Roman Britain

In the study of Roman Britain today, the Romans are the bad guys. There are several reasons for this. In the 19th century the Romans were the goodies, and when the British Empire was at its height and when classical education was in its glorious heyday – I had the good fortune to come in at the end of it – the Roman Empire was seen as the precursor to the British Empire and parallels were frequently drawn between the two: the British Empire was marvellous, and so too was the Roman Empire. Now the situation is reversed. The British Empire is gone but is certainly not forgotten, but very much remembered as being something that was all bad. But the parallel with Roman Britain has also remained, and now that the British Empire is bad, the Roman Empire must be bad too, and the Romans are placed in a position of the British as the villains who imposed civilisation on the noble natives.

I am not convinced, either of the innate badness of the British Empire, nor of the innate badness of the Roman Empire. Consider for instance the case of pottery. Archaeologists can never make up their minds how far we should trust pottery. Pottery is by far the most common archaeological find, appearing virtually everywhere: on most digs it is vital for dating, but we then go on sometimes to try to understand something more – which is the dining room and where are the kitchens? If a site has good pottery, then the owners must have been rich. If the site only has coarse wares then it must have been a hovel. But how far can we take pottery to be a proxy for civilisation as a whole? There can be no doubt that Roman Britain produced lots and lots of pottery, virtually all of it good quality: even the poorest coarse wares would have held water or could have been used for cooking over a fire. And that is surely something to be thankful for. And that I would argue is the strongest evidence for the virtues of Roman Britain. The people who lived there, lived well. Even the poorest drank from waterproof cups and ate food from a fire-proof cook pot. And it was the disappearance of this pottery that is the surest mark of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In Roman Britain, people were warm and well-fed. And that, I would argue, was why the Roman Empire was a Good Thing.

But what did this process of Romanisation mean? The Romanisation of Roman Britain was the title of the first great book on Roman Britain by Professor Francis Haverfield in 1905, and archaeologists ever since have been pondering the meaning of Romanisation – a word which they have allowed, even though they have rejected the word that often goes with it – civilisation. To my mind the problem of Romanisation is simple. It means the adoption of the full-blown market economy and the changes to a flatter open society that went with it, and any account of Roman Britain and in particular of its success must be accompanied by an examination of these two linked attitudes, that of economy and society.

At this point we should perhaps pause to consider what Romanisation really meant. Paradoxically we should perhaps begin with taxation. Taxation is always considered to be one of the great disadvantages – the horrid Romans came along and imposed taxation, with the implication that nobody paid any taxes before. The reality was probably very different. We must assume that previously the economy was a traditional tribute economy: you worked for two or three days a week on the lord’s farm, you served for two months every year in his army and at harvest, 50% of your yield went to the lord or his various hangers-on. You got precious little reward for your own efforts. Romanisation changed all this. The old feudal dues became a thing of the past, and instead you paid taxation. All right, in many cases the tax may have been claimed somewhat arbitrarily by some tax farmer rather than a tax collector, but all the same, I would suspect that the total take would have been rather less than it would have been before, while life and success was in your own hands.

Consider too the question of the ownership of land. In the old economy we must assume from ethnographic parallels that the land belonged to the tribe and the land you considered your own was only held on lease from the tribe. If you wanted to do a change of use, from herding to arable perhaps, you would have to apply to the tribal council or to the chief for permission. We must perhaps think of the Middle Ages, with its common field system and suspect that something similar would have been the norm for any primitive society. With the strip field system, there was little point in trying to improve your strip, because next year it would be allocated to someone else. You could not buy and sell the land, for it was not yours to buy or sell; similarly you could not mortgage it nor raise money on it. To all intents and purposes, you are tied to the land and all your assets are bound up in your position in the society. In other words there would have been all the standard problems that one meets in any third world country today, the problems that the World Bank and the development agencies must overcome to improve agriculture in the Third World. I would assume that Romanisation would have been similar to what the World Bank is trying to do in third world countries today – to sort out property rights so that the property owner can be responsible for success and failure and can be encouraged to show initiative to improve what has now become his property.

