A History of Ancient Britain (61 page)

All of that in the English countryside in
AD
250: underfloor central heating in every room, indoor plumbing, glass windows. When the inhabitants of Britain forgot about
central heating, after the time of Roman rule was over, they would not embrace the idea again for around 1,600 years.

As well as the finest home comforts, the owners of villas would have enjoyed the best Roman-inspired cuisine as well. The man of the house at Bignor would likely have gathered his guests around
that octagonal fountain in his summer dining room, where they would have relaxed on couches drinking wine and toasting Bacchus. The topless dancers on the mosaic floor would have drawn their eyes,
while the soft tinkling of the fountain’s waters helped them relax and unwind.

It was in such an atmosphere that the food would have been served and according to Roman cookery expert Sally Grainger, the treats would have been like nothing ever tasted in Britain before.
‘What they [the Britons] were doing was roasting a lot of meat, drinking a lot of ale and eating a lot of bread,’ she said.

The Romans, by contrast, introduced spices like coriander and cumin – the dominant flavours in Indian curry today. They used a lot of lovage, a plant whose leaves could be used for salads
and soups, whose roots could be cooked as vegetables or grated, and whose seeds provided yet another spice. The chefs would have to be careful with it, though, since too much would render any dish
bitter and unpalatable. Like Thai cooks today the Romans were extremely fond of a powerful fish sauce they called
garum
and used it as a base for sweet as well as for savoury dishes. They
introduced lentils to Britain, as well as chicken.

The French like to claim the invention of fine dining and attribute the emergence of the first of their professional chefs to the greatest chopping implement there ever
was – the blade of the guillotine. The story goes that since the nobles kept staffs of highly trained chefs and cooks, the Revolution denied most of those artists their employers, and
therefore their incomes. Suddenly needing paid work, they made their way to the nearest auberge and offered their services. Soon every drinking den in France was providing food prepared by the
finest chefs – and a legendary reputation for cuisine was born.

As it turns out, however, the Romans were way ahead. They too had their chefs – slave chefs right enough, but every bit as talented and well trained as any Frenchman, and even given to
writing cookery books such as ‘Apicius’, a collection of Roman recipes from the late fourth or early fifth century
AD
.

In Britain the Roman chefs and cooks soon had access to carefully cultivated orchards of apples, cherries, plums and pears. They planted other novelties like green vegetables including cabbages,
leeks and peas. There were herb gardens too, within a few years so that the very best of Roman fine dining was being enjoyed in villas all over the south and east.

It was a culinary revolution more than a millennium and a half before any serious chopping got under way in France. All that remains uncertain is how many Britons actually got to taste it. For
the rich it probably became commonplace. For the mass of the population no doubt it was, ‘Let them eat roasts . . . and bread . . . and drink ale,’ just as before. So far just around
800 villas have been identified in Britain, accounting for only one per cent of all rural settlements in southern England.

I have to say the sample menu prepared for me by Chef Sally Grainger was fantastic. There was belly of pork slathered in a paste of pepper and spices and roasted in a portable two-piece clay
oven that sat over the flames of the hob, and a pudding that consisted primarily of eggs and what I initially considered to be a worrying quantity of that ubiquitous fish sauce. My fears were
proved groundless, however. The pork was perfect and the pudding tasted of many good things, none of them fish.

Regardless of how delicious the Roman cuisine may or may not have been, the truth of it all was that, out of a population of perhaps three or four million in the third century
AD
, only a fraction lived in towns, even fewer in villas like Bignor. For at least 90 per cent of the people, therefore, life during the Roman period – food included – was
much the same as it had always been.

Chysauster is a wonderfully preserved ancient village in the West Penwith area of Cornwall, not far from Penzance. Only a relatively small section remains, a few houses
and workshops, but it is hugely evocative and atmospheric. Walk around the place, without reference to the information boards, and I promise you would swear you were looking at a settlement built
during the Bronze Age – even the Stone Age. It has much of the feel of Skara Brae on Orkney.

