Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise of Roman Britain

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

On August 26th, 55 BC, Julius Caesar and his legionaries waded ashore just north of the White Cliffs of Dover. Right there in the surf, they were met by Celtic warriors, who charged them on foot and on horseback. The fighting was fierce, but Caesar's legions prevailed. A few months later, having extracted tribute and pledges of allegiance from local tribes, Caesar returned to Gaul. But this was just the beginning - a hundred years later the Romans would return, beginning a period of Roman rule that lasted for over 350 years.This is the first of a two-part series that tells the story of Roman Britain, from Julius Caesar's first expeditions through to the collapse of the Roman Empire. For this, we're joined by Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History and The Fall of Rome podcasts.If you'd like to hear more about the history of Rome, you can listen to:The Roman Navy in Britain - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/theromannavyinbritainStone Age to Roman Days - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/story-of-england-stone-age-to-roman-daysRoman Emperors with Mary Beard - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/roman-emperors-with-mary-beardProduced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. When Julius Caesar was thinking about crossing the Channel and invading Britain, he did a little intelligence gathering, and he wrote down his assessment of the Britons in his book The Gallic Wars. They consider it contrary to divine law, he wrote, eat the hare, the chicken or the goose. They raise these, however, for their own amusement and pleasure. The climate is more temperate than Gaul, since there are fewer periods of cold. Early shout out for the Gulf Stream there. By far the most civilised are those who dwell in Kent.

Their entire country borders on the sea, and they do not differ much from the Gauls in customs. Very many who dwell farther inland do not sow grain but live on milk and flesh, clothing themselves in skin. All the Britons paint themselves with woad, which produces a dark blue colour, and for this reason they are much more frightful in appearance in battle. They permit their hair to grow long, shaving all parts of the body except the head and the upper lip. Julius Caesar must have thought there was nothing in that intelligence too scary because he launched the first Roman invasions of Britain, 55 and 54 BC.

That was the start of Rome's official connection with Britain, although it's certain that traders, merchants, explorers had visited Britain before. Following Caesar's invasions or raids, there was around a century of quiet as Rome was engaged elsewhere on its frontiers or with political upheavals and civil wars at home. Strabo, who was a Greek, I suppose a geographer and historian who lived in Asia Minor during that period of the Roman Republic transitioning to the empire, so around about the same time, a little later, that Julius Caesar was active, he wrote that Britain was virtually Roman property, so conquering it was hardly worth the bother. Particularly, and I'm quoting,

if the people live in islands which are of such a nature they can neither injure nor benefit us in any way because of their isolation. For although they could have held even Britain, the Romans scorned to do so, because they saw that there was absolutely nothing at all to fear from the Britons, for they're not strong enough to cross over and attack us, and that no corresponding advantage was to be gained by taking and holding their country. Well, Strabo may have been right. Emperor Claudius did decide to invade Britain in 43 AD, about 20 years after Strabo died,

and it was never the easiest of provinces for Rome to hold down. Sometimes it was something of an ulcer, oozing out precious military and financial resources that could have been spent elsewhere. This podcast is all about Rome and Britain, its rise and its fall. And to talk me through, I've got one of the world's best history podcasters. He's Patrick Wyman.

He's an author, historian. He's host of Tides of History. He hosted the podcast The Fall of Rome, which, as you might guess, was all about the, quote-unquote, downfall of the Roman Empire in the West. And nowhere was that downfall harder and steeper than in Britain. So in this two-part series, we'll be talking to Patrick about the rise of Rome in Britain, its creation, its establishment, and its flourishing, and then we will talk about its collapse. This is part one, the rise of Roman Britain. Enjoy.

Patrick, so good to have you on the podcast, bud. Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. I'm a longtime fan, so it's great to finally convince you to come on. This is very cool. Can you tell me, what did Britain, what did the island, anyway, across the narrow seas, what did it mean to Rome? What did the Romans know about it before they set foot, before imperial forces actually set foot here? know about it before they set foot, or before imperial forces actually set foot here? So there was some awareness of Britain. And I think it's important to note how much things had changed between Caesar's time on the island in the middle of the first century BC and the time

of the actual Roman invasion of Britain 100 years later. That in 55 BC, Britain really was the edge of the known world. I mean, it was past a huge region that the Romans had not really penetrated prior to Caesar's conquests. So at that point, Britain was terra incognita. I mean, it's known from travel accounts and probably merchants would have been aware of the mineral resources, especially of southwestern Britain. But it's really off the edge of the map. By the time the Romans are showing up there in numbers in the middle of the first century AD to invade Britain under Claudius, by that point, it's much more known. It's not an unknown part because Roman Gaul is right across the water. When you look at archaeological finds from early first century AD Britain,

I mean, tons of Roman coins. To some extent, the aristocracy, the elite of Britain is already a little bit Romanized. I mean, they've already gotten a taste for some of the finer things that Rome has to offer. So from that perspective, it's an easier sell for the inhabitants of Britain when the Romans show up than it would have been a century before when Rome is an entirely unknown thing. unknown thing. Yeah, you mentioned some of these accounts. One of those great documents that we know existed, but we no longer had. Pythias of Massalia, he was a kind of Greek geographer in what is now modern day Marseille, France, I guess. It seems that he made a journey right up, perhaps even north of Britain. So there would have been information floating about in the Mediterranean world and the Roman world, which we don't know about, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah. And these are trade routes that have existed in some form for a very long time. So there is a long tradition of mobility and trade along the Atlantic seaboard and extending into the Mediterranean that goes way back into the Bronze Age. So it varies depending on the extent and volume of trade that's happening along those routes and human mobility that goes

along with it. So people migrating, the movement of people and ideas that's varying based on period, but the trade routes are always there. There are always people traveling back and forth, especially from Northwest Iberia to Southwest Britain. That's a really direct shot. So this is part of the fringes of this world. But from the perspective of written sources, I always wonder how much overlap there is between the people who are doing the trading and who have this kind of street knowledge of what the Atlantic seaboard looks like and the rules of the game there and the people who are writing geographical texts. So obviously there are some exceptions, but I kind of wonder if those aren't like two different worlds and how

much information is actually diffusing and whether those aren't just kind of different knowledge networks, you might say. I love it. I love it. Like plenty of the elder writing his encyclopedia and he's like, we know so little of this distant place. All the guys in Northern Iberia just spending their whole time trading with the Bristolians and the people in London, what is now London and Bristol. Like, it's, yeah, that's such a good point. Yeah. They're like, this is the cove you want to go to if you get the good tin. Like, this is where you want to go. You don't want to go up the coast there.

That's crap tin. This is where the good tin is, and the people speak this language, and these are their habits. Yeah. And then that tin we know, as you say, in the Bronze Age, it's appearing in the Eastern Mediterranean. But I guess they wouldn't have even known it was coming from there. Someone just handed it off to them in Northern Italy or Greece or something.

Okay, so we got some links, but Julius Caesar decides to invade. And in doing so, it gives us the first written account of my home and native land, 55 BC. He's conquering Gaul, what is now France. Astonishing campaign of conquest. We now know astonishingly violent as well. Why does he cross the channel? So I think to understand why he does this, you need to look at, first of all, Caesar's ongoing hunger for publicity is a big part of that. So to be able to have gone to the very edges of the known world, to have planted the Roman standards, so to speak, that's a huge public relations coup for Caesar in the context of

his rivalries back in Rome. So Caesar's Gallic Wars is, I mean, it is essentially a propaganda document that this is intended for circulation. This is intended for people to see what Caesar has been up to and the glory that he's bringing to Roman arms, the glory of Roman prestige, and that this is playing with the crowd in Rome, that the crowd in Rome is placing a lot of emphasis on this. So I think, first of all, you know, Caesar's never going to turn down a source of plunder and slaves. First of all, I mean, he's never going to do that. But also there is really a domestic aspect to this, that Caesar's conquests are part of what

gives him the public profile necessary to launch his bid for power in the coming years. It's an inherent part of that, the fact that Caesar has these accomplishments to his name. So he lands on the coast of Kent. And this is one of my favorite facts here. And please, listeners, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been scouring the history books for invasions of Britain, 2,000 years. This is the only one that is opposed on the beach, like D-Day style, fighting through the surf. There's sort of Hollywood version of an invasion because usually people invade, they find a cove, an inlet, a river estuary, and then they unload and then eventually they'll fight a battle later on once the locals can immobilize themselves and meet the threat.

This one, the locals were waiting for him and they fight in the surf. It's incredibly dramatic. It's really shocking to me that this incident has never gotten in-depth film treatment for exactly that reason, that it seems so cinematic because it's people who are going to the edges of the known world, meeting an entirely unknown folk. I mean, you can't imagine there's a lot of linguistic overlap. It's not like these people are talking to each other all that much. So, I mean, you have a meeting of two entirely different worlds in the surf on a beach. That's incredibly cinematic and a dramatic moment. And then it's not repeated for

another hundred years. It's they're in and out. And the people who are going to Britain that are Romans are not soldiers. They're merchants, they're sailors, they're traders. They're, if some of the sources are to be believed, tutors for the children of the Southeastern British elite. So it's this kind of incredibly dramatic one-off thing that happens. What's your hottest take on exactly what Caesar leaves behind him, if you like, after his two little exhibitions across 55 and 54 BC? Has he set up a kind of sort of client arrangement where the kings have sort of agreed to pay tribute to him and lip service to Rome's authority? Or did he get a piece of paper and dash out the door as quickly as he could? I think it's the latter. I think he gets a piece of paper and he dashes out the door. I think

at that point, he's achieved his goals in terms of the propaganda value of the campaign. And who's going to question what control he's actually exercising over these people or what control Rome is exercising? I mean, it's so far away. And he had to have been aware that the process of even exerting control over Gaul was going to be a massive hill to climb in the coming decades. So I think he was happy to get out of there and just say, look, the nominal suzerainty is all that we need here. And then what ends up happening is that the Romans do Romanize Gaul over the course of the next century or so, and that that bleeds over the channel. So there's an extent to which these are really long-term processes. We can get the

drama of what Caesar does, but it's also a generational thing where the Roman world is slowly but surely encroaching more into Britain. That's an interesting way of looking at it. So in 43 AD, so nearly 100 years later, Rome is consumed by civil wars, famously after the assassination of Caesar. And then there's a period of stability, but then there's crisis in Germany. There's not much bandwidth to deal with the Brits. But in 43 AD, Claudius decides to go and do it. Do you think by that stage, the relationship between Britain and the Roman Empire had changed? As you said, there was more of a lunar pull. There was more trans-channel cultural exchange going on. You

know, aristocrats sending their kids over to the Roman Gaul and learning the language and dressing up in togas or whatever. I mean, this was a slightly different prospect, this invasion. dressing up in togas or whatever. I mean, this was a slightly different prospect, this invasion. Yeah, it's much better known territory. You have to view the Roman world as a kind of series of concentric circles, right? That you have at the very core of it is Rome. You move out into the provinces and this is the Roman world. There are people speaking Latin. There are planned Roman towns. It's not either A, Roman or B, not Roman. It's a spectrum of Roman-ness and different aspects of Roman culture to which groups are drawn that they're embracing. And so when you get beyond the technical, quote unquote, borders of the Roman world, there's no, aside from specific

places, there's no real like line in the sand that says you're in Roman territory or not. Britain is in that outermost circle even before the Roman invasion. So there's plenty of trans-channel commerce. Like I said, there's a lot of evidence of Roman coinage going to Britain. There's coins being minted in Britain on the Roman model, which tells you something really important. If you have the idea of coinage is really important to understanding how trade is being carried out, that this is part of the same economic sphere. So when the Romans then invade and show up, Britain is not nearly out, that this is part of the same economic sphere. So when the Romans then invade and show up, Britain is not nearly as unknown. There is already a market for Roman goods and Roman ideas and potentially for Roman power as a thing to be exploited in local conflicts

