The story of Wroxeter
When the Roman army reached the Shropshire plain, people had been farming it for more than 1,500 years. They were the Cornovii. They lived in farmsteads, perhaps in hillforts like the Wrekin too. They used no coins, little pottery apart from containers of salt from the Cheshire brine springs, and probably vessels of leather and wood. Their wealth was in cattle and sheep, and there is no sign that they were warlike.1
The army arrives
The army came in the late 40s AD, about four years after the invasion, and built camps at the river crossings. Around AD 47 a fort for 500 cavalry went up by the ford. The tombstone of one of its riders, Tiberius Claudius Tirintius, shows his unit came from Thrace, now Bulgaria and Greece.1
About ten years later the Fourteenth Legion built a full fortress a kilometre to the north, on high ground above the Severn: room for 5,000 legionaries and 500 cavalry, with workshops, stores, a hospital, baths and a mansion for the commander. Soldiers could not legally marry, but many had partners, local women or women who had followed the legion from Mainz in Germany. A village of families and traders grew up outside the gates.1
For the local people, losing land to the fortress, facing soldiers, money and a new language must have been a shock.1 The Twentieth Legion took over around AD 68. Wales was conquered by 78, the army moved north, and once the legion began a new fortress at Inchtuthil in Scotland, around AD 85, Wroxeter was no longer needed.1
A city on a soldier’s grid
The army flattened the fortress walls but left the streets, and in the 90s a city was laid out on them, probably by local leading families and retired soldiers together. It was planned on a grand scale: 78 hectares and 48 blocks, almost five times the size of the fortress. Probably not all of it was ever filled.1
Its civic centre was finished between AD 130 and 150: a public bath house with a market hall and shops, and across the road the forum, the city’s marketplace, town hall and courts. Around AD 200 the city got a wall, not of stone but of timber and turf, perhaps more for show than for defence.1
The slow end
There was no sack. In the 3rd and 4th centuries the empire paid out more than it raised, and inflation hit city government hard. At Wroxeter the baths grew shabby and part of the forum was abandoned early in the 4th century. Great buildings were taken down when they became unsafe. By the middle of the 5th century the city centre was empty. A small community stayed by the ford, around what became St Andrew’s church, which still lines up with the Roman street grid.1
Where the evidence is unclear
A city or a plan for one?The 48 blocks were marked out, but it is unlikely all were lived in, at least at first. The grid shows ambition more than population.1
Did Christians carry on here?St Andrew’s may have taken over from an earlier British Christian community, the last of the Roman townspeople. The church’s earliest stone is 10th or 11th century, so it cannot be proved.1
