HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/tag/roman-britain Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:56:44 GMT en hourly 1 How did the Romans conquer Britain? You might be surprised by what our expert has to say https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-romans-conquer-britain-you-might-be-surprised-by-what-our-expert-has-to-say/ Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:00:32 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-romans-conquer-britain-you-might-be-surprised-by-what-our-expert-has-to-say/ Ferdinand Addis speaks to Charlotte Vosper about his new book, Conquest: A History of Roman Britain, which traces the complex and fascinating story of the Roman conquest of Britain Charlotte Vosper: Julius Caesar launched the first Roman attempt to invade Britain in 55 BC. Why did he want to conquer this island?
Ferdinand Addis: In Commentaries on the Gallic War, Caesar’s own reports of his military campaigns, he gives a boring explanation based on military necessity, claiming that the Britons had been supporting Gaulish rebels. But we mustn’t believe him. Whatever he writes, he writes for a reason – usually a political one. In many ways, the invasion of Britain was prompted by his rivalry with another Roman general, Pompey, who was known as Rome’s greatest conqueror up until that point. It’s a kind of publicity stunt.
How was Britain understood by the Romans then?
Caesar wanted to present Britain as a totally unknown land, and carefully shaped his narrative to suggest he was the first Roman to land there. He described Britons as unspeakably savage and primitive, living on only meat and milk – implying that they hadn’t yet begun farming. He also claimed that they shared wives and lived in a rather dubious polyandrous set-up. Essentially, the vision he presented to Rome was of a wild people.
Romans seem to have accepted this view. Catullus’s poetry, for example, depicts Britain as the loneliest, wildest island in the universe. In reality, though, Britain already had a long history of connection to the continent, with trade routes running through Gaul and around the Mediterranean.
How did Britons’ lives and relationship with Rome change after Caesar’s second invasion attempt in 54 BC?
A lot. Former allies, the Gauls, had vanished behind a Roman wall of occupation on the continent and the Britons themselves had come face to face with the overwhelming military power of the Romans. There were some reasonably hard-fought battles, all of them won by the Romans. But the conquest wasn’t completed then.
After Octavian became the first emperor of Rome (as Augustus) in 27 BC, he does seem to have had relations with British kings, who visited him in Rome and likely gave him young British princes to be brought up there. The ancient geographer Strabo wrote that it wasn’t worth Augustus’s while trying to conquer Britain, because the Britons already paid so much in tributes and were clearly in Rome’s orbit.
The Britons, meanwhile, started adopting the symbolic language of Roman power. So, for example, you start seeing the Latin word rex on British coinage. Now, why would British kings, who ruled what was in theory an illiterate Celtic population, put a Latin word on their coins? The answer is that they were beginning to respond to the presence of Rome and learning how to adopt their modes of asserting power.
Romans returned to Britain in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius. Why – and how did that invasion play out?
When Claudius became emperor, he was regarded as the family idiot, and needed to earn military prestige to legitimise his new position. So he looked to Britain. Verica, ruler of a kingdom in southern Britain, had asked for military support against the rival Catuvellauni tribe. This gave Claudius an excuse to invade. Four of his legions sailed to Britain, smashed the Catuvellauni and occupied their main towns. When Claudius entered the town of Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), most of the other tribes were quick to seek peace terms.
The problem was that Roman deals could be very treacherous. Take the Iceni of East Anglia. They thought their deal made them trusted allies of Rome. But after a few years they were forced to give up their weapons and accept Roman protection.
And this protection was fairly fickle. Around AD 60 or 61, king Prasutagus of the Iceni died, leaving his kingdom to his daughters. The Romans were not, however, very enthusiastic about women in power, and the procurator (provincial tax collector) beat Prasutagus’s widow, Boudicca, and raped the young princesses. In response, the Iceni rose up in a full-scale revolt, joined by tribes including the Trinovantes who lived around Camulodunum. Boudicca’s forces massacred the populations of London, Camulodunum and Verulamium (St Albans). When the Romans defeated the Iceni, we are told they killed everyone and everything they could find on the battlefield: every man, every woman, every pack animal. The Romans were willing to exterminate entire peoples if they felt it necessary.
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After such rebellions subsided, how much did Britons integrate and assimilate Roman culture?
The key – and most contested – word here is ‘Romanisation’. To what extent did Romans Romanise the Britons, versus the Britons Romanising themselves? It’s a bit of both. Take religion: the Romans had something we call the Interpretatio Romana. Essentially, when the Romans arrived in your country, they would take a look at your native gods and decide which Roman deities they actually were. Britons could continue to worship their funny local gods, the Romans decided, because actually they were just Roman gods in disguise.
The great example is the transformation of the hot springs at Aquae Sulis – now Bath. When the Romans arrived, they found a spooky, steamy swamp on the Avon. As far as we can tell, British worshippers ventured alone into the swamp to throw in little offerings.
The Romans recognised that some kind of divine activity was making the water hot. So they identified the British goddess Sulis as the Roman deity Minerva, and built an enormous temple to her on top of the hot spring. They were saying to the locals: you can worship your goddess, Sulis – but in the Roman way, in a big, square temple with lovely pillars, a bit of sculpture, a Roman altar, Roman priests. Oh, and next to the temple we’re building a leisure centre, a luxury bathing complex. We’re not letting all that hot water go to waste.
Some people look at Aquae Sulis and see a triumph of cultural fusion. I see another act of domination, of conquest. But it’s true that, at the Temple of Sulis Minerva, both Romans and Britons deposited curse tablets. Each was a little strip of lead on which you’d scratch a curse, then scrumple it up and chuck it in the water, hoping that the goddess would punish your designated victim. My favourite reads something like: “Could the person who stole my hooded cloak please be inflicted with maximum death?”
