Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  It can be said with some certainty that the majority of the people were still living in the Iron Age, and would continue to do so for several hundreds of years. One agricultural innovation, however, occurred as a direct result of imperial decree. The fenlands of East Anglia were drained, and the reclaimed soil made productive with hundreds of villages and farms planted in a pre-ordained manner. The whole area became an imperial estate, taxed for the benefit of the central government. The prosperous Salisbury Plain became another imperial estate.

  Taxation, including a land tax and a poll tax, was the key of Roman exploitation. As the costs of maintaining the army, in the face of northern invaders, became ever higher so the burden of taxation increased. The Roman occupation hastened the process by which a tribal economy gave way to a monetary economy. The tribal coinage, more significantly, was replaced by imperial coinage. The Romans of course also levied taxes on the fruits of trade. Industrial centres, such as the potteries at the village of Castor in Cambridgeshire, altered parts of the landscape. Ironworks were established in all areas of the country from the coast of Kent to the banks of the Wye. Lead mines were in continuous use throughout the Roman period. Under the twin stimuli of demand and innovation, English production was never more buoyant. Coal was used for working iron and heating the bathhouses; it was also the fuel for the sacred fire at Minerva’s temple in Bath.

  Two native woollen products were in demand by the subjects of the empire; one was known as the birrus Britannicus, a type of waterproof cloak and hood. The other, the tapete Britannicum, was a woollen rug. Other forms of merchandise included bears and bulldogs for the Roman arena. The men wore jackets of cattle hide and leather breeches. It was said that Caesar had invaded England so that he could get his hands on some excellent oysters.

  In the early third century the country was divided into two provinces, Britannia Superior with London as its capital and Britannia Inferior with York as its centre. ‘Superior’ and ‘Inferior’ were geographical, not qualitative, terms. The two areas were later subdivided into four and then five provinces, emphasizing the fact that the country was being closely administered and exploited.

  As the country became a settled part of the empire, its role changed. The armies of occupation became armies of defence; they became naturalized, with a self-conscious local or regional identity. Over one-tenth of the entire imperial army was stationed in the colony, which meant that its forces had extraordinary power over events in distant Rome. Mutinies, and uprisings, were not uncommon. In AD 268, one governor of England, Carausius, proclaimed himself emperor. He took his forces to the continent and, in his absence, the various towns and cities of the country took measures to defend themselves against possible reprisals from Rome. One hundred years later another Roman commander seized the province and declared it to be independent. He was disabused of this notion in a battle somewhere in central England, but it is a measure of the significance of the country in imperial calculations.

  England was worth a fight. Its ports, its metals, its taxes, helped to sustain the vast engine of Roman commerce. Yet it remained wealthy and productive largely because of its agriculture. In AD 359 the emperor, Julian, organized a fleet of 600 ships to transport corn from England to the war zones of the Rhine. The country had become one of the bread baskets of Europe, and by the fourth century it had never been more prosperous. The villas of the grandees became larger and more luxurious, and there can be no doubt that the social stratification of the country grew ever more pronounced under the auspices of imperial rule. The Roman English controlled the Iron Age English.

  The northern borders were always a source of conflict, with the weight of the Scots and the Picts pressing against them, but the general frontiers of the province soon came into jeopardy. There is a curious alignment of forts in southern England known generally as the ‘Saxon Shore’, but their purpose is not altogether clear. Were they a means of defending the coast against Saxon invaders from the north-west of Europe, or were they perhaps designed to harbour Saxon fighters and traders? They may thus have been designed to protect the seaways between England and Europe from pirates and other marauders.

  Yet, as with so many aspects of England under imperial control, the evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive; we rely on chance inscriptions, the indications of archaeology and the occasional commentaries of Roman historians. The Roman governance of England lasted for 350 years – the same span of time that separates the contemporary reader from the Great Fire of London – and yet it is the least-known phase in the country’s history.

  In particular we cannot see the people – the Romanized leaders in their fashionable and luxurious villas, the smaller landowners in farmsteads built of stone or timber, the townsmen inhabiting one- or two-room houses along narrow and squalid lanes, the civil servants working in offices while wearing their official togas and military belts, the landless labourers living in dormitories set well away from the villas, the whole general tide and swell of population unmoved by purges and coups and counter-purges that are evident in the pages of Roman histories.

  There is much unknown, also, about the advance of Christianity. England had been introduced to that faith in the second century, but it was perforce a minority religion. The Roman English had been reconciled to the Roman gods, while the Iron Age English no doubt still venerated the ancient deities of hill and forest. Christianity was not an indigenous faith. Nevertheless, Christian vessels and plaques from the third century have been found in Huntingdonshire, close to the river Nene, and are clear evidence of a local shrine; they are in fact the earliest examples of such vessels from the whole of the empire. A Christian cemetery, of approximately the same date, has been uncovered at Poundbury in Dorset. Christianity had penetrated as far north as Carlisle by the fourth century.

