A History of Ancient Britain (64 page)

For a start he said the messages were best described as ‘curse tablets’, since people were usually appealing to the goddess in hope of revenge. The whole
concept is fascinating because so many of the ‘wrongs’ seem trivial – and therefore wholly understandable. Tomlin said it was important to remember that the Roman world was
‘badly policed’ and that people had to find their own ways of recovering stolen property or seeking redress for insults and slights.

He has deciphered all manner of curses, and usually they were invoked for the theft of towels and clothing, or occasionally of a ring or other piece of jewellery. The strategy seemed to be to
make over ownership of the stolen property to the goddess herself so that it would then be in her interest to reclaim it. If you could not have the item back yourself, at least there would be the
comfort of knowing the thief would lose it too, and hopefully be savagely punished at the same time. The most potent were written backwards, or otherwise encrypted, so that only the goddess would
understand them.

The venom goes on and on. Around 130 curse tablets have been deciphered from the Bath collection and since they have been delivered to a goddess of healing it comes as no surprise to learn the
requested punishments include everything from blinding, to failure of vital organs, to an inability to eat, drink, sleep, sit, lie down, urinate or defacate. For all the curative and relaxing
properties of the baths, these people were often furious indeed.

Elsewhere in Britannia disgruntled citizens sought similar help from other deities. On the foreshore of the Hamble Estuary in Hampshire, a metal detectorist found a curse tablet dedicated to
another pairing of gods, this time Niskus, thought to be a local water god, and Neptune, the Roman god of the sea.

Twinning of gods and goddesses was a tactic the Romans employed all across their Empire. It was a cosy set-up and it served them well. But a quite different challenge was presented by a cult
that began spreading out of the Middle East during the first century
AD
. It emerged from the province of Judaea and at first most Romans were unconvinced to say the least.
For one thing it demanded obedience to a single god. The very idea seemed absurd. But there was a problem: followers of the cult were being assured of something no one had ever even dreamed of
before – eternal life. Anyone and everyone – from emperors to slaves – was being promised they could survive death itself. No Roman god had ever made such an offer before. It was
a powerful message and as the followers grew more and more numerous, their cult was outlawed by Rome. Now its followers had to practise in secret.

Like everything else that touched the Roman world, Christianity eventually reached Britain. Since the religion was banned, any merchant or traveller bringing the new teaching across the Channel
was taking a terrible risk. Nonetheless the religion found its way into the province of Britannia and the proof of its presence is revealed by objects bearing the first two letters of the Greek
spelling of Christ – ‘chi’, which usually appears as an ‘X’, and ‘rho’, represented with a ‘P’. The chi-rho symbol was used rather like a
secret sign by which Christians might recognise one another.

In February 1975 a ploughman working in a field in the village of Water Newton in Cambridgeshire unearthed a metal hoard, damaging several of the items in the process. All but one of the objects
are made of silver; the other, a small disc, is made of gold. There are nine silver vessels – cups, jugs, dishes and the like – but the rest of the artefacts are thin triangular
plaques. Now in the collections of the British Museum, the so-called Water Newton Silver is thought to date from the fourth century
AD
.

The little plaques would, at first sight, suggest pagan worship and similar items have often been found dedicated to gods like Jupiter and Mars. Several
of the Water
Newton pieces, however, bear the chi-rho symbol and the hoard is therefore regarded as the earliest collection of Christian liturgical silver found in Britain so far. The village of Water Newton is
close to the site of the Roman town of Durobrivae and it is thought that a congregation of Christian Romans living and worshipping there found cause to hide their precious silver – and then
never had the opportunity to recover it.

Many similar items have been recovered over the years, either bearing the chi-rho mark or sometimes the Greek letters alpha and omega, first and last and therefore also symbolic of the Christian
message.

Unlikely though it may seem for a religion based around events that unfolded in the Middle East at the start of the first century, a key turning point for early Christianity happened in Britain.
In
AD
305 Emperor Constantius I arrived in Britain and headed north. His objective was a military campaign against the Picts and within a year he was proclaiming victory
– as well as awarding himself the grand title ‘Britannicus Maximus’. Still puffed up with his triumph, he withdrew south of Hadrian’s Wall and was wintering in York when he
was suddenly taken ill. Sensing he would not recover, he urged the army to accept his son, Constantine, as the new Emperor. This they were apparently happy to do and Constantine I – later
styled Constantine the Great – was duly proclaimed by the legions at York.

Not everyone in the Empire was happy with the turn of events, however, and soon a power struggle ensued. Constantine’s principal challenger was Maxentius and their rival forces finally had
their climactic showdown at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, just outside the gates of Rome, in
AD
312. Legend has it that before the battle Constantine looked up at the sky
and saw a fiery cross. That night Christ visited him in a dream saying, ‘By this sign conquer’. Realising what he must do, Constantine ordered his men to adorn their shields with the
chi-rho symbol and to march into battle behind a Christian banner. They were victorious and from that moment the future of Christianity within the Roman Empire was transformed. By 313 the worship
of Christ was officially approved and his followers were freed from the fear of persecution.

Even then the struggle for supremacy was not over for Constantine. Only after another bloody civil war did he finally emerge, in
AD
324, as the undisputed (and first
Christian) Emperor of the Roman Empire. He it was who established a new Christian Rome, named Constantinople, on the Bosphorus, and by championing – or at the very least, accepting –
Christianity, he allowed it to change the world.

