the year is 1622 and a man named Nicholas Burgier is tasked by the French King at the
time of mapping the entire Roman Empire what was he did just that and he came up
with a two-part 1,000 page document called L Empire D Roman or something
like that but in doing that he made one small mistake so subtle in its content
that it still perpetrates itself today 400 or so years on in the media and it's taken
for granted as we speak welcome to the story of everything you know about Roman Roads is
wrong, I'll tell you the story of about five or six different myths as I walk along various Roman
roads first up the Fosse way you have to forgive me because every so often I'll dive into a hedge
just like this and show you a bit of Roman Road here we are a bit of the
Fosse way that isn't on a main road and it isn't a main road today the
a37 is to the south of me and this here is a significant part of the
fosse way. While we continue up the Fosse way towards Beacon Hill well let's keep on point
because the first myth is the groma and that the notion that all Roman roads were aligned using
Gromas, now the use of gromas isn't disputed in any way there's archaeological evidence to
suggest they were used I think even a complete one was found in the remains of Pompeii however when
you look at every video every blog every bit of article that writes about them where they
all seem to gloss over one significant point, so a groma is a super useful surveying tool think
Plum lines hanging from across in order to set a route against a fix point in the distance perhaps
a beacon this all adds up and you can set off your many surveying underlings across the hills to line
up dozens of these points so as may become obvious in order to use a groma effectively
well you need to know with a fair degree of accuracy which direction you want to head in,
that's not too difficult but when I say a good degree of accuracy not just to the degree you
need to be absurdly accurate if you want to hit a straight line it's 60 miles in
the distance so here we have two options number one we rely heavily on beacons set fires along
the Route in the general direction alter them as we go and also as we reach our destination
now depending on the length of the route this would take an absurd amount of time truly even
with an unlimited people to hand you still have to relay messages head back and forth move line
up repeat the process over and over number two why we take a more accurate direction from the
immediate point that we leave place a and do the same for Place B at the same time I still don't
think we're going to be absolutely spot on so the line is laid from each Direction until it meets in
the middle now this in my opinion unless absurdly accurate would always leave lead to a very slight
Kink or change in the middle and that is pretty much what we commonly see here in the south of
the UK at least so yes the groma was part of this bigger plan but it's important to see it
as one tool of many in various surveying methods of the Romans rather than the be all and end
now there are three types of Roman Road you may not have heard of two of them number one
for foot traffic only referred to as the ITA number two for the pack horse the Beast of
Burden like a bridleway of today referred to as the Actus and number three the VIA the classic
Roman Road that we know and love for wheeled traffic there a great example just here in the
Hedge you can see the Aggar running down there which raised up in the middle and that's where
this next myth starts Roman road construction try Googling Roman road construction and you'll get a
whole load of results just like this a 3 to 6 foot trench is dug then filled with stones the
statumen and then a fine layer of rudus and then the nucleus and then the pavementum now when you
dig deep and you try and find evidence for this construction method on the Roman Road well you
often go back to a first Century writer Marcus Vitruvius and he wrote about these layers so it
all adds up but there was one problem which is where our friend Nicholas burgier possibly went
wrong Marcus Vitruvius wasn't talking about Roman roads he was talking about architecture and how
to build a villa and the foundations so in 1617 Nicholas B's detailed study of the great Roman
roads of the Empire well actually confused the words pavementum meaning floor with the French
word pave meaning stone or paved Road this was all very odd on Nicholas B's part because he even
did excavations of Roman roads just like this one here and he never found one example that
matched the description from Marcus Vitruvius even if you're doing a btech in college today
on road construction with the main textbook still has diagrams and pictures on how Roman
roads were built You Dig Down 3 to 6 ft for your foundation it's funny how that notion has been
perpetrated for that time on for the 400 years and it still exists today in modern education
now here in Britain in fact let's go and have another look at this, well much archaeological
evidence suggests that mainly the the top layer of soil was scraped back perhaps 6 in to a foot and
then filled with the more hardcore and final layers on top so what about the image of the
paved Roman Road the Romantic image nope again something that's been perpetrated by the media
for decades that the whole empire of Britain was paved on the main Roman roads just simply
not true yes perhaps more so as time went on in the towns and cities and the the areas of
populations or forts but certain and not outside of those not one shred of evidence suggests
