APPENDIX: ROMAN BRITAIN

(Chapter V. Vol. I. pp. 170–194)

Mommsen’s sketch of Roman Britain has often been called deficient and inaccurate. As a general judgment, this is wholly unjust. The sketch has real and distinct merits. When first issued in 1885, it marked a great advance towards a right conception of its subject. It differed conspicuously, and all for the better, from the other sketches of Roman Britain which were then current and accepted, Hübner’s papers since collected in his Römische Herrschaft in Westeuropa, Wright’s Celt, Roman, and Saxon, Scarth’s Roman Britain. To-day it is perhaps the best existing account of the conquest and military administration of the province, and it contains much which no one—least of all, our English archaeologists—can afford to neglect. On the other hand, it is undeniably not one of the best sections in the volume to which it belongs, and it treats some parts of its theme, notably the civil life and civilisation, very shortly. One may be pardoned for taking the occasion of its republication in English dress, to make a few additions and corrections which may interest English readers, while they fill some gaps and take note of some recent discoveries.

The accounts of the Claudian invasion and the early years of the conquest (pp. 172–9) are, in their broad outlines, beyond reasonable doubt. But details can perhaps be added or altered. The army which started in A.D. 43 in three corps (τριχῇ νεμηθέντες, Dio, 60, 20) may well have landed in the three harbours afterwards used by the Romans in Kent, Lymne, Dover, and Richborough—the last named being the principal port for passengers to and from Britain throughout the Roman period. The difficult river crossed shortly afterwards by Plautius may be the Medway near Rochester, where in after years the Roman road from the Kentish ports to London had its bridge. The subsequent course of the invading armies is not easy to trace. But it would seem that, when they had won London and Colchester, they advanced from this base-line in three separate corps to the conquest of the South and Midlands. The left wing, the Second Legion Augusta under Vespasian, overran the south as far (probably) as South Wales and Exeter (Suet. Vesp. 4; Tac. Agric. 13; Hist. iii. 44; tile of Legio ii. Aug. at Seaton, Archæological Journal, xlix. 180). The centre, the Fourteenth and Twentieth Legions, crossed the Midlands to Wroxeter and Chester (tile of Legio xx. at Whittlebury, Vict. Hist. of Northants, i. 215; inscriptions at Wroxeter and Chester). The right wing, the Ninth, moved up the east side of Britain to Lincoln (tile of Legio ix. at Hilly Wood, on the road towards Lincoln, Vict. Hist. of Northants, i. 214; inscriptions at Lincoln). These three lines of advance led direct to the positions of the fortresses where we find the legions presently posted. They agree also with the three main groups of Roman roads which radiate from London: (1) the south-west route to Silchester, and thence by branches to Winchester, Exeter, Bath, South Wales; (2) the Midland "Watling Street," by St. Albans to Wroxeter and Chester; (3) the eastern route to Colchester, Cambridge, and Castor near Peterborough, to Lincoln.[308]

In any case there can be little doubt that by A.D. 47 or 48—within four or five years of the first landing—the Roman troops had reached the basins of the Humber and the Severn, as Mommsen observes (p. 176). This much is plain from the fact that Ostorius, who came out in 47, had at once to deal with the Iceni of Norfolk, the Decangi of Flintshire, the Brigantes of Yorkshire, the Silures of Monmouthshire (Tac. Ann. xii. 31). But the difficult corruption of Tacitus (ibid.), cuncta castris antonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat, is probably to be emended (with Dr. H. Bradley, Academy, April and May 1883) cuncta cis Trisantonam, i.e. the Roman frontier at the moment was, roughly, Severn and Trent. This is preferable both to Mommsen’s suggestion (given above, p. 176 note) and to mine (Journ. Phil. xvii. 268). The older and more violent remedy, Avonam inter et Sabrinam, though revived in the text of the second edition of Furneaux’s Tacitus (1907), is pretty certainly wrong; indeed, it is not Latin.

It would seem then that, by 47 or 48, practically the whole lowlands were in the hands of the Romans. Whether Chester had already been occupied or (as seems likelier) was first garrisoned when Ostorius attacked the Decangi, must remain uncertain; it must in any case have been occupied soon (Eph. Epigr. vii. 903; Domaszewski, Rhein. Mus. xlviii. 344). Caerleon, connected by Mommsen with Tac. Ann. xii. 32, presents more difficulty, since it has yielded hardly any datable remains earlier than about A.D. 70–80; however, no other site can be suggested on our present evidence for the hiberna of the Second Legion Augusta before 70. Wroxeter rests its claim to a fortress on two early inscriptions of Legio xiv. (Vict. Hist. Shropshire, i. 243, 244), and this may be adequate, though Domaszewski doubts it. The course of Watling Street seems to show that Wroxeter was occupied before the troops pushed on to Chester.

