Roman Britain

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman Britain was one of the most distant and contested corners of the Roman Empire, a province that took the better part of four decades to conquer and nearly four centuries to hold. The island sat at the edge of the known world, and for the soldiers who crossed the Channel, it carried the unnerving quality of a place beyond the limits of civilization. When the troops assembled for the invasion of AD 43, they mutinied before even setting sail. Only when an imperial freedman spoke to them directly did they summon the courage to cross the Ocean.

  What followed was one of antiquity's longest provincial experiments. Rome poured legions into Britain, built walls across its northern reaches, and watched province after province splinter and reform. Governors schemed for the throne. Native queens burned cities to the ground. Emperors died in York. The island seemed to consume ambition.

  How did Rome come to occupy Britain in the first place? What did nearly four hundred years of rule actually produce on the ground? And when the legions finally left, what did they leave behind? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Caesar's Foothold

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  Julius Caesar first landed in Britain in 55 BC, not as a conqueror, but as a reconnaissance force with no cavalry and ships battered by storms. The military result was modest: a foothold on the coast of Kent and little more. Yet in Rome, the Senate declared a twenty-day public holiday in Caesar's honour. Simply reaching Britain and returning with hostages was treated as a triumph.

  The following year Caesar returned with a substantially larger force, coercing many Celtic tribes to pay tribute and installing a friendly local king named Mandubracius over the Trinovantes. His rival, Cassivellaunus, was brought to terms. Caesar took hostages and sailed back to Gaul. He conquered no territory and left no troops behind.

  Augustus planned three separate invasions after Caesar's expeditions, in 34, 27, and 25 BC, and cancelled all three. What developed instead was a relationship of trade and diplomacy. The geographer Strabo, writing in Augustus's reign, claimed that taxes on trade with Britain brought in more annual revenue than any conquest would have produced. Luxury goods flowed into southeastern Britain, and British kings sent embassies to the imperial court. Britain had entered Rome's sphere of influence without a single Roman soldier stationed there.

• 3. Invasion and Conquest

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  Claudius sent four legions to Britain in AD 43, and the invasion force was led by Aulus Plautius. Among the commanders was Vespasian, then a legionary officer, later to become emperor. The troops sailed in three divisions and probably landed at Richborough in Kent, though part of the force may have come ashore near Fishbourne in West Sussex.

  Two battles broke the resistance of the Catuvellauni and their allies, one on the river Medway and a second on the Thames. One of the Catuvellaunian leaders, Togodumnus, was killed; his brother Caratacus survived to keep fighting. Plautius halted at the Thames and sent for Claudius himself, who arrived with reinforcements that included artillery and elephants for the final march on the Catuvellaunian capital, Camulodunum, the city known today as Colchester.

  By AD 47 the Romans controlled the lands southeast of the Fosse Way. Wales proved harder. The Silures, Ordovices and Deceangli resisted for years, and Caratacus led an effective guerrilla campaign against Governor Publius Ostorius Scapula until 51, when Ostorius finally lured him into a pitched battle and defeated him. Caratacus fled north to the Brigantes, whose queen, Cartimandua, proved her loyalty by handing him to Rome as a prisoner. Brought to Rome in chains, he gave a speech dignified enough to persuade Claudius to spare his life.

• 4. Boudica's Uprising

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  Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, died leaving a will that split his kingdom equally between the Roman emperor Nero and his own heirs. Rome ignored the will entirely, seizing the tribe's lands by force. When Boudica, Prasutagus's widow, protested, Rome flogged her and assaulted her daughters. What followed was one of the most destructive uprisings in the history of the province.

  Boudica led the Iceni, joined by the Trinovantes, against the Roman colony at Camulodunum. They destroyed it. The Ninth Legion was sent to relieve the city; part of it was routed. The rebels' next target was Londinium, which the governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who was away campaigning against the Druids on the island of Mona in Anglesey, rode hard to reach. After assessing the situation, he concluded Londinium could not be defended and withdrew, leaving the city to be burned. Verulamium, the city now known as St Albans, suffered the same fate. The historian Tacitus reported that between seventy and eighty thousand people died across the three cities.

  Paulinus regrouped with two of the three remaining legions, chose a battlefield, and defeated the rebels at the Battle of Watling Street despite being outnumbered by more than twenty to one. Boudica died shortly afterwards, either by self-administered poison or by illness. The emperor Nero, in the aftermath of the revolt, considered withdrawing from Britain altogether.

• 5. The Walls and the North

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  Gnaeus Julius Agricola pushed the frontier of Roman Britain to its greatest extent, reaching Caledonia in modern Scotland during his governorship from 77 to 84. At the Battle of Mons Graupius in mid-84, Agricola faced the Caledonian leader Calgacus. The historian Tacitus, who was Agricola's son-in-law, estimated Caledonian casualties at upwards of ten thousand; Roman losses were around 360. Tacitus also recorded Agricola's bitterness when he was recalled to Rome shortly after the victory, before the conquest could be consolidated.

