Britannia

• 1. Introduction

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  Britannia first appeared on a Roman coin in the 2nd century AD as a seated woman in a Corinthian helmet, her right breast exposed, a spear resting in her hand, a shield at her side. She was not yet the warrior queen of empire. She was a province - the edge of the known world, stamped in bronze for the emperor who had claimed her. Nearly two thousand years later, she still turns up every time the Royal Mint strikes a new coin. What made a figure invented by Rome become the lasting face of Britain itself? How did a seated captive become an armed queen standing before the ocean? And why do the British, who eventually threw off Rome, still wear her face?

• 2. A Name Before a Nation

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  Pytheas, a Greek explorer and geographer, wrote the first known version of the name in the 4th century BC, calling a group of islands off the coast of North-Western Europe Prettanike or Brettaniai. He had sailed there himself, one of the few ancient writers who had. By the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus had recorded the name Pretannia as a rendering of what the indigenous Pretani people called themselves. The Romans, following Greek usage, initially grouped Great Britain, Ireland, and the island they called Thule - possibly Iceland or Orkney - together as the Insulae Britannicae. Over time the name Britannia narrowed. It came to mean the island of Great Britain specifically, and then, after the conquest of 43 AD, the Roman province covering roughly the southern two-thirds of that island. The northern third, known as Caledonia, covering the territory of modern Scotland, resisted Roman control. Hadrian's Wall was built as the boundary between the province and the unconquered north, though the wall itself lies entirely within what is now Northern England. For about twenty years in the mid-2nd century AD, Rome pushed further north to the Antonine Wall, holding a southern strip of what is now Scotland before pulling back. The name Britannia is a Latinisation of the native Brittonic word Pretanī. That word, through centuries of use, eventually became the English word Britain and the modern Welsh Prydain.

• 3. Rome's Invented Goddess

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  A frieze discovered at Aphrodisias in 1980 offers an unsettling early image: a bare-breasted, helmeted female warrior labelled BRITANNIA, writhing under the heel of the emperor Claudius. Claudius had visited Britain during its conquest and was awarded the agnomen Britannicus as if he were its sole conqueror. That first image made Britannia a captive, not a sovereign. The figure softened under Hadrian, appearing on coins as a more regal-looking woman. By the 2nd century she had become a goddess, modelled closely on Athena-Minerva: seated, helmeted, holding a spear and shield. Some coin types placed her on a globe above waves, a deliberate statement about Britain's position at the edge of the known world. When Roman Britain was divided into four provinces in 197 AD, two of them were named Britannia Superior in the south and Britannia Inferior to the north, the name now carrying administrative weight as well as symbolic meaning. Similar coin types were also issued under Antoninus Pius, suggesting the image had become a stable part of how Rome presented its British province to the wider empire.

• 4. The Medieval Thread

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  After Roman rule ended in the 5th century, the name Britannia did not disappear. Latin remained common among native Brythonic writers, and the term continued in Welsh tradition. It appeared in works including the Historia Britonum, the Armes Prydein, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae, which spread far beyond Britain during the High Middle Ages. As Brythonic Celts migrated to the Armorican peninsula - the region now called Brittany - they carried the name with them. By at least the 6th century, Britannia also referred to that continental territory, meaning literally "land of the Britons." The existence of two Britannias, one island and one peninsular, gave rise to the French term Grande Bretagne, meaning Great Britain, to tell them apart. In the 9th century, the terms Bretwalda and Brytenwealda were applied to certain Anglo-Saxon kings to claim a wider dominion over Britain. Coins and royal charters often carried the title rex Britanniae. When England was eventually unified, the title chosen was different: rex Angulsaxonum, king of the Anglo-Saxons, signalling that Britannia and Englishness were not yet the same thing.

