A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  By the time Hadrian died in 138 the wall had done its work of containment well enough for his successor, Antoninus Pius, to push the frontier north, deep into Scotland, to a turf wall built from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth, confining the hostile Picts (literally the ‘painted ones’ or picti) to what Tacitus had called the northern ‘island’ of Caledonia. Now that they were no longer on the first line of defence, forts such as Housesteads and Corbridge developed into something more like upcountry hill stations and centres of bustling business than anything resembling a Roman Checkpoint Charlie. The wall was rarely thought of as a cordon sanitaire, something that would hermetically seal off Roman Britain from the rest of the island to the north. The idea was less to prevent movement than to control and observe it. If there was a killing to be made it would be measured less in bodies than in denarii, the takings from the customs tolls imposed on goods travelling from one side of the wall to the other. That way, traders and suppliers who were making money from the presence of the military would also be paying for the country’s defence, a kind of protection that the Romans would have been horrified to consider as a racket. Rather than thinking of Hadrian’s Wall as a fence, it might be more accurately seen as a spine around which Roman control of the north of Britannia toughened and stabilized.

  If we can now imagine a place like Vindolanda fort, about halfway along the length of the wall and one mile to the rear, as not such a bad posting, it is because our sense of what life was like for the soldiers at the wall forts and for the population who lived around them has been transformed by one of the most astonishing finds of recent Roman archaeology. For twenty-five years, archaeologists have been cutting slices of the soil, from 23 feet deep, broad enough to see, when inspected sideways on, in a kind of cross-section of the ancient past, whether the dirt retains any of the paper-thin, postcard-size, wooden tablets on which the men and women of Vindolanda recorded the comings and goings of their daily life. Written in ink, fragments have survived rather in the way one might imagine (though this is increasingly unlikely in the age of e-mail) the little bits of receipts, credit card payment stubs, junk mail and circulars that we casually toss aside. They have opened a window on to what the world of the Roman fort was really like.

  Suppose you were a trader in fish sauce, that ubiquitous and smelly table condiment of the Roman Empire, without which, it seems, no soldier could face a day’s duty, and you were making a delivery to Vindolanda. The first thing that would strike you was how very few soldiers actually seemed to be around. When a tally was taken on 18 May (AD92–97) no fewer than 456 out of the fort’s nominal strength of 756 were either absent or sick. Then you might notice that the soldiers who were there didn’t look especially Roman, but were rather tall, lanky types with fair hair and pink cheeks, which makes sense since most of them were in fact Dutch (Batavian) or Belgian (Tungrian) auxiliaries. There also seemed to be a lot of people around doing strictly non-military jobs: building workers, cobblers, vets and armourers. You would also see enviable luxuries: a hospital for the sick, communal latrines, a heated bath-house and enormous granaries. If you were asked to stay for a meal, you would probably accept, because you knew they ate well: oysters and roedeer venison, goat’s meat and pig’s trotters, garlic, olives and radishes. And you would be reminded that it was a global empire you were serving by the presence of exotic pepper in your diet. There would, of course, be the usual grousing about the shortage of beer and gossip about which lads got which jobs and what exactly they had to do to get them; when they would next get a chance to go on a boar-hunt; how long their stint was before they could get out of the army and get their citizenship as a reward; the laziness or the excellence of their slaves; and juicy tittle-tattle about the station commander, Flavius Cerealis, and his wife Sulpicia Lepidina and her social world.

  On the third day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday I warmly invite you to make sure that you come to us, as your arrival will make the day more enjoyable for me if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerealis. My Aelius and my little son send him theirs. I shall expect you sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul as I hope to prosper and hail.

  Although at the beginning of the four centuries of Roman rule distinctions between Latins and Britons were brutally sharp, sometimes drawn in blood, by the late second and third centuries, Britannia – especially in lowland England from the Weald to the Lincolnshire Wolds in the east, and from Devon to Carlisle in the west – had settled down into a hybrid, polyglot, rather easy-going province, not the nightmare of perpetual insurrection it must have seemed at the height of Boudicca’s revolt.

  Of course, not everyone among the native population of Britannia enjoyed the fruits of Roman rule equally. For the vast majority of country-dwellers, who continued to speak their Celtic tongues, it was just a case of one kind of landowner replacing another. The warriors of the British tribes, who had enjoyed high status for their performance of military services for the chief, were probably the most traumatized of all, shoved aside by the professional army of the Romans and faced with a choice of joining the unfamiliar world of urban society or of staying on the land as masterless peasant cultivators. In the top tier of society, however, a remarkable hybridization took place, just as everywhere else in the Roman Empire at its height, with the distinctions between natives and newcomers increasingly blurred. It is not exceptional to find a tombstone erected at South Shields by a Roman from Palmyra, Syria, to his wife Regina, a British ex-slave. And beneath the veneer of official Roman religion, all kinds of native British-Celtic cults survived. In a first-century grave at Corbridge a beheaded skeleton was buried along with a batch of bodies who were buried with their boots, the better perhaps to march into the afterlife.

