A History of Ancient Britain (62 page)

Do not for one moment derive anything negative about that comparison. By as early as 27
BC
the Romans had established their Pax Romana – Roman Peace. It would give
rise to more than two centuries of relative calm for the ancient world. Life might well have been nasty, brutish and short for most people back then, but at least under Roman rule there was a nod
to hot baths and an outside chance of some decent food.

From where Claudius was standing, the island of Britain looked like a place in danger of descending into the kind of turmoil that was bad for business. He was new in the
job as well, still warming the seat of the imperial throne, and he needed a good war to secure some votes at home. Rome needed British grain and metals and all the rest, and petty feuding between
bad neighbours was something best snuffed out sooner rather than later. Left alone it might lead to a civil war and that could have all sorts of consequences – not least the kind of
conflagration that could pull in any number of different tribes and lead to unrest elsewhere as well. Viewed from that perspective, the so-called Roman invasion begins to look much more like an
intervention to ensure a return to stable government.

Most archaeologists have long accepted Richborough in Kent as the place the Romans first made landfall in
AD
43. Apart from anything else it would have made for a short
crossing. More recently, however, there has been a groundswell of support for another site, near Chichester in Sussex.

Around a mile and a half from Chichester itself is the famed Fishbourne Roman Palace, a villa par excellence. Established as the site of a fort soon after the invasion, it had been developed
into a luxurious ‘palace’ before the end of the first century. The site was discovered by accident in 1960 but more recent excavations, in 1995 and 2002, have unearthed artefacts that
may suggest the place was home to Verica himself.

Since the Romans were en route to support Verica and his Atrebates in Sussex during their time of need, it would have made perfect sense for them to land and establish their beachhead in the
backyard of the man himself. Since the days of Commius at least, the safe anchorages around Chichester had been familiar to Roman traders. When the dust of invasion settled, however, it was
seemingly not Verica who was anointed by the Romans. He was an old man by then and it was a younger noble of the Atrebates – one Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus – who emerged as the
Empire’s placeman. Perhaps Verica’s reward, soothing ointment for his otherwise bruised ego, was the gift of a grand pile built and paid for by his Roman guests. Fishbourne is certainly
unusual. Unlike other villas it does not appear to have been at the centre of agriculture, so the source of its income is unclear. Some have suggested it was the home not of Verica, but of
Cogidubnus. Whoever first occupied the first palace, it certainly outlived them. Fishbourne was being inhabited and modified until around
AD
270, when it was gutted by a
fire. The damage was seemingly too great for repair and thereafter the place seems to have been taken apart.

The Romans were at least as good at politics as they were at war. No wonder, then, they understood that the iron gauntlet of violence was a clumsy tool. If a hammer is
all you have got, you tend to treat everything like a nail. So if the Celts were strongly attached to some customs, then let them keep them. As long as the grain kept ripening in the fields and the
mines kept producing gold, silver, lead, copper and tin, such tolerance was good for business.

No matter how reasonably a leader behaves, or appears to behave, however, there will always be those who consistently and stubbornly refuse to get the message. Nothing will work with them, in
fact – neither reason nor flattery, nor violence. Some people are so set in their ways and so unshakeably confident of their own position, they will not be moved, not even by the threat of
death. Sometimes their commitment comes from deeply rooted tribal identity and blood ties. Sometimes it is just a characteristic woven through an individual’s DNA like a bright thread through
cloth.

In the film
Cool Hand Luke
the eponymous hero refuses to submit to the regime in a Florida prison camp. He is a prisoner himself and apparently powerless in the face of the guards and,
more particularly, the camp governor, known as the Captain. On the face of it, Luke has nothing with which to fight and nothing much to gain by fighting; yet he will not submit to the rules, even
when by doing so would seemingly be to his benefit. Playing cards with his fellow inmates one night, he bluffs his way to winning the pot even though he has nothing of value in his hand. But as he
explains to his fellow inmate, Dragline, ‘Sometimes . . . nothing can be a real cool hand.’

