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.

V.

The Countryside

In Roman Britain, at least 3 million people lived in the countryside in dwellings that ranged from wattle-and-daub huts to substantial stone-built Roman farmsteads (villas). The former were identical to those in which the Iron Age peasant had lived and were especially common in northern and western areas of Britain, where towns were not to be found. Well-appointed farms, even those with only a few rooms and perhaps a living-room with mosaic floor (as at Sparsholt, in Hampshire), mark considerable investment. The famous villas with many mosaics are exceptional in every way and should be compared with great houses of more recent times, such as Audley End, in Essex, or Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire. The villa at Fishbourne, in West Sussex, dating from the 1st century, was possibly the palace of a local “client” king called Cogidubnus (or, more probably, Togidubnus). Those at Bignor, also in West Sussex, and at Woodchester, in Gloucestershire, were the centres in the 4th century of great country estates belonging to magnates whose funds surely came from more than several square kilometres of land. Other richly appointed courtyard buildings in the countryside may not, in fact, have been villas but hostelries associated with religious cults. Such is certainly the case with the guest-house beside the temple of Nodens at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, and it has recently and most plausibly been proposed that Chedworth Roman villa, further east in the same county, is no such thing as a villa but also a hostelry.

Most villas were farms. The central house was fairly compact, with five or six rooms. Sometimes the rooms were fronted by short wings, and a veranda providing an open corridor between them. Like modern farms, with which they can be compared, Roman villas also included barns and other outbuildings for farm servants, livestock, and the storage of grain, as well as paddocks and fields. Some villas may have been owned by small farmers, but others were occupied by bailiffs and formed part of larger estates whose owners may have lived abroad. Sometimes, an estate would be farmed by a resident owner with the help of dependent clients, as an inscription on a mosaic from the villa at Thruxton, in Hampshire, laid out by “Quintus Natalius Natalinus and the Bodeni” seems to attest. Although slavery undoubtedly existed, most farm labour was probably provided by free peasants and perhaps by serfs tied to the land. The villas at Barnsley Park, near Cirencester, may have been engaged in fattening livestock for market in its surrounding paddocks. Other villas too could have had a special function, such as that at Hambleden, in Buckinghamshire, which seems to have been industrial. Others, such as that at Combe Down, near Bath, and Kingscote, in Gloucestershire, appear to have been the official residences of minor officials.

Many houses in the countryside remained simple. In western and northern Britain, but also sometimes in the more settled parts of the province, circular houses, characteristic of the pre-Roman Iron Age, continued to be used into the 4th century. Most Roman houses were rectangular, some quite small but others barn-like and containing accommodation for both people and animals. A number of such buildings are known to have existed in Hampshire, at North Warnborough and Meonstoke, for instance; an example from Meonstoke had a very impressive façade of patterned brickwork, part of which is now in the British Museum. However modest the villa, its proprietor was anxious to impress his neighbours.

VI.

Trade and Industry

One of the reasons why the Romans invaded Britain was the country's richness in mineral resources. The most important were lead and silver, often found together and extracted from mines in the Mendips, in Derbyshire, and in Flintshire. The lead was cast into large ingots, sometimes bearing the name of the emperor and sometimes those of private lessees (owners of mines on a leasehold basis). Such ingots have been found not only in Britain but in France as well, indicating a substantial export. Tin was much less widespread in the Roman Empire, but it was a vital component of bronze, and Cornish tin was thus of some importance. In Britain itself, tin was often alloyed with lead to make pewter; moulds have been found in various places, including Lansdown and Camerton, near Bath, and in Silchester. Services of pewter, like the large one from Appleford, near Oxford (now in the Ashmolean Museum), were used as convenient substitutes for silver and were especially popular in the 4th century. Iron was required in great quantities for everything from nails and tools to attractive wrought-iron chains with which to suspend cauldrons; it was mined on the Weald (in Kent and Sussex) and also in the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire). Copper was mined in North Wales and gold at Dolaucothi, near Llandovery, Dyfed, and perhaps elsewhere.

The industry that has left most traces was the manufacture of terracotta for tiles and pottery. While some tileworks were official concerns that, for example, served the needs of the procurators in London or the colonia in Cirencester, most were private concerns that might have supplied roofing tiles for villas. Some pottery, such as the black-burnished ware of Dorset, was produced in vast quantities and taken as far as Hadrian's Wall. Other areas of pottery manufacture were Brockley Hill, near Stanmore, Middlesex, notable for producing mortaria (mixing bowls), the New Forest, and Nene Valley, and, especially in the 4th century, the immediate vicinity of modern Oxford.

