ROMAN BRITAIN
An Introductory History of England & Europe by Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher - published London Victor Gollancz - 1935
THE EXPEDITION arranged by Claudius for the conquest of Britain set out in the year A.D. 43, and led to much hard fighting. But from that time onward, for about three hundred and fifty years, until, indeed, the Roman Empire itself went down under the onslaught of the barbarian invaders, we may think of Britain, not as an unknown and remote island beyond the civilised world, but as a part, if only a distant part, a sort of outpost, of the Roman world.
The Romans in 43 A.D. seem to have driven the Britons before them, and when the Emperor himself arrived, bringing
with him, strangely enough, a number of elephants, which can scarcely have been of great use, several tribes submitted
to the Roman power, and the southeastern parts of the country were ready to be organised on Roman lines. Perhaps,
if we drew a line from the Bristol Channel across to the Wash, we should have a rough idea of the Roman boundary,
though in the distant west, Cornwall and Devonshire, the natives probably were little affected. But all round the
borders of the newly conquered land the tribes were raging and ravaging. On the north were the fierce and restless
Brigantes, long to prove a thorn in the side of Romanised Britain ; on the west, sheltered by their wild mountains,
were the tribes of what is now Wales. However, after much fighting, the Roman forces won a great victory somewhere
near the borders of Herefordshire and Shropshire, and the Welsh tribes were subdued. The British king, Caractacus,
who had fled north, was given up by the Brigantian queen, and he and his family were taken to Rome, there to be
displayed upon the occasion of a triumphal holiday. He was allowed to live, and, as he walked about the streets
of Rome and admired the splendid buildings, he is said to have wondered aloud how his captors, who possessed such
wonders, could covet the huts of Britain. For some years to come, however, although there were times of peace,
there were also times of hard fighting against some of the British tribes, among them the famous attack of the
Icenians, in the east of England, led by their queen, whom we all know as Boadicea. She and her warriors destroyed
Roman-British towns and slew numbers of people. But in the end she, too, was defeated, and by degrees, though not
without more fighting, much of Britain became more and more Romanised. Trade helped, so did road- and bridge-making,
and the clearing of parts of the great British forests; the Romans gradually turned some of the British villages
of rough huts into something like Roman cities. London was a trading centre before the Romans came, because of
its position upon its tidal river, opposite Gaul and her ports, it was bound to be as soon as there was trade between
Britain and Gaul; Roman London, enclosed within its walls, became an imposing city. Some of the other Romano British
cities, for instance, Lincoln or York, are still cities, though others, like Silchester or Richborough, vanished
from the map. If we try to discover why the Roman towns (many of which have names ending in Chester or Cester or
Caster - as, for example, Doncaster, Cirencester - from the Latin castra or camp) stand where they do, we must
remember that the river valleys were still mostly undrained marshes, which is why, for instance, we find so little
left by Rome in the middle Thames or Severn valleys. We have also to remember the forests. Most of Sussex and much
of Surrey and Kent were forest, so was a great part of our western Midlands; so, too, was and much of Herefordshire,
Hampshire and most of Dorsetshire .
If few Roman towns remain, the Roman roads still stand upon our maps: the straight paved roads which linked camp
with camp and city with city, so well surveyed many of them are in use to this day, that their lines closely followed
by the nineteenth-century engineers who covered our island with railway lines . The L.M.S. follows the line of
Watling Street ; the L.N.E.R. from London to Doncaster is very near Ermine Street ; the G.W.R. and southern close
to the Roman roads into western Britain . Long after the Roman legions had gone : their roads remained for may
centuries the only hard roads this island was to possess .
Meanwhile although the south and east became peaceful and prosperous , the tribes of the north were neither , and
it was clear that there could be no real peace until they were subdued. One Roman governor after another waged
war not only against the Brigantes, but also against the tribes of Wales, although the west gave less trouble than
the north.
By the end of the first century most of Britain was more or less Romanised, had good roads and the beginnings of
towns, used pottery and utensils of Roman patterns, some imported, some home-made. Britain was part of an Empire
in which every educated person could speak the common language, Latin; where local people, talking their own dialects
among themselves, often picked up a few words of the universal tongue; where there was free movement between the
different parts, so that people from all over the Empire came to Britain, sometimes marrying British women and
remaining in our island, while Roman gods and goddesses were adopted, or identified with local deities.
