Kitabı oku: «Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History», sayfa 2

CHAPTER 2

The Roman Invasion of Britain

43 AD

In 43 AD, Roman forces under the command of the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and began what became a complete conquest of the country. Britain remained a province of the Roman Empire for nearly 400 years.

In his famous novel, I, Claudius, Robert Graves gives us a striking picture of the Emperor who conquered Britain. Hidden from public view by a family ashamed of his stammer and slobbering, he is dragged from hiding by the assassins who have murdered his predecessor, the mad Caligula. They make him Emperor, confident they can control him. What they do not realise is that Claudius’s behaviour is the result of illness, not foolishness: he will make a better Emperor than they think.

Graves’s portrait is based on the writings of the Roman historian, Suetonius, who described the activities of the first twelve Roman Emperors in often lurid detail. According to him, corruption, a thirst for power and lust seemed to be the principal characteristics of the men who ruled half the world. Their policies, if they deserve such a description, were designed to keep them in power by appeasing the people. The conquest of Britain fell into this category. It began because a new Emperor needed to consolidate his position: 400 years of Roman Britain started in order to give Claudius the adulation he needed from the citizens of Rome.

Claudius was not the first Roman leader to cross the Channel in an attempt to incorporate Britain into Rome’s vast foreign conquests. In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar, then master of all of Gaul, decided to invade. His first expedition was on quite a small scale, but his second was much larger. In 54 BC he landed with five legions (about 25,000 men) and 2,000 cavalrymen somewhere near Deal on the Kent coast, and throughout the summer successfully fought his way north until he crossed the Thames, probably at Brentford in Middlesex. The purpose of this expedition is unclear. Some time before the end of the summer he decided to return to Gaul. He never went back to Britain although he recorded, as he did in many places where he fought, his impressions of the people. The men dyed their bodies with blue woad, he said, which made them look very frightening in battle; they wore their hair long, but shaved everywhere else apart from on the upper lip; and they shared their wives among them. These were the people that he had invaded, subdued and left behind. It would be nearly a hundred years before the Romans returned.

Claudius, aware that his survival as Emperor would require something more substantial than his reputation as a fool, turned to Britain as the place where he could demonstrate military prowess. It also made some strategic sense. Unless brought under Roman control, the island of Britain could have proved a useful base for the Empire’s enemies to attack its possessions in Gaul. In May 43 AD, a large force of 40,000 men under the command of Aulus Plautius landed on the south coast, though not before their commander persuaded them to set sail in the first place. The soldiers did not like the idea of a journey into an unknown world. Once across the Channel, however, their campaign went well. They defeated the British chieftain, Caractacus, who fled to Wales, and by the autumn were ready to receive their Emperor so that he could enjoy his triumph. At Colchester eleven British tribal kings surrendered to Claudius, who was now able to return to Rome as warlord as well as Emperor. The Senate voted to build him a triumphal arch in recognition of his victory. The inscription on it read that he had ‘brought barbarian peoples beyond the Ocean for the first time under the rule of Rome’. The Roman occupation of Britain had begun.

The Romans took Britain very seriously, grasping possession of their new province with ferocious speed. Within seven years of Claudius’s triumph they had established a base at London, built a bridge across the Thames and begun to construct a road network throughout the south of England. Caractacus came out of Wales to confront them but was betrayed by a rival tribe and sent as a prisoner to Rome where Claudius pardoned him. Ten years later, Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni in the east of England, attacked Colchester, London and St Albans. Apparently tall with long, red hair, Boudicca, and her army of tribesmen, succeeded in terrifying the Roman invaders. In 61 AD her vast troop of footsoldiers and charioteers, their women and children watching from wagons drawn up around them, faced a much smaller Roman force. The site of the battlefield is not known, but it is believed to be in the Midlands, possibly near what is now Wroxeter in Shropshire. Roman discipline utterly defeated British size. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by the victorious forces of the Empire and Boudicca herself died shortly afterwards, perhaps by her own hand.

By the end of the 70s AD most of England was under Roman control; however the Britons of Scotland remained unconquered. Agricola, who became Governor of Britain in 78 AD, decided to carry the fight into their territory and won a major victory at Mons Graupius near Aberdeen in 84 AD. He claimed that Scotland had been subdued, but in this he spoke prematurely.

At Mons Graupius the commander of the Britons made a speech to his troops in which, the Roman historian Tacitus tells us, he told his men that they were all loyal to one united race. The Roman troops, he cried, had no such glorious unity because they came from all over the world. His description of the Roman army’s origins was quite accurate, although he was unwise to assume that this was a military weakness. The Roman Empire was by its very nature cosmopolitan and the men who fought for it came from many different backgrounds. Aulus Plautius, Claudius’s commander, had been a provincial governor in Eastern Europe, in what is now Hungary and Austria. Suetonius Paulinus, the commander who defeated Boudicca, was the first Roman general to cross the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. Agricola, the victor at Mons Graupius – and, incidentally, Tacitus’s father-in-law – was born in southern France, in what is now Provence. The conquest of Britain was carried out by men whose home was where duty took them. Wherever they were – in the African desert, the German forest, the English fen or the Scottish mountain – they rigorously applied their abilities to the cause of imperial victory.

