Throughout its history, the British Isles have always been a land of many

languages and many cultures, some older than others. With a presence in the
isles that extends far into the mists of prehistory, the Celtic Britons predate the
mounted Norman knights of Duke William, the Saxon Fyrds of Alfred the Great,
the Great Heathen Army of Ivar the Boneless, and the Legions of Emperor
Claudius. As this litany of conquerors might suggest, the Celtic Britons have
spent much of their history in a steady retreat, However, there is so much more
to their history than sorrow and loss. In this special long-form documentary, we
will do justice to the fascinating society and history of the Celtic peoples of
Britain, covering everything from their earliest origins to the wars with Rome, to
the departure of the Empire, the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, and the mythical
age of Arthur. Consider liking, sharing, commenting and subscribing, it helps
immensely. As we’ll see, Britain has been conquered and colonised many times
in history by various peoples, who usually arrived in force and brought about
epic clashes of civilisations. Who are the Celts? In the modern day, the Celtic
languages and cultures of Britain are highly marginalized. The insular Celtic
tongues, once the predominant forms of speech across the entire British Isles,
today survive in daily use only on its extreme westernmost fringes. Irish and
Welsh are faring the best, with a relatively healthy population of speakers in the
hundreds of thousands, but the fates of Scottish Gaelic, Cornish and Manx are
fraught with far more doubt. Breton, a Celtic language brought to France’s
northwestern peninsula by British migrants in the early middle ages, also faces a
bleak future. However, modernity has brought about a renewed interest in Celtic
identity. Today, Celtic heritage is a point of pride for people not just in the
British Isles but for tens of millions of people in Canada, America, Australia and
even South America. Perhaps nowhere is the romantic appeal of Celticism more
evident than in the corpus of modern fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien, a proud
Englishman, once remarked that “Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior
language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful.” Tolkien’s passion for
all things Celtic is reflected in the social fabric of Middle Earth. Sindarin, the
language of the Gray Elves of Beleriand, was constructed primarily from Welsh
vocabulary, while influences from Brythonic and Gaelic folklore are ubiquitous
throughout the Silmarillion. Later giants of the genre like The Witcher’s Andrzej
Sapkowski and Wheel of Time’s Robert Jordan continued this Celtophilic trend.
Consequently, fans of modern fantasy, even ones who don’t know a thing about
Celtic history or culture, have subconsciously learned to associate
quintessentially Celtic motifs with the most ancient, mysterious and magical
aspects of the literary worlds they love. All of this serves to labour the point that
in this day and age, “Celtic” identity is widely considered a thing to be
treasured, which makes it ironic that for all of ancient history, it never existed.
Today, the word ‘Celtic’ enjoys widespread popularity as an ethnic identifier.
However, when used in a historical context, the term becomes far more muddy.
Although the countless tribes who dominated the forests and hills of Britain in
the immediate centuries before the rise of Rome are posthumously labelled as
‘Celts,’ there is little evidence they considered themselves to be part of anything
resembling a single ethnic group. Theoretically, if one acquired a time machine,
travelled back to the Britain of the st century BC, and roamed the land speaking
to the chariot-riding locals in the various dialects of ancient Brythonic, said
locals would introduce themselves not as ‘Celts,’ an exonym first introduced in
the writings of an Ancient Greek, but as warriors of the Catuvellauni, Iceni,
Brigantes, Dumnonii, and so on. However, it cannot be denied that these
enigmatic ancient peoples shared common religious practices, social customs,
and closely related languages. Greek and Roman writers, a certain Julius Caesar
among them, noticed as much, while the material artifacts left behind for
modern archaeologists to find also suggest a strong sense of cultural continuity
between the so-called ‘Celtic’ regions of the ancient world. So, in the words of
Professor Barry Cunliffe, a rockstar of European archaeology, professional
historians who refer to the regionally diverse yet ultimately related peoples of
iron-age Britain as ‘the Celts’ are “not being entirely outrageous.” Origin of the
Celts in Britain Having now covered the disclaimer to end all disclaimers, let's
wind back the clock, and travel deep into the fog of prehistory, where the story
of Britain’s oldest peoples begins. The Celts may be the oldest surviving culture
in Britain, but they were not its first. The presence of homo sapiens on the Isles
dates back at least , years. Agriculture and animal husbandry began developing
during the Neolithic period, around years ago. These days, the stone age is a
byword for a primitive, but the Britons of this era were anything but. They lived
in sophisticated sedentary dwellings, had vibrant styles of artistic expression,
and were capable of transporting massive, -ton standing stones over vast
distances to create giant monuments, the most iconic of which you’ve probably
heard of. Around the nd millennium BC, the Bronze Age came to Britain.
Bronze is an alloy composed of two metals copper and tin, and as it so
happened, Cornwall and Devon possessed some of the largest reserves of tin in
Europe. As such, Britain became the Silicon Valley of the Bronze Age world,
the key terminus of a trade network with tendrils that spread across huge swaths
of Europe and the Near East. Through intermediary peoples along the Atlantic
coastline, British tin made its way as far as the great Levantine cities of Tyre and
Sidon. Although the Britons of the stone age and early Bronze Age left plenty of
cultural belongings behind for archaeologists to analyze, they were not literate
societies, so ultimately, we know precious little about how they identified
themselves and what language they spoke. However, most historians agree they
were probably not yet Celtic at this time. This begs the question, when, how, and
from where did Celtic culture arrive in Britain? The traditional narrative on the
origins of the Celts is the Hallstatt theory, which postulates that Celtic culture
originated in the first millennium BC in the heart of central Europe, from where
it spread on the backs of ceremonial horse-drawn wagons throughout the
Continent, eventually reaching Britain. However, in some circles, the Hallstatt
theory has recently fallen out of fashion in favour of a newer theory labelled ‘the
Atlantic Celts.’ This hypothesis argues that the origins of the Celtic language
and culture lie not in Central Europe but along the continent’s west coast. Let us
set the scene It was around BC, and the Mediterranean World was on fire.
Marauding Sea Peoples, whoever the heck they were, were devastating the
coastlines of Egypt, Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire, bringing those
civilizations to their knees and collapsing the once-sophisticated trade networks
which connected them. Meanwhile, in the West, things were comparatively
hunky-dory. Much as it had been in the early Bronze Age, the Atlantic littoral
during this time was a maritime highway upon which trade thrived. Between the
pyrite deposits of western Iberia, the gold and copper mines of Brittany and
Ireland, and the tin deposits of Cornwall, there was plenty of wealth to go
around for those communities that faced the endless sapphire horizon. Between
the th and th centuries BC, artifacts along the Atlantic coastline start becoming
more homogenous. From Iberia to Ireland, the presence in the archaeological
record of nearly identical looking ‘Carp’s Tongue Swords,’ concentric-patterned
round shields, ritual war wagons, and large cooking cauldrons suggests the
emergence of a culturally uniform social caste of warrior-elites whose way of
life revolved around martial prowess and ritual feasting. Moreover, the fact that
these artifacts are often found in the context of religious offerings thrown into
lakes, rivers, and bogs indicates the emergence of a shared belief system
involving the appeasement of the Chthonic gods of the earth. Finally, it is likely
that as this shared values system evolved, so too did a lingua franca a common
form of speech through which it was spread. Thus, as the theory goes, the
culture and language that spread along the Atlantic coastline in the Late Bronze
Age was the earliest form of the Celtic “package.” This would make the Celts of
Britain not the westernmost extremity of a migratory expansion which began in
the Alpine mountains but part of the original coastal heartland from where the
culture originated. When exploring the ethnogenesis of Celtic Britain from a
modern archaeological lens, there is an overall lesson to take away. Since the
ancient Celts had no written records of their own, historians have traditionally
been overwhelmingly reliant on the writings of Greek and Roman authors for
literary accounts of their society. From that perspective, Britain was always at
the edge of the world, a land of barbarians too far away from the centers of
civilization to be relevant to anything or anyone. However, as we have now
seen, this was hardly the case. For millennia before the Roman legions set foot
on the island, Britain was a dynamic cultural hub and vibrant commercial
entrepot with an influence that projected across thousands of miles. In the words
of Barry Cunliffe, the Celts of Britain and their Bronze Age ancestors were “far
from the distant, benighted periphery to the bright and beautiful Mediterranean,
but part of a cohesive cultural zone capable of spectacular development built on
home-grown innovation.” The th century BC marks the twilight of the Bronze
Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. During this time, we can assume that the
Celtic culture which had developed on the Atlantic coast began an eastwards
march into inland France, Iberia, southern Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and
other places the Celtic culture is known to have thrived in the immediate
centuries before the rise of the Roman Empire. In these places, Celtic warrior
elites came into contact with other wealthy, sophisticated societies, such as the
Greeks via the colony of Massalia, the Etruscans of Northern Italy, and the
nomadic Scythian horselords. The cultural influences of these foreign peoples,
along with the fantastic wealth that establishing exchange networks with them
brought, resulted in the development of a dynamic new Celtic ‘cultural package’
known today as the La Tene Culture. Developing in four separate tribal centers,
principally along the Moselle and Marne rivers, La Tene soon expanded across
much of Europe. Lasting from around to BC, the La Tene period is the most
iconic era of ancient Celtic history. Its artwork is what the conventional mind
considers quintessentially Celtic, featuring cauldrons, drinking vessels,
weapons, shields, armour and jewellery characterized by stylistic spiral patterns.
