Verulamium and the Persecutions

Verulamium — Tacitus’s municipium, burned by Boudica, rebuilt into one of the largest towns of Roman Britain — is the fixed point of the Alban tradition: whatever else is uncertain, the martyr belongs to this city. This file describes the town, then sets out the three imperial persecution contexts (Severan, Decian/Valerianic, Diocletianic) into which his death has been placed, including the datum on which the whole dating debate turns: Constantius Chlorus, ruling Britain and Gaul during the Great Persecution, did not execute Christians.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

The City

Verulamium grew up in the valley of the little river Ver, on Watling Street some twenty miles northwest of London, on the site of the pre-Roman oppidum of the Catuvellauni. It is the only British town Tacitus calls a municipium — he names it, with London and Colchester, among the settlements destroyed in the Boudican revolt of 60/61, when its people were massacred (Tacitus, Annals 14.33). Rebuilt, and rebuilt again after a great fire c. 155, it became by the later second century one of the two or three largest towns of the province: a walled circuit of some 200 acres, a forum and basilica, temples, town houses with mosaics, and — uniquely visible in Britain today — a Roman theatre, adjacent to a temple in the manner of Gallic sanctuary sites (Wheeler and Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic and Two Roman Cities, Oxford: Society of Antiquaries, 1936; Frere, Verulamium Excavations, 3 vols., 1972–1984; Niblett, Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans, Stroud: Tempus, 2001).

Two features of the town’s topography matter directly to the Alban tradition. First, the river: Watling Street crossed the Ver, and anyone leaving the town toward the northeast — toward the hill on which the abbey now stands — had to cross water, which is the setting of the crowded bridge and river-crossing in the martyrdom narrative (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.7; see The Confession and the Execution). Second, the cemeteries: Roman law required burial outside the walls, and Verulamium’s cemeteries lined the approach roads. The medieval abbey — the claimed site of Alban’s grave — stands outside the Roman town, across the river, on the hilltop beside the road: precisely where a Roman-period grave, and a martyr’s grave among them, would lie (Niblett 2001; Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “The Origins of St Albans Abbey,” in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Leeds: Maney, 2001). The topography does not prove the tradition; it is, at minimum, consistent with it.

Sheppard Frere’s excavations of 1955–61 demonstrated something else of consequence: Verulamium remained an organized, functioning town deep into the fifth century — a large town house built c. 370 was still being modified generations later, and a new water-pipe was laid after the mid-fifth century, implying civic authority still capable of public works (Frere, Verulamium Excavations; Niblett 2001, ch. 8). A community that could maintain an aqueduct could maintain a martyr’s shrine; the town’s late vitality is part of the argument for the continuity of Alban’s cult from Roman Britain into the post-Roman world (see The Attestation Ledger).

The Persecutions: Three Candidate Contexts

Roman persecution of Christians was episodic, not continuous: long stretches of local, sporadic enforcement punctuated by short empire-wide storms. Three of those storms — and the lulls around them — supply every date ever proposed for Alban.

The Severan context (c. 202–211)

Under Septimius Severus (193–211) the Church suffered severely in several provinces: the martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicity at Carthage (203) and of the catechumens of Alexandria (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica VI.1–5) belong to these years, and Tertullian’s letters attest governors actively trying Christians. The Historia Augusta claims Severus forbade conversion to Judaism and Christianity (Vita Severi 17.1), but that late and unreliable compilation is doubted as evidence of a formal edict; most modern scholars see intensified local enforcement rather than a general persecution [Disputed: the existence of a Severan “edict” against conversion rests on the Historia Augusta alone and is widely rejected; the reality of severe Severan-era persecutions in Africa and Egypt is not in doubt — see Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, Oxford: Blackwell, 1965, ch. 10]. What gives the Severan option its force for Alban is geography: Severus himself came to Britain in 208 with his sons Caracalla and Geta to campaign in the north, and died at York in February 211. For roughly three years the emperor and the apparatus of imperial justice were physically present in the province — the setting John Morris proposed for a martyrdom at Verulamium c. 209 (Morris, “The Date of Saint Alban,” Hertfordshire Archaeology 1 (1968): 1–8; see The Scholarly Positions).

The Decian and Valerianic persecutions (250–251, 257–260)

In 250 the emperor Decius ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and obtain a certificate (libellus) proving it — the first universal, empire-wide test, which made every Christian everywhere liable (Frend 1965, ch. 13; the surviving Egyptian libelli document the mechanism). Valerian followed in 257–258 with edicts aimed at the Church’s structure: clergy were to sacrifice on pain of death, assemblies were banned, church property confiscated; Cyprian of Carthage was beheaded under them on 14 September 258 (Acta proconsularia Cypriani; Frend 1965, ch. 14). Both persecutions ran wherever Roman government ran, Britain included, though no British episode is recorded in any contemporary source. W. H. C. Frend argued that this mid-third-century context — universal edicts, clergy hunted, but persecution brief enough to leave a small martyr-roll — best fits the little Britain remembers: Alban at Verulamium, Julius and Aaron at Caerleon (Frend, “The Christianization of Roman Britain,” in Barley and Hanson, eds., Christianity in Britain, 300–700, 1968; cf. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500, 1981, ch. 3).

