Creighton J. Britannia. The creation of a Roman province

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to many people who have helped me in my research into the

Late Iron Age and Early Roman period: not least the Arts and Humanities

Research Board, whose support gave me time to write a substantial part of

this book. Colleagues at Reading have provided a great community within

which to discuss and play with ideas, I would especially like to mention Rich-

ard Bradley, Mike Fulford, Janet DeLaine, Ray Laurence and many of my

students over the years. I have had opportunities to test out some of the

ideas at papers given in many institutions, Leicester, Oxford, London, New-

castle, Reading, Southampton, and the audiences were always informative

and generous in their response. I am particularly grateful to Martin Millett,

Simon Esmonde Clearey and Mike Fulford who read various parts and drafts

of the book; they have saved me from many follies, and the book is very

much the better for it, though of course they have not always interpreted

the past in the same way. In the editorial process I would particularly like to

thank Frances Raymond for her literary guidance; and the team at Routledge

and The Running Head who saw the book through to production, especially

Richard Stoneman. Any errors which remain are entirely my own.

All references in the text follow the Harvard system, or are standard classi-

cal references to ancient texts.

The cover design was by Aaron Watson. Figures 2.2 and 2.4 are repro-

duced with kind permission of Colchester Museums; Figure 2.5 of the

British Museum; Figure 2.6 of Ray Laurence; Figures 4.1 and 7.9 of St

Albans Museums; Figure 7.3 of Ralph Isserlin; and Figure 7.8 of Sussex

Archaeological Society. Figures 6.1, 6.2 and 7.5 also contain some artwork

by Margaret Mathews. Finally, a much-shortened version of chapter 3 was

published as Creighton (2001a).

ABBREVIATIONS

CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1853–)

ICC Index of Celtic Coinage, maintained at the Institute of Archaeology

in Oxford, available at: http://athens.arch.ox.ac.uk/ coins/ ccindex.

htm (accessed 1 May 2004)

ILS H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin, 1892–1916)

RIB R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain,

vol. 1 Inscriptions on Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)

RIB 2 R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Brit-

ain, vol. 2 Inscriptions on Materials Other than Stone, seven fascicules,

1990–5, ed. S.S. Frere and R.S.O. Tomlin (Gloucester: Alan Sutton,

1990–5)

RRC M.H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (London: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1974)

VA R. Van Arsdell, Celtic Coinage of Britain (London: Spink, 1989)

xii

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

USED

Quotations from the following translations have been used and are duly

acknowledged:

Caesar, The Civil War, together with The Alexandrian War, The African War and The

Spanish War by other hands, translated by J. Gardner (Penguin Classics 1967)

Caesar and Hirtius, The Conquest of Gaul, translated by S.A. Handford with

revisions by J. Gardner (Penguin Classics 1982)

Dio, Roman History, vol. 7, translated by E. Cary (Loeb Classical Library

1926)

Diodorus Siculus, translated by C.H. Oldfather, vol. 3 (Loeb Classical Library

1939)

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, translated by L. Thorpe

(Penguin Classics 1966)

Livy, translated by T.G. Moore, vol. 8 (Loeb Classical Library 1949)

Livy, translated by H. Bettenson (Penguin Classics 1976)

Polybius, The Histories, translated by W.R. Paton, vol. 3 (Loeb Classical Library

1923)

Seneca, The Apotheosis of Claudius, translated by A. Perley Ball (New York:

Columbia University Press 1902)

Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, translated by J.C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library

1914)

Tacitus, Agricola, translated by H. Mattingley and revised by S.A. Handford

(Penguin Classics 1970)

Tacitus, Annals, translated by M. Grant (Penguin Classics 1971)

INTRODUCTION:

WRITING HISTORY

Cunobelin, ‘King of the Britons’, was dead. He had probably been dead

for a few years, but the political and military ambitions of the new Roman

Emperor, Claudius, were very much alive and he was desperate for a victory

to secure his new regime. So, in the early summer of AD 43, Claudius’ army

landed in Britain and rapidly swept through the southeast until they came

to their prize, Camulodunum, Cunobelin’s capital. Here the troops stopped

to await the arrival of the Emperor himself to lead the ﬁ nal entry into the

town as triumphant victor. The ﬁ rst step in the conquest of Britain had been

taken. Over the next few generations the Roman forces negotiated, battled

and fought their way across the island until much of it fell under the pax

Romana. During this period the names of several friendly monarchs are men-

tioned – Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus in the south of Britain, Prasutagus in

East Anglia, Cartimandua in the Pennines – their hazy role acknowledged in

paving the way towards Roman hegemony.

