The taxman's tavern

For this programme, Tony Robinson and the Team travelled to Alfoldean in Sussex to uncover a 'mansio' – an official Roman coaching inn. Located on Stane Street – now the A29 – the mansio was at the heart of a much larger community. Time Team ambitiously set out to uncover the story of the whole settlement.

As trenches were opened over a 600-metre-square expanse of land, the archaeologists uncovered structures and finds suggesting that Alfoldean was once a thriving village, but that it suddenly fell out of use halfway through the Roman occupation of Britain.

Atrocious weather and the sheer scale of the site pushed the Team's resources to the limit. But with the help of a local school's archaeology students and some heroic work by Phil Harding and the diggers, Time Team revealed some remarkable details of a settlement that exemplified Rome's ruthlessly efficient control of Britain's resources.

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