It was also during the La Tene apex that the Celtic world came crashing
headlong into the Greco-Roman one. Indeed, it was during these centuries that
ancient Celtic warbands sacked Rome, invaded the Balkans and Greece, settled
in Anatolia, then got uno-reversed by Rome in a centuries-long staggered
conquest which ultimately ended with Vercingetorix throwing his arms at Julius
Caesar’s feet, and, more relevant to this story, Emperor Claudius pointing his
legions across the channel to Britain the last Celtic Frontier. But now we are
getting ahead of ourselves. Culture of the Celtic Britons Before we launch into
the arrival of the Imperial Eagle on Albion’s shores, let us first take a brief pause
from the march of history and paint a picture of what society in iron age Britain,
as part of the La Tene Cultural world, would have looked like immediately
before the Roman Conquest. First, let us talk about the linguistic landscape.
While there was likely once a single proto-Celtic language, by the late iron age,
it had diverged into several related yet mutually unintelligible forms of speech.
Throughout most of what is now England and Wales, a language called
Common Brittonic was spoken. This tongue was probably mutually intelligible
with the Gaulish language spoken across much of continental Europe around the
same time. Echoing across the rocky crags of the Scottish highlands was the
Pictish language, a tongue so poorly attested to that historians debate whether it
was a dialect of common Brittonic, its own distinct Celtic language, or even a
non-Celtic language entirely. Finally, spoken in Ireland was the lilting prose of
Gaelic. This language formed a separate branch of the Celtic language family,
which Celtiberian, another divergent Celtic language spoken in Spain, was
probably also part of. The linguistic diversity of iron-age Britain is still reflected
in the Celtic languages of today, which are split into two branches, the
descendants of Common Brittonic Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, and the
descendants of old Gaelic Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. Society in iron age
Britain was highly decentralized and divided up into a patchwork of tribal
territories. Generally speaking, the landscape was dominated by elevated
hillforts, where a local chieftain and his cadre of warrior elites kept a watchful
eye over the handful of surrounding farming communities. Indeed, while the
Ancient Celts are often, somewhat rightfully, portrayed as an extremely
bellicose people, it should be noted that after accounting for a Chieftain, his
warrior aristocracy, and a small caste of specialized crafts and artisans, % of
Celtic society consisted of unglamorous, yet economically crucial subsistence
farmers. After all, everyone, mighty warlords included, needed to eat. Still,
Celtic Briton society was no doubt a warlike one, with social prestige directly
linked to feats of strength and victories won in combat. As such, fighting
between communities, while probably mostly small in scale, was routine and
ritualized. Warfare among the iron-age Britons was probably not conducted all
that differently from how their Gaulish brothers on the continent went about it.
All in all, facing these warbands across the battlefield was a horrifying
experience. Both Roman and Greek records report on the terrifying nature of the
Celts, claiming that before any engagement, they would roar and brag,
performing ritualistic war dances while bellowing a deafening din out of their
boar-headed war trumpets. All this may seem juvenile to the modern observer,
but if one puts themselves in the shoes of a superstitious plebeian fresh off an
ancient olive farm or the slums of Rome, one can appreciate the nigh
supernatural terror that a mob of screaming, dancing, horn-blaring muscle-men
must have had. One thing that set British warriors apart from their Gallic
kinsmen during this era was their mastery of the war chariot. A sleek, two-
wheeled horse-drawn vehicle, the Chariot had become a mainstay throughout
the Celtic world during the early La Tene period, replacing the cumbersome
four-wheeled ritual wagons which had served as symbols of power since the
Bronze Age. However, by the time the continental Celts were duking it out with
the Greco-Roman world, the chariot had fallen out of use as a battlefield unit in
favour of mounted cavalry. Yet in Britain, it persisted as an instrument of war
and would later confound the likes of Julius Caesar, whose legions had never
encountered such vehicles until their foray into the foggy isle. Another aspect of
Celtic Briton society that puzzled the strictly patriarchal Romans was the
apparent normalization of women wielding positions of political or military
power. Exactly how much political capital and social equality women had in
both ancient Britain and the rest of the Celtic world is still a matter of debate
among modern historians. However, the Roman writer Tacitus, in his book
Agricola, remarked that ‘the Britons make no distinction of gender among their
leaders.’ However, it should be noted that Tacitus made that remark to
contextualize the story of a certain specific warrior Queen, whose story will
absolutely be covered later in this documentary. Greek and Roman writings and
sculptures have given us a romanticized image of the average Celt as a towering,
red-maned noble savage sporting a manly mustache while painted head to toe in
terrifying war paint. In reality, the average Ancient Briton would not have been
much taller than the average Roman or Greek. While fashion differed from
region to region, iron-age Celts tended to dress conservatively in their day-to-
day life. Men generally wore long-sleeved tunics and baggy trousers woven
from flax and wool. Women tended to wear long dresses, while both sexes were
often draped in cloaks decorated with colourful plaid patterns rendered from
natural dyes of copper, berries, plants and stale urine. Personal grooming was
highly important to the Celts. For example, both sexes were said to meticulously
and painfully pluck all their body hairs. Additionally, there is some truth to the
stereotypical depiction of the thick warrior’s mustache, depicted often in both
Celtic and Greco-Roman iconography, it was likely a common fashion among
Celtic men and was believed to be a sign of manhood & virility. Celtic warriors
were also said to have washed their hair in a mixture of slaked lime and water,
which stiffened it into stiff white spikes. Jewellery was a common accessory
among the upper classes. The brooch, a fastener for a cloak, was a remarkably
enduring characteristic of Celtic fashion for centuries. Bracelets and arm rings
were common, fashioned in the ornate swirling style characteristic of La Tene
art. Celtic jewellery often had cultural or spiritual significance. The Torc, a
weight metal neck-ring, was perhaps the most important ornament. Beyond its
value as a symbol of status and rank, it bore a deep religious importance, said to
bestow the protection of the Gods to whoever wore it. The Celts of Britain
shared much of their physical characteristics with their Gaulish cousins on the
continental mainland, but one thing unique to the islands was the practice of
ritual tattoos. According to Roman accounts, the ancient Britons rendered a
bluish dye from the isatis tinctoria flower called woad, which, when applied to
their flesh, was said to provide magic protection in battle. Let us now touch
upon the complex topic of religion. The Celtic Gods did not belong to an
ordered pantheon like the Greco-Roman Olympians, and spirituality across the
Celtic world was not uniform. Today we know of over Celtic deities, most of
which were the patron of a single tribe or a local god associated with a certain
area. However, there were also Gods who were prominent across the Celtic
world. These would include the thunder-wielding Taranis, Maponos the God of
Youth, Belenus the Sun God, Cernunnos the Horned One, Epona the Horse
goddess, and Toutatis, the war-like pan-Tribal protector. Ancient Celtic religion
was a highly ritualized, deeply sophisticated belief system, which in many cases,
was facilitated by a class of professional priests. It is here we come to perhaps
the most iconically enigmatic aspect of Celtic society The Druids. Today, the
Druids conjure up a popular image of mysterious, long-bearded elders in white
robes, harvesting mistletoe in ancient woodlands. However, far from being
simple forest sages, Druids wielded massive political influence, often serving as
peace-makers and diplomats on behalf of their chieftains, mediating legal
matters, serving as healers, and heading education in their tribe. Training in
order to become a druid involved an intense -year regimen in which a dedicant
had to memorize a massive array of oral histories, religious lore, medicinal
knowledge, astronomy, and of course, religious rituals and divination practices.
