Wakefield Museums and Castles

Carved in stone?

We know hundreds of Roman placenames names from Britain. Some names survive directly from the Roman period. This is because they were part of long-lasting inscriptions on metal or stone.

For example, the Roman name for York is 'Eboracum'. It was found carved on a dedication stone from a temple there.

Inscriptions including place names are also found on objects like milestones, grave markers or altars.

However, most names are preserved less directly. They are found in documents copied by medieval monks from earlier Roman documents.

Sometimes the Roman place names are fairly well known. A few haven’t even changed much – 'Londinium' became London, and 'Britannia' became Britain. Usually though, the names are nothing like the place names we use today.

So how do we match these names to places we know existed in Roman Britain?

This Roman milestone was found in Castleford but the inscription is a dedication to the Emperor Florian. It doesn’t include a placename. It is on display at Castleford Museum.

Ravenna cosmography

'Lagentium' is the name most often used today for the Roman settlement that became Castleford.

It comes from a text called the 'Ravenna Cosmography'. This is a list of place names from all over the world known to the Romans, from Ireland to India. It may have been created by copying names off a map (or maps), and / or by adding names from written descriptions of Roman road routes. There are over 300 places named in the British section of the Cosmography.

We know that the author was a monk in Ravenna, northern Italy, in the early 700s AD. It is not clear how he was organising the names.

'Lagentium' comes after very mangled versions of what were probably the Roman names for Tadcaster and Leeds. Assuming he was working from a map or road route, that would suggest 'Lagentium' was nearby. Castleford is the most likely place.

Artist's impression of the gate to the Roman fort at Lagentium

Antonine Itinerary

Castleford is also probably named in another, older text called the Antonine Itinerary. This is a series of descriptions of how to get from one place to another.

From a starting point, each 'Iter' (journey) lists the series of stops by place name along the road to the finish point. It also includes the distance between each one.

The Itinerary doesn’t list all the roads and places in Roman Britain, or even give direct routes. It may well be a set of standard routes for tax collectors.

Artist's impression of a typical day inside Lagentium

Itinerary inaccuracies

One problem with the 'Itinerary' is that the mileages aren’t always accurate. There are 15 of these routes in Britain, recording a total 225 places.

Two of the routes almost certainly include a stop in Castleford. These are the 'Iter 5', London to Carlisle, and 'Iter 8', York to London. Both of these routes have stops at York and Doncaster, whose Roman names we know from a number of sources.

Between these two places, there is a stop that is generally agreed must be Castleford. It is at roughly the right distance, though in both routes the actual mileage is wrong for both legs. The two routes also have two different words for this stop, 'Legeolio' ('Legeolium') and 'Lagecio' ('Lagecium').

As we saw with the Ravenna Cosmography, this is not an unusual problem when dealing with written records. The actual versions of the Itinerary that survive today are not Roman. They were all copied in the 1400s. They were copied from a book that was recorded in the library of Speyer Cathedral in 1542, but was lost by 1672. We don’t know how many times it had been copied since first being written in the Roman period. We don’t even know exactly when it was created. In fact, it seems likely that it was put together from individual routes created at different times.

The earliest route seems to be from around 100 AD, while the latest comes from about 300 AD. It is likely that the majority of the routes were compiled in the early 200s AD.

The fact that it was copied many times explains some errors. Names were changed or misspelt. Distances were incorrectly copied. They were written over hundreds of years by people who never visited or knew the places referred to. Additionally, the two routes may have originally been in separate texts. These were also copied before being collected into the Antonine Itinerary.

A complete Roman copper-alloy knee brooch dating to circa AD 150-250. The inscription indicates that the was brooch was made in Lagentium. (The British Museum's Portable Antiquities Scheme)