The Romans would not have conquered Britain had there been nothing in it for them. Although not united as a single nation, the British were a long way from being a chaotic, squabbling group of tribal kingdoms – as they have sometimes been portrayed. For example, the different parts of the British Isles had long been connected by a system of roads and tracks, and the landscape was organized into a complex network of farms, hamlets, villages and larger settlements, although true towns had yet to appear. Farming in pre-Roman Britain was well organized and very productive. Most importantly, there is little evidence that fields or farms were abandoned after the Roman conquest. The vast majority continued in use and became even more productive as money-based markets were set up in the newly established towns that grew in prosperity in the second and third centuries AD.
The layout and development of ancient field systems can reveal much about past farming practices and they have long fascinated prehistorians who have studied and surveyed them, both on the ground or from the air, for well over a century.1 When Roman field systems were studied, it was often as part of a prehistoric or regional survey. Only occasionally, the Fens being a notable exception, were Roman field systems studied in their own right and there was certainly no attempt to draw them all together into a coherent picture.2
We saw in the previous chapter how the military-focused approach to the Roman conquest caused problems with the interpretation of hillforts such as Maiden Castle. Similar approaches – almost amounting to an obsession – dominated studies of Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman military installations throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s. I suspect the failure to consider fields of the Roman period in Britain as a unified topic was another outcome of this overemphasis on military and other history-based issues, together with a disproportionate emphasis on the archaeology of Roman villas, towns and roads. (The study of Roman roads could, of course, also be readily linked to the military.)
The field systems of Roman Britain were only considered as a unified topic as recently as 2007, in a remarkable atlas compiled by Jeremy Taylor.3 This study draws extensively on a mass of unpublished data, housed in local council offices – the result of excavations and surveys carried out in advance of development projects. The Roman fields of England were based upon (and developed out of) the fields that were being used in the late Iron Age, at the time of the conquest, in AD 43. The families who farmed them were the families who ran them before the Roman invasion. As a general rule, there was little or no disruption when the Roman army arrived. Farming landscapes in the north and west tended to be more open, with larger fields and grazing areas and with more dispersed and smaller rural settlements than those in the south and east, where greater emphasis was placed on the growing of crops.
The big change in Roman times came in the later second and third centuries, when trading networks opened up and farms and other rural industries became more prosperous. I have always found this particular period fascinating. The conquest had happened, and people accepted it; but they were still British, they still had Celtic (i.e. British) names and they probably still spoke a Celtic language, but by now they would have understood Latin and maybe, too, some of the contemporary languages of Germany and the Low Countries, with which trading links were becoming better established. Europe was in a state of flux; this was a period of rapid change. So are there signs in the archaeological record of how people were able to adapt so rapidly to the new reality of Roman rule – in the course of just two or three generations? At the time of writing, we are living through a period of extraordinary uncertainty both at home and abroad: Brexit still looms darkly over the horizon, the Covid pandemic continues its unpredictable course, Trump lost the election but was reluctant to accept the result, and China is growing increasingly menacing. Talking to friends, relations and colleagues, it is clear that we are all seeking stability in our lives, and we find it in different ways and in a variety of activities. I find myself spending most days out in the garden, either weeding borders or planting a huge selection of fruit and vegetables. When Maisie isn’t in the garden with me, she occupies her time sewing or cooking – but she doesn’t restrict herself to old favourites. We have both found that we can enhance the interest of whatever it is we are doing by venturing into unexplored territory, whether that be new fabrics or patterns, or new recipes involving previously untried vegetables. Tenderstem broccoli and home-grown and dried cannellini beans have recently become firm favourites, both in the vegetable garden and on the dinner table.
I think I might have found evidence for a similar enjoyment of new food fashions and other innovative personal experiences during politically or socially difficult times in the finds we came across when we dug the ditches of a farm dating to the early Roman period at Fengate in Peterborough.4 I confess they didn’t make much sense to me when we excavated them in the late 1970s, but I think they are beginning to do so now. The farm in question was erected on the site of a later Iron Age hamlet that had been in existence for some three or four centuries. At any one time, it would have consisted of about a dozen houses, plus shelters and small barns for livestock. This was quite a substantial and prosperous community in the later Iron Age, but it seems to have been abandoned at about the time of the Roman conquest. We don’t know why its inhabitants left, but it seems to have been a peaceful process. The site of the deserted hamlet was then reoccupied about a century later, in the third quarter of the second century AD. This reoccupation made use of many of the earlier site’s ditches, but this time for a farm rather than a settlement. The farm was based on livestock, probably cattle and sheep (to judge from the bones found). It lay at the wetland edge and was accessed by way of a wide, ditched droveway, which would have been used to drive livestock to and from the higher land of the fen margins, now beneath the city of Peterborough.
