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The Boudican destruction horizon identified in Colchester, London and Verulamium is very helpful in giving us insight into the nature of the built environment of those towns and cities before a.d. 60 and into their slow recovery, especially of Colchester and Verulamium, afterwards.1 Pre-Flavian urban development has been identified in other southern towns, too, notably Chichester (and Fishbourne) and Silchester,2 and Ernest Black sees the presence of ‘thin-walled box-tiles’ at the port site at Fingringhoe, Essex, and the ‘proto-palace’ at Fishbourne, as well as in Colchester and Canterbury as evidence of pre-Boudican bath building.3 This is tantalising, but is it enough of a context to explain Dio Cassius’ comments that the causes of the Boudican revolt included the confiscation of money lent by Claudius to leading Britons which had to be repaid, coupled with the calling-in of a loan equivalent to 40 million sesterces by Seneca.4 Who was borrowing and for what? Did it include buildings identified in the three towns that suffered at the hands of Boudica as well as in other towns where there is evidence of pre-Flavian building, but where it is difficult to distinguish between pre- and post-a.d. 60 contexts? To what extent was Roman-style building, especially of bath-houses, only confined to towns before a.d. 60? Of the several hundred legionaries and auxiliaries retiring each year with their savings and retirement gratuities, how many chose to settle in the province on retirement? How many in the towns and how many in the countryside? How did private projects relate to public building works? The purpose of this paper is to review the question of how far Roman-style building, particularly in masonry, had taken off across Britain, outside of a military context, whether before a.d. 60 or before the Civil War of a.d. 68–69 and the start of the Flavian dynasty.
In regard to public building works we should pause to consider how the road network was being developed and how precursors of the cursus publicus were supported before Boudica or during the Claudio-Neronian period as a whole. If we have a terminus post quem of a.d. 47/8 for the construction of the road leading west out of London5 that subsequently divides to become the road to...