Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

ural fortifications 335
they persisted. In the seventh century, the history of rural settlement in the
two regions again merges, with the disappearance of the ‘villa’ as a traditional
style of building even in the southern provinces, and the persistence
of the word in contemporary usage only to describe estates or villages.
Many questions about late villas, however, still remain, to which it would
be very nice to have clear archaeological answers. Quite how large, sumptuous
and classical were the villa buildings so lovingly described by
Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century (or indeed those similarly
described by Sidonius Apollinaris a century earlier)? And what exactly did
a sixth-century royal ‘villa’ in northern Francia look like, such as the one at
Berny-Rivière near Soissons, where Gregory of Tours was tried in 580?
Was it a recognizably ‘Roman’ building, or something that we might term
‘sub-Roman’; or was it perhaps principally a great series of timbered halls,
like the roughly contemporary Northumbrian villa regia at Yeavering? 35
iv. rural fortifications
One feature of settlement in the countryside, which affected most of the
late antique world, was an increase in the number of fortified sites. The
third century had, of course, introduced war to many previously peaceful
areas, and frontier-zones remained exposed to attack through the following
centuries. The collapse of the frontiers in the west at the beginning of
the fifth century, and the emergence here of new and often unstable political
groupings, meant that in much of the former empire warfare became
endemic. Unsurprisingly, these changes are reflected in the emergence of
fortified rural sites.
Once again, the evidence is both documentary and archaeological. The
documentary evidence is still very useful: for instance, from Gaul it provides
us with information about rural fortifications sponsored by aristocrats,
which seem to have combined the luxurious living-quarters of the
traditional villa with the security of strong walls and towers. 36 But this literary
evidence consists of individual snippets of information, which
cannot on their own be fitted into a broad pattern of settlement. For this
we must again rely on archaeological survey and excavation.
The archaeological record reveals a wide variety of different types of
fortified rural site in the fifth and sixth century, with considerable regional
variation in the precise type used: farmsteads and villages surrounded by a
35 Gregory gives few clues, though Hist. v.50 refers to an atrium, and to a new supertegulum, presumably
the apex of a tiled roof. On the archaeological and literary evidence for late rural settlement in
Gaul, including ‘villas’, see also Samson (1987).
36 Sid. Ap. Carm. xxii (on the burgus of Pontius Leontius on the Garonne, written probably in the
460s); Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. iii.12 (on the castellum of Nicetius of Trier on the Moselle, written
in the 560s).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008