and in the battle for local prestige. So this is one of the core dynamics that the Romans always understand is that there are going to be some local leaders who are interested in bringing Rome in on their side to get a leg up on their local rivals. So this is always how the Romans operate is they're looking for local partners. This is not so much a top-down conquest as it is, we're going to kind of insinuate ourselves with overwhelming force and we're going to pick individual locals or groups of locals with whom we can work, and we're going to eliminate the others. So the Romans are no fools when it comes to conquering. They know that just straight up showing up and trying to exert complete military control is a fool's errand. It's not going to work in the short term. It's not

going to work in the long term, certainly. So what you need are local partners, people to work with. And the aristocracy of southeastern Britain just before the Roman conquest is absolutely ripe for that. These are people who are prepared for it. And Tastus tells us, doesn't he, that the Brits are hopelessly divided. So there's always going to be a younger son. There's going to be a half-brother that's furious that he didn't inherit. And he's going to think, hey, you know that's furious that he didn't inherit. And he's going to think, hey, you know, we've got links with Roman Gaul now. Maybe I can get these guys

to come and help me, put me back on my rightful throne. Exactly. And the Romans pursue this everywhere along their frontier, everywhere. This is one of their core strategies for maintaining control, both within Roman territory and beyond Roman territory is the Romans know that you can't defend a frontier by just manning a bunch of forts or by maintaining a maritime boundary of some kind. You need to be going out there, you need to be showing the flag, and you need to be exerting some influence. And the way that you do that is you pick winners and losers, right? You pick individual people, you pick local partners, and you subsidize them. So you give them gold, you launch military expeditions on their behalf,

you bring their children to Rome, you promote trading links, that they have all of these more and less subtle ways of determining what's happening beyond the titular boundaries of the Roman Empire. It's a really intelligent way of managing things. So you have a velvet glove and you have an iron fist inside that velvet glove when you need it. Okay, so the Emperor Claudius, who's also in need of a little PR prestige boost back in Rome, he launches his legions across the channel, 43 AD. We've got archaeological evidence, don't we, of local collaborators, some sort of local kings, local chieftains appear to do quite well and build sort of huge Roman-style villas that we found parts of. So you think that there's a sort of patchwork going on here, but there's some fighting

to be done as well. In particular, we think one man, Caraticus, who is a kind of a linchpin of the anti-Roman British resistance. Yeah. So this is what you see pretty much everywhere the Romans show up, is that there are going to be some local leaders who side with the Romans and who see that this is the way the wind is blowing. This is where there's hay to be mown, so to speak. And then there are going to be others who line up against the Romans. And in the case of Britain, the further away that you get from southeastern Britain, the more likely you are to find resistance because these are people who have had less exposure to Roman culture as a whole. They're further away from both the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. It's harder for the Romans to reach them. So the further away that you get from this beachhead in Southeastern Britain, the more resistance you get and that which peaks, of course, when you get to Northern Britain. So this is a kind of general, well, I guess the battle for Roman Britain never ceases in some ways, but this is a decades long struggle to bring more and more of this troublesome archipelago in which I'm sitting now under control. Yeah. And the Romans go about this

really systematically. They go about it intelligently. They have a template that they know how to follow where, again, they've got their local partners and they're going to plant towns at specific strategic locations. They're going to build roads. They're going to build forts. So when you're looking at the first 50 or so years of Roman occupation in Britain, what you see are forts. You see local settlements that are becoming more Romanized, that are picking up building plans along Roman lines. And the countryside is still full of Iron Age roundhouses. Nothing really changes when you get off the main routes. People are not speaking Latin, but slowly but surely, more and more, you're getting these

little islands of Roman-ness. So when you plant a town, it's not just that you're building buildings along the Roman lines. It's not just that it looks like a town that could be anywhere in Italy or Gaul or Iberia. There's a great deal of looks like a town that could be anywhere in Italy or Gaul or Iberia. There's a great deal of human mobility that goes along with that. So there's in-migration to Britain from elsewhere in the Roman world. And so this process of Romanization, you might call it, is proceeding because there is back and forth flow of people. A lot of those people are soldiers, but there are also civilians. There are traders coming from all over the place. And slowly but surely, this network of Roman towns and forts is becoming more civilian. It's seeping out deeper into the countryside.