  The most deservedly famous of all these hybrid icons is the cheerful face that greeted poolside devotees (along with a group of carved bathing beauties) as they entered the colonnaded porch of the temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath. In keeping with a place that may have been built to its state of classical opulence and grandeur by that unapologetic celebrant of Romano-British good feeling Togidubnus (a.k.a. Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus of the palace of Fishbourne), whose territories now stretched all the way into the west country, there are allusions in the relief sculptures to the imperial magnificence of Claudius and Vespasian. But Togidubnus was a true cultural cross-breed, and it would have been just like him to have concocted a signature deity for the baths that was part-Roman (with suggestions of the Gorgon’s head) and part Celtic, perhaps Sol, old Sunshine himself, who warmed the cockles of the Romans, if not in the Mendip air, then certainly in the steaming waters of Aquae Sulis.

  Bath was the quintessential Romano-British place, at the same time mod-con and mysterious cult. On either side of it were a pair of Iron Age forts, Little Solsbury and Bathhampton, and given the native British reverence for the waters, Togidubnus was almost certainly taking advantage of his new position to build on the kind of site that, in the older culture, it would have been sacrilegious to turn into a spa. In its prime, Bath was a huge extravaganza of buildings constructed over a spring, which gushed a third of a million gallons of piping hot, bright orange (from the mercuric oxide) water, 104°F (40°C), up into the bathing pools every day. To soak at Bath was to give both your body and your soul a good cleaning, ablution and devotion. Much of the bathing – as well as the gossip, flirtation and deal-making that was bound to go on in the steamy drip of the spa – took place in the austere grandeur of the Great Bath (with second thoughts on something injudicious said or done perhaps occurring in the subsequent cold dip that was meant to close the pores). But the real heart of the place was the sacred spring, where the water gathered in a ferny grotto. A specially cut window allowed devotees of the presiding deity, the genius of the place, Sulis Minerva herself, to look over the spring towards an altar erected in her honour, and it also let bathers throw a little something in the waters to attract her attention.

  From the
trove of objects taken from the drain during excavations in 1878, it is apparent that the more one wanted a favour, the more lavish the offering – a bag of gems, a pair of earrings. What was wanted, it appears from the stones, was sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse on faithless lovers – ‘By this Tacita is cursed and declared putrefied like rotting blood’ – and especially on the casual petty-thieves for whom Bath must have been a goldmine: ‘Whether pagan Christian, whosoever; whether man or woman, boy or girl, slave or free, has stolen from me, Ammianus, this morning six silver pieces, from my purse, you Lady Goddess are to extract them from him.’

  Bath was not the only place where Romano-Britons could wallow in the well-being of the province. From the great trading centre of Londinium, through settlements like Gloucester, which had begun as a retirement colony for Roman soldiers, to Colchester, which had risen, phoenix-like from its burned ruins to become a majestically imposing city, the island was dotted with towns of between 15,000 and 20,000 citizens. It was the beginning of authentic urban life in Britain. And although in the country the vast majority of the peasantry still spoke Celtic tongues, by the third century AD the descendants of the old British warrior nobility grew up speaking and writing Latin, even though they must have been conscious of being part of a native elite. Once educated, they could join the government of the towns as curiales (councillors) and live in town houses with engineered water supplies, which would be connected to their houses if they could afford it. Nothing remotely like this degree of hydraulic and sanitary convenience would be available again in Britain until the nineteenth century. The tables of the governing class were stocked from markets, to which farmers, who could now raise crops for a cash market, brought fresh produce, and their houses were full of goods made in Britain, such as Oxfordshire or New Forest pottery, the best competition for the imported Samian redware that flooded the Roman Empire. There were animal games in the theatre, dull council meetings in handsome stone assembly rooms and ostentatious suburban villas, seldom more than half a day’s ride from town, with walls painted with faux architectural details to make them seem even grander.

  It is quite wrong to think of the third or even the early fourth century AD as the twilight zone of Roman Britain. Whatever the problems of metropolitan Rome, with usurper succeeding usurper with dizzying speed and obligatory bloodshed, the sun was still shining on Britannia. Some of the most stunning creations of Romano-British art were produced in this period, like the splendid villa at Bignor in Sussex, or the showy hotel at Dover, known as the ‘Painted House’, its rooms now buried several feet below the surface of the street. To anyone arriving in the province from Gaul and lucky enough to be lodged in this place, there would have been no thought at all that this was the architecture of ‘decline’.

  At some point, however, Dover’s significance for Britannia changed from being a port of entry to being a defensive stronghold, and the welcome mat gave way to the keep-out sign, in the shape of massive walls, which at one point cut right through what would once have been the Grand Hotel’s lobby.

