Angmering Roman Villa
About
Angmering was one of the earliest masonry villas built anywhere in Roman Britain, going up within a generation of the Claudian conquest and decorated with marble fittings imported from Italy alongside local Sussex stone. Its bathhouse featured painted wall plaster and hypocaust underfloor heating, evidence of a wealthy, thoroughly Romanized owner just decades after the invasion. First noted by antiquarians in 1819, the site was systematically excavated between 1936 and 1946. By 117 CE the villa had already stood for roughly half a century.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →