Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

And Britain, the province of Britannia, was just a tiny part of this monarchy, which, at its maximum extent, stretched from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the River Euphrates in the east and from the moors of Scotland in the north to the sands of the Sahara in the south.

The myriad peoples inhabiting the Empire spoke many different languages and honoured many different gods. But there were also powerful, supervening forces of unity as well. First, there was the army. It was the Roman army which had conquered most of the known world for Rome and it was the army which kept it Roman. So everywhere in the Empire the imperial army performed the same drills; built similar forts and wore the same uniforms. Close behind the soldier marched the tax collector and the lawyer. So everywhere too the imperial bureaucracy, which was mind-numbing in its size, hierarchical complexity and expense, collected the same taxes; enforced the same Roman law on all free men and used the same Roman weights and measures.

In these and all other forms of governmental administration, one official language was employed: Latin – though in the Eastern Provinces Greek also enjoyed a high status as a second, as yet unofficial, language. Everywhere, therefore, anybody who aspired to be anybody had to speak, read and write one or preferably both of these languages, which also carried a common Classical literature and culture with them. The same went for the visual arts where, yet again, there was a single official style – the Roman version of Classicism – which was used for buildings, arte-facts and decoration throughout the Empire.

How would Britain, which the Romans disparaged as the ‘ends of the earth’, fit in with all this?

The first Roman expeditions to Britain were led by the proto-emperor Julius Caesar, in 55 and 54 BC. Born in c.102 BC. into a noble if impoverished family, Caesar soon proved himself as ambitious as he was multi-talented. And, in achieving his ends, he set in train the events which transformed Rome from a Republic – a commonwealth of free men, if bitterly divided by class and interest group – into the absolute monarchy of the Empire.

Caesar’s expeditions to Britain were an interlude in his conquest of Gaul. This established his reputation both as the power-broker of the Roman world and, thanks to his account of the conquest in his De Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), as a great, if self-serving, military historian. The first British expedition was little more than an armed reconnaissance raid. But in the second Caesar brought a substantial force of five legions with their auxiliaries, amounting to about 27,000 men. He defeated Cassivellaunus, and penetrated north of the Thames. Caesar never makes clear Cassivellaunus’s precise status. But the best guess is that he was tribal king of the Catuvellauni. There was some attempt among the warring British tribes to sink their differences with the appointment of Cassivellaunus as overall commander, and some success with guerrilla tactics. But, finally, what turned the day for Caesar was not the force of the Roman army but the weakness and divisions of the British coalition. Nevertheless, Cassivellaunus had held out long enough to stop Caesar capitalizing on his gains. Instead, after signing treaties, Caesar withdrew to deal with more pressing problems in Gaul. The Roman legions would not return to Britain for nearly a hundred years.

In 44 bc, ten years after he had left Britain, Caesar was made life-dictator, though he ostentatiously refused the crown itself. Months later he was dead of multiple stab-wounds from the daggers of former friends and foes alike. The assassination was intended to save the Republic. In fact, it administered the death blow. For the man who emerged victorious from the years of civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination was Caesar’s great-nephew by marriage and adoptive son and heir Octavius, later surnamed Augustus.

Unlike Caesar, Augustus was as subtle as he was ruthless. So, instead of treating republican institutions with contempt, he cherished them. Indeed, he loved them to death. The Republic was ‘restored’, with much fanfare, in 27 BC. But, one by one, Augustus took over all the powers which had been carefully separated under the republican constitution.

But what to call this monarchy that dared not speak its name? Augustus himself liked to be addressed as princeps – that is, ‘first (among equals)’. But he also used the style imperator or general. Since the command of the army was now the real key to power, his successors soon started to use imperator or emperor as their principal title. The title was deliberately not royal to avoid alienating residual republican feeling. But it betokened, as it still does, power that was greater, in both extent and intensity, than that of any mere king.

In ad 43, Claudius, one of the most historically minded emperors, determined to complete the task that Caesar had started. Claudius was eager to establish his warlike credentials, but could not afford to take any personal risks. The result was that this second Roman invasion of Britain became as much a piece of theatre as a military expedition, with its two initial leaders effectively acting the corresponding roles of impresario and general. They were Aulus Plautius, whom the Roman historian Tacitus called a ‘famous soldier’, and Narcissus, Claudius’s all-powerful secretary and an imperial freedman, who accompanied Plautius as a kind of political commissar. But the oddly matched soldier and the manumitted ex-slave proved an effective double act. Plautius, with his Gaulish auxiliaries, fought his way to the Thames, at which point Narcissus informed the emperor that it was time for him to set out. Claudius eventually arrived, complete with ceremonial elephants and a vast cavalcade – and stayed only sixteen days. But it was long enough for him to take part in a set-piece campaign masterminded by Narcissus. He crossed the Thames ‘at the side of his troops’; ‘caused the barbarians to come to hand in battle’ and entered Colchester, capital of the Catuvellauni, in triumph. He was repeatedly acclaimed imperator by the troops and received the submission of no less than eleven British kings.