The homes are cellular, built of dry stone and laid out around courtyards that were likely where most of the day-to-day work was carried out. Around the courtyard are various buildings, some for
living in, some for keeping animals, some for general storage.

But excavation and analysis of finds at Chysauster reveal it was established in the early part of the second century
AD
, probably by members of the local Dumnonii tribe.
While Britons in Colchester were enjoying chariot racing at the circus, hearing tales of the legend that was Diocles, and while the inhabitants of London watched a great wall being built around
their town, the folk of Chysauster 250 miles or so to the west were quietly growing crops and tending their animals, just as they always had.

They had access to tin, in nugget form in the streams and rivers, and since it was still a valuable commodity they could have used ingots of it to barter for whatever they could not make or
grow. Their village was inhabited for just 100 years or so – four or five generations, and right in the middle of the Roman occupation of Britain – and yet it would appear their largely
were mostly untouched by most of what was new.

There would have been Romans nearby, possibly garrisoned in a fort. Their taxmen would have come around at regular intervals demanding coins. And as long as the residents of Chysauster and other
places like it had bothered to exchange enough animals and crops for the requisite currency, then those taxmen would have taken it and been on their way.

Another part of the secret of Roman success, then, was to leave people to live the way they wanted, provided they paid their dues and made no trouble. Far away from the urban centres people had
much more choice about just how Roman they actually wanted to be; and so a place like Chysauster could survive and even thrive, as a sort of relic of the old Britain. You might almost describe the
unremarkable, unremembered lives lived in such places as a biddable, passive resistance to the centralised authority of Rome.

From time to time there are burials too that suggest unspoken defiance,
continuing commitment to older rites. Roman dead were laid to rest flat on their backs, ideally in
designated cemeteries set apart from where people were living. When archaeologists find skeletons placed in the ground within settlements during those centuries, curled on their sides like babies,
perhaps with traditional Celtic grave goods, they suspect something old, something retained from times past, that flourished only at the end.

Back at North Down in Dorset, inside that banjo enclosure where a farming family had grown wealthy trading with the Roman invaders, but on their own Celtic terms, was found the skeleton of a
young man. He was buried sometime in the second half of the first century
AD
a few decades after the Romans arrived in Britain. For all that his family were happy to sell
their surplus grain to the incomers, to acquire tastes for Roman fashions, jewellery and food, they stayed faithful to many of their old ways. There was no obvious cause of death for the young man
– no wounds or signs of disease. In any event, when he came to die he was buried in the foetal position, knees pulled up towards his chest and arms tucked in front of him. He was not set
apart then either, in the Roman way, but kept close by and still at the heart of his family.

There is always something touching about such graves, cut and filled at that time. They make a person wonder whether perhaps a flicker of defiance of Rome was enacted in life or saved quietly
for death. In any event they speak of deeply held beliefs and truths, of true colours worn. In their hearts – in the hearts of those found dead, and in the hearts of those that put them in
the ground out of sight at last – they were never Romans, and only Britons.

More of the same was demonstrated by the excavation of a Roman villa at Thruxton, in Hampshire, near the hill fort of Danebury. The site was already famous for its stunning mosaic floor, which
was removed in 1899 for display in the British Museum. The mosaic, which features the god Bacchus, also reveals that the occupants seem to have considered themselves both Roman and British at the
same time. The inscription, Quintus Natalius Natalinus et Bodeni, suggests Thruxton was home to a man named Natalinus who was descended from a native British family called Bodeni. It might be
reasonable to assume the Bodeni family were farming land there or thereabouts long before either of the Roman invasions.

Work on the villa began towards the end of the second century. For a while it was a fairly modest affair, essentially just a rectangular hall with a pitched roof supported by upright posts and
horizontal trusses. During the
fourth century however, there was a change. One end of the building was set apart from the rest and subdivided into three rooms. It was in the
last of these – a room now entirely separate from the hall and accessible only from the outside via its own door – that the mosaic floor was laid down.

