The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (2 page)

I have chosen to begin the story of Britain in the year the Romans came, fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, over 2,000 years ago. Before Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire’s greatest general, led his first expedition ashore, the country’s stormy seas isolated her from the traffic of the European continent. Apart from her own inhabitants, no one knew very much about the place, though there were rumours. How far did it stretch north? Were its forests impenetrable? Was it really an island? Was its mineral wealth extraordinary?

Since at least the fourth century before Christ, that is 250 years before Caesar appeared, the natives had been mining highly prized gold and tin for export at the Island of Ictis (St Michael’s Mount) on the extreme south-western tip of Britain, and they had trading links as far afield as the Mediterranean. As a result of this trade, in 300
BC
the Greek colony of Massilia, or Marseilles, had sent one of its citizens named Pytheas on a reconnaissance trip to Britain. Pytheas had noted the friendly nature of the inhabitants. It was said that the Britons’ relations further east had some secret method of transporting vast blue stones from a more mountainous region. On a great plain north-east of their chief port in Dorset, they or perhaps their gods were said to have erected the enormous circle called Stonehenge which was used for religious ceremonies.

But Pytheas’ description is a mere fragment reported in a later work. Since the British tribes could not read or write, they remain as mysterious and fabled as their distant ancestors, the small, dark, long-headed Neolithic or New Stone Age invaders who started to arrive from the Mediterranean in 3000
BC
. That British Neolithic man hacked at the soil with deer antlers to grow a little wheat, and that he used flint-headed arrows to kill game for food have had to be deduced from what archaeologists have found in their long barrow graves. It is only when we get to Caesar’s
Commentaries on the Gallic War
that we are able to read the first written description of the country known to the Romans for 400 years as Britain.

By the time of Pytheas and Caesar himself the inhabitants of ancient Britain were mainly what have come to be known as Iron Age Celts. Like the Iberians in Spain and the Gauls in France, they were members of the great military aristocracy which until the rise of the Rome city state in the third century
BC
were masters of the trade routes between northern and central Europe and the Mediterranean. The Celts were the second wave of invaders to follow Neolithic man to Britain, but they came 2,000 years later, around 1000
BC
. Between Neolithic man, whose great monument is the stone-circle temple at Avebury in Wiltshire, and the Celts another wave of invaders had arrived.

These invaders were round-headed Bronze Age people, originally from the Rhineland, who reached Britain in about 1900
BC
. They were a stronger, larger race than Neolithic man, though still dark and swarthy, and they swiftly occupied England from the east coast of Yorkshire down to Surrey. This more sophisticated race is sometimes known as the Beaker People because of the drinking vessels found in their graves. They could make tools from bronze; they built Stonehenge; they buried their dead in individual round barrows. But in their turn about 1000
BC
their way of life was challenged by a new, more powerful civilization.

From the first millennium
BC
the Celts of eastern Europe were migrating west. The expansion of the Germanic tribes at their back encouraged them to move into northern and western Europe, particularly into France, Spain and Britain, bringing with them what is known as the Iron Age. Their peoples were sophisticated enough to known the secret of mining iron ore out of the ground–they could extract the iron ore by heating it. Then they worked the more difficult metal by beating layers of it together. This enabled them to achieve a major advance on bronze or flint tools, and with their stronger iron spears they easily defeated the Bronze Age peoples. They could also travel faster in chariots furnished with iron wheels and drawn by horses that they loved so much they had them buried with them in their graves.

Tall and fair skinned with red or blond hair and blue or green eyes, the Celts were not only physically quite dissimilar to Bronze Age man, they also spoke a different language. No one is quite sure why two kinds of Celtic languages developed. Goidel, from which comes the word Gaelic, was spoken in Ireland and Scotland, and Brythonic is the family from which Welsh, Breton and Cornish derive. Unlike the cave-dwelling Neolithic man, the Celts built their own huts with posts sunk in mud and woven branches for the roof. Although at first they lived in hill forts enabling them to command the countryside, they developed ploughs and were soon farming the surrounding land in small square fields, a shape that would continue through Roman times. Some of those who settled in south-west England lived in lakeside villages, island-like enclaves designed for protection. The Celts were ruled by queens as well as kings, and might even be led in battle by women.