The Brigantes, always turbulent, became in time a little less troublesome, but beyond them, in the far north, were
wild and dangerous tribes, and the question of the frontier was constantly pressing. Eventually the Emperor himself
came to Britain, and as a result of his expedition we have perhaps the most impressive relic of the Roman occupation
of our island, the Great Wall. It stretched right across the neck of Britain, from the Solway Firth to the Tyne
; it marked the northern frontier, beyond which lay hostile territories; its garrison was available in case of
trouble with the Brigantes, whose intractability had already made it necessary for the Romans to build forts and
roads all over the Pennine country, and to organise a strong military centre at York. The first wall was strengthened
and improved many years later by the Emperor Severus. It was a great rampart of stone, perhaps seventeen or eighteen
feet high, six or eight feet wide. Along it were large camps, small forts, and smaller erections like sentry-posts.
The camps were laid out upon the regular Roman plan, with fine public buildings, officers' quarters with elaborate
heating arrangements (highly desirable in our climate), manned by soldiers drawn from all parts of the Empire.
Outside the camps were quarters for merchants, servants, grooms, wives, and children, surrounded by shops and inns.
We can still see the foundations of these buildings, the pavement of their streets. Even in the south of England
we still remember the Roman Wall, when we buy Tyneside coal under the name of " Wallsend." The soldiers
who came from warmer lands than ours must have been as much surprised and tried by our long winter nights and our
northern mists as were the Indian troops who came so many centuries later to train and to fight in France and Flanders.
Except beyond the Wall, where there was usually strife, the rule of Rome had given to Britain the supreme blessing
of peace. We have accounts which tell of busy seaports, of abundance of corn and cattle, of many mines, and we
can picture to ourselves a civilisation more advanced than that existing before the coming of the Romans. In the
villages, life must still have been simple, and the ordinary every-day existence of the ordinary every-day family
one of hard work upon the land, among the livestock, or perhaps about the mines. But there were no longer frequent
raids by one's neighbours; no longer were women, children, and animals obliged to fly for safety to the earthen
forts upon the hillside. Meanwhile, trade, the business of managing the country, of collecting the taxes, brought
to Britain many who were not villagers. All over the country we find the remains of their houses. We can imagine
to ourselves the mine manager or the official who had to live here, and was determined to make himself as comfortable
as he could, arranging for the building of what he considered a respectable house, with proper baths and heating
arrangements, well-laid floors of tiles adorned with pictures or patterns. In the sunny southern valleys, with
their steep slopes, we find the Roman houses, but we find them, too, in the chilly north, for the first settlers
were not only officials and business men, but also soldiers, and, as time went on, the leading people of the island
adopted Roman ways of life and plans of building. In the settled south many officials were of British birth and
race, Roman citizens ( like Paul), while those coming from other parts of the Empire adapted their houses and their
ways of life to the exigencies of our climate.
But, though Britain was upon the whole peaceful and prosperous, all was not well with the rest of the Empire. In
Italy land went out of cultivation, and crowds of idle people, who had to be maintained by public money, and kept
amused by shows and circuses, flocked into Rome. Upon the frontiers of the Empire the barbarians were pressing,
there was much fighting, and in the wake of the fighting came pestilence and plague. Law and order seemed to disappear.
The barbarians mostly threatened the Empire upon land, but some of them took to sea-roving, and finally attacked
not only northern Gaul, but also Britain. It was necessary to defend Britain against these pirates; a fleet came
into being, there was an official known as Count of the Saxon Shore, and a series of strong forts built along the
coast. The man who first successfully organised Britain's sea-power (Carausius) took advantage of his strength
and set himself up as Emperor of Britain. However, after some years, he and his successor vanished, and Britain
was once more within the Empire, though not until the Emperor of the moment had himself come to the island, and
had, indeed, died here, at York, where his son, the great Constantine, was hailed as Emperor by the soldiers. Another
period of prosperity followed; Britain was rich enough to sell corn to the provinces of the Lower Rhine.
Halfway through the fourth century, however, there was fresh trouble in the north, where the Picts and Scots were
raiding. It was not only necessary to guard the shores against the pirates, but to make renewed efforts against
the ravaging tribes in the far north. Elsewhere, too, the Empire was in grave danger. The barbarians were pressing,
and pressing hard: troops could ill be spared for distant Britain; they were urgently needed elsewhere; the local
army may have grown more British, more inclined to manage itself At the beginning of the fifth century barbarians
were attacking Italy; they rushed upon Gaul. At this moment the British soldiers seem to have broken out into mutiny.
The British felt that the imperial power was doing little for them; it was, indeed, pressed to desperation; and
they determined to set up for themselves. Britain was no longer a province of the Roman Empire.
