A History of Ancient Britain (60 page)

Such a grand idea was as hard to control as it was to conceive of and some of what happened within its frontiers may have been unexpected even by its architects. For one thing the towns and
cities became melting-pots, attracting anyone and everyone from all parts of the Empire.

In York Museum are the remains of a woman known to archaeologists as Ivory Bangle Woman. When she died, around
AD
250, she was still in her early twenties, or even
younger. Her bones reveal no signs of stress caused by poor diet or chronic illness, and no injuries of the sort that might
have left their marks on a skeleton. The cause of
her death, while so young and apparently healthy, remains unknown.

We are to believe she was a wealthy young woman because alongside her in her grave were items of considerable value. An exquisite blue glass jug, the work of a highly skilled specialist
craftsman; a necklace of finely shaped and faceted blue-glass beads; a bracelet made of Whitby Jet, that most captivating of materials. Anyone who saw her in her finery would have realised at once
she was a woman of substance, from a rich and powerful family.

But if the Jet is local, from the coast of Yorkshire itself, one of her belongings came from much farther afield. The find in question is a delicately turned and carved bangle made from ivory
and sourced originally, in all likelihood, from somewhere in Africa. Her time on Earth was short and yet the evidence she left behind suggests a fascinating life for all that. She may even hold the
explanation for the mystery, quite literally, in her own head – for the shape of her skull has its own fascinating story to tell, or at least hints to make. For one thing her forehead is
quite flat and therefore reminiscent of the skulls of black Africans. Her nose, however, seems more typical of a white European. Chemical analysis of her teeth has in fact suggested Ivory Bangle
Woman may have grown up somewhere in north Africa – perhaps in Libya or Tunisia.

Was she the wife or daughter of a centurion or other high-ranking soldier posted to Britannia with his family? The thought of her, with her youth and perhaps beauty too, head held high and hips
rolling as she strolled around York in all her expensive jewellery, makes her seem exotic even today. The possibility alone of such a woman in such a place so long ago is tantalising to us, and yet
even if she was a woman of mixed blood, part black African and part white European, and a rich one at that – in the multicultural melting-pot that was Roman York in
AD
250, she would not have been unusual.

Around 50 skeletons recovered during excavations in York in the late 1960s formed the basis for a recent scientific study of the likely origins of those people and the authors of the subsequent
report, published in 2009, believed their findings suggested ‘a heterogeneous population’. ‘The combined results lead archaeologists to believe that the population of Roman York
comprised individuals from a broad spectrum of ancestral heritage and geographic origin,’ they wrote. ‘Given the history of Roman Britain, this is precisely what we should expect. In
the north of England, urban
centres such as York were populated by both military and civilian personnel from all over the Empire and were often founded specifically to
accommodate these individuals. The . . . data identified individuals with both European and African ancestry, in addition to a number of individuals with a mix of characteristics suggesting a
degree of admixture.’

Some of the skeletons reveal the likelihood they were the second- or even third-generation offspring of African migrants, and as well as skeletal evidence of Africans in York there are
occasional finds there of African-style cooking stoves.

As Ivory Bangle Woman so elegantly demonstrates, being Roman was not about where you had been born. Instead it was about how you lived, how you dressed, the values you held. There was a sense in
which the Roman Empire would allow a person to make his or her own way in the world. There was no need to feel shackled to some or other ancestral heritage. If a person made the decision to leap
wholeheartedly out of the world of their birth and into the world defined by the frontiers of that empire, then all well and good. Ivory Bangle Woman also makes it plain that status was not related
to colour. It was about whether you were a Roman citizen, or a free non-citizen, or a slave. Hers was not the only burial that implied high status; others alongside had also enjoyed privileged
lives.

Whatever barriers Rome might have put in front of a person, skin colour was not one of them. After all, Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor from
AD
193 to 211, was born in
the city of Leptis Magna, in modern-day Libya.

Along with everything else we do not know about Ivory Bangle Woman, we have no way of saying for certain what language she learned at her mother’s knee. A place like York, with its fort on
one side of the River Ouse and its civilian town on the other, would have echoed to the sounds of many different tongues. But we do know that all of the inhabitants would have been united under one
common language, the language of Rome and the Empire – Latin.

What made Latin special was that as well as being spoken, it was written down. Its arrival on these shores meant that for perhaps the very first time the people faced the prospect of having
their words and actions – their very existence – recorded for posterity. The advent of writing, this alone, is what truly defines the break between prehistory, the domain of
archaeologists who must reassemble the ancient past from objects and burials – things left behind – and history, the domain of historians who have recourse to
documents, diaries, letters and all the other products of the written word – thoughts left behind.

The problem is the paucity of written words from this earliest period. For the most part there are just abbreviated inscriptions above doorways and beside gateways, on tombstones and so on. What
you want to see is evidence of the everyday, of random, idle jottings that give a sense of what people were actually thinking about at any given moment of their lives.

Precisely those sorts of insights are contained within a unique collection of ‘postcards’ found during excavations at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall, in 1973.
Called the ‘Vindolanda Tablets’, they are in fact thin slivers of locally grown birch, oak and alder, about the size of the postcards we know today. More than 500 were excavated during
the 1970s and 1980s, within a waterlogged dump close by the site of the commanding officer’s house, and yet more have been unearthed since.

When they first started coming to light they were almost dismissed as no more than wood shavings – until one of the excavators found two stuck together and bothered to pull them apart.
Preserved on the inside surfaces was handwriting in faint ink. The processes of decay had meant the writing on most of the others was all but invisible and certainly indecipherable to the naked
eye. Only modern imaging techniques using infra-red light have made it possible to read once more what was on the minds of some of the officers, soldiers and wives who spent time on Hadrian’s
Wall in the first and second centuries
AD
. It seems the practice was to score each card down the middle, write on the two halves with quill-like pens and a carbon-based ink,
and then fold the thing in two so that an address might be written on the outside.