Mommsen’s account of the Boadicean revolt (pp. 179–181) is famous for his denunciation of Tacitus as “the most unmilitary of all authors.” It must be conceded that Tacitus is unmilitary—not so much because he is condensed or discontinuous or ignorant of geography (E. G. Hardy, Journ. Phil. xxxi. 123), as because he has a literary horror of all technical detail, and desires to give the general effect of each situation without distracting the reader by vexatious precision and difficult minutiae. But in this case his narrative (Ann. xii. 32 foll.) is better than Mommsen (or indeed Domaszewski) allows. Paullinus doubtless marched to London, as Horsley long ago observed, because it lay on the road (Watling Street) from Chester to Colchester; that he hurried on in front of his main forces is implied in the iam at the beginning of c. 34.

The conquest of Wales (p. 182) was completed, as Mommsen says, in the decade A.D. 70–80. But his statements require some re-wording. Roman remains are not “completely absent” in the interior; the continuance of native resistance to Rome is very doubtful; the existence of Celtic speech and nationality in Wales to-day is—in large part, at least—due to a Celtic revival in the late fourth or the fifth century, and to immigration of new Celtic elements at that time, and cannot therefore be cited as here. So far as present evidence goes, the district as a whole seems during the first, second, and third centuries to have closely resembled the similar mountainous districts of northern England, save only that the Welsh tribes never revolted after A.D. 80, while the Brigantes gave trouble throughout the second century. The same system of small auxiliary castella was established in Wales as in northern England. These forts are at present almost wholly unexplored. But we can detect unquestionable examples at Caerhun (Canovium, Eph. vii. 1099) and Carnarvon, in the north; at Tommen-y-mur, Llanio-i-sa, and Caio, in the west; at Caergai (Eph. vii. 863), Castle Collen near Llandrindod (ibid. 862), Caersws in the upper valley of the Severn, and the Gaer near Brecon, in the interior; at Gelligaer (Trans. Cardiff Nat. Soc. xxxv. 1903), Merthyr Tydfil, Cardiff, Abergavenny, Usk, in the south, besides others not yet satisfactorily identified as military sites. Several of these have yielded remains suggestive of the first century, and indeed of the Flavian period. The only one as yet properly excavated, Gelligaer, seems to have been occupied under the Flavians, and dismantled after no very long occupation, probably early in the second century. Such dismantlement suggests that the land was then growing less unquiet. But Wales never reached any higher degree of Roman civilisation than the north of England. Towns and country houses were always rare, and its population lived mostly, it would seem, in primitive villages (Arch. Cambrensis, 1907). Later on, in the fourth century, Celts began to come in from Ireland, much as other barbarians entered other parts of the Empire, but their dates and numbers are very little known; see my Romanisation of Roman Britain, pp. 27 foll. and refs. there given.

The invasion of Caledonia (p. 183) by Agricola has been illustrated by recent discoveries. As I have pointed out elsewhere, we have traces of Agricola’s line of forts (Tac. Agr. 23) at Camelon (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland, xxxv. fig. 10) and Bar Hill (G. Macdonald, Roman Forts on the Bar Hill, Glasgow, 1906). Farther north, near the junction of the Tay and Isla, at Inchtuthill, in the policies of Delvine, a large encampment of Roman type has yielded a few objects datable to the Agricolan age (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. xxxvi. pp. 237, 242), and may give a clue to the site of Mons Graupius. Farther south, the large fort lately excavated by Mr. James Curle, at Newstead, near Melrose (C. I. L. vii. 1080, 1081; Scottish Hist. Review, 1908), was certainly occupied in the Agricolan age. To this date, too, may perhaps be assigned the siege works round the native fortress on Birrenswark in Dumfriesshire, with their leaden sling-bullets (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. xxxiii. 198 foll.). Evidence that the Legio ii. Adiutrix was then posted at Chester, probably forming a double-legion fortress with Legio xx., was obtained in the excavations of 1890 (Catal. of the Grosvenor Museum, Chester (1900), pp. 7 foll. and Nos. 23–35). An inscription from Camelon with the letters MILITES L·II·A·DIE may have been intended to refer to this legion, but is a forgery (Class. Review, xix. 57). No trace of Agricolan or of Flavian remains has yet been found on the line of Hadrian’s Wall, except at two points, which, strictly speaking, are near but not on the wall, Carlisle (Luguvallium), and Corbridge (Corstopitum), where the two great north roads pass on towards Caledonia. For the influence of continental frontier troubles on the British operations of Agricola see also Ritterling, Jahreshefte des österr. arch. Instituts, vii. 26.

The years between the recall of Agricola and the building of Hadrian’s Wall (roughly A.D. 85–120) are a historical blank. Even the position of the northern frontier during these years is unknown. The Romans seem to have soon withdrawn from the line of the Clyde and Forth (Macdonald, Bar Hill, pp. 14, 15). Whether they also withdrew south of Cheviot is not quite clear, in the present state of the Newstead excavations.