For Britons, life changed in a million different ways. If you were a skilled craftsman, maybe your life got a bit better. If you were a farmer, maybe the Romans stopped the neighbours raiding your cattle. If you got sent down the salt mines, on the other hand, your life got markedly worse. It’s a very mixed picture.
In the biography of the famous governor of Roman Britain, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, we’re told that he encouraged the Britons to learn Roman ways – to wear togas, enjoy Roman pleasures, live in Roman houses. But it’s really interesting that this book, The Agricola, explicitly says that this process of Romanisation, which the Britons learned to call civilisation, was in reality just a part of their servitude.
When was the conquest complete?
Essentially, the process came to its triumphant conclusion with Agricola’s great victory at Mons Graupius, probably in AD 83, although dates are always uncertain. He led his men to what he thought was the farthest tip of Scotland, the end of the world – beyond that, nothing but ice and dragons – probably around Aberdeen or Inverness, and fought a Caledonian army. Yet he never deployed his actual legionaries.
The Roman army at that time comprised two classes: legionaries – who were Roman citizens, albeit not necessarily Italians – and auxiliaries, non-citizen soldiers drawn from subject populations. At Mons Graupius, he deployed several cohorts of Tungrians and Batavians from the mouth of the Rhine, very good soldiers famous for their ability to swim in full armour.
The Roman historian Tacitus cites the Caledonian leader Calgacus as saying: these are slave soldiers coming to fight us, held to Rome by fear. Some are even Britons. Surely they won’t enforce Roman tyranny? Why wouldn’t they join the Caledonians to wipe out the legionaries and win back their freedom? Yet they didn’t – none of them. That is real conquest: when conquered lands themselves provide the soldiers for the next conquering wave.
What evidence do we have of life in Britain after that final conquest?
We have little snapshots from here and there, among which my favourite bits of evidence are amazing writings from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, just south of what would become Hadrian’s Wall – an archaeological miracle of preservation.
These were written on thin postcard-sized pieces of wood used for disposable notes. A lot got thrown away, and sank into the oxygen-free earth where they were preserved. These notes, dating from the later first and second centuries AD, were written by Batavian and Tungrian auxiliaries in the fort. They include all sorts of nonsense, like: “Please, can we have some more warm socks?” Or: “When should I deliver the beer?”
A lot of it feels like idle chatter. And although this seems so ordinary today, in the ancient world this level of communication was quite revolutionary. You could only have it with a widely literate population, and it was sustained by the famous Roman roads, well furnished with post houses and inns, so that it was easy to give someone a little note to carry to, say, a friend in London.
Each fort on the northern frontier line had a prefect, each with a wife – often a young woman or teenager. They were too grand to be hobnobbing with the ordinary soldiers, so many were quite lonely and wrote letters to each other: “Please come to my birthday party.” So there was a funny little society. The husbands were, of course, all writing to each other as well: “Do you want to come hunting?” and so on. It was a kind of information revolution. The sort of ordinary chatter that filled Roman roads was new, and gives a wonderful picture of people going about their everyday business.
Hadrian’s Wall was built from around AD 122, decades after Agricola’s ‘complete’ conquest. Why?
Obviously the conquest wasn’t as complete as all that if the Romans then had to build a wall right across the middle of Britain 40 years later.
The straightforward view is that it was purely defensive. But if you just wanted to keep out barbarians, you didn’t need an enormous stone barrier. The Romans constructed a long wooden barricade to keep out the Germanic tribes – and they were no pushovers. Hadrian’s Wall is huge, monumental – nearly 2.5 metres thick, made with dressed stone in places, and possibly whitewashed, so it would have gleamed.
Probably it looked like a classical city wall, which is significant because that was a real trope in ancient Roman rhetoric – to say of the Roman empire that it “made of the world a single city”. So, though it had a concrete practical value, it was massively over-engineered to do the job. It was a powerful symbolic gesture.
Hadrian, the emperor who built it, had big ideas. He wanted to make the empire neat and tidy, with a good, firm border: everything on the inside was Roman, and everything on the outside was barbarian, and could essentially be forgotten. Of course, that attempt was unsuccessful. The empire was never tidy. Resistance, which the Romans would call barbarism, was always boiling away within the frontiers, behind the wall.
How did Roman rule in Britain come to an end?
Over time, peoples on the empire’s frontiers grew stronger, and got better at penetrating Roman defences and exploiting Roman riches. In Britain, the tribes threatening incursions were Saxons, Angles and Jutes from the Low Countries and Germany.
The date traditionally given for the departure of Romans from Britain is AD 410, but this is very murky. A famous line from the Byzantine historian Zosimus says that in that year the Emperor Honorius writes to the cities of Britain telling them to “look to their own defence”, and this is often taken to be Rome washing her hands of Britain. In reality, the process was probably more drawn out, with a succession of crises. It was hard to keep the local army commanders and aristocrats happy. Every so often, some general would decide “I’m emperor now”. What typically followed was that he marched his legions over to the continent, where they were defeated. That happened twice in AD 406 alone. And that left Britain fatally weakened.
What happened in Britain after Roman rule ended?
The evidence dries up, so what happened after the Romans left is very, very obscure. With few exceptions, there’s no written evidence, we don’t have any good pottery and no one was building with stone.
But also, I think, life in the century or so after the Roman departure was challenging, with large-scale population movement from across the Channel. Recent DNA analysis of remains in post-Roman cemeteries shows that by the end of the fifth century quite large numbers of people in Britain had Germanic rather than British Celtic ancestry. We don’t know exactly the form that change took – it was not necessarily any sort of deliberate genocide or even a single invasion – but there was certainly a significant movement of people.
What does this history tell us about the nature of the Roman conquest?
