Listed 12 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for wider area of: "DEVON County ENGLAND" .
NEWTON ABBOT (Town) ENGLAND
EXETER (Town) ENGLAND
Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) Devonshire, England.
The cantonal city of the Dumnonii, the Iron Age tribes inhabiting the modern counties
of Cornwall, Devon, and West Somerset. The city was named from the river Exe,
Celtic Eisca, Wysc, meaning river abounding in fish. The position is given in
road-books in the 2d c.: Antonine Itinerary, Iter XV, in the Peutinger Table fragment,
and is twice mentioned in the Ravenna Cosmography. Excavation has demonstrated
that the site began as a Claudian military post, a fort, probably of 2.4 ha, S
of the later city and supplemented by a lookout fortlet on the crest of Stoke
Hill, 3.2 km NE. About A.D. 47-48 this was replaced by a legionary fortress, probably
the headquarters of the Second Augustan legion. Remains of roads, timber barracks,
workshops, officers' houses and an imposing stone bath building have recently
been identified in the center of Exeter. A reduction in the garrison took place
during the reign of Vespasian, when the caldarium of the baths and the barracks
were altered. By A.D. 80 there was a general military withdrawal from the SW consequent
on the need to garrison Wales and the North, and the fortress was converted for
civilian use. The military bath house became part of the municipal offices with
a new entrance and an extensive forum. New public baths, of which a plunge bath
in the frigidarium and a stone conduit for the waste have been located, were built
on an adjacent site.
The defenses, a rampart and ditch with stone gates, were begun after
A.D. 160 and supplemented by a massive stone wall during the early 3d c. The 3.2
km circuit of the wall mostly survives, apart from the gates, enclosing a city
of 36.8 ha. The Roman masonry consists of a facing of rectangular blocks of local
volcanic stone on a core of grouted rubble 3 m thick; a chamfered plinth indicates
the Roman ground level. Bastions were added in mediaeval times, and there is much
later repair with different stone.
The road grid, only partly known, is irregular because of the hilly
character of the interior. Little is known of domestic buildings; 10 tessellated
pavements have been recorded but fragments of only two with geometric designs
survive. Trade with the Mediterranean in the 3d c. is indicated by Alexandrian
coins, and the existence of a Christian community by a Chi-Rho inscribed on a
cooking-pot sherd.
The forum was in disuse by A.D. 375 and the coin series ends effectively
with Gratian A.D. 383. Finds of imported amphorae show that part of the municipal
offices were altered and occupied into the 5th or 6th c. It is likely that an
impoverished city was still inhabited when the Saxons arrived in the mid 7th c.
The finds are in a museum in Rougemont House, Exeter. were in the 19th c., however,
and were not well recorded.
A. Fox, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Feb 2006 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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