Inside the Roman walls are the ruins of a medieval keep, gap-toothed and jagged and louring. William the Conqueror’s army landed here in 1066. Later, his half-brother Robert held it along with the Rape of Pevensey, a wedge of its hinterland. In the 1190s, Richard I paid for building work. Later, a stone-built bailey was constructed, and it held out for over a year when besieged by Simon de Montfort’s forces in 1264. In the fourteenth century it belonged to John of Gaunt; in the fifteenth, Henry V imprisoned his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, here. Under Elizabeth I, a gun emplacement was erected to ward off Spanish invasion. During the Second World War, the castle was refortified. A blockhouse for anti-tank weapons was built in the Roman west gate. Pillboxes were slotted in among the ruins. They were carefully constructed from the same flint as the rest of the castle, and so are inconspicuous. Look hard enough, though, and you will see the slits of machine-gun posts, moments of modernist rectilinearity among the collapsed angles of ancient masonry.
I think of Roman Britain and its curious bequest to us: how it has become a place where we may play out our uncertainties and anxieties about the perils of empire; a place where we might, if we choose, consider a meaning for Britain that complicates, and long pre-dates, the national boundaries and identities that are now so strongly reasserting themselves. I think of Roman Britain above all as the place where these islands were begotten in writing. In a landscape that vibrates with stories, where every crag and moor, city and suburb, wasteland and industrial tract has been written into being, the Romans were the first to mould the land in prose. If it is to medieval literature that we owe the idea of Britain as a busy and productive and domesticated land, a ‘fair field full of folk’, then it was the Romans who first made it wild, a land of sudden mists and treacherous marshes, a territory of mountains and impassable rivers. A land as ferocious as its people.
As I wandered about the ruins of Pevensey, the village was preparing for a celebration, putting up a stage in the castle precincts and warming up a barbecue. A trunk road throbbed, out of sight. I walked across the levels, where a solitary cuckoo marked time, to the Martello towers by the grey and corrugated sea.
Notes
(RIB = The Roman Inscriptions of Britain. See Bibliography, here.)
Chapter One: Kent and Essex
• Page 5 epigraphs: Solinus, 22.1; Shakespeare, Richard II, II, i; Brenton. This is the first line of The Romans in Britain, which was first produced in 1980. • Page 6 ‘Terrified by the situation’: Caesar, 4.24. • Page 6 ‘many ages since absorpt by the ocean’: Stukeley, 1776, p.127. • Page 7 ‘sluggish and heavy’: Tacitus, Agricola, 10. • Page 7 Britons had close links with their neighbours across the Channel: Caesar, 4.20. • Page 7 ‘ultimosque Britannos’: Catullus, 11, 11–12. • Page 8 ‘toto divisos orbe’: Virgil, Eclogues, 1.66. • Page 8 the Cassiterides: Herodotus, Histories, 3.115. • Page 9 Diodorus Siculus on Britain: the Library, 5.21 ff. • Page 11 Roman road turns out to be Iron Age: Pitts. • Page 12 Cassius Dio: only books 36 to 60 (inclusive) remain. The rest exists as fragments, or otherwise ‘epitomes’, or abridgements made in the medieval period. For Roman Britain, the most important figure here is Xiphilinus, a Byzantine monk, who in the 1070s made an epitome of books 46 to 80, and who is the main authority for books 61 to 80 (including the events after the invasion of Britain by Claudius). • Page 12 ‘imperium sine fine’: Virgil, Aeneid, 1.279. • Page 14 Richborough in the First and Second World Wars: see Butler; Grenville. • Page 14 ‘exo tes oikoumenes’: Cassius Dio, 60.19 • Page 19 ‘By laying all the circumstances together’: Morant, p.12. • Page 21 Colchester’s chariot track: on the archaeology, see especially pp.1344 ff. in the report by Pooley et al.