Hadrian’s Wall from Tyne to Solway (p. 186) has assumed a very different historical appearance since Mommsen wrote his paragraphs on it in 1885. Then, the theory of Hodgson and Bruce held the field—that the stone wall which is still visible, and the double rampart and ditch to the south of it (called by English antiquaries the “Vallum”), were both Hadrian’s work, the wall for defence against Caledonia and the “Vallum” for defence against stray foes from the south. This view was accepted by Mommsen. But later excavation and observation have shown that the “Vallum” cannot be regarded as a military work—though it is certainly Roman and connected with the wall. Excavations have also shown that the wall itself falls into two periods. At Birdoswald (Amboglanna) there was first a wall of turf (murus caespiticius); later, almost but not quite on the same line, came the wall of stone and the fort of Amboglanna in its present form. Similarly at Chesters (Cilurnum) two building periods are discernible; the character of the first is obscure, but the stone wall and the fort of Cilurnum belong unquestionably to the second (Cumberland Arch. Soc. xiv. 187, 415, xv. 180, 347, xvi. 84; Arch. Aeliana, xxiii. 9). As our ancient authorities persistently mention two wall-builders, Hadrian and Severus, and as the earlier wall of turf can be assigned to no one but Hadrian, it would seem that we may assume a first fortification of the Tyne and Solway line in turf about A.D. 120, and a rebuilding in stone, on almost exactly the same tracé, about A.D. 208 by Severus. The "Vallum" seems to have been built in relation to one or the other—more probably the earlier—of these stone walls, and may represent a civil frontier contemporaneous with it (Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, v. 461; Pelham, Trans. Cumberland Arch. Soc. xiv. 175). The attempt of Dr. E. Krueger (Bonner Jahrbücher, cx. 1–38) to show that the "Vallum" is an earlier independent work, built by Hadrian, while the turf and stone walls are post-Hadrianic, seems to me both unproven and contradicted by recent excavations.

Mommsen’s account of the Wall of Pius between Forth and Clyde and of the Roman occupation of Scotland also needs modification. Statistics of coins found in Scotland (printed in Antonine Wall Report, 1899, pp. 158 foll., confirmed by all later finds) show that the Romans had retired south of Cheviot by about A.D. 180, and never reoccupied the positions thus lost. The mass of inscriptions, to which Mommsen alludes, also contains nothing later than the reign of Marcus. It becomes, therefore, impossible to connect the Wall of Pius with the literary evidence relating to wall-building by Severus. That evidence must belong to the Tyne and Solway. The length which it assigns to the wall, cxxxii. miles, suits the southern line best. The numeral in any case needs emendation, but it is as easy to read lxxxii. as xxxii., and 82 Roman miles fit closer to the length of the southern line (73–1/2 English miles) than do 32 Roman miles to the 36–1/2 English miles of the northern wall. Our knowledge of the northern wall itself and of forts either north of it, like Ardoch, or south, like Lyne and Newstead, has been much widened by excavation, but the gain has been rather to the archaeologist than to the pure historian.

In the later history of north Britain the chief recent addition has been evidence of a serious rising about A.D. 158, which perhaps covered all the land of the Brigantes from Derbyshire to Dumfriesshire. Inscriptions found at Birrens, at Netherby between Birrens and Carlisle, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and at Brough in north Derbyshire, mention a governor Iulius Verus as then specially active, and special reinforcements as then arriving from Germany (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. xxxviii. 454). It is natural to connect these with the words of Pausanias (cited on p. 188, note 2), and the connection had the approval of Mommsen. For the division of the province into two by Severus see Domaszewski, Rangordnung, p. 173. The boundary between the two provinces is unknown; perhaps a line from the Humber to the Mersey is not altogether improbable. Nor is there evidence to show how long the division lasted.

Of the civil life and Romanisation of Britain (pp. 191–4) I have written somewhat fully in a paper on The Romanisation of Roman Britain. Here I may indicate some points. Mommsen’s view that the cantonal system adopted in Gaul was dropped in Britain is opposed by an inscription found at Caerwent in 1903, which records the erection of a monument by the canton of the Silures after a decree of the local senate—ex decreto ordinis respublica civitatis Silurum (Athenaeum, Sept. 26, 1903; Archaeologia, lix. 290); other inscriptions, if less decisive, suggest that the case of the Silures was not unique in the province. Indeed, a list of the cantonal capitals, and therefore of the cantons, seems to survive mutilated in the Ravennas (ed. Parthey and Pinder, pp. 425 foll.). There we meet, besides three municipalities carefully so labelled, nine or ten towns with tribal affixes—Isca Dumnoniorum, Exeter; Venta Belgarum, Winchester; Venta Silurum, Caerwent; Corinium Dobunorum, Cirencester; Calleva Atrebatum, Silchester; Durovernum Cantiacorum, Canterbury; Viroconium Cornoviorum, Wroxeter; Ratae Coritanorum, Leicester; Venta Icenorum, Caistor-by-Norwich—and perhaps Noviomagus Regentium, Chichester. Add to these Isurium Brigantum, known otherwise by this title, and Dorchester in Dorset, and there emerges a fairly complete list of just those towns which are declared by their remains to have been the chief “country towns” of Roman Britain. The reasons why so little is heard of the cantons are, I think, plain. They were smaller, poorer, and less important than those of Gaul—as, indeed, a comparison of the town-remains shows; there was, further, no British literature to mention them; and, lastly, they quickly fell before the barbarians in the fifth century.