  This sea-change from expansive optimism to fretful caution did not happen overnight. Roman Britain died very slowly, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with rather a long-drawn-out sigh. And not for any lament for the imagined lost liberties of Celtic Britain, but rather for Mother Rome herself. If we ask what was wrong with Roman Britain, the answer is: not much, not, at any rate, in the third and fourth centuries. The trouble was not here but there. Ironically, as the taproots of Roman-British culture ran more deeply and more strongly, the metropolitan centre of the empire began to subside into anarchy, with multiplying emperors, conspiracies, murders and usurpations. The very core of Roman rule, legitimacy, itself became problematic. When a new currency was issued from Rome, it met with resentment and resistance in Britain. It was precisely because Britannia seemed to be one of the strongest, rather than one of the weakest, of the provinces, that when military strong men raised the standard of revolt in York or London, they did so not in the name of national independence but as reformers who were more Roman than the Romans – the saviours of the empire who would descend from the chilly north to save the languid eternal city from itself.

  The most extraordinary of these men was Carausius, who started his career as a pilot-helmsman in the muddy waters of the Belgian coast and rose through the ranks as a captain commissioned to sweep the North Sea of pirates. Rather than render to Caesar what was Caesar’s, Carausius proceeded to use his prizes to build a formidable power base, going all the way in 286 and having himself declared emperor. A succession of British historians, not least the great eighteenth-century writer Edward Gibbon, romanticized Carausius as an authentic early British king, an Alfred before his time, a mariner-hero. But Carausius was really an adventurer, who used Britain as an operational base to advance his imperial ambitions. Styling himself Marcus Aurelius Carausius, after the most philosophical of emperors, he dressed up his military exploits with cultural self-promotion, minting coins that referred to the onset of a new golden age, and himself as the ‘Renovator of Rome’. Carausius’s publicity machine may have been so good that it tempted his own second-in-command, Allectus, to believe that he could easily take it over. So in 293 he murdered Carausius and promptly minted his own coins before going down in defeat to a Roman army of repression. But the general at whose feet defeated London kneeled and who was hailed as ‘Restorer of the Light’ was Constantius, the deputy of the Emperor Maximian and father of Constantine.

  Compared to the disasters unfolding on the empire’s eastern frontiers, where the barbarian armies were slicing deep into its territories, Britain must have seemed, at least superficially, an impregnable rock. The defensive line of Hadrian’s Wall was supplemented now by a chain of nine ‘Saxon Shore’ forts, completed by Carausius and strung strategically along the eastern and southern coasts, from Brancaster in Norfolk to Portchester in Hampshire. But manpower had, in fact, been seriously drained by returning many of the troops to the continental empire, where they were desperately needed. And this attrition did not go unnoticed by Rome’s enemies, for in 367 something unprecedented happened: a co-ordinated onslaught by three separate sets of raiders. From across the North Sea came Anglo-Saxons, who penetrated the Saxon Shore forts and killed their commanders. Other fortresses, traditionally assumed to be solid, were pierced by warriors who came from lands that had never fallen under Roman rule: Picts from central and northern Scotland and the Gaelic Dal Riata (usually, and much more confusingly, referred to as the ‘Scoti’) from Ireland. Villas were sacked and burned, and towns were terrifyingly cut off from any kind of relief or reinforcement. The chronicler Ammianus wrote of London being surrounded by gangs of looters, who pushed crowds of captured men and cattle along the roads.

  It was not all over with Britannia. Two years after the shock of the barbarian raids, a semblance of Roman law and order had been restored and the garrisons strengthened. But the end of the fourth century undeniably saw a crisis. Ironically, some of the country’s helplessness in the face of outside attack was due to its being too well-adjusted to Roman government. The continuity of town life that lay at the heart of the system presupposed adequate defence. But that had been left to professional troops and foreign and native auxiliaries, who could no longer be relied on (whatever the promises from Rome) to stay put when needed. Bereft of that protection, the most Romanized regions of the province could not suddenly conceive of an improvised self-defence, much less do something about it. It was on the less urbanized fringes of Britannia – in Wales, Devon and Cornwall, and in the far north, for example, where the old British sub-Roman warrior class had been less integrated into Roman government – that it was possible to mount some resistance, usually led by local autocrats and helped by rugged topography. One of them actually reoccupied the deserted fort of Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall as his military headquarters.

  Military peril engendered economic crisis. In the heartland of Roman Britain generations of farmers had prosper
ed by producing for the town markets. With those markets now imperilled by barbarian raids, the vital connection between town and country snapped, leaving many of the villagers to resort to cattle- and sheep-droving. Those who stayed had no reason to be particularly loyal to the Romano-British. As long as they were left alone, why should they care who lorded it over Britain? For the unfree country people, the changes that were so traumatic for their rulers were just a matter of exchanging one lot of masters for another. So when, in 410, the Emperor Honorius responded to requests for help from Britain by writing to the leading citizens of Britannia that from now on they would have to defend themselves from their own resources, Romano-patriotic resistance was hardly on the cards.