Thruxton was excavated by Sir Barry Cunliffe and he was of the opinion that the room functioned as a shrine. Outside the shrine, but quite close to it, was a grave containing the remains of a
man who had been buried with Late Iron Age Celtic jewellery. Nearby was a pit full of animal bones that also returned a Late Iron Age date. Most intriguing of all, the builders of the villa had
gone to the trouble of erecting a wooden fence that surrounded the grave and the pit and then connected it with the outside wall of the building – so that all were joined together as one.

Surely the intention of all that effort is quite clear. The Bodeni family might have adopted Roman ways but they remembered who they were. They were the descendants of an ancient British family
and when they created their Roman shrine they were careful to incorporate within that sacred space the grave of an ancestor buried nearby and still revered.

Sir Barry suggested that for the Bodeni family, the Roman invasion of
AD
43 had mattered little. ‘There would, of course, have been new taxes to pay, a new range of
consumer durables available in the distant market towns, and soon a new network of highways making travel much easier for those with time and inclination. But for the most part life was little
changed,’ he wrote. ‘Farms continued to be owned and worked by families whose ancestors may have broken the land many centuries earlier – perhaps even before iron had come into
general use.’

The story of the Romans in Britain is complicated to say the least. Characters make their appearance and we think we understand their backgrounds and therefore their motives. Then suddenly there
is a twist and all at once we have to consider a different angle, allow for behaviour we had never suspected. Sometimes we realise the picture we had in our heads is quite wrong, and late in the
day we have to allow for the possibility that everything was subtly different all along.

The enduring and popular impression of the Roman arrival in Britain is one of invasion. Rapacious and acquisitive, they set their sights on Britain – and persevered until it was theirs.
The ways of Rome were made the ways of the new province as well.

But we have only to look at our own modern world to be reminded that regime change is almost always a process of Byzantine complexity. By the
time one country is invaded
by another – or by a union of others – a great deal of politicking has probably already gone on behind the scenes and out of sight of the public. To put it another way: if you find
yourself watching a shotgun wedding, it is pretty obvious the couple already know each other well enough, whether or not the families seem genuinely thrilled.

So as it turns out, when Emperor Claudius decided to send his legions across the Channel in the summer of
AD
43, he had some reasons for believing his advances were
expected – even desired. Back in Caesar’s day the name of Commius, King of the Atrebates, had been crucial. He it was who had acted as go-between, shuttling back and forth between
Caesar and the British tribes in hopes of striking a deal acceptable to all parties.

By the time of Claudius, it was a descendant of Commius who played the key role. Verica – whose name and likeness appeared on that tiny silver minim excavated from Silchester, and who
styled himself ‘CF’ for ‘Commius Filius’, son of Commius – was a king with a problem in
AD
43. Just as in Caesar’s time, it was the
Catuvellauni tribesmen in Essex that were making waves. Back then it had been the antipathy of their bellicose King Cassivellaunus towards his neighbours, the Trinovantes, that sparked war. More
recently the Catuvellauni had been led by Cunobelin; and now they were at daggers drawn with the Atrebates, whose territory was spread across modern Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey.

By
AD
43 Cunobelin was dead and it was his sons Togodumnus and Caratacus who were carrying the torch of war. It was either fear or desperation or both that drove King
Verica of the Atrebates to cross the Channel then and seek help from the Roman Emperor. Deliberately or not, willingly or not, Verica had given Claudius the excuse he needed.

Now take a moment to view Britain from where Claudius was standing. Better yet, replace him in your mind’s eye with any recent President of the United States of America (and, just for the
sake of it, have him backed by any twenty-first-century British Prime Minister and the leaders of some other members of the United Nations) and then ruminate on the way the West views the wider
world.