MEDIOLANUM AULERCORUM
(Evreux) Eure,
France.
The name is of Gallic origin, and the
site is mentioned in the Geography of Ptolemy, the
Antonine Itinerary, and the
Peutinger Table, along with the
cities of Lugdunensis Secunda, as the chief city of the
Aulerci Eburovices. In the 4th c. A.D. the old name was
replaced by that of the tribe: the
Notitia provinciarum
refers only to the civitas Ebroicorum, which after the
region was Christianized by St. Taurinus became a diocesan see which exists to this day.
The site lies at the bottom of the Iton valley. The left
side of the valley, which is very steep, shows traces of
a prehistoric settlement (spur of the Câtelier with
trench and earth rampart), but the area is too small to
have held a population of any size. The other side was
less steep and conditions were more favorable. The original settlement was probably on a natural terrace on this
side, around what is now the Boulevard Pasteur; Gallic
coins have been found here. The settlement spread rapidly towards the river so that the whole of the Mediolanum site, ca. 100 ha, seems to have been inhabited
by the beginning of the 1st c. A.D. The town was built of
light materials and was not very densely settled.
Then, for political reasons, probably the same reasons
that caused the fall of Gisacum, the Romans made
Mediolanum an administrative capital in the second
half or end of the 1st c.; probably a town-planning
scheme contributed to the change. The marshy parts
of the valley were filled in. A conduit (it still exists
as the canal de la reine Jeann) piped the waters of the
Iton, a few km upstream, over an earth-bank to the foot
of the hill. A system of secondary conduits served the
whole of the lower city and also carried the waste water
back to the river. From that time on the center of the
city's activity was at the bottom of the valley, around
the forum and near the baths, while the theater was
erected on the hillside halfway from the original site.
Roads to Lisieux, Rouen, Amiens, Paris and Sens, Chartres, Le Mans, and Tours originally ran around the terrace settlement, but when the city was changed the roads
were changed also, and the road junction was apparently aligned on the axes of the new forum.
Mediolanum flourished in the 2d and 3d c. In the city
center (now the quarter of the Cité de l'Evreux) were
the forum and some large buildings: these are still buried
4-5 m deep and little is known about them. Traces of a
bath building and a floor covered with a geometric mosaic have been found in the Rue de la Petite Cité, but the
best evidence of the importance and quality of the
monuments is the architectural fragments (capitals) that
were reused in the surrounding wall. Some fairly large
buildings have also been located, with clay walls covered
with frescos and built on masonry foundations. Most of
the houses were built of light materials; stone was used
only for public buildings. The city owed its prosperity
not only to its administrative and political importance
but also to industry: the quantities of iron slag found
in digs are evidence of metalworking, while an inscription referring to the fullers' guild and a fine fulling
tank, discovered recently, indicate cloth-making. The
Iton boasted a small port; olive oil from Baetica and
ware from potteries in central Gaul were imported in
quantity.
The city was almost completely destroyed by fire in
the Germanic invasions of the late 3d c. It was then,
presumably, that the great heap of treasure found in
1889 on the site of the modern Hôtel de Ville was
buried: 300 kg of coins, the most recent bearing the
likeness of the emperor Probus (A.D. 276-282). As a
defense against further invasion a fortified keep ca. 8 ha
in area was built in the city center, which remained a
key element in the defense of Evreux to the end of
the Middle Ages. It was surrounded by a rampart with
one gate and a moat supplied with water from the conduit. The erection of this rampart made it necessary to
change the line of the main roads, which from then on
ran to N and W outside the walls. In the 4th c. the
site shrank considerably and its population, now probably much smaller, took refuge within the fortified city
or close to it. The monuments whose materials had been
reused in the rampart were not rebuilt.
Mediolanum has now almost completely vanished:
only the rampart can be seen today. It forms a quadrangle ca. 1 km around; some large wall sections are
still standing on the S, W, and N sides but none of the
round towers that flanked it has survived. The wall is
3 m thick. The lower courses are made of reused materials (sarcophagi, large blocks of masonry, architectural elements) laid without mortar; they are topped
with a rubble-work of flint faced with opus-quadratum
with bands of tile.
The ruins of the theater are ca. 500 m SE of the
city; known in mediaeval times as the Castel Sarrazin,
they served for a long time as a quarry. They were
excavated in 1843, but later razed by the owner of the
property. Dating from Claudius' reign (A.D. 41-54),
according to an inscription, the building followed the
natural slope. The facade is 75 m long and oriented to
the N, the radius of the cavea is 24 m and that of the
orchestra 12 m.
The baths lay at the foot of the hill ca. 100 m N of
the theater. Their ruins were destroyed at an unknown
date, but the foundations have been traced for 75 m.
Their size would indicate a monument larger than the
baths at Gisacum, and the archaeological context dates
them no earlier than Vespasian's reign (A.D. 69-79).
Outside the site is a large area bordering the Sens
road, now known as Le Clos-au-Duc. In antiquity it was
a cemetery covering several ha, and many incineration
burials have been found there. Some Gallo-Roman sarcophagi have been discovered in the same sector but
closer to the town. Both caskets and lids are simple
and without decoration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Bonnin,
Antiquités gallo-romaines
des Eburoviques (1860); J. Mathière,
La civitas des Aulerci Eburovices a l'époque gallo-romaine (1925); M.
Baudot, “Le réseau routier antique du département de
l'Eure,”
Normannia (1932); id., “Dernières découvertes dans l'Evreux gallo-romain,” Bulletin de la Société normande d'études préhistoriques 24, 4 (1947-48); M. Le Pesant, “Les fouilles de la rue de l'Horloge à Evreux,”
Annales de Normandie (1951).
M. LE PESANT