Much of our knowledge about Druidic practices can be attributed to the writings
of the man, the myth, the legend himself Julius Caesar. According to him, the
Druids hosted a pan-tribal meeting each year in the Forests of the Carnutes, a
sacred ground in Northern France where major political or religious issues were
settled between tribes. However, the center of Druidic studies, the Harvard of
the Druidic world, so to speak, was located in Britain. Indeed, the sacred isle of
Anglesey, located in what is now Northern Wales, would later be the stage of
the violent climax of Rome’s relations with the Druidic order. One of the key
duties of a Druid was to officiate sacrifices to the Gods, sacrifices which often
were of a human nature. Human sacrifice is a common taboo associated with
Ancient Celtic religion and is often described by Roman writers as a core part of
Celtic practice. According to the Roman Author Lucan, different Gods called for
different forms of ritual slaughter. Toutatis’ victims were drowned in a vat of
water, while Taranis’ called for men to be beheaded or burned alive in giant
effigies of straw. Human sacrifices often involved divination rites, the Greek
historian Diodorus attested to a practice in which a victim was butchered so his
entrails could be read to interpret the will of the Gods. It should be noted,
however, that the Druids never wrote anything down and kept much of their
knowledge a closely guarded secret restricted to members of their order. We will
never have their own accounts of their religious rites, while the Roman authors
who wrote about these practices had a vested interest in making their Celtic
enemies look savage and barbarous. It would be revisionist to deny the existence
of human sacrifice entirely, but we should also keep in mind the limited
perspective that modern scholars have offered on the subject. Julius Caesar’s
Invasions of Britain Speaking of the Romans, their influence was felt on Britain
long before a single legionary had ever planted his caligae on the beaches of
Dover. Although the Briton’s distant Gallic cousins in Northern Italy had once
brought the Eternal City to its knees and then kept the young Republic confined
to its native peninsula for well over a century, the rd and nd centuries BC had
seen a reversal in fortunes as the dauntless maniples of the Latins pushed back
the Italian Celts, breached the Alps, then emerged into the plains beyond,
subjugating much of southwestern continental Gaul. With the benefit of
hindsight, modern observers may see the slowly narrowing expanse between
Rome and Britain as nothing more than the ominous foreshadowing of a
conquest to come. However, for a time, the burgeoning Republic’s increased
proximity made the Chiefs of Britain exceptionally wealthy. Through a
sophisticated network of tribal intermediaries along the Atlantic coastline, south-
eastern Britain and Late Republican Rome were connected in a system of
material exchange which enriched both worlds, with the Britons exporting
metals, corn, hides and slaves in exchange for a slew of Mediterranean luxuries
such as wine, figs, and exotic glass ornaments. However, as is often the case in
history, sometimes all it takes to shake up a comfortable status quo is the
ambitions of one man. Indeed, in the mid- st century BC, a certain vociferous
general, descended from Venus herself, crowdsurfed upon the white cliffs of
Dover. Gaius Julius Caesar had arrived, and with him, the long saga of war
between Roman and Briton had begun. The year was BC, and Julius Caesar had
been rampaging around northern Gaul for three years. What had begun as a
particularly dramatic episode of border patrol against the migratory Helvetii
tribe had evolved into a grand protracted military campaign to conquer the very
heart of the Gallic World. The year BC marked the one-year consulship of
Crassus and Pompey, the two statesmen who, alongside Caesar, formed the
illustrious First Triumvirate. By this point, Caesar’s relationship with these two
esteemed friends and colleagues of these was quickly developing into a rivalry,
and with Crassus and Pompey now in a position of immense political power,
Caesar needed political capital of his own, which he could only gain by doing
something so bold that it would earn him enough prestige to stay in the public
eye. To that end, he resolved to go with his legions where no Roman had gone
before across the tempestuous Atlantic Ocean and onto the lands that lay
beyond. As previously mentioned, all Roman exposure to Britain thus far had
been indirect. To the average legionnaire, Britain was the mysterious, foggy
edge of the world, and it was even popular in some Roman scholarly circles to
deny the island existed at all. Caesar, of course, knew better, for he had gathered
a decent amount of second-hand information about the island from northern
Gaulish notables, who had long maintained diplomatic ties with the Britons.
Since ‘I want more followers on my Twitch stream than Crassus and Pompey’
wasn’t considered a valid reason to invade an entire country in the framework of
Rome’s legalistic approach to international relations, Caesar reasoned that his
casus belli was to punish the Britons for supporting his enemies in mainland
Gaul. In fairness, there may have been some truth to this. Back during the nd
Century BC, Chieftains of the Gallic Belgae tribes migrated across the channel,
establishing themselves as local rulers around what is now southeastern
England. They introduced the practice of minting coins to the island, these coins
weren’t used as a form of standardized currency per se but rather as special
political tokens which, when exchanged between two chieftains, tied them
together in obligations of friendship and mutual aid. This indicates that cross-
strait alliances between the tribes of Britain and Gaul were commonplace. In
fact, according to Caesar, shortly before his time, a Belgic King, Diviciacus of
the Suessiones, commanded the fealty of tribes on both sides of the channel.
After a brief detour across the Rhine river to massacre some Germans, Caesar
prepared to make the journey across the wine-dark expanse. He questioned some
Gallic sea merchants who regularly did business across the channel for intel
about Britain, its people, customs, military tactics and good harbours to make
landfall, but the merchants were tight-lipped, not wanting to give up valuable
information which could hurt their bottom line. Ahead of his invasion, Caesar
also sent Commius, one of his client Kings among the mainland Belgae, across
the channel, hoping his prestigious Belgic lineage would aid him in convincing
some of the British Chieftains to swear fealty to Rome. At midnight on August
rd, Julius Caesar set forth from Portius Itius at the head of two legions, the VII
and X, alongside a contingent of cavalry. Immediately, there were problems.
Summer weather conditions across the English Channel were fickle and
hazardous. Due to contrary winds, eighteen of Caesar’s transport ships, which
just happened to be ones ferrying his cavalry, were blown back to the mainland.