This is how the Roman conquest of Britain is often seen. Caesar may have

led a couple of expeditions to the island in 55 and 54 BC, but it was with

the arrival in AD 43 of the army, the key institution of the Roman state,

that we herald the beginning of Roman Britain proper. What I wish to do

in this book is comprehensively to blur this picture. All clear event and date

boundaries in history tend to provide conceptual ways to divide up time

easily and make our understanding of the past manageable, but nearly all

mask longer-term processes. 1066, the most memorable date in English his-

tory (Sellar and Yeatman 1930), may have witnessed the Norman invasion,

but institutional and cultural changes once attributed to it are now viewed

as being part of a much longer trajectory; just so with the Claudian invasion

of Britain. While it was probably the most dramatic moment in the conquest

of Britain, it was only one event which needs to be understood within the

longer-term political and military changes taking place in the ﬁ rst century

BC/AD. Unfortunately histories of ‘Britain’, the modern nation state, often

gloss over this in their construction of a story. The Roman conquest of Brit-

ain is not seen as a gradual process involving diplomacy and the piecemeal

opportunistic takeover of a multitude of separate kingdoms over a period

of a century and a half from Caesar to Domitian; instead it focuses upon

one date, one event, AD 43, with little else entering popular consciousness.

The Romans are foreigners who invade and take over. Britain is subjugated

within the framework of a new empire. Superﬁ cial history often neglects to

point out the British contribution to this process which smoothed the way

for integration, failing to acknowledge pre-existing links, friendly kings (or

collaborators?) and the British troops that joined the Roman army which

helped to subjugate other areas. The population of Britain was far from

being innocent subjugated peoples of an empire; it was rather a mixture of

individuals with a bewildering range of aspirations, many of whom found

an outlet through engaging with the power structures developing with this

new Empire, most of them in harmony with their community, but some also

no doubt acting at the expense of their neighbours. The British were not

all innocent victims in their own subjugation. It has always seemed to me

that our uneasy relationship with our Roman past is not too dissimilar from

current discourses about the relationship of Britain and continental Europe,

with British identity often being bound up in a rhetoric focusing more upon

two world wars, rather than Britain’s integration into a new European polity

(Laurence 2001a).

Writing about the past is a curious activity. All we can hope to do is to

reconstruct in our imaginations what occurred. Often those creations will

have more to do with our current concerns and ideological values than

with whatever might actually have happened. We study ‘Roman Britain’, but

‘Britain’ is in itself an ideological construct which has altered its meaning

signiﬁ cantly over the last 2,000 years. First it was the Roman name for an

island, then for the area which became a Roman province. When this prov-

ince was divided into four, only two had the epithet Britannia attached. Later

‘Briton’ gave identity to the Welsh and Scots in contrast to the Anglo-Saxons,

as new ethnic identities emerged in the migration period. Under the Tudors

and Stuarts the constituent kingdoms of the island were politically reuniﬁ ed,

resulting in a new Great Britain, which subsequently developed an Empire,

now the Commonwealth. Today ‘British’ has become a problematic identity

caught between devolution, European Union, and a complex association

with the one-time American colonies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the

way historians have constructed ‘Britannia’ in their imaginations has changed

signiﬁ cantly over time as the world around them has transformed itself.

The purpose of this introduction is to show how ideologically driven

our reconstructions of the past are – how our entire framework of think-

ing about things has been constrained by ‘received wisdom’ which may seem

timeless, but was not the wisdom of other ages. From here it will be possible

to start constructing a new imagined Roman Britain, or at least, my imagined

Late Iron Age and Roman Britain.

