Alice Holt in the Roman Period :
The Alice Holt & Farnham Potteries
October 14th 2007.
>>Back to Home Page
"...fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave".
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.(1776).
For four hundred years Britain was part of the mightiest Empire of the Ancient World and what is now Alice Holt Forest was one of the most important industrial sites, the centre of a pottery industry which made Alice Holt the 'Stoke-on-Trent' of Roman Britain.
The Romans began their conquest of the Celtic tribal kingdoms which occupied the island of Britannia in the year A.D. 43 when the Emperor Claudius (in dire need of a 'PR coup' to counter his image as an unprepossessingly ageing, bookish man in a society which lionised vigorous military glory) ordered a full scale military invasion.
Alice Holt sat fair and square in the middle of the most prosperous and highly 'civilised' part of the Romans' new Province, close to the capital Londinium (London) and close to the main road between the important local capital of Calleva (now the wonderful deserted city of Silchester with its surviving walls and amphitheatre) and the South coast port of Noviomagus (Chichester)
Click here for TIMELINE OF ROMAN BRITAIN
Important Roman remains are to be found throughout the surrounding area. On the Silchester-Chichester road there was a small town sited at Neatham close to present day Holybourne.The countryside along the hills bordering the Wey Valley between Farnham and Alton was occupied by prosperous agricultural estates, probably dominated by vineyards and cornfields. Recently extensive patterns of carefully laid out grid iron field systems and connecting roads have been identified all along the Roman road from Durovernum (Canterbury) to Venta (Winchester) which followed the major pre-historic trading route along the Downs which is today represented by the A31 and the "Pilgrims Way". Indeed, many elements of the landscape aroiund Alice Holt, such as field boundaries and trackways can be traced back to Roman times, or in some cases to the pre-Roman Celtic period especially on the elevated malmstone ridge around Wyck, the Worldhams and Binsted.
click to see MAP OF ROMAN FEATURES IN THE LANDSCAPE AROUND ALICE HOLT FOREST
Villas, large country houses at the centre of these rural estates, equipped with such luxurious conveniencies as piped water, underfloor central heating and beautiful mosaic floors have been excavated at Wyck, West Worldham, South Hay and Coldrey, near Bentley with others located ant Kingsley, Blackmoor and Liss. The superb 'Blackmoor Beaker' (a.k.a 'The Selborne Cup') found in a cremation burial near Blackmoor and numerous coin hoards testify to the prosperity of the area.
(L) The 'Blackmoor Beaker' or 'Selborne Cup'
(R) The amphitheatre at Calleva, regional capital of the romanised Attrebates tribe. Now the atmospheric deserted city of Silchester
The most notable single find in the area was the 'Blackmoor Hoard': no less than 29,773 coins dated to the end of the 3rd century A.D. This may well have been wages for the army of Allectus, usurping ruler of a breakaway Britannia whose troops were defeated in A.D. 296 by the Imperial troops of Constantius Chlorus at a battle generally located to the nearby Woolmer Forest area.
Alice Holt stands on a wide outcrop of the 'Gault', a heavy, blue clay laid down during the Cretaceous period around 100 million years ago. The Gault is a first class material for pottery and pits from which it was excavated are visible, for example near the Straits enclosure. Fine quartz sand used to temper the pots is also to be found in nearby heathland areas of the Western Weald beyond Dockenfield. The undulating, frequently waterlogged land of Alice Holt was not attractive for agriculture and like most of the Weald was heavily wooded. Wood was the other important resource for the potteries: used to fire the kilns, one of which was reconstructed some years ago as a project by the Forestry Commission. A wide area around the kilns would certainly have been 'coppiced'. Trees were cut down to the stumps on a cycle of ten to thirty years, producing a dense crop of poles, ideal for producing faggots of firewood to fuel the kilns to the required temperature of some 890 degrees celsius. Samples of charcoal found on kiln sites indeed show long thin poles of young oak, hazel and willow provided the fuel ,some of which may have been reduced to charcoal prior to being used in the kilns. The final raw material needed for the potteries was turf, from which the domed kilns themselves were constructed.
The Roman kilns were mainly of a type known as updraught kilns, with distinctive long, narrow fireboxes, which maintained a low-oxygen draught or 'reducing' environment, necessary to keep the pottery grey in colour and prevent oxygenation which produced a redder, more crumbly ware.
For many years archaeologists have studied the form and fabric of ancient pot sherds closely, classifying them into myriad distinct types in order to identify both their age and area of origin. The Forest has given it's name to Alice Holt Ware, found in Roman sites over a wide are of South Eastern Britain. It's a generally grey (Sometimes whitish or somewhat red) with a high content of sand. Alice Holt Ware is classified as a 'coarse' pottery. It was of good quality and superior to the 'home made' output of many local producers but essentially a utilitarian, household ceramic, not comparable in quality or cost to the fine, red-painted 'Samian' ware which was imported from France for use as the Roman housewife's 'best china'. Many pieces are decorated with simple patterns scratched in by using a wooden comb and a few carry graffiti left by the potters. Pipe clay extracted from an outcropping of the Reading Beds north of Farnham seems to have been used to apply a fine slip to some of the pots.
