Conclusion

The works examined above have been explored through a chronological study based upon the four overlapping themes of civility/ Romanization, the walling out of humanity, Roman incomers, and ruination, emphasized through a reading of the sources to explore how the discovery of objects and sites has helped to inform a number of contrasting interpretations that went in and out of fashion. A number of more local and fragmented tales have also been addressed in passing and it is evident that a very different account could have been articulated if I had drawn more directly upon such ideas. Tales, such as those of Onion the Silchester Giant, Graham’s creation of a breach in the Antonine Wall, King Arthur and his ‘O’on’ at Camelon in central Scotland and the activities of the devil at Rodmarton, provide information about how local people interpreted the physical remains of the Romans in Britain. The focus on elite tales in this book should not detract from the potential of local myths, but a thorough study of such material remains to be undertaken. Instead, this book has emphasized stories that have been told about the pre- Roman and Roman history of Britain that served to develop relevant national and imperial tales. The significance of the civilizing of the ancient Britons drove a particular approach to the ancient sources during the early seventeenth century that emphasized the passing on of Roman civility to people of England (or Lowland Britain). From this point of view, the ruined Roman Walls projected the territorial limit of civility, beyond which were the lands of barbarians. Towards the end of the century, a new interpretation arose that placed emphasis on the Roman settlers, their ‘stations’, and roads, reflecting the contemporary military aspect of society while envisaging England (or Lowland Britain) as the inheritor of Roman civility. This military conception was redefined and updated during the succeeding centuries as an analogy for the extension of state control over the Scottish Highlands and later for the exploration, documentation, and domination of territories in India and elsewhere.

‘A colony so fertile’

In A Specimen of a History of Oxfordshire, the Reverend Thomas Warton reflected on the significance of the Roman pavement at Stonesfield (Oxfordshire) and explored the two main themes which structure chapters three and four: he writes of Roman settlers who migrated with their families to Britain but suggests that wealthy and well-connected Britons might have built villas like the example uncovered at Stonesfield. From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the debate about the nature of society in Roman Britain drew upon these contrasting images to explain the character of the Roman occupation of southern Britain. Certain writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had developed the idea of the passing on of civility from the Romans to the British, which could be used as a source of patriotic reflection. There was less confidence in this idea during the eighteenth century, when influential works on the Walls and the northern stations promoted a primarily military interpretation of Roman sites in the south. In the introduction to his volume of 1793, Roy presented a thoughtful assessment of contemporary understanding of Roman Britain and emphasized its military nature. Following earlier examples, he divided the monuments of the Roman empire into two types: the public buildings—the temples, amphitheatres, and baths well known to British gentlemen from their visits to Italy—and the military sites. Roy emphasized that, with regard to military remains of Britain ‘perhaps no quarter of their vast empire, not even Italy itself, furnishes so great a variety; and many of them exceedingly perfect’. By contrast, in reflecting on public buildings, he states that ‘Britain affords very few vestiges of any consequence’. Indeed, it is true that, by the late eighteenth century, there was very little published evidence for public buildings to compare with the extensive evidence for the military sites of southern Scotland and northern England. Roy argued, ‘neither is it probable that the Romans ever executed many of those costly edifices in this island’. At the time Roy was writing (c.1773), little excavated evidence had been found for public buildings or ornate architecture anywhere in Britain.

‘Made and not born civill’

This chapter reviews the emergence of civility in Britain under Roman tuition, through writings and images, with a particular focus on the historical and geographical works of William Camden and John Speed, English antiquarians whose influential accounts helped to transform understanding during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Their works are placed in the context of their time by considering contemporary writing that addressed colonial issues and also a number of plays that referred to the ancient past. How these comprehensions of native civility fared in the new political circumstances leading up to the end of the seventeenth century is also addressed. The pre-Roman and Roman population of Britain took on a particular significance in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This related to changing ideas about English (and British) identity in the context of the rediscovered classical writings, and to the intellectual assessment of the value of such concepts in the context of overseas ventures in Ireland and America. New understandings of national identity explored ancient accounts of Britain, setting them in the context of dominant ideas about classical Roman character, themselves derived from ancient writing; these defined the Roman as a complex amalgam of civilized and barbaric, cruel and cultured. A particular issue emerging from this understanding of the British past is emphasized: that Roman conquest and control led to the transfer of ‘civility’ to the savages or barbarians of southern Britain. The increasing focus on classical Rome and ancient Britain by scholars in Elizabethan and Jacobean society could not be satisfied by the narrative accounts presented by the classical authors. these texts were lacking in information about issues that were significant to antiquaries at this time, the new focus on pre-Roman and Roman Britain both motivated and drew upon the results of the search for the material remains of these people in the countryside of Britain. The initial growth of interest in Roman Britain took place at a time when Rome was viewed negatively and this influenced how ideas about the ancient past were articulated. From the time of Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s and during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth (1558–1603), classical Rome was often regarded with ambivalence in England because of its associations with the contemporary city.

