You can find them here and there, scattered across England: the small green mounds, the hillocks and filled-in ditches, the hints of straight lines that once cut through the landscape. Just beneath the long grass lies the rich silt, piled up by the wind or washed in by the rain in the 62 years since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I I. In the 177 years since Victoria took the throne. The 949 years since a determined William of Normandy landed on the English shore. The 1,418 years since St. Augustine came to Canterbury, a prayer book in his hand.
Dig down in any of those places—from Exeter up to Wallsend, on one diagonal of the English countryside, and Ambleside down to Dover, crisscrossing on the other—and underneath the present grass and brambles, down past the thousand years of smoothing silt, you’ll discover a seam of ash mixed with a dark, thick loam. And beneath that, a solid layer of fired brick and quarried stone, mortared with Roman concrete. It is a deep truth of England, of most of Western civilization, that if you dig down deep enough, you always come at last to the hard remnants of ancient empire. Rome is the buried foundation on which the weight of the world still rests.
As Guy de la Bédoyère points out here, Britain was not unknown to the ancient Mediterranean world. In the fourth century b.c.—while Rome was still struggling to expand on the Italian peninsula—the explorer Pytheas sailed from his base in the Greek colonial city of Massalia (now Marseilles) to circumnavigate Brettaniai. The tin mines of Devon and Cornwall became vital to Europe only later, after the exhaustion of Spanish tin; but even by the third century b.c., traders were hauling British tin across to Gaul—floating it down the Rhône to the Mediterranean and on to Rome, which had become the gravitational center of the known world, pulling everything toward it.
Only in 55 and 54 b.c. did Rome pay serious attention to the island, when Julius Caesar led his legions in a pair of voyages across the English Channel. He had some excuse, as the Britons had been aiding the Belgic tribes he was fighting in his conquest of Gaul. Still, even Caesar’s own account in his Commentaries makes the invasions seem less a military endeavor than a star turn, undertaken mostly for their effect back in Rome: Caesar goes to exotic Britain!
Caesar’s expeditions did, at least, manage to prove that even lands as distant as first-century Britain were already influenced by the sheer presence, the weight, of Rome in the ancient world. Mandubracius, a threatened prince of the Celtic tribe of the Trinovantes (in what is now Essex), had fled across the channel to seek Roman protection and aid. Caesar would use the second of his attacks on Britain to install the grateful Mandubracius as Trinovantian king—and, of course, to demand tribute and hostages, since Caesar was doing what the Romans always did on the edges of their land: stealing a little booty, choosing sides, and encouraging clients and allies.
However often that technique eventually resulted in imperial expansion, it was typically prompted by a more conservative impulse simply to preserve existing possessions. The Romans used neighboring buffer states partly as a bulwark against raids but even more to provide the tripwire system they needed to protect the empire. The actual extent of Roman defense-in-depth, in place of fortified borders, is much disputed by classicists; but where it worked, the Romans could maintain their empire on the relative cheap by garrisoning rapid-response legions in the provincial cities, where their military presence would also serve the purpose of discouraging revolt.
In the case of Britain, the client system worked, more or less, for 90 years. Although Caesar’s grand-nephew Augustus threatened invasion three times, he never carried through on his threats—at least partly because he didn’t need to. The various tribes of Britons were well caught in the orbit of Roman trade, with the island providing Rome more cash in import customs and duties than Rome could get by conquering the Britons and taxing them (or so the geographer Strabo claimed at the time).
Things started to break down, however, in the new century, as political upset and intra-Briton wars caused a decline in trade. Three years after Caligula’s peculiar failure to invade—leaving his soldiers to gather seashells on the shores of Gaul—Claudius pressed forward in a.d. 43, sending approximately 40,000 men (four legions and their auxiliaries) to calm the island’s turmoil. The Romans wouldn’t leave for another 367 years.
This is the period that the author asks us to consider here—as well he ought, for it is a longer period of British history than the stretch, for example, from the Restoration of Charles II till now. Even 1,500 years later, the Roman influence on Britain shows in towns’ names and their locations, in the paths of the roads and waterways, in the kingdom’s divisions and its languages. In the very shape of the countryside, for that matter, with all those mounds and hillocks signifying that here the Romans built a fort, and here a villa, and here a public bath, and here defensive walls, encampments, sewers, and aqueducts.