And all this in barely more than a fortnight! The sense of theatrical artificiality was only heightened by the fact that, when he had returned to Rome, Claudius immediately ordered a repeat performance. He took part in an even grander triumph and laid on a re-enactment of the highlights of his campaign in the Campus Martius. The scenes included ‘the assault and sacking of a town’ and ‘the surrender of the British kings’. We don’t know who played the British kings. But Claudius, ‘presiding in his general’s cloak’, appears to have played himself.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of Britannia, the political situation was more complex. For in ad 43 the Romans, whatever the textbooks might say, did not conquer Britain. Instead, in the smallest of small colonial wars, they defeated a single dominant tribe, the Catuvellauni, and took over their territories in the south-east. Outside this area, other tribal kings continued to exercise their sway under Roman protection. Indeed, the Romans added to their number by setting up the renegade British prince Cogidubnus as king of a new, artificially created tribe called, significantly, the Regnenses (‘The King’s Folk’).

The reason for this apparent generosity was straightforward. British kings, who had started to issue Roman-style coins and to give themselves the Latin title of rex, had been the most effective agents of Romanization before Claudius’s invasion and, led by that accomplished quisling Cogidubnus, they continued to play the same role afterwards.

But not for long. For rebellions, like that of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, in ad 60, and deliberately fostered quarrels in the British royal families took their toll. The result was that, within thirty years, direct Roman rule covered most of southern Britain and was being aggressively extended far into modern Scotland.

There were to be no more kings in Britain till the Romans had gone.

With the coming of direct Roman rule, Romanization became a matter of public policy. It was pursued especially effectively by Agricola, who was governor for the unusually long period of six years from ad 78 to 84. Within a year of his arrival he had embarked on a major building programme, giving ‘private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and private dwelling houses’. He also provided a sophisticated Classical education for the sons of the British elite.

His campaign seems to have enjoyed quick success. As early as ad 79 or 81, an inscription was set up at Verulamium (St Albans) to commemorate Agricola’s role in the creation of a splendid new Forum or marketplace. And the British elite at least eagerly embraced Latin, the toga, hot and cold baths and banqueting while reclining on couches. ‘They called [it] civilization’, Tacitus sardonically observes, ‘when it was but a part of their servitude.’

Perhaps. But the prosperity brought to Britain by the pax Romana – ‘the Roman peace’ – was real enough: some six thousand miles of well-engineered, solidly metalled roads were built; towns grew and flourished; farmsteads expanded into substantial, luxurious villas; the spa-complex at Aquae Sulis (Bath) reached its greatest extent in the third and fourth centuries and the population of Britain rose to about four million, a figure that would not be reached again for a millennium.

But there was a price to be paid for this prosperity as Britain, like the rest of the Empire, became a target for raids by less civilized peoples beyond the frontiers. The Romans, borrowing a piece of racial snobbery from the Greeks, called such peoples ‘barbarians’. The word meant ‘non-Roman’ or ‘non-Greek’. But it quickly acquired overtones: of contempt, because the barbarians were uncivilized; and of fear because they were a threat to civilization. For the German tribes, in particular, had never accepted rule from Rome and not even Rome had been able to force them to bend the knee.

There were internal problems as well. All power, in theory and usually in practice, was in the hands of the emperor. He, as we have seen, was a god on earth, whose task it was to rule and defend the Empire. The duty of his subjects was to obey and pay their taxes. The idea that there might be any limit on what the emperor could do, or that his subjects should have a say in what got done, was simply inconceivable.

With no constitutional means of opposition, force was the only – and the frequent – resort. The result was that the later Empire was plagued with rebellions, military revolts and palace coups. Britain, with the strong garrison required by its exposure to barbarian raids, supplied more than its fair share of military usurpers who aspired to the purple. It was also, like other remote outposts of empire, used as a place of internal political exile. The exiles conspired with each other; suborned the troops and generally subverted the province from within.