And then there is the economy outside agriculture. As in any pre-Industrial society, agriculture probably accounted for 90% of the economy of Roman Britain which is why agricultural problems should always be discussed first. But we must also consider the other 10% of the economy – the rising middle classes of the specialised craftsmen so vividly revealed on the Vindolanda tablets. We might begin by looking at what might be called the visible side. First and foremost there are the potters - soon to become veritable pottery factories as the Roman success forged ahead. Then there must have been the builders whose sturdy stone buildings dominate the Romano British landscape. And behind them there must have been the plumbers, the builders of the hot baths, the people who made the hypocausts work, and the mosaicists who laid down the mosaic floors. And then there are the archaeologically invisible activities. First and foremost one suspects the textile producers who produced the Burrus Britannicus – the heavy woollen cloak for which Britain became famous. And there was the distribution side, the shop keepers but probably far more important the packhorse men and the carriers, the complaint of one of whom that he could not deliver because the roads were so bad has an honourable place in the Vindolanda tablets.

In short, a new middle class emerges, many of them, one assumes, self employed or working in a small business, but all bound together in the market nexus that is made possible by money. Without money, efficient distribution is very, very difficult. With money, it suddenly becomes much, much easier.

There are two big leitmotifs in all these changes, which collectively make up the heart of Romanisation. The first is efficiency . If you want to build a house, instead of bringing in your friends and neighbours to help and calling on the tribal levee, you simply collect together sufficient denarii and call on your local builder. You will get the job properly done, on time and within budget (one hopes), – otherwise he doesn’t get his pay. This is the secret of the market place, and it surely meant that Roman Britain became very much richer (and therefore happier?) than the economy that went before.

But the second leitmotif is perhaps the most important one of all: the magic word ‘freedom’. Now freedom is never mentioned as being one of the benefits of Romanisation – quite the reverse. The conventional wisdom sees the pre-Roman Britons as being a lovely ‘free’ people who were then enslaved by the Romans – a view indeed encouraged by Tacitus. I suspect that the reverse was true and that the highly complex, highly structured and highly constricting tribal society was replaced by an open society. All right, there are always limits and constrictions to be observed in any open society, but for the individuals concerned, the open society meant freedom. Freedom to live their own life in their own way, – to succeed, or occasionally to fail. And, if parallels with modern closed societies are to go by, there would have been a greater sexual freedom too - freedom to marry the girl you want to marry, not the girl that your parents decide you should marry. And, If Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is anything to go by, there is the freedom to flirt – the essential precursor of choosing your own partner. It would be hard to prove this for Roman Britain, but we should remember that this is normally one of the great advantages of the open society – ask any ex-Muslim today. I am sure that the result of Romanisation was that the peoples of Roman Britain got on with living their own lives, and by and large succeeding. It is a story that is being repeated today world wide.

It all depends on what you mean by freedom. Does freedom depend on the ability to put a cross on a piece of paper every five years? Or is it something more intimate, the ability to live our own lives in our own ways, and to make decisions every day as to how to live the life we want to lead? The big view no doubt matters, and the immediate aftermath of the conquest was no doubt traumatic. But I always recall the similar situation in Germany after the war, and the speed with which the Nazis became a bad dream. I first visited Germany in 1955, just ten years after the end of the war, and I could be in no doubt as to the vitality of the wirtshaftswunder, and the universal belief that losing the war had been a ‘good thing’. I suspect the same was true with Roman Britain. There would have been an immediate shock for a year or so, but then there would have been the feeling that they were now no longer barbarians, but were part of the big civilised world and all the freedoms that that entailed. And to me all the evidence from Roman Britain suggests that except in odd packets – such as the Iceni in East Anglia who proudly clung to their barbarism – most of the southern part of Britain embraced civilisation – which meant Rome – very rapidly indeed.

The Iron Age beginnings

But the changes that we call Romanisation – and the adoption of the market economy, did not suddenly begin with the Roman Conquest. The change had already begun in the centuries before the Romans came, and the full story of how Britain adopted the money economy is rather more complicated and more interesting in its details. Indeed, by the time the Romans arrived, many of the changes had already taken place – or had begun to take place, at least in southern Britain: that is why the conquest, and Romanisation, was so rapid and complete.
Celtic coinage, and the changes that accompany it, began right back in the Iron Age in around 100 BC. The Iron Age is one of the most complex and indeed most fascinating period of British prehistory. It is the first period for which we have considerable amounts of ordinary pottery and therefore to the archaeologist a considerable amount of dating evidence. It is the period when we begin to have houses in quantity and we can see the dwelling places and the hillforts of the inhabitants.

