March 2021

The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II

Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!