So why were there no Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century?

My little post about Roman ghosts was not being a thing in the nineteenth century, of course leads on to the obvious question of why?

Well, I don’t know, but I have a theory.

Nineteenth century people loved ghost stories, as much, if not more than we do. Like us they liked being creeped out, so it’s not a distaste for the actual idea of ghosts.

It's more to do with a lack of awareness of Roman remains in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Thirty or so years ago I used to live in the middle of York, near the centre of the old city, in a nineteenth century terraced house, and the standing joke was that if you wanted your garden dug over, all that you had to do was notify the York Archaeological Trust that you’d found something, and you’d get a van load of spade wielding diggers round that afternoon.

Not true, but there’s a bit of truth in the story. Archaeology only achieved any sort of popularity in the nineteen eighties, before that it was seen as an occupation of dotty academics who spent the summer poking about ruins in Greece or Italy, or equally enthusiastically went on about crop marks.

Again not true, but not exactly untrue either.

Lets wind back to the nineteenth century.

There was no archaeology until the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was the odd antiquarian, and some of them were quite odd, who would sometimes investigate the odd bronze age grave mound or some Roman masonry they found on their property, but that was about it.

Some were quite systematic, and some were decided amateurs, and some like seventeenth century antiquarian Edward Lhwyd made valid inferences based on the evidence available.

Archaeology as we know it developed on the back of Schliemann’s mis-discovery of Troy and the discoveries of Nineveh and Babylon, and was something that happened out there, rather than closer to home.

It’s only later, in the early twentieth century that one starts to see something like systematic archaeological investigations in England and Wales.

While local antiquarian societies would occasionally sponsor digs, and finds of  Roman coins and pottery would occasionally be reported in newspapers, reports only start to become common after about 1880 - which is slightly strange as I thought the railway construction boom of the mid 1800s might sometimes  turn up Roman remains, but if they did, they appear not to have been reported widely in the newspapers of the day.

Before the early twentieth century, little was known about the Roman presence, because there actually were relatively few visible remains from the Roman period, people simply forgot about the Romans, and hence no stories about Roman ghosts, because there was nothing to inspire them ...