We often think of conquest in purely military terms – a matter of moving an army here or there, capturing this or that city. There’s much more to it than that. That’s what I wanted to tease out – to show that to some degree, although conquest is a military operation, it’s also a political operation, a cultural operation. It involves not just military violence but also repression, compromise, persuasion – persuading new subjects that there’s more to be gained working with you than against you.
Conquest is also not something that any one person can control. These are great deep currents that surge, and any individual is merely caught up in them. Think of Claudius. Did he conquer Britain? In a sense, yes. But in another sense, he was just doing what he had to do from one day to the next to survive.
Throughout history, there have always been conquerors, lawgivers, people who want to set the world in order according to their own personal idea of good. There have also always been rebels, people who would rather die than submit. In many situations, people have to choose whether to assimilate or resist, sometimes at the cost of everything, causing nothing but bloodshed.
Is Boudicca a hero or a villain? She got many, many thousands of people killed – probably hundreds of thousands. Would it have been better if she’d just taken her whipping and gone off into the darkness? That’s a live moral question – the sort of thing that keeps me thinking about the Roman empire.
Why should we be interested in this history today?
Well, partly because conquest is still very real, and it’s worth knowing something about what it looks like and the sorts of compromise that may be demanded of a person in these circumstances. It’s also worth understanding something about the ideological dimension of conquest – the ideas of empire, of law, of justice and of global empire that took young men from Roman towns in southern Gaul to the north of Scotland, carrying the emperor’s image on their standard and the eagle on its pole.
Also, what makes humans act as we do? Why do we travel these vast distances to lay down the law to one another? I hope that this book contributes a little bit to our ability to think about those things.
More than that, though, Roman Britain is fascinating just as a puzzle on its own terms. The period is so well studied that you would think there would be nothing new to learn, but the picture we have of what happened changes all the time. In the past 20 years alone, the picture of who the Britons and the Celts were has been transformed. People are always digging up wonderful treasures from the ground.
When most people think of Roman Britain, they think of painted warriors on a cliff-top watching Julius Caesar sail in on a ship, with the forces of law and order and running water and straight roads – and that’s it. Then, 400-odd years later, it’s all gone and we’re into the ‘Dark Ages’. But the truth is that it’s intricate, it’s complicated, it’s fascinating, and it’s full of weird little lives – people just trying to do their best.
Ferdinand Addis is a historian and writer. His latest book is Conquest: A History of Roman Britain (Apollo, 2026).
This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> How Rome really conquered Britain https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-rome-really-conquered-britain-podcast/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:31:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-rome-really-conquered-britain-podcast/ Ferdinand Addis reveals the reality of Rome's conquest and occupation of Britain – from Caesar's invasion in 55 BC to the decline of Roman influence by 410 AD What if the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain was more complicated than we might think? Ferdinand Addis reveals how it really happened.
Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Ferdinand guides us through the complex process of conquest – from Caesar's arrival in 55 BC, to Hadrian's Wall in 122 AD, to the decline of Roman occupation by 410 AD.
]]> How did the Anglo-Saxons triumph in Britain? You can blame it on the Romans https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-anglo-saxons-triumph-in-britain-you-can-blame-it-on-the-romans/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-did-the-anglo-saxons-triumph-in-britain-you-can-blame-it-on-the-romans/ The collapse of Roman rule in Britain, followed by the emergence of kingdoms established by Germanic tribes, marks one of the most turbulent periods in Britain’s history. But what factors drove this dramatic transformation? Nick Higham chronicles the rise of the Anglo-Saxons Throughout history, many Scots have harboured a lingering mistrust of the English. Plenty in Wales felt similarly. Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ who also conquered swathes of land west of his kingdom, must take much of the blame. But the fundamental roots of these tensions stretch back to a time centuries before that bellicose English king, to the slow, messy, turbulent collapse of Roman Britain and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.
A whistle-stop précis of the textbook history goes something like this: Iron Age Britain was inhabited by tribes of Celts. Then came the Romans: nearly 100 years after Julius Caesar’s exploratory forays, in AD 43 the Emperor Claudius launched an invasion. Within half a century, the southernmost two-thirds of the island was conquered, creating the Roman province Britannia. As part of the Roman empire, it was subject to externally appointed governors and protected by its army.
But in the fifth century – the pivotal year often cited is 410 – events in continental Europe drove the Roman authorities to abandon Britain. Within a few decades, Roman-style artefacts had been replaced in the archaeological record of eastern Britain by metalwork, pottery, burial styles and buildings indicative of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – an umbrella name coined later to encompass Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians from north-west Europe. These settlers – or invaders – were those described by Bede in 731 as gens Anglorum: English people.
It’s a neat story, and one with which many readers will be familiar. However, it’s also a story that raises a number of questions. What drove the collapse of Roman rule in Britain? How did Britain differ from its neighbours on the continent in this period? What attracted Anglo-Saxons to Britain from the fifth century? And how, by the beginning of the seventh century, were they well on their way to becoming the dominant force across much of the British Isles?
To answer these questions, we must first examine the relationship between the people of Britain and the Roman administration through those centuries of imperial rule. The bonds that tied Britain to Rome – or, more to the point, the lack of them – would have an enormous impact on what happened after that relationship began to fracture.
Regional divide
During the Roman period, there were key differences between Britain’s western uplands and its less-hilly eastern areas. In the west, the dominant language remained Celtic Brittonic, evolving into Welsh. Towns, villas, manufacturing facilities, extensive field systems, mosaics and churches were lowland phenomena, leaving the westerly uplands as military spaces – particularly in the north – or areas given over to pastoralism.
Yet a key point here is that, even in lowland Britain, the Brittonic language survived. Britons were barely engaged in imperial frameworks: none was made emperor before 400, nor did any Briton enter the Roman senate or attain high office. To Rome, Britain was always liminal, its inhabitants mere “savage ploughmen”, as the Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus put it.