Excavations of the Roman waterfront in London have confirmed Tacitus in showing the significance of this port as a centre for import and export in the 1st and 2nd centuries. Jet seems to have reached the Rhineland, while pewter vessels and certain products of British kilns (especially late Roman Oxford ware) are recorded in Gaul. More important exports were corn, wool, and textiles, including a special kind of coat known as the birrus Britannicus. Trade doubtless existed on the western side of Roman Britain, way beyond the frontier into Scotland and into Ireland; a trading port was recently discovered at Drumanagh, about 25 km (15 mi) north of Dublin. Doubtless various trinkets and other manufactured goods were exported to the barbarians in exchange for slaves and other products such as skins.

VII.

Social Status

The granting of Roman citizenship to any non-Roman was at first a rare distinction, and in the decade of the Roman conquest the only Britons who possessed it were probably a few favoured pro-Roman aristocrats like Togidubnus. Increasingly, however, Britons acquired it by serving on town councils or through service in the auxiliary regiments of the army where, on retirement after 25 years' service, a veteran would receive a diploma on a bronze tablet awarding him citizenship and bestowing the same status on his wife and children. By the early 3rd century, a very high proportion of the free population probably had Roman citizenship. In 212, Caracalla extended it to all free men in the Roman Empire; the motive was not so much altruistic as driven by the desire to increase revenue from the taxes which all Roman citizens were called on to pay.

Socially, at any rate, the distinction was maintained between honestiores (the upper class of the Roman citizens) and humiliores (their inferiors). The former would have comprised high officials, villa owners, and rich merchants; the latter, farm servants (often in a position of serfdom) and artisans. Slavery is little mentioned, although it certainly existed. (A letter found in London mentioned the sale of a slave girl, and iron shackles are sometimes found.) Apart from service in the mines, where conditions, in Britain as elsewhere, were probably very poor, the lot of slaves was not necessarily very different from that of free but poor men and women.

VIII.

Religion and Culture

A.

The Imperial Cult

Until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Romans did not attempt to impose Roman religion on their subject peoples. The only exception was the imperial cult, whereby Augustus and other deceased and deified emperors were venerated in special temples erected in major towns. The construction of a major temple set up in ad 54 by order of the Roman Senate to honour the recently deceased Claudius, the conqueror of Britain, became a flashpoint for rebellion. This was less for religious reasons than because native tribes and their leaders were expected to spend lavishly on building and embellishing the sanctuary. Once major grievances had been settled, the cult seems to have continued in Colchester, London, and elsewhere, while at native temples, even in the deep countryside, the numen (spirit) of the reigning emperor was worshipped alongside the true gods.

B.

Celtic and Roman Gods

Roman Britain illustrates the success that the Romans achieved in adapting native cults to their own. Celtic deities were merged with their Roman equivalents (seeRoman Mythology). At the great healing sanctuary of Bath (Aquae Sulis, “the waters of Sulis”), a temple of Roman form was erected to the goddess Sulis Minerva; at Nettleton Shrub, near by, Apollo was venerated as Cunomaglos (“hound-prince”), while at Lydney Park, in Gloucestershire, there was a healing shrine to Mars Nodens. Even where the Celtic names of deities have not been preserved (as at Uley, in Gloucestershire, where, in Roman times, a temple was dedicated to Mercury), it seems that native Britons still brought their problems to be solved by the god. Here, as at Bath, tablets of lead inscribed in Latin bear inscriptions asking for redress against thieves, while altars and the bones of animals attest to sacrifices made as thanks-offerings for favours granted.

Right down to the end of Roman rule, belief in Roman gods remained vigorous among the native Britons. A cache of gold jewellery and silver spoons buried near Thetford (and now in the British Museum) was dedicated to the Italian god Faunus, here given several strange local epithets such as Ausecus (“prick-eared”) and Medigenus (“mead-begotten”).

C.

Mithraism

Some cults came to Roman Britain from the East. One such was that of the Egyptian goddess Isis, to whom a temple was erected in London. The orgiastic worship of Attis and Cybele is also attested in London, as well as at Gloucester and Verulamium. The Oriental deity best known to us today is Mithras, an Indo-Iranian god of light, who was popular among certain elements in the Roman army, as finds from the Mithraeum (temple of Mithras) at the forts at Carrawburgh and at Housesteads, on Hadrian's Wall, show. By far the richest Mithraeum found in Britain was that discovered beside the Walbrook, in London; finds from the site include slabs of imported marble, one of which bears a dedication by a veteran of the Second Legion, pointing to the possibility that the devotees here were also mainly soldiers. However, Mithraism, with its high moral demands, would also have appealed to the merchant class, which was very important in London.

D.