Typical alice holt wares including a flagon from the Museum of London
Flagons, jars and dishes of various types predominate; some based on traditional local designs, others produced in imitation of popular continental 'Gallo-Belgic' or Rhinish styles indicating the cosmopolitan taste of the customers. There was also some production of bricks and tiles for building. The scale of the industry is indicated by the number of kiln sites,:around 80 are clustered in the Southern end of the Forest with more sites to the South of Farnham and around Binsted as well as sites at Kingsley, Headley and Tilford. It's estimated that a minimum of some half a million 'wasters' or reject items are contained in the known kiln sites. Depending on the reject rate, production must have averaged in the order of tens of thousands of pieces annually. Over the nearly four centuries when the potteries were active, there were noticable changes in the quality of wares produced, with later products being finer and containing less coarse sand than the earlier wares. Much of the distribution seems to have been by river, following the little River Slea down to its confluence with the Wey and eventually the Thames. Plus the pattern of finds suggests cartloads of pottery were despatched by road to Silchester, Winchester, along the Hog's Back to Kent and via the bridge over the Thames at Pontum (Staines) along Stane Street (now the A30) to London. Thence smaller quantities were transported into Essex along Stane Street's Easterly continuation, the modern A12 towards Colchester.
The distribution of finds of Alice Holt Ware, the red diamond marking the site of the potteries (Tyer 2003)
Who controlled the industry and how it was organised is largely a mystery but it may well have been centred on the settlement at Neatham which was on an important trading route and was also probably the centre of local wine production for which a ready supply of large vessels was essential. The town's probable name Vindomis is thought to refer to it's position in 'the wine country'. At Farnham the remains of a bath block, apparently for the use of workers has been found in association with the kilns. Whether they were slaves or freemen; independent entrepreneurs or part of a monopolistically controlled industry is not known but all the signs point to more, rather than less centralised organsiation. There is no evidence of government involvement in the industry: on the contrary Alice Holt ware is rarely found in military contexts, whereas the Poole-based industry clearly had major contracts to supply the army.
Quite early in the Roman period, certainly by the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, the first of the Flavian Dynasty who assumed the throne in AD. 69 there was large scale pottery production going on in kilns in and around what is now Alice Holt Forest.Alice Holt was already supplying the important market in the new and booming capital city Londinium (London). During the A.D. 70's as much as 25% of all the ceramics sold in the capital were of Alice Holt origin, although later more local suppliers began to eat into the Alice Holt area's dominance of the Londinium market. The second century saw the Alice Holt potters losing some of their share of the market accross the South East to other centres such as those based around Poole and smaller concerns closer to London.
However the Alice Holt industry witnessed a big revival in the third and fourth centuries with sites in Staines and London containing anything from 30 to 60% material of Alice Holt origin and isolated finds showing some Alice Holt goods reaching more distant customers in Essex and Kent. This upswing in production seems due mainly to the reimposition of a degree of political order and monetary stability which boosted trade throughout the Roman world in the reign of the Emperor Aurelian from A.D. 270 onwards. At this time the production and marketing seems to have become more sophisticated with the potters specialising in standardised storage jars of 2 sextarii (approx 1.1 litre) and 8 urnae (= 200 sextarii or approx 110 litres) capacities. It's likely that these were used for transporting locally grown wine. The fact that very few pieces of Alice Holt ware have been found on the Continent suggests that English wine enjoyed much the same reputation in France as it does today! After A.D. 350 there was a further expansion in production levels and in the areas to which Alice Holt ware was traded, with examples turning up from Gloucestershire in the West to near Colchester in the East.
However by the the beginning of the fifth century, Britannia, in common with the rest of the Western Roman world was sliding inexorably into chaos: mired in political instability, with insufficient military forces to defend the coasts and borders from constant attack by plundering barbarian tribes. Economic decline set in to the point where money, exchange and trade became increasingly neglected. By the time the last Roman Legions departed in A.D. 410, the Alice Holt kilns were still active but after about A.D. 420 there was a rapid tailing off of production. Instead, smaller local potteries started turning out a limited range of crude, reddish 'Surrey slipware' and these 'cottage industries' seem to have increasingly taken over from large, specialised production centres, not only at Alice Holt but throughout the country.
So the Alice Holt area reverted progressively to forest, becoming eventually the hunting ground of the Bishops of Winchester, capital of the Saxon Kingdom of Wessex which eventually succeeded the Roman Empire as the Dark Ages gave way to the early Medieval period.
Today the kiln sites are not visually spectacular, being low mounds or patches of sooty coloured earth on the forest floor , often marked by masses of nettles and elder (both are 'greedy' plants which grow near all sorts of human occupation sites due to the high levels of nutrients in the soil: even after some 1600 years) Where the ground is disturbed by tree falls or rabbit burrows, huge quantities of pottery fragments often come to light. As the area has been virtually free of plouging throughout its history, the pottery sherds remain very concentrated at the original dumps around the kilns, altough scattered fragments are often to be found washed out in the stream beds that cross the southern parts of the Forest.
Click to see air photo of a kiln site near Alice Holt
Those who might think of searching the sites for hidden treasures should be aware....
1) These are Scheduled Ancient Monuments, therefore protected by law
2) Metal detecting is forbidden on Forestry Commission land
3) The kiln sites represent the accumulated waste materials of the industry: ash, charcoal and deliberately rejected broken pots thrown casually on the ground and generally smashed to smitherines. Those expecting to find a priceless vase or hoard of gold coins are as unlikely to find them digging here as they would be to turn up a diamond necklace on a modern rubbish dump!
The kilns were first recognised by local antiquary W.L.Long who noted them when the Farnham to Petersfield Turnpike (now the A325) was cut through the Forest in the 1820's , but Long was unsure whether the pottery might be Roman, 'British' or Saxon. Over the first half of the twentieth century several sites were excavated by Major Wade, the energetic local historian and archaeologist who lived in Bentley (famously keeping the skeleton of a young Roman displayed in his dining room, having excavated it from the villa site at Coldrey).Wade published a small pamphlet on the subject which was sold locally.
The most detailed and comprehensive account of the potteries and their history can be found in M.A.B.Lyme and R.S. Jefferies 1979 work The Alice Holt/Farnham Roman Pottery Industry (Council for British Archaeology Research Report no30)