‘The Roman occupation of Britain and our own occupation of India’

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of significant social change, with the industrialization of society and a massive increase in population, but there was no sudden transformation of ideas about Roman Britain. During this period, significant new archaeological finds came to light as a result of development associated with the industrialization of society, including the excavation of quarries, the construction of sewers, canals, and railways, while deep ploughing located further buried remains in the countryside. Writing in 1849, Charles Tucker suggested that the scale of development since the mid 1820s had contributed ‘so extensively to more certain knowledge of the habits and manners of the early occupants’ of Britain. Improvements in public transport resulted in a wider popular interest in the past, with the creation of national and regional archaeological societies, including the British Archaeological Association, which held its first meeting in 1844. These new organizations held meetings at which antiquaries could discuss archaeological discoveries, while the published proceedings disseminated knowledge. The realization of the antiquity of the human race brought about a serious and sustained challenge to the biblical story of creation during the middle of the nineteenth century. Gradually, with the developing knowledge of geology, ‘prehistory’ was seen to represent a great depth of time and this made it possible to conceive of a chronologically based understanding of the ‘primeval’ past. Understandings of Roman Britain, however, were slower to change, since they were based on more firmly established roots derived from centuries of study of classical texts, artefacts, and sites. Nevertheless, important discoveries helped to formulate new ideas. The period from the 1780s to 1820 was highly significant with the impressive architectural remains discovered at Bath and at a number of Roman villa sites, demonstrating the wealth of some elements of society in Roman southern Britain. The context for reflection upon these archaeological remains was transformed through the actions of British collectors in the Eastern Mediterranean who, from the 1840s, brought home classical monuments and artefacts for display in the British Museum. A renewed focus of interest in ‘the Roman Wall’ developed in the mid nineteenth century, while significant new work was undertaken on the buried Roman remains at London, Cirencester, Silchester, and Verulamium.

A wall to separate the barbarians from the Romans

This chapter explores the ways in which Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall were interpreted from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, while also addressing the discovery of the Roman military ‘stations’ of northern Britain. In the context of debates about the unification of England and Scotland, the Walls were commonly used to explore the differing identities of contemporary populations. Writing to a friend in 1739, Sir John Clerk reflected on the meaning of the Roman fortifications of northern England and southern Scotland, observing that: ‘’Tis true the Romans walled out humanity from us, but ’tis as certain they thought the Caledonians a very formidable people, when they, at so much labor and cost, built this wall . . .’ A Scot himself, Clerk’s musings on the purpose of the Picts’ Wall contains a basic interpretational dichotomy, contrasting the exclusion of civility with the scale of northern valour. This chapter assesses the way in which these two ideas were used to explore the contemporary significance of the Roman military fortifications, providing a justification for programmes of surveying and publication. It also assesses how the remains of Roman camps, forts, and military ways that were recognized and planned from the end of the seventeenth century, came to be used to inform eighteenth century military strategy, embodying knowledge relevant to the colonization and control of the Scottish Highland population. The associations with ancient Roman parallels drawn upon at this time derived from the nature of the classical education of the upper classes and the contemporary political context. Antiquity was familiar through the reading of classical texts, a staple element in the education of all gentlemen. The Roman parallel emphasized an idealized notion of virtue and civic patriotism but also stressed ideas of taste, learning, and civic virtue which validated the status of the aristocratic ruling elite. In this context, it was logical that Roman military monuments were seen as providing useful lessons for scholars, landed gentlemen, and military men.

Introduction

This book examines the impact of the discovery of physical evidence for Roman Britain between the late sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. My earlier work, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen, explored how the Roman past of Britain was articulated as an aspect of ‘imperial discourse’ in British late Victorian and Edwardian society, how the Roman history and monuments of Britain were used to construct an imperial ancestry for contemporary Britain. The Roman empire, and Roman Britain in particular, were drawn upon to provide powerful contrasts and comparisons between the superpowers of their respective ages, drawing out morals and lessons for the contemporary imperial age. This book seeks to address the value of ideas derived from Roman Britain in the construction of British nationhood and in the context of empire-building, but with a far longer chronological perspective. Before the later sixteenth century, people in Britain had thought and written about the Roman past, but conventional wisdom suggests that it is only from this time that a self-critical and conscious appreciation of the classical writings that addressed Britain emerged. It is also from this time that the value of past objects and sites started to be recognized. In studying the ways that objects and remains from the pre-Roman and Roman past were received, we shall see that the increasing comprehension of the significance of ancient objects was itself a result of the gradual acceptance of the authority of the classical texts that referred to pre-Roman and Roman Britain. Knowledge of the culture and history of ancient Britain prior to this time was communicated through a series of mythical tales that presented a heroic picture of the ancient past. For the English, this ‘old British history’ presented what Philip Schwyzer has called a ‘grand and sprawling narrative’, derived mainly from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, c.1136). These powerful ideas related the initial peopling of these islands to Brutus and his followers who had fled the sack of Troy. During medieval times, various associated stories had been elaborated around mythical and semi-mythical ancient rulers of Britain, including Cymbeline and Lear.