The Iron Age was famously divided up by Professor Christopher Hawkes in the 1930s into the A, B, C of the British Iron Age. On the continent, the Iron Age was divided between the Hallstatt and La Tène periods: the former from the 8th to the 4th century BC was centred in south Germany, and reflected perhaps a barbaric version of Greek influences, while the La Tène was centred in the Rhineland and produced a wonderfully flowing art style. A similar division can be seen dimly in the British Iron Age, but Hawkes argued that the parallels were not exact and so he proposed to call them by the neutral terms of A and B, the Iron Age A being Hallstatt going down to 400 BC and the Iron Age B being the La Tène from 400 BC onwards. But sometime around 100 BC, changes happened and he proposed to call this the Iron Age C. And while the terms Iron Age A & B are now rarely used, I still think the term Iron Age C covers a very major change.

The most obvious change was the introduction of coinage. Celtic Coinage had already been established on the Continent for several hundred years, and a wonderfully barbaric art style had evolved in which the original head of Philip of Macedon and a charioteer were gradually transmuted into a phantasmagoria of abstract art which attracts the modern eye more than it did our Victorian predecessors. The earliest coinages in Britain were introductions from the Continent known as Gallo-Belgic coinages, presumably introduced by rulers from the Continent, but gradually the British too began to issue their own coinages which soon arranged themselves into a number of tribes from which a history of the Iron Age C can (to the horror of many purist modern archaeologists) be constructed.

Pottery changes, too. Hitherto, Iron Age pots were handmade, albeit the best of them to a very high standard. But now wheel-made pottery makes its appearance, especially in the south east in the so called Aylsford-Swarling culture, with pots similar in appearance to those on the continent. Indeed, considerable amounts of pottery begin to be imported from the Continent, especially the black shiny terra nigra wares which are the predecessors of the terra rubra or red wares later known as Samian wares. More significantly perhaps, a small number of amphorae were found, that is the huge jars for importing wine from the Mediterranean area. Beer is spurned for the upper classes, – wine must be drunk . Indeed there is a huge revolution in table manners; whereas before, food was eaten communally from a central cauldron, from which chunks of meat could be speared out – there are splendid accounts of this in the Irish Epics particularly in the oldest of the Irish Epics called MacDathro’s pig – now individual plates make their appearance and food is served up for each individual diner on their own plate. This marks a really huge revolution, in its way far more subversive, or should I say significant, than any military invasion.

Burials too change. It is a standing joke that there are no burials in the Iron Age; well, there are some burials, notably the chariot burials in Yorkshire, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Ominously, human bones are sometimes found in disused storage pits discarded among the rest of the food wastes. In this very end of the Iron Age however, elaborate burials are discovered, notably in the south east of the country, in Kent, and in particular in Hertfordshire. Chieftains are laid to rest in a rectangular subterranean pit resembling a room, surrounded by eating utensils, with wine amphorae stacked in the corners. Sometimes they are even buried with their gaming boards: a vivid life in the afterworld is clearly envisaged. Again a major change has taken place, with the upper strata of society at least adopting the customs on the continent

But perhaps most significant of all, the geography changes. In the early and middle Iron Age, the densest distribution of hill forts is in Wessex. In the ultimate Iron Age, all the richest discoveries come from the South East, from Hertfordshire around St Albans, from Essex around Colchester, and from Kent. Hill forts are replaced with new defensive structures known as oppida, the Latin word for town . These are huge sprawling enclosures more or less defended where it is often hard to discern the occupation within them. On the Continent some of them reach considerable size, such as Manching, in southern Germany.

