This Roman Tower Makes No Sense

This ruin beside York's city walls is one of the most mysterious and potentially most important structures found anywhere in Britain. Yeah, we're starting off that strong. This stone tower, known as the Anglian Tower, was built directly into the side of an old Roman fortress. And it's found here, in the heart of medieval York. It has been described as, and I quote, the most interesting building in Britain, because this little tower may belong to the very little understood Dark Ages, preserving a piece of York at the time the Roman Empire gave way to medieval England. So how old is this thing? What was its purpose? And who built it? Hello, I'm here today because of that. And I'll tell you what, I'm very excited. What you're looking at behind me has long been known as the Anglian Tower, named after the Anglo-Saxons. And that's because for the better part of about, I don't know, 80 years, people have thought that this dates to the 7th century. So around the time when the Anglo-Saxons were starting to take a foothold here in north-east England, in terms of migration era or early medieval architecture, there isn't really any parallel to this building anywhere else in Europe. And that's not just me saying that. Historic England themselves have described this as one of the most unique buildings in their collection. And that's because the vast majority of pre-10th century architecture in Britain, in fact all of it, is ecclesiastical, i.e. churches. So this being some kind of early medieval structure, so well preserved, is so rare, it's just unbelievable. Where to begin? Well, here are the basics. The Anglian Tower, or just Tower 19 to any boring folk out there, is a square-footed stone tower built into the York's Roman fortress. It stands in the York Museum Gardens, behind the Archive, in sight of the famous Multangular Tower, with these little Roman coffins in it. It looks simple enough, but the strange thing is that nobody can fully agree when, or by whom, it was built. The tower's most obvious feature is this passage, now well below ground level, with an arched doorway at either end. This, theoretically, once allowed guards to pass through while patrolling behind the Roman wall. The brick vaulted roof over this passage, although it's quite often filmed and talked about, is not original, as it was actually added by the Victorians. The walls are unusually thin, only around half a metre thick, which, according to experts, suggests that the surviving ruin is only the lower part of a once much grander building. It now stands around 15 feet high, though it is thought to have originally risen to more than 33 feet. Unlike the surrounding Roman wall, which is made from magnesium limestone, the tower uses roughly cut blocks of quarried oolitic limestone. Oolitic? How the f*** did you say that? Hold on, pause there, I'll be back. The tower uses roughly cut blocks of quarried oolitic limestone. They're both limestone, so if you're not a geology nerd, it's not that obvious, but as we will later learn, this difference makes all the difference. Because the tower contains no reused Roman stone at all, and that matters immensely because by the early medieval period, when the Anglo-Saxons were knocking around, builders usually scavenged Roman ruins for material wherever they could, especially here next to a big Roman wall that they're knocking into. It would take more than a mere prehistorian like me to describe what's going on here in this little passage, but basically I'm sandwiched between two Roman and early medieval walls with... let me just shoot over. With this on the other side, it's probably overblown because I haven't set the exposure properly, but that right there is the big medieval wall. Below it a Roman one, and in the distance over there, that's the multi-angular tower, which is Roman with a bit of medieval stuck on the top. This little passage here is surely one of the most interesting historic places in all of Britain. Here, someone instead brought in freshly quarried stone from somewhere else. Importantly, the date of construction is still widely debated because no direct dating evidence was found during excavation, but the most widely known theory links it to an Anglo-Saxon revamp of York's Roman defences sometime around 616 AD or 633 AD. But another theory just hit the tower, a view that has become increasingly persuasive in recent years, that it belongs to the most mysterious era of British history of all, the sub-Roman period, perhaps the late 4th or 5th century AD, when imperial authority was collapsing across Britain, and York may still have been trying to maintain its own walls after the Roman troops had left. If this is true, then the name Anglian Tower can be promptly popped in the bin, because this may actually be one of the last military structures ever added to Roman Britain. But, of course, to understand it, archaeologists had to dig beneath it, and what unfolded was a long sequence of York's history and one of the nation's most tragic excavation stories. If you don't know this already, York actually has a very important place in Roman history, in world history really. It was where Septimius Severus would rule the entire empire from for a period, it was where Hadrian set up his big military camp before he, you know, built a wall, and probably most importantly, it's where Constantine the Great was crowned Roman Emperor. Now if you don't know, Constantine