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Pavements and Poverty in the Chiltern Villas

In addressing a CBA conference in 1965 Mr. C. E. Stevens performed his now famous ‘strip-tease act’, whereby he arrived at the conclusion that, save in a few exceptional areas, south-eastern England from Hengistbury Head to the Wash rarely produces Romano-British villas with patterned pavements. He related this phenomenon to the system of land-tenure which he believes he can recognize operating in south-eastern England during the Roman period—tenure in tir gwelyawg. Hence, the occupiers of the villas did not lay mosaic pavements because they ‘do not seem to have had the power of capital accumulation sufficient to place an order for them’. South-eastern England thus becomes a zone of ‘poor men's villas’ (to use Mr. Stevens' term), and sitting in the very centre of this zone are the villas of the Chilterns. Mr. Stevens generously recognized that High Wycombe was an exception to his rule, and rather more grudgingly admitted that Totternhoe might be another, but he was confident that ‘critics might find one or two more, but not many’. I have previously challenged, in passing, this harsh assessment of the Chiltern villas, but in the last two years additional information has come to light and the importance of well-dated mosaic pavements from villas has been emphasized by Dr. D. J. Smith's brilliant chapter on villa-mosaics in The Roman Villa in Britain.