Peter Jones
Britons Never Shall be Slaves
An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54BC - AD409
By David Mattingly (Allen Lane / Penguin Press 580pp £30)

There are two stories about Roman Britain. One is that ancient Brits were gentle, egalitarian souls, ideologically committed to the concept of community, passionate about the arts and culture, and with a nuanced sensitivity to dance rhythms. The arrival of horrid Romans with their rough armies came as a terrible shock to this warmly liberal pre-Guardian culture. The other is that the Brits were brutal, ignorant, naked, woad-spattered, murderous, ululating slobs to whom the arrival of civilised Romans, with their superb language, mighty economy and strong sense of legal process, all accompanied by the smack of firm government, was the best thing that could ever have happened.

These alternative stories bring into focus two complementary and crucial issues. How do you write a history of a conquered people when the few written sources that have survived, literary and epigraphic, were the product of the imperial conquerors? And how do you determine in whose eyes any generalisations that we make about Britain under the Romans might have been true?

The great Roman historian Tacitus made strenuous efforts to get inside the mind of Rome’s enemies. In his Agricola, an account of his father-in-law’s governorship of Britain in the first century AD and an absolutely central document for our understanding of the period, he invents a speech to put into the mouth of the Scottish leader Calgacus, who is attempting to stop Agricola’s advance into Scotland in AD 83:

Plunderers of the world, they have exhausted the land and now ransack the sea. Enemy wealth excites their greed, enemy poverty their lust for power – as is obvious, since neither East nor West has yet glutted them … While relatives are being torn from us by conscription to slave it in other lands, our wives and sisters, even if they are not raped by our enemies, are defiled by those who masquerade as ‘friends’ and ‘guests’. Our goods and fortunes are drained to pay taxes, the produce of our land to pay corn levies, and our very bodies and hands to build roads through forests and swamps, under blows and insults …

It is a view with which David Mattingly, scion of a family of distinguished ancient historians, is sympathetic. In this long, detailed and scrupulously fair account, he brings all the evidence he can muster to bear on the analysis: Roman history, biography, geography; ancient road-maps, administrative lists, epigraphic material (letters, coins, decrees, inscriptions, dedications, curse-tablets and so on); and archaeology (mostly carried out only on major military sites, which in itself automatically skews the picture). From his findings, Mattingly attempts to distinguish three different types of experience of ‘life in Roman Britain’: the military, the urban and the rural.

He begins by outlining the history of Roman military engagement with Britain from Caesar’s investigative assaults in 55 and 54 BC – which got nowhere but, in Mattingly’s view, brought Britain firmly within the ambit of the Roman world – to Claudius’s full-scale invasion in AD 43. Here the Romans played their usual game of iron fist and velvet glove: ruthless against resistance, but flexible and accommodating with local elites who knuckled under and agreed to do the routine work of local government in return for kick-backs. Wales remained a centre of revolt, and it was while the Romans were dealing with trouble there that Boudicca launched her rebellion in the South in AD 61. It failed partly because client kings like Togidubnus in the area south of the Thames remained loyal to Rome. The effect was to delay further subjugation of the province; but when Agricola did extend Roman domination into Scotland in the 80s, the Romans could not consolidate, and eventually settled uneasily for a frontier along Hadrian’s Wall. Wales was finally brought to heel on the principle of divide and rule, the Romans keeping local tribal groupings separate and therefore weak by using networks of roads and forts to occupy the spaces between them. In all this, Mattingly argues that the army, far from imbuing locals with a sense of all-embracing Romanitas, went out of its way to emphasise its power, difference and distance from local civilians. That was the key to military identity in Roman Britain.

Urban communities, Mattingly argues, developed very differently from those in the rest of the empire, for two reasons: first, Britons had nothing remotely resembling townships on the Mediterranean model; and second, while in most of the rest of the empire Romans came, saw, conquered, established a functioning local administration and left, Britain remained under permanent military occupation. The result was a large influx of foreign merchants and craftsmen who knew Roman ways, spoke Latin and could provide the services that Britons could not. These too were keen to maintain their distance from the locals. Further, the Roman ‘benefaction culture’ so typical of much of the rest of the empire – local elites winning prestige by ‘doing good’ for the community and proclaiming it in boastful Latin inscriptions – is notably lacking here; elite Britons simply did not want to become ‘like them’. Huge changes, of course, appeared on the surface in architecture, building techniques, transport, communications, productivity, the arts, social practices, education, and so on. Tacitus talks of Britons learning Latin, wearing togas, building temples, forums and arcades and enjoying baths and sumptuous banquets. But Roman urban culture never sank deep roots into the British social soil. When the Romans left in AD 409, what survived of their culture left with them.

As for rural communities, the Roman invasion generated tremendous changes. The Roman land-surveyor Siculus Flaccus neatly summarises the principles:

certain peoples have continued to wage war against the Romans, others have kept the peace, others have declared their submission to Rome and frequently taken up arms against their enemies. That is why each people has received a [different] legal settlement according to merit…

The point is that a conquered enemy’s land was regarded by Romans as theirs to dispose of as they saw fit, and much of it would be assigned to retired soldiers, leased out to raise revenue (especially if it was rich in natural resources), and so on. This may explain the relative poverty and underdevelopment of local populations in the bolshy West and North of Britain. Meanwhile, ‘free’ Britain (north of Hadrian’s Wall) was paradoxically all the stronger for the Roman presence, since the foreign occupation had the effect of binding previously warring tribes into cohesive and more powerful groupings.

This review can only scratch the surface of a large, important and extremely clearly written book, whose conclusions are based on the intensive consideration of myriad small examples. Mattingly sees the Roman occupation in less than rosy terms: colonial, exploitative and self-interested, squeezing the provincials for all they were worth in order to support the occupation, whatever benefits may have accrued for the few. He would agree with the famous judgement Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus:

Perverting language, they call robbery, butchery and extortion ‘government’, and when they make a desert, they call it ‘peace’.