An on-going project by the authorFootnote ¹²⁰ to characterise the ceramic building material (CBM) from the Roman town at Silchester has discovered a previously unpublished relief-patterned tile design. Relief-patterned keying is primarily found on box-flue tiles. The dies, applied using a wooden roller, vary considerably in terms of the designs they feature, from relatively simple geometric diamond-and-lattice designs to complex motifs and often elaborate decorative schemes. LowtherFootnote ¹²¹ studied their production and distribution based on initial findings at the villa site on Ashtead Common. He divided the designs into nine preliminary groups based on their decorative schemes and proposed a date range for their production of c. a.d. 80–150; though the reuse of tiles in the construction of buildings of a later date obscures the final date of their production, there is no evidence of their use later than (or as late as) a.d. 200.Footnote ¹²²

Relief-patterned flue-tiles were made in a range of fabrics with some evidence of the same dies on different fabrics and others only used on a single fabric.Footnote ¹²³ This evidence led Lowther to the conclusion that these roller-stamps were used by itinerant tile-makers, skilled specialists producing flue-tiles using local tileries alongside other tile-makers, and thus needing to differentiate their products, like potters sharing the same kiln.Footnote ¹²⁴ Betts et al. proposed a number of systems for the production of relief-patterned tiles: local production for use in the immediate area of the kiln sites; itinerant production with a tile-maker moving between production centres; and central production for distribution to building projects.Footnote ¹²⁵ These systems are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive and are likely to have been coeval.

In their corpus of relief-patterned tiles,Footnote ¹²⁶ four dies are recorded as being present in the CBM assemblage from the Roman town at Silchester, dies 3, 27, 38 and 39. Further examples of dies 27 and 39 have been recovered during the excavations of Insula IX,Footnote ¹²⁷ along with examples of dies 27 and 68 identified in the assemblage from the forum-basilica excavations.Footnote ¹²⁸

In the publication of the investigations at the forum-basilica at Silchester, a small, unstratified fragment of tile was illustrated and described as having ‘cuboid impressed decoration’.Footnote ¹²⁹ A recent reassessment of this assemblage has brought to light a larger fragment of the same tile which shows it to be part of a relief-patterned flue-tile with roller-stamped decoration (fig. 14). The tile was recovered from a Period 7 (fourth-century) post-hole (F264) in the basilicaFootnote ¹³⁰ where tile was used as packing around the post. The tile is certainly residual in this context.Footnote ¹³¹

FIG. 14. Photograph and drawing of a new relief-patterned flue-tile from Silchester. (Photograph by Sarah Lambert-Gates; drawing by Sara Wilson)

The tile is made of a hard, red (Munsell: 2.5YR 5/8) homogeneous, slightly micaceous fabric. The fabric is characterised by moderate (10–15 per cent) fine quartz inclusions along with rare inclusions of iron oxides, calcium carbonate and flint. It is comparable to fabric 2459A in the fabric series maintained by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), which has a suggested date range of pre-a.d. 60–1 to mid-second century.Footnote ¹³² Examples of tegulae, imbrices, flue-tile and bricks are all found in this fabric in the Silchester assemblage. It shares the same composition as the fabric of the examples of die 27 from Silchester, although these have a straw/organic moulding agent, comparable to MOLA fabric 2459C.Footnote ¹³³ The design of the roller-stamped decoration could be described as part of the diamond-and-lattice designs,Footnote ¹³⁴ of which die 39 is an example, albeit in a different fabric and comprised of much smaller design components. While die 27 examples are of a similar fabric, they are stylistically very different designs.

The total width of the flue-tile is 147 mm, with walls up to 24 mm thick. There is a semi-circular cut-out at the bottom edges of both sides of the tile which would have allowed hot air to get into the flue system when the flue was constructed to the level of the floor of the hypocaust.Footnote ¹³⁵ These sides are not roller-stamped but have been keyed by scoring with a lattice design.

To date, this is the only known example of relief-patterned decoration of this type, so the author would be interested to hear of any other examples.