ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. II
In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in
connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles
'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is, of course, closely akin to
such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a 'colonia'
implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the
'municipium' made town-planning appropriate to this class of town
also.
It was, however, not limited to these towns. It appears not seldom in
provincial towns of lower legal status, such as were not uncommon in
Britain, in Gaul, and in some other districts. Four instances may be
quoted from the two provinces just named. In the first, Autun, the
town-planning is explained by the establishment of the town full-grown
under Roman official influence. Unfortunately, however, little is
known of the buildings, and it is difficult to judge of the actual
character of the place. In the second case, Trier, we may conjecture a
similar official origin. At Silchester, official influence seems also
to have been at work, and it is not impossible that the fourth case,
Caerwent, may be explained by the same cause. In these two latter,
however, it is more important to observe the nature of the towns,
which is better known than that of any others in western Europe. For
they embody a type of urban life which is distinct from any that
occurs in Italy or in the better civilized districts of the Empire,
and which illustrates strikingly one stratum of provincial culture.
_Autun_ (fig. 29).
Caesar won northern and central Gaul for the Roman Empire; it fell to
Augustus to organize the conquered but as yet unromanized lands. Among
many steps to that end, he seems to have planted new native towns
which should take the places of old native tribal capitals and should
drive out local Celtic traditions by new Roman municipal interests.
These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman municipal
status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that. But they were
plainly devised to help Romanization forward, and their object is
declared by their half-Roman, half-Celtic names--Augustodunum (now
Autun), Caesaromagus (Beauvais), Augusta Suessionum (Soissons),
Augusta Treverorum (Trier), and the like.[103] Of two of these, Autun
and Trier, we chance to know the town-plans. The reader will notice a
certain similarity between them.
[103] Hirschfeld, _Haeduer und Arverner_ (_Sitzungsber. der
preuss. Akademie_, 1897, p. 1102). Similar hybrid names have
been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west
Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited
sites--Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the
like. But these are almost all small places or forts, and their
names represent no policy of Anglicization.
[Illustration: FIG. 29. AUTUN.
After H. de Fontenay, 1889.]
Autun stands on the site and contains the stately ruins of the Roman
Augustodunum, built by Augustus about 12 B.C. He, as it seems, brought
down the Gaulish dwellers in the old native hill-fortress of Bibracte,
on Mont-Beuvray, and planted them twelve miles away on an unoccupied
site beside the river Arroux. The new town covered an area of
something like 490 acres--that is, if the now traceable walls and
gates are, as is generally thought, the work of Augustus. The town
within the walls must have been laid out all at once. Quite a large
part of it, perhaps has much as three-quarters, have revealed to the
careful inquiries of French archaeologists a regular system of
quadrangular street-planning, which may very likely have extended even
through the unexplored quarter. The Roman street which ran through the
town from south to north, from the Porte de Rome to the Porte
d'Arroux, was fronted by at least thirteen 'insulae', and one of the
streets which crossed it at right angles was fronted by eleven such
blocks. They vary somewhat in size. The larger 'insulae', which lie
west of the main north and south street, are oblong and measure about
150 x 100 yds. (say, 3 acres); many smaller ones are more nearly
square (98 x 98 or 109 yds., about 2 acres).
But the regularity of the plan is plainly the work of civilized man.
When the Celts were brought to live in a Roman city, care was taken
that it should be really Roman.[104] Only we may perhaps wonder
whether the plan may not have been drawn by Augustus with an eye more
to the future than to the present and may have included more 'insulae'
than there were actually inhabitants to occupy at once. That was the
case certainly in the mediaeval English town of Winchelsea, where the
rectangular building-plots laid out by Edward I have in great measure
lain empty and untenanted to the present day.
[104] H. de Fontenay, _Autun et ses monuments_ (Autun, 1889), pp.
49 foll. and map (1:6,250). The existence of a town-plan was
first noticed by J. de Fontenay, _Bulletin monumental_, 1852, p.
365, but his map appears to be incorrect and his views generally
are based too much on _a priori_ assumptions.
_Trier_ (fig. 30).