the Great was the man who brought Christianity into the Western world. I mean, there's a bit of simplification going on there, but he was the first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity, and without him being crowned, well, the world, and Europe as we know it, would be a very different place. But things like this, that have a connection to that period in time, well, I mean, how much more important can you get? Most of what we know about the Anglian Tower comes from excavations carried out between 1969 and 1971, when archaeologists cut sections through the earth banks behind York's medieval wall to try and understand how the tower related to its surrounding defences. Yet, it had actually been discovered much, much earlier, in 1839, when workmen who were digging through the ramparts struck masonry. On an 1852 map, it was simply labelled as a Roman chamber. It was found again in 1934, but neither occasion produced proper investigation. It was only the 1969 excavation, led by one Geoffrey Radley, that fully exposed it and tried to explain what it actually was. But I must note that Radley sadly died during this work, when his trench collapsed in on him, which is horrible, but let's at least give some thanks to the man who uncovered most of what we know about this incredibly interesting building. What Radley found was a bit more than puzzling, because although the tower sits inside a break in the Roman wall, he argued that the structure itself was not Roman. His main reason was that the masonry, the walls, are only about 18 inches thick, far thinner than proper Roman military construction. It's a bit of a no true Scotsman sort of thing going on here, but the foundations themselves were shallow and the whole thing had a bit of a rough workmanship about it, which doesn't necessarily scream late Roman. Radley thought that this looked closer to Northumbrian work, or the kingdom of Northumbria. By this he meant that it looked like Anglo-Saxon masonry trying to imitate Roman masonry. That interpretation helped fix this idea, but let's go ahead and pick some holes in Radley's ideas, because as mentioned previously, the stone itself complicates things. The builders used freshly quarried Ullitic limestone brought in from outside York towards the Wade's Causeway area. Shout out to this video I made earlier, and that is hard to explain in the 7th century when reused Roman masonry was the norm. Modern assessments of the tool marks also suggest details closer to Roman military work than early Anglo-Saxon stone building. That has led some in the archaeological community to propose a very different possibility, that the tower was built when Roman authority in Britain had already broken down after the imperial troops had been withdrawn in the early 5th century, famously in AD 410, the Roman Emperor Honorius told Britain's cities to, apparently, look to their own defences. If York still had local authority, this tower may have been part of that response, some kind of hurried repair built by people trying to hold together a fortress after the Roman troops had abandoned it, as waves of Angles, Saxons, Scots, Jutes, Picts, the Irish, they were all just bundling in and attacking people. It's rough construction actually fits this moment rather well. If trained military engineers had already left Britain, then whoever repaired this section of wall may have been working with reduced skill and whatever kind of stone was lying around ready to build, I don't know, other buildings in York. Excavations also suggest that the tower fell out of use quickly, before a massive earthen bank, which is usually linked to the Vikings, was heaped over it, sealing it and burying it, preserving the lower storey we see today. The frustrating part is that no direct dating evidence was ever found, there were no coins or timbers, there was nothing firmly tied to the moment of construction at its base. Late Roman pottery was found against the tower, a little Anglo-Saxon material appeared higher in later deposits, but nothing decisive from that moment of construction. However, some more recent work by York Archaeology in 2022 did confirm that earlier deposits do still survive below the modern surface, but these produced no new dating evidence. So, unfortunately, the mystery remains. Which, like all my greatest videos, leaves us with this. It may be Anglo-Saxon, but it may equally belong to that very moment when Roman Britain and early England intersected, when York was no longer fully Roman. And it wasn't England either. It's a mystery. And, of course, that uncertainty is exactly what makes this tower so fascinating. So, I hope you've all enjoyed this little video, and if you're in York, go and visit it. Bring your litter pickers and a bin bag, because it's always covered in rubbish. Because, I don't know, wasters hang around behind this tower. It's really weird, considering how important this is, that it's been sort of, I don't know, it's almost sort of abandoned. It's been re-abandoned, if anything. It's strange. But yeah, if you enjoyed the video, please do like and subscribe. Especially do subscribe, if you've made it this far, you're probably someone who wants to subscribe. So, you know, what are you doing? Press the subscribe button, or leave a nasty comment. If you didn't enjoy the video, say something horrible in the comments. Do something, at least. Thank you all so much for watching, and I'll catch you on the next one.