Christianity

The earliest evidence of Christianity in Roman Britain dates from the 4th century ad. A collection of silver vessels and other pieces found at Water Newton, Cambridgeshire (and now in the British Museum), bear Christian dedications and appear to be church plate (items used in the celebration of the Eucharist). Other vestiges of Christianity include paintings featuring the Chi-Rho (a symbolic emblem of Christ made up of the first letters of his name in Greek) and orantes (figures with arms raised in the attitude of prayer), from the Roman villa at Lullingstone, Kent; a baptistery within the fort at Richborough, Kent; and a cemetery church excavated outside the walls at Colchester. In addition to this material evidence, St Patrick and Pelagius originated from Roman Britain, the former evangelizing Ireland and the latter leaving Britain to become the great adversary of St Augustine of Hippo in the great debate on the efficacy of Divine Grace. Recent study of St Patrick's writings has revealed a remarkably complex and erudite use of Latin—evidence of an unexpectedly high level of education in 4th-century Britain.

E.

Art

In the matter of material culture, Britain before the Romans had been the home of a vigorous and refined native tradition in art which, in the Iron Age, produced such masterpieces of Celtic bronze metalwork as the Battersea shield (British Museum), the Torrs chamfrein (possibly a pony-cap; National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh), the Birdlip mirror (Gloucester Museum), and the gold torcs (heavy neck rings) from the hoard unearthed as Snettisham, Norfolk.

The Roman conquest did not destroy this tradition, as was once thought, but transformed it. Under the Romans, British metalworkers turned their attention to a wider range of items, including figures that combine Roman classicism with the Celts' delight in texture and sinuous forms. Among the notable achievements of British metalworkers during the Roman occupation are a small statue of a muse (Reading Museum), from Silchester, and an image of the Roman god Mars (British Museum) from Foss Dyke, Lincolnshire, with cascading hair and decoratively stylized musculature. According to an inscription at its base, it was made for the Colasuni brothers by Celatus, an aerarius (a bronzesmith or coppersmith). British artisans were probably involved in casting large statues. Even the head of Hadrian (British Museum), from London, appears to be local work; the convoluted hair certainly looks Celtic.

It is certain that many Britons more than mastered the carving of stone; fine examples include the celebrated male Gorgon from the pediment of the temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath and the great capital (for a free-standing column) carved with the figures of Bacchus and his companions (Cirencester Museum). The existence of a Cotswold school is also attested by fine representations of Mercury in relief (from Cirencester) and in the round (from Uley). Another, related school was located further north: high-quality sculptures are known from Ancaster and Lincoln. A striking female mask (British Museum) with curving S-scroll tresses from Towcester, Northamptonshire, may also be attributed to this school. A third school has been identified at Carlisle, where it produced a number of distinctive gravestones.

Of the arts of Roman Britain, perhaps the most celebrated today is that of the mosaicist. In the 2nd century, mosaic workshops were set up in several major towns, including Colchester, Verulamium, and Cirencester, where fairly simple but attractive designs were produced, mainly geometric but some showing figural work. The economic downturn suffered throughout the Roman Empire during the 3rd century was reflected by a dip in patronage but, in the 4th century, Romano-British mosaics really came into their own. Cirencester was again a major centre, with a brilliant series of floors featuring a concentric design in which Orpheus is depicted with animals and birds circling around him. The largest is in situ on the site of the palatial villa at Woodchester, near Cirencester; a smaller version from the Barton Farm villa, just outside Cirencester, is in the Corinium Museum, Cirencester. Other floors from the same school, one with a Bacchic theme, can be seen at Chedworth villa. Another workshop specializing in rather fleshy animals and plants was based at Dorchester, in Dorset. The great villa-like complex at Frampton included a large number of mythological scenes, such as Perseus and the sea monster, Aeneas plucking the golden bough, and Cadmus slaying the serpent of Mars.

The subjects of the Frampton mosaics have been thought to be derived from illustrations to the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It is certain that the story of Dido and Aeneas (Taunton Museum) from the floor of the bathhouse of a villa at Low Ham, Somerset, is based on an illuminated copy of The Aeneid of Virgil, while the triclinium (dining room) floor of Lullingstone villa, Kent (also probably laid by mosaicists from Dorset) shows Europa being abducted by Jupiter in the guise of a bull; it is accompanied by a verse alluding to the storm that wrecked Aeneas's fleet at Carthage but in a metre that imitates Ovid. Presumably the verse was written by the owner of the villa and, as such, attests to his education not only in the use of Latin, but in the enjoyment of literature.

