Dan Snow's History Hit - UnRoman Britain
Episode Date: January 26, 2020How far did Roman culture and politics penetrate into Britain during the Roman occupation of Britannia?Miles Russell, archaeologist and writer, argues that Britain wasn't as Romanised as has often bee...n believed; in fact only the wealthy elite really emulated fashions from Rome. He highlights archaeological evidence which shows that the bulk of the population went on with their lives as best they could whilst the forts, towns and later villas were little bubbles of Roman culture having limited impact on wider society. Join Dan and Miles as they discuss.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm still in St Helena, a little volcanic
outcrop in the middle of the South Atlantic, one of the most isolated communities of human beings
on planet Earth. So lots of History Hit content being produced here, just you wait, it's going
to be awesome. It's not just Napoleon Bonaparte, all sorts of other stuff as well. Did you know
that on this island there is the most important archaeological record of the middle
passage of the transatlantic slave trade anywhere in the world yep watch this space lots coming out
here soon um this podcast has nothing whatsoever to do with centellina it has everything to do
with roman britain or un-roman britain Just how far did Roman ideas, language, culture, religion,
politics, demographics penetrate into Britain during the Roman occupation of Britannia from
the 1st to the 5th centuries AD? In this podcast, I've talked to Miles Russell, who doesn't think
it did penetrate very far,
and he's got lots of fantastic archaeological evidence to support the idea that Roman rule
was just a bit of a veneer, or certainly confined to isolated spots around our island.
You can check out lots of Roman history on historyhit.tv. It's my new digital history
channel. You can go over there, you can use the code POD6, P-O-D-6. You can watch my documentary on Santolina. You can watch various documentaries
on there. You can check it all out. But if you go over there, historyhit.tv, use the code POD6,
P-O-D-6, you get six weeks for free. Make up your mind. If you like it, then go on and become a
subscriber. It'd be great to have you on there. Lots coming up in 2020. In the meantime, everyone,
here's Myles Russell. Enjoy.
Miles, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
That's quite all right.
I'm so interested by this, by your work,
because I often wonder whether we should think,
we think about ancient empires in the way that we think about the sort of,
you know, the 19th, 20th century empires,
big blocks of pink on a map and it looks contiguous.
But it's almost like we're talking about a Roman empire
made up of nodes of Romanitas with a sort of hinterland
that actually is almost untroubled by Roman rule.
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, it's very easy to think that the Roman
Empire is one sort of homogenous uniform block, and it's the same type of civilisation right the
way across the empire. And it's not sort of local ethnic identities remain intact. But as you go
further to the peripheries, and certainly Britain right on the margins of empire you've got large areas where the old iron age British tribal identities survive and we can see that in burials you can see that
in religion you can see that in in housing styles and it's really I guess Rome's very good
at defeating people militarily but the question is as you get out into the fringes is it great at winning the hearts and minds of the population to want to make them become roman but in a way
like does does rome care about that you know it's like until nationalism gets invented and
mass mobilization of all societies it's presumably if you're a roman leader as long as you know
alpine valleys are sort of quiet you don, maybe you don't really care about what
goes on out there. And the same is true of Britain, you know, on the borders of Wales and
local tribal rulers or elders kind of hold sway as long as they don't kick off and they pay a bit
of tribute. Does it really matter? I think that's exactly right in the sense that, I mean, Britain's
one of the most heavily garrisoned of territories within the Roman Empire, and certainly around Hadrian's
Wall and the northern part of Britain. You've got a dense concentration of soldiers there.
But Britain is making money. It's contributing to the finances of empire, especially with regard to
agricultural production. You've got the lead and tin mines in Western Britain. You've got the gold
mines and copper mines in wales so it's generating
a lot of what the empire you know the roman empire is a resource hungry state and it needs these sort
of raw materials and britain has got that and i think as long as as rome is able to utilize that
and to make money then ultimately as long as things are peaceful, they don't really mind. I mean, in one or two instances, this causes a problem,
because obviously in AD 60, you've got Queen Boudicca of the Icani rising up against Rome.
Essentially, her tribe had been given money just to keep quiet,
but they don't seem to have been won over to the Roman cause.