Nevertheless, by AM the next morning, the remainder of the Roman fleet had
spotted the horizon, and what a sight it was a massive sheer cliff of pure white,
rising straight from the ocean as if the sword of a God had cleaved down upon
the coast. The White Cliffs of Dover are one of Britain’s most iconic natural
landmarks, but they make for an absolutely horrible place to disembark an
invading army. Worse still, the Romans had been expected, for as their ships
approached, they spotted a line of painted warriors staring down at them from
the clifftop, howling and roaring, ready for battle. Rather than linger where the
enemy could indefinitely lob missiles down at them from a sheltered high
ground, Caesar ordered his fleet to sail northeastwards until the cliffs began to
drop away. Eventually, the Romans came upon what modern archaeologists
believe to be Pegwell Bay on Thanet Peninsula, where they once again
encountered the British warband awaiting them on the sands, having been
stalking their ships down the coast the entire time. This was a highly mobile
force, comprised in large part of cavalrymen and, more notably, charioteers, a
unit that Caesar’s troops would have been unfamiliar with. The invaders
resolved to disembark and confront their foes, but even here, it was a daunting
task. Filled to the brim with armoured men, the transport ships were too low in
the water to sail close to shore, meaning that the legionaries would have to
disembark in deep water in heavy armour, hampering their mobility and
perilously exposing them to missile fire. No man dared make the plunge until,
according to Caesar’s account, the standard-bearer of the Xth legion roared
"Leap, fellow soldiers, unless you wish to betray your eagle to the enemy. I, for
my part, will perform my duty to the republic and to my general!” Properly
chastised, the Romans began leaping overboard. The battle had begun. As the
legionaries approached the shore, they were battened upon by a withering hail of
missile fire, likely consisting of slings, arrows and javelins in equal measure.
However, the soldiers of the Republic pushed through this deadly downpour
and, upon reaching shallow water, managed to form an orderly battle line. When
they reached the beach, a wall of fearless, howling warriors crashed into this
line, but the legionnaires held, Latin discipline measuring up to Celtic ferocity.
Caesar calmly watched on from aboard a ship. Whenever he spotted a section of
the line about to break, he deployed small platoons of shipboard reserves onto
little rowboats, which ferried themselves onto the beach to shore up the crack.
As British cavalrymen and charioteers attempted to outflank their enemy, they
were pelted by catapultae mounted artillery aboard the Roman vessels.
Eventually, a signal was given, and the Britons withdrew. Composed mostly of
mobile-mounted units, the Britons were able to peel off and disappear into the
woods easily, while the Romans, composed only of heavy infantry, were unable
to pursue. Still, the Romans had successfully established a beachhead and
quickly erected a fortified camp. Night fell without further incident, and in the
morning, ambassadors arrived from some of the local tribes. These dignitaries
came in peace and brought with them a familiar face Commius, Caesar’s
Gaulish client King. Apparently, Commius’ attempts to sway the Britons into
accepting Roman overlordship had not impressed them, for they had
immediately arrested the Belgic ruler, but now, those same Britons had
apparently changed their tune. They claimed that they had no affiliation with the
angry rabble who had formed yesterday’s ‘welcoming committee’ and offered
Caesar valuable hostages to ensure their compliance. Caesar had only been in
Britain for two days, but in that time, he had made a show of strength in the
beach engagement and compelled at least some local notables to pay homage to
him. So far, so good. However, the proconsul’s fortunes immediately did a in
the following days. When the ships carrying Caesar’s cavalry once again
attempted to cross the channel, they were caught in a fierce storm and blown far
off course. That same storm wrecked the transport ships anchored off the beach,
sinking some and rendering others inoperable. In a foreign and unfamiliar land,
with no mobile scouts and running low on food, Caesar was now stranded. This
fact was not lost on the Britons. Realizing that if they could entrap him until the
winter, they could starve him out, the natives renewed the attack. Caesar
immediately set up routine foraging parties to gather both food and lumber to
repair his ships. But his noose was tightening. One night, under the shroud of
darkness, the British hostages slipped out of the Roman camp unnoticed. Not
long after, a squadron of charioteers ambushed a Roman foraging party.
Reinforcements from the camp drove off this attack, but a few days later, a
massive army appeared from the treeline before the Roman stockade. Evidently,
the natives had been hard at work forming a large tribal coalition to crush
Caesar’s ambitions for good. Yet, once again, the legionaries held the line. In
this, they had unlikely aid from Commius, who had been able to scrounge up
some local support after all, likely from the traditional enemies of the tribes who
opposed Caesar. With an improvised force of native British cavalry supporting
them, the Romans prevailed, and the hostile Briton horde was routed. Following
this, the Romans were able to finish the makeshift repairs on their ships, which
they hastily boarded and promptly returned to Gaul. Caesar’s invasion of Britain
had, quite frankly, been a failure, and he had been lucky to get away with his
life. Of course, anyone remotely familiar with the man would know he was not
exactly the ‘leave good enough alone’ type. So, he immediately began planning
invasion two electric boogaloo, and this time, there would be no half-measures.
The invasion force that assembled at Portius Itius in the summer of BC was over
double the size of the one from the previous year, consisting of five full legions
comprising up to , professional soldiers. They would be transported aboard an
armada of ships. These were not the leaky tubs from the previous invasion,
which had proven so vulnerable to the wrath of Taranis, the Celtic God of
Thunderstorms. Instead, these new vessels had taken inspiration from the ships
of the seagoing Gallic Veneti tribe, making them far more suitable for enduring
the capricious channel winds. Accompanying him was a force of Gallic cavalry
led by various local chieftains from Northern Gaul. By bringing these Gallic
Kings along with him on the campaign, he reduced the risk of rebellion on the
continent while he was away on the island and also sent a simple message to the
Britons ‘I have compelled your kinsmen across the sea to do as I command, and
by Jupiter, I will do the same to you!’ The fleet cast off on the night of July the
th, with Caesar leaving behind his subordinate, Labienus, at Portius Itius to
manage a cross-channel supply chain so that, unlike last time, the Roman
expedition in Britain could be regularly repositioned. The fleet came within
sight of misty Albion the following morning. They landed likely where they had
the previous year, at Pegwell Bay. This time, there was no native horde on the
sands to greet them. Upon landfall, Caesar immediately established a fortified
beachhead, then took the lion’s share of his forces and marched inland to find
the enemy’s position. At a crossing along the River Stour, the legionaries
discovered a large British force. A battle ensued, in which the Romans gained
the upper hand, prompting the Britons to zip off on their speedy chariots. This
time, Caesar had the cavalry to pursue, but the sun was falling, and the terrain
was unfamiliar, so he decided to play it safe and make camp. The next morning,
the proconsul received word that yet another storm had wreaked serious damage
to his ships. The damage was not nearly as bad as it had been last year, but
nevertheless, Caesar was forced to return to the beach and prioritize repairing
his boats. Meanwhile, many tribes of Britain had put aside their differences and
united around their mightiest warlord, a man named Cassilvellaunus. Far more
than just some barbarian brute, Cassivellaunus possessed a strategic mind that
rivalled Caesar’s own. Realizing his lightly armoured Celtic warriors could not
defeat Roman’s heavy infantry in a pitched battle, he pinned his hopes upon the ,
chariots under his command. After the Roman cavalry fended off some raids on
his foraging parties, Caesar once again assembled the bulk of his forces and
marched inland towards the river Thames. During this hellish advance,
Cassivellaunus’ Fast & Furious street racers harassed the Roman column like a
swarm of wasps. Using hit-and-run tactics, the charioteers swerved in close and
hurled javelins at the invaders, then Tokyo drifted away the moment they were
pursued, disappearing into the woods. The Roman cavalry did their best to swat
away these attacks, but pursuing them was perilous. At one point, a contingent
of Roman riders was lured deep into the forest and ambushed on all sides.