  Hadrian arrived on his tour of the provinces around AD 120 and directed the construction of a defensive wall close to the line of the existing Stanegate frontier. Built largely of stone, Hadrian's Wall became the permanent northern boundary of the province. Under Antoninus Pius, the frontier briefly pushed further north to the Forth-Clyde isthmus, where the Antonine Wall was built around 142, this one largely of turf. By 163 or 164, after a period of revolts and instability, the Antonine Wall was abandoned and the Romans fell back to Hadrian's Wall.

  In 180, the Picts breached Hadrian's Wall and killed the commanding officer. The governor Ulpius Marcellus restored peace by 184, only to face a mutiny from his own troops. The army in Britain sent a delegation of fifteen hundred men to Rome demanding the execution of a Praetorian prefect named Tigidius Perennis. The emperor Commodus met the party outside the city and agreed to have Perennis killed. The mutiny did not end there.

• 6. Emperors Made and Lost

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  Constantius died in York in July 306, and his son Constantine was acclaimed emperor there by the troops. Constantine later became Constantine the Great, and Britain was the starting point of his march to power. A generation earlier, the future emperor Pertinax had been sent to Britain to quell the army's insubordination after the Perennis affair, was attacked and left for dead during a riot, and asked to be recalled to Rome, where he briefly succeeded Commodus as emperor in 192.

  The province's capacity to produce imperial pretenders was a structural problem Rome never fully solved. It required three legions to garrison adequately, but whoever commanded those legions had a ready-made power base. Clodius Albinus, governor of Britain, crossed to Gaul in 195 with his three legions to press his claim against Septimius Severus. He came close to winning. Severus's reinforcements carried the day, and Albinus committed suicide. Severus tried to prevent recurrence by dividing the province into Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior, keeping any one governor from controlling too many troops at once.

  In 383, Magnus Maximus raised the standard of revolt at Segontium in north Wales, crossed to the continent, and held much of the western empire for several years. His campaigns drained troops from Britain; forts at Chester and elsewhere were abandoned, and Irish settlers moved into north Wales in the vacuum. After Maximus fell in 388, it is unclear how many of the troops he had taken with him ever returned.

• 7. End of Roman Rule

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  In 407 the army in Britain elevated a soldier named Constantine III to the throne, and he crossed to Gaul. A Saxon incursion in 408 was reportedly repelled by the Britons themselves. In 409 the historian Zosimus records that the inhabitants expelled the Roman civilian administration. By 410 the administrative machinery of imperial government had effectively collapsed. Local warlords emerged across Britain, still operating according to Romano-British customs and conventions.

  The transition left deep marks on the landscape of everyday life. Coins minted between 378 and 388 are very rare in the archaeological record. Copper coins are virtually absent after 402, though silver and gold from hoards indicate they were still present. By 430 it is likely that coinage as a medium of exchange had been abandoned entirely. Mass-produced wheel-thrown pottery ended at roughly the same time; the poor made do with rough grey ware or turned to leather and wooden containers.

  Not every trace of urban life vanished at once. New mosaic floors were being laid at villas such as Chedworth and Hucclecote in Gloucestershire around this period, and the story of Saint Patrick indicates that villas were still occupied until at least 430. New buildings were still going up in Verulamium and Cirencester. Urban centres including Canterbury, Cirencester, Wroxeter, Winchester, and Gloucester remained active into the fifth and sixth centuries. A significant date in this unravelling is 446, when the Britons sent an unanswered appeal to Aetius, the leading general of the western Empire, pleading for help against Saxon invasion. The appeal came to be known as the Groans of the Britons.

• 8. What Rome Left Behind

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  Roman citizens who settled in Britain came from across the Empire, and the demographic evidence is striking. A 2012 study found that around 45 percent of sites investigated from the Roman period contained at least one individual of North African origin. Londinium, with an estimated population of about 60,000 people, drew inhabitants from continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

  The Romans introduced improved agriculture, urban planning, industrial production, and architecture, and they brought new species with them. The edible snail Helix pomatia appears in the record with Roman settlement. There is evidence they may have introduced rabbits. The box tree, Buxus sempervirens, is rarely recorded before the Roman period but becomes a common find in towns and villas afterward. The soldiers reportedly brought the Roman nettle, Urtica pilulifera, to warm their arms and legs in the British climate.

  The roads the Romans built continued to be used for centuries, and many are still followed today. The Latin language left a mark of roughly 800 words absorbed into Common Brittonic, the language spoken across the island at the time of the invasion. English, the majority language of modern Britain, is not descended from Latin or from Brittonic; it comes from the Germanic tribes who settled from the fifth century onward. Yet cities whose names began in Roman mouths, Londinium, Mamucium, Eboracum, survived as London, Manchester, and York, carrying the empire's presence forward even after the province itself had ceased to exist.