Chapter Two: Norfolk
• Page 25 epigraph: The Tragedie of Bonduca, 1.1. • Pages 25–26 Tacitus on Caratacus: Annals, 12.33–8. • Pages 27–28 Tacitus’s account of Boudica: ibid., 14.29-37. • Pages 32–33 Horace’s Ode 1.37, ‘Nunc est bibendum’, on the defeat of Cleopatra. • Page 33 Cassius Dio’s account of Boudica, History of Rome, 62.1–6. • Pages 33–34 Holinshed, 4.12 • Page 36 Elgar and Caractacus: I am grateful to the participants in the University of Bristol’s interdisciplinary Caractacus Day, held on 18 March 2012, for their penetrating thoughts on Elgar’s Caractacus; in particular to speakers Tim Berringer, Richard Hingley and Ellen O’Gorman. • Pages 36–37 On the composition of Caractacus: Moore, p.230. • Page 37 ‘I made old Caractacus stop as if broken down’: letter of 21 August 1898, quoted in ibid., p.238.
Chapter Three: London
I am grateful for help with this chapter to Jenny Hall, formerly of the Museum of London, who generously walked me around the Roman city; and to Roy Stephenson, head of archaeological collections at the Museum of London. • Page 43 epigraphs: Camden, ‘Midle-sex’. Here, and throughout, page numbers for Camden are not given. Readers are advised to consult the searchable online text at www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/. Macaulay, p.453 • Page 44 ‘copia negotiatorum et commeatuum maxime celebre’: Tacitus, Agricola, 14.33. • Pages 44–45 on the heads in the Walbrook Stream: Geoffrey of Monmouth, A History of the Kings of Britain, 5.5. • Page 46 ‘great Plain of Ashes and Ruins’: Wren, p.267. • Page 46 ‘the most remarkable Roman Urns’: ibid., p.266. • Page 46 ‘Having rummaged all the Ground thereabouts’: ibid., p.296. • Pages 47–48 Penelope Lively’s description of the bombed-out city comes at the very end of her memoir. • Page 48 on ‘the new ruins’: Macaulay, pp.453–4. • Pages 53–54 Roach Smith’s unpublished diaries are held in the British Museum.
Chapter Four: Silchester
I am grateful to the editors of the Guardian for allowing me to adapt material from the article ‘Re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth’ (2 April 2011) in the latter part of this chapter. • Page 60 epigraph: Propertius, 4.10.25–8. • Page 62 Boudica on the foodstuffs of the Britons: Cassius Dio, 62.5. • Page 62 Isle of Wight, as well as twenty hill forts: Suetonius, Vespasian, 4. • Pages 62–63 ‘Agricola gave private encouragement’: Tacitus, Agricola, 21. • Page 64 Stukeley on Silchester: Stukeley, 1776, p.178. • Page 64 ‘sometimes surprizd the whole College’: quoted in Haycock, p.40. • Page 65 ‘a mighty conceited man’: Lukis, vol. 73, p.170. • Pages 70 and 72 Novels readable by anyone from nine to ninety; ‘I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain’: Sutcliff interviewed by Raymond H. Thompson, 1986, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/sutcliff.htm. • Pages 70 and 71 ‘I don’t write for adults, I don’t write for children’; ‘Fortunately, I have got a very good memory’: Rosemary Sutcliff interviewed for the Independent by Giselle Green, 18 April 1992.
