Year Event Year Population   850BC Bladuds mythical Birth 1086 890   60 Romans arrive in Bath 1379 1025   400 Romans Leave 1660 1200   577 Saxons capture Bath at Battle of Dyrham 1699 3000   676 Osric founds Monastry at Bath 1750 9000   818 Arthur defeats Saxons at Battle of Badon [...]

Bladud Bath was founded by Bladud, the eldest son of the legendary King Lud. As a boy, Bladud contracted leprosy and was banished to Swainswick to become a pig farmer. One day as he was watching his pigs, Bladud noticed that some of the pigs were rolling around in the thick mud and he went [...]

Aquae Sulis Although still mostly buried under magnificent Georgian streets, the Roman ruins in Bath are unsurpassed in Britain. About 2m below the present level of the city, the Romans started building their great baths and temple at the sacred spring soon after the Conquest, in the middle of the 1st Century AD. They named [...]

Flooding finally ruined Bath wondrous temple and the Great Bath complex. Built in the slight hollow around the hot spring, the Baths and temple were particularly vulnerable to the rising water level of the 4th century AD. The baths drained into the River Avon, as they do today, and as the Avon’s level rose so [...]

King Arthur Bath is well known for being the site of the legendary battle of Badon, which the Welsh annals say was the twelfth and greatest battle fought by Arthur against the invading Saxons. Known as the ‘Siege of Badon Hill’, the exact site of the battle was probably the refortified Celtic hillfort at Bannerdown, [...]

Bath’s population multiplied itself by well over ten times during the course of the 18th century. From a still small classic medieval city of just 2000 people, with its market place and many mangers and defensive walls, Bath was transformed into a fashionable metropolis of nearly 30,000 citizens in just 100 years. The Dandy Into [...]

At Bath the River Avon crossed the Fosse Way and the major road from London to Wales. The Roman roads themselves followed great prehistoric routes that converged on the vital river-crossing at Bath. As well as connecting Bath with the great places of Roman Britain the Fosse Way provided the Romans with lead mined in [...]

Like many of Somerset’s fast-changing cities and towns, Bath’s population was deeply divided in the years leading up the Civil War. It was a division based on social, economic and religious grounds. The local gentry joined with Bath’s merchants and cloth-makers in their revolt against the tax-raising whims and religious edicts of an aloof and [...]

Strategic position Although some of Bath’s manufacturers were engaged on wartime production, producing gun mountings, torpedo parts, aircraft propellers and other products for military use, German Intelligence had not identified Bath as a strategic target. Similarly, although the Admiralty had moved its entire warship design operation from London to Bath, the intelligence at the time [...]