Even after hundreds of years of Roman control of the south of Britain, much of the northern third of the island refused to accept the regime. The Romans called their province Britannia and no
doubt they liked to pretend it was a single, unified entity. But it was an illusion and they knew it. Britannia was a fractured land. Despite the efforts of soldiers and administrators alike,
despite thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of forts, shining towns and cities, despite the presence of a Romano-British elite living in villas, drinking wine and eating spiced meats –
despite all of that and more besides the project remained unfinished, the picture imperfect.

Ever since
AD
136 there had been a livid scar across the face of Britannia. It was a lime-washed white blemish called Hadrian’s Wall that advertised, upon a
billboard 74 miles long and 20 feet high, Rome’s failure to subdue
the peoples of the north. During the second century
AD
Rome had to station
40,000 auxiliary soldiers on that wall just to keep the barbarians at bay. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of civilisation but, worse than that, it underlined the truth that Rome’s reach
exceeded her grasp.

It was in
AD
297 that the name Pict – or rather Picti – was first recorded in writing. The credit goes to a Roman writer named Eumenius, more famous for his
speeches than for references to obscure peoples beyond the reach of Empire, but who nonetheless made a reference to all the strife those people were causing. Having first encountered the Caledonii,
it was the Picts who became a more abiding and troublesome obsession for the invaders as time wore on. And given that they left behind no written words of their own, we have to be grateful to the
Romans for at least making a note of the existence of the people of the designs.

Despite the fact that they kept no records, the Picts are remembered too in place names. In his
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
–
The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People
– the Venerable Bede noted that the Picts spoke a language of their own. Bede was writing in the early eighth century
AD
, but he was able to tell us there
were five languages spoken in Britain at that time. While he was happy to report that ‘all are united in their study of God’s truth by the fifth – Latin – which has become a
common medium through the study of the Scriptures,’ he did at least make room for the other four, namely Anglo-Saxon English, Brittonic Welsh, Gaelic and Pictish.

The words of Bede are backed up by those of another cleric, Adomnán, Abbot of Iona. In his hagiography of his predecessor Columba he described his master’s visit to the northern
kingdom of Brude, a Pictish king based near the River Ness. Columba spoke Gaelic – the language of much of Scotland and Ireland – but Adomnán points out that he needed a
translator in order to be able to speak to the king, so the Pictish language must have been quite different from his own.

Norse, the language of the Vikings, would be written into the landscape in later centuries. Gaelic has left its mark too, with words like ‘cill’, meaning chapel or church, as in
Kilmarnock; ‘dun’, meaning fortress, as in Dundee or Dunkeld, the fortress of the Caledonians; ‘inver’, meaning the meeting of the waters, as in Inverness, the meeting of
the waters of the River Ness, and ‘tigh’, meaning house, as in Tighnabruaich, the house on the hill.

But while Scots Gaelic is still spoken by a few tens of thousands of people, Pictish survives only in words on maps, or engraved on stones. ‘Pett’, or
‘pit’, is a Pictish word meaning a portion or a share, as in Pittenweem or Pitlochry; ‘carden’ means a thicket, as in Kincardine, and ‘aber’ means
the mouth of the river, as in Aberdeen.

There are even suggestions in the Roman writings of a grudging respect for their painted foes. In
AD
211 there were negotiations between the Romans and a Scottish tribe
called the Maeatae, who occupied lands around the modern towns of Stirling and Falkirk and also towards the south and west. At some point in the talks a meeting took place between a woman referred
to only as the wife of the Maeatae chieftain Argentocoxus, and Roman Empress Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor Septimius Severus.

Heaven alone knows what the women must have made of each other – one a tattooed tribal queen, the other a haughty Roman of the highest rank. According to the Roman writer and historian
Cassius Dio, it seems Julia had learned that the tribeswomen were in the habit of brazenly sleeping with men other than their husbands, and threw this in her rival’s face. ‘We fulfil
the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women,’ replied the chieftain’s wife. ‘For we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be
debauched in secret by the vilest.’