Chapter Five: Wales and the West
• Page 75 epigraph: From Hardy’s A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork. • Page 75 ‘It lieth low near merry England’s heart’: Wilfred Owen, ‘Uriconium: An Ode’. • Page 75 ‘Hurry, Harold, hurry’: quoted in Jon Stallworthy’s biography of Wilfred Owen. • Page 76 Charles Dickens wrote up his visit to Wroxeter in an article called ‘Rome and Turnips’, for All the Year Round magazine. • Pages 78 and 80 Quotations from Owen’s letters: Owen’s correspondence can be found in full in Owen and Bell. • Page 80 Wheeler’s memories of Housman are recorded in Wheeler, 1955, p.29. • Page 80 Wheeler’s memorial address by Sir Max Mallowan: quoted in Hawkes, p.9. • Pages 80–81 Wheeler’s taste in women: ibid., p.10. • Page 81 I am indebted to Dr Lydia Carr for her generosity in allowing me to read her unpublished DPhil thesis on Tessa Verney Wheeler, which was an invaluable resource in the writing of this chapter. It has since been published by Oxford as Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two. • Page 82 J. N. L. Myres’s memories of the dig at Y Gaer: quoted by Hawkes, pp.90–1. • Page 82 Sir Flinders Petrie’s letter to Mortimer Wheeler: quoted by Carr, p.76. • Page 84 South Wales News reports the Wheelers departure: quoted in ibid., p.80. • Page 85 ‘Caerleon is of unquestioned antiquity’: Gerald of Wales, p.114. • Page 86 Verney Wheeler’s to-do list: ibid., p.93. • Page 88 Mortimer
Wheeler discovers the ‘minimi’: Wheeler, 1955, p.86. • Page 90 the Daily Mail on Verney Wheeler at Verulamium: Carr, p.188. • Page 90 ‘a satiety of Roman things’: Wheeler, 1955, p.91. • Page 90 William Wedlake’s recollections of Maiden Castle: quoted in Hawkes, p.168. • Page 90 Wheeler’s account of learning of Tessa’s death: Wheeler, 1955, pp.50–1. • Page 91 ‘the magic of the great hill’: Carr, p.288. • Page 91 Wheeler’s description of the ‘massacre’ at Maiden Castle: Wheeler, 1943, pp.62–3. • Page 91 The graves are no longer thought of as a ‘war cemetary’: see Sharples, pp.124–5: ‘[Wheeler’s] vivid description of the sack and slighting of the hillfort, followed by the hasty burial of the dead is not altogether consistent with the evidence on the ground.’
Chapter Six: Bath
• Page 93 epigraph: from Carter. • Page 95 ‘There once many a man’: Alexander. • Pages 95–96 On the benefits of the waters: Guidott, p.131; Stukeley, 1776, p.146. • Page 96 Soft-porn Bath: the reader is referred to Anon, 1700. • Pages 96–97 Jan Morris – from her essay on Bath in Among the Cities. • Page 97 ‘a grand place of Assembly’, Wood, 1749, p.232. • Pages 97–98 Leland in Mearne, 1768, p.62. • Page 98 Sylvia’s suicide: Wood, ibid., p.446. • Page 98 ‘a silly pack of stuff’: Lukis, vol. 73, p.337. • Pages 98–99 Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bladud, The History of the Kings of Britain, p.81. • Page 99 ‘skipping from one remote Part of the Island to another’: Wood, 1749, p.14. • Page 99 Bladud/Abaris riding on a sacred arrow: ibid., p.33. Abaris is in Herodotus’s Histories, 4.36; Herodotus claims he will ‘make no mention’ of this fantastic story. • Page 99 Bladud and Zoroaster: Wood, 1749, p.36. • Pages 99–100 Bladud and the Druids, ibid., p.137. • Page 100 Strabo on Druids: Geographia 4.4, 4–5 • Page 100 Suetonius on Druids: Claudius, 25.5. • Page 100 Sibbald on flint arrowheads: see Piggott, 1989, p.9. • Page 100 Stukeley’s Druidic temple in his garden: Lukis, vol. 73, p.208. The description comes in a letter to Samuel Gale, of 14 October 1728. Stukeley goes on to remark that the temple is near his treasured Roman altar, where once he buried his wife’s miscarried foetus, ‘about as big as a filberd’ (hazelnut), ‘with ceremonys proper to the occasion’. • Pages 100–101 ‘struck dead upon the spot’; Stanton