John Peter Wild

The Textile Industries of Roman Britain

The achievement of textile producers in Roman Britain is highlighted most strikingly by two sets of entries in the Edict of Diocletian, a conspectus of traded goods and services available across the Empire, published in A.D. 301. The British birrus , a hooded cape of wool, is ranked equal sixth in a list of fourteen categories of birrus distinguished from one another by price and quality. A corresponding, but shorter, list of tapetia , wool rugs, puts both the British first-class and second-class grades ahead of all the rest: the British tapete , in short, was second to none. No other British product was deemed worthy of mention by the compilers of the Edict; prima facie , therefore, one could argue that textile production was Britains leading industry by the late third century A.D. Can such a notion be substantiated?

The Byrrus Britannicus

In an attempt to halt the serious inflation in the later Roman Empire, Diocletian (n. 1) in A.D. 301 issued, in the form of an edict, a tariff-list of maximum permitted prices for consumer goods and of minimum wages for certain classes of labourer. He addressed it to the provincials of the whole empire (n. 2) ( orbi universo ) and appealed for their wholehearted co-operation in carrying it out. For us, it is a mine of vital information about the economic and social conditions of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. Among the woollen textiles listed in chapter XIX appears the byrrus Britannicus (n. 3) which is of some local interest for Roman Britain. It is with this that we shall concern ourselves in the following discussion.

The Roman Body Found on Grewelthorpe Moor in 1850: A Reappraisal

In the spring of 1850, a remarkably well-preserved male bog-body was found on Grewelthorpe Moor, near Ripon, North Yorkshire. The body was clad in brightly-coloured woollen garments and a pair of leather ‘sandals’, the style of which induced two late nineteenth-century writers to conclude that it was that of an ‘ancient Roman’ (see below). More recently, Tinsley recognized the importance of this find and suggested that the body may have been a ‘Roman soldier’. In the absence of adequate supporting evidence, one of the present authors (J.P.W.) previously expressed skepticism concerning the bodys supposed Roman date. Two woollen fragments which survive in the Yorkshire Museum in themselves provide insufficient dating evidence. Fortunately, the surviving shoe-sole is of a distinctive Roman-British regional type. This article presents the dating evidence, reappraises the clothing in the light of its confirmed Romano-British origin, and re-assesses the circumstances behind the death in the light of comparable finds.

Loanwards and Roman expansion in north-west Europe

In this article the author reviews the evidence which loanwords supply for the character of cultural contact in north‐west Europe during the Roman period. After some brief comments on the general p...