THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 196

The Roman Occupation of the British Isles

13-2. The Roman Occupation of the British Isles

During the early years of the conquest we can, indeed, trace garrisons at one or two places, such as Cirencester. But, as the conquest advanced, it was seen that the lowlands needed no force to ensure their peace, and the troops were pushed on into the hills, beyond Severn and Trent. Eighteen or twenty forts were dotted about Wales, though many of these seem to have been abandoned in the course of the second century, as having become superfluous through the growing pacification of the land.

A much larger number can be detected in Derbyshire, Lancashire, the hill-country of Yorkshire, and northwards as far as Cheviot: Hadrian's Wall, in particular, was principally defended by a series of such forts. We cannot, however, give precise statistics of these forts until exploration has advanced further: it is doubtful not only how far the known examples provide us with a fairly full list of them, but, still more, to what extent all the forts were in occupation at the same time and to what extent one succeeded another.

The troops which garrisoned these military posts were Roman, in the sense that they not only obeyed the Roman Emperor but were in theory and to a great extent in practice, even in the later days of Roman Britain, recruited within the Empire. The legionaries came from Romanised districts in the Western Empire; the auxiliaries, naturally less civilised to begin with but drilled into Roman ways and speech, were largely drawn from the Rhine and its neighbourhood: some probably were Kelts, like the native Britons, others, as their names on tombstones and altars prove, were Teutonic in race. To what extent Britons were enrolled to garrison Britain, is not very clear; certainly, the statement that British recruits were always sent to the Continent, chiefly to Germany, by way of precaution, seems on our present evidence to be less sweepingly true than was formerly supposed.

From the standpoints alike of the ancient Roman statesman and of the modern Roman historian the military posts and their garrisons formed the dominant element in Britain. But they have left little permanent mark on the civilisation and character of the island. The ruins of their forts and fortresses are on our hillsides. But, Roman as they were, their garrisons did little to spread Roman culture here.

Outside their walls, each of them had a small or large settlement of womenfolk, traders, perhaps also of time-expired soldiers wishful to end their days where they had served. But hardly any of these settlements grew up into towns. York may form an exception: it is a pure coincidence, due to causes far more recent than the Roman age, that Newcastle, Manchester, and Cardiff stand on sites once occupied by Roman auxiliary forts. Nor do the garrisons appear to have greatly affected the racial character of the Romano-British population. Even in times of peace, the average annual discharge of time-expired men, with land-grants or bounties, cannot have greatly exceeded 1,000, and, as we have seen, times of peace were rare in Britain. Of these discharged soldiers by no means all settled in Britain, and some of them may have been of Keltic or even of British birth. Whatever German or other foreign elements passed into the population through the army, cannot have been greater than that population could easily and naturally absorb without being seriously affected by them. The true contribution which the army made to Romano-British civilisation was that its upland forts and fortresses formed a sheltering wall round the peaceful interior regions.

Behind these formidable garrisons, kept safe from barbarian inroads and in easy contact with the Roman Empire by short sea passages from Rutupiae (Richborough, near Sandwich in Kent) to Boulogne or from Colchester to the Rhine, stretched the lowlands of southern, midland, and eastern Britain. Here Roman culture spread and something approximating to real Romanisation took place. The process began probably before the Claudian invasion of 43. The native British coinage of the southeastern tribes and other indications suggest that, in the 100 years between Julius Caesar and Claudius, Roman ways and perhaps even Roman speech had found admission to the shores of Britain, and this infiltration may have made easier the ultimate conquest.

After the conquest, the process continued in two ways. In part it was definitely aided by the government which established here, as in other provinces, municipalities peopled by Roman citizens, for the most part discharged legionaries, and known as coloniae: these, however, were comparatively few in Britain. Far greater was the automatic movement. Italians flocked to the newly opened regions — traders, as it seems, rather than the labourers who form the emigrants from Italy to-day: how numerous they were, we can hardly tell, but such commerical emigrations are always more important commercially than for their mere numbers. Certainly a far more notable movement was the automatic acceptance of Roman civilisation by the British natives.

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