The town-life of Roman Britain (p. 192) was somewhat more extensive than Mommsen allows. There were four coloniae—Colchester or Camulodunum, founded about A.D. 48 (Tac. Ann. xii. 32); Lincoln, Lindum, established after the transference of the Ninth Legion to York, probably in the late first century; Gloucester or Glevum, founded A.D. 96–98 (C. I. L. vi. 3346); York or Eburacum, planted at an unknown date, on the opposite bank of the Ouse to the legionary fortress; and one municipium, Verulamium, outside St. Albans, founded before A.D. 60. There were also about a dozen “country towns,” already enumerated in the last paragraph. These were for the most part not large villages, but actual towns, furnished with temples, fora, houses, and street plans of Roman fashion, and inhabited, so far as our scanty evidence goes, by populations of which both upper and lower classes spoke and wrote Latin. At Bath, Aquae Sulis, were well-built baths, and a stately temple of the goddess of the waters. At London, Londinium (later Augusta), was a prosperous and wealthy trading-centre. But London was the only town of real size or splendour. The rest, like the cantons mentioned above, were small and unimportant as compared with similar towns elsewhere, and though it is not strictly true that Gloucester and Verulam have produced no inscriptions (p. 193; Eph. Epigr. iv. p. 195), the epigraphic yield has been scanty in every town except perhaps York.

The roads of the province (p. 192) are numerous, though fewer than our English antiquaries sometimes suppose. Those in the south, as Mommsen rightly saw, radiate from London: see p. 192 above. The northern military district is traversed by three main routes. One runs up the west coast to the Solway and Carlisle. A second runs through the east of the island, from York to Corbridge and to various points on the eastern part of Hadrian’s Wall. The third, diverging from the second, crossed the Yorkshire and Westmorland hills and thus reached Carlisle. From Corbridge and Carlisle roads ran on northwards, and the eastern, if not the western, of these gave access to the Wall of Pius. The Roman roads of Wales are still imperfectly known, but there was a road from Chester to Carnarvon, another from Caerleon past Neath to Carmarthen, and a third joined the western parts of these two, while others connected the forts in the interior.

More doubt surrounds the Romanisation of the province. Vinogradoff (Growth of the Manor, p. 83) thinks that the Roman civilisation spread like a river with many channels which traverse a wide area, but only affect the immediate neighbourhood of their banks. I agree rather with Mommsen’s conclusion (pp. 193, 194)—though the real difference between the two writers is not so very great. The towns, both municipalities and “country towns,” seem to have been thoroughly Romanised. The numerous farms and country-houses (often styled "villas") are also in nearly every respect Roman, and the very scanty evidence which we possess as to the language used in them favours the idea that it was Latin. Even the villages, such as Pitt-Rivers excavated (Excavations in Cranborne Chase, etc., 1887–98), show little survival of native culture. It is to be noted, too, that Celtic inscriptions of Roman date, such as occur occasionally in Gaul (Rhys, Proc. British Acad. ii. 275 foll.), are wholly wanting in Britain. Probably, therefore, Roman civilisation came to predominate throughout the lowlands, though not in its more elaborate and splendid forms. There were, however, thinly populated areas where we can trace hardly any population of any sort, Romanised or other, as, for example, the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and a large part of the Midlands (Vict. Hist. of Warwickshire, i. 228), while the Cornish, Welsh, and northern hills seem never to have admitted very much Romanisation outside the forts which garrisoned parts of them. The analogies of other western provinces, of Gaul (above, vol. i. p. 101) and Africa (ii. 328), suggest that Celtic speech may have lingered on in such districts for centuries, though not as an element hostile to the Roman; it is also quite probable that Celtic private law and custom survived beside the Roman (L. Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, p. 8). But we have no distinct evidence of either fact.

The spellings Ordovici (p. 182 and map) and Cartimandus (pp. 182, 183) are Mommsen’s own choice.

SYRIEN und MESOPOTAMIEN.

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AEGYPTEN.

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