INTRODUCTION

Changing representations of Britain and Rome

(and Europe)

In recent histories of Britain, the story normally starts with Julius Caesar’s

visits to the island in 55 and 54 BC. These are usually treated in a pejorat-

ive way:

Caesar’s two expeditions to Britain are among the least important,

and certainly the least successful, of that conqueror’s career. In

the course of early British history, too, they were scarcely of great

signiﬁ cance. Brilliantly lit for us by Caesar’s own account, the two

excursions did little or nothing to alter the relationship between the

Britons and Rome. That was to come later and as a result of diplo-

macy, not invasion. Commercial and cultural contacts across the

Channel in later days were to do far more than Caesar’s campaigns

to bring Britain within the Roman orbit. Even the passage of Cae-

sar’s army through South-eastern Britain has left no certain trace for

the modern observer.

(Todd 1981: 15)

What often follows is a brief sketch of the archaeology of the island in the

following 97 years until the Claudian legions invaded properly and the prov-

ince of Britannia was created. This downgrading of Caesar’s achievement is

one of the things that I tried to contest in an earlier book on Later Iron Age

Britain (Creighton 2000). There, I attempted a rereading of the evidence that

saw two dynasties of Southern and Eastern Britain established as friendly

kings of Rome, closely tied to Augustus’ ideological project in the creation

of a new network of power, namely the Principate. In this version Caesar

had clearly and actively brought Britain within the Roman orbit. One of the

mechanisms for this, I suggested, was the practice of educating the sons of

kings in Rome. They were called obsides, a word often translated as ‘hostages’,

though that term now conveys a greater sense of peril and danger than was

probably the case. Perhaps fosterage conveys a more accurate description of

what was going on. The process incubated a link between the oligarchy of

Rome and the kingdoms at the edge of the Roman Empire. This last idea

was received either with a great deal of interest and support, or else with

rejection and hostility, rarely anything in between. It seemed I had struck a

nerve; some people wanted to keep imagining clear blue water between Brit-

ain and Gaul until the fateful loss of liberty under the Claudian legions, and

I was blurring that boundary. This set me investigating people’s ideological

background as they reconstructed the past. Why did they have such different

and strong emotional responses to it?

When I wrote about British obsides, I had had the naivety to imagine that I

was ﬂ oating a relatively new concept. Of course I had not. The idea actually

INTRODUCTION

had a very long history; indeed it was the dominant theme in the way that

Early Britain had been imagined from the twelfth to the eighteenth century.

However in the nineteenth century it rapidly seemed to disappear from Brit-

ish narratives of the past. Why? Its prevalence then, and suppression since,

appear to be a clear case of contemporary ideology inﬂ uencing the writing

of history, and tracing this change can help us place our own ideological

baggage in context and make us more reﬂ exive about how we reconstruct

the past.

Among the earliest narrative histories to survive was that of Henry of

Huntingdon (c.1129). At the time the Plantagenets held both sides of the

English Channel. Within a Norman worldview, northern Gaul and southeast

Britain were not foreign places but were part of a single territory. Domains

switched hands from one overlord to another through the processes of war,

marriage and even debt repayment (e.g. the Duke of Normandy lost his ter-

ritories to his fraternal creditor, the King of England, in the twelfth century,

after pawning them to raise money for the crusades). Henry, Archdeacon of

Huntingdon, imagined Britain to be part of the whole Roman world ever

since Caesar: ‘Augustus succeeded Julius Caesar and held the monarchy of

the whole world. He surveyed the entire globe and took tribute from the

Britons as from his other Kingdoms’ and ‘Tiberius, the stepson of Augustus,

reigned after him for 23 years, over Britain as well as over the other King-

doms of the whole world’ (Greenway 1996: 16). The notion of tributary

kingdoms was unproblematic in his day and age. The glory of the conquest

of Britain went to Caesar, not to Claudius or his successors.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1136) elaborated upon Henry’s brief history

a few years later (Thorpe 1966). His book contained a bewildering mix of

fantasy combined with genuine sources. In it he included the names of the

Eastern Dynasty, which he reconstructed as: Cassivelaunus, succeeded by

Tenvantius (Tasciovanus), then Cymbeline (Cunobelin) and ﬁ nally Guiderius;

all of which he derived from an early medieval king-list (Creighton 2000:

142). Here is Geoffrey’s representation of Cymbeline:

[He was] raised to royal eminence, a powerful warrior whom

Augustus Caesar had reared in his household and equipped him with

weapons. This King was so friendly with the Romans that he might

well have kept back their tribute-money, but he paid it of his own

free will.