Drew as a model of the planets: Wood, 1749, p.148. • Page 101 ‘furnish’d the various Sorts of Building’: Wood, 1741, p.74. • Page 101 the Romans communicate architecture to the Britons: Anderson, p.27. I am grateful to Jacqueline Riding for the steer to Anderson, and to Mowl and Earnshaw’s biography of Wood. • Page 101 ‘If we were to scrutinize’: Wood, 1741, p.221. • Page 102 the idea of a link between Stanton Drew and the Circus was put forward by Mowl and Earnshaw, in their fascinating biography of John Wood the elder. See especially p.179 ff. • Page 103 ‘whether pagan or Christian’: see Tomlin, ‘The Curse Tablets’, in Cunliffe, 1988, p.232. • Page 103 theft of a cloak: ibid., p.198. • Pages 103–104 eating, drinking, defecating or urinating: ibid., p.160. • Page 104 the goddess can debilitate as well as cure: ibid., p.102. • Pages 104–106 the whole story of Edward Nicholson here is indebted to Tomlin, 1994. I feel sure that his article, a splendid conjunction of razor-sharp scholarship and vivid pen-portrait, is the best (or nearest to) fun that can be had with the otherwise dead-serious journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
Chapter Seven: Hadrian’s Wall
• Page 111 epigraphs: W. Hutton, p.312; Collingwood Bruce, p.40; Long, p.16. • Page 114 farmers complain about disruption caused by tourists: H. Davies, p.160. • Page 118 Warburton’s manuscripts ‘unluckily burnd’: quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–90, vol. 59. • Page 118 Warburton, p. iii. • Page 118 travel ‘with me, though by your own fire-side’: W. Hutton, p.vii. • Page 118 ‘feeds upon withered husks’: ibid., p. vi. • Pages 119–120 destruction of the wall at St Oswald’s: ibid., p.202. • Page 120 beef at the Twice Brewed: ibid., p.230. • Page 120 Stanwix, a beauty and fleas: ibid., p.285. • Page 121 the first ‘pilgrimage’: Collingwood Bruce. • Page 122 Revd John Auden (1860–1946): he appears as the ‘Rev Prebendary Auden, Church Stretton’ in the subscribers’ list in Bushe-Fox. He was the author of The Little Guide to Shropshire, a copy of which W. H. Auden owned. John Auden first published the book in 1912 and revised it (1918) while he was a serving soldier. • Page 122 ‘fearfully badly’; ‘an uncomfortable pause’: see Mitchell, p.522, who notes that ‘the haunting quality of the blues melody was such that Peter Pears in later life was still able to sing the first few bars’. • Page 123 Britten’s music … was thought lost: see the Britten-Pears Foundation website, http://brittenpears2.org/?page=news/index.html&id=57. Guardian news story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/feb/27/topstories3.arts. The newly rediscovered song was performed, with simple piano accompaniment, for a profile of Auden made for The South Bank Show, broadcast on 18 February 2007, directed by John Mapplebeck. My thanks to Matthew Cain and Siobhan Panayiotou for tracking down a DVD. • Page 124 ‘Roman Wall Blues’. Colin Matthews also very kindly arranged for a recording to be made of the Britten song with his new piano accompianment, sung by Mary Carewe, with Huw Watkins. It is available to download on the NMC website: http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/roman-wall-blues • Page 127 Had Auden been writing his radio drama today: Bowman (p.79) makes the connection between ‘Roman Wall Blues’ and the tablets; as does Beard, 2006. • Pages 127–128 on finding the first Vindolanda tablet: R. Birley, p.32. • Page 129 the Vindolanda tablets have been digitised – with images, translations and commentary – at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/. Most of the individual tablets I have mentioned are browsable in the ‘highlights’ section. • Page 130 Appendix Vergiliana/Georgics: Bowman, Thomas and Tomlin.