We may take another example from a northern city, Trier on the Mosel,
in north-eastern Gaul (Augusta Treverorum). It was in its later days a
large city, perhaps the largest Roman city in western Europe. When its
walls were built and its famous north gate, the Porta Nigra, was
erected, probably towards the end of the third century, they included
a space of 704 acres, twenty-five times as much as the original
Timgad, though, it must be added, this area may not have been wholly
covered with houses. But it was then an old city. Its earliest remains
date from the earliest days of the Roman Empire (A.D. 2), when it was
founded, like Autun, on a spot which had (as it seems) never been
inhabited before.[105] Of this first beginning we possess vestiges
which concern us here. Eight or nine years ago, when the modern town
was provided with drainage, the engineers of the work and the Trier
archaeologists, headed by the late Dr. Graven, combined to note the
points where the drainage trenches cut through pieces of Roman
roadway.[106]
[105] Ademeit, _Siedelungsgeographie des Moselgebiets_, pp. 367,
431.
[106] H. Gräven, _Stadtplan des römischen Triers_ in _Die
Denkmalpflege_, 14 Dec. 1904 (1:10,000); the plan has been often
copied, as by Cramer, _Das röm. Trier_ (Gütersloh, 1911), and Von
Behr, _Trierer Jahresberichte_, i. 1908. Compare Barthel, _Bonner
Jahrbücher_, cxx. 106. Trier at some time or other became a
'colonia'. When this occurred, is hotly disputed; the evidence
seems to me to suggest that it was founded without colonial
status and became a 'colonia latina' in the course of the first
century (see Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 153). I have
therefore inserted Trier in this chapter with Autun and not in
Chapter VIII with Orange and Timgad.
These points yielded a regular plan of streets crossing at right
angles, which in many of its features much resembles that of Autun.
Thirteen streets were traced running east and west, and eight (Dr.
Graven says seven but his plan shows eight) running north and south.
The east and west streets, with two exceptions, lay some 320 ft. from
one another. The north and south streets varied, some observing that
distance, others being no more than 260 ft. apart. As a result, the
rectangular house-blocks varied also in size. The largest seem to be
those which fronted a street that crossed the town from east to west,
from the Imperial Palace to the Baths and the West Gate, and
corresponds roughly with the present Kaiserstrasse. This may well have
been the _decumanus_, the main east and west street of the 'colonia',
and hence the house-blocks fronting it may have been unusually large
(p. 77). One of them, near the Neumarkt, reached the awkward size of
nearly 3-1/2 acres (320 x 460 ft.). Others elsewhere were smaller,
many measuring 320 x 320 ft., and others again 320 x 245 ft., rather
less than 2 acres. In general, the 'insulae' on the east and west
sides of the town were larger than those in the centre. The whole has
a resemblance to Autun, and is more irregular than writers on Trier
are ready to allow.[107]
[107] Gräven estimated that, except in the central street, all
the 'insulae' measured 300 Roman ft. (290 English ft., 88
metres), but his plan suggests rather 100 metres. We need in
reality that larger plan which he did not live to complete.
How many houses may have occupied either a large or a small 'insula'
is uncertain; indeed, we know next to nothing of the private houses of
Roman Trier. Nor can we fix the number of the 'insulae'. On the west,
and still more on the east and south-east of the town, much of the
area was not touched by the drainage works and therefore went
unexplored. We have proof only of streets and buildings for a mile in
length and half a mile in breadth.
[Illustration: FIG. 30. TRIER.
From plan by the late Dr. Gräven.]
Nevertheless we may make some guess at the original area. The
streetage itself plainly dates from the original foundation of the
Romano-Gaulish town by Augustus. There is, indeed, no other epoch in
its history, so far as we know it, when a complete laying out could
have been carried through. On the other hand, it is not probable that
the first town was a mile long and half a mile wide. Possibly, as an
acute German archaeologist has suggested, the small 'insulae' in the
south of the town may indicate the line of an original wall and ditch
which, like the first walls of Timgad, were overrun later by an
expanding town. Certainly, early graves found hereabouts show that
this space lay once outside the inhabited area, and similar evidence
has been noted both on the north of the town in the Simeonstrasse, and
on the west near the Mosel Bridge. If this be so, Augusta Treverorum
may have at first covered only 120 or 130 acres; then, as the place
spread beyond its original limits, its builders followed more or less
closely the lines of the first streets, and, save near the Porta
Nigra, continued the chess-board pattern as it was continued at Turin.