By the first century
BC
Britain (or Britannia, as the Romans called it) had attracted Caesar’s hostile attention. He wished to put an end to the use of Britannia as a sanctuary by the leaders of Gaul (a country covering roughly the territory of modern France) rebelling against their Roman overlords. Archaeologists have shown that in the first century
AD
the inhabitants of Britain’s south coast, sailing from their chief port of Hengistbury Head in Dorset, had a great deal of trade with Gaul. Within Caesar’s lifetime southern Britain and northern France may have been ruled by a Gallic overlord called Diviacus. Caesar believed that the Britons’ powerful religious leaders, the Druids, were also helping to foment trouble. The rebellious Belgae in north-west Gaul, what is now Belgium, had close relations across the Channel in Britain to whom they were in the habit of fleeing in times of trouble. These Belgae, who were now known as Catuvellauni after their leader Cassivellaunus, had settled there from Gaul within living memory. Making Britannia a province of the Roman Empire would finally break the power of the Belgae, whom Caesar was determined to destroy. It would also usefully add to his reputation as a great man by extending the empire even to the edge of the known world. Expanding the empire’s territories, rather than administering them, was how glory and power were won in the uniquely militaristic society of Caesar’s Rome.

Gathering information about Britain’s harbours and landing places was one reason why Caesar sailed across the ‘Ocean’ (the Channel) on his first expedition in 55
BC
. He landed with some difficulty owing to a spring tide which swamped his heavy transport ships. He noted that the houses and inhabitants of Britain seemed very similar to those of Gaul, with the striking difference that rich or poor the British men were shaved of all bodily hair (except for the upper lip, where they grew long moustaches) and painted with a blue dye called woad. Their reddish hair was also worn very long, often with a headband. They knew how to cure hides for export and had a good trade with the continent in iron, cattle and corn, using gold and iron bars in a rudimentary currency system. But as Caesar approached the shores of Kent at what is now Deal the woad-covered Britons looked wild and primitive as they whirled in their chariots on the cliffs above him. Because they wore skins Caesar assumed that they could have no knowledge of cloth-weaving, which to a Roman was one of the marks of civilization. But the ancient Britons’ appearance was misleading. They knew how to spin wool, how to weave it into garments and how to dye it with colours from flowers and insects. Indeed they usually wore long woollen tunics, cloaks and robes fastened by intricate articles of jewellery in swirling patterns which their talented smiths made out of gold, silver and enamel. They were half naked when they were first seen by Caesar only because that was their battle costume. Their Celtic relations, the Gauls across the channel, fought completely naked.

Caesar nevertheless continued to believe that, although the people of Cantium (his translation of the name he heard them use for their country–that is, Kent) were in fact fairly civilized and knew how to grow grain, Britons who lived further north did not know how to cultivate crops and lived on what they hunted. It was true that compared to Roman civilization, with its advanced precision engineering which enabled the Romans to build stone bridges, roads and aqueducts, its architectural science which threw up palaces and forts, its military and political science, the Britons seemed childlike, ignorant and superstitious. They were ruled by the white-robed Druids, who regarded mistletoe as sacred and practised human sacrifice, burning their victims in wicker cages. Hares, fowl and geese were also sacred, which meant they could not be eaten–although the Britons liked them as pets. The Britons were said to love poetry, but they were also extremely quarrelsome.

Caesar found Britannia’s climate more temperate than that of Gaul, though much wetter, and by his water clock he could confirm that being further north the nights in this strange new country were shorter than on the continent. Moving inland he came upon a great river in the east of the country about eighty miles from the south coast which he called the Thamium, a Latin approximation of the name the ancient Britons gave to what we still know as the Thames. He was impressed by the bravery of the British warriors and by their methods of chariot warfare, describing them in considerable detail. In particular he observed their brilliant control of their horses, which they drove fearlessly down steep slopes at full gallop only to turn them in an instant. They would then run along the pole of the chariot to the yoke and urge the horses onwards.