More and more of the local aristocracy is implicated in it. So it takes a long time and there is a lot of fighting, but it is a process that proceeds pretty straightforwardly. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. tales and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. it's so interesting hearing you talk so fluently about this because i always think that we're so used to these 19th century wall maps and 20th century of the european empires big

you know pink and for the british empire spreading across the planet. And actually, I always think the Roman Empire, the Roman world is more like when you look down on those maps of lights at night from space and there's like nodes and links and roads and ports. And then there's intense pricks of light around certain places and then darkness in other places. And that's what I imagine the Roman Empire to be. Actually, as you say, nodes of Romanitas

with probably some fairly untouched places in between where the local population just didn't see a huge amount of change from pre-Roman rule to Roman rule. Yeah, there are still people speaking Gaulish in Aquitaine in the 5th century BC. You mentioned the nodes and links. That's very much how the Romans understood their world. If you look at how the Romans visually depicted space, it looks like a map of the London Underground. It looks like a tube map where you're going from station to station. That's how they understood it.

That's how they moved through space. It was point A to point B. They were moving from island of Romanitas to island of Romanitas. They were moving from one town to the next, one fort to the next, along these really well-defined routes, both water routes and land routes. Like we think of the roads, but also the Roman Empire is really well-defined routes, both water routes and land routes. We think of the roads, but also the Roman Empire is held together by water routes. A far greater volume of trade and human mobility is happening along rivers, along coastal shipping routes than it is along the roads. But this is how they understand space. So they're not thinking

about the countryside. If you're a Roman garrison marching from one fort to the next, you're not thinking about the very Celtic style roundhouses that you're seeing as you're walking through the countryside. You're thinking about, I'm going to get to the next town. I'm going to get a hot bath. I'm going to get a nice meal. Maybe there'll be some company there. That's what you're thinking about if you're a Roman moving through this world. Okay. So let's rattle through some of the bigger moments in this first hundred years of Roman rule, if you like. We've got to stop briefly at Boudicca's revolt, brilliantly symbolizing what you've just been talking about, a British client, king and queen, up in East Anglia. The king dies, the Romans decide to maybe take a little more direct, formal control over that territory.

Queen Boudicca resists, and soon she's got the whole province up in flames. Roman rule is shaken here. Yeah, and this is something you see a lot with Roman conquests is that often you get more serious rebellions not in the immediate aftermath of the Roman conquest when people are traumatized and they've seen kind of the full bite of Rome. It's a decade or two in. It's well after initial contact. It's after local people have A, had a chance to understand how the Romans operate, and B, to develop a list of grievances, to have good reasons for not liking

the Romans. And if you're looking at this, say, 20-ish years in, which is when Boudicca's revolt happens, the Roman military presence is presumably reduced from what it had been right at the moment of invasion. And that's when, if you're a local client ruler and you're dissatisfied with Rome, you're thinking about this, you're like, there aren't actually that many soldiers here. There's definitely a military presence, but if you can peel off enough locals and you can peel off enough local support and you can dig into that network of local elites who have bought into Roman rule, it's not at all unthinkable that you can drive the Romans out. Now, will they come back? Maybe. There's a sense in which Boudicca's

rebellion, it always seems to be people think like it's doomed. And that's not the case at all. There are successful rebellions against the Romans all the time. It's just, do they stay successful in the long run? The one that everybody knows about is the Teutoburg Forest in Germany. But this is, again, the Romans following the same template where you move in, you launch some military campaigns, you find local partners with whom to work. It's just in that case, they had three legions destroyed. But the fact that our sources don't speak to a Roman patrol getting ambushed or a garrison getting wiped out, this has got to be stuff that is happening on a fairly regular basis throughout the Roman world that it's just we're not hearing about it because we don't have the correct sources. We don't have that