_Silchester_ (figs. 31, 32).
Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum (fig. 31), shows a different picture,
which is the more interesting because the excavations carried out in
1890-1909 have given us a fuller knowledge of the town than of any
other Roman site in the western provinces.[108] It was, apparently,
the old tribal capital of the Atrebates and the county-town of its
district in Roman days; though not possessing the full municipal
status, it was probably the seat of local government for a
considerable neighbourhood. In outline it was an irregular eight-sided
area of 100 acres, defended by a strong stone wall, which was added
long after the original foundation. Internally it was divided up by
streets which, except near the east gate, run parallel or at right
angles to one another. Its buildings are: a Forum and Basilica, a
suite of public baths, four small temples, a small Christian church, a
hotel, and a large number of private houses. Its area is by no means
filled with buildings. Garden ground must have been common and cheap,
and the buildings themselves do not form continuous streets; they do
not even front the roadway in the manner of houses in Italian towns.
In these respects Silchester differs widely from any of the examples
which we have already considered, so far as their internal buildings
are known to us. I will not call it a 'garden city', for a garden city
represents an attempt to add some of the features of the country to a
town. Silchester, I fancy, represents the exact opposite. It is an
attempt to insert urban features into a country-side.
[108] For accounts of the Silchester excavations, see
_Archaeologia_, vols. lii-lxii, and _Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire_, i. 271, 350; large plan by W.H. St. John Hope
(1:1,800) in _Archaeol._ lxi.
[Illustration: FIG. 31. SILCHESTER.
(For detail see fig. 32.)]
Most of it must have been laid out at once. At any rate, the area of
which the 'insulae' numbered X, XXI, XXXV, and XIX form the corners,
and the Forum the centre, must have been planned complete from the
first. This covers just 40 acres, and is divided into rectangular
plots of which the smallest covers a little less than an acre and a
half, while the largest fall little short of 3-1/2 acres.[109] Outside
this area, the division of the town into 'insulae' is less completely
carried through, although most of the streets run straight on as far
as the walls, and one or two details may tempt us to think that the
division into 'insulae' was at some time extended beyond the line
ultimately taken by the walls.
[109] The plots are of three sizes, two being 3-4 acres (128 x
130 yds.), six about 2.4 acres (128 x 89 yds.), and six about 1.4
acres (89 x 80 yds.). In the third size the dimension of 240
Roman feet (p. 79) can perhaps be recognized.
[Illustration: FIG. 32. DETAILS OF FOUR INSULAE, THE FORUM AND THE
CHURCH AT SILCHESTER. (From _Archaeologia_.)]
But whatever the exact amount of Roman building and Roman street-plan
given to Silchester when it was first laid out, the place is not in
effect a real town. It is not merely that, as I have said, the houses
do not form continuous streets. A glance at the houses will show that
they could not possibly be fitted into streets. The types of house
here visible are not town houses. They are the types which appear
among the 'villas', that is, the landlords' or the farmers' dwellings,
up and down the rural districts of Roman Britain and northern Gaul,
and the town which they constitute is a conglomeration of country
houses. The reverse has taken place of that which we often see to-day
in England. Our modern builders and architects had--until perhaps
quite recently--only one idea of a small house, the house, namely,
which to-day characterizes the monotonous streets in the poorer
quarters of our new towns, with its front door and bow window on one
side, its offices behind, and its two other sides left blank for other
houses to stand against. This is a town house. Yet our modern builders
use it, all by itself, in the most desolate country districts. I came
across one such not long ago, when driving over a lonely valley in
Exmoor. There it stood, with no other house near it, yet with its two
sides blankly waiting for the street that ought to form itself to the
right and left.
The opposite of this has occurred at Calleva; here the rural house has
been used, with scarcely a change, to form a town. We see the Roman
street-plan introduced in surroundings which are not properly urban.