Despite the apparently lower form of civilization that prevailed in Britain, neither of Caesar’s two expeditions reflected much glory on him. His famous wisecrack ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered), never applied to Britain. His first invasion ended in stalemate because the effect of British tides was unknown to a man brought up in the tideless Mediterranean, and he failed to land enough soldiers to secure the country. He attempted another invasion from Boulogne a year later, in 54
BC
with a huge force of twenty-eight warships and 800 transports (built lower for British waters) and this time was more successful. Under the ensuing peace treaty the British tribes were meant to send tribute to Rome once a year, but the invasion ended inconclusively when Caesar had to dash back to Gaul to stamp out a rebellion.

Caesar might say that the Cantii of Kent, the powerful Trinovantes of Essex and the Iceni of Norfolk had surrendered to him, but unlike when the real conquest of Britain took place under the Emperor Claudius ninety years later he left no garrisons behind. Though he and his legions had crossed the Thames it was only the defection of the Trinovantes of Essex which saved the Romans from being driven out of the country by the sheer weight of the British numbers. For once the squabbling British tribes had united, under Cassivellaunus. In the face of the separate peace reached by the Trinovantes, Cassivellaunus decided it was wiser to make terms with Caesar. But these were hardly onerous. There was no sense that Britain now formed the most westerly outpost of the empire. Caesar himself does not seem to have believed that he had really conquered Britain. He never ordered a Triumph, the traditional way of showing off new acquisitions by parading the natives as slaves around Rome. The only trophy he is said to have displayed was a corselet made of British freshwater pearls (he was very disappointed by the lack of silver in Britain). He may have been pleased to leave a country whose climate the first-century Roman historian Tacitus would call ‘objectionable, with its frequent rains and mists’, where crops were slow to ripen but quick to grow due to the ‘extreme moistness of land and sky’.

Then Caesar’s attention was diverted by the Civil Wars back in Italy, and his successors too had more pressing concerns than Britain. For almost a hundred years the Britons under their kings and chiefs were free to carry on the existence of their ancestors, but very subtly and slowly their lives were changing. They were increasingly in contact with Rome at both diplomatic and trade levels. Britain was now selling grain to the Roman Empire and buying olive oil and wine from Roman traders in exchange, as we can tell from their presence in late-first-century
BC
British graves. Highly wrought artefacts of Roman workmanship–such as the silver cups found at Hockwold in Norfolk–previously believed to have been the property of Roman officers after the invasion are now thought to be gifts to an important pre-conquest British chieftain from the Roman government. Increased contact with Roman-educated Gauls escaping to Britain–for example, Commius, who had helped Caesar with the attempted invasion, but who became king of the Atrebates in the Sussex area–brought more Roman habits into Britain. By the end of the first century
BC
a number of kings in southern England, including Tincommius, Commius’ son, who lived at Silchester in Hampshire, had their own mints. They were striking their own coins inscribed in Latin and calling themselves ‘rex’ even though they could not themselves read or write.

The most important of these kingdoms were those ruled by the descendants of Cassivellaunus, whose tribe the Catuvellauni had massively extended their territories since Caesar’s departure. The lands of the Catuvellauni stretched in a semi-circle from Cambridge and Northampton down through Hertfordshire to Surrey, south of what became London. By the beginning of the first century
AD
they were ruled by King Cunobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), whose coins bear the letters CUNO. The early-second-century Roman historian Suetonius called him King of the Britons. It was because of a row between Cunobelinus and his son Adminius that the far-off and still mysterious country of Britain once more came to the attention of the authorities in Rome. For Prince Adminius, who had been banished by his father, fled to Rome and the court of the Emperor Caligula.