Roman Britain

I

Introduction

Roman Britain, Britain under Roman rule, from around the time that the native Celts were finally subjugated by the mid-1st century ad to the early 5th century, when the Roman Empire had begun to break up, and Britain was no longer a part of the empire. The Roman conquest brought a profound change to daily life in Britain, in terms both of culture and of material goods: contact with the Roman world brought to Iron Age Britain the concept of the city and of citizenship, the villa system of farming, an extensive trade network reaching as far as the Mediterranean, a new pantheon of deities, the Latin language, and an introduction to Classical literature (see Latin Literature).

II

Governing the Province

Historical accounts of life in Roman Britain, ancient as well as modern, concentrate on military themes, mainly of conquest, of maintaining frontier defences, and of withstanding barbarian attack. (The Romans regarded all those who did not speak Latin—and hence appeared to babble when they spoke—as barbarians.) However, the main concern of Roman administration, and increasingly of the leaders of the Britons themselves, was to maintain just and orderly government and to spread Roman civilization. There are hints of this attitude in the writings of Tacitus, concerning the 1st century ad, and of Ammianus Marcellinus, concerning the 4th. Their writings are backed up by the findings of archaeology, which for more than three centuries has been uncovering a wide range of Roman sites in Britain, both in towns and in the countryside.

Except for very brief periods when the Roman emperor was present (as was Claudius in ad 43 and Hadrian in ad 122), the most important man in the Roman province during the first 150 years after the conquest was his deputy, the governor. In the early 3rd century ad, Septimius Severus divided Britain into two provinces, under the control of two governors; in the 4th century, it was further fragmented into four, although an overall vicarius (substitute) was put in charge of what was now called “the diocese of the Britons”.

Governors of Britain in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and of northern Britain in the 3rd, were actively involved in campaigning; but it is important not to underestimate the governor's no less onerous task as an administrator and supreme justice within the province. As towns were established, he was to an increasing extent a circuit judge sitting in important cases in the great basilicas (town halls) built in the great towns of Roman Britain from the ad 70s onward. The emperor, however, not wishing one man to have too much power, appointed a procurator to look after financial affairs and also to monitor the activities of the governor.

At local level in southern Britain, the old Celtic tribes were organized into civitates (local communities), each civitas having a capital town. The citizens of coloniae (colonies), such as Colchester, Gloucester, and Lincoln, and from the early 3rd century York, were for the most part retired legionaries. London was a centre whose status is uncertain but it grew up almost spontaneously as a trading mart north of the Thames bridgehead a decade or so after the conquest and it seems to have become a convenient capital for the province. Together with London and the coloniae, most civitas capitals developed into some of the most important English towns and cities; among them are Canterbury (Durovernum Cantiacorum), Winchester (Venta Belgarum), Leicester (Ratae Corieltavorum), Cirencester (Corinium Dobunnorum), and Chichester (Noviomagus Regnorum), the latter taking its name from the independent client kingdom, or regnum, set up by the Romans in the friendly territory of the southern Atrebates.

In virtually all cases, civitas capitals were built on the site of Roman forts and perhaps trace their immediate origins to the civilian settlements that grew up outside the gates; there was certainly an element of deliberate planning in their foundation, after the army had moved on, as their more or less regular street-grids testify. As to their status, we know that Verulamium, the capital of the Catuvellauni, which preceded St Albans, became a municipium (autonomous borough) within a very few years of the conquest. This gave it certain legal rights recognizable throughout the Roman Empire, including the automatic bestowal of Roman citizenship on its 100-strong town council, or ordo, which met here, as in other towns, in a chamber at the back of the basilica. Verulamium was surely not the only “native” city in Britain with such rights, and it is fairly certain that Leicester, for example, was similarly made a municipium.

The administration of provincial towns was a simplified version of that of Republican Rome, with two chief magistrates (duoviri iuridicundo) in place of consuls, and below them a pair of officials (aediles) to deal with such perennial problems as street-cleaning, waste disposal, and sometimes the provision of entertainments. Marcus Ulpius Ianuarius, an aedile in the little city of Petuaria (now Brough-on-Humber) provided a stage for the theatre.