The outward expression of the civilised municipal system jostles
against a provincial and rural life. Here was a premature attempt to
municipalize the Briton, which outstripped the readiness of the Briton
to be municipalized. Silchester was probably a tribal centre before
the Roman came; for awhile it may have remained much the same under
Roman rule. But forty years after the Roman Conquest, in the reign of
Vespasian (about A.D. 70-85), the Romanization of the whole province
appears to have rapidly advanced. It was, indeed, encouraged by the
Home Government. Various details suggest that the laying out of
Silchester belonged to this very date. But to this the Callevan failed
to rise. He learnt much from Rome; he learnt even town-life; he did
not learn town-life in its highest form. When his town had been
'haussmannized' and fitted with Roman streets, and equipped with Roman
Forum and Basilica, and the rest, he yet continued to live--perhaps
more happily than the true townsman--in his irregularly grouped houses
and cottages amid an expanse of gardens. The area of Silchester
differed little from that of Aosta; its population, if we may judge by
the number of dwelling-houses, was hardly as large as that of Timgad.
_Caerwent_ (fig. 33).
I turn lastly to another Romano-British town, Caerwent (Venta
Silurum), between Chepstow and Newport in Monmouthshire. It is a
smaller town than Silchester. Both towns perhaps began with the same
area, 40 or 45 acres. But Caerwent never expanded; it remained not
much more than 45 acres within the walls. Land was probably valuable
within it; certainly its houses are packed closer, and its garden
ground is smaller than at Silchester. Its general type is, however,
the same. It has a very similar Forum and Basilica, Temples, an
Amphitheatre, and a large number of private houses which resemble
closely those of Silchester. It has, moreover, at least in the parts
that have been so far excavated, distinct traces of a rectangular
street pattern, which, if it was carried through the whole town, would
provide (including the Forum) twenty 'insulae'. The size of these
blocks cannot be determined with any precision. Indeed, in some cases
the houses seem to have encroached on and distorted the street-plan.
Probably it would be true to say that the average block covered an
acre and a half or an acre and two-thirds.[110] We do not know enough
of the history of Caerwent to do more than guess how this street-plan
came to it. Very likely the same process of establishing a
Roman-looking town for a local capital was adopted here as at
Silchester. Very likely the step was taken in the same period as at
Silchester, that is, in the last thirty years of the first century.
Its occurrence is significant. Caerwent lay remote in the far west,
with nothing but garrisons beyond it. It was the outpost of Roman city
life towards the Atlantic. It was the only town of Roman municipal
plan in Britain which was swept by Atlantic breezes.[111]
[110] The three best defined examples measure about 260 x 260,
260 x 280, 275 x 275 ft. (1.55, 1.61, and 1.73 acres respectively).
The unit of 240 Roman feet (p. 79) does not appear at Caerwent.
[111] Accounts of the Caerwent Excavations, 1899-1910, will be
found in _Archaeologia_, vols. lvii-lxii. A good plan of the
whole town, from which fig. 33 is taken, was issued in vol. lxii,
plate 64, by Mr. F. King, architect to the excavations (scale,
1:900).
[Illustration: FIG. 33. CAERWENT.
(Reduced from plan by F. King.)]
Silchester and Caerwent did not stand alone in Britain. At Wroxeter,
the ancient Viroconium, tribal centre of the Cornovii and a
Romano-British country-town much like Silchester, though somewhat
larger, oblong 'insulae' have recently been detected by Mr.
J.P. Bushe-Fox which measure 103 x 126 yds. (2-2/3 acres). At
Cirencester, the Romano-British centre for the canton of the Dobuni
and a still larger town than Wroxeter, the 'insulae' near the Basilica
seem to have measured as much as 120 yards in length, though full
details have not yet been obtained. Both these towns may be ascribed
to the later years of the first century and to the same civilizing
process as Silchester and Caerwent. As further Romano-British towns
are uncovered, we may therefore hope for more examples. However
imperfectly the inner meaning of town-planning was understood, it was
plainly common in the south of Roman Britain.