True, Britain’s fertile lowlands contributed taxes in cash and in kind, and sufficient profit for landowners to commission sometimes lavish Roman-style villas. But in 353, these landowners’ peace was shattered by the defeat of the usurper western Roman emperor Magnentius at the hands of his eastern rival, Constantius II. Magnentius’s defeat was followed by savage reprisals in Britain, where he had enjoyed support. The contemporary soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that Constantius’s notoriously cruel representative Paulus Catena (‘Paul the Chain’) “descended like a sudden torrent upon persons and estates”, whether guilty or not.
This was a critical moment in the decline of Rome’s influence in Britain. Catena’s violent intervention seems to have triggered a transfer of confiscated property to overseas magnates – which may explain why so many villas became derelict. The resulting economic haemorrhaging from the province lowered demand and stifled manufacturing, importing and service industries. Britain suffered, economically and socially.
The chaos didn’t end there. Across the final quarter of the fourth century, western Roman armies endured further defeats in civil wars, leaving them undermanned, ill-funded and politically impotent. Britain’s northern garrisons may have remained largely in post following this tumult but, crucially, Britain’s lowlands to the east were undefended, opening the door to seaborne attacks.
Britain was part of the Roman empire for perhaps 14 to 18 generations. During that time, imperial protection had invariably been reimposed following crises. This time, though, was different. Honorius (emperor from 393 to 423) is recorded as responding to a plea for aid by advising British towns in 410 that they would need to defend themselves. This would have been understood by all sides to be an interim strategy pending the return of normal Roman governance to Britain. However, barbarian intruders and internal struggles on the continent continued to prevent the Roman recovery of Britain.
Edge of empire
Post-410, then, Britain was neither properly inside nor truly outside the empire, and the likelihood of intervention by western Roman forces oscillated according to circumstances across the Channel. Even so, archaeological finds imply that members of Britain’s elite retained much of their power, adhering to Roman dress codes until the third quarter of the fifth century. They continued to increase their commitment to Christianity, by then the imperial religion, and enjoyed ongoing access to Roman-style education, evidenced in Latin works by Britons including Gildas, a learned sixth-century church deacon.
As late as 429, a bishop from Gaul took command of British soldiers confronting Saxons and Picts, indicating continued efforts to deter attacks despite the lack of military expertise locally. According to one fifth-century writer, Britain remained “a very wealthy island” that the military-minded bishop “rendered secure in every sense” – against both heretics and ‘barbarians’, as Romans termed pagan tribes who didn’t speak Latin. Despite those efforts, though, Britain’s lowlands remained vulnerable to barbarian incursions. A Gallic chronicler noted Saxon raiding in 410, and Gildas knew of Pictish and Scottish assaults.
Meanwhile, it seems there was a shift away from agriculture towards livestock, presumably resulting in a falling tax-take, but another source of income was found. Land previously exploited on behalf of the state or overseas magnates (absentee Roman landowners) likely provided resources that could be used to pay mercenaries to replace the depleted garrisons. This measure, intended to be temporary, meant recruiting barbarians – often men from the Germanic tribes that would become known as the Anglo-Saxons – to help defend against sea-raiders. And it had far-reaching consequences.
The earliest Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Britain date from c420, so people from northern Europe had clearly begun settling by then. From such sites, including Spong Hill in Norfolk, we can infer that incomers arrived mostly across the decades from around 420 to 460. Anglo-Saxon – and, occasionally, Irish – artefacts found farther inland can be taken as evidence that barbarians were also hired to provide internal security or as bodyguards.
The patterning of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in, for example, Lincolnshire and Sussex is consistent with settlement initially overseen by British regional rulers. In the long term, though, employing barbarians against attacks potentially launched by their own kin was risky. Mercenaries had more to gain by increasing their own numbers and dispensing with local elites altogether.
Aggressive incomers
Our Gallic chronicler reported that, c441, “the British provinces… were reduced to the rule of the Saxons”. This seems simplistic, and was written at a considerable distance, but it does suggest that incomers had by then seized regions perhaps including Norfolk and the east Midlands.
Gildas noted that Britons sought aid from the western Roman general Flavius Aetius in defending themselves against Picts and Scots between 446 and 454, but no help arrived; Flavius’s assassination in the latter year effectively ended any prospect of Rome’s return to Britain. It was at this point in his narrative that Gildas began remarking on British kings, perhaps implying that some kind of government was emerging in a Britain independent of Rome.
One leader named by Gildas, writing the following century, was Ambrosius Aurelianus. He is described by Gildas as being Roman, with parents who had “worn the purple” – suggesting a continental family who had attained wealth and power in Britain. This war leader reportedly led a British force to victory over Saxon raiders.
The pivotal figure in these struggles, though, was apparently a man Gildas described as a “proud tyrant”. This ruler, named Vortigern by Bede, hired further Saxons from overseas and supplied them via Roman-style taxation in kind. The ninth-century Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) provides Vortigern’s genealogy, indicating his descent from a Christian Roman family connected with Gloucester.
That location suggests that the political focus had shifted from the south-east to the still-wealthy lowlands at the heart of the western province Britannia Prima, ruled from Cirencester. Recent excavations at nearby Chedworth villa have revealed a mosaic floor laid no earlier than the second quarter of the fifth century, implying that investment in Roman material culture and social norms continued significantly later here than it did farther east.
Act of folly
To Gildas’s mind, the hiring of ‘barbarians’ to defend the eastern coast – though common Roman practice – was an act of folly, leading to their rebellion and a great raid “from sea to sea”. While victories were won by both sides, and despite British success at the siege of Mons Badonicus (Badon Hill, which some think may have been Little Solsbury Hill near Bath, or Badbury Rings in Dorset) around the turn of the sixth century, the Saxons ultimately triumphed. An unnamed treaty to end the war, referred to by Gildas, seems to have recognised Saxon control of most of lowland Britain.
Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon population numbers, movements and interactions in this period suffers from a paucity of relevant material evidence. But, certainly in the more open, lower-lying regions of the south and east, a substantial labour force must have worked the land, implying that numerous Britons survived external takeover and remained in those areas – albeit not always toiling for their own benefit.
Gildas noted that many of his grandparents’ generation were “made slaves forever”. Tellingly, the Old English wealas – from which ‘Welsh’ derives – meant both ‘foreigners’ and ‘slaves’. Unfree agriculturalists appear in early English law documents. And when Bishop Wilfrid was granted the Selsey estate by the formerly pagan South-Saxon king in the 680s, it came with 250 slaves. Most such enslaved people were almost certainly of British ancestry.
Again, the patchy nature of Anglo-Saxon material culture in the archaeological record from this period makes it difficult to plot accurately the English presence versus enduring British populations. One hint comes from Bede who recorded a war against British adversaries won by the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelfrith of Northumbria in c600. As a result, some defeated regions were forced to pay tribute, while others were settled.
In his polemical De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), Gildas compared events in Britain to the occupation of Judea by Assyrian forces detailed in the Old Testament. He painted the Saxons as ungodly incomers to be expelled, not assimilated.
That view contrasts with the near-contemporary willingness of Gallo-Roman bishops to baptise Franks and Burgundians. So Germanic tribes were being embraced by Christians on the continent while racial, ethnic and ideological distinctions were reinforced in Britain. Clearly, England was established through warfare. But the incomers were encouraged to invest in their inherent German-ness by the racial and ideological hostility they encountered.
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The result was that Britain came to host the largest pool of pagans anywhere in Roman (or formerly Roman) western Europe. Frankish kings sought to spread Christianity in south-east Britain in the later sixth century, and in the 590s Pope Gregory I sent Italian monks led by Augustine to Canterbury, assuming that British clergy would assist his missionaries. They didn’t, instead clinging to their expectation that God would expel the ‘barbarians’.
In consequence, Christianity in Britain fractured. Rome’s mission dismissed the Britons as heretics, and threw its considerable ideological weight behind the new English converts. The combination of Rome’s religious authority and Anglo-Saxon secular power triggered the wholesale acculturation of Britons wherever they were vulnerable, undermining the Welsh language and British identity throughout England. People of Welsh and British ethnicity were increasingly restricted to regions subject to British lords, lands distant from both English kingship and the Anglo-Roman clergy.
Difficult relationship
That rift sealed the fate of the British – and the dominance of the English in the lowland south and east of the island. But the foundations of England and its cultural robustness have far deeper roots. The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons can ultimately be traced to Britain’s problematic relationship with the Roman empire. The Britons’ retention of a Celtic language, their absence from imperial structure, the fact that much of their island’s best agricultural lands were owned by magnates overseas, the fact that they identified primarily with Britain – all contributed to a peripheral status in the Roman world. So when the Saxon mercenaries they hired to help defend Britain against other ‘barbarians’ rebelled, Britons were isolated and vulnerable, receiving no assistance from their former imperial rulers.
The northern uplands of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland fell to Anglo-Saxons across the later sixth and seventh centuries, leaving British communities under their own kings only in the Clyde valley, alongside those in Wales and Cornwall. Here Celtic survived, along with the belief that, when God willed, the English would be forced out. The 10th-century Welsh poem Armes Prydein (The Prophecy of Britain) predicted a time when Saxons would be expelled from the stolen lands and the British people would recover all Britain. They’re still waiting.
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Was Elizabeth II's reign a golden age? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-elizabeth-iis-reign-a-golden-age/ Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:11:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-elizabeth-iis-reign-a-golden-age/ By the end of Elizabeth II's reign in 2022 – the longest in Britain’s history – the nation and its place in the world was markedly different. Sir David Cannadine guides Danny Bird through the contours of the Second Elizabethan Age. When the late Queen acceded to the throne in 1952, Britain, though left bankrupt and reeling from the Second World War, was still a major global power.
By the end of Elizabeth II's reign in 2022 – the longest in Britain’s history – the nation and its place in the world was markedly different. Sir David Cannadine guides Danny Bird through the contours of the Second Elizabethan Age – from 'de-Victorianisation' to deindustrialisation – and the ways in which the monarchy responded to such dizzying change.
]]> When did Roman Britain really end? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-did-roman-britain-really-end-podcast/ Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:54:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-did-roman-britain-really-end-podcast/ Nicholas Higham explains why the story of the decline of Roman Britain, and the rise of England, is more complicated than you might have assumed How did England – and Englishness – emerge from the final days of Roman Britain? And what separated Englishness from Britishness?
Emeritus professor Nicholas Higham –whose latest book is How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons – speaks to James Osborne to explore the twisting and turning tale of England's origins from post-Roman Britain: a story of clashing cultures, religion, and migration.
]]> Be neighbourly like a Pompeian https://www.historyextra.com/membership/be-neighbourly-like-a-pompeian/ Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:30:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/be-neighbourly-like-a-pompeian/ A communal toilet might be an unlikely place to seek life inspiration, but we can all learn from Roman community values, Dr Jess Venner tells Dr David Musgrove Would life be better if we all went to the toilet together again? That’s a question that I wonder about sometimes, and if you know your ancient history, you’ll know that I say ‘again’ because I’m drawing on the experience of the Roman communal toilet. Go to somewhere like Chedworth Roman villa in Gloucestershire, or Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, and you’ll see the remains of their multi-occupancy latrines. There people sat cheek by jowl doing their business, with no screens to hide their modesty or disguise the fact that they were relieving themselves in the company of their peers.