However, just like last time, Caesar received a bit of a deus ex machina in the
form of local support. Not every tribe in Southeastern Britain was super down
with Cassivellaunus being in charge. The Trinovantes were particularly
unhappy. Recently, Cassivellaunus had killed their King and forced his son,
Mandubracius, into exile. Sometime before the invasion of Britain,
Mandubracius had fled to Gaul, where he had become a ward of Caesar. Now,
the Trinovantes approached the proconsul, offering him submission if their
Prince was returned to them. Caesar happily complied, and soon after, five other
tribes with grievances against Cassivellaunus the Cenimagni, Segontiaci,
Ancalites, Bibroci and Cassi, also came forth and supplicated themselves.
Caesar’s new native allies gifted him with an invaluable piece of information the
location of Cassivellaunus’ hillfort, which was probably located at the modern
site of Devil’s Dyke in Hertfordshire. Caesar beelined it to this stronghold,
wanting to finally force his wily foe into the pitched engagement which had thus
far alluded him. Knowing the storm was approaching his very doorstep,
Cassivellaunus sent word to his allies Cingetorix, Carvilius, Taximagulus and
Segovax, the “Four Kings of Kent,” and instructed them to stage a diversionary
attack on the Roman beachhead to force Caesar to divert his forces. Ultimately,
this was a failed gambit, for the rump guard on the beach was able to repel the
four Chieftain’s assault, and after a short encirclement and siege, Caesar was
able to capture Cassivellaunus’ fortress, although apparently was not able to
capture the warlord himself. Still, his warrior’s mustache heavily singed,
Cassivellaunus decided to throw in the towel and enter negotiations with his
Patricianly foe. The terms of surrender were fairly lenient. Cassivellaunus
delivered valuable hostages into Caesar’s hands, agreed to pay an annual tribute
to Rome, and promised not to seek revenge against the Trinovantes or any other
tribes who had turned against him, which were now under Roman protection.
Following this settlement, the proconsul departed with his armies. He had
unfinished business in mainland Gaul and had to set forth before the peak of the
stormy season. Ultimately, Gaius Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain did not set
up any permanent Roman presence on the island, although it did set a precedent
of various chieftains in the southeast of Britain becoming autonomous client-
Kings under Roman influence and protection. This status quo would endure for
generations, but a century later, the Imperial Eagle would return to British
Shores, and this time, it was there to stay. Claudian Conquest of Britain The
year was AD, and the Roman Empire had a new Princeps. Claudius was not the
type of man one typically calls an Emperor. A shy and frail boy who struggled
with a limp and a speech impediment, he had stumbled into the Imperial Purple
only because he was too pathetic to be seen as a threat during the political
purges committed by the Mad Emperor Caligula, and been the only member of
the Imperial family left to take the throne after Caligula’s assassination. But he
was no fool and knew that in order to win the support of his soldiers, he needed
to shake off his craven reputation and engage in a grand conquest like his great
dynastic ancestors Caesar and Augustus. For that, he chose the one corner of the
Celtic world which had not yet been made fully subordinate to the Roman
Empire. Recently, Caratacus, King of the Catuvellauni, had been making
aggressive expansions of his own, conquering the Trinovantes’ tribal capital of
Camulodunum and deposing Verica, the erstwhile King of the Atrebates. Both
the Atrabates and Trinovantes were Roman clients, and Caratacus’ predecessor,
Cassivellaunus, had agreed to respect the latter’s sovereignty in the treaty he had
made with Caesar a century ago. Because of this, Claudius was hand gifted a
valid casus belli for his invasion of Britain, with his expedition framed as a
mission to protect Rome’s allies and punish Caratacus for violating the treaty
signed by his forebear. In the year AD, years since Julius Caesar forayed into
Britain for the first time, Roman troops began assembling in Gesoriacum in
preparation to cross the channel. To lead this invasion, Claudius appointed
Aulus Plautius, a distinguished senator and capable general. The force that
gathered consisted of Legio XIV Gemina, Legio XX Valeria, Legio IX Hispana,
commanded by one Gnaeus Hosidius Geta, and Legio II Augusta, which was
notable for being commanded by Vespasian, the future Emperor of Rome. In
addition to the regular legionaries, auxiliaries from the Empire’s conquered
peoples were called upon. These were drawn principally from the Germanic
Batavi tribe and the native tribes of Gaul, who were levied by their Imperial
masters to participate in the subjugation of their British cousins. All told, the
invasion force amounted to , light infantry, heavy infantry and cavalry, with half
of that number consisting of Roman citizens and the other half consisting of
Gaulish and Batavian auxiliaries. By Claudius’ time, Gaul had been thoroughly
incorporated into the Roman Empire, but the Celtic tribes of Britain still held a
mystic aura in Roman eyes. This was nothing new, of course, the Gauls of the
continent had also once been seen as supernatural demons, only to be thoroughly
demystified through centuries of contact and conquest. But to the Romans of the
st century AD, Britain was a land wreathed in the fog of mystery, full of
untamed, long-haired savages streaked with haunting blue tattoos that gave them
the mien of vengeful spirits. Of course, south-eastern Britain had been in the
Roman sphere of influence ever since Caesar’s hot girl summer in Kent a
century earlier. But, to the average plebian legionary without higher education in
contemporary geography and geopolitics, Britain was little more than a land of
spirits and bogeymen. Thus, even before the invasion force set sail, Aulus
Plautius was faced with a major mutiny on his hands. His men flatly refused to
cross the ocean, which was considered to be the boundary of the proper world of
mankind. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, this mutiny was
nipped in the bud when Narcissus, an ex-slave in service of Emperor Claudius,
mounted General Plautius’ tribunal and began haranguing the soldiers for their
cowardice. Either deeply humiliated or amused at being chastised by a former
slave of all things, the legionaries erupted with shouts of ‘Io Saturnalia!’, a
reference to the Roman festival where slaves became masters for a night, and
resolved to follow Plautius across the sea. The aforementioned Cassius Dio,
whose writings are incidentally the only ancient source that chronicles this
invasion, does not state where Plautius’ invasion force made landfall, but
modern archaeologists confidently place the location at Richborough, Kent.
