The Urbanisation of the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire: A Juridical and Functional Approach to Town Life in Roman Gaul, Germania Inferior and Britain

What made a settlement a Roman town: its legal status, its grand buildings, or what people actually did there? Frida Pellegrino uses Gaul, Germania Inferior and Britain to test those definitions. A settlement could have formal civic standing without being especially monumental, while another might perform urban functions without the same legal recognition.

Beyond the recognised city capitals lay smaller settlements that connected people, goods and surrounding countryside. Their location, scale and relationships reveal different patterns of growth across the north-western provinces. Pellegrino also asks what remained of earlier settlement systems after Roman conquest, tracing changes in local communities alongside the new administrative world in which they lived.