I’m an enthusiast for lavatorial matters, so I gave a talk on the history of toilets at the fabulous Chalke History Festival this summer. When I raised the idea of a return to communal defecation in the Roman style, it returned a surprisingly positive reaction from the audience in the marquee. That was probably just a response to my rabble-rousing rhetoric in the moment. I rather doubt that a petition for open loos would be well received in reality. However, maybe there is something in the ancient Roman attitude to the importance of community and neighbourly values that we could learn from.
Community spirit
Dr Jess Venner is a Roman historian, with a particular expertise in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and when I asked her for a Life Lesson from History, she proposed that we might take something from the Romans’ strong sense of community. “Romans were good neighbours because they built their lives around community,” she explains. “Community was everything to the Romans. They considered it to be honourable and virtuous to rely on one another. And above all, to be kind and to make sure that everything you choose to do is virtuous in the sense that it’s not stepping over other people to get there.”
For Jess, this sense of community is expressed most clearly in a crisis situation. When the chips are down, you default to your base instincts, and that’s what she reckons we see in Pompeii in the year AD 62, when the now-famous Roman city in the Bay of Naples was struck by disaster. If you’re thinking that I’ve got my dates wrong because everyone knows that Vesuvius erupted and engulfed the place in molten rock and pumice in AD 79, that’d be fair comment. But in the decade before that, Pompeii suffered a different disaster – an earthquake.
The date is slightly contested, because Seneca the Younger says it was in AD 63, but most experts today would plump for disaster striking in AD 62. “A big earthquake hit Pompeii and took out a lot of the city. A lot of the people there, as Seneca tells us, were so shocked by the event that they wandered around aimlessly afterwards and didn’t know what to do with themselves,” says Jess. “People were maimed and people died, and a lot of buildings, public and private, were destroyed. This was the start of the earthquakes that continued up to the eruption of AD 79, which we know today as being a warning sign.”
As if the quake wasn’t bad enough, it precipitated a tidal wave, and released poisonous gases (which curiously, and very specifically, were said to have killed 600 sheep). So, clearly that was a substantial shock, but it’s the crisis response that is interesting. Normally, in this sort of situation, an embattled Roman community might have expected to get imperial support, but in this case that wasn’t forthcoming. Perhaps that was because the emperor Nero was otherwise engaged establishing his reign, or maybe it was a response to Pompeii’s history of rebellion against Rome.
Rebuilding Pompeii
Whatever the reason, it seems that the Pompeians were left to deal with the aftermath as best they could themselves. Despite this absence of imperial support, they built back quickly. The first public building to be erected anew was the Temple of Isis, but it was funded privately rather than from the emperor’s purse. The people of Pompeii didn’t just rebuild though – they also creatively responded to the earthquake by making agricultural gardens in the spaces freed up by the fallen buildings.
“I fondly think of Pompeii as an incredibly resilient city. They bounced back by finding opportunity in the gaps, literally. They were taking materials, reusing them from buildings that had been demolished, or they were demolishing them themselves. And they were opening up huge vineyards, orchards and vegetable plots. It was very, very green. Walking through it in the ancient period, it would’ve been amazing. You would’ve had birdsong and trees poking over the side of walls.”
Fruit was grown in these new green spaces, and with the upsurge in post-quake urban gardening, we can see the community ethos of the Romans bursting through. In Pompeii after AD 62, we find the first evidence of the ‘pomari’ or united fruit sellers. This was a support group that was set up to offer financial backing to fruit sellers if they were down on their luck. It provided help in life, and in death: funerary epitaphs make note of their assistance to the deceased.
The fruit sellers are just one example of several occupational support groups, and they appear to be a practical response to the catastrophe. As Jess explains, in Pompeii, they seem to come to prominence in the aftermath of the earthquake: “When crisis hits, you find these things becoming more obvious in towns in the archaeological record: like with the pomari, they suddenly pop up. They may well have existed before this but it is unusual that we have no record before this point.”
- Read more | Are you healthier than a Roman? These ancient secrets for longevity are still shockingly relevant
A support network
It wasn’t just money that these groups provided – they were also there for knowledge sharing. As Jess points out, the sharing of expertise is acknowledged today as being a key driver in developing resilience. Over time, the support groups changed from being agriculturally focused to being more involved with merchant activity. But throughout they were allowing people to learn and share from another: they even had apprenticeships of sorts.
We’re talking local initiatives, built around neighbourhoods, with people looking out for each other in an organised and intentional way. There might have been elite individuals or families driving things as patrons, but the impetus was grass-roots.
The Roman empire was a diverse place with a lot of different peoples and communities living together. That was particularly the case in Pompeii. So you might be wondering how a community spirit was fostered in such a cultural melting pot – it’s certainly something we seem to struggle with together in Britain.
According to Jess, religion was a powerful connecting force: “There were neighbourhood communities; they had shrines in the neighbourhoods, on street corners, and they would all gather there. There’s graffiti from very many different people around these shrines, acknowledging that lots of people would be passing and interacting with this piece of graffiti.”
So you’ve got occupational support groups, religious worship providing a glue of shared interest, and neighbourhood communities where people knew each other. This might sound like a nostalgic 1950s throwback, but Jess describes life organised around these neighbourhoods, with doors that were left open and a sense that you knew who your people were.
Of course this only goes so far, because clearly there were folks in these communities who probably didn’t have the chance to engage in this neighbourhood structure – I’m talking about the enslaved in this society. Clearly those people broadly had to do what they were told to do, and their lives were far removed from this supportive umbrella.
But for those whose social status did allow them to be part of the network, no doubt this was a great boon. It probably encouraged entrepreneurship and risk-taking because you felt you had something to fall back on if things went awry in whatever venture you attempted. Apparently, according to Jess, the Romans didn’t even have a concept of failure, but instead saw things that hadn’t gone well as simply opportunities for reinvention. That all sounds very positive and forward-thinking – it is the sort of mindset that a 21st-century business cries out for in its employees.
