A History of Ancient Britain (52 page)

It was the tribes in the south and east of England who faced the onslaught first. These were the Cantiaci, who in time gave their name to Kent; the Iceni in Norfolk; the Trinovantes in Essex
and, most powerful of all, the Catuvellauni, who controlled an extensive territory north of the River
Thames. The biggest obstacle in the way of a united front was a bitter,
long-running feud between the Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni, neighbours and deadly rivals.

A coalition of some of the tribes had gathered around the leadership of Cassivellaunus, fearsome and bellicose chieftain of the most fearsome and bellicose Catuvellauni. Rather than fight them
on the beaches, Cassivellaunus had taken his army inland in hope of sustaining a guerrilla war of ambush and lightning strikes.

Whatever chance of success such a force might have had in the face of 50,000 highly trained infantry and cavalry, it was hopelessly compromised by human frailty. The Trinovantes from south of
the Thames believed their own chieftain had been murdered by men of the Catuvellauni and put revenge ahead of inter-tribal unity. While Cassivellaunus hoped his superior knowledge of the geography
of his home turf would give him an advantage, the Trinovantes sided with the invaders and offered to show them the way into the Catuvellauni heartlands.

Cassivellaunus had drawn up his troops on the north bank of the Thames at the point occupied today by the west London suburb of Brentford. In 54
BC
it was, as the modern
name suggests, a shallow ford at the confluence of the Thames and Brent rivers. It was the only point where men and horses could hope to cross and Cassivellaunus might have prayed the Romans would
never find it – that the deep, black barrier of the water itself would hold back the foe. With the help of their new-found friends, however, Caesar and his legions were there in no time.

A battle duly ensued but, for all the undoubted bravery of the defenders, there was never any real chance of withstanding the onslaught. The front rank of any Roman army fought for no more than
15 minutes before being pulled back to the rear to recover their strength. Fresh men stepped forward to replace them and in this way any enemy found itself fighting a foe that never tired, never
weakened. It was an enervating battle of attrition and in time the British warriors were overwhelmed and forced to break and run. Everyone could see which way the wind was blowing and one by one
the tribal leaders made terms with Caesar. Cassivellaunus retained the loyalty of his own closest followers and they withdrew to fight another day. But it was over.

Here was the lesson that later Britons would learn from. By failing to stand together, the British tribes had defeated themselves. It would become part of the lore of the British people –
that in the fight to defend British
people from the tyranny of dictators, unity and loyalty were everything.

The names of those peoples sound as foreign to us now as those of any Native American Indians – indeed only the Romans’ latinised versions survive – and yet they were part of
the story for hundreds if not thousands of years. Among the missing are the Atrebates in Hampshire; the Brigantes, their name meaning ‘hill-dwellers’, in the Pennines – likely a
confederation made up of smaller tribes like the Corionototae, the Lopocares, the Tectoverdi and the Setanti; the Parisii in east Yorkshire; the Carvetii in Cumbria; the Dubunni in the Cotswolds;
the Deceangli, the Demetae, the Ordovices and the Silures in Wales. On and on goes the roll-call of peoples lost to us, and yet still in our DNA somewhere. In Scotland were the Novantae in the
south-west; the Damnonii in Strathclyde; the Votadini in the south-east; the Venicones in Tayside and the Epidii in Kintyre and on the islands of Arran, Islay and Jura. Imagine, too, the language
that went with those names, that could string them together like beads on a necklace.

For now, though, in 54
BC
the inescapable fact was that Britain’s doors lay open to the invader. It might have been easy to imagine that, in the aftermath of such a
decisive defeat, all Britain would quickly have fallen under Roman rule. But of course it was not quite like that. Caesar stayed for just three months. Having contented himself with pledges of
allegiance from the tribes of southern Britain, he loaded his army back aboard their ships and returned to Gaul.