Disembarking , men and all their horses, equipment, and provisions on a beach
was a long and cumbersome process, which made it all the more peculiar that
the Romans were able to do so unhindered. No native force had come to oppose
the Roman landing. It is highly likely that a large Cativellauni-led coalition
army had been waiting on the beaches of Kent up until recently. But, after
hearing about the mutiny of the Roman troops from cross-channel Gaulish
traders, the threat of imminent invasion was greatly diminished, and most of the
gathered tribes dispersed and returned to their farms. From Richborough,
Plautius led his expedition westwards along the River Stour, where still he
encountered no native resistance. However, this calm before the storm would
not last. By now, the Catevellauni and their allies were frenziedly rousing to
arms. As soon as word of the Roman landing spread throughout the land, their
massive, multi-tribal army began to reconstitute itself, led by King Caratacus
and his brother, Togodumnus. Cassius Dio fails to name the location where this
British force gathered, but the consensus of modern historians is that the two
brothers chose to make their stand somewhere along the west bank of the River
Medway. This dynamic duo of Catuvellauni royals likely commanded the fealty
of nearly all the tribes of southern Britain and were capable of assembling a
massive horde. However, it would take time for this pan-tribal force to filter in
from outlying regions. As such, the brothers deployed a vanguard to delay the
Roman advance. When Plautius attempted to ford the Stour river at a place near
modern Canterbury, he finally encountered armed resistance from the warriors
of the Cantiaci. According to Cassius Dio, the Romans handily batted away this
advance guard and secured its surrender. Around this time, another tribe, the
Dobunni, approached Plautius with their emissaries and supplicated before the
Imperial Eagle. Plautius left behind a small contingent of soldiers to build a fort
near Canterbury and secure his initial land gains, then continued westwards,
towards where the main indigenous host was gathering to oppose him. After
crossing the Stour, the Roman army likely advanced in a broad column along a
prehistoric trackway which had been maintained by the Britons and their
ancestors since the stone age. Eventually, they arrived upon the east bank of the
Medway River, likely at a shallow but marshy ford about four miles above
present-day Rochester. There, the legionnaires and their auxiliaries came face to
face with the dragon they had come to slay an absolutely massive throng of
painted warriors staring them down from the opposite side of the water. Cassius
Dio does not provide us with the numbers of Caratacus and Togodumnus’ army,
but historians have asserted that the Briton host may have numbered a
staggering , . Whether or not this number is exaggerated, the natives certainly
outnumbered the invaders by a significant number. The four legions fanned out
into a long battle line along the riverbank, and a tense standoff ensued. The ball
was in the Roman’s court, for the Briton’s main objective was simply to hold
their position and the onus to advance was on the invaders. However, launching
a full frontal assault across the water would be disastrous for the Latins, and
both Plautius and the Catevellauni brothers knew it. According to Cassius Dio,
the Britons were quite overconfident about their position, for they ‘pitched their
camp rather careless fashion,’ not expecting the Romans to be able to cross the
river. It is hard to believe that a pair of battle-hardened warlords like Caratacus
and Togodumnus would be so naive to believe that some yards of water would
stop the Roman war machine dead in its tracks. But, if we take Cassius Dio’s
account of the supposed arrogance of the barbarians at face value, then their
hubris would be their undoing. Plautius knew he needed to create a diversion
before attempting to ford the river with his main army. To that end, he set up a
ruse, ordering the legions to look busy and move about purposefully to convince
the enemy that full-scale preparations were being made for an immediate
assault. While the Britons watched all this with fascinated anticipation, Plautius
deployed his Batavians to quietly enter the water some distance upstream and
make a stealth crossing. Natives to the marshy lowlands of what is now Holland,
the Batavians were experts in swimming across even the fastest of rivers in full
arms and armour. The Germanic auxiliaries made it onto the British side of the
Medway unnoticed. From there, they attacked not the dense mass of native
warriors pressed on the bank but their chariots and tethered horses, which would
have been parked in a cluster behind the horde and left relatively unguarded.
The Batavians fell upon these war vehicles, smashing wheels and hamstringing
the legs of the steeds which pulled them. When the British realized what had
happened, they were likely thrown into a rage. The horse and chariot were a
Briton’s symbol of status and martial pride, and to have them so savagely
vandalized would have undoubtedly thrown many a warrior elite into an
apoplectic fury. As the Batavians withdrew back across the water, and a chaos-
engulfed native horde gravitated its attention towards their maimed steeds,
Plautius had finally achieved the diversion he needed. The dye cast, he
commanded Vespasian to lead Legio II Augusta across the river. Carefully
wading their way across the shallow marshes, the second Legion apparently
managed to make it onto the opposite bank unnoticed. When the Britons realized
they had been outmaneuvered, they threw themselves against the advance force.
However, Vespasian held the line, his , -some legionaries withstanding the
tsunami of Celtic ferocity that crashed against their scutums. The Romans had
successfully established a bridgehead on the British side of the river, with the
Britons forced to pull back and regroup. As night fell, Plautius ordered Legio IX
Hispania under Hosidius Geta to make the crossing under the cover of darkness
and reinforce Vespasian. The next day, fighting began anew. Far from being
routed, the Britons fell upon the Romans with renewed viciousness. Without any
regard for their own lives, wave after wave of half-naked Celtic screamers threw
themselves upon the bristling shield wall of their steel-clad foes. Evidently, the
Britons initially had the upper hand and were able to create some perilous
fissures within the Roman line. At one point, Cassius Dio notes that Legio IX
was under serious threat of being swamped, with Hosidius Geta himself
narrowly escaping capture. Evidently, it was Geta who turned the tide. Instilled
with a valorous second wind, the Legate of the Ninth rallied his men and turned
the tide, probably successfully executing an encircling movement which
ultimately put the British horde to flight. The Battle of the Medway ended in a
decisive victory for the Romans. Although Caratacus and Togodumnus had both
escaped the battlefield, the army they had assembled had likely sustained
massive casualties, and their prospects in fielding a force large enough to face
Plautius’ four legions head-on again were grim. The Romans were now
effectively the masters of lowland southern Britain. After the battle, Caratacus
and Togodumnus fell back to the Thames with what remained of his army, the
Romans in hot pursuit. According to Cassius Dio, the Britons crossed the water
at a point where the river discharged into the ocean and formed a lake at flood
tide. The brother-kings of the Catevellauni hoped to use this complex terrain to
make another stand against the Imperial advance despite their diminished
numbers. However, it seems that Plautius was able to either find a pre-existing
bridge further upstream or have his soldiers construct a pontoon. Crossing with
his legions while his Batavian stalkers swam across the water on a different
stretch of the river, the invaders ‘engaged the enemy from several sides at once,
cutting many of them down.’ This caused another British rout, but as the
Romans pursued without due precaution, large groups of legionaries got lost in
the marches where they were ambushed and cut down. During this battle,
Togodumnus appears to have been killed. According to Cassius Dio, the
Catevellauni King’s death reinvigorated the fighting spirit of thoroughly
battered Britons with a thirst for revenge. At this point, Caracatus had probably
come to terms with the fact that he no longer had the manpower to face the
Roman legions head-on. Bidding his anguished farewells to his kinsfolk in the
eastern lowlands, who he was now forced to leave to the mercies of the Imperial
Eagle, he and his followers retreated into the hilly highlands of Western Britain,
where they intended to launch a stubborn, persistent and brutal guerilla war
against the inevitable Roman advance. And yet, that advance did not occur. For
now, Plautius refrained from marching into the hills, choosing instead to
consolidate what was already in his possession. Despite having taken little to no
part in the actual conquest, Emperor Claudius was anxious to bask in its glories.
Thus, with the southeastern portion of the island cleared of all resistance,
Plautius sent for his Augustus. The Imperial procession arrived in August with
the Emperor, his Praetorian guard, and a contingent of war elephants. Shortly
after his arrival, Claudius rode into the Cativellauni capital of Camulodunum,
which had been abandoned by Caracatus during his westward retreat. There,
dignitaries from many local tribes approached to offer their submission. For
most Britons, it would have been an imposing sight indeed, the Imperial
Overlord cloaked in resplendent purple, mounted atop a massive gray monster in
the capital where their defeated King once ruled. New times were upon them,
and the land of Britain now had new masters. However, the Roman conquest of
Britain had still only just begun, and it would take decades still for her legions to
tame even the southern half of the island, let alone the wild, mountainous north.
Par for the course in Celtic history, disunity hampered the British war effort.
Some tribes with already Roman-leaning leaders, like the Iceni, submitted
quickly, and were allowed to retain limited independence as client Kings under
Roman rule. Even the resistance leader Caratacus himself was captured by
Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes, who handed him to the Romans in chains.