So at several points, there are difficulties that Rome experiences in Britain,
but by and large, it tries to delegate authority to the British tribes because it doesn't really
want to heavily garrison the southern part of Britain where you've got lots of agricultural
production. But as long as it's making money, as long as it isn't an overall drain on resources,
then I think they are relatively happy
to let the Britons do what they've always done and not to interfere too much. Is that why we get
the sort of idea of a colony meaning not what it's come to mean in early modern and modern
British history, world history, which is a sort of a big geographical region, if you like, a colony like, you know, Virginia, but a colony like a
town like Colchester, Camulodunum, there are little nodes, are there, of where the Romans do
sort of build little versions of Rome? Yes, yes. I mean, Colchester is a very good example because
Colchester is one of the first towns to be established in Britain. And as a colony, essentially, it is for retired soldiers.
It serves one of two purposes.
It's a way of getting rid of soldiers who've done their 25 years service
because Rome obviously has got the first professional army in the ancient world.
So after their 25 years service, they can be retired into this new town
and be given land and property and so on so
it gets rid of that issue but also colchester could serve as a as a model town as like a
milton keynes in the roman britain you know it's showing you this is how a town should work this
is the benefits of a civilized way of life now colchester doesn't succeed too well because you've
got the problem that the britains aren't that enamoured by the place.
You know, you've got people who up until fairly recently were killing or enslaving them or lording over them are now living in the town and doing pretty much the same sort of thing.
So during the Boudiccan uprising of 1860, Colchester becomes the main target of hatred and is burnt down. But the idea persists. And after Rome has quelled
that rebellion, it creates towns. It basically creates the infrastructure of towns. You've got
the roads, you've got a forum, the economic centre, you've got a basilica, the administrative
heart. And then you can build up bathhouses and amphitheatres and key elements of a Roman way of
life. But to be honest, once Rome has established these towns,
these tribal centres across Britain, it then moves away.
And it's a case of relying on the local elite to convey a sense of Roman-ness,
to oversee Roman laws and to keep things running.
But I think, as we said earlier, as long as their tax is being paid
and money is being
made then then rome really isn't that too bothered and when you look at some of these towns implanted
into britain after the first sort of 60 70 80 years they're not hugely successful you can see
that animals are being corralled inside the towns there are pottery kilns there are metal working
they look a little bit more i suppose like you'd
expect a shanty town a wild west town in in the us you know in the 19th century they don't look
like mediterranean style towns i think the problem is we've tended to look at these urban centers in
britain and equate them with pompeii and herculaneum and all these other great roman cities and think
they were exactly the same and once you get below the skin once you get into the the archaeology and equate them with Pompeii and Herculaneum and all these other great Roman cities and think they
were exactly the same. And once you get below the skin, once you get into the archaeology,
you'll see actually they're not like that at all. They're set up to be great functioning urban
centres, but the reality is on the ground they weren't. And I think that's really a fault of
the Roman state not winning over the hearts and minds, but also Britain's being a little bit cooler towards the idea of wanting to be Roman.
How interesting. And what does population density look like in southern Britain in this period?
Are people, nowadays we think of, you know, most of us live in towns and cities. Would it have been
far more even, of course, far fewer people, but spread across, you know, in subsistence agriculture?
I mean, would it? And therefore these towns wouldn't have been as important in the economy as Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, London are now.
Yeah, again, today, I think we are we get so focused on towns and certainly in the Roman mindset, the town was the centre of civilisation. But when you
look at the population spread, as far as we can understand it, in the late Iron Age, at the time
that Rome arrives in the first century AD, you've got a very scattered and diverse population.
You've got one or two key centres in the south and east. you've got relatively dense population centers at key places like
chichester in sussex and colchester in essex where trade is being enacted between britain
and the mediterranean world but once you move away from that you've got small farmsteads you've got
clan groups you've got probably two or three families in little clusters of roundhouses farming their landscape. It's
quite a politically fractured landscape. And in one hand, it makes it relatively easy to conquer
because when the Roman armies arrive, you've got thousands of these heavily armed, well-trained
soldiers, but they've got no one really to come up against because you haven't got the political organization there to bring large field armies to fight against Rome.
The Britons are very good at guerrilla warfare and attacking the Roman army while it's on the march.
But they're absolutely hopeless when it comes to pitched battles.
So it's very easy to defeat them.
But then it's very difficult to try and bring them into this Mediterranean idea of towns, because whereas when Rome conquered in Egypt and across the Aegean in Greece, there you've got civilizations that are similar to Rome.
They understand the importance of towns. They've got well-organized, well-structured society.
