ABSTRACT
The native religion in early Britain was for both men and women a combination of superstition, fear, awe, pragmatism and a modicum of faith. Because the gods were not anthropomorphic they could be anywhere, but particularly in trees, animals, birds, water or in the earth, and could cause havoc at any time among unsuspecting humans. Thus they had to be propitiated with offerings or rituals, knowledge of which resided in the priests or Druids. Such knowledge was power, and it is not surprising that the Romans saw the Druids as subverting the authority of the state, and as being a focus for resistance to Romanisation in Gaul and Britain. Their eradication was driven by politics, rather than religion. The Romans brought their own gods to Britain, but as their religion was an amalgam of Greek, Etruscan, oriental and native Roman deities, it was not difficult to absorb the religion of yet another culture, and to see it through Roman eyes. That the native Britons did not necessarily do so was unimportant, intent as the Romans were on creating another part of the Empire on the edge of the Ocean. With the Roman world edging closer to chaos in the third century, religions which offered hope, not in this world but in the next, appealed to many. So it was that Christianity, which had suffered several severe persecutions in the almost 300 years of its existence, was able in 313 to be free of the stigma of a proscribed religion and openly to attract converts to a religion which offered salvation and hope for life after death. Its future for the next millennium and a half was secured when, in 391-92, the emperor Theodosius I closed the temples and banned all pagan cults. Christianity became the religion of the State.