Most were composed by officers and seem to relate to the running of the fort. Some seem almost like ‘hand-over’ documents left behind by outgoing men for the benefit of those taking
their places: ‘The Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.’ The
Latin word in use there was actually ‘Brittunculi’, a soldier’s typically derogatory nickname for an awkward foe – in this case one that will not stand and fight but who
strikes and runs in the manner of the guerrilla.

Elsewhere there are examples of the usual gripes: ‘My fellow soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent.’ Perhaps most famous of all of the Vindolanda Tablets is one written
by a woman. Claudia Severa was the wife of the commander of a fort elsewhere on the wall and sometime
around
AD
100 she wrote to Sulpicia Lepidina,
the wife of the commander at Vindolanda, to invite her to her birthday party.

Alan Bowan of Manchester University was one of the scholars who succeeded in translating the tablets and he explained how, together, the collection offers a unique insight into the life of the
fort and its occupants. ‘We’ve got one tablet that shows the price paid for pepper. We have another example in which a writer refers to someone he’s trying to help . . . a man
who’s “a lover of literary culture” – a remarkable phrase to be using on the northern frontier of Britain at this time.’ Alan also explained the important role of the
Latin language itself in bringing together the disparate peoples of Roman Britain. ‘In Britain itself there was a large number, in the pre-Roman period, of different tribal units, different
small kingdoms and fiefdoms. The Roman presence brings them all under one system, and that system was run in Latin.’

It was all a remarkable change from the way things had operated in Celtic Britain. For Celts, it appears tribal identity – the bloodline and family to which a person belonged –
underpinned everything else. Under Rome, however, a person might have much more control over ‘what’ or ‘who’ they were. To some extent, and for the people with the freedom
to do so, there was an element of choice. There were still those whose birth was interwoven with their destiny – slaves and the children of slaves for example. But for others it was a
question of whether or not they wanted to act as Romans did, to live urban lives or not.

Roman ways even reached out into some parts of rural Britain as well. As a Roman citizen a person could legally own land and property; and such holdings could also be bought, sold and inherited,
all within the letter of Roman law. In the south and east of Britain, for the very rich at least, all of this gave rise to something that, while it sounds and seems so commonplace now, was truly
astonishing then.

The Roman villa operated exactly like a Victorian country house. It was a luxurious home at the centre of a working estate that generated a rich income for its owners. As well as providing
accommodation for the family itself, there would also have been space set aside for domestic servants and for those who worked the land. If all of that sounds familiar then it is necessary to
remember once more the impact of such a concept on native Britons.

Even after decades, even after a couple of hundred years of Roman rule, the majority of Britons were still used to roundhouses – simple,
single-roomed homes where
all the business of life was performed in one open space centred around a hearth. The Roman villa by contrast was everything we visualise when we think about somewhere to live: rectangular
buildings with straight walls and corners; separate rooms with doors providing privacy; corridors linking one space to another; more than one way in or out; glazed windows; tiled floors and tiled
roofs; running water.

It was a world away from all that had gone before and yet another example of how everything before the Romans seems ancient and of the past, while everything after their arrival feels familiar
and somehow part of the present.

Bignor Roman Villa in Sussex was occupied between around
AD
250 and 350. Precisely how long the buildings were upstanding will never be known, but in time they
disappeared from sight completely. It was only in 1811, when farmer George Tupper felt the blade of his plough collide with a buried stone, that daylight fell once more upon a small wonder of Roman
Britain. What Tupper had hit, and then uncovered with his bare hands, was in fact one side of a hexagonal water fountain set into the floor of a lavish dining room.

The whole site was gradually excavated by John Hawkins, a local landowner, and an antiquary by the name of Samuel Lysons. Eventually revealed were parts of what was once a huge villa sited
within a large estate quite close to a Roman road connecting London and Chichester. Evidence excavated over the years suggests part of the wealth created at Bignor was based on supplying the Roman
military with grain as they passed up and down on the road nearby.

Originally arranged around a large, square enclosure, the buildings provided accommodation that was luxurious even by modern standards. The original Georgian excavators went to the trouble of
erecting buildings to protect the floor surfaces they had uncovered; and it is those floors that reveal how wealthy the inhabitants must have been.

What survives at Bignor are some of the very best mosaic floors anywhere in Britain. Around the fountain unearthed by Tupper are brilliantly executed depictions of topless dancing girls; at the
other end of the room Jupiter, in the guise of an eagle, has Ganymede grasped in his talons ready to be carried back to Olympus for service as cupbearer to the gods. In other rooms winter appears
as a doleful woman, cupids fight as gladiators and, best of all, there is the face of Venus, regarded as one of the finest mosaics anywhere.

The Venus and gladiator images appear in a room set aside from the rest of the villa. It is entered by its own door, directly from outside, and seems likely to have
served as the place where the man of the house would have conducted serious business. Part of the mosaic floor has collapsed in antiquity and, while that might be regarded as a tragedy by fans of
mosaics, it provides a wonderful view of the underfloor central heating system, known as a hypocaust – literally ‘heat from underneath’.

The floor sits on brick piles that create a network of subterranean channels. All of these were once connected to a furnace built outside the building itself and powered by charcoal. Flues in
the walls, connected to the passages under the floor, then drew the hot air from the furnace so that it heated floor and walls alike. Apparently the system was so effective that the floor would
become warm to walk on with bare feet.