III

The Army

After the 1st century, the army was for the most part stationed well away from civilian centres. London, however, had a fort manned by detachments from all three units stationed in Britain, doubtless providing a guard for the governor. A major town also grew up just south of the River Ouse, opposite the fortress of the Sixth Legion at Eboracum (York). From the early 3rd century, a line of forts was established along the south-eastern coast of Britain to serve as protection against attack from the sea. Otherwise, civilian areas of ancient Britain saw only a few soldiers seconded from the legions to serve, for instance, as policing officers for the Cursus Publicus (imperial communications system).

Forts in northern Britain and in Wales provided military control. Commanders also found themselves maintaining order in the wild countryside of Wales, the Pennines, along the frontier line of Hadrian's Wall, and in southern Scotland. In addition, the army was a focus for Romanization, as the civilian settlements outside such forts as that at Vindolanda show. There is evidence that native Britons around such outposts adopted a Romanized lifestyle and learnt how to speak Latin. For most of the time, Roman soldiers were not fighting but simply keeping the Pax Romana (peace under Roman rule) in distant outposts and by their presence discouraging incursions southward. Their duties included observance of the Roman religious calendar of festivals and sacrifices, maintaining their own forts, establishing customs controls on the frontier, and even farming, although taxes in kind were doubtless levied on the native inhabitants of these regions. Along Hadrian's Wall, the Romans left the most tangible traces of their presence in Britain; recent excavation, for example at Burdoswald, in Cumbria, has confirmed that when, at the end of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th, Roman political control crumbled, the forts continued to be occupied, perhaps by the descendants of the very men who had patrolled it, though they were now in truth no more than farmers.

IV

Towns and Town Life

While most of the population of Roman Britain, perhaps as much as 90 per cent, lived in the countryside, towns were central to Roman life. Such terms as “civilization” (from civis, meaning “citizen”) and “urban” (from urbs, meaning “city”) emphasize that culture springs from the town.

The towns stood at nodal points on a road system that enabled goods to be brought from near and far. From the nearby civitas came local produce and products such as corn, vegetables, fruit, meat, wool, building materials, and coarse pottery; from coastal areas came fish and shellfish; from Spain and Italy came wine, olives, olive-oil, and fish sauce, in amphorae (two-handled earthenware containers); from Gaul came samian ware (a fine red tableware); sometimes, from Campania, came bronze vessels; and, from the East, came marble facings and glass. The town acted as the market from which agricultural surpluses (such as wool from the Cotswolds, in the case of Cirencester) or locally made items (such as shale dishes and armlets, in the case of Dorchester, or jet, in the case of York) were dispatched. A flourishing money economy led to the creation of service industries such as baking bread, making shoes and agricultural tools, and interior decorating. By the 2nd century, merchants as well as local landowners were building quite luxurious town houses whose main rooms were decorated with frescos and which had mosaic floors.

In a list of the amenities which sprang up in towns in Britain, houses come third after temples and forums. The construction of an administrative centre, including a vast basilica and a market square, doubtless needed government permission and perhaps even assistance. Temples were sometimes built or embellished by guilds of artisans or merchants (as in Chichester and Silchester). No town was complete without at least one suite of public baths, allowing the citizen and, at a minimal charge, the visitor to progress through a range of rooms from cold to steamy-hot and back again, or to idle away the time talking and taking moderately strenuous exercise. Most towns doubtless had an amphitheatre, or an arena combined with a theatre, so that the populace and countrymen in town for a market or festival could enjoy bear-baiting or bull-baiting, or a performance by mime actors. Although Tacitus tells us, rather priggishly, that “the Britons spoke of such novelties as civilization when they were really features of their enslavement” (Agricola), it is clear that they were avid to enjoy them.

One feature of the Roman town that often survives, at least in part, is its circuit of walls. Although the walls ostensibly define the town's extent, they were in fact added only later, for the most part in the 3rd century, and do not fully define the built-up area of the agglomeration; there were often undeveloped areas within the walls and suburbs without. These walls were built partly for prestige and partly to keep out marauders, who were not necessarily barbarians on organized raids but opportunistic criminals such as robbers and highwaymen.