• 5. Revival Under Empire

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  John Dee was the first to revive Britannia as a political symbol in the English Renaissance. In his 1576 work on navigation, he used a frontispiece showing Britannia kneeling by the shore and beseeching Elizabeth I to strengthen her navy and protect her empire. The image was a deliberate argument, not just decoration. After Elizabeth's death in 1603, her Scottish cousin James VI became James I of England. On the 20th of October 1604, he proclaimed himself "King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland." A pageant staged on the streets of London in 1605, described in Anthony Munday's Triumphs of Reunited Britannia, placed Britannia herself on a triangular mount - the shape of the island - as a fair nymph presiding over a newly joined kingdom. When Charles II placed Britannia on a farthing in 1672, it was the first time she had appeared on British coinage. Samuel Pepys recorded that the figure was modelled on Frances Teresa Stuart, the future Duchess of Richmond, who was famous at the time for refusing to become the king's mistress despite his strong infatuation with her. With the Acts of Union in 1707 joining England and Scotland, and then the union with Ireland in 1800, the figure took on heavier symbolic duties, becoming a rallying point for a newly unified British identity. Her spear became a trident in 1797 to mark the Royal Navy's victories. A helmet was added to the coinage in 1825. By the reign of Victoria, Britannia stood before tall-masted ships, her Greek hoplite shield now bearing the Union Flag, with the British Lion at her feet. Neptune is shown symbolically passing his trident to Britannia in William Dyce's 1847 fresco "Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea," a painting Victoria commissioned for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

• 6. On Coins and Banknotes

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  From 1672, when Britannia first appeared on the farthing, she remained on British coinage for more than three centuries. The halfpenny carried her image from the late 17th century until 1936. During the reign of Queen Anne, the halfpenny's Britannia was said to closely resemble the queen herself. The penny bore her image from 1797 to 1967. When the Bank of England was granted its charter in 1694, its directors decided within days that the seal should depict, in their spelling, "Brittannia sitting on looking on a Bank of Mony." A figure of Britannia appeared on the five-pound note printed in black and white - known as the white fiver - from 1855 until 1957. From 1928, ten shilling and one pound notes carried a seated Britannia holding both a spear and an olive branch. The 25-cents fractional paper currency of the Dominion of Canada in 1870, 1900, and 1923 each depicted her. In the spring of 2008 the Royal Mint unveiled new coin designs for ordinary circulation that removed her image. The government noted that existing 50p coins would remain in circulation. In 2015 a new definitive two-pound coin was issued with a revised image of Britannia. In late 2015, a limited run of one hundred thousand fifty-pound coins was struck, placing Britannia on one side and Queen Elizabeth II on the other. The 2021 Britannia bullion coin range, based on Philip Nathan's original 1987 design, introduced new security features including a latent image, micro-text, surface animation, and tincture lines. In 2021 the Royal Mint also issued commemorative coins featuring a redesigned Britannia as a woman of colour.

• 7. The Name Spreads

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  Cool Britannia, a phrase drawn from a humorous reworking of "Rule, Britannia!" by the Bonzo Dog Band, became a shorthand in the 1990s for a fashionable Britain of new pop groups, style magazines, young fashion designers, and a surge of new restaurants and hotels. The original song has words by James Thomson, who lived from 1700 to 1748, and is often used as an unofficial national anthem. Beyond popular culture, the name Britannia has been applied to a wide range of institutions and objects. Britannia silver, a high-grade alloy, was introduced in Britain in 1697. HMY Britannia, King George V's racing yacht, was scuttled in 1936. The RMS Britannia was the first steam ocean liner owned by Samuel Cunard, entering service in 1840. The SS Britannia, a British liner of 1925, was sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Thor in 1941 with the loss of 122 crew and 127 passengers. The Bristol Type 175 Britannia was a turbo-prop airliner that flew in 1952. Britannia Royal Naval College remains the Royal Navy's officer training college at Dartmouth. The Brit Award statuette depicts Britannia, and has been redesigned over the years by artists and designers including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sir Peter Blake, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood, and Dame Zaha Hadid. New Zealanders took the idea further still, adopting a figure called Zealandia, described as Britannia's daughter, who appeared on postage stamps at the turn of the 20th century and still features in the New Zealand Coat of Arms.