  Christianity only became the sacerdotal face of the empire after Constantine the Great’s conversion in AD 312; Constantine had in fact been acclaimed and appointed emperor at York in AD 306 and in subsequent years seems to have considered England to be one of the spiritual centres of his rule. York itself was refashioned in honour of his elevation, and he made three further visits to the province. He styled himself on Britannicus Maximus, and it seems likely that London itself was for a while renamed Augusta in his honour. So the Christianity of England was an important element of its later development.

  It was a monotheistic faith in a period when the emperor himself aspired to single rule, and it assumed a uniform set of values and beliefs that could be transmitted across the empire. It helped to support the legislative and bureaucratic forces of the centre. Its adherents were, unsurprisingly, drawn from the governing class. There can be no doubt that in England, for example, the Romanized population were quick to embrace the delights of an institutionalized faith. That is why Christianity became associated with the culture of the villas. It was also a religion of the administrative elite in the towns and cities, where a bishop was charged with the care of his urban flock.

  In AD 314 three English bishops, together with a priest and a deacon, were attending an ecclesiastical council at Arles in southern France. The bishops came from York, London and Lincoln; the deacon and priest arrived from Cirencester. Evidence for what may be a Christian cathedral, complete with marble and painted walls, has been found at excavations near Tower Hill. A holy well was located in the centre of the nave. This may have been the diocesan centre for Bishop Restitutus of London. There is precious little evidence for other churches of the third and fourth centuries (although one has been found at Silchester), but there is good reason for this. The earliest churches lie concealed beneath more recent ones in the long history of sacred spaces. We would find the churches of early English Christianity only if we could uproot the cathedrals and churches of the modern world.

  No empire can last forever; no state can remain steady and unscathed. The frontiers of the Roman polity were steadily being threatened and, in many places, overwhelmed. The pressure of the northern tribes grew ever
more insidious. The Franks had entered northern Gaul. The Visigoths were to settle in Aquitania. The threat to England was posed by the Picts and the Scots in the north, together with their tribal allies among the Franks and the Saxons. In AD 367 a force overcame Hadrian’s Wall, and then in dispersed bands moved southward to ravage the country; the commander of the forts of the Saxon Shore was murdered and the provincial leader known as Dux Britanniarum was captured. It was a notable defeat for the English. Roman intervention and rebuilding, including the refortification of key posts, helped to maintain prosperity and peace for forty years; but then the northern tribes came back.

  A series of bids for imperial power by various pretenders meant that, at the beginning of the fifth century, England was effectively stripped of its military forces. They had gone off in search of glory. Civil war between the various pretenders to the imperial throne weakened the self-discipline and orderliness that had always been the sign of Roman rule. The administrative machinery was beginning to break apart. In 408 the northern tribes were emboldened once more to attack, and the Roman English had no choice but to defend themselves. A contemporary historian, Zosimus, records that they ‘took up arms and, braving danger for their own independence, freed the cities from the barbarians threatening them’. He also reports that they then expelled their Roman governors and established their own administrations.

  Various levels of intrigue are embedded in this simple narrative. There would have been some Roman English who wished to retain the Roman administration from which they derived great benefits; there would have been others who wished to be rid of the burden of taxation and coercion associated with the central government. Two years later, in 410, one section of the English appealed to the emperor for arms and men; it is not clear whether they were needed against an external army of Saxons, or against an internal English enemy. In any case the emperor, Honorius, replied that the English must now fend for themselves. This was effectively the end of Roman England.

  Another historian, Procopius of Caesarea, further reveals that after the disappearance of the Roman officials the various cities and regions were taken over by ‘tyrants’ or ‘usurpers’. They may have seemed like usurpers from Rome, but in actual fact they are likely to be the familiar English leaders descended from tribal chiefs or large landowning families. As the hand of Rome was lifted the English tribes and polities reacted in several significant ways. The Romanized English in the towns and cities, with the dependent estates all around them, are likely to have formed themselves into self-governing administrative units; the leaders of these small states were still known as ‘magistrates’. In the civil zone of the country – in the east and south-east – there rose small kingdoms that were defended by mercenaries. The kingdoms of eastern England, for example, were obliged to use Germanic soldiers; these troops would pose problems in subsequent years. The tribes in the more distant regions of the country, never properly Romanized, reverted to pre-Roman forms of social organization. The remaining detachments of the armies of the north were grouped under a commander who became their chieftain. One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme ‘Old King Cole’.

  So the pattern of English life is localized and various in this period after the withdrawal of the Roman imperium. Signs of a more general change, however, can be found. The taxation system of Rome was dismantled, and the countryside was now controlled by an aristocracy of landowners. With the abandonment of taxation, the circulation of coinage diminished rapidly. By 410 the large centres of pottery manufacture had gone out of business; the demand no longer existed. Brick-making did not return to England until the fifteenth century. Villas were neglected or abandoned, becoming unused sites for later settlers.

