Exeter () is a cathedral city and the county town of Devon, South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol.
In Roman Britain, Exeter was established as the base of Legio II Augusta under the personal command of Vespasian. Exeter became a religious centre in the Middle Ages. Exeter Cathedral, founded in the mid 11th century, became Anglican in the 16th-century English Reformation. Exeter became an affluent centre for the wool trade, although by the First World War the city was in decline. After the Second World War, much of the city centre was rebuilt and is now a centre for education, business and tourism in Devon and Cornwall. It is home to two of the constituent campuses of the University of Exeter: Streatham and St Luke's.
The administrative area of Exeter has the status of a non-metropolitan district under the administration of the County Council. It is the county town of Devon and home to the headquarters of Devon County Council. A plan to grant the city unitary authority status was scrapped by the 2010 coalition government.
Name
The modern name of Exeter is a development of the Old English Escanceaster, from the anglicised form of the river now known as the Exe and the Old English suffix (as in Dorchester and Gloucester), used to mark important fortresses or fortified towns. (The Welsh name for the city, , similarly means "caer or fortress on the Exe".) The name "Exe" is a separate development of the Brittonic name—meaning "water" or, more exactly, "full of fish" (cf. Welsh pysg, "fish")—that also appears in the English Axe and Esk and the Welsh Usk ().
History
Prehistory
Exeter began as settlements on a dry ridge ending in a spur overlooking a navigable river teeming with fish, with fertile land nearby. Although there have been no major prehistoric finds, these advantages suggest the site was occupied early.
Coins have been discovered from the Hellenistic kingdoms, suggesting the existence of a settlement trading with the Mediterranean as early as . Such early towns had been a feature of pre-Roman Gaul as described by Julius Caesar in his Commentaries and it is possible that they existed in Britannia as well.
The unreliable source Geoffrey of Monmouth stated that when Vespasian besieged the city in 49 AD its Celtic name was Kaerpenhuelgoit, meaning 'town on the hill under the high wood'.
Roman times
The Romans established a 'playing-card' shaped (rectangle with round corners and two short and two long sides) fort () named Isca around AD 55. The fort was the southwest terminus of the Fosse Way (Route 15 of the Antonine Itinerary) and served as the base of the man Second Augustan Legion () at some time led by Vespasian, later Roman Emperor, for the next 20 years before they moved to Caerleon in Wales, which was also known as Isca. To distinguish the two, the Romans also referred to Exeter as , "Watertown of the Dumnonii", and Caerleon as Isca Augusta. A small fort was also maintained at Topsham; a supply depot on the route between the two was excavated at on Topsham Road in 2010.
The presence of the fort built up an unplanned civilian community ( or ) of natives and the soldiers' families, mostly to the northeast of the fort. This settlement served as the tribal capital () of the Dumnonii and was listed as one of their four cities () by Ptolemy in his Geography (it also appeared in the 7th-century Ravenna Cosmography, where it appears as an apparently confused entry for ). When the fortress was abandoned around the year 75, its grounds were converted to civilian purposes: its very large bathhouse was demolished to make way for a forum and a basilica, and a smaller-scale bath was erected to the southeast. This area was excavated in the 1970s, but could not be maintained for public view owing to its proximity to the present-day cathedral. In January 2015, it was announced that Exeter Cathedral had launched a bid to restore the baths and open an underground centre for visitors.