That, in abbreviated form, is the familiar version of the events of 55 and 54
BC
taught to countless generations of schoolchildren. It is a version of the truth (myths
and legends form like pearls around grains of sand, or like raindrops around specks of dust), but it is certainly less than the whole story. For one thing it has the Romans leaving in 54
BC
without so much as a backward glance. The schoolchildren are expected to believe that after all that effort – with a view to adding Britannia to the Roman demesne
– Caesar just cut the place adrift once more. The next significant date in the story is
AD
43 – the best part of a century later – and we are traditionally
told that Britain was left to its own devices for all that time. But if that is what most of us think, the scholars know different.

Key to their deeper understanding is the coinage. When some numismatists look at the coins circulating in Britain in the middle of the first century
BC
, they spot a clean
break. After the Roman invasion of 54
BC
the old Celtic coins disappear and are replaced with new – suggesting one hierarchy had been replaced by another.

In his wonderfully readable
Britannia: The Creation of a Roman Province
, John Creighton identifies three ways in which the new coins differ from the old. Firstly
there is an abrupt change in the familiar depictions of a human head on one side and a horse on the other. After Caesar’s time in Britain, the imagery suddenly mimics that of coins minted in
Gaul. The second change is in the amount of gold in gold coins: where once the gold content was highly variable, suddenly it became carefully regulated and consistent. Thirdly, says Creighton,
hoards featuring both old and new coinages are rare – making it likely that the old coins were withdrawn and replaced wholesale by the new version. ‘The combination of these three
changes in the gold coinage, all happening at the same time, suggests a radical restructuring of the political arrangement of south-east Britain at this date, even though otherwise in the
archaeology we see little alteration,’ he wrote. ‘A recoinage across all of south-east Britain required the mobilisation of a significant degree of power or authority.’

Creighton infers the ‘radical restructuring of the political arrangement’ went further than just issuing new coins. He believes the Romans also installed two Gallic aristocrats as
kings of two new territories, one south of the Thames and one in the east.

Caesar himself refers to a figure named Commius, a Roman-approved king of the Atrebates tribe back in northern Gaul. Caesar trusted Commius and sent him to Britain as part of the build-up to his
invasion in 55
BC
, with instructions to win over as many as possible of the British tribes. While his diplomatic mission was a failure – he was captured on arrival
– he retained the general’s support. Returned to Caesar as a bargaining chip, he was subsequently rewarded with fresh territory in Gaul. ‘My reading of the evidence, therefore,
would be to view Commius as being appointed king over several of the political groups that surrendered to Caesar on his expeditions to Britain,’ wrote Creighton.

Commius is the name on some of the first of the new coins issued in southern Britain, along with that of a figure named Tasciovanus. Creighton suggests the former was made king in the south,
while the latter was put in place in the east. The use of placemen was the Roman way, after all – demonstrating so much more finesse than the blunt edge of invasion. That the Republic was so
polished, so experienced in the business of takeovers, somehow makes it seem even more sinister, even more irresistible.

Details like these make the story infinitely richer and more satisfying than before – reminding us that powerful states use wit and guile just as
readily as brute
force in pursuit of their objectives. Better yet, they expose as nonsense the idea the Romans left the best part of 100 years between phase one and phase two of their plans to conquer the islands.
In the years after 54
BC
a new chapter was opened in the history of Britain. In many practical respects it was truly momentous – in fact, the end of our prehistory.
From then on, to a greater or lesser extent, the land was under the gaze of those in the habit of writing things down.

It is true to say Roman forces had touched only a small part of Britain. But while the tribes in the north and west likely felt Caesar’s adventures and intrigues among the Trinovantes and
the Catuvellauni were distant concerns, those in the south and east came face to face with a new reality. And just as the tale told by the coins would be easy to overlook, the effects of those
first decades of Roman suzerainty on the fabric of life in southern Britain are less than obvious at first glance.

Silchester, in Hampshire, became one of the most important Roman cities in Britain. They knew it as Calleva Atrebatum – a latinised form of a Celtic name meaning ‘the wooded
place’ – but it was a fully functioning town for generations before Emperor Claudius arrived in Britain to celebrate the official conquest of the new colony in
AD
43. Today it is the site of one of the largest archaeological excavations currently under way in Britain and evidence already recovered has proven beyond doubt that Calleva was
something previously unknown: a town founded, built and run by Britons.