In Britain, it's very dispersed, tribalized society.
in Britain it's very dispersed tribalized society and I don't think they're ever fully won over to this idea of what a town should be and they don't fill it with the same kind of
functions and resources that we'd see a Roman town say in North Africa or in Greece.
And so the archaeology that this is fascinating what because we assume don't we that sorry stupid
people like me assume that there were all these sort of Brits that just eventually started living in towns and going to the baths and things.
So these towns were not a success.
We should think of them as the sort of model towns that perhaps the Soviets would build in strange parts of the Soviet Union that were just never properly kind of moved into as the builders had intended.
I think, yes, yeah.
I mean, you can compare them with that.
I think the trouble is we get blinded by this sort of the archaeological skeleton of these places.
You know, you see the road layout, which was set out by the Roman government in the earliest stages.
And what happens with a lot of towns, say, like, for example, Dorchester or Cirencester,
And what happens with a lot of towns, say, like, for example, Dorchester or Cirencester,
is you see in the last few decades of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD,
suddenly there's a big explosion of townhouses. You get massive mosaics and big elite structures being built.
Now, that's because I think a lot of wealthy people are moving into the town.
Perhaps they're moving into an undeveloped part of the Roman Empire empire so these might be wealthy business successes from other parts of the roman world
moving into britain but they are developing their own private estates within these towns so it the
towns are becoming more sort of like um almost like a sort of a sort of an elite ghetto you know
this is where you've got a closed estate where the wealthy
are building their luxury apartments but they're excluding the rest of society so we see this
archaeologically i mean you dig in cirencester or dorchester and you see mosaics and you're
it's very easy to think well this is fantastic the britains are all living like romans but they're
not it's just a very small minority of extremely wealthy people
who at the very end of Roman Britain are moving into the not very successful towns and developing
it for their own ends. So it's a bit like when we focus on that side, the wealthy side, and we look
at the villas, it's a bit like trying to understand, say, 18th or 19th century England by just looking
at stately homes and not looking at the rest of
society to get a better picture. I mean, the Roman archaeology is fantastic. It does look amazing and
it is incredible to see, but it only represents sort of less than 1% of the population within
the province at that time. So when we look at, say, the West Country, so Exeter and its hinterland,
and then up to Chester and its hinterland in the northwest.
You think there would have been a sort of pinprick of Romanitas.
And then would the people outside the walls of those towns,
or outside those towns, would they be living almost untrusted?
Would they be living beyond the Roman state?
Would they be taxed?
Would they be doing military service?
What would their relationship with Rome be like? It's certainly very difficult. They would
certainly be taxed. They would be contributing to the Roman program. But it's interesting,
the further you get from the towns, the less Roman it becomes. You see all of the excavations
that we're doing now in Dorset. you can see as you move away from the key Roman
towns, you suddenly start discovering long houses and round houses, the sort of structures that are
being built in the pre-Roman Iron Age are still continuing 100, 200, 300 years after the invasion.
And there are a few sort of Roman coins on this site, you would get some Roman pottery,
but it's almost as if people are carrying on
the same sort of existence and they're not really buying into a Roman market they've got the odd
sort of knickknacks they've got these things that are helping facilitate or better their lifestyle
but they're not becoming Roman they're not restructuring their houses in a more Mediterranean
way they're not going over completely to this new style of fashion. Now,
whether that's either deliberate resistance to these ideas or whether it's more passive in that
they don't see any benefit about being Roman, they don't see any sort of financial incentive
to become Roman, but they're just carrying on their own sort of lifestyle. So often when we
see forts up on Hadrian's Wall in the militarized zone or we see
towns like Chester or Exeter they're like little sort of bubbles of Roman lifestyle and once you
start moving 10-20 miles away from these you're moving into a more rural landscape within which
native culture patterns survive and it's only really towards the end of Roman Britain that we
get the villas being it's almost injected or built or developing into this landscape.
But as I said, that seems to be more to do with a wealthy elite, possibly from another part of the empire, rather than the Britons themselves.
You know, when we look at villas, it is very tempting to say this must be the native Britons who've wholeheartedly embraced Roman culture.
But it doesn't look as if that's the case. You know, they're developing 300 years after the invasion.
So the success of a Roman lifestyle in distant Britain is actually very limited.
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echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week I mean, you say whether it's passive or whether it's sort of actively anti-Roman.