that there was once a question on Qi hosted by Steven fry there went something like this,
"who invented straight roads" but I felt a bit suspicious and I thought well the claxon's going
to go off because that's the obvious answer "the Romans oh dear oh dear oh dear" Steven
fry came to the conclusion that the Romans just built on top of ancient trackways the work and
The Routes were already done for them now that notion has sat in my head probably for the last
decade ever since and it probably shouldn't be sat there for a number of reasons so sit
yourself down on Google and try and find evidence for this try and find archaeological papers which
study this rather than just a passing mention you probably won't yet you'll find this repeated over
and over by countless media outlets and blogs alike but did it actually happen well in part
yes I think some of the larger routs such as the fosse way or watling Street well they certainly
formed ancient trackways before the Roman roads but consider the rest of the Roman Road Network
and The Wider context consider what an ancient trackway looks like and again its wider context
pre Roman Britain and we have a number of tribes and whilst trade took place throughout that era
between the those tribes it's important to think of them as their own rule within their own Empire
there would have been absolutely zero joined up thinking on routeways that would connect major
settlements across those tribes and yes we did have things like the Ridgeway and the path of
leas resistance but nothing quite like what the Roman Empire gave us thereafter consider
this very Roman Road just sat here on the edge of the pathway that I'm walking on this is the
portway that goes from basically London through down to serum and onto Dorchester now that forms
a relatively straight line between each as we've discussed but also pre-roman well they had the
route but they didn't they had the Harrow way the Pilgrim's way and they really zigzagged their way
across the country straight line almost certainly not defensive perhaps yes so yeah the Romans
did come along and broadly use the same route between town and town and resource to Resource
but to imply they just built and upgraded on top of ancient trackways simply isn't true
and of course doing quite an injustice to the civilization that was the Roman Empire and its
technology. So there was a viral Tweet back in 2019 largely based on an early internet chain
mail thingy which gave the story of the modern Railway gauge of 4' 8 1/2 in and how it came
from an Imperial War Chariot now these were apparently made just wide enough to fit two
horses backsides in and of course you can derive many amusing statements to link the two it appears
that the Crux of this comes from a statement which reads the people that built the tramways
and early Railways used the same Jigs and tools as they used to build wagons which used the same
wheel spacing this is a massive assumption based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever and assuming
tools and jigs seemingly remained the same for centuries and potentially Millennia so how do
we go about debunking this well for a start the UK used a wide variety of gauges in early
Railway years so that statement falls apart just there without much effort now it stated that the
Wagon Wheel spacing on a Roman wagon was tightly monitored and needed to be specific distance in
order that the wagons did not break in the paved wheel ruts this was the same throughout Europe
including Britain it goes on to profess yeah that's complete nonsense too the implication it
states is that these ruts were created by War chariots and therefore the gauge has lived on
ever since and you can draw all kind of amusing sentences from that completely not true if you'd
like a full debunk of this a very detailed one I'll link below to railway engineer Gareth dennis
[Music] this next up maps not so much a myth as such but perhaps a uh preconception of map and
map Usage Now I think with regards to Maps since the Roman times and today we've kind of Gone full
circle let me explain what I mean so let's say you were tasked with moving something on the Roman
Road Network maybe from I don't know let's say York to silchester whether you are responsible for
moving an army unit or working for the government on the circus publicus whatever it be you wouldn't
be expected to take out a huge map and navigate your way you would have what was referred to as an
itinerary and then of course came the 1800s and the need to map every corner every Hill
every Forest every Road in this country largely for military purposes in its early
days the likes of William Roy mapping in Scotland gave the birth of the Ordinance
survey and on then for the next 200 years even when I was a kid growing up I had me
OS maps and I'd cycle everywhere I possibly could looking at a map flat on a table where
do I go next but now perhaps if it wasn't for an education system which taught me that I wouldn't
really have a need for that flat table map I wouldn't have a need for that at all because
I'll just plum in my location on a satnav or Google Maps and I'll just use that as an
itinerary, so I've been paul, I hope you've enjoyed something a little bit different today
with the Roman myths if you like what you're see you want to see some behind the scenes waffle with
me and Rebecca then obviously you can sign up to our patreon or the members by clicking on a couple
of the links in the description below see you this time next week or whenever the next video is