What is surprising about the place is that as early as 25
BC
it featured streets laid out like a modern city, on a regular grid pattern – something archaeologists
previously believed arrived only when the Romans came to stay, in
AD
43. (Something similar is suggested at Fishbourne, in West Sussex, where some of the excavated pottery
dates to around 20
BC
; there is an early mosaic showing the Iron Age town laid out in a grid pattern.)

Fascinatingly, at Calleva the town planning – and that is what we are talking about – is a fusion of British Iron Age and Roman sensibilities. For while the main axis of Roman towns
ran from north to south, at Calleva the alignment was east to west. Iron Age traditions gave priority to the path of the sun, with house entrances facing east; so that although the planners had
clearly acquired some of the new ideas, they clung stubbornly to important elements of the old. Iron Age Silchester is nonetheless the earliest known example of town planning anywhere in
Britain.

Who then was responsible for such quasi-Roman behaviour, on an island
apparently abandoned by the Romans 30 years before? The answer is to be found back on the beach at
Walmer, with Caesar in 55
BC
. By his own account he demanded and was given ‘hostages’ from the tribes as gestures of their good will and their intention to
behave themselves. Those individuals, likely to have been the sons or close relations of the chieftains, were then spirited away, all the way back to Rome. But the use of the word
‘hostages’ – so loaded with notions of imprisonment and threat to life – is unhelpful. It just happens to be a convenient translation of the Roman word
obses
and has
tended to remain stuck in the literature ever since.

In fact the lot of the
obsides
was far from unhappy and it is more accurate to think of them as exchange students.
Obsides
were educated in the Roman way, mixed freely with Roman
citizens and were generally encouraged to become Roman in their dress, outlook and behaviour. Once their makeover was complete – perhaps many years later – they were sent home. It was
hoped that they would take Rome with them, and that consciously or unconsciously they would educate the people back home, persuade them the Roman traditions and practices were best.

In the case of the founding of a city like Calleva, the chronology fits. Perhaps we should picture the return to Hampshire of men who had last seen Britain when they were mere boys. By dint of
an adolescence and young manhood spent in the Classical world, they must have returned as strangers to a strange land. They were still the sons of chieftains and aristocrats but now their strongest
allegiances may have been to Roman foster families a thousand miles away – certainly to Roman ways.

Homesick for another world, they might understandably have used their influence to try to create, among the fields and roundhouses, some shadow of all they had left behind. They did not just
bring back a taste for ordered streets either. The new city was soon filled with new sights and smells as well. Evidence from the Silchester excavations shows the inhabitants acquired a taste for
Mediterranean exotics like coriander, dill and anchovies.

Jonathan Swift is one of several people credited with the line, ‘He was a brave man that first ate an oyster.’ At various times in prehistory they had been an important and plentiful
food, but during the Iron Age of southern Britain they were off the menu. In Calleva, however, they were being consumed by the barrow load and so the locals had to have acquired that habit from
somewhere. The somewhere was Rome, where oysters were as popular as ever.

The archaeologists have found coins in the Silchester excavations as well.
A tiny silver minim, about the size of the nail on an adult’s little finger, has on one
side the head of a man and the name Verica. He is styled like a Roman emperor but on his head he bears an unmistakably Celtic torc. The other side reveals more about his identity: another torc
encircling the letters CF, standing for ‘Commius Filius’. This then is a coin minted under the authority of King Verica, a descendant of Commius – surely the same Commius set in
place by Caesar himself.

Coins like that minim, tiny though it is, would have had a huge impact on the people of Calleva and on the wider world of southern Britain. It is hard for us to imagine the power coins once had.
We see tokens for buying a newspaper, or to drop into a busker’s hat. Increasingly now we do not even bother to bend down and pick the lowest denominations if we drop them. They are close to
being meaningless and valueless.