So much has been written about the ancient Britons dyeing themselves blue with "woad" and so on that we are inclined to regard them as far more rude and savage than they were. They seem to have lived in huts made of stone and turf and partly excavated in the ground and to have been hunters, and, in a very simple way, farmers. Some of their houses were built on oak piles driven into the soft ground of the marshes. They lived in small communities, or tribes, often fighting against each other, and with a head-man over each tribe. But besides these communities scattered over the country, there had already been established towns where markets, for buying and selling, were held. This, at all events, would be a tolerably correct picture of the south and east of Britain, where there was a close connection, across the narrow Channel, with Gaul and the Roman influences. Cæsar's Romans found the Brythons buying and selling with gold coins and iron bars serving them for money.
I say that this is a tolerably true picture of the south and east, particularly because it is in those parts that an invader, whether he came for peaceful trading or for warlike aggression, would find it the most easy to establish himself. If we look for a moment at the geography of our country we shall see that this must have been so.
For one thing, they are the parts which lie nearest to Gaul and the rest of the Continent from which the invader would be likely to come. And then you will see that the south and east, say as far north as the Humber and as far west as the Severn, are, in spite of certain high ridges of downs and hills, by far the more level, generally, and less broken. They were easier to traverse. We have to imagine all the country far more densely wooded than it is now, and all the river valleys far more marshy. In consequence of the marshy softness of the lower ground, we find that the old tracks generally went along the uplands, wherever that was possible.
Colchester, in Essex, was the chief city of Britain when the first serious Roman invasion came, and under Claudius the legions crossed the Thames, took Colchester and mastered all the south-east of Britain. Wherever the Romans came, it was their custom to make military roads if they had any intention of settling in the country. Julius Cæsar's expedition we have to regard as little more than one of discovery—to see what the island was like, and whether its products would pay the Empire for the cost of conquest. His decision must have been that it was worth the cost, because we know that several of the emperors had designs for making the conquest, but, busy as they were elsewhere, nothing was done to achieve it until Claudius came to the throne in Rome.
The produce that the Romans found, which induced them to think that the island was worth conquering, was chiefly mineral; tin, lead and iron, with a little gold; and later Britain grew corn for the Empire.
The Brythons seem to have been stubborn fighters. They had horses and chariots, with blades, like scythes, sticking out from the sides of the chariots. But it seems that they had little discipline and little idea of forming themselves into any order when they went into battle. They could have had no real chance against the experience and skill, to say nothing of the better arms, of the Roman soldiers.
So, after the establishment of the Roman authority in the south, the penetration of the island by the legions went on. They penetrated as far north as Cromarty, and as far west as Anglesey, but they never really subdued either the far north, where the people called Picts then lived, or the broken and hilly countries in the west, which the Celtic Brythons still occupied. Under one of the generals, Agricola, whose campaigns are described by the Roman historian, Tacitus, we find that a line of forts was established across the narrowest part of Scotland, from the Clyde to the Forth. But under the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138, the great effort of the Empire was to establish certain limits, or boundaries, which it would be able to hold against all attacks from beyond those boundaries. During his reign the Empire gave up some of its conquered territory in Asia. Hadrian erected a line of palisades, or strong wooden walls, along the boundary line of the Empire between the Rhine and the Danube, and in Britain he threw up a wall, a long way south of the Clyde and Forth, from the Solway to the mouth of the Tyne. Evidently, however, this obstacle was not effective in keeping out the Pict, for twenty years later we find his successor, Antoninus Pius, building a second wall from Forth to Clyde, for the better security of the frontier.