Settle: A Historic Market Town

city in the press was perhaps that of the amphitheatre, located a short distance beyond the south-east angle of the town defences, although an earthwork had been tentatively identified as part of such by R. G. Collingwood in the 1920s. Of greater significance is the information obtained about extramural settlement. The road originating at York approaching from the south-east and that heading north from the town can both be seen to be lined for a considerable distance by long narrow property plots laid out at rightangles in a pattern frequently seen along the approach roads to Roman towns as well as forts. As at those military sites, the area of settlement was far greater than that enclosed by defences. Similarly, the foci of settlement were those roads which saw the greatest volume of traffic and were thus best located for commercial enterprises. The recent work has also revealed that the sequence of the town’s defences in the later Roman period was more complex than believed previously. The addition of external towers to the town wall can now be seen to have been accompanied by the logical provision of a pair of ditches further out from the wall. More of a surprise is the discovery that this was followed by the creation of two annexes, on the northern and eastern sides. As the authors comment, these have few obvious parallels in the defences of other Roman towns but then again, this may simply be due to the fact that such features have not been sought at other sites. The authors reasonably surmise that the annexes were provided to enclose that which couldn’t be accommodated within the existing defended area either due to a lack of space or for other reasons. They suggest that they may have provided secure areas for goods in transit to the frontier zone and/or centres for the collection of taxes in kind perhaps replacing or supplementing the intramural granaries identified near the north town wall. The small collection of official sealings found within the area of the north annexe may be relevant. This publication has a high quality of production, free from textual errors to this reviewer’s eye, and with a layout including numerous illustrations of excellent clarity. It should without question be required reading for any student of Romano-British urban centres.