SNN112204 - A Roman villa and an Anglo-Saxon burial at Wootton Fields, Northampton

A previously unknown Roman villa standing within a square ditched enclosure of nearly 0.5ha, and overlying a pit alignment and middle to late Iron Age settlement, was located in 1999 during monitoring of groundworks on a new housing development. The partially exposed building remains were cleaned and planned before they were reburied for long-term preservation. The main house comprised a simple strip building with front and rear corridors. One room was furnished with a hypocaust and had painted walls, but the absence of any tessarae shows that there were no mosaics or tessalated pavements. A probable original bath house at the northern end of the range was replaced by a bath house at the southern end. This was therefore a relatively impoverished villa presumably farming a small estate that never generated great wealth. In 2002, an area to the north-east was excavated prior to further housing development. It contained a small ditched enclosure, dated to the first century AD, and a pond and several shallow pits containing iron smelting debris dating to the third to fourth centuries AD. An area of Roman occupation on the opposite side of the valley was subject to evaluation in 2002, followed by a watching brief and limited excavation in 2003. Here a hoard of coins was buried within a pottery vessel in the 330s AD. A further small coin hoard was deposited in the 370s in a pit next to the small pond to the north-east of the villa. A small quantity of fifth century Saxon pottery and an Anglo-Saxon inhumation burial of the seventh century show that there was later activity around the villa site. The medieval field system appears to have respected the location of the villa, suggesting that some walls may still have been standing when the field system was established in the tenth century AD or later.