Aquae Sulis (Latin for Waters of Sulis) (now the city of Bath, Somerset) was a small town in the Roman province of Britannia, established in the first few years after the Romans arrived in Britain. It is situated where the Fosse Way crosses the River Avon, in an area of naturally occurring hot springs. The settlement had developed into an important walled temple and bath complex by the 3rd century AD, and appears to have served as a visitor attraction before falling into disrepair and eventual decline by the start of the 5th century. The Antonine Itinerary register of Roman roads lists the town as Aquis Sulis. Ptolemy records the town as Aquae calidae (warm waters) in his 2nd-century work Geographia, where it is listed as one of the cities of the Belgae.
The Roman town walls were retained by later inhabitants, and within them a monastery was established in the 7th century, developing to become Bath Abbey. The Roman Baths, long flooded and silted up, were being improved and developed for visitors in Elizabethan times, along with the grant of a city charter. By the 18th century Bath led the field in the fashion for bathing and spa resorts and the 'King's Bath' was given a Georgian makeover. By the 1900s the Great Bath itself had been discovered, excavated and given a neo-classical superstructure. The city's Georgian architecture, combined with the impressive Roman remains and visitor complex, has resulted in Bath becoming one of Britain's major tourist destinations. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, and is included in a second such designation as one of the eleven 'Great Spa Towns of Europe'.
Development
Baths and temple complex
The Romans probably began building a formal temple complex at Aquae Sulis in the AD 60s. The Romans had probably arrived in the area shortly after their arrival in Britain in AD 43 and there is evidence that their military road, the Fosse Way, crossed the River Avon at Bath. An early Roman military presence has been found just to the north-east of the bath complex in the Walcot area of modern Bath. Not far from the crossing point of their road, they would have been attracted by the large natural hot spring which had been a shrine of the Celtic Brythons, dedicated to their goddess Sulis. This spring is a natural mineral spring found; it is the only spring in Britain officially designated as hot. The name is Latin for "the waters of Sulis". The Romans identified the goddess with their goddess Minerva and encouraged her worship. The similarities between Minerva and Sulis helped the Celts adapt to Roman culture. The spring was built up into a major Roman Baths complex associated with an adjoining temple. About 130 messages to Sulis scratched onto lead curse tablets (defixiones) have been recovered from the Sacred Spring by archaeologists. Most of them were written in Latin, although one discovered was in Brythonic; they usually laid curses upon those whom the writer felt had done them wrong. This collection is the most important found in Britain.
The Brythonic curse recovered on a metal pendant is the only sentence in the language that has been discovered. It reads: Adixoui Deuina Deieda Andagin Uindiorix cuamenai or maybe Adixoui Deiana Deieda Andagin Uindiorix cuamiun ai
The affixed – Deuina, Deieda, Andagin, (and) Uindiorix – I have bound
An alternative translation based on a translation of certain words as non-proper nouns is the following: May I, Windiorix for/at Cuamena defeat (alt. summon to justice) the worthless woman, oh divine Deieda. (Alt. Divine Deiada, may I, Windiorix, bring to justice/defeat (in court) the woman at Cuamena.)
This is still an uncertain translation in that it takes into account the nominal cases of the nouns:
Windiorix (alt. Windorix) - nominative masculine (subject), lit. "fair-headed" (windo) "king" (rix); Dewina Deieda - nominative/vocative feminine "divine Deieda" (deiada "goddess"); Andagin - accusative feminine "woman"; Cuamenai - locative/dative feminine of Cuamena
Gaius Julius Solinus remarks "The circumference of Britain is 4875 miles. In this space are many great rivers, and hot springs refined with opulent splendour for the use of mortal men. Minerva is the patroness of these springs. In her shrine, the perpetual fires never whiten into ashes. When they dwindle away, they change into stony globules."Gaius Julius Solinus Polyhistor § 22.10 {18}. trans. Arwen Elizabeth Apps, Gaius Iulius Solinus and His Polyhistor, Macquarie University, 2011 (PhD Dissertation) https://topostext.org/work/747
Walled town
It was the religious settlement, rather than the road junction further north and the residential area now known as Walcot, which was given defensive stone walls, probably in the 3rd century. The area within – of approximately Mayor of Bath Roman Bath – was largely open ground, but soon began to be filled in. There is some dispute as to whether these new buildings were private dwellings or were associated with servicing the pilgrims to the temple. There was also a ribbon development along the northern road outside the walls and cemeteries beyond.
Decline From the later 3rd century on, the Western Roman Empire and its urban life declined. The great suite of baths fell into disrepair, but some use of the hot springs continued. After the end of Roman rule in Britain around AD 410, some residents seem to have remained, but violence appears to have taken root. Archaeological evidence of chaos and piratical raids on the few citizens who remained resident in the 440s include the finding of a young girl's severed head in an oven in Abbeygate Street during excavations in 1984–1985.