(Geoffrey of Monmouth iv. 11)

So here in the Plantagenet world, where hostage taking and fostering was

commonplace, the idea of British princes being brought up in the court of

Rome was unproblematic and natural. After all, classical sources said that

British boys had been seen in Rome and that British kings had paid court

to Augustus (Strab. Geog. 4.5.2–3). This notion of British princes in Rome

INTRODUCTION

and of Cunobelin’s kingdom being intrinsically associated with the Princip-

ate was widespread, and these ideas were woven into narratives throughout

successive generations down to the late eighteenth century. Popular histories

such as Holinshed (1587), and more serious works such as Carte (1747) and

Barnard (1776), concurred.

Kymbeline or Cimbeline the sonne of Theomantius was of the

Britains made king after the deceasse of his father . . . This man

(as some write) was brought up at Rome, and there made knight by

Augustus Caesar, under whome he served in the warres, and was in

such favour with him, that he was at libertie to pay his tribute or

not . . .

Kymbeline, being broght up in Rome, and knighted in the court

of Augustus, ever shewed himself a friend to the Romans, and

chieﬂ ie was loth to breake with them, because the youth of the Brit-

aine nation should not be deprived of the beneﬁ t to be trained and

brought up among the Romans, whereby they might learne both to

behave themselves like civill men, and to atteine to the knowledge

of feates of warre.

(Holinshed 1587: chapter 18)

there was a continual intercourse between the people of Britain, and

the subjects of the Roman empire; the principal of the British nobil-

ity resorted frequently to Rome itself, and some of them were there

educated. The Roman publicans, settled here for collecting the cus-

toms of merchandize, had all the opportunities they could wish for

observing the nature, situation, and condition of the country.

(Carte 1747: 97)

Cunobeline . . . ascended the throne of power. This prince was

remarkable for possessing great talents, cultivated and improved by

an excellent education at Rome. He kept up a friendly correspond-

ence with the Romans; he subdued the Trinobantes and Dobuni,

for having joined the invaders of his country; and he coined money

to pay the duties imposed by the Romans on British merchandize

imported into Gaul.

About this period the Britons opened an extensive commerce

with Gaul. They became more polished, and their intercourse with

Rome, to which they sent their children to be educated, afforded

them an insight into its power and policy. Augustus beheld these

growing improvements with an eye of jealousy, and as presages of

future independency, besides, they paid no other tribute than a small

duty on merchandize; in all other respects they were free people.

The Roman emperor therefore resolved to compel the Britons to

INTRODUCTION

observe the treaty they had made with Julius Caesar, and to pay the

stipulated tribute, which had not been demanded for at least twenty

years.

(Barnard 1776: 17)

This unproblematic acceptance of the interrelationship of Cunobelin’s king-

dom and the Principate died away in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In its place Rome became distant from Britain, and in some versions Cuno-

belin switched to be anti-Roman. We can see this taking place by examining

the fate of Shakespeare’s play based on life at the court of King Cunobelin:

Cymbeline. By tracking changes in its performance history we can see how

attitudes to the past were changing in parallel to contemporary geo-political

events.

Shakespeare derived his inspiration from a blend of Holinshed’s Chron-

icles (1587) and a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1350s). The plot involved

sexual intrigue in Cymbeline’s court and included the usual collection of

wicked queens, banished nobles, a cross-dressing princess and general confu-

sion. The historical backbone to the plot came from Rome’s desire to have

her unpaid taxes settled. In the description of the court we have Roman

lords present and received warmly in Britain (despite the threats of war)

and we have Cymbeline reﬂ ecting kindly on his upbringing under Augustus,

recalling how the Princeps had even knighted him. The wicked queen and

stepmother, true to type, promotes discord and warfare and Rome is forced

to invade. Cymbeline’s army wins the day. However, there is a ﬁ nal twist: the

great god Jupiter appears to a soothsayer in a dream, prompting Cymbeline

to decide to pay the tribute anyway. The play ends with a joyful rapprochement,

with the British and Roman ensigns being processed in unity to the Temple

of Jupiter in the British capital, Lud’s town (Camulodunum, then thought to

be London).

