Britain

Britain remained the least Romanised of the empire’s Celtic provinces, though any fears the Romans initially held that Ireland and the unconquered north would prove to be unsettling examples of freedom proved groundless. The Britons came to regard the Caledonians and Irish as barbarians and enemies. Not that there is any reason to suppose that they had ever regarded them as friends anyway. The part of Britain under Roman control became the province of Britannia, ruled by a governor based in London. By c. 100 most of the province had been subdivided into civitates based on the Iron Age tribal territories, much as had been the case with Gaul. Roman rule increased the pace of urbanisation. Colonies (coloniae) of Roman citizens, mainly discharged veteran soldiers, were founded at Chelmsford (Caesaromagus), St Albans (Verulamium), Gloucester (Glevum), Lincoln (Lindum) and York (Eburacum) to act as agents of Romanisation. Some of the late Iron Age tribal oppida, such as Silchester (Calleva), were adopted as civitas capitals. In other cases new towns were founded to replace old hillforts. In this way Dorchester (Durnovaria), the civitas capital of the Durotriges, replaced the nearby hillfort of Maiden Castle. In the economically advanced lowland zone the native aristocracy was readily accommodated within the administrative hierarchy of province and civitas and they took up the burdens of building temples and other public buildings. Their lifestyles, appearance and dress, even their names, became Romanised. Tacitus wrote, somewhat sneeringly, of the Britons being enslaved by baths and banquets and proudly describing this aping of Roman manners as humanitas (‘civilisation’). Not all Romans were so superior. As far as the Roman poet Martial was concerned, his British lady friend Claudia Rufina positively exemplified humanitas - flattery indeed. Classical sculpture, wall painting and mosaics were introduced, though they were often adapted to local taste. A spectacular example of this is the very unclassical Medusa’s head carving from the temple of Sulis-Minerva at Bath. Despite this, the insular La Tene style remained popular for personal jewellery, especially in the north. As in Gaul, the Romans tried to win over the locals by introducing them to the amenities of urban life, such as hot baths and amphitheatres. In the south-east, the aristocracy reorganised their lands into large-scale farming estates and built villas for themselves, but in the west and north farming and building techniques remained unchanged by the Roman conquest. Even in the south-east, small farmers still remained outside the imperial cash economy in the third century. Much of Wales and northern England was economically too under-developed to be incorporated into the normal pattern of civil administration. These mineral-rich and strategically important areas remained under direct military government throughout the Roman occupation. Tribal identities remained strong in these regions throughout the period of Roman rule, but they seem to have declined in importance in the south-east.

Though the imperial cults were introduced into Britain, Celtic paganism remained strong. Often, as was common throughout the Roman empire, native cults were assimilated with Roman cults, as happened in the temple of Sulis-Minerva at Bath, where the Celtic goddess Sulis was equated with the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva. Celtic paganism was still going strong in the late fourth century, when a temple to the local agricultural god Nodens was built at Lydney in Gloucestershire. Despite official prohibitions, human sacrifice and the head cult continued to be practised publicly almost to the end of Roman rule. One example, dating to c. 200, is the skull of a teenage boy, which had been de-fleshed and displayed on a post in a temple at St Albans before being buried in a ritual pit. The boy had been battered to death. Impressive Christian mosaics at the fourth-century villa at Hinton St Mary show that Christianity had begun to win converts in the upper classes by the early fourth century, but its progress was slow before the emperor Theodosius officially banned all pagan cults in 391. The conversion of the Britons to Christianity thereafter must have taken place

Plate 17 Head of Medusa from the temple of Sulis-Minerva, Bath

Source: Roman Baths Museum, Bath, Avon, UK/Bridgeman Art Library, Www. bridgeman. co. uk

Over a very short period of time. Certainly the writings of St Patrick and Constantins of Lyon, who wrote an account of the visit of St Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, to Britain in 429, betray no evidence at all of surviving paganism. Nor are anything other than Christian symbols ever found on fifth-century memorial inscriptions.