The Diocletianic or “Great” Persecution (303–305 in the West)

On 23 February 303 Diocletian’s first edict ordered churches demolished, scriptures surrendered and burned, and Christians stripped of legal rank; later edicts (303–304) imprisoned clergy and finally commanded universal sacrifice on pain of death (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica VIII.2–6; Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 10–15). This is where Bede — following Gildas, who himself wrote “as we conjecture” — places Alban (Bede, HE I.6–7; Gildas, De excidio 9–11). But the empire was then a tetrarchy, and the West was not the East. Britain and Gaul were governed by the Caesar Constantius Chlorus (Caesar 293, Augustus 305, died at York 306), the father of Constantine — and the Christian sources themselves testify that he declined to kill. Lactantius, writing within a decade, says Constantius, “so as not to seem to dissent from the instructions of his superiors,” allowed the demolition of “the meeting-places — that is, the walls, which could be restored — but preserved intact the true temple of God, which is in human beings” (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 15.7, ed. and trans. J. L. Creed, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Eusebius likewise exempts Constantius from the persecutors and says he kept his subjects’ worship unharmed (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica VIII.13.13; Vita Constantini I.13–17).

Here is the crux that Section 03 develops in full: if the Great Persecution in Britain was, on the contemporary evidence, a persecution of buildings and not of bodies, then an execution at Verulamium in 303/304 is hard to accommodate — and the traditional Bedan date inherits a structural problem that no amount of later tradition can dissolve (Levison, “St Alban and St Albans,” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359; Morris 1968; Thomas 1981, ch. 3). Defenders of the traditional date reply that Lactantius and Eusebius wrote to flatter Constantine’s father, that the first edict was enforced everywhere and could kill through its penalties for resistance, and that a zealous local iudex could exceed his Caesar’s temper; the debate is genuinely open, and this collection does not adjudicate it (see The Evidence and The Scholarly Positions).

The Frame Completed

Whichever storm took Alban, the aftermath is the same and is not in doubt: within living memory of Roman rule his grave outside Verulamium was a shrine famous enough to draw a Gallic bishop across the Channel (Constantius of Lyon, Vita Germani 16, trans. Hoare, The Western Fathers, 1954), and the town of the Catuvellauni ended by trading its ancient name for the martyr’s (see Protomartyr of Britain). The city made the martyr’s setting; the martyr remade the city’s name.

References

Tacitus. Annals 14.33. (Verulamium a municipium, destroyed in the Boudican revolt.)
Wheeler, R. E. M., and T. V. Wheeler. Verulamium: A Belgic and Two Roman Cities. Oxford: Society of Antiquaries, 1936.
Frere, Sheppard. Verulamium Excavations, 3 vols. London/Oxford, 1972–1984. (The town’s fabric and its fifth-century continuity.)
Niblett, Rosalind. Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans. Stroud: Tempus, 2001.
Biddle, Martin, and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. “The Origins of St Albans Abbey.” In Martin Henig and Phillip Lindley (eds.), Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology. BAA Conference Transactions 24. Leeds: Maney, 2001. (The extramural, cemetery-consistent siting of the abbey hill.)
Eusebius. Historia ecclesiastica VI.1–5 (Severan martyrdoms); VIII.2–6, VIII.13.13 (the Great Persecution; Constantius’s mildness); Vita Constantini I.13–17.
Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 10–15, esp. 15.7, ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. (Constantius destroyed walls, not people.)
Historia Augusta, Vita Severi 17.1. (The doubted conversion ban.)
Acta proconsularia Cypriani. (Cyprian’s execution, 14 September 258.)
Frend, W. H. C. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. — And “The Christianization of Roman Britain,” in Barley and Hanson (eds.), Christianity in Britain, 300–700. Leicester, 1968.
Thomas, Charles. Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500. London: Batsford, 1981.
Morris, John. “The Date of Saint Alban.” Hertfordshire Archaeology 1 (1968): 1–8.
Levison, Wilhelm. “St Alban and St Albans.” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359.
Gildas. De excidio Britanniae 9–11, ed. and trans. Winterbottom (Phillimore, 1978); Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.6–7, ed. Colgrave and Mynors (Oxford, 1969); Constantius of Lyon, Vita Germani 16, trans. Hoare, The Western Fathers (Sheed and Ward, 1954).