page_title: Fishbourne Roman Palace
section_title: History and description
hierarchical_section_title: Fishbourne Roman Palace / History and description
caption_attribution_description: English: Fragment of stucco moulding from the Roman palace at Fishbourne
context_page_description: Fishbourne Roman Palace is in the village of Fishbourne, Chichester in West Sussex. The palace is the largest residential Roman building discovered in Britain and has an unusually early date of 75 AD, around thirty years after the Roman conquest of Britain.
  Much of the palace has been excavated and is preserved, along with an on-site museum. The rectangular palace surrounded formal gardens, the northern parts of which have been reconstructed.
  Extensive alterations were made in the 2nd and 3rd centuries when many of the original black and white mosaics were overlaid with more sophisticated coloured work, including the perfectly preserved dolphin mosaic in the north wing. More alterations were in progress when the palace burnt down in around 270, after which it was abandoned.
context_section_description: The first buildings on the site were granaries, over 33m long, apparently a supply base for the Roman army constructed in the early part of the conquest in 43 AD. Later, two residential timber-frame buildings were constructed, one with clay and mortar floors and plaster walls which appears to have been a house of some comfort.
  These buildings were demolished in the AD 60s and replaced nearby with an elaborate and substantial stone-walled villa, or proto-palace, in about 65 AD which included a courtyard garden with colonnades and a bath suite, together with two other buildings, and using material taken from the earlier buildings. It was decorated with wall paintings, stucco mouldings and opus sectile marble polychrome panels. The life-size head of a young man carved in marble, found during excavations in 1964, and identified as a likeness of Nero aged 13 created at, or shortly after, his formal adoption by the emperor Claudius in AD 50 probably originated from the proto-palace. Foreign, probably Italian, craftsmen had to be employed at this early period. This building was not unique in this area as the villa at Angmering was similar in many respects and suggests a number of aristocrats living in the area who must have used the same workforce.
  The full-size palace with four residential wings surrounding a formal courtyard garden of 250 by 320 feet (75 by 100 metres) was built in around 75–80 AD and took around 5 years to complete, incorporating the proto-palace in its south-east corner. Massive levelling of the vast site reached up to 5 feet (1.5 metres) in places. The gardens were surrounded by colonnades in the form of a peristyle.
  The north and east wings each consisted of suites of rooms built around courtyards, with a monumental entrance in the middle of the east wing. In the north-east corner was a huge aisled assembly hall. The west wing contained state rooms, a large ceremonial reception room, and a gallery. The south wing probably contained the owner's private apartments although the north wing has the most elaborate visible mosaics. The palace included as many as 50 excellent mosaic floors, under-floor central heating and an integral bathhouse. The garden was shown to contain elaborate plantings of shaped beds for hedges and trees with water supplies for fountains. In addition the south wing overlooked a vast artificial terrace laid out as a rectangular garden extending 300 ft towards the sea where there was a quay wall. This garden was planted as a "natural" landscape with trees and shrubs, and with a pond and stream. It also had colonnades on at least one side.
  Decoration of the palace was elaborate, including wall paintings, stucco mouldings and opus sectile, marble polychrome panels examples of which are in the museum. As in the proto-palace, foreign craftsmen had to be employed at this early period.
  The palace outlasted the original owner and was extensively re-modelled early in the 2nd century, and maybe subdivided into two or more separate villas with the addition of baths suite in the north wing. A remarkable new Medusa mosaic was also laid over an earlier one in the centre of the north wing in about 100 AD.
  In the middle of the 2nd c. AD, further major redesign included demolition of the recent baths suite and the eastern end of the north wing, probably due to subsidence from underlying earlier infill. New baths were built in the garden and peristyle in front of the east wing and a wall across the garden enclosed the northern half. 
  The north wing was also extensively altered in plan, with 4 new polychrome mosaics including the Cupid mosaic dating from about 160 AD.
  Further redevelopment was done at times in the late 3rd century. The final alterations were incomplete when the north wing was destroyed in a fire c. 270 AD. The damage was too great to repair, and the palace was abandoned and later dismantled. It is not known whether the fire was accidental, set by coastal raiders or part of a more widespread period of disruption caused by the revolt of the 'British' emperor Carausius in the 280s AD.
caption: Stucco fragment from Fishbourne
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