Britain produced no great literary figure to compare with Sidonius or Ausonius, though St Patrick was a Romano-Briton. So was the theologian Pelagius (d. c. 418), who rejected the orthodox Christian teaching that humankind’s salvation depended on divine grace, preaching instead that man had free will to choose between good and evil and so was responsible for his own salvation. He was declared a heretic in 417. There were British poets who could write elegant verse in Latin but only a few couplets have survived on tombstones and mosaics. The only one known by name lived towards the end of the fourth century - Silvius Bonus, who was mocked by the Gallic poet Ausonius, who said he could not be a good poet because no Briton could be a good poet (‘French’ contempt for ‘British’ culture started early). Scenes from the Aeneid and images of Roman gods and Greek myths on mosaics and tableware show that the British elite were familiar with Classical authors, including Homer, Virgil and Ovid, and wanted to display the fact to visitors. A red jasper intaglio bearing a portrait of Socrates, found in Gloucestershire, indicates that some educated Britons had an interest in Classical philosophy. The elite quickly learned to speak and write Latin, but they were always bilingual. The majority remained Celtic-speaking. Even the rich, such as Quintus Natalius Natalinus, the owner of a villa at Thruxton in Hampshire, still had Celtic names in the fourth century. Latin was purely a language of culture and administration and no British vernacular version of the language developed as it did in Gaul and Spain. The Brithonic language borrowed around 800 words from Latin but it remained Brithonic.

Britain survived the empire’s crisis years in the third century relatively unscathed either by barbarian invasion or civil war, though it was independent from central Roman authority as part of the Gallic empire and again under the usurpers Carausius and Allectus, who ruled a short-lived ‘British Empire’ between 286 and 296. The fourth century has, with good reason, been described as the ‘Golden Age’ of Roman Britain. The sea did not perfectly insulate Britain from the troubles suffered by Gaul - raids by Saxon, Pictish and Irish pirates required a considerable and continuing attention to coastal defences - but the province was relatively secure in comparison. The insecurity on the continent even benefited the British economy. The Rhine frontier was under constant pressure from the Germanic tribes and the provisioning needs of the Roman army stimulated agriculture in Britain. Luxurious villas sprang up across important graingrowing areas like the Cotswolds. Britain’s relative immunity to invasion ended with the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367. The Roman province was assailed by a formidable alliance of Scotti (from Ireland), Attacotti (origin unknown) and Piets (from northern Britain), who attacked from the north and west, and Franks and Saxons, who attacked the Channel coast. The garrison got no warning of the attack because the agents placed to supervise the northern tribes had been bribed. Britain’s cities, by now mostly walled, seem to have held out, but plundering bands overran the countryside and the commander of the coast defences was killed. The invaders were driven out in 368 after reinforcements arrived from Gaul, but a pervasive sense of insecurity remained and the fabric of Roman Britain began to unravel. Barbarian raids, or even just the fear of them, hit the countryside the hardest. Some villas and farms can be shown to have met violent ends but most were simply abandoned or allowed to fall into disrepair; very few survived into the fifth century. Towns had never flourished in Britain in the same way they had in Gaul, and they too went into decline as they lost their administrative functions due to political instability.

Though fourth-century Britain was politically loyal to the empire, the province won a reputation as a breeding ground for usurpers, most of them ambitious generals. The trend was set by Constantine the Great, who was proclaimed emperor at York in 306 (of course Constantine won and so is not usually considered a usurper - that status is reserved for losers). Later usurpers, such as Magnus Maximus (the Maxen Wledig of Welsh legend) who rebelled in 383, withdrew troops to fight in civil wars on the continent, so weakening the garrison and leaving the province exposed to barbarian raids. The last British mint had closed by 388 and, as money supplies from the continent were intermittent, coins gradually went out of circulation. In 407 another usurper, Constantine III, led another army out of Britain to Gaul in pursuit of his political ambitions. By this time it seems that the Britons had had enough; the empire was no longer working for them, and in 410 they expelled Constantine’s administration and organised their own defences against the barbarians. Britain thus became the only province ever to leave the empire of its own volition. Pelagius had many followers in Britain, and his doctrine of spiritual self-help may well have influenced the Britons in their momentous decision to break with Rome.