All these problems came together in the single great crisis of ad 367, known as the barbarica conspiratio, ‘the Conspiracy of the Barbarians’. Britannia was attacked from three sides: by the Picts from the north and the Scots (who then inhabited Ireland) from the west, while the Saxons rampaged on the Channel coast of Gaul and perhaps of Britain too. The Roman generals were killed or overwhelmed; internal conspiracy was given free rein and the fall of the Roman regime seemed certain. But the arrival of an expeditionary force commanded by a general-cum-politician of genius, Theodosius the Elder, saved the day. The barbarians were seen off; military discipline restored and the leading traitors executed.

So Roman Britain lived to fight another day. But just how Roman was it? For some time now it has been gospel among historians that Britannia was a province like any other, as loyal to Rome and as fully integrated into Roman ways. But there are some important pieces of evidence which refuse to fit the theory. For instance, the only Romano-British author whose works survive, Gildas, always distinguishes the ‘Romans’ from the ‘British’ and is almost uniformly hostile to the former: the Romans, he writes, had seized Britain by guile rather than honest victory in the field and they had imposed a rule that was both alien – ‘so that [the country] was no longer thought to be Britain but a Roman island’ – and oppressive, with ‘taskmasters’ and ‘cruel governors’. Historians have explained away Gildas’s hostility by arguing that, though he wrote fluent Latin, he reflected the views of those outside the Romanized elite.

Maybe. But there also have to be doubts about the political, as opposed to the social, Romanization of the elite itself. For even they failed to participate in the imperial administrative machine. Provincials, of course, were not allowed to hold office in their native province. But they could – and, in the case of the Gauls, frequently did – hold office elsewhere. Not so the British. Why? Perhaps, then as now, the Oceanus Britannicus (the English Channel) was seen as a real barrier. Perhaps, bearing in mind the booming prosperity of Britain in the third and fourth centuries, they were simply doing too well at home to want to risk their luck abroad.

We shall, finally, never know.

Whatever the reason, however, the British then remained semi-detached from the Empire, just as the British now are semi-detached from the European Union. And it is as different, semi-detached and even semi-barbarous, that they appear in our final glimpse of Roman Britain. It comes from the poem De Reditu Suo (‘On his Return’) by the Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, who was returning home after serving as a high official in Rome. He travelled by sea from port to port and in one of these he met his friend Victorinus, the former vicarius (governor) of Britain. Namatianus then gives a pen portrait of Victorinus, which turns into a back-handed picture of late Roman Britain. Victorinus, the poet writes, had been a just and upright administrator, who had worked to win the affection of the British people despite the fact that they were so remote and primitive.

Why such language after four centuries of Roman rule? There is only one explanation. Victorinus and Rutilius, Gauls though they were by birth, saw themselves as Romans and heirs to the culture and Empire of Rome. The Britons, on the other hand, were different. They might be within the Roman Empire. But they were outside the charmed circle of Romanness. They were subjects and natives. They were not Romans.

Such, probably, is the background to the strange death of Roman Britain. For the Romans did not abandon Britain in ad 409 of their own volition. Rather, it seems, they were expelled by their discontented British subjects, who thought that they could defend themselves better than the decadent power of Rome. Such provincial risings had occurred before and Rome had always fought back. Moreover, the leaders of the British ‘cities’, as the old tribes had been renamed, soon had second thoughts and appealed to Rome for help. But this time the Emperor Honorius had more important concerns on his mind as in ad 410 Rome itself had been captured by Alaric the Goth. The city, inviolate for a thousand years, was sacked and the emperor’s own sister was among the booty carried off. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Honorius rejected the British appeal and ordered the cities to look to their own defences.

Britannia was now on its own. How would it fare?

II

With the break between Britain and Rome, all legitimate political authority – which had been vested in the emperor – came to an end. Who filled the vacuum we do not know. Perhaps the representative British Council of the cities, which had existed in the early third century with largely ceremonial functions, was revived as a working government, like the Congress of the Revolutionary American Colonies.

And, like the Revolutionary Congress, the Council’s first task was defence. For Britain’s barbarian enemies took advantage of the departure of Roman officialdom and the field army to redouble their attack. At first the British, long unused to defending themselves and with inexperienced and divided leadership, did badly. But they soon learned to use the formidable defensive works which the Romans had left behind. Each was targeted against a different enemy. Hadrian’s Wall defended the northern frontier against the Picts; a chain of forts along the west coast, from the Solway Firth to Cardiff, held off the Scottish raiders from their Irish homeland; while the massive fortifications of the Saxon Shore, which stretched from Branodunum (Brancaster) in the north to Portus Ardaoni (Porchester near Portsmouth) in the west, were built to protect the East Anglian, Kentish and Channel coasts from the Saxon pirates from across the North Sea. Even today, the remains of the Saxon Shore forts are impressive. The walls of Gariannonum (Burgh Castle) in Norfolk are ten feet thick and still stand some twenty feet high; similarly, the vast circuit of the walls of Porchester seem framed to enclose a substantial town rather than a mere fortress.