Further north, another mosaic workshop was located at Brough-on-Humber, or perhaps at Aldborough, Yorkshire. To that workshop is attributed a remarkable series of floors at Horkstow, Lincolnshire, including a local interpretation of the concentric Orpheus design and a spirited chariot race. In eastern England, a mosaic school with its office perhaps at Water Newton, Cambridgeshire, attempted only geometric designs.

IX.

Inscriptions and Literacy

As might be expected, the fullest evidence for literacy in Britain comes from the forts and fortresses of the Roman army, which have not only yielded many official dedications of buildings, altars recording vows made to the gods, and the inscribed tombstones of soldiers, but even (at Vindolanda, in Northumberland, just south of Hadrian's Wall) files of correspondence written on wooden tablets.

However, reading and writing were also widespread among the civilian population of Britain, as is proved by graffiti scratched on walls, and on pieces of pottery and tiles. Very occasionally (in waterlogged deposits of London) archaeologists have discovered a letter written in ink or scratched too deeply through the wax of a wooden writing tablet. All are in the Latin language. It is easy to imagine that the Roman teacher (grammaticus), who perhaps taught under the shelter of the colonnade of the forum, would have had no difficulty in finding pupils. Tiles on which alphabets have been scratched are known from Cirencester and Wroxeter, and another including a phrase from Virgil's Aeneid from Silchester. Some of the evidence for a much wider appreciation of Classical literature among the leisured classes in their villas has been mentioned above.

Towns have yielded a few formal inscriptions, some of them very grand, such as the dedications of the forums at Verulamium and Wroxeter set up respectively by the civitates of the Catuvellauni and the Cornovii. There was also the statue which, as the inscription on its base indicates, was erected by the ordo or senate of the Silures at Caerwent in honour of the one-time legate of the Second Augusta legion which was based at Caerleon near by, probably because he was their patron representing the interests of the civitas to the far-away imperial government. Other inscriptions are religious in nature: among them are the dedication of the Temple of Neptune and Minerva at Chichester and various altars, including one to the genius (spirit) of the city of Cirencester and another to the mother goddesses at Winchester. Funerary inscriptions range from the grand lettering on the tomb of the procurator, Classicianus, from London to the touching epitaph of a little girl called Corellia Optata at York.

X.

The Legacy of Roman Britain

By the early 5th century, with the gradual collapse of the Roman Empire already under way, Rome lost direct control of Britain, as well as its other provinces in western Europe. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries heralded the next stage in the history of Britain.

The continuity of towns in post-Roman Britain has been the subject of debate. Some, such as Dorchester (Dorset), Dorchester (Oxfordshire), and Lincoln, probably maintained some sort of urban cohesion through the early Middle Ages. In others, for instance Canterbury, there may have been a short break in the later 5th century before occupation was resumed. Tellingly, the sites of most Roman towns lie directly beneath their medieval and modern successors. This was not only because the sites themselves were well chosen but because they continued to be regarded as seats of government and of ecclesiastical power. The short list of bishops attending the Council of Arles in 314 gives the names of the bishops of York, London, and Lincoln, then the capitals of three of the four late Roman provinces and the seat of bishops today.

As to the countryside, it is clear that it continued to be farmed. (Pollen analysis demonstrates that the wildwood cleared to make the villa estates did not regenerate.) Moreover, it is likely that many Anglo-Saxon estates, especially the villae regales (estates which were held by the king), were descended from Roman estates.

It was in eastern Britain, where the Anglo-Saxon presence was strongest, that cultural continuity from Roman times was correspondingly weakest, even though the population of eastern Britain was made up largely of the descendants of Romano-Britons. In western Britain, continuity was much stronger, even though the Celtic tongue (rather than Latin, apart from a few loan-words) survived. Nevertheless, in upper-class and Christian circles, Latin continued to be read and spoken, and was spread to Ireland. The standard of Latin which was written by St Patrick, his forebears, and successors was remarkable. The tradition of literacy and learning in Ireland and in western Britain, even if it was augmented by influence from Gaul and elsewhere, can be seen in part as the legacy of Roman Britain.

Evidence for the persistence of Christianity is harder to identify in south-eastern Britain. It certainly survived in Christian enclaves such as that which centred around Verulamium, and which shifted to the hill near by where Alban was martyred in 304; it was evidently a place of pilgrimage through the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, many of the inhabitants of post-Roman Britain were still pagan. They held beliefs not so very different from those of the newcomers from north-western Europe with whom they were to merge, adopting new styles of ornament but perhaps retaining their own traditions in other respects, such as metalworking and enamelling, and in burial rites. In one such rite, the head was removed from the body after death: this had been a common tradition in late Roman Britain (found, for instance, in the Roman cemetery at Lankhills, Winchester) and was still being practised in the 7th century at Winnall, near by.