As far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Arthurian Battle of Mons Badonicus () has been suggested to have taken place near Aquae Sulis. Tim and Annette Burkitt have proposed Caer Badden (), about north-east of the Roman mines at Charterhouse, on the basis of the Welsh Annals, as well as archaeological and toponymic evidence.Burkitt, Tim and Annette. "The Frontier Zone and the Siege of Mount Badon: A Review of the Evidence for their Location". Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society 1990, vol.134. pp.81–93.Burkitt, Tim and Bennett, Annette, "Badon as Bath", Popular Archaeology, April 1985, Vol.6, No.6.
Medieval legend In medieval times, the Roman temple at Bath was incorporated into British legend. The thermal springs at Bath were said to have been dedicated to Minerva by the legendary King Bladud and the temple there endowed with an eternal flame.Geoffrey of Monmouth. Historia Regum Britanniae, II:10.
An 8th century poem in Old English, The Ruin, describing the ruinous changes that had overtaken a Roman hot-water spring, is assumed to be a reference to Aquae Sulis. The poem was copied in the Exeter Book for transmission to future generations.
Rediscovery
A 3rd century writer, Gaius Julius Solinus, described a British hot spring with Minerva's temple, which gave subsequent historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth access to that knowledge, which they understood to relate to Bath. On the ground, however, late Roman Aquae Sulis experienced a decline, presumably related to the shift to Christianity and away from the old temples. In the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman legions in 410 AD the decay and collapse of the buildings and baths continued. Over the centuries that followed, several metres of accumulated material buried the Roman occupation layers. The Great Bath became completely silted up and seemingly vanished from memory. It is unknown if the town was completely abandoned. It may well have remained in use, but the inhabitants left few physical remains.
Saxons and Normans An 8th century poem called The Ruin describes the decayed Roman city and the hot springs, but is ambiguous both on the state of any standing buildings and of any continuous occupation. The trend was reversed from the 7th century with the arrival of a monastic community. The town was also a noted administrative centre by the 9th Century when, as part of Alfred the Great's Wessex Kingdom, it was laid out as a Burh, within the old Roman walls. By the time of the Norman Domesday Survey of 1086 Bath was the largest town in Somerset, with a thriving monastery, a mint and market and 178 burgesses. With the installation of the Norman Bishop John of Tours to the diocese, the Cathedral was transferred from Wells to Bath, and around 1090 he began construction of a huge new Cathedral Church serving both the Abbey and the town, within its own precinct occupying the southeastern quarter of the walled town. Bishop John also took great interest in the hot springs, and constructed, over the site of the Roman sacred spring itself, a new bathing pool that came to known as the King's Bath. Some of the 12th century stone arches were built directly onto the Roman reservoir walls on the north and east sides of the pool indicating considerable awareness of the earlier structures.
Antiquarians In the early 16th century John Leland visited Bath as part of his tour of England, recording antiquarian objects. He recorded a number of inscriptions from Roman grave markers, and this set the pattern for those that followed, notably William Camden. Camden's Brittanica of 1586, with additions in succeeding centuries, provided an accessible record of Bath's monuments and stones, especially after it was translated from Latin to English in 1789. A spur to knowledge of Bath's past came from Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Despite the Cathedral functions progressively moving back to Wells, in 1499 King initiated a complete rebuilding of Bath Abbey Church. Smaller than the decaying Norman Cathedral, it remains an extravagantly impressive structure, close by the Roman baths and repurposed as the town's Parish Church. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was another catalyst for redevelopment works within the old Abbey precinct, and through all these works many Roman artifacts came to light to be recorded by the antiquarians. The 'Queen's Bath' was built above the Roman 'Circular Bath', and 'Cross Bath' and other smaller baths were developed during Elizabethan and later periods as places of healing as part of the redefining of the medieval hospitals. These disparate processes all worked to bring a greater consciousness of Bath's Roman past. In the 17th and 18th centuries antiquarians such as William Musgrave and William Stukeley took an interest in Bath, publishing carefully drawn descriptions of new finds, and records of various Roman cemeteries, which set a trend for local antiquarian study and recording.
Builders The biggest feature of 17th and 18th century Bath was the beginning of a vast building programme, led by John Wood senior, a local architect who pioneered the use of local Bath stone for distinctive classical buildings, designed using Palladian architectural principles. With his interest in the classical world, John Wood took considerable interest in the Roman items that came to light during construction of both his own and other building works. Much of the town's Georgian expansion was happening outside the walls, where Roman finds were rare, but the new prosperity of the town was resulting in rebuilding and infrastructure works within the town as well. In 1727 a trench for a new sewer in Stall Street brought to light the gilded head of Minerva, still one of Bath's greatest Roman treasures. Work by Wood on the Mineral Hospital in 1738 recorded Roman buildings. The Duke of Kingstone's baths, built in the late 1750s, revealed the east end of the Roman bathing complex, and steps were discovered that would later be found to belong to the 'Great Bath'. It was, however, the rebuilding of the Grand Pump Room in 1790-3, that unearthed the facade of the Roman Temple, with its Gorgon's head centrepiece. The publicity surrounding this put Aquae Sulis firmly into the wider public consciousness.