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Essay on History and Exploration of Villas

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History and Exploration of Villas Villa is the Latin word for farm, and can also mean 'a large country or suburban house'. They ranged from luxurious mansions to small working farms. Some villas, like Woodchester Roman Villa in Gloucestershire compare with eighteenth-century stately homes. They sported lavish mosaic floors, wall paintings, marble statuary, columns and balustrades. But few Romano-British villas were as posh as this. The majority were considerably smaller and included houses, like Sparsholt, farmhouses with outbuildings where owners could only afford one mosaic. A villa wasn't just a building. The term …show more content…

Another villa with a similar location is Bignor. It was located near Stane Street, for easy access to Londinium. North Leigh Villa was located near Akeman Street, which was another major route in Roman Britain. This makes Chedworth a typical villa as far as location goes. It was near a major communications route, and had easy access to towns. It was also near a stream, and was built on an intensely farmed piece of land. As H.H Scullard said of typical villas, "One factor was dominant in their choice of sites: their distance from the town. Villas were working farms, and, therefore had to be in contact with their markets, so that their viability depended on their access to roads and towns".

There were many different types of villa. H.H Scullard described the four main types of villa as "the cottage, the winged corridor, the courtyard, and the aisled villa". Because it was hard to light the inside of the villas, and land availability wasn't usually a problem, Roman Villas tended to be rows of rooms, or wings. The simplest were one row, usually with a corridor. Then a pair of small wings might be added - we call this the 'winged corridor' villa, which was very common. To make a house bigger, wings would be extended around a courtyard. This is what happened to

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