Not your classic bath: adopting and adapting Roman bathing habits in NW Gaul

Abstract

Roman-style bathhouses are often used as markers to study processes of ‘Romanisation’, or, more generally, the spread of a Roman way of life throughout newly conquered regions. The building type, with its characteristic hypocaust system and pools, was a foreign element in regions unacquainted with communal bathing. However, to assume that these buildings were introduced and spread as a ‘package’, with the standard sequence of rooms and accompanying technology, would be oversimplifying a complex phenomenon of acceptance, rejection and adaptation. Since Roman baths are too often perceived as a mainly urban phenomenon, regions on the fringes of the empire with low levels of urbanisation, including the northern provinces, have been excluded from most seminal works.1 The present paper aims to examine a corpus of baths in NW Gaul from between the 1st and early 4th c. (i.e., the period between the first villa constructions and their abandonment following Germanic invasions) in order to challenge idées fixes2 that their plans were rigid and standardised and that most were in urban settings.