I mean, Britain was one of the most heavily garrisoned provinces of the Roman Empire.
That's partly because of the strategic threat from the north of the island,
and I guess the Irish.
Is it those external threats, or is there a sense in which Boudicca in 60 AD
and then one or two other
risings, this was a troublesome province to police? It was always a troublesome province,
yes. And towards the end of the empire in the third and fourth centuries, it becomes extremely
rebellious and turns its military strength against Rome as people are trying to break away from the
empire. But I think the difficulty really with
Britain is that that Rome wanted the metal reserves that it got from Wales and from Devon
and Cornwall it wanted the agricultural production and the taxation from southern and eastern Britain
it didn't really have much to gain from northern England and up into Scotland because there you've
got very sort of pastoral landscapes not not that much intensive agriculture going on, a very dispersed settlement pattern.
And it's very difficult to garrison that. I mean, Rome, certainly in the first century when Britain
was invaded, didn't really conceive the idea of frontiers. It was always about almost with
missionary zeal, spreading their word, spreading their culture across Europe.
And occasionally they came across natural boundaries like the Sahara Desert or political ones when they come up against the Persians in the east.
But in Britain, there's only a small part of the island that really they were that bothered with, that they thought they could exploit financially and politically.
financially and politically. And so if you're ignoring Northern Britain, you need a substantial garrison there just to keep them away from your investments in the South. So you're right,
there's about three legions throughout the history of Britain, which is about a tenth
of the whole military garrison strength of the empire is invested in Britain to keep that
Northern frontier secure secure and then
later to protect the harbors on the western part of britain against sort of tribes from ireland who
who weren't conquered and then later from the first sort of english pirates coming over the
angle angles and saxons during the great sort of migrations but it's a very tricky province to
really control and towards the end it becomes too expensive and it becomes so
politically troublesome because there are basically if you're in charge of a significant
military garrison in britain you're feeling cut off and separated and divorced from the rest of
the empire i think the it's very tempting to build up your own empire because you can protect yourself you can protect your
harbors you can create your own sort of state away from Rome. Rome seems too distant if your taxes
are you know going off in in that general direction in the third and fourth centuries it seems better
for a lot of politicians in Britain to break away from the rest of the empire and do their own
thing so I think the danger there for Rome is there's just so many soldiers stuck in britain and if they haven't got anything particularly to do
then they become a source of rebellion so it's all getting a bit brexity now it's all getting a bit
contemporary here well i mean i think that's that that's the danger i mean it's i think i mean it
might be something to do with with the sort of the political sort of ideology in Britain, the sense of an island nation,
their leaders sometimes feel, you know,
why are we interested with people overseas
unless you're controlling your own empire?
And yeah, unfortunately, there are certain parallels
you can see with the way in which British leaders
tried to break with Rome in the same way
that they have been doing recently.
And of course, then you got uh decades of civil war and
economic collapse afterwards but you know that's another story hey ho yeah hopefully it's not going
to be repeated right so so because i'm like you know i'm reading peter heather's book on the fall
of rome and he says actually britain was almost at ground britain's the ultimate example of where
where romanness was almost completely extinguished you know in terms of language and religion and
and architecture and everything else so so it sounds to me like that's not a product of these violent barbarian Anglo-Saxons
jutes and everything coming across. It's actually just because it never really took hold in the
first place. So it was always, Roman-ness was always fragile in Britain. Exactly. I think it's
that very fragileness that is the issue, because when you look at fifth, sixth century Britain, you don't get any aspects of Roman culture really surviving.
Arguably, in little pockets of Christianity surviving and Latin being the language of the church.
But beyond that, with regards to Roman religion, Roman settlement types, the Roman language, Roman legal system, it all goes.
And I think the issue there is that the Britons have effectively rejected, I mean,
the only people who are wholeheartedly embracing Roman culture in the fourth and fifth centuries
are the wealthy elite. And once the economy breaks down, they're either dead or they've
changed allegiances, they've gone somewhere else else the bulk of the British society has never really been brought on board the the Romans of program
and so by the time the first Saxons settle in Britain there is no Roman culture surviving so
it's not a case of these Germanic peoples coming into Britain and in the very sort of Arthurian
tradition you're a mythical figure defending roman culture against these barbarians
the saxons arrive roman culture is already dead in britain it's been dead for decades
so neither the britains nor the saxons are sort of inheriting or continuing a roman tradition
it's only much much later in the sixth and seventh centuries when you've got the catholic church
bringing christianity back into britain do you see a revival of Roman ideas?
