in the early to mid-fourth century. The last thing we can actually show that was done to the Roman Baths in terms of additions and repairs, took place after 340 A.D. So, there were still doing repairs and things after 340 A.D., middle of the fifth century. And that was a period where, you know, nobody living at the time would have had any idea that some things were going to go downhill pretty quickly. The central empire from about 380 onwards started to suffer from all sorts of issues, attacks and barbarians. Probably a couple of pretty nasty episodes of the plague were going through reducing manpower in the army and in the tax base if you like. About 380s, there was a lot of problem with, with, with invading, troops and invading barbarians as they would call them, people from north, from central Europe and northern Europe. Originally some of them from central Asia. These are the vandals and the goths and the Huns and so on. But the, that was beaten back and the empire kind of pretty much established itself. But then there was a series of young, weak emperors and civil war, and things kind of just went downhill and, the, the ability to control this vast empire from the center started to decline.

We don't know what was happening in the Roman Baths and there and in the temple in that last half of the fifth century, except sorry fourth century, except that we know that around about 350, the temple precinct for the last time was cleaned, was swept out because we find coins of 350s on the paving of the Roman courtyard and they're not cleaned up. And then we find lot of rubble and dirt and soil accumulating the sort of stuff you get in open air courtyard if nobody's looking after it. After about something until about 380 or so, people start to repave that courtyard, but very roughly, very crudely, almost like cobbling over the original of this dirt and muck that accumulated over the temple precinct floor. Then, and that, that that process of dirt muck accumulating and more cobbling and more layers being made. So, people were using this area wanting to floor it, but it wasn't being maintained in the way it had been before and then the big thing that happened about 390, the outdoor altar was actually thrown down. We know that because parts of it recognizably parts of it, with carvings of gods and goddesses on were thrown down and incorporated in one of these pavings. And then around about 400, we found recognizable chunks of the grand buildings around the temple precinct incorporated into the latest pavings, which we can think we can date to around about 430. So, from about 380 to 430, you've got the temple precinct being used, being paved. And these paintings have a lot of wear on them. We can see that the people are using them, but they're incorporating bits of the buildings that had stood around that courtyard. So, these buildings are now derelict.

Again, around about 430, the grand carved pediment, that's the gable above the columns on the front of the temple, 30ft up in the air, was built, were all thrown down. The these are religious symbols, carvings, pagan carvings, thrown down, thrown face down, reused as paving again around about 420, 430 and, that really does indicate that the temple wasn't in use anymore. That probably was being the area was probably being Christianized and also that somebody had the authority or the bravado to destroy this pagan settlement, this pagan site with its temples and its outbuildings and its colonnades, oh, and they must have there was no one to stop them. They must have no other authority or power to do this. Which kind of implies that the whatever organization was running the baths and the temple didn't really exist anymore, had no influence.

What we do find very early fifth century items still being thrown into the kings baths, into the hot spring and the very latest paintings. These late paintings incorporate, bits of temple and bits of other structures have wear patterns that lead to the door of the great spring as the temple of the king's bath, the sacred spring. So, people were still going to the spring and making offerings right up into the 430s. How much longer? We don't know. The evidence archeologically runs out. And it does pretty much all over. The baths themselves, if the temple was in such a state and it was buildings was being knocked down and so on, we can only assume they weren't being looked after, weren't being maintained, weren’t being used anymore. Sometime maybe around 390’s, 400’s. But we simply don't know, because the archeology that might have shown us some of the information was removed by the Victorians with that reco, when they cleared the site, when they first discovered it. We did find a little area of archeological deposit which ran from, late Roman into late Saxon. So, 400 to 800 900 hundred A.D. In one corner of the baths, we excavated it. And it appears that in around about 400, some parts of these heated rooms I was talking about earlier were smashed down and partly demolished. But we can also show that some other heated rooms and other places weren't knocked down weren’t demolished. So, it looks like. The buildings were being partially recycled, if you like, partially demolished, but other bits were still standing.

Another item that we do know about is that the, the stone paving around the great baths, there's a lot of very substantial stone paving has wear patterns, very substantial wear, like six inch, these are thick slabs of stone and have some of the worn down 5 or 6in deep with people walking backwards and forwards. Now, that could never have happened while the baths were in use as baths, because in the baths you wore, you weren't barefoot or you wore straw sort of espadrilles soft soled shoes. And people walking on the, on the site now you because if you visit, you can still walk on that paving. They've been doing that for 140 years. There's no where people wearing outdoor shoes. What caused these wear patterns? I think it must have been, well, I can show that it was late. It must have been after it ceased being used as a baths. People were using it for something else and wearing outdoor shoes, which at that time almost certainly means sandals or shoes with hob nails. And those hob nails would have worn away the soft bath stone quite quickly and quite easily and that kind of wear you get when you're wearing outdoor shoes. So, there's something going on. So, I think what we're looking at is an establishment that ceased to be used as a baths was being sometime in the late fourth, well into the fifth century. But water is still flowing. The kings bath at the sacred spring where the water came up. We know that the, the roof, the this the, the vaulted brick and concrete and stone roof collapsed into the spring, because we found it collapsed when we did the excavations under the water, as it were. And what happened then was that that roof falling into the hot spring raised the water level in the hot spring from the Roman level to about another five, 4 or 5ft higher. Still contained within that rectangular Roman building that they built in the second century, whose roof had collapsed. But the walls were still there. And those walls turned this rather oddly shaped sacred spring the Romans built into a rectangular bath. And that became the, that became the medieval king's bath.