The conventional picture of the Roman conquest features blue-painted Ancient Britons facing the uniformed might of the Roman army.a In reality, the distinction between the two sides was not as stark. Many of the well-established British tribal kingdoms had good relations with Rome and certainly in better-off parts of south-east England people from richer families drank wine and used olive oil imported from the Mediterranean. In the late Iron Age, many more people began to use a type of sprung brooch, which closely resembles a large modern safety pin. These so-called fibula brooches are decorative, but they are essential for securing Roman-style toga-based clothing. So the evidence seems to be suggesting that many in the upper echelons of Iron Age communities in southern Britain were starting to adopt aspects of Roman culture about a century before the conquest of AD 43. The excavations of the Fengate settlement, prior to its abandonment at the time of the Roman conquest, revealed some thirteen fibula brooches.
The recut ditches of the second-century AD settlement at Fengate produced large quantities of pottery made in the semi-industrial workshops of the nearby Roman town of Durobrivae (modern Water Newton) just 11 kilometres (7 miles) to the west. In among the pottery were a few pieces of Samian ware, glossy and finely finished red pottery that was made in central Gaul (France). This was very upmarket stuff and would have made quite a statement when placed on a dinner table. The dig also revealed about a dozen pieces of hard ceramic kitchen mortars, including one example that was half-complete. These mortars look remarkably similar to modern ones and feature strong, wide rims that were easy to grip. Many were well-worn and some had been burned. Their importance lies in the way that they were used: most mortars were, and are, used to grind or powder spices. So far as we know, the use of spices was unknown in British prehistoric kitchens. The grinding of spices for food was a Roman practice, and yet here is good evidence of its adoption by Late Iron Age Britons in a Fenland farm kitchen.
It seems to me that the local British population adapted to the challenges of what was rapidly becoming a new order by changing with the times, but they would have done it in their own way – and that’s why I am prepared to bet good money that even the spiciest food
prepared in a Fenland farmhouse would still have had a distinctively British flavour. People were adapting to the changing world around them in their own, distinctive fashion.
*
The two or three centuries that followed the withdrawal of the last Roman troops from Britain, in the years around AD 410, have often been described as the Dark Ages – an inaccurate term that I detest, mainly because it suggests that the Romans brought light, which then vanished when they withdrew. These centuries were traditionally seen as very bleak: civil governance broke down, farms and fields were abandoned and countryside that had been cultivated returned to dense woodland. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, this grim and lawless landscape was then invaded by successive waves of Anglo-Saxon brigands and warlords from the other side of the North Sea. That at least was the conventional wisdom in the decades before and just after the last war; but it was largely based on misreadings of later accounts of the period, which were not trying to portray objective history and were all written for their own, rather different motives.
Then in the 1960s, at places like Mucking in Essexb and elsewhere, archaeologists returned to the excavation of early post-Roman sites, but at a much larger scale than had been possible previously; what they revealed was very different from the, by then, widely accepted view of an anarchic age of darkness. Their findings have been enhanced and confirmed by research in subsequent decades and we now see the post-Roman Anglo-Saxon period as an exciting time of change and innovation. A coherent group of regional kingdoms emerged, and – after a period of several centuries during which the balance of power shifted between them – eventually came together into a single nation and identity, that of England and the English.
The change from a more Romanized way of life was not as dramatic as used to be believed: entire field systems were not abandoned overnight. Naturally, there were some changes: there was no Roman army, for example, that needed to be supplied with British grain, and there was a move towards the keeping of more livestock, but scrub and then woodland did not take over the British landscape. As for the human population, there is genetic evidence for an influx of people from continental Europe, but there is also evidence that British people moved across the Channel.5 In other words, it was a two-way process. The population movements were probably rather slighter than we are currently witnessing in the early twenty-first century. The change in language took place over several centuries. The language brought to Britain by Germanic settlers in the fifth century, known as Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), became the dominant tongue spoken in England and the south of Scotland, gradually replacing Brythonic and Latin, the languages of Roman Britain – although Latin would remain the language of scholarship and the Christian church (present in Britain since mid-Roman times). Brythonic would eventually retreat to the western parts of Britain – to Wales and Cornwall – while in northern Scotland and Ireland other forms of Celtic were spoken. Many communities across Britain would have been multilingual, however, as indeed are significant numbers of people in north Wales, the Scottish Isles or western Ireland, today.
We know from sites in the Somerset Levels and at Flag Fen and Must Farm in the Fens that the prehistoric inhabitants of Britain were very good at woodwork.c It would seem that these traditions of craftsmanship continued to develop through Roman times because they again became evident in the early post-Roman Saxon period. This was the time when timber buildings became more popular, following the widespread use of brick and stone that had become so fashionable in Roman Britain. Surviving early Saxon timberwork is still quite rare, but excavations have revealed the ground plans of many buildings. Using their ground plans as a basis, experimental archaeologists have worked out how these timber structures were assembled and erected.