kind of on the ground knowledge. It's just not the kind of thing that survives, but that's the tapestry of Roman rule is that there's always resistance to it. Sometimes that resistance is more violent than others. We know Boudicca's name because she had a great chronicler. And so we get a fantastic bout of information, but I think figures like her are much more common than we tend to assume, that this kind of resistance to Roman rule is not at all out of the ordinary. She torches Camulodunum, which is now Colchester, London, Verulamium, which is now St. Albans. And you can still find the burn layer as you dig down under those cities. And in London particularly, where the houses have been torched in the extreme heat of the blaze that her warriors ignited. She was eventually crushed,

according to Tastus and Cassius Dio. We don't know exactly where, but one day we may find that battlefield. But as the Romans move north, there are other tribes that resist. We get to the Scottish problem quite soon, don't we? We get to the problem with the mountainous, rugged, difficult north of Britain. What do the Romans do about that? So the first thing they try to do is extend a network of forts deep into what's now Scotland. So more and more of them have been excavated. But every time they think they've found the northernmost limit of how far the Romans got, they seem to find another fort another 10 or 15 or 20 miles beyond that.

Very systematically, the Romans do what they always do. They are building a network of strong points in an attempt to control the countryside. And there's no reason why they have to stop where they eventually end up doing it, Hadrian's Wall. I mean, in the decades prior to that, they have gone well north. They've gone 100, 150 miles north of Hadrian's Wall, deep into present day Scotland. They know, as you always know, that you try and control the lowlands because A, that's where the tax revenue is. B, that's where the people tend to be. And C, what's happening in the highlands, you kind of let that go. That's a much harder thing to control is what's happening there.

They do this everywhere. Even within Italy itself, when the Romans are trying to exert control over it, they have the most problems with the Samnites who are hill people in central Italy. So the Romans are aware of these dynamics, but they're like, okay, we build forts, we control the lowlands, we find local partners. It's just eventually you get to the point where it's so far away and there are not that many easy water routes. When you look at the places where the Romans are able to exert direct control, they tend to be places that have close by sea coasts with easy inland transportation. And that is not the lowlands of central Scotland. This is not an easy place to go. Roman Britain in general, and this is an important thing to understand about Britain,

especially when we start talking about its end, is that it is always a net consumer of resources for the Roman Empire. You're always having to station soldiers there. You have to supply those soldiers. You have to pay them. The Romans are always putting more into Britain than they're getting out. It's not that they're getting nothing out. It's not that it's like useless territory, but it is a net consumer of resources. And the further you get away from the ports of Southern Britain, the harder it gets to supply those, the more difficult the ask becomes, the higher your casualty rates, right? The harder it is to find soldiers who are excited to go serve there. And also, if this is where those Roman soldiers are going to get their land eventually when they retire, this is a big part of the incentive for military service in the Roman world. Who wants land there? No, you want a nice farm in Tuscany or Iberia or Southern Gaul. You want

someplace where the sun's going to warm your face, not some boggy marshland. So it's a tougher ask in every possible way. And you can see why the Romans pull back, why they build Hadrian's Wall eventually. You can see why the Romans pull back, why they build Hadrian's Wall eventually. And they build Hadrian's Wall, then they move north and they try and build the so-called Antonine Wall across the narrowest part of what is now Scotland, roughly from Glasgow to Edinburgh. And then in just after 200 AD, Septimius Severus launches an absolutely massive annexation push in Scotland and there seem to be enormous losses, and Severus ends up dying in York from disease, possibly contracted as part of that brutal campaign.

So the northern frontier kind of remains this movable feast. They don't settle on it. But it certainly, to the south of Hadrian's Wall, seems to be reliably Romano-British in these centuries. Let's come on to the process of making the world Rome. I mean, from Southeast, what is now Southeast England, right the way up to Northumberland, what is going on in that province? As you said earlier, they're building roads, they're building towns. Is it a successful, you know, are the Brits all going, hang on, this is the future. Let's all

