Roman villa at Yewden

 Yewden villa, in Hambleden, was excavated in 1912, by A H Cocks, a former curator of the County Museum.  The site produced a number of unusual discoveries, including a very high number of iron styli – pens for writing on wax tablets - as well as lots of corn drying kilns, but most startling, a very high number of infant burials.

A community archaeology project, ‘Romans in the Hambleden Valley’, is being lead by Dr Jill Eyers of Chiltern Archaeology, and the group has been looking at all the finds from the original excavation, in the care of the County Museum, in the light of more recent ideas and new research.

The re-examination of the infant burials has attracted a lot of attention and featured in a new BBC2 series ‘Digging for Britain’ broadcast in August 2010. Childbirth in Roman times was much more dangerous than today, for both mother and child and infant mortality was high, so infant burials are common on Roman villas, but the massive number found at Yewden (97 infants) is far higher than any other villa site in Britain.

Recent examination of the skeletons by Dr Simon Mays of English Heritage, has revealed that the infants almost all died around the time of birth, suggesting this may be an example of deliberate infanticide.  This was legal in Roman times if the baby’s mother was a slave.  A large number of deliberately killed babies may relate to wanting to keep the mothers at work, rather than having to care for the children.

The villa was occupied for several hundred years, and there is a theory that for part of that time, it may have been a brothel – which would explain the high number of unwanted babies.  Another theory is that it was an Imperial supply depot, with a lot of literate and numerate workers (explaining the large numbers of iron styli), perhaps processing grain (explaining the corn drying kilns).  If the literate workers were mostly women, then the need to keep them working may help explain the infanticide.

We cannot know for certain what happened to the Yewden babies, but because their remains have been cared for by the County Museum, 100 years after their discovery we can tell a little more of their story, and perhaps, in another 100 years, new techniques may reveal the full truth.

Some of the finds from the villa are on display in the County Museum.