How could barbarian raiders overcome such obstacles? The answer, probably, is that they did not. Instead, like the Greeks before the walls of Troy, they were inadvertently let in.

As it happens, we have, albeit imperfectly, both sides of the story. The British perspective is given by Gildas’s The Ruin of Britain; the invaders’ by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede was a Northumbrian, born in 673 on the lands of the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth. At the age of seven, his parents sent him to St Peter’s to begin his education. And there he remained, first as student and then as master, either at Wearmouth or at the twin monastery of St Paul at Jarrow on the River Tyne, till his death in 735 at the then ripe age of sixty-two.

It would be hard to think of a career that was more circumscribed or less eventful. But that is to see it simply in physical terms. Instead, Bede was an adventurer of the mind and his terra incognita was the great library accumulated by his own patron and teacher, Bishop Benedict Biscop, at Jarrow. Bede explored this library thoroughly and meticulously. But he was no dry-as-dust scholar. Rather, as with those who go into the unknown, there was a touch of boldness about him, and a willingness to think afresh.

The result was that this provincial monk, who never stirred more than a few dozen miles from his place of birth, became responsible for a remarkable series of scholarly innovations which changed the intellectual life of Europe.

He was particularly interested in chronology – that is, the ordering of events in time. This is the basic tool of the historian, and to help himself and others to date events accurately he wrote two handbooks. They listed world events from ancient times to his own day and – in place of the chaos of different eras used then and for long after – they popularized what has become our standard means of dating by the year bc or ad. He was also, since he was unusually scrupulous both about naming his sources and quoting from them accurately, one of the pioneers of the footnote and the bibliography. He had a clear understanding of causation, and wrote in a plain style which was refreshingly different from – say – Gildas’s excitable rhetoric. Finally, Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people. And he applied all of this to his late masterpiece, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he finished only four years before his death. If the writing of history is one of the glories of England as a country and of English as a language (as I think it to be) then Bede, though he wrote in Latin, deserves an honoured place as the founder of a national tradition.

The British Gildas, like the Anglo-Saxon Bede, was a monk and he too wrote in Latin. But that is all the two men have in common. Otherwise, they and their works were as different as chalk and cheese. Gildas’s is a diatribe; Bede’s a sober history. The former is written in the heat and terror of events; the latter retrospectively, when the dust had begun to settle a little. But it is no emotion recollected in tranquillity; instead, Bede’s contempt for the vanquished British is as fresh as when the two peoples first met and took an instant and lasting dislike to each other.

And the British were by no means the only ones to detest the Saxons. The Saxons were part of the great diaspora of Germanic peoples, who first threatened the Roman Empire and then, in the fifth century, overran it. Their homeland lay in the north German plains between the River Elbe to the east and the River Ems to the west in a region still known today as Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). Here, the North Sea coast is flat and low-lying and even the hinterland rises only to a hundred-odd feet above sea-level. The result is that the frontier between land and water is uncertain: there are marshlands and fenlands; great rivers which are tidal for scores of miles and huge storms which sweep in across the coastal flats. And, above all, there is the sea.

Even now, the sea is dominant. Then, it was omnipresent, both as a threat and an opportunity: it forcibly inducted the Saxons into the arts of seamanship; it also drove them out, to search for plunder and for territories in softer lands to the west and south. Here they struck terror, along the coasts of Britain and Gaul, from the Wash to the Bay of Biscay. ‘The Saxon’, wrote the Gallo-Roman nobleman Sidonius Apollinaris, ‘is the most ferocious of all foes.’ Their ships were long, clinker-built and with high, curving prows, each carved with the image of a sea-serpent. The men on board were strange in appearance too to those accustomed to Mediterranean build and coloration. They were tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed and with their blond hair shaved at the front, ‘till the head looks smaller and the visage longer’. Neither the sea nor shipwreck, Sidonius continued, held any terrors for them; nor did the common rules of humanity. Instead, at the end of each summer’s raiding party, they would drown one in ten of their captives as a sacrifice to their savage gods.

