Engleton Roman villa, located near Brewood in south Staffordshire close to Watling Street, was a modest courtyard-style farmstead occupied broadly between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. It appears to have been a working agricultural establishment rather than a high-status residence, consistent with the small-to-middling villas typical of the West Midlands.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa lay in the rural hinterland of the legionary fortress at Wroxeter (Viroconium) and close to the small town of Pennocrucium, suggesting it formed part of the agricultural economy supplying military and urban markets along Watling Street. Such villas are relatively uncommon this far west, making Engleton a useful indicator of Romanised farming in the territory of the Cornovii.
The site was excavated in 1937 by Hilda Mary Sheldon (later published in Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society), revealing a rectangular winged-corridor building with associated outbuildings, hypocaust traces, painted wall plaster, tesserae, and quantities of pottery and tile. Little further investigation has been undertaken since, and the original records remain the principal source of information.
Engleton Roman villa, located near Brewood in south Staffordshire close to Watling Street, was a modest courtyard-style farmstead occupied broadly between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Engleton is classified as a Roman villa — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Roman villa 300yds (270m) NW of Engleton Hall (0.6 km), Eaton House Fort (0.8 km), Pennocrucium (0.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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