Toilet wisdom
So, back to the communal toilet. Is that the ultimate manifestation of Roman community spirit? Surely you can’t get much closer to your neighbours than by unburdening your bowels in their company.
”It was a very communal area. It seems completely wild to us now, and actually it's probably only from the Victorian period onwards that we started getting really fussy about it. But it was a very communal thing,” comments Jess. “So you would go into the public latrines and they would be a lot of benches with semi-circular cut-outs. You would do your business and you would be sitting right next to somebody else. You would be having a conversation with so and so down the road or across from you”.
- Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
The amount of graffiti in these toilets suggest that people were spending a decent length of time in the public latrines, long enough to make their mark on the walls. Jess even goes so far as to opine that it might not have been dissimilar to the experience of going to a pub in Britain – the communal toilets would have been a place to meet, chat, maybe even do business (while you did your business).
Failing well
This might be going too far, I know, and there are obvious safeguarding concerns attendant with toilets that are as public as the ancient examples we’re talking about. So maybe Roman-style toilets isn’t the answer. But there is something we can take from their approach to community, and the clear value they placed on it as something to strive for. Not only would it bring us together and help us find harmony in an ever-more diverse world. But also, and this I find a very diverting line of thought, maybe this sense of a community safety net might unlock our inner risk-taking entrepreneurial selves and inject some blistering fresh energy into the economy as well.
It’s basically the same argument as that proposed by people who talk up the Universal Basic Income as the driver to unlock national productivity, but in this case, without the expense of paying everyone a salary. Because we know our neighbours have got our backs, we’ll all be free to fail and fail big, even if that isn’t a concept that the Romans would have been able to get their heads round. It’s a short step from a communal toilet to a glorious national social and economic rebirth.
As a coda, sadly, we know that even the resilient Pompeians weren’t able to overcome the catastrophe that overtook them a few short years after the earthquake of AD 62. No amount of communal support could hold back the venting fury of Vesuvius and the destruction if wrought on the city. Of course, we know what we do about the neighbourly virtues of Pompeii’s people because the place was preserved under the pumice that pounded it, but there was no chance of the city reinventing itself after AD 79.
This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
]]> The Romans were blamed for massacring these Iron Age warriors. But did they actually murder themselves? https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/the-romans-were-blamed-for-massacring-these-iron-age-warriors-but-did-they-actually-murder-themselves/ Mon, 19 May 2025 11:11:52 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/the-romans-were-blamed-for-massacring-these-iron-age-warriors-but-did-they-actually-murder-themselves/ Dorset's Maiden Castle was the site of an infamous Roman massacre. Or was it? New research on the skeletal remains of Iron Age Britons suggests that it wasn't Caesar's legions who were responsible... When the invading Roman legions assaulted the mighty hillfort of Maiden Castle, in Dorset in the middle of the 1st century AD, they killed and quickly buried its British defenders among the ramparts.
That’s the story that the celebrated archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed in the 1940s, following the excavations on the site that he and his equally talented wife Tessa carried out before the Second World War (she died in 1936, but he carried on their research).
Wheeler discovered what he described as a war cemetery in the East Gate ramparts. He found 34 skeletons there, many with horrific injuries. He concluded that these burials were all made in one episode, following an assault on the fort by the advancing legions of Roman soldiers after their landing in Britain in AD 43.
That colourful narrative has been challenged by academics in recent decades. This year, 2025, Martin Smith, Miles Russell, and Paul Cheetham, authors of a new paper ‘Fraught with high tragedy: a contextual and chronological reconsideration of the Maiden Castle Iron Age ‘war cemetery’ (England)’ (Oxford Journal of Archaeology) suggest that actually, the evidence points to these burials representing several moments of lethal self-inflicted violence, perhaps over many generations, spread mostly between the early and middle decades of the 1st century AD. In other words, the Iron Age Britons at Maiden Castle were killing each other long before the Romans arrived – and they did so with extreme violence in some cases.
Maiden Castle is a huge, and famous, archaeological site in southern England. With Neolithic origins, it was occupied through much of the Iron Age. Its multiple ramparts enclose a vast space, which English Heritage describes as being equivalent to 50 football pitches.
During excavations in the 1930s, archaeologists uncovered Iron Age burials scattered across the site. Although only a small part of Maiden Castle has been excavated, most of the remains found were of adult men, and many of them showed signs of traumatic injuries.
- Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age
The authors of the new paper detail the violent story: “The most frequent class of unhealed weapon injury was sharp force trauma (incised cuts or perpendicular chopping blows by bladed implements) both in terms of the number of individuals affected (17) and also the total number of wounds observed (49). Blunt force injuries were the next most frequent (10 individuals, 15 injuries), followed by penetrating injuries from pointed implements (three individuals, four wounds)”.
If that’s not brutal enough, some of the burials show evidence of overkill, or particularly extreme violence “inflicting multiple wounds in combinations far beyond what would be required to terminate or incapacitate”. Such overkill is particularly marked in the unfortunate inhabitants of the shared graves. Stable isotope analysis of these bones also shows that the people buried at Maiden Castle (in this sample at least) enjoyed diets rich in animal protein, which could indicate that they were higher status members of the community.
This new assessment of how these people’s lives ended is based on a radiocarbon dating programme on the skeletal remains, and a reanalysis of the burial patterning of the graves across the hillfort. That has indicated to the authors that there isn’t strong evidence for Wheeler’s single catastrophic event theory. Rather, they see the burials among the ramparts as indicative of “three possibly brief episodes of lethal violence, each a generation apart”, and all most likely before the Roman invasion.
The violent deaths of those buried at Maiden Castle may have been the result of a multi-generational power struggle before the Romans arrived. As the authors of the paper observe, “This pattern is plausibly suggestive of increasing societal stress in the decades leading up to the Roman conquest in the mid AD 40s, following which the area was formally pacified”.
