ABSTRACT
The Britain Caesar knew from his own observations and those of his surveyors was limited to the Thames Estuary, northern Kent and the woods and marshes of the Lea Valley and perhaps some of the land immediately to the west. The advent of the Roman traders and the establishment of their posts led to more extensive and detailed knowledge, and Rome began also to seek alliances with distant tribes. There were fugitive princes like Tincommius of the Atrebates, who could have given Roman officials first-hand accounts of their tribal territories and the lands beyond. The cautious Plautius would have sought out all the available information and must have had a reasonable idea of the geography of southern Britain. He could even have planned the precise extent of the conquest with the chief advisers of the Empire. What emerges from the subsequent military dispositions is the idea of a strictly limited conquest, with the creation of a new province, the western boundary of which was the Humber Estuary, the Trent, the Warwickshire Avon, the lower Severn, the Bristol Channel and the Exe. This line follows the natural divide formed by the limestone escarpment into which the rivers have cut their valleys.1 It also marks a cultural boundary, seen most dramatically in the distribution of the British coins2 since, apart from strays accounted for by fugitives and Roman soldiers, they are found only to the south and east of this line and the tribes beyond never produced coins of their own. If this can be used as a measure of social or economic advance it is a significant watershed. Rome did not particularly want peoples within her Empire who would not be converted into respectable citizens.