And we know that it was in use in the probably the eighth and ninth centuries, which means it must be in use earlier, because we have two references. One just talks about there being a hot bath in baths, which people came to from all over the place, the other saying that there is a bath in the land of the witches, of which you of the Saxon tribe took over this area of the Dobunni. There's a bath in the land of the witchy, which is made of brick and stone, which the current one is something that that medieval re-use of the Roman Baths Spring is brick and stone. Where man may go to have a bath, and it can. You can have a hot bath or a cold bath as he pleases. Now, we don't know quite what that means, but that's, in eight hundreds, saying there is a bath in Bath which fits the description.

There's a famous poem written by a Saxon poet in the probably eighth century, possibly bit earlier, called the ruin, which describes a bath with hot water flowing over its courtyards, but which is in ruin. It doesn't say that it's Baths but all the description, which is quite detailed, tells you that it must be Bath, and it's also the hot flood flowing over the stone courtyard. So, they talk about, so we've got a period when you know things are going downhill, we don't know the detail. But we've got fascinating, tantalizing glimpses. I mentioned the date 407 I’ve simply say that in terms of the bigger picture, that was when the last, Roman armies left Britain. There was no longer a Roman army in Britain in 407. In 410, there is a letter written by the emperor. There's some argument about what it means, but it seems to suggest to the townships all around the empire, that you've got to look after yourself now, I, I’m busy fighting a civil war, basically and I’m not going to be able to send troops back to you. And it appears very that, from just reading backwards from what we know later, that the Roman local administrative units reorganized themselves as small kingdoms, if you like, with raising their own troops and that sort of thing, so that the bath would have been in the area of modern town of Cirencester or Corinium Dobunnorum, that's the main town of the Dobunni. An area that, they probably organized as, as a defensive unit, as an administrative unit and presumably the rich people, the landowners and all that thing clumped together to try to run the place for a while. And it seems they probably did. Because that the Dobunni were running, the late Roman post-Roman Dobunni people were running became almost completely exactly the kingdom, the Saxon kingdom of the witchy few hundred and some years later, we don't know the change of the day or period and had that information. So, I think there's a certain amount of continuity on a small scale, of the administrative unit. And then it's not until, well, that then the eighth century becomes part of the fairly powerful kingdom of, of Mercia, one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which later merged to form England. Yeah. In that later period, Bath became quite important because it was on the border of two of these Saxons kingdoms, Wessex in the south and, Mercia in the north, and that was actually on the borderline. And so, it retained a certain amount of importance, to, to the various kings and, princelings. From 410 to 700 it's a lot of it is, inference and controlled guesswork and so on. Because we did the archeology of that period is very difficult to interpret, and there's very little writing written history.

Mitchell: It’s interesting not to think about the or imagine the bath, as a, as a development. It had its own life. You know, we often think of an architectural monument as a stagnant, static piece. And, in one life, this thing truly had a long lifespan used by many different people and it writes the history of not just itself as a building, but also the, the culture, the society around it. And yeah, that's one of the reasons I love to study architecture, because it reveals so much about the people around it, and the history, through just the building sticks and bricks and stone, you can find out so much. It reveals a lot about the human condition. Thank you so much, Peter. I really appreciate you joining us. Do you have anything else you'd like to add? To the conversation that you feel that would be worth discussing?

Peter: No, I think the only thing I might say is anybody watching this and is inspired to visit the city. When you turn up, you might think you might feel that the entrance fee to the museum is rather steep. This is not cheap, it's not a cheap experience. But a few years ago, there was a survey and people queuing up to go in were asked what they thought about the price. And I thought, well, most of this was a bit steep, you know, because we've but we're here, we've come we've got to see it, you know. And then there was survey when they left after they'd been through and seen everything and asked if they thought it was worth it, and 90% said yes.

Mitchell: And I can I can vouch for that. When I went over there, we took a tour in the evening and went in. And then the following morning we actually reserved the baths for ourselves to do filming and walk around and kind of study the place and it was worth every penny. So, I can attest to that.

Peter: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, it's been interesting to talk to you.

Mitchell: Yes. Thank you so much, Peter. I really appreciate it. Really insightful and I personally learned so much, and I hope people listening, also did, so thank you.

Peter: Okay.