However, resistance continued in the northwest, spearheaded by the Silures and
Ordovices tribes, who used guerrilla hit-and-run tactics to stymy the Imperial
advance for over a decade. Still, the Roman war machine proved relentless, and
by AD, was encroaching upon the island of Ynys Mon, one of the most
important religious sites in Britain, and home to the islands’ Druidic order. Like
their continental brothers, the Druids of Britain had been one of the primary
driving forces of resistance against the Empire. When a Roman army led by
Gaius Suetonius Paulinus arrived on the sacred isle, he came face to face with a
line of chanting wizards clad in occult robes, standing behind wild priestesses
wreathed in black, waving torches and screaming curses in the eerie Brythonic
tongue. The extremely superstitious Legionaries stood paralyzed in utter terror
at the magic of the druids. But Paulinus screamed courage into his men, and the
Romans rallied, slaughtering all before them, and burning every sacred grove on
the island to the ground. The scouring of the holiest site in Britain was meant to
crush the native spirit, and Boudicca’s Rebellion yet the resistance continued, its
torch passed on to an iconic warrior queen who needs no introduction. During
the initial Roman invasion, the Iceni, a Brittonic tribe based in the east of the
island, allied with the Romans as a means to secure protection. They paid tribute
to the Empire, but were ruled by their own kings, who saw the way the wind was
blowing. In the AD, the Iceni king Prasutagus died. In his will, the Roman
Emperor Nero was made co-heir with the king’s two daughters. Prasutagus did
this in order to safeguard his kingdom and household and to ease them into
Roman rule, but his attempts to play nice with the new overlords would be for
naught, and end up bringing nothing but woe unto his next of kin. After the Iceni
King’s death, Roman legions marched to seize the tribes’ entire territory.
According to Tacitus, Prasutagus’ ‘kingdom and household alike were
plundered like prizes of war’, and Iceni lands were earmarked for annexation
into the Roman province. This was a quintessential example of the underlying
harsh and oppressive conditions of the Roman occupation of Britain. We only
have Roman accounts of the period, but even these are enough to reveal terrible
misadministration ranging from cruelly negligent to downright criminal. It is
possible that the procurator of Britannia would have been under constant
pressure to improve his cash flow, and the temptation of Iceni riches was too
much to pass up on. In addition, the forced levy of young adolescent warriors
into the Roman legions as auxilia was almost universally detested. Whatever the
reasoning, when the king’s widow, Queen Boudicca, protested against this
treatment, she was flogged, and her daughters were abused by Roman soldiers.
Furious at this humiliation and wishing to force the Romans off their lands, in
the year CE, Boudicca raised her people to war. In gathering an alliance to
oppose the Imperial occupiers, the Iceni were quickly joined by their southern
neighbors - the Trinovantes. The ‘British disaster, as Suetonius called it, had
began. The revolt occured at a particularly bad time for the Romans, because the
governor of Britannia as the time, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was away in
northern Wales, culling an island of Druids, and could not quickly return. Before
long, the Iceni and their allies were marching south to the Roman military
colonia of Camulodunum, modern day Colchester. This town served as one of
the main symbols of Roman domination in Britain, and a constant sting to the
pride of the Celtic warrior. Presently, it was almost entirely undefended, for its
garrison, the Twentieth Legion, had gone west with Paulinus. To make matters
worse, while Camulodunum was full of Roman administrative and cultural
buildings, it had little in the way of military fortifications, without so much as
walls to hide behind. When the hated colonia received word of the incoming
storm, they pleaded with the procurator in Londinium, Catus Decianus, for help.
Rather than marching to the aid of his countrymen, the procurator sent them a
meagre strong force of poorly equipped slaves. It is entirely possible that
Decianus completely underestimated the scale of the revolt. A , strong segment
of the IX legion hastily rushed to the rescue of the colony. However, in their
haste they were ambushed by Boudicca’s Iceni forces and almost totally
destroyed. Without any substantial relief arriving in time, the Britons bore down
on the city. Men, women and children were wiped out by hanging, crucifixion,
burning and other cruel means, while the colony’s buildings were burned to the
ground. Survivors of this first wave fled to the great temple of Claudius for
protection, and were shielded for two whole days by the veteran Romans and the
small number of reinforcements sent to the town. Despite their resistance, the
Celtic numbers paid off and they burst into the temple, killing everyone they
saw. The destruction of Camulodunum was so total that archaeologists are able
to see a noticeable layer of scorched debris left by the sacking of the city called
the ‘Boudiccan destruction horizon’. In the aftermath, a messenger reached
Paulinus in Wales, informing him of the disaster and prompting him to force
march his troops back to the east, while he rode swiftly with a group of
horsemen to appraise the situation. Londinium was the rebels’ next major target.
This Roman city, founded just after the conquests of AD, had in the decades
since Claudius’ initial invasion grown into a bustling trade centre populated by
merchants, travellers, Roman functionaries and their families. Before
Boudicca’s horde of Brittonic warriors could arrive in Londinium, Paulinus
arrived with his small mounted contingent and contemplated making a stand to
save the town. However, he quickly realised that without his legions, it was a
foolish fight to get into. He instead decided to abandon Londinium to its fate in
order to buy time for his armies to concentrate, and retreated northwest along the
road which would become known as Watling Street. Soon after Paulinus’
retreat, the same devastation which had scoured Camulodunum now hit
Londinium. The death and destruction was absolute. After slaughtering the
population of Londinium, Boudicca set off in the direction of Verulamium,
moving north up Watling street before doing what she had done to the two other
larger cities. The lack of coins in the archaeological record however, could
imply that the inhabitants realised what was coming and managed to escape with
much of their portable wealth - possibly following Paulinus north. Nevertheless,
Verulamium also ended up a blackened wasteland. Meanwhile, Paulinus had
united with the forces he could muster, and picked a spot for the coming
decisive battle about half-way up Watling street, attempting to draw Boudicca as
far west as possible to allow time for the legionaries to rest. The field on which
the climactic battle would be fought was a spot surrounded by wooden slopes
with a narrow entrance, and protected in the rear by a primitive forest dense with
undergrowth. A traditional Roman tactic of using terrain to his advantage,
Paulinus knew that in this position, the Romans could not easily be assailed
from the flanks or rear. Where exactly in middle-England the battle took place is
still a matter of debate, and many locations have been put forward including the
town of Mancetter, but it could have been any number of places. Wherever the
eventual conflict took place, Paulinus had around , soldiers at his disposal,
consisting of roughly , highly-disciplined legionary heavy infantry, drawn from
legio XIV Gemina and a vexillatio - or a temporarily detached segment of legio
XX. The , additional troops were six cohorts of auxilia infantry and two alae of
cavalry, including the consistently fearsome Batavians from the Rhine region.
Paulinus had attempted to reinforce his numbers by calling legio II Augusta
from the south, but its commander ignored the request. Forming up in front of
their defensive position was, according to Cassius Dio, a horde of , Celtic
screamers. These numbers are highly questionable, but even if we divide the
supposed Celtic horde by five, the Romans were still outnumbered around five
to one. The majority of the rebel infantry was armed in the traditional manner of
the La Tene Celtic warrior, girded with a combination of long slashing swords,
shields and short thrusting spears. As for armour, it was very rare, and Celtic
warriors probably went into the fray dressed only in a pair of loose woolen
trousers. They instead relied on their fearsome physique and individual skill in
fighting to gain victory. Celtic aristocrats and military elites also formed a small
force of open-fronted, lightning fast and nimble chariots. As the rebel force
approached Paulinus’ ragtag, half-strength contingent, he arrayed his forces
along a narrow defile, with his legionaries serving as the core strength of his
army in the centre, three auxilia cohorts on each of their flanks and an alae of
cavalry on each wing, anchored by the forests. The dense forest cover at the
sides and behind also meant retreat would be impossible if the Romans were
defeated, it was to be all or nothing battle. As the opposing forces readied
themselves for the fray, both commanders attempted to motivate their men.