This play was written shortly after the accession of King James VI of

Scotland to the English throne and was ﬁ rst performed c.1609. It was a time

when the English nationalism of Shakespeare’s earlier history plays was no

longer appropriate. James was attempting to secure treaties with European

powers, and, perhaps more importantly, he had another pet project under-

way: the union of England and Scotland. London at this stage was full of

Scots, and James would periodically descend upon Parliament to regale them

on progress with the Act of Union. In this context the theme of Cymbeline,

two former adversaries looking forward to their coming union, was entirely

appropriate. The parallels would have been lost on none of the audience.

The Roman invasion was set not in the southeast at Richborough or Chi ches-

ter, but at Milford Haven in South Wales – a bizarre location in our minds,

but to the contemporary audience this was where the last successful invasion

of Britain had landed, when Henry VII fought against Richard III, to found

the Tudor dynasty. So the play is a mirror of the creation of what was to

INTRODUCTION

become the new Great Britain, fostering harmony and union, admonishing

those who would seek discord and division.

Shakespeare’s plays were popular for a while, but fell out of favour during

the Restoration. When Cymbeline returned to the playhouses it was modiﬁ ed

to suit the changed political climate. In 1759 William Hawkins wrote a new

version of the story, but in his drama any thought of looking forward to a

union with Rome was missed out entirely. In this rendition Cymbeline ends

not by the king agreeing to pay the taxes to Rome, but with the complete vic-

tory of the British against their continental foe (Vickers 1976: 374). At the

time Britain was engaged in the seven-year war with France, while relations

with Rome and the papacy were at a low point. Not long after, David Garrick

performed in his own production of Shakespeare’s original play (1761) – but

here too, amendments were made to the text and the reconciliatory tribute-

paying ending was suppressed (Brown and Johnson 2000: 6).

It seems that from the late eighteenth century popular and academic rep-

resentations of Later Iron Age Britain and Rome were more interested in

ﬁ nding a sharp division between Britain and the continent. Mention of the

notion of British kings being brought up in Rome virtually ceases, and Cae-

sar’s achievements are now downplayed. This is the tradition in mainstream

narratives, which has remained to this day. The desire to create distance with

continental Europe is not surprising. Problematic relations with catholic

France grew worse with the Revolution. To add to this, Napoleon’s Empire

and Napoleon III’s resurgent imperialism later in the nineteenth century

both explicitly used Roman imagery in their representations of statehood

and monarchy. The modern nation state of Britain now stood in antithesis to

continental empire builders, whether Napoleon’s France or the newly uniﬁ ed

Germany of the late nineteenth century.

Those performances that did take place in Victorian Britain eschewed the

political message, and instead focused upon Cymbeline’s daughter, Princess

Imogen, as a model of feminine virtue. Since then, Cymbeline has been relat-

ively neglected, little performed in the twentieth century, and little studied

by Shakespearean scholars. As histories created distance between Britain and

Europe, so the play fell out of fashion; except in one distant part of the Brit-

ish Empire, namely India. Here Victorian imperial administrators were facing

a problem. They were ﬁ nding that the Christian education being promoted

in the newly established university colleges was not working because of the

successful retention of Hinduism by the majority of the students. To tackle

this, English literature was thought to be a potential medium for inculcating

British values as an alternative to Anglicanism, so Cymbeline found its way on

to the curriculum. The subtext of Britain’s incorporation into the Princip-

ate could be paralleled with India’s annexation into the British Empire. The

success of this tactic meant that Shakespeare rapidly became part of educa-

tional curricula both there and back in Britain, and before long knowledge

of the bard was mandatory for entry into the civil service and professions,

INTRODUCTION