When the Romans invaded Britain in A.D. 43 their military strategy relied as much upon building forts next to defended tribal centres as it did in winning set-piece battles. When the campaigning reached the Severn in the late 40’s and 50’s A.D., the Roman Legions built a road on the east bank of the river between the legionary fortresses at Kingsholm (near Gloucester) and Wroxeter (on the Severn near Shrewsbury). This road passes from north to south through Worcester, and may be the road identified on a number of archaeological sites in the northern part of the city (from Castle Street to Broad Street) running some 150m. to the west of the present High Street/Tything alignment. Whether or not a bridge was constructed over the river at this time is uncertain, although the site was presumably significant as a fording point, providing access to the Malvern hill-forts and the communities living beyond.

While there is evidence that the late Iron Age defensive ditches on the east bank may have been dug out during the first century A.D., there is no other evidence to suggest that this was used as a fort by the Romans, and scatters of military equipment and coins found in the city centre from this early period may have been lost during the course of road building, or won by the local inhabitants in battle, rather than being rubbish from a Roman military garrison.

As the Roman military machine soon passed across the Severn to begin campaigning in Wales, the military significance of the river crossing at Worcester would have quickly faded, leaving the local inhabitants to adapt to the new economic and political conditions of the times. It was probably during this immediate post-conquest period that a branch road to the salt producing centre at Droitwich was constructed - possibly following the line of an old prehistoric trackway - leading off the main highway through Lowesmoor, up Rainbow Hill and into the Warndon area, and salt is likely to have been brought along this to Worcester to be traded up and down the river.

While trade and commerce would have been a feature of the first century settlement, which may have had a nucleated core in the area of the present Cathedral Close (within the old Iron Age enclosure), the community was predominantly engaged with an agrarian economy exploiting the light tillable soils on the river terraces. Cattle pens, threshing floors and agricultural buildings from this period have been discovered in the present city centre, and while these are associated with Roman style pottery and imported goods (such as high quality Samian tableware from Gaul), it is not until the early second century that any sign of ‘Roman’ structure can be seen in the settlement layout.

The massive investment in capital works which took place in Britain during the first half of the second century A.D. (in particular during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian) provided a demand for raw materials, tools and manpower which stimulated economic development throughout the province, and it was probably this that prompted the development of a major iron smelting industry at Worcester. This industry seems to have begun in the Deansway/Broad Street area, where excavations have revealed three regularly laid out streets associated with clay furnace bases and other structures forming part of a complex which extended northwards into Blackfriars (now the Friary Mall shopping centre) and Angel Place. During the course of the third century this complex grew northwards along the main road as far as Castle Street, a distance of over 0.5km, and extended down as far as the river banks on Pitchcroft - an area of over 16 hectares (c. 40 acres).

The substantial scale of the iron workings provided an abundant supply of iron slag which was selectively used as a road surfacing material (the still iron-rich slag rusting together to form a true ‘metalled’ surface), and may well have been used for other civil engineering projects. Demolition of the medieval bridge in 1781 revealed iron slag piers that were removed with ‘the utmost difficulty’, suggesting that the structure may originally have been Roman, while bore-hole evidence indicates that the medieval Newport Street/Dolday suburb was built on an artificial tongue of land between the river terrace and the bridgehead which comprised, at its lower levels, a massive dump of iron slag. So extensive was this dump that in 1653 Andrew Yarranton was granted permission by the City Corporation to mine ‘Roman cinders’ from Pitchcroft (on the site of the present cattle market) which he re-smelted in the technologically more advanced furnaces of the time.

The ore for the industry probably came from a local source of bog iron - not the Roman mines in the Forest of Dean - while the charcoal fuel would have been produced locally. Although a massive amount of pig-iron was being produced by the settlement, this appears to have been transported elsewhere for manufacturing purposes, presumably mainly by river, which raises the question as to where the settlement’s docking facilities were located. Aside from the waterfront of the east bank itself, the juncture of the Frog Brook with the Severn (at Diglis) would have provided a sufficiently deep off- channel harbouring facility, although as yet neither area has been investigated archaeologically.

While the second and third century Roman settlement is presently classed as a specialised industrial site, the area of the presumed town centre - the area of the later Cathedral Close - still remains to be investigated. This nucleus would probably have contained a market area, shops, taverns, domestic buildings and, possibly, a few public buildings, although the settlement was probably not an administrative centre during this period and does not appear to have been a formally planned Roman town. While limestone was imported from the Cotswolds, this appears to have been used mainly to line wells and make plaster (painted fragments of which are known from the city), and on the present evidence most of the settlements buildings would appear to have been timber constructions. Suburban development extended into the Sidbury area, and here the third century buildings benefited from a water supply provided by lead collared wooden pipes. To the north of the industrial suburb, in Britannia Square, the footings of a circular sandstone building discovered in the 1840s may have been the remains of a Roman temple, and finds of roof tile and the occasional tessera (mosaic fragment) in the area certainly point to the existence of one or more high status Roman buildings there. While the settlement cemeteries have still to be located, Roman cremation burials are known south of Severn Street (south of the Cathedral) and on Deansway, while inhumation burials (generally, a later practice) are known from Deansway, Blackfriars and Farrier Street.

The impression of the second and third century settlement is of a bustling industrial town and trading centre with extensive suburbs spreading loosely along the main axial road on the river terrace down into the river margins, but with no apparent sister settlement on the west bank. With close links to the salt producing centre at Droitwich and to the Malvern potteries (producing their distinctive orangey red Severn Valley Ware), and with a rich agricultural hinterland (the structure of which is still visible in the area south of Droitwich) the town would have been an important redistribution centre for local products, and it is this historic function which is likely to have been the reason for the settlement’s survival - rather than abandonment - during subsequent periods of economic and social instability. While no inscriptions or other texts can be directly attributed to the Roman settlement, the listing of towns contained in the seventh century Ravenna Cosmography makes reference to a place called Vertis - 'a place on a sharp bend in a stream or river' - which might just be Roman Worcester.

The third century seems to mark the limit of the settlement’s expansion, by which time it extended over an area greater than that of the later medieval city, and during the late third and fourth century the effects of rampant inflation, the breakdown in continental trade and the fragmentation of administrative control which characterise this period, would have conspired to produce a general decline in the urban population. The settlement appears to have contracted into a defended enclosure at the southern end of the river terrace (built along the line of the old Iron Age enclosure), the population once again engaged with a predominantly agrarian economy. Iron production seems to have stopped during the first half of the fourth century, by which time part of the old workings along Deansway had been turned into a cemetery (containing at least 14 burials). Archaeological evidence indicates that rubbish was being tipped in areas where previously there had been neatly laid out streets, and the Sidbury suburb had to be abandoned due to flooding caused by the silting up of the Diglis basin.