Behind me is the Stanegate. This was fashioned by the residents of Corbridge into a high
street along which shops and businesses jostled to get access to the travellers passing along
the frontier of Roman Britain. This was really the lifeline of the Roman town for almost
all of its existence.
By the end of the second century the permanent fort had left and the town that had been outside
of that fort had expanded and really capitalised on its important position on the crossroads.
Running east to west was the Stanegate, running north to south was Dere Street, and of course
then there’s the River Tyne that connects Corbridge to the coast. This makes Corbridge
the ideal location for a trading town.
These objects are a real insight into the thriving town or market town, as we would
maybe describe it, Corbridge would have been. These pots we think were made in the late
second and third century. Now this mould here shows Jupiter Dolichenus, who’s a god who
originates in Syria and is brought across the Empire by the army. This piece shows a
smith god and he’s got his tools of his trade. So he’s holding an axe, his tongs
and this here is his anvil ready to strike.
To make a town like this successful you need everyday people like the blacksmith, grafting
to make the products and to sell them. And they would have done so from buildings like
this. This is a humble strip house. At the front, next to the high street, would have
been a shop. At the back there was probably a workshop and then above that dwelling space
for the family that lived here.
Now we don’t just have this evidence at Corbridge. We have evidence of broader manufacture.
And we know that there were people making mortaria at Corbridge, which is grinding vessels,
and this is a fragment here. And you can see here this is stamped with a name or three
letters, and the name is Saturninus. And we know this was made at Corbridge because we
have the stamp. Saturninus would have wanted people to know that he made this mortaria,
because then if it’s a good mortaria they’ll recommend him to other people to buy his mortaria
from. It’s a bit of free advertising and also a little bit like a trademark.
So not only did they take a certain amount of pride in some of the materials they made,
the people of Corbridge took pride in their town. As a place of wealth, as a place of
beauty, both in terms of what they were producing and where they were living. So for example
the granaries had these elaborate columns. Behind me there would have been a public fountain
which would have had statues either side of it.
Across the Roman Empire every time a fort is built or settled, a town springs up around
the outside to service that fort. Quite often when the fort leaves or the army leaves, that
town disperses. However at Corbridge that is not the case. The army leaves and the town
stays and actually gets bigger, so it’s building its own identity.
Here we have a visual representation of the longevity of Corbridge. Down at the bottom
here is the road level quite early on in the town’s history, then over the centuries
the residents of Corbridge repaired the road, adding new flagstones to make sure that trade
could continue to pass. And so the level of the road rises up a couple of metres to where
it was at the very end of Roman Corbridge, sometime in the early fifth century.