embrace Romanitas. So as I mentioned earlier, it's not really like being Roman is an A or a B thing. There's a spectrum of it and there's different kinds of Roman-ness depending on where you are and depending on your occupation, whether you live in a town or a city or the countryside, whether you're in the army or not is really the key thing. understand being Roman as a spectrum and a bunch of different things, Britain south of Hadrian's Wall is as Roman as anywhere in the Roman world. It's every bit as Roman as Southern Gaul. It's every bit as Roman as the coast of Iberia. It's every bit as Roman as Tuscany is because there's a lot of different ways of being Roman. And what you would expect is that in towns, which are becoming an increasing feature of the countryside in the late second, third and into the early fourth century in the towns, everybody's speaking Latin. The local aristocrats all have townhouses that they go to. They all have their villas out in the countryside. I mean,

the villas that have been excavated in Britain are just as nice as villas anywhere else in the Roman world. It's clear that the people who are living in them, these Romano-British aristocrats are well aware of what the trends and the fashions are and that they too want their villa to have a bathhouse. And the Roman world archaeologically is a lot like Ikea. It's a lot of really standardized stuff. It's the same kinds of roof tiles. It's the same kind of pottery. There's really specific bath tiles that you use in bathhouses called hypocaust tiles. It is a really standard material checklist of things that you're going to find that you're like, oh yeah, this is a Roman site.

Whereas the medieval world is much more like Etsy. It's much more artisanal and small batch. And so if you're looking at it materially, you excavate a Roman period site in the countryside in Britain and it's Roman. It's the same stuff built along the same lines. And a lot of this has to do with mobility of people. This is a really important thing to understand is that the Roman world is a space of movement, that tons and tons of people are on the move all the time. But where are those people going in the Roman world? They're going to towns and cities. So it's not like you're getting a whole big batch of migrants showing up in Roman London, and then they're going off into the countryside in the Cotswolds. They're in London.

Or then they go to York. Or then they're going to forts along Hadrian's Wall. Or then they're going to one of the many other towns in Roman Britain. So when you're looking for evidence of migration, when you're looking for evidence of movement – and these are people who – the culture that they share in common with the locals is Roman culture. If they're sharing a language with them, it's Latin. So this is how Latin is spreading. This is how Roman material culture is spreading. You have migrants coming in, local aristocrats adapting to what they understand is the norms of the Roman world, and above all, soldiers. Soldiers moving in and out are the primary vector for Roman culture. They're the primary vector for the Roman economy because they have to be fed and paid. So to the extent that coin is coming into Britain, it's usually

coming in as soldiers pay that they're then spending in the local economy. There are roots of army supply that are like, these are the veins and arteries of Romanization is the means of supplying soldiers, the soldiers moving in and out, the traders that are coming to support that activity. There is a state-level basis to the economy and society that everything else is building on. And that's where Romanist comes from. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And the food. There's a lot of dismay about British food even today, but before the Romans, it clearly wasn't pretty bad. And the Romans introduced, well, they introduced deer, I think, fallow deer. They introduced carrots, a huge number of, obviously,

food from the Mediterranean world and beyond. It seems that Romans introduced pheasants, donkeys, rabbits. I mean, it's like this island would have been transformed. And what about identity? By conquering, perhaps not unlike the Brits in India, did the Romans help to create a British identity, you think, or would they have felt like citizens of the empire? I think they mostly would have felt like citizens of the empire? I think they mostly would have felt like citizens of the empire because there are wide regional differences within Britain. So I think the further you go West in the Roman period, the less Romanized it is. There are far more people still speaking British there. Not that there aren't people speaking Latin and not that there aren't multilingual people, but I would say

you go out into the countryside in the west of Britain in 200 A.D. and you're far more likely to hear someone speaking British than you are Latin, which is not all that different from any other Roman province. But I think it's probably more attenuated in Britain. I think it's probably more that dynamic is probably more obvious the further away you get. But again, this is part of the spectrum of being Roman that you see elsewhere in the Roman world. The ancestors of the present day Basques never pick up Latin. Like I said, there are still people speaking Gaulish in Gaul in the fourth, fifth century AD. There are still people speaking Punic in North Africa well into that same period. So the further you get from these islands of Romanitas, the less Roman it's going to seem. They're still using Roman style material goods.