Riding the royal chariot along with her two daughters, the queen is reported, by
the probably inventful Cassius Dio, to have driven through her loose ranks,
shouting to the warriors around her “We British are used to women commanders
in war', 'I am descended from mighty men! But I am not fighting for my
kingdom and wealth now. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost
freedom, my bruised body, and my outraged daughters....Consider how many of
you are fighting—and why! Then you will win this battle, or perish. That is what
I, a woman, plan to do!—let the men live in slavery if they will.”. The
comments made on the other side of the battlefield were far more brisk and
businesslike, brushing off the apparent ‘riff-raff’ opposite them. “Ignore the
racket made by these savages!” Paulinus orated to the troops. “They are not
soldiers. They are not even properly equipped! We have beaten them before and
when they see our weapons and feel our spirit, they WILL crack.” With a
clamorous din of war cries from both sides, the British charioteers opened the
battle, wheeling up and down the Roman line, throwing insults and deadly
javelins at the Romans in equal measure. The Romans managed to resist this
missile onslaught, and before long, the charioteers retreated as the warbands
surged forward. They came in a gargantuan head-on assault, hoping to use the
shock factor of their charge to crash through and break apart the Roman line.
However, Romans’ clever use of terrain now came into effect. As the
numerically dominant Celtic horde charged up the slope, it was naturally
funnelled into the increasingly narrow defile, which acted as a force multiplier -
limiting the number of warriors which could engage the Romans at any one
time, and blunting their charge, due to its uphill nature. Nevertheless, the
screaming warriors charged forward and, just before they hit the Roman line,
were showered by a storm of legionary Pila javelins, which would have caused
crippling casualties in lightly armed troops. Then, the Roman formation charged
downhill in a series of offensive wedge formations, aiming to carve deep
swathes into the enemy mass. The legionaries smashed their enemy in the face
with the metal centre of their heavy scutum shield, and then thrust with the
gladius. With the impetus of their initial shock charge blunted by the terrain,
sophisticated tactics and brutal efficiency of the enemy, the battle turned.
Boudicca’s light infantry, who probably had little experience fighting the kind of
heavily armoured and armed troops Rome fielded, were progressively, slowly
but certainly carved into during the course of the day. British vigor and ferocity
were pushed back by Roman endurance and discipline, closer and closer to the
semicircle of wagons behind them. Catastrophically, women, children and the
infirm had accompanied the men to this battle. However, the wagons
inadvertently served as a large net through which the Celts could not escape
quickly enough, and they were massacred. Despite fighting for their own lives
and those of their lives ones, the Romans had no mercy. The women, child and
even draught animals were slain by the Roman gladius. We do not know how
many perished, but , Britons were said to have died on the battlefield, at the
meagre cost of Romans. Though Boudicca managed to escape on her chariot,
Tacitus tells us that took her own life a few days later, while Cassius Dio says
that illness claimed her. Poenius Postumus, the legio II commander who had
refused to assist Paulinus, committed suicide when he heard news of the victory
- clearly aware of the fate that awaited him for his insubordination. The legion
itself was disgraced, and remained II Augusta for the rest of its days.
Conversely, legio XIV Gemina gained the titles Martia Victrix - Martial and
Victorious, while legio XX gained the title Valeria Victrix - Valiant and
Victorious. The rest of the Iceni and Trinovantes were utterly annihilated by the
punitive Paulinus. After this defeat, Britannia would increasingly be solidified as
a Roman province. Roman Invasions of Scotland Sporadic warfare continued for
another twenty years, but by AD, Britain had been subdued. ...Or had it? Over
centuries of Imperial occupation, formerly Celtic territories like Hispania and
Gallia Transalpina had all become core domains of the Roman Empire. Roads,
aqueducts, and grand cities increasingly connected these outlying territories to
the Italian heartland. The Gallic language survived among the peasantry for a
time, but the local nobles, subjected to centuries of Latin education, had become
thoroughly Romanized in every meaningful way. Britain was different. As the
Empires’ furthest frontier territory, the Brythonic Celts never embraced the
Roman identity as much as their cousins on the continent had. Of course, some
did. The south and eastern edges saw substantial infrastructure spending that led
to the development of Roman roads, villas, and cities like Londinium and
Eboracum. The local elites here soon got with the program, embracing the Latin
language as well as the trappings of Roman material culture. But this civilization
existed on a gradient. If a man left the paved streets of Londinium and traveled
north or west, the landscape would change. He would begin to see fewer castras
and villas, and more wattle roundhouses in the environs of iron-age hillforts.
The regions of what is now most of Northern England and Wales had been
where anti-Roman resistance had been strongest, and though the natives here
had no doubt been conquered, they never truly embraced the Roman way of life
like their south-eastern kinsmen had. It was here that classical Celtic staples like
La Tene artwork and the tribal lifestyle survived. For nearly the entirety of
Imperial rule, these regions had to be kept under strict military occupation. But
for all their independent spirit, these were not the last free Celts. If one headed
further north, they would find themselves standing before a massive
whitewashed wall that stretched from horizon to horizon. A massive structure
which, at least in Roman eyes, marked the border where civilization ended, and
untamed savagery began. Since the iron age, the northern half of the island of
Britain, corresponding to modern Scotland and the northern extremity of modern
England, had been home to many tribes. Perhaps the most powerful of these
were the Caledoni, who lived in the highlands of modern Scotland. Their name
was a proto-Celtic portmanteau meaning ‘those with hard feet’, probably a
reference to the rugged territory they inhabited. In later centuries, the Romans
called them Picti- Latin for painted ones. In these wild northern hills, amidst
torrential rivers and rolling plains on the edge of the world, lay the final frontier
of Celtic independence. The roots of Rome’s first campaigns into the northern
half of Britain in AD. After a year of civil war, one man had eliminated all of his
rivals and claimed sole dominion of the Imperial Purple. That man was none
other than Vespasian, the general who, in his youth, had been the hammer that
broke the Britons at the Battle of the Medway. Vespasian’s days of campaigning
on the edge of the world were over, but his ambitions to fully tame perfidious
Albion were not. In AD, he appointed one of his most trusted supporters,
Gnaeus Julius Agricola, to command Legio XX Valeria Victrix and bring order
to the defiant Brigantes, who had thrown off their pro-Roman Queen
Cartimandua and launched an open revolt against Imperial overlordship.
Evidently, Agricola was successful because six years later, in AD, Vespasian
made him the governor of the entire province and equipped him with four
legions to govern it. At this time, Britannia was one of the most heavily
garrisoned parts of the Roman Empire, and for good reason. At years old,
Agricola inherited a province which was barely tamed. Boudicca’s rebellion was
still in recent living memory, and even now, there were sparks of insurrection in
Wales and northwestern England which had yet to be put out. Agricola’s goals
for his tenure as Governor were simple enforce Romanitas upon the conquered
tribes of Britain, and expand the frontiers of the Empire to the hitherto
unconquered tribes of the unexplored northern half of the Island. Before we
launch into Governor Agricola’s epic faceoff against the howling Scots, we must
first be responsible historians and discuss the primary source which chronicles
his invasion. Almost everything we know about Agricola’s campaigns against
the Caledonians comes from a biography fittingly known as The Agricola,
written by the Roman historian Tacitus, who happened to be Agricola’s son-in-
law. So, not only are we dealing with our usual issue of viewing ancient Celtic
history through an exclusively Roman lens, but we are also contending with the
fact that our main primary source was written by a man with a nepotistic interest
in glorifying his main character. As such, many modern historians are very
critical of Tacitus. However, it's not really in our wheelhouse to put a , -year-old
proto-ethnographer on trial, so we will simply depict his interpretation of events
as is. When Agricola was a little boy, his mother always told him ‘Son, no
Scotland for you until you finish your Wales.’ Taking that wisdom to heart, he
spent the campaigning season of AD grinding down the stubbornly defiant
Ordovices. Making good use of the mobile and amphibious Batavian auxiliaries
who had previously played a critical role in the initial conquest of Britain,
Agricola crushed the Ordovices in battle. Continuing where Gaius Suetonius