Apart from Claudius, two other Emperors stand out as having an important part to play in the history of Roman Britain. The first, Hadrian, became Emperor on the death of Trajan in 117 AD. He turned out to be a highly competent ruler, conscientious and interested in learning about the territories he controlled. Like many Emperors of Rome, he had to watch his back: he had enemies everywhere. He therefore undertook long visits to the furthest outposts of the Empire to meet the troops who defended it. This was a wise strategy. It inspired loyalty in men who, separated from central government by long tours of duty in remote corners of the world, could become tempted into revolt. Hadrian seems to have enjoyed these expeditions, taking satisfaction from the task of securing his Empire’s frontiers. In 122 AD he came to Britain at a time when, as far as we can tell, the northern part had been suffering from the invasion of barbarian tribes. Determined to put a stop to these – and to indulge in his love of building – the Emperor decided to construct a wall across Roman Britain’s northern frontier. Picking the narrowest neck of territory that he thought suitable for the purpose, he built a great stone defence system from the estuary of the River Tyne in the east to the shores of Solway Firth in the west. This was Hadrian’s Wall, 80 Roman miles long (73.5 in modern miles) with a small fort at one-mile intervals along the whole stretch of it. The size and shape of the wall changed as the Romans developed their thinking during its construction; most of it was completed within eight years. It was the biggest fortified frontier in the whole of the Roman Empire, a resolute emblem of its enormous power. After Hadrian died in 138 AD his successor, Antoninus Pius, who may have decided that he needed a military exploit to prove that he was not too mild-mannered, decided to reoccupy southern Scotland. He ordered his legions to move north and built another wall – the Antonine Wall – from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde. With an eye to economy he had it made out of turf. But the Pictish tribes of Scotland proved hard to subdue. When Antoninus’s successor, Marcus Aurelius, came to power the Romans retreated to behind Hadrian’s great edifice where they stayed until the time came for them to leave altogether. Marcus Aurelius is today remembered more for his writings as a stoic philosopher than as an Emperor, and in the rearrangement of Britain’s northern defences he seems to have taken a leaf out of his own book: ‘That which is not good for the bee-hive,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be good for the bees.’

The other great Roman Emperor inextricably caught up in the affairs of Britain was Constantine. In 305 AD he left the intrigues of the capital of the Empire behind to campaign with his father, Constantius, in Britain. Constantius was a Caesar, a junior emperor in charge of the northern provinces. Father and son fought against the Pictish tribes still untamed north of Hadrian’s Wall, but in 306 Constantius died at York. His troops then proclaimed his son Emperor, even though the Praetorian Guard in Rome had nominated a rival, Maxentius. Some historians believe that Constantine built the great Roman walls around York at the time of his proclamation. Whatever the truth there is no doubt that at a crucial moment in the history of the whole Roman Empire, this ancient British city became the centre from which its future sprang. From there Constantine would go on to defeat his rival outside the gates of Rome and, as one of the greatest Emperors in the last century of Roman power, tolerate the rise of Christianity, create a new capital in Constantinople and die converted to the Christian religion.

The country developed from a wild, barbarous land into a unified self-governing province – Britannia.

The impact of the Roman occupation on Britain was profound. The country developed from a wild, barbarous land inhabited by fierce tribes into a unified self-governing province – Britannia. A network of roads linked all corners of the land; a single currency created a coherent market for trade; and the refinements of Roman civilisation brought fine buildings and magnificent fortifications to the towns and cities. Latin became the language of law and education. The British adopted the customs and attitudes of their governors: many of them wore togas. British metals were taken back to the heart of the Empire to be fashioned into weapons and armour, and wine and exotic fruits made their way northwards in return. Britain developed into what it would become again – a trading nation. But no empires last forever. By the end of the fourth century AD, Britain, like the rest of Rome’s once indomitable possessions, was suffering from invasion on all sides. The Empire had finally cracked in two with an eastern half based in Constantine’s capital of Constantinople and a western part still trying desperately to cling to power in Rome. In 410 AD the last Emperor of the western Empire, Honorius, told the people of Britain that he had no legions left to defend them. Britannia, Rome’s most northerly outpost, the troublesome island that had over four centuries succumbed to its power and become one of its most precious possessions, was abandoned. The unity of Roman Britain broke apart and the country surrendered to the tribal ambitions of foreign marauders. The Dark Ages had begun.

I remember once being involved in a documentary series for the BBC with the historian, John Roberts. It was called ‘The Triumph of the West’ and in it he explained how Western ideas and values had grown to be such a dominant force throughout the world. One sequence was filmed in the Forum in Rome. Roberts talked about Charlemagne, who in the late eighth century conquered a large part of Western Europe and tried to bring some sense of order to the chaos created by the wars of its different tribes. In 800 Charlemagne entered Rome where the Pope made him Holy Roman Emperor, a title that would exist in European history for centuries afterwards. Imagine, said Roberts, what it must have been like for Charlemagne, a man who could not write but who was struggling to tame the disruption all around him, to enter the Forum Romanum – a place which he had never seen before and of which he had no conception. He must have realised that the Roman Empire, although it had been extinguished four hundred years before, created a civilisation more advanced and more sophisticated than the one in which he was living.

For Britain, as for the rest of Europe, the collapse of the Roman Empire was an extraordinary period in its history. Nearly everything it had built – its language was one exception – was eventually demolished. It would be 600 years before anything remotely comparable emerged to replace it.