LANGTON
E Riding, Yorkshire, England.
The village is 4.8 km SE of Malton. The Roman buildings
on East Farm, 1.2 km to the E, were discovered in 1899,
and excavated in 1926 and 1930-31. The earliest feature
on the site was an oblong ditched enclosure of 0.12 ha,
originally interpreted as a military fortlet but more
probably a farmstead of native type. This was succeeded
by a series of Roman buildings which included a small
dwelling, a small so-called bath house (probably a corndrier), various farm buildings, a well, corn-drying kilas,
and a circular platform which was interpreted as a
threshing floor. The complex was contained within a
system of ditches covered by the latest buildings.
The first version of the dwelling was a simple structure
(15.6 x 5.9 m) succeeded by a second house (29.8 x
7.6 m), built 3 m farther N. This was later modified
by the addition of two rooms with hypocausts. The excavators dated their so-called fortlet to ca. A.D. 80-120
and the beginning of the villa to ca. 200 with the period
of maximum prosperity in the 4th c., but a recent reinterpretation, taking the fortlet as a farm, suggests continuous development from ca. 150 until the end of the
4th c. and possibly later. Further Roman buildings, with
tesselated floors, were recorded in 1863 in a field 0.4 km
to the W, and it seems probable that the excavated remains formed part of a much larger complex. Nevertheless the excavation and recording set a new high standard,
and Langton has been widely taken as the type site for the
simpler kind of Romano-British villa developing somewhat later in the N than in the S.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
P. Corder & J. L. Kirk,
A Roman Villa
at Langton, near Malton, E. Yorkshire (1932); reinterpretation: G. Webster in A.L.F. Rivet, ed.,
The Roman
Villa in Britain (1969) 246-48.
A.L.F. RIVET
