Venta Belgarum
Situated 20.8 km N of Southampton Water, at a natural focus of communications reflected in the network of Roman roads approaching the city from all directions. The capital of the civitas of the Belgae, by the 2d c. A.D. Venta was the fifth largest city of Roman Britain, with a walled area of 58.2 ha.
The Roman town lay on a sloping site W of the river Itchen. The higher W area was occupied in the 1st c. B.C. by an extensive defended settlement of the pre-Roman Iron Age, which was abandoned perhaps a century before Romano-British occupation began on the lower slopes and on the valley floor. Despite the name Venta Belgarum, there is no evidence that the site was occupied in the immediate pre-Roman period by a Belgic oppidum, and the town seems to have been entirely a Roman creation.
There is no evidence as yet for a military origin of the Roman town, and little trace of Romano-British occupation of any kind before A.D. 55. The earliest structures recorded are timber buildings on the lower slope of the W hill, considerably W of the center of the later walled area; they were burnt down about A.D. 60. Settlement of the valley bottom became much more intense during the Flavian period, but was apparently quite unplanned, and probably not of urban character.
The town was founded at the end of the 1st c. A.D., when the laying out of the streets, the construction of the first defenses, and the building of the forum followed in quick succession. The street plan was a regular grid pattern, with evidence for insulae of 400 Roman feet square. The initial plan may have been confined to the valley bottom and the lower slopes of the hill, but the first defenses enclosed a larger area to the W, although their course to N and S is not yet established. The forum was built in the central insula, on a previously domestic site. Its structure is imperfectly known, but it may have measured ca. 123 by 93 m, with its longer axis E-W.
Urban development along the new streets was rapid; the houses were mostly timber-framed, and remodeled on stone ground-walls in the second half of the 2d c. Sometime after A.D. 150-160, and perhaps as late as the end of the century, the defenses were reconstructed in earth and timber, enclosing an area of over 57 ha. The new defenses followed the earlier line on the W, but to N, E, and S followed a new course which was to remain the line of the city's defenses for more than 1500 years. The early street plan may at this time have been extended W to fill the defended area, although occupation of the W part remained slight. These defenses were again remodeled in the first half of the 3d c. by the addition of a stone wall pierced by perhaps five gates, all presumably, like the excavated S gate, on the site of earlier timber gateways.
Development within the walls continued throughout the 3d c., but at the end there were great changes, perhaps associated with reorganization after Constantius I's suppression of the British revolt. The nature of 4th c. Winchester is uncertain. Occupation seems to have been denser than before, and to have spread for the first time over the whole walled area. There is evidence for suburban development, and the extramural cemeteries to N and E spread far from the walls. The town was perhaps changing from its role as the cantonal capital of the civitas of the Belgae to a more complex function in which an imperial weaving works, known from the Notitia Dignitatum to have existed in Britain at a town called Venta, played a major part.
Some houses were now suppressed and part of the forum abandoned, but elsewhere houses continued to be remodeled and were clearly occupied into the 5th c. Soon after the middle of the 4th c. A.D. there is evidence of alien elements in the population which grave goods and burial rites suggest were of S German origin; they may have been laeti, barbarians settled in the Winchester area for defense of the 4th c. civitas. At about this time bastions were added to the town wall. In the first half of the 5th c. there was a second implantation of barbarians, laeti or foederati, but this time from N Germany. These people, whose pottery in Winchester antedates by nearly a century the arrival there of the English, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were established within the framework of a still functioning Romano-British community. By the middle of the century the economic basis for this community had disappeared, urban population dwindled and only the barbarian mercenaries remained to become in course of time the foundation from which the Old English captital emerged into a new urban life at the end of the 9th c.
The Winchester City Museums hold the finds and records up to 1960. Those of later excavations by the Winchester Excavations Committee are maintained by the Winchester Research Unit, 13 Parchment Street.
BIBLIOGRAPHYF. Haverfield, VCH Hampshire I (1900) 285-93; C.F.C. Hawkes et al., “Saint Catharine's Hill, Winchester,” Proc. Hampshire Field Club 11 (1930); M. Biddle, Interim Reports on the excavations of 1961-71 in ArchJ 119 (1962) 150-94; AntJ 44 (1964) 188-219; 45 (1965) 230-64; 46 (1966) 308-32; 47 (1967) 251-79; 48 (1968) 250-84; 49 (1969) 295-329; 50 (1970) 277-326; 52 (1972) 93-131MPI; B. W. Cunliffe, Winchester Excavations 1949-60 I (1964) MPI; Britannia 3 (1972) 348-49P.
M. BIDDLE