The Saxons first appeared in British waters in about ad 285, when the admiral sent against them, Carausius, rebelled against Rome and set up the first seaborne British Empire. His regime issued a remarkable series of propagandistic coins, and it was probably he who had the strategic imagination to conceive of the defensive scheme of the Saxon Shore forts. Subsequently, after Constantius Chlorus had re-established Roman power in Britain, the forts became one of the great frontier commands of the Empire, under a high military official known as the Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxons, and their fellow Germanic tribesmen to the west, the Franks, also played a part in the penultimate act of Roman Britain, the barbarica conspiratio of AD 367.

There was another reason for the almost superstitious dread which the Saxons aroused: their unrepentant, aggressive and, it would appear, bloodthirsty paganism. For Rome and Empire had become Christian. This story too began in Britain, when on 25 June 306, in the great legion-ary fortress of Eboracum (York), the troops of Constantius Chlorus, who had just died, acclaimed his son Constantine as emperor. Constantine, known to history as The Great, completed the evolution of the Empire into an oriental despotism; his ‘conversion’ in 312 also began the transformation of Christianity from a savagely persecuted sect into the official religion of the Empire – including the province of Britannia. Basilica-like churches were built in the major British cities and British bishops took part in the Councils of the Church.

But, despite the Saxons’ ferocious credentials as heathens as well as barbarians, in the early fifth century it was the Picts and Scots who seemed the greater threat to post-Roman Britain. The result was one of the great miscalculations of history. Under the pressure of constant warfare against the Celtic invaders, the representative regime of the British cities had been quickly supplemented by the rule of military strongmen, who dignified themselves with the revived name of rex or king. And, in the middle years of the century, a certain Vortigern, whose name means ‘Mighty King’, may have established an overlordship over all Britannia.

Quite how the two forms of government, the royal and the representative, related to each other is uncertain. But, faced with renewed incursions from the Picts and Scots, both groups, according to Gildas, came together in the fateful decision. ‘Then all the councillors, together with that proud tyrant, … the British King, were so blinded’, Gildas reports, ‘that, as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting among them (like wolves into the sheep fold) the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations.’ The Saxons, Gildas continues, who arrived in ‘three ships of war’, ‘landed on the eastern side of the islands, by the invitation of the unlucky King’ and there made their first settlement. The terms of Vortigern’s invitation gave the Saxons ‘an allowance of provisions’, handed over each month, in return for their military support.

This sounds like the kind of arrangement which the Romans themselves had frequently made with their barbarian neighbours. For relations between Rome and the barbarians were not simply of hostility. They were more complex – and ambiguous – than that. Indeed, they bear a striking resemblance to our own, equally ambiguous, attitudes to immigrants and asylum seekers. On the one hand, we fear them and the threat they pose to our way of life and security; on the other, we recognize the vital contribution they make to our economies by doing the jobs our own people won’t. The barbarians came to play a comparable role for Rome. For the people of the Empire soon began to disdain the hardships of the soldier’s life. Instead, the best soldiers were drawn first from the hardy mountain tribesmen of the Balkans and later from Germany itself. Whole tribes were settled on the border territories of the Empire in return for military service. And individual Germans rose far and fast in the imperial armies until they started to dominate the senior ranks.

And it was in some such role as hired mercenaries that the Saxons first settled in post-Roman Britain. The arrangement was always risky. But in Britain it encountered the additional difficulty that the Roman structures of administration and taxation, which alone could guarantee a regular handover of supplies, had been dismantled – either deliberately by the Romano-Britons themselves, or consequentially following the drying-up of coin supplies from the Empire. The results were predictably disastrous as quarrels broke out over the sufficiency and regularity of the supplies. Gildas claims that the Saxons deliberately played up the quarrels. But they could equally have interpreted the irregularities as a sign of bad faith on the part of their hosts. At any event, the Saxons first threatened and then carried out reprisal raids. Soon, these escalated into an all-out war of conquest.

In the war, the initial Saxon settlement, as Gildas saw with the blinding clarity of hindsight, had handed all the advantage to the invaders. It acted as a Trojan Horse, getting the Saxons past the coastal fortifications which served as the first and chief British line of defence. It was also a beachhead, enabling the Saxons to bring over reinforcements as and when they pleased from their homeland. The Britons could not fight against these odds and their towns were sacked and their populations massacred from east to west of the island.

Gildas may have witnessed a late example of such a sack:

All the columns [he writes] were levelled with the ground by the frequent strokes of the battering-ram, all the husbandmen routed, together with their bishops, priests, and people, whilst the sword gleamed and the flames crackled round them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid spots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press.