They may still be living instyle material goods. They may still be living in Roman-style houses. They are hooked into the Roman economy, this much larger kind of unit. But identity-wise, most people's identities are still primarily local and familial. Whether there's another layer of Roman identity on top of that, I think it's much more present the closer you get to population centers and major trade routes. And then let's finish up, I guess, by just talking a little bit about Christianity when it's introduced. It takes hold in Britain as it does elsewhere across the empire. Yeah. And again, it's traveling along the same routes. Christianity, when you look at its spread around the Mediterranean world, it's very much following these same major trade routes. It pops

up in big cities first because it's people traveling from node to node. So you find much more evidence of Christianity in towns, cities, and forts in Roman Britain. That's where Christianity shows up first, and then it kind of diffuses into the countryside. But it is present in the countryside. We know this because we have a truly remarkable source from late Roman Britain, St. Patrick's Confession. It is one of my very favorite sources from anywhere, anytime in the ancient world. And this is a text that's written by a Romano-British person. Also, one of the few texts we have that's written by a former slave in the Roman world. And the way that it's written, the language of it, linguists used to talk about there being interference from a Celtic language in this text, that he had only learned Latin as a second language. It's actually not that at all. It's that he writes Latin like somebody who was taught written to the standard of an aristocrat's Latin. It's written the way a normal, everyday Romano-British person would have spoken. And it makes it such a fascinating text. And you see that, oh, this is just how Romano-British people talk.

This is how they lived. Had there not been Anglo-Saxon invasions, there would have been a British romance language. There would have been a romance language that was spoken in lowland Britain that was akin to what eventually becomes French. Well, we're going to talk about the invasions, the Germanic and other invasions from the late fourth century onwards in the next episode. You're joining us for this whole mini-series. We're so grateful for you coming on both these podcasts. Tee us up for the next episode. Position us in the late fourth century. There are clouds gathering on the horizon. What threats are in the offing? The biggest threat that the Roman world is facing, and I think this is really heightened in Roman Britain because of its distance from other parts of the Roman world, is just the

difficulty of responding to threats on the frontier, the difficulty of responding. So the Roman world has become increasingly centralized over the course of the third and fourth and end of the fifth centuries. There is a much larger bureaucracy. It is a much more top-down, highly directed sort of world, that there's much more control exerted from the center of the provinces than there used to be. Now, in a context where the Romans need to be squeezing for resources because population is lower, the economy is not as healthy as it was in the first couple of centuries, the climate has gotten worse, there's more endemic and epidemic disease

than there was, the authorities have to squeeze harder to get the same amount of resources necessary to defend this whole thing. The problem is the further you get away from the center, the harder it is to squeeze and the easier it is for somebody at the center to say, we just can't afford this. We can't afford to send soldiers here. You're on your own. So paradoxically, this squeeze for central control eventually leads to much more localization. And this is what we're going to see in Rome and Britain moving forward, is not just migration into Britain or invasions, not just kind of the collapse of central authority. What we're going to see is an active process of local people taking control of their destinies and taking control of their political futures.

And that what a lot of the times we see is that the decline or fall of Rome is actually a reassertion of local people's agency. Okay, well, we'll see how that reassertion goes next time on the podcast. Thank you very much indeed, Patrick, for coming on. I'll see you next time for the fall of Roman Britain. Thank you so much. Roman Britain. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for listening to this episode. Episode one in our series about Roman Britain. If you want to learn more about Roman Britain, well, goodness me, we've got some podcasts for you. We've got the Roman Navy in Britain, which we

broadcast all the way back in July 2020. And we've also got part one of our Story of England series from May 2023, an award-nominated series, folks, in which I visit some of the sites where you can still get a sense of Roman Britain today. That's called The Story of England's Stone Age to Roman Days. And if you're interested in the Roman Empire more generally, we've got a lot of content for you. For example, we had Mary Beard on in September 2023 in an episode called

Roman Emperors with Mary Beard. If Roman history is your thing, please do go and have a listen to those episodes. Thank you for listening. you you