NOTE. THE EASTERN PROVINCES.
To complete the survey of Roman provincial town-planning, we must
glance briefly at the East. Here towns of Roman origin were few, and
of those few scarcely any are well known. But they do not lack
interest. For example, take Antinoê, built by Hadrian in memory of his
favourite Antinous, on the banks of the Nile. It was a parallelogram
more than 3 miles round, which covered an area of 360 acres. Two main
streets, each colonnaded, crossed at right angles and cut it into four
parts. Of the other streets, nothing certain seems to be known. But
references to the town in papyri denote four quarters of it by various
letters, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and distinguish its house-blocks
by the term Plintheion with a numeral attached. Thus, a house is
described as lying 'in the letter Delta and the Plintheion 7'. Our
documents show that there were in Antinoê at least eleven of these
Plintheia.[112] It is fairly plain that they are rectangular
'insulae', of either Roman or Hellenic type, while the general fashion
of the town and of its monuments suggest a Greek rather than an
Italian city.
[112] _Exploration des ruines d' Antinoe_, by A.C. Gayet
(Annales du Musée Guimet, xxvi, Paris, 1897); _Grundzüge der
Papyruskunde,_ Wilcken, i, pp. 49, 50. Professor A.S. Hunt refers
me to the following papyri:--Reinach, 49. 11; Oxyrhynchus, 1110.
9-10 and note there; Brit. Mus. 1164 (c) 12. The numeration of
the divisions of the town by letters was borrowed from
Alexandria, where the five parts of the city were known as A, B,
C, D, E. For plans see the Napoleonic _Description d'Égypte_ iv
(Paris, 1817), plate 53, and E. Jomard, _Antiquités d'Égypte_
(1818), chap. xv.
[Illustration: FIG. 34. BOSTRA.
(After Baedeker.)]
Another instance may be found still further east, in the land beyond
Jordan, at the capital of the Haurân, Bosrâ, anciently Bostra. Little
has been achieved in the way of exploration of this site beyond
studies of the stately ruins of theatres, palaces, temples, triumphal
arches, aqueducts. Little can therefore be said as to the date of its
ground-plan. But it was rectangular in outline, or nearly so; and its
streets crossed at right angles and enclosed rectangular insulae.[113]
The place owes all its greatness to Rome. During the second century it
was the fortress of the Legio III Cyrenaica, which guarded this part
of the eastern Roman frontier. About A.D. 225 it became a 'colonia,'
and perhaps we should date from this the town-plan just described
(fig. 34).
[113] Baedeker, _Palestine and Syria_ (1906), p. 162.
This rectangular planning remained long in use in the Eastern Empire.
When in A.D. 705 (as it seems) the town of Chersonnesus in the Crimea
was rebuilt after a total destruction, it was rebuilt on a symmetrical
plan of oblong 'insulae' (25-30 by 60-70 yds. area). Its streets were
mean and narrow. But their plan at least was apparently more regular
than that of their predecessors.[114]
[114] Minns, _Greeks and Scythians_, pp. 493, 508, and references
there given.
CHAPTER X
ROMAN BUILDING-LAWS
Archaeology tells us that the western half of the Roman Empire and
many districts in its eastern half used a definite town-plan which may
be named, for brevity, the chess-board pattern. It remains to ask
whether literature, or at least legal literature, provides any basis
of theory or any ratification of the actual system which archaeology
reveals. Of augural lore we have indeed enough and to spare. We know
that the _decumanus_ and the _cardo_, the two main lines of the Roman
land-survey and probably also the two main streets of the Roman
town-plan,[115] were laid out under definite augural and
semi-religious provision. We should expect to find more. A system of
town-planning that is so distinctive and so widely used might
reasonably have created a series of building-laws sanctioning or
modifying it. This did not occur. Neither the lawyers nor even the
land-surveyors, the so-called Gromatici, tell us of any legal rules
relative to town-planning as distinct from surveying in general. The
surveyors, in particular, are much more concerned with the soil of the
province and its 'limitation' and 'centuriation', than with the
arrangements of any individual town, and, whatever their value for
extramural boundaries,[116] throw no light on streets and 'insulae'.
