A History of Ancient Britain (54 page)

For all the shock and awe of the military, the Roman advance was really much more about patience, planning and a genius for the science of
logistics. From the moment they
marched up the beaches from their landing craft the Romans knew that the transformation of the land of the Britons into the province of Britannia would be the work of decades. It is tempting to
imagine the Roman army sweeping across the islands like a great wave, washing all resistance before it, but the reality was different.

Britain had felt the power of a tsunami before – in 8000
BC
, when the forces of nature had made the place an island once and for all. But if the Roman advance
resembled anything it was an older force still, that of the glaciers. Rome would remodel Britain gradually, grinding forwards relentlessly. The generation that arrived in
AD
43 would retire and die, to be planted in British fields, but there would always be others following behind. Rome was not built in a day and neither was Roman Britain. Its architects had time on
their hands and the stamina and patience to match.

So the legions marched out of the south-east, heading north and west, to fight their battles and erect their forts. Behind them came the engineers who would eventually construct more than 2,000
miles of roads for easy marching and easy tax collection; they built towns and cities for the all-important bureaucrats who would fill in the forms and count the money. Wherever they went the
Romans had to plan and build more and more, until in time they would create an entire infrastructure.

At least as impressive as anything else they conceived are their roads – famously straight, uncompromising routes connecting the new cities. It had long been assumed that, until the
arrival of the Romans, Britain was a land of tracks and pathways – ancient and familiar but ephemeral, maintained only by the imperceptible wear of footsteps and the wheel rims of
chariots.

The ghost of a barbarian Britain is a hard one to lay to rest. Never mind that amphorae full of Roman wine were enlivening the long winter nights in Gurness Broch on Orkney, or that a king of
those islands was named on a triumphal arch raised in Rome, as one who bothered to bow to Claudius at Colchester. Forget too that gold jewellery in the tradition of the Classical world of the
Mediterranean was sought by the well-to-do in the land that would become Scotland, perhaps a couple of centuries before Claudius’s birth. The discovery of a taste for fancy bangles, made of
southern European coloured glass, at Hengistbury Head in the century before Caesar apparently matters not. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is still easiest to imagine Britain spurning
all the changes and advances happening
elsewhere, the mass of her peoples resisting civilisation just as they would resist the Romans themselves.

Modern Britons’ reluctance to let go of their inner barbarian is tightly bound to the British sense of independence. Britons need to know they are different – and that, furthermore,
they have always been different. But an archaeological discovery in Shropshire in 2009 is yet another nail in the coffin of that unquiet spirit.

A long, straight earthwork running for miles through the Shropshire countryside had long been regarded as part of the Roman road network. English archaeologist and Roman specialist Ivan Margary
was the expert on the subject in the 1940s and 1950s and classified the Shropshire stretch as something akin to a Roman B-class road. If Margary said it was a Roman road, then that was that. An
excavation in 1995 had looked at a small section of the thing and drawn the same conclusion.

But 14 years later, when the Tarmac Company proposed to quarry away a 400-yard-long stretch of it, archaeologists were called in to take a second look. To begin with, the team was persuaded they
were indeed dealing with a Roman road. It had the familiar profile of a few feet of clay and hardcore topped with a cambered surface. There was a drainage ditch on each side into which passing
travellers had flung the usual assortment of Roman-period rubbish. But, more interestingly, there were signs the road had been rebuilt on more than once occasion, and samples were collected in
hopes of obtaining dates for the various phases of construction. Rather than dating to a time after the invasion, however, the road had been built sometime in the second century
BC
– and then repaired and rebuilt for the last time long before the Romans were even in Kent.

That the Romans found perfectly usable British roads in some parts of the land seems fairly certain now: we have already seen the long, straight metalled road at Silchester in 25
BC
. Perhaps the soldiers, and some of their more worldly superiors as well, were surprised by how much they did recognise. Britannia may have been off the radar for most of them –
and for all of their lives until they splashed ashore on the south coast – and yet there they were marching for some of the time at least along metalled roads through a landscape of ordered
fields and trackways. Sometimes the roads passed through towns –
oppida
in their own Latin tongue – where they might find bathhouses in which to wash and soothe aching muscles,
as well as innumerable craftsmen, artists and specialists in mysteries like medicine. If they had expected such towns to be chaotic and disorganised – if they
expected
them to exist at all – then they were wrong again. Those towns they encountered had clearly defined zones, with places of industry kept separate from places where people lived. There was
ritual and religion as well – unfamiliar and foreign to Roman soldiers’ eyes no doubt, but no less sophisticated and complex than their own.

Those legionaries might have known next to nothing about the British, so how disconcerting for them to find the British seemingly knew a great deal about them.

There were coins in circulation as well – much like the sort used in Gaul – and the invaders would have noticed how the local kings were styling themselves in the Roman manner. They
might have seen the petty kings from time to time and they would certainly have noticed how many of the native men and women were wearing clothes and jewellery modelled on those worn in Rome, if
not actually imported from there.

That the little kings of Britannia were dressing like Romans can only have worked in the Empire’s favour in the long run. The first time a Briton saw one of his own dressed that way
– or the first time they clapped eyes on a Gallic import like a Commius or a Tasciovanus – the garb might have seemed strange. Soon, though, they would have grown used to it, and by the
time the first king was succeeded by a second and then a third, they might have paid more attention to the clothes and the crown rather than to the man or the woman.

