Monday, October 06, 2014

Back in April of 2012 I posted a piece about Roman East Yorkshire and the civitas of Petuaria near Hull.
I stated that the forerunner of Hull, Wyke came into existence in late medieval times, and inferred that there was no settlement in the Hull area in Roman times.
I was wrong. Though the evidence for a settlement in the area is archaeological and no written record has turned up to date.
I quote here from a recent publication, "The Parisi: Britons and Romans in East Yorkshire" (The History Press, Stroud, 2013), the work of Dr. Peter Halkon of Hull University.*

"For many years ... it was supposed that much of the lower Hull Valley around the City of Kingston upon Hull itself was devoid of Roman activity because it was under water and the few Roman finds handed in to Hull Museums were attributed to servicemen returning from overseas losing the ancient souvenirs picked up during their foreign postings in the First and Second World Wars ... In the series of excavations undertaken in the Old Town, the discovery of Roman pottery showed that buried Roman land surfaces may exist (Bartlett, 1971), but it was not until 1984 that this suspicion was confirmed when the owner of a new house at Greylees Avenue, on the outskirts of the city just off Beverley High Road, not far from the West Bank of the River Hull, recognised samian and other Roman pottery as he prepared his new garden. The occupant informed Hull Museums and the subsequent excavation yielded 4,000 Roman finds from the later first to fourth centuries AD, including building remains and ditches suggestive of land management."
(Halkon p.156)

"Excavation in the 1990s in the Sutton Fields Industrial Estate at Malmo Road, to the east of the River Hull, revealed drip-gullies from rectilinear buildings, postholes, pits and ditches and a 60m cobbled trackway ... Further investigation was undertaken here in 2005 ... with finds including ceramic building material, animal bone and pottery from the second and third centuries AD. The ceramic building material included tiling from both roofs and central heating systems and a fragment from a stamped tile of the VI Legion. These find are intriguing: is this a demonstration that people local to the area here had fully absorbed Roman lifestyles. or was the site in some way connected along the river system to the legionary fortress at York?"
(ibid., p.157)

The reference to Bartlett, 1971, is to a report on excavations in Hull's old town in the Kingston upon Hull Museums Bulletin, nos.3 and 4, 1971, by John Bartlett, and entitled "The Medieval Walls of Hull".
I quote -
"In the museum there are a number of complete Roman pots from Hull i.e. from Thoresby Street and from National Avenue, and extensive collections of sherds from the neighbourhood of Haworth Hall, from the Barmston Drain near Endike Lane and from Saltend. It is therefore not true, as has sometimes been suggested, that before the foundation of medieval Wyke the site that was to become Hull had always been uninhabited. How important Romano-British settlement was around the lower reaches of the River Hull cannot yet be estimated. It seems likely that a Romano-British land surface exists below the town at considerable depth sealed by sterile layers of river alluvium laid down in Saxon times. It is only very exceptionally that there has been any penetration in modern times down to these depths."
(loc cit., p 26)

I feel the need for some names, locative or personal, to place these artefacts in a human context.

*In my earlier post I referred to this local population (tribe?) as the Parisii, because that was the spelling I first encountered. I know also that I've seen Roman Brough called "Petuaria Parisiorum", only later did I see the spellings Parisi and Parisorum. I have not emended my earlier post.
Halkon does discuss a connection between the the Parisi of Britannia and the Parisii of Gaul, and cites favourable evidence while remaining neutral on the topic.

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