And you see the first sort of Saxon monarchs and kingdoms,
and they start using Roman text on their coins.
But that is Roman ideas and Roman culture being brought back.
When they arrived, it was completely dead.
That's absolutely fascinating.
And what sites are you working on at the moment that are really shining a light on this? on this well as i say we've been digging a whole series for the last sort of 10
years or so we've been looking at bournemouth university we've been doing a number of
excavations around dorset because you've got here the the duratrigues tribe uh which were settled
before the romans arrive and what we've been trying to do is is trying to understand what
happens when the roman state when the roman army has moved through. Because the idea, you know, it's always been felt that you've got a
town like Dorchester being developed, surely the natives were shaved and washed and put into togas,
almost like a sort of a Roman reservation, and they became Romanised. And of course, that's not
the picture at all. So we're taking a whole of native british sites in and around the dorchester
area and investigating them and seeing what happens in the first second third fourth centuries
how do they develop and we're finding more and more that native burial patterns continue
uninterrupted native building styles continue and yes you do find coins and pottery but society is never being won over by the roman cause so blinded there we are by
big masonry structures and mosaics it's the native sites timber buildings which of course don't
survive uh prominently today but there's many more of those and it's really that story that
we're tracing and trying to give a more nuanced picture of what's happening in britain as part
of the roman empire because i said it's not a great success for rome yes it makes money out of
this this territory but it never really wins the people over and it's trying to understand why and
how that happens and looking at the archaeological evidence to to try and elucidate that i i this is
i mean we can't answer this but why do you think is it just time? Is it just, do you just need generations to make that process happen?
Why do we think the people of Southern Gaul became more Romanised if they did?
Well, I guess the difficulty when we look at someone like Gaul
is that Gaul in modern day France, it's conquered extremely quickly.
You've got Julius Caesar marching his soldiers into there.
And in a
series over a decade, we are seeing in the 50s BC of a population base, probably about 3 million
living in central France. A million are killed. Men, women and children are slaughtered by the
soldiers that come in. A million are probably enslaved. And you've got a third of the population
left. And the whole political
system is in tatters. And at a very basic level, from that point onwards, it's relatively easy to
impose Roman control and build towns. And over time, you know, generations later, when the
population base has increased, Gaul becomes an extremely successful and Romanized part of the empire. In fact,
it embraces Roman culture, arguably more successfully than any other Western provinces.
Now, in Britain, you've never got that kind of population cull. You haven't got that kind of
disruption or dislocation. Rome is very keen to sort of, I mean, on the one hand, it's never meeting massed armies to fight against, but it's very keen to delegate authority.
It's the cheaper option. It's more arguably from their point of view, cost effective.
But because population isn't disrupted significantly, I think it retains its culture patterns and identity right the way through the roman conquest i mean you could argue after you know world war ii east eastern germany becomes a probably one of the most prominent and
successful communist states but it's gone through significant disruption population um you know
have been scattered um and so the the new systems embed themselves quite successfully and quickly i
think the same thing's true in gaul and france that there's so much disruption there's so much slaughter on an industrial scale that
afterwards the survivors there's no resistance to rome whatsoever whoever's left embraces it
and generations down the line it's extremely successful so i think at a very basic level
rome needed to kill more people in Britain to embed Roman culture more successfully.
And thankfully, they didn't do that. But because of that, you've got native patterns surviving for
far, far longer than they do in France. Well, that's an amazing, amazing thought. I did not
know about those Gallic figures. That's absolutely astonishing. It's quite shocking, really. I mean,
Julius Caesar is often put up as one of the greatest Romans, but when you look at it in those terms, it's the kind of extermination, the kind of social dislocation that he enacted
upon Gaul is just shocking. Amazing. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast,
Myles Russell. How can people find out about what you're doing and keep up with you?
Well, as I said, the Bournemouth University website, we've got lots of reports on our excavations going on.
If you look at Duratriga's Dig on Twitter,
you'll find out our reports.
And UnRoman Britain, where myself and Stuart Laycock
are looking at the UnRoman nature of the province,
is published now with History Press.
Brilliant. UnRoman Britain, everyone.
Go and check it out.
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast
thank you
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