- Read more | Roman invasion of Britain: did the Britons ignore them?
Fascinatingly, and gruesomely, Smith, Russell and Cheetham also propose that the particularly violent examples of ‘overkill’ could be explained as performative executions, for an audience, willing or unwilling, to witness. The public mutilation and death of leading men leads the authors to suggest “the idea that these represent an episodic dynastic struggle where the outcome was intended to send a clear message to a wider audience”.
This interpretation is at odds with the Roman attack narrative of Mortimer Wheeler.
“This was a case of Britons killing Britons, the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification,” notes Dr Russell. “The Roman army committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them.”
Bournemouth University’s Dr Miles Russell, one of the authors of this paper, is also a regular contributor to HistoryExtra. You can listen to him answering all the key questions about Roman Britain in this Everything you wanted to know podcast episode.
]]> The ultimate Romans quiz https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ultimate-romans-quiz/ Fri, 15 Nov 2024 07:30:17 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ultimate-romans-quiz/ From emperors to toilet practices, how well do you actually know the Romans? Put your history knowledge to the test with our quiz… View Riddle on the source website]]> Gladiator tales https://www.historyextra.com/membership/gladiator-tales-podcast-guy-de-la-bedoyere/ Mon, 11 Nov 2024 07:00:53 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/gladiator-tales-podcast-guy-de-la-bedoyere/ Guy de la Bédoyère shares some surprising stories from the history of gladiatorial games How did gladiators supercharge the rise of Julius Caesar? What can we learn about arena fighters from the petrified remains at Pompeii? And why did gladiatorial bouts get banned there for a whole decade? As Gladiator II arrives in cinemas later this week, Guy de la Bédoyère shares some lesser-known aspects of the history of gladiators with Kev Lochun.
]]> My life in history: manager at the Roman Baths and Pump Room https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-life-in-history-manager-roman-baths-pump-room/ Fri, 20 Sep 2024 07:30:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-life-in-history-manager-roman-baths-pump-room/ As part of the 'My life in history' series, Amanda Hart talks about her role as manager at the Roman Baths and Pump Room How did you first get interested in history, especially archaeology?
I have always been fascinated with archaeology and there have been a number of key moments in my life that have shaped my desire to work in museums – from visiting my first one, to finding items during archaeological excavations. There is just something about ancient objects and making the connection with past societies that I find utterly captivating.
It was studying archaeology at university and specialising in archaeological curatorship in my further studies that set me off on my career path. I focused on museum education for many years, developing workshops for schools and community groups. Learning and participation is highly important to me and, I believe, should be part of a museum’s core purpose.
What led you to the Roman Baths and Pump Room?
I previously worked as director of the Corinium Museum in Cirencester [which has a collection mainly consisting of Romano-British artefacts, but also includes a wide array of objects spanning prehistoric to Victorian times].
There, I led a major project to create new prehistory galleries, along with a new discovery centre, garden, shop and reception area. Following the transformation of the Corinium Museum, it felt like the right time to move on, and I began my new role at the Roman Baths in 2022. There are several similarities between the two places, so it seemed like a natural progression.
What does your role entail, and is there anything new you hope to bring?
Within my team, I am responsible for the day-to-day running of the site, as well as management of the collections, learning and community engagement, and the visitor experience. The Roman Baths uses a variety of methods to engage visitors, including a comprehensive audio guide and several holographic projections that really bring its history to life.
- Read more | What were houses like in ancient Rome?
Being new to the post, I am currently reviewing the interpretation across the site. I believe there are some new and relevant narratives in the story of the Roman Baths that need to be told: around identity, migration, multiculturalism, health and disability, to name a few.
What are your favourite items and insights about the roman baths?
As I have a condition called lupus, which can affect my joints and mobility, I have an interest in the hot springs and how the natural mineral water has been used for healing – particularly for rheumatic diseases. Medical writers in ancient Rome, such as Celsus and Galen, attest to the curative properties of bathing, while the Pump Room, which was built in the 18th century, became a fashionable place to drink the mineral water for health reasons.
My favourite objects are the curse tablets: prayers of Romano-British people asking the goddess Sulis Minerva for revenge for an injustice done to them. The messages usually related to something personal, such as the theft of everyday items like a cloak or gloves.
They were scratched into lead or pewter squares, folded or rolled up, and then thrown into the hot spring where the spirit of Sulis Minerva was believed to have dwelt. It is a privilege to be able to read these prayers – messages their owners probably never expected would be read 2,000 years in the future.
Is there a recommendation you would make to visitors?
The Roman Baths is an exceptional place, and unique in Roman Britain as a bathing and temple complex. Of course, visitors cannot help but be impressed by the scale and beauty of the centrepiece of the site, the Great Bath.
I recommend visiting on a cold and sunny morning to see the steam rising off the water. It makes for a magical experience – you can almost feel Sulis Minerva’s presence.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow a similar career route?
I would advise finding a course of study that suits their needs, as there are many routes into museums these days. It is important to get experience of the different functions of a museum (such as retail, marketing, community engagement, exhibitions, collections and events), and see how these interact with each other to make a memorable visitor experience.
- Read more | A timeline of Roman Britain
I’d also recommend they join a museum sector network to keep informed of the latest news and events – there’s so much information available virtually, from podcasts and e-newsletters to online conferences. The most fun advice I’d give, however, is to go and see lots of exhibitions and museums in person. It’s great inspiration!
Amanda Hart is the manager of the Roman Baths and Pump Room in Bath, Somerset. Built on the site of a hot spring, the baths were in use throughout the centuries of Roman rule in Britain. Today, the Georgian-era Pump Room is a restaurant where visitors can sample the water. Learn more here.
This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
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