  The days of public and monumental display in the cities had gone. But this does not necessarily mean that the cities decayed or were in decline; they had simply changed their function. They remained centres of administration for the immediate area, and housed the local bishop and the local leader, but they no longer wanted or needed the imperial facades of the third century. The basilica at Silchester, for example, was converted into a centre for metal-working. The urban population remained, and there is evidence of rebuilding at York and Gloucester in the fifth century. A new water supply, with timber pipes, was introduced to Verulamium in the latter half of that century. So a civic organization was still in operation. The Roman city of Wroxeter has been unearthed from the fields of Shropshire. It did not disappear after the Romans had left. The basilica was razed, and in its place a large wooden hall was erected; this hall became the centre for a complex of timber buildings based on Roman models. A prosperous and busy life continued well into the medieval period.

  Archaeologists have discovered, from the strata of the fifth century, a deposit spread over many towns and cities; they have named it ‘dark earth’. This was once thought to be evidence of abandonment and desolation. Now it is more correctly interpreted as the residue of wattle-and-daub dwellings. The towns and cities of the fifth century may have been heavily populated, maintaining a commercial life that never left them.

  Self-sufficiency was established upon barter and local trading. There is evidence of hand-made pottery, and quantities of raw clay that might have been used for the building of walls. The lives of the farmers and labourers of the country were changed not at all by the dislocation of leaders.

  The Confession of St Patrick, who was taken by Saxon slavers at the end of the fourth century, shows that the affluent life of the villa owner continued into the early decades of the fifth century. On Patrick’s return to England, six years after his capture, his father urged him to enter public service; local rhetoricians were employed, for example, to guide the populace. Some kind of working polity was based upon a Roman original. When Bishop Germanus came to England from Gaul in 429 he was greeted by the leading men of Verulamium in a gesture of civic unity. These are likely to have been the members of the diocesan or provincial council who had taken over the administration of the city. In the life of Germanus they are reported to have been ‘conspicuous for their wealth, fashionable in their dress, and surrounded by an adoring multitude of people’. This was not a country denuded of its prestige or affluence.

  Germanus had come in part to assist the English in their fight against the Picts and Saxons, adding weight to the suggestion that there was some sudden or overwhelming Saxon ‘invasion’. But in fact the Saxons were already here. They had been in England from the third century. They were already part of the fabric of English life. The urban and tribal elites needed Saxon warriors to defend their property; many of these soldiers married native women, and settled down with their families. Germanic forces remained among the Roman army in the north. Saxon traders lived in the towns and cities. Saxon workers cultivated the lands of Kent in exchange for occasional military service.

  Here we must confront questions of nomenclature. By common consent the native English, from the Iron Age forwards, have been called ‘Britons’. But the term is really only pertinent to the Atlantic English of the western coasts; these are the Britons who migrated to Gaul and established the province of Brittany. They are the people who spoke Celtic and Gaelic. The Britons were also strong in the north, as a permanent reminder of old tribal groupings. In the centre, south and east of the country were native English, too, but they inhabited the regions where Saxon settlers came to dominate, sometimes by peaceful and sometimes by violent means. It was from one band of these settlers, the Angles, that the name of England itself first emerged. ‘Engla land’ was the Viking description. It is characteristic of a country that, from the first century to the thirteenth century, was subject to almost continual foreign occupation. The ‘empire race’ was once a colonized and exploited people.

  3

  Climate change

  The climate of England has been characterized as generally damp and relatively sunless but, as every native knows, the weather is as various as the land. In the south-east
the summers are warm and the winters are cold, while in the north-west the winters are mild and the summers are cool. In the north-west four and a half hours of sunshine light up an average July day, while on the south coast six and a half hours can be anticipated; the western seaboard attracts 40 per cent more rainfall than the eastern. The predominant wind of autumn and of winter is from the south-west; in the spring it is the east. This was the weather that created a land of damp forests of oak and ash, of marshes and heath wrapped in mist. In the north and the west lay the moors and the mountains, where the soil was thin. This was the land of pasture rather than of crops, and the local farmers grew only as much corn as they needed for themselves. The south and east were the lowlands, with gradual undulations in the rich earth; this was ground as fit for corn as for cattle. It was the territory of ‘mixed farming’.

  In the history of England these patterns of climate are of the utmost importance; if there is a drop in temperature of two degrees, as in the period from 500 to 300 BC, the prospect of adequate harvests in the north is noticeably curtailed. A difference of one degree made a failure of the harvest seven times more likely. In this period, then, we see the abandonment of upland farms and settlements. The southern land was warmer, and more stable; it was the home of the plentiful harvest, and the general dampness meant that crops could even be grown on lighter soils where sand and chalk prevailed. It is a general truth, therefore, that in the south-east the land was devoted to wheat whereas in the north it was given over to oats. But important regional variations were still found. Oxfordshire and north-east Suffolk grew wheat, whereas Norfolk grew more rye. Oats were the main crop in Lancashire, while rye was dominant in Yorkshire. Wheat and barley shared the ascendancy in Wiltshire whereas, in the rainier country west of that shire, barley predominated.