I am writing this chapter in the attic bedroom of my wife’s parents’ house in Dumyat Drive, Falkirk, and from the windows I can see the long ridge of the Ochil Hills (from
‘uchel’, meaning high). The highest point in the view is a flattened summit shaped like a thick pancake. This is Dumyat Hill and the story goes that the name is a corruption of Dun
Maeatae, the fortress of the Maeatae, so that even the writing of this book has a shadow of the ancient past across it, perhaps a Pictish shadow at that.

It was in Falkirk in 1934 that workmen digging a seven-foot-deep ditch unearthed a find that immediately resonated through Scottish hearts and minds. It is now in the care of the National Museum
of Scotland in Edinburgh, and it is called the Falkirk Tartan. It has to be said, it is not much to look at. What the workmen actually found was a reddish clay pot containing a hoard of almost
2,000 silver Roman coins – the largest hoard of its kind ever found in Scotland.

The coins themselves cover a range of dates, from 83
BC
through to
AD
230. Many of them are worn thin and look as though they were in active
circulation for a long time before finally being collected together and put into the ground inside their pot. The workmen had been digging in a spot just 400 yards or so north of the Antonine Wall
and best guesses by archaeologists suggest the cache belonged not to any Roman, but to a native
tribe or family. The coins may have been paid as a series of bribes, over
several generations, to secure co-operation – always cheaper than war. Why the hoard was buried will remain a mystery.

Alongside the coins – and presumably originally covering the mouth of the pot – was a small piece of the simplest woven fabric imaginable. Specialists in tartan have described the
pattern – or sett, to use the more precise term – as the ‘shepherd’s check’. It comprises just two colours of undyed wool, brown and off-white or cream, and that it
survived at all is miracle enough. Somehow the fact that it is such a meagre scrap of a thing only adds to its potency.

Tartan is a powerful word in modern Scotland, and modern is the key word here. The traditional dress of the Highlander, until it was banned after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745/46,
was the ‘breacan an feileadh’, the belted plaid – 12 yards of plaited and folded woven wool fabric that was kilted, literally ‘tucked up’ around the body and fixed in
place with a buckled leather belt around the waist.

But while the makers of the plaid in those pre-Culloden days came up with patterns composed of many colours, achieved with dyes made from local plants and minerals, there never were any
‘clan tartans’. They never functioned like football strips – team colours that let a MacDonald differentiate himself from a Campbell, or a Stewart from a MacNeill. In times of
inter-tribal warfare, members of a clan might identify themselves to one another by all wearing a sprig of the same plant or flower in their bonnets, but that was as far as it went.

The whole ‘cult of tartanry’, as it has been described, was largely the invention of John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, two Polish brothers who turned up in
Edinburgh during the feverish run-up to the visit to Scotland’s capital city by King George IV in 1822 – the first by a monarch since that of Charles II in 1650. Brandishing what they
claimed was an ancient text called ‘Vestiarium Scoticum’, ‘Scottish Costumes’, they claimed not only that they were the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, but that
they and they alone knew the significance of tartan.

Conmen, salesmen – call them what you will; but the brothers succeeded in making a fortune by persuading well-heeled Scottish gentlefolk to buy tartans described in the Vestiarium (a book
they showed briefly once and that never saw the light of day thereafter). Each of the hundreds of different patterns matched a different proud Scottish surname. And so an entire industry, and a
legend, was born.

All of this tomfoolery is why the modest nature of the Falkirk Tartan matters so much. While they bear no resemblance to the bright, regimented colours of the modern
plaids so beloved by tourists, patriots and nationalists, the soft hues of the Falkirk Tartan have something quiet to say that is actually worth listening to.

That scrap of woven wool speaks of the people who made it and wore it nearly 1,800 years ago. Within yards of that abandoned Roman wall were people who lived according to their own ways and
beliefs and damned the consequences. For generations the Romans had had to hand over coins to them and others, the better to keep the peace. But while the silver bought co-operation, it was never
enough to buy the culture, far less the independence, of the Picts.