The Romans were mad builders, and the remnants of their busy construction are found across the entire island. And yet, despite the physical record that still remains, de la Bédoyère points out how little we understand the ordinary lives of the Romano-Britons. “Roman Britain was a human experience,” he writes.
The breathless extension of that sentence reveals the strengths and weaknesses of The Real Lives of Roman Britain. This is scholarly enthusiasm, rather than scholarly argument, and de la Bédoyère appears both in control of his material and out of control of his prose as he barrels from one brief figure, one small inscription, one well-studied archaeological dig to another figure, inscription, and dig. He seems a genuinely sensible historian, and his instincts usually feel right—as when he mocks the recent trend to understand Roman Britain as the brutal oppression of peaceful druidic natives by wicked imperialists. (It’s a view as dated and simplistic, he notes, as the Victorian view of complete Roman benevolence that it purports to replace.)
Still, in a sense, de la Bédoyère is unfair to the historians who have concentrated on the grand themes, grand figures, and grand battles of Roman history. The conquest of Britain remains endlessly fascinating, settling back most of the time to Hadrian’s Wall (the 73-mile-long fortified line, begun in a.d. 122, that separated Roman territory from the North Britons) after the peak of Roman extension with Agricola’s expedition into Scotland in a.d. 84. Perdomita Britannia et statim missa, as Tacitus famously claimed: “Britain was captured and then let go,” the conquest of the island done by Agricola and undone by subsequent Roman dithering.
This is history with real consequence. The failure to complete the conquest of the British Isles set up for Rome what we might call the Dilemma of Britain. To rule the unruly Britons (especially in Wales), protect against raids from Ireland, and keep the Picts north of the wall, Britain required at least three legions. But that many troops in such close proximity was a perpetual temptation for any governor or military legate willing to cast the die and make a play for the emperor’s chair by taking his soldiers across the Channel for a march on Italy. The history of Roman Britain is a repeated tale of garrisons stripped for imperial adventures during periods of unrest in Rome and garrisons restocked during periods of Roman stability. The effect on the people of Britain is significant.
The Real Lives of Roman Britain is similarly a little unfair to the disputes of archaeology. R.G. Collingwood is known in America for his theoretical work on the philosophy of history and art, but he remains best known in England for the 125 papers and five books he wrote on Romano-Briton archaeology between 1913 and 1939. A proponent of question-and-answer excavation—which argues that we should dig only when there is an actual historical question that needs answering—Collingwood remains one of the few philosophers to think seriously about archaeology. And again, this is something of real consequence, as de la Bédoyère’s sources seem to have begun doubting the middlebrow populism—Let’s increase tourism by digging up everything and signposting it all!—that has lured British archaeology since the 1960s.
There’s no denying, however, that Guy de la Bédoyère has focused attention back on the ordinary lives of the ordinary people, insofar as we can know them. He observes, for example, how the Roman presence set down people in Britain from across the empire. After the Anglo-Saxon invasions, as the Romans withdrew in the fourth century, the island wouldn’t be as cosmopolitan again till the 19th century. Perhaps the most provocative observation de la Bédoyère takes from his fragmentary evidence is that the people in Roman Britain rarely thought of themselves as Britons. They were members of one small Celtic tribe or another: Atrebates, Brigantes, Cantiaci, Dumnonii, Iceni, and on and on. Or they were Romans. And often they considered themselves both, without perceiving any contradiction. Rome was their supranational identity, tribe their subnational identity, and nationalism would not even begin to emerge until the Britons’ battles against the Angles and the Saxons.
That may be why the legends of the brief period of sub-Roman Britain feel somehow more authentically British than the much better documented history of the earlier Roman Britain. The tales of Arthur and Merlin, the medieval romances built around the Round Table and the Quest for the Holy Grail—they are what forms the thin, mysterious layer of ash and loam just above the Roman ruins. The Angles and Saxons would push the Britons to the corners of the British Isles—and then came the Vikings, and then the Normans, and then . . . a thousand more years of history piling up. But underneath it all, still, a Roman foundation.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
