INTRODUCTION

From the earliest contacts of Caesar’s invasions to the break-up of the Western Empire, the history of Rome’s involvement with the island of Britain spans a period of nearly five centuries. It is not the purpose of this Introduction, however, to attempt a survey of those years – these already exist in much greater detail than would ever be possible here – but rather to examine the sources, be they literary, epigraphic or numismatic, that form the substance of this book and to indicate some of the problems and difficulties encountered in their use. Despite the volume of material upon which our understanding of Roman

Britain is based, it remains an inescapable fact that this is but a fraction of what once existed. Unlike the historian of more modern times, for whom archival material exists in relative abundance, the student of antiquity is separated from his topic of enquiry not only by at least a millennium and a half but more importantly by a major cultural upheaval and a virtual collapse of learning in which many of the accumulated records of the classical world ceased to exist. In the case of literary works, what remained was then subjected to a further and protracted period of attrition in which survival became largely dependent upon the ability of their contents to inspire continued interest in the monks who laboured in the scriptoria of medieval monasteries. For it was only through their periodic and painstaking copying and recopying of manuscripts over the centuries that writers as diverse as Caesar, Claudian, Tacitus and Gildas exist for us today. Needless to say, however, the interests of the medieval monk were not always identical to our own, and our ability to study the tedious ruminations of this or that late grammarian is scant compensation for the loss of many major texts. In the case of inscriptions and coins, on the other hand, their survival has been more dependent upon pure chance, when concealment, either deliberate or accidental, has preserved them in whole or in part from the ravages of reuse or wanton destruction. Faced, then, with a body of evidence which, for all its size, is incomplete, we

have to recognise and accept that there are times, whole decades indeed, when our ignorance of events is almost total, caused by the failure of hardly any record to survive. The extent of our losses we see, for instance, when an author refers fleetingly to matters dealt with more fully in works or books no longer

extant: the reference by Tacitus to the military prominence of Venutius (§71) or that by Ammianus Marcellinus to the Areani in the reign of Constans (§262). In other cases, the source may survive but only in tantalisingly truncated form: the fragmentary books of Dio Cassius or the Epitomes of his histories produced in the eleventh century by the Byzantine monk Xiphilinus. Here too we can include the many damaged inscriptions such as the tombstone of Classicianus with its two missing lines (§80), or the even more fragmentary Agricola-inscription from St Albans (§106). By way of contrast, other periods of the province’s history appear endowed

with a veritable superabundance of material either in the form of multiple surviving sources or the existence of a single work characterised by the depth and detail of its contents. The danger here is that we are tempted to compensate for what we lack elsewhere by attributing to such periods an emphasis and importance that is out of proportion to their real significance. The career of Agricola might well be a case in point. The prominent position enjoyed by his six-year governorship, its virtual domination of the closing decades of the first century AD, rest entirely upon the biography written by his son-in-law Tacitus. Remove that and he sinks to the same level of obscurity as many ostensibly eminent governors whose achievements, for want of extant records, we cannot assess with any degree of certainty. A somewhat similar problem arises for those periods in which sources of

information are less than common: the danger of our uncritically accepting what in more favourable circumstances might well be dismissed as garbled conjecture on the part of the author. This becomes particularly evident at the very end of Roman Britain when we are faced by a writer such as Gildas, attempting to reconstruct in the sixth century the breakdown of Roman rule that had taken place 100 years earlier and for whom historical truth was less important than the religious significance perceived within events. At the same time, however, we need to be aware that by rejecting too readily what Gildas says we may equally pass over the germ of truth that lies within his narrative. In addition to those general considerations of distorted emphasis outlined

above, distortions which arise primarily from the incompleteness of our evidence, others exist that are more specific to the individual type of source material. These we shall see as we deal with the sources themselves.