[115] See p. 73.
[116] Schulten, _Hermes_, 1898, p. 534.
The nearest approach to building-laws which occurs is a clause which
seems to be a standing provision in many municipal charters and
similar documents from the age of Cicero onwards, to the effect that
no man might destroy, unroof, or dismantle an urban building unless he
was ready to replace it by a building at least as good or had received
special permission from his local town council. The earliest example
of this provision occurs in the charter of the municipality of
Tarentum, which was drawn up in the time of Cicero.[117] It is
repeated in practically the same words in the charter of the 'colonia
Genetiva' in southern Spain, which was founded in 44 B.C.; it recurs
in the charter granted to the municipality of Malaga, also in southern
Spain, about A.D. 82.[118] Somewhat similar prohibitions of the
removal of even old and worthless houses without special leave are
implied in decrees of the Roman Senate passed in A.D. 44 and A.D. 56,
though these seem really to relate to rural rather than to urban
buildings and were perhaps more agrarian than municipal in their
object.[119] Hadrian, in a dispatch written in A.D. 127 to an eastern
town which had lately obtained something like municipal status,
includes a provision that a house in the town belonging to one
Claudius Socrates must either be repaired by him or handed over to
some other citizen.[120] Similar legislation occurs in A.D. 224 and in
the time of Diocletian and later.[121]
[117] Mommsen, _Eph. Epigr._ ix, p. 9; Dessau, _Inscr. sel._
6086; 'nei quis in oppido quod eius municipi erit aedificium
detegito neive demolito neive disturbato nisei quod non deterius
restiturus erit nisei de senatus sententia. sei quis adversus ea
faxit, quanti id aedificium fuerit, tantam pequniam municipio
dare damnas esto eiusque pequniae quei volet petitio est.'
(English translation in E.G. Hardy's _Roman Laws and Charters_,
p. 101.)
[118] Dessau, 6087, 6089; Hardy, _Roman Laws_, part 2, pp. 34,
108.
[119] For these decrees, which are practically equivalent at this
date to laws, see _CIL_. x. 1401 = Dessau 6043, and de Pachtère
in _Mélanges Cagnat_, p. 169.
[120] For the letter of Hadrian see _Bulletin de Corresp. Hell._
x. 111; it is quoted by Bruns, _Fontes_, 1909, p. 200. Compare
the _Historia Augusta_, Life of Hadrian, ch. 18.
[121] Mommsen, _Eph. Epigr._ iii, p. 111 and _Ges. Schiften_, i.
158, 263, 371; Liebenam, _Städteverwaltung_, 393.
Rules were also laid down occasionally to forbid balconies and similar
structures which might impede the light and air in narrow streets, and
it was a common rule that cemeteries and brickyards must lie outside
the area of inhabitation. At Rome too, efforts were made by various
emperors to limit the height of the large tenement houses which there
formed the 'insulae'. These limits were, however, fixed haphazard
without due reference to the width of the streets; they do not seem to
occur outside of Rome, and even in Rome they were very scantily
observed.
But in general no definite laws were framed. Probably the
municipalities were somewhat closely tied in the administration of
municipal property and had to refer schemes for the employment even of
the smallest bit of vacant space to the 'patron' or the _curator_ of
the town. But, apart from the provisions mentioned above, they had no
specific rights, that are recorded, against private owners or
builders. It was only once, after Rome itself had been burnt out, that
an imperial order condemned landowners who 'held up' their ground
instead of using it, to forfeit their ownership in favour of any one
who offered to build at once.
CHAPTER XI
THE SEQUEL
What was the sequel to this long work of town-planning? Two facts
stand out distinct. First, the Roman planning helped the towns of the
Empire to take definite form, but when the Empire fell, it too met its
end. Only here and there its vestiges lingered on in the streets of
scattered cities like things of a former age. But, secondly, from this
death it rose again, first in the thirteenth century, with
ever-growing power to set the model for the city life of the modern
world.