Some of the sources suggest Constantine had been introduced to Christianity by his mother, Helena. According to some, she was the daughter of an innkeeper and had married
Constantius when he was a junior officer stationed at Naissus, on the Danube. It was there that Constantine was born, on 27 February
AD
272. Some scholars have suggested his
decision to accept Christianity was just another shrewd political move. By bringing the new religion into the fold, along with its already uncountable numbers of followers, it could be organised
and therefore controlled by the state. In any case Christianity began to flourish and by
AD
391 it was the old, pagan religions that were banned. The time of goddesses like
Sulis-Minerva had come and gone and her spring at Bath was abandoned, left to silt up and overflow, her temples to fall into decay.

Soon Christianity was making a more overt mark on Britannia. At Lullingstone Villa in Kent the mosaic floor is augmented with Christian motifs and there are also paintings of people in prayer.
The chi-rho symbol is there again in the mosaics from the villa at Hinton St Mary, in Dorset, alongside a face that may represent Christ himself. At Frampton Villa nearby there are three mosaics
featuring a fusion of pagan and Christian symbolism. Whatever else the villa owners were enjoying in fourth-century Britannia, many of them were being careful to make the worship of Christianity a
part of it all.

Yet another ploughman, this time at Mildenhall in Suffolk, in 1942 found one of the most famous silver hoards in the country. It comprises fabulously extravagant serving platters, bowls, ladles
and spoons, mostly decorated with Classical motifs. Of the eight silver spoons, three bear Christian symbols including the chi-rho and also alpha and omega. Two of the spoons have the word
vivas
, meaning ‘may you live’, another sign popular among early followers of the Christian faith.

All the while Christianity’s star ascended, the light of Rome began first to flicker, and then to dim. In
AD
367 a co-ordinated attack by Picts from Caledonia,
Scoti warriors from Ireland and other barbarians including Saxons from Germania inflicted a terrifying blow. It is said that disgruntled Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall colluded with the
northern tribes and opened the gates. A whole swathe of northern Britannia was overrun and countless civilians slaughtered. It was not until the end of the following year that the Romans were able
to regroup and defeat the uprising. By the winter of
AD
368 the barbarians had been driven back into the sea or beyond Hadrian’s Wall once more.

For all the Roman celebrations of victory, Roman supremacy in Britannia had been rattled to its foundations. By the time Emperor Theodosius died in
AD
395, the sun had already begun to set on the rest of the Empire as well. During his time in office he had succeeded in fighting off yet more barbarian attacks around his demesne, but
the mere fact that so many felt confident enough to rear up at all meant Rome no longer wielded absolute authority. The Empire began to depend more and more on mercenaries to defend her boundaries.
Even the role of Emperor was eclipsed. After Theodosius they were heads of state more than real leaders and effective power was wielded by senior military figures.

The Empire had been split in two by Diocletian in
AD
285 – eastern and western. The eastern half became known as the Byzantine Empire and would survive in some form
until 1453, when it fell to the Ottoman Turks of Sultan Mehmett II. The soldier in charge of the western empire was Flavius Stilicho, a Vandal by birth and married to Theodosius’s niece. In
Britannia there was increasing trouble from Caledonian Picts, Irish Scots and Saxons from the Continent. The Romans fought back against them as the fourth century drew to a close, but in truth they
were doing little more than manning the barricades. By
AD
398 Stilicho had bigger problems than those being posed by the Picts in Britannia. Increasing levels of barbarian
attacks on the mainland of Europe left him no option but to begin pulling men back out of Britannia so they might be more usefully deployed elsewhere.

For a while during the fourth century, Britannia had seemed like a safe haven, far from the troubles afflicting the Empire on the mainland. Many Roman citizens, senior military and political
figures among them, had even retired there, taking their valuables with them for safekeeping. That time had passed, however. An already volatile situation finally came to boiling point in
AD
409 when yet more barbarian attacks – and the likelihood of more to come – led to nothing less than a full-scale rebellion by the Roman soldiers tasked with
keeping a lid on it all. Even the civilians rose in protest, railing against the Empire.

By the time Alaric, King of the Visigoths, finally achieved what had previously been unthinkable and broken through the gates of Rome itself in
AD
410 the isles of
Britain were Britannia no more. Britain would survive and prevail – she always had – but nearly four centuries of direct Roman rule had come to an end. That much was over.

Amongst everything else the Romans did for us, they herded us across
the bridge that separates prehistory from history. Whatever might happen on these islands from now
on, there was at least an outside chance of it being written down somewhere. In the end we had lost nothing. Like so many people before them, the Romans had arrived in Britain expecting to change
it – and were themselves changed too. Roman Britain had been a unique place, a uniquely modified version of the Roman idea. This is what Britain has always done – Britain the island,
the mountains, valleys, lochs, lakes, fields, forests and coastline of the place; she accepts all comers but quietly transforms them, shapes them in her own image. Britain has had a history of
making things British.

Roman rule in Britain lasted, give or take, for four centuries. Counting back four centuries from 2011 leads all the way to 1611 – the year William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
was performed for the very first time. It was also when the Authorised King James Version of The Bible was published after seven years of dedicated work by a team of 47 scholars. The King James in
question was James I of England and VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots.

A span of time like four centuries seems an eternity when looked at that way; and yet it may have taken our Neolithic forebears five centuries to build the great mound of Silbury Hill. Fewer
years separate us from Cleopatra than separate Cleopatra from the building of the Great Pyramid. Time is all about perspective.