A village of reconstructed Saxon buildings has been painstakingly recreated at West Stow in Suffolk.6 Over the years I have visited many ancient timber buildings and I am always slightly disappointed that they have completely lost their smell of ‘woodiness’. The sap and oils that give oak and pine their light but very distinctive smells have long since dried up. As we saw at Seahenge, the smell of tannic acid is very strong indeed shortly after the oak timbers have been cut and splitd and tannin continues to scent the air for a long time afterwards. Many of the reconstructed buildings at West Stow have already been standing for the equivalent of a human generation (say thirty years), yet when you’re inside them, they still retain a distinctly woody atmosphere. It’s what you would have experienced had you been living there in Saxon times – together, of course, with the usual household smells of fires, cooking, laundry and babies.
*
The second and most famous conquest of British history after the Romans was, of course, that of the Normans, in 1066. We always think of the Normans as being French, whereas the truth was far more nuanced. At the time, western Europe had been forming many new identities, which were in the process of settling down. The Normans were becoming French, but their roots are revealed by the dictionary definition of the name, Norman: ‘one belonging to the mixed Scandinavian and Frankish race’.e Britain was going through similar changes, which were probably hastened by the arrival of the new elites from across the Channel. As with the earlier Roman invasion, history has tended to overemphasize the new, in favour of what had gone before. The process was actually begun by the Normans themselves, who set about an extraordinary programme of building, or – more importantly, sometimes – rebuilding. Most of the surviving Norman buildings are castles, monasteries, cathedrals and, of course, parish churches. England has one of the largest and finest collections of medieval churches anywhere – and about a quarter of the eight thousand or so that survive are Norman. But closer inspection usually reveals a more complex story. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at Canterbury, where the first church of post-Roman Britain was established by St Augustine in 597.
It is believed that Augustine might have used an earlier Roman church or some other building for the very first cathedral, but soon work began on a new structure, which was revealed when Kevin Blockley and his team carried out detailed excavations ahead of the re-flooring of the nave between January and June 1993.7 They uncovered evidence for an earlier building, which had been constructed in at least four phases.8 The first church, which may or may not be that of St Augustine (the dating is still too imprecise to be certain), was considerably smaller than the rebuilding that happened later. It was undoubtedly post-Roman, because its walls were cut into a layer of Roman soil. The second phase saw the demolition of the first church and the construction of a larger and longer building, perhaps in the seventh century.
The third phase saw a rebuild of the second structure, but we don’t know why this happened. In the fourth and final phase, we are presented with one of the largest Saxon cathedrals in England and undoubtedly one of the finest of its time in Europe. Any developing structural problems were sorted out by enlarging and thickening walls. Two substantial six-sided towers were added at the west end, which also featured a rounded apse, like that at the east end. Rounded, or apsidal, church ends developed in Roman times and were an important component of early post-Roman Byzantine churches. They became common across most of Europe in early medieval times.9
15.1 A reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral as it might have appeared before the Norman Conquest, around AD 1000. The drawing is by the archaeologist Kevin Blockley, who co-directed extensive excavations of the cathedral between January and June 1993.
© Canterbury Archaeological Trust
I love to visit ancient buildings and I’m usually equipped with my mobile phone and, of course, a copy of the relevant Pevsner county-by-county guide. These sources tell me in great detail about the various phases of each building – how this window was reframed and that doorway blocked or moved – and I can usually absorb myself in such things for about an hour, before my head begins to swim and I start to crave a cup of tea, or something a bit stronger. It’s then, when I’m sitting down, either within a restaura
nt or tea room or outside, that I start to contemplate what might have happened and what life would have been like there in the past.
Sometimes in these circumstances, well-known historical events come to dominate one’s thoughts. In the case of Canterbury, it has to be the ‘martyrdom’ of Archbishop Thomas Becket, who was murdered in the north-west transept of the cathedral in 1170.10 I say ‘martyrdom’, because his murder could also be seen as a straightforward piece of power politics gone wrong. The subsequent elevation of the victim into a saint was more about the reputation of Henry II than Becket. I was pondering such themes when I came across what in many ways was a far more memorable event, which had taken place 159 years previously, in that now vanished, pre-Norman cathedral.11
The many Danish raids of the tenth and eleventh centuries AD were often led by men with wonderful names. The devastating raid on Canterbury by the brothers Hemming and Thorkell the Tall in 1011 reduced the cathedral to ashes. The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Alphege, was bound and taken prisoner to their camp at Greenwich. He refused to be ransomed, so the furious Danes murdered him by pelting him with ox bones during a drunken orgy. Following the raid and the withdrawal of the Tall Vikings, the shrine of the martyred archbishop drew many pilgrims to the city. And the story of his murder continues to fascinate me. On digs I have dealt with many, many bones, so I often find myself wondering about the ones those Vikings drunkenly hurled at the unfortunate archbishop: had they been kept to one side, following the butchery process earlier? Or were they thrown at the poor bishop only when the meat had been gnawed off them? The latter would have resulted in a much more protracted, if slightly sweeter-smelling, demise.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 29