I. The value of town-planning to Roman civilization was twofold. It
increased the comfort of the common man; it made the towns stronger
and more coherent units to resist the barbarian invasions. When, after
250 years of conflict, the barbarians triumphed, its work was done. In
the next age of ceaseless orderless warfare it was less fit, with its
straight broad streets, for defence and for fighting than the chaos of
narrow tortuous lanes out of which it had grown and to which it now
returned. The cases are few in which survivals of Roman streets have
conditioned the external form of mediaeval or modern towns. We in
England tend perhaps to overrate the likelihood of such survivals. Our
classical education has, until very lately, taught most of us more of
ancient than of mediaeval history, and when our antiquaries find towns
rectangular in outline and streets that cross in a Carfax, they give
them a Roman origin.
Such a tendency is wrong. Plentiful evidence shows that even in Italy
and even in towns where men have dwelt without a break since Roman
days, the Roman streets, and with them the Roman town-plans, have far
oftener vanished than endured. Rome herself, the Eternal City, uses
hardly one street to-day which was used in the Roman Empire. Some few
Italian towns, described in detail above, have a better claim to be
called 'eternal'; half a dozen in northern Italy retain their ancient
streets in singular perfection. Yet even there cities like Padua and
Mantua, Genoa and Pisa, have lost the signs of their older fashion.
So, too, in the provinces. In the Danubian lands only one town can
even be supposed to preserve a few of its Roman streets. In all the
once great cities of that region, Sirmium and Siscia, Poetovio and
Celeia and Emona, they have wholly gone; you may walk across the sites
to-day and seek them in vain in modern street or hedgerow or lane. In
Gaul there were many Roman municipalities in the south; there were
many towns of lesser rank but equal wealth in the centre and west and
north. But we owe our knowledge of their town-plans to an inscription
from Orange and to some excavations at Autun and Trier. Cologne and
Trier alone, or almost alone, keep Roman streets in modern use, and
they are significant. Both became Roman towns in the first century;
both held colonial rank; both have lived on continuously ever since
and hardly changed their names. Yet both bear to-day the stamp of the
Middle Ages, and the Roman streets which they use are small and nearly
unrecognizable fragments.
There is, indeed, no law of survivals. Chance--that convenient ancient
word to denote the interaction of many imponderable forces--has ruled
one way in one place and otherwise in another. Sometimes monuments
have alone survived, sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give
reasons for this contrast of fates. At Pola, gates, temples, and
amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past and the modern town-square
keeps so plainly the tradition of the Forum that you cannot walk
across it without a sense of what it was. Yet not a single street
agrees with those of the Roman 'colonia'. In the Lombard and Tuscan
plains, at Turin and Pavia and Piacenza, at Florence and Lucca, the
Roman streets are still in use, just as the old Roman field-ways still
divide up the fertile plains outside those towns. But, save in Turin,
hardly one Roman stone has been left upon another. In the no less
fertile plain of the lower Rhone, at Nîmes and Arles and Orange, the
stately ruins wake the admiration of the busiest and least learned
traveller; of the Roman streets there is no sign.
Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other
western province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer. In London,
within the limits of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the
course of any Roman street, though Roman roads that lead up to the
gates are still in use. At Colchester the Roman walls still stand; the
places of the Roman gates are known; the masonry of the west gate is
still visible as the masonry of a gateway. But the modern and ancient
streets do not coincide, and the west gate, which has so well
withstood the blows of time, can hardly be reached by road from within
the city. At York the defences of the legionary fortress have still
their place in the sun, but the 'colonia' on the other bank of the
Ouse has vanished wholly from the surface, walls and streets together,
and the houses of the citizens of Eburacum are known solely by finds
of mosaic floors. At Lincoln the Roman walls and gates can easily be
traced and one gate rears its arch intact, but the Bailgate alone
follows, and that erratically, the line of a Roman street. The road
from the Humber, thirty miles north of Lincoln, runs to-day, as it has
run for eighteen centuries, under the Newport arch and through the
modern town and passes on southwards. That long straight road has
given a feature to Lincoln, but it is a feature due to the Roman
highway outside the town, not to the streets within it. Lincoln itself
is as English as Cologne and Trier are German.