This is the genius of uniform; and the raiment worn by kings and queens is just that, a uniform. Once the subjects understand the office denoted by the crown, they might become less interested
in the face beneath it. The king is the king because his outfit says so, and that is all a person needs to know. This is a process that can make puppets interchangeable. (There is a story, perhaps
apocryphal perhaps not, that the American film studios conceived of the Lone Ranger as a masked man for one very good reason: the audience never got to see the actor. If the actor got ideas above
his station and started asking for more money, he could swiftly be replaced and his adoring fans would be none the wiser. The same was surely true for puppet kings and queens. If the crown no
longer fitted the wearer in imperial eyes, then it could be moved onto the head of the next man.)

If the time came when the Republic, or later the Empire, sought to replace a native king with a home-grown governor – to change an ‘independent’ kingdom into a province –
then that might be accomplished without any of the subject population even noticing the sleight of hand.

Whether or not they recognised aspects of the landscape around them, the Romans set about the business of remodelling the place in their own image. With a military
infrastructure of forts in place, the planners and engineers got to work building towns and cities. In the comparatively safe south-east they established Colchester, London and St Albans, and on
the frontier beyond they founded Exeter, Gloucester and Lincoln. If these were under way relatively quickly, it would take decades to expand that frontier. Wales was first and then the north. York
was founded in
AD
71 and then Carlisle, deep in bandit country, by
AD
79.

After around 35 years of marching, fighting and building, much of the template of the Britain we recognise today had been carved from the ancient landscape. Superimposed upon the old bones of
the place was a new skin carefully sculpted so as to be recognisable as an adopted daughter of the Empire.

One of the very first of the new towns was Camulodunum, founded in
AD
49 and known to us as the city of Colchester. It was near here, in the 1990s, that archaeologists
found the grave of the man called doctor, or druid. The Romans must have asked the locals what they called the native settlement that already thrived on the site on their arrival. When they were
told it was dunum – the fortress – of Camulos – the god of war – the soldiers merely latinised the name. Here had been the royal stronghold of the Trinovantes – the
same that had felt so threatened by their neighbours, the Catuvellauni, that they opened Britain’s doors to Caesar in 54
BC
.

In
AD
65, more than a century after that betrayal, a huge triumphal arch was built through the walls of the Roman town that supplanted the Iron Age settlement, dedicated
to the glory of Emperor Claudius. A single archway still stands today, made of red Roman bricks. This is the Balkerne Gate, the oldest surviving and most complete Roman gateway in the whole of
Britain. It is a strange relic today, like a hanging valley left high and dry above the modern traffic thundering past on the A134 dual carriageway below. There is a pub beside it and people bustle
obliviously through the ancient gateway, mostly heading to and from the walkway that carries pedestrians over the road.

But for all that it is lost in the modern world, it still carries some of its old power. Any Celtic Briton used to a village of roundhouses would have been stunned into obedience by such a
structure. Having passed through something like the Balkerne Gate you would hardly have to feel the sharp
edge of a Roman sword to understand that the people who could build
such things were the people in control.

For every Briton cowed by Camulodunum, there would have been a Roman soldier returning from the front, or a bureaucrat employed to count taxes, who took great comfort from entering a town little
different to any in the Empire. These were the
civitates
built in the image of Rome and for Romans and they were symbols of permanence. The first of them were established as colonies for
retiring soldiers and if the veterans of the conquest were staying put, so was everyone else.

Anyone seeking a memorial to those anonymous souls crushed beneath the Roman machine need only look around a place like Colchester. Built into its 2,000-year-old foundations are their skulls and
bones. In an annexe of Colchester Museum I was given permission to examine all that remained of two men who lived and died in the town around
AD
50 – just when
Camulodunum was being built.

Neither of them died naturally. Only their skulls survive and those were found during the excavation of a ditch in the 1970s. They make for grim viewing: one features a thumb-sized depressed
fracture of the crown, caused by a crushing blow from a blunt instrument like a cosh or a hammer. It had been a mortal wound. The other man’s skull was even worse, with two or three deep cuts
made by something heavy and sharp, an axe or a sword. These showed the man had been the victim of a clumsy decapitation.

These are the remains of two British men who met their deaths in Camulodunum before the paint was dry. It is highly likely they represent some of the hundreds, thousands of locals pressed into
duty as labourers and builders of the new town. In some long-forgotten manner they fell foul of their overlords and were messily butchered. Their severed heads may well have ended up on the ends of
sharpened poles, a warning to all of the fate awaiting any who, by accident or design, got in the way of the march of Rome.

Dead men like those were details anyway, as far as the Roman Empire was concerned. The whole point of the exercise, the reason for expending all that effort to make a province of Britannia, was
to take advantage of all the land had to offer. The islands had been known, since the time of the first Greek map-makers at least, as the Tin Isles. It was well known too that there was copper
aplenty in the wild lands of Wales, as well as on the neighbouring island of Hibernia – Ireland. Where such mineral wealth existed there might well be all the rest as well: gold and
silver.

Celtic Britain had been a source of slaves. Rather than kill the men and women of your defeated foe, it made much more economic sense to sell them on instead. The Celts
had made a profit from such human misery and the Romans were more than happy to keep the business going.

In the Mendip Hills of Somerset the Roman prospectors quickly found rich reserves of galena, the naturally occurring mineral form of lead. Within six years of their arrival in Britain, a
large-scale lead mine was in business in an area known today as Charterhouse. The scars on the landscape, long since overgrown and reclaimed by nature, are on such a scale they appear like the work
of nature. Great trenches called ‘rakes’ up to 30 feet deep and as much as 100 yards long were hacked out of the bedrock to expose the galena. The mine was soon the biggest lead-mining
operation in the whole of the Empire and the output was on such a colossal scale it brought protests and demands for cuts in reduction from rival mines in Roman Spain. What was achieved by the
Romans during their tenure would not be equalled in the Mendips for 1,000 years after their departure in the fifth century.