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.