In Britain the major ones are at St Albans – the so called Prae Wood defences, while to the south of Colchester there are the very extensive Gosbecks defences, moistly unoccupied except for a large farmstead at the centre, which was probably the nearest approach to a ‘palace’: later the Romans were to erect a theatre cum temple complex over the site. Oppida are still controversial but it is clear that a new concept of kingship is arising where the oppidum perhaps encloses a he area of farmland that was so extensive that in Britain at any would not have been defensible against any serious attack.

How far was this the product of invasion? This whole new life-style shows many similarities to similar happenings on the continent: but how afar is it due to an ‘invasion’ or a series of incursions from the Continent? Caesar says that the maritime parts of Britain were inhabited by tribes that had migrated from Belgium: they came to raid, but stayed to till. The modern fashion is to ignore this, and to point out that the Roman town that was called ‘The Market Place of the Belgae’ – Venta Belgarum is in fact Winchester, which is outside the main centres of the late Iron Age changes. No matter, perhaps it was the last place to be reached by the Belgae, and somehow attracted their name. But coinage appears to record at least one ‘invasion’, that of Commius, the former ruler of the Atrebates in Northern France. He was one time the friend of Caesar, then became his enemy and fled from France to Britain wher heappears to have carved out a substantial dynasty, known as the Atrebates. Is this perhaps typical of what really happened, that the Belgic invasions mostly consisted of a small number of warriors who succeeded in establishing carving out fiefdoms in Britain? There may not have been a major invasion in terms of people, but there could well have been a substantial element of foreign intrusion in the changes that took place.

The Conquest

But if Iron Age Britain was rapidly acquiring the trappings of civilisation, why would the Romans want to conquer it? Numerous reasons have been given which can perhaps be brought under three headings. Firstly there are the economic headings that were especially fashionable in the 1930s- 50s when economic explanations were fashionable. Did the Romans invade Britain as an exercise in profit taking, looking at the valuable minerals that came from Britain as well as the wheat, cattle, hides, slaves and hunting dogs recorded by Strabo? Strabo himself record the opinion that the profits were unlikely to exceed the revenues already collected in the form of duties on the trade, - and even today few governments set out on conquest for purely economic reasons.

A more reasonable explanation looks at the internal politics. When Caesar invaded in 55 and 54 BC, he made peace treaties with the native kings on his departure, notably with his arch-enemy Cassivellaunus. The Romans at this period were establishing a number of ‘client kingdoms’ on the fringes of the empire – of which that in Judea is, thanks to the Bible, the best known. A similar sort of arrangement appears to have been put in place in Britain, where two major ‘kingdoms’ appear to have emerged, an Eastern Kingdom, based in St Albans and Colchester, and dominated from around AD 10 to 40 by the great king Cunobelin who minted more coins than all the other kings put together; and an Southern Kingdom of the Atrebates, based around Chichester and Silchester. But around AD 40 Cunobelin died, and the rulers of the Southern Kingdom fled to Rome and asked for support. Rome may have felt that the time had come to regularise an unstable situation.

And thirdly there are the reasons of Rome’s internal politics. In AD 41 the unpopular ruler Caligula was assassinated and was replaced by his uncle Claudius whom hostile sources painted as something of a gibbering simpleton with a strong stammer who had to be dragged out from behind a curtain to be made Emperor, In truth he was a somewhat more substantial figure but he was no soldier and emperors should be soldiers, and soldiers need triumphs: so why not invade Britain to get an easy triumph? Britain was invaded, the conquest was easy and Claudius got his triumph. No doubt this was not an unimportant reason for invading Britain.

I believe that there is an additional over-riding reason or sets of reasons. As we have seen, Britain was rapidly becoming ‘civilised’ and adopting many of the accoutrements of the Roman World. Would it not be simple and easy to add Britain to the Empire? Once the conquest was complete, most of the army could be withdrawn and the soldiers who would otherwise have been stationed in northern France to keep a watch on the Britons could thereby be made redundant.

There was however one basic miscalculation. Britain was bigger than they thought, and it was only in the south eastern part that the changes had taken place. The further you went north and west, one met up with societies which were still irredeemably ‘barbaric’: small scale, fragmented, difficult if not impossible to conquer, and even more difficult to hold down if conquered. And this problem underlies the whole history of Roman Britain.

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3rd July 2006