ROMAN BRITAIN, 43 - 410 AD

•·       Britain was an afterthought. It was not about economics. Rome's rulers were already the richest men in history. Nor was it about military security. The Channel was as effective a frontier as one could wish for.

•·       The invasion of Britain was a war of prestige.

•·       In 54 B.C. Julius Caesar had invaded Britain with the aim of conquest.

•·       Britain was mysterious place for the Romans.

•·         For the Claudian invasion, an army of 40,000 professional soldiers - half citizen-legionaries, half auxiliaries recruited on the wilder fringes of the empire - were landed in Britain under the command of Aulus Plautius.

•·       Resistance continued elsewhere.

•·         Bitterness against Roman oppression had driven Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, into a revolt that came close to expelling the invaders.

•·       Under the provincial governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Romans occupied northern Britain, reaching what is now called the Moray Firth in 84 AD.

•·       Here, and across the empire, the Romans were drawing symbolic lines across the map. On one side 'civilisation', on the other 'barbarians'. On the ground, the lines were made real in stone, earth and timber.

•·         The Roman army was also stationed in the west and the north - in lonely auxiliary forts in the Welsh mountains, the Pennines, or the Southern Uplands of modern Scotland; or in one of the big three legionary fortresses at Isca Silurium (Caerleon), Deva (Chester) and Eboracum (York).

•·       Here, through some 350 years of Roman occupation, the army remained dominant.

•·         Change was limited. The land was impoverished and sparsely populated, and the army took what little surplus there was, so there were few of the trappings of Romanised life.