Chapter Eight: Scotland
• Page 137 epigraph: Skene, p.82. • Page 137 over 200 sites north of Hadrian’s Wall: according to Fraser Hunter, principal curator archaeology, Iron Age, Roman and early history at the National Museum of Scotland. I am indebted to Dr Hunter’s paper given at the Roman Society Septimius Severus day at the British Museum, 26 November 2011. • Page 139 Agricola advances north: Tacitus, Agricola, 23ff. • Page 139 The shift from Graupius to Grampius: Keppie, ‘Legacy of Rome’, p.8. The edition in question was published by Franciscus Puteolanus in 1476. • Page 140 ‘Perdomita Britannia et statim omissa’: Tacitus, Histories, 1.2. • Page 140 a stage on which his subject could be the Roman he needed to be: this passage is indebted to the analysis of the Agricola at the end of Woolf, 2007. • Page 141 Wade’s bridge: Breeze, Roman Scotland p.108, compares the Roman and Hanoverian experiences of Highland Scotland. • Pages 141–142 ‘Marvel at this military road’. The Latin inscription, replaced in 1932, runs:
MIRARE
VIAM HANC MILITAREM
ULTRA ROMANAE TERMINOS
M PASUU CCL. HAC ILLAC EXTENSAM
TESQIS & PALUDIB’ INSULTANTEM;
PER RUPES MONTESQ: PATEFACTUM
ET INDIGNANTI TAVO
UT CERNIS INSTRATAM
OPUS HOC ARDUUM SUA SOLERTIA
ET DECENNALI MILITUM OPERA
AN AER X 1733 PERFECIT G WADE
COPIARUM IN SCOTIA PRAEFECTUS
ECCE QUANTUM VALEANT
REGIA GEORGII 2 AUSPICIA!
• Page 142 William Roy – a factor’s son from Lanarkshire: Hewitt, p.14. Her introduction and first chapter provide a vivid account of the production of the Military Survey of Scotland in the wake of the 1745 uprising. • Page 142 William Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland (1747–55) can be viewed online at http://maps.nls.uk/roy/index.html. • Page 143 ‘Military men … in reasoning’: Roy, 1793, p.iv. • Page 146 the hero Gryme: Skene, p.82. • Pages 146–147 Alexander Gordon on Croy Hill and Bar Hill: Gordon, pp.136–7. • Pages 148–149 Fordun on Arthur’s O’on: Skene, p.46. • Page 148 ‘rotundam casulam’: I am indebted to Darrell Rohl of the University of Durham, whose unpublished MA dissertation, which he kindly allowed me to read, brings together accounts of Arthur’s O’on from the twelfth century onwards (p.53 ff.). • Page 149 ‘dedicated
to Romulus the parent’: Stukeley, 1720, p.27. • Page 149 ‘some may think we have done the Caledonian Temple too much Honour’: ibid., p.19. • Page 149 ‘a Place for holding the Roman Insignia’: Gordon, p.31. • Page 150 Stenhousemuir football club: an observation made by Lawrence Keppie (personal communication). • Page 150 ‘No other motive induced this Gothic knight’: from the minute book of the Society of Antiquaries, 21 July 1743. • Page 150 ‘I like well your project’: letter from Gale to Clerk, 20 August 1743; ‘barbarous demolition’: copy, in Clerk’s hand, of a letter to William Stukeley, 16 July 1748. Both in the National Archives of Scotland, GD18/5018 and GD18/5027. • Page 151 ‘occasioned by eating too much cabage broth’: Clerk, p.146. • Page 151 ‘my publication of Arthurs Oon’: letter from Stukeley to Clerk, 21 March 1724/5, National Archives of Scotland, GD18/5027. • Page 152 ‘full of compliments, as usual with foreigners’; ‘I press’d Mr Bertram to get the manuscript’: Stukeley, 1757, pp.12-13. • Page 153 ‘He gives us more than a hundred names of cities’: ibid., p.15. • Page 154 ‘which I shewed to my late friend Mr Casley’: ibid., p.13. • Page 154 ‘scrupulously exact’, Hatcher, p.vii. • Page 154 ‘be useful to distinguish this ridge of mountains’: Conybeare and Phillips, p.365. • Page 155 ‘more or less good idiomatic English’: see Woodward, vol. 220, pp.620 and 445. • Page 156 ‘his silk-dyer father’: J. A. Farrer, p. 26, has a biographical sketch of Bertram. • Page 156 ‘The World oftener rewards the Appearances of Merit: see Bertram, 1751, pp.9, 13, 15. • Page 156 Bertram’s contribution to linguistics: Linn, p.190.
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