II. But if Roman streets have seldom survived continuously to modern
days, if Roman town-planning perished with the western Empire, it has
none the less profoundly influenced the towns of mediaeval and modern
Europe and America. Early in the thirteenth century men began to
revive, with certain modifications, the rectangular planning which
Rome had used. Perhaps copying Roman originals seen in northern Italy,
Frederic Stupor Mundi now built on a chess-board pattern the Terra
Nova which he founded in Sicily. Now, in 1231, Barcelonette was built
with twenty square 'insulae' in south-eastern France. Now, too, the
'Bastides' and 'Villes Neuves' of southern France and towns like
Aigues-Mortes (1240) were built on similar plans.[122]
[122] For the Bastides and Villes Neuves see Dr. A.E. Brinckmann,
_Deutsche Bauzeitung_, Jan.-Feb., 1910, and, for an example, fig.
35. Many of them may be earlier than 1200 (A. Giry, _Bibl. de
l'École des Chartes_, xlii. 451), but those with more or less
chess-board plans seem later.
[Illustration: FIG. 35. PLAN OF A BASTIDE TOWN, SAUVETERRE-DE-GUYENNE
NEAR BORDEAUX (A.D. 1281).
(By Dr. A.E. Brinckmann.)]
Soon after, the chess-board pattern came to England and was used in
Edwardian towns like Flint[123] and Winchelsea; then, too, it was
adopted at the other end of the civilized world by German soldiers in
Polish lands. Cracow, for example, owes to German settlers in the
mid-thirteenth century that curious chess-board pattern of its
innermost and oldest streets which so much puzzles the modern
visitor.[124] It is unnecessary here to follow further the renaissance
of town-planning. By intervals and revivals it continued to spread. In
1652 it reached Java, when the Dutch built Batavia. In 1682 it reached
America, when Penn founded Philadelphia. In 1753, when Kandahar was
refounded as a new town on a new site, its Afghan builders laid out a
roughly rectangular city, divided into four quarters meeting at a
central Carfax and divided further into many strangely rectangular
blocks of houses.[125]
[123] Compare E.A. Lewis, _Medieval Boroughs of Snowdonia_, pp.
30, 61 foll.
[124] So, too, Lemberg. Compare R.F. Kaindl, _Die Deutschen in
den Karpathenländern_, i. 178, 293; ii. 304; he does not, however,
deal with the actual plans.
[125] I have to thank the late Sir Alfred Lyall for a sight of a
survey made by English engineers in 1839.
But in growing, the old town-planning has passed into a new stage. The
Romans dealt with small areas, seldom more than three hundred acres
and often very much less. The town-plans of the Middle Ages and even
of modern times affected areas that were little larger. Only the last
days have brought development. Till the enormous changes of the
nineteenth century--changes which have transferred the termination of
ancient history from A.D. 476 to near A.D. 1800--the older fashions
remained, in town-life as in most other forms of civilized society.
Towns were still, with few exceptions, small and their difficulties,
if real, were simple. Save in half a dozen abnormal capitals, they
had, even in relatively modern days, no vast populations to be fed and
made into human and orderly citizens. They had no chemical industries,
no chimneys defiling the air, or drains defiling the water. Now,
builders have to face the many square miles of Chicago or Buenos
Ayres, to provide lungs for their cities, to fight with polluted
streams and smoke. Their problems are quite unlike those of the
ancients. When Cobbett, about 1800, called London the Great Wen, he
contrasted in two monosyllables the ancient ideal of a city with the
ugly modern facts.
It is not, therefore, likely that modern architects or legislators
will learn many hints from plans of Timgad or of Silchester. There are
lessons perhaps in the growth of Turin from its little ancient
chess-board to its modern enlargement, but such developments are rare.
The great benefit to modern workers of such a survey as I have
attempted is that it shows the slow and painful steps by which mankind
became at last able to plan towns as units, yet inhabited by
individual men and women, and that it emphasizes the need for definite
rules and principles. Nor is it perhaps quite superfluous to-day to
point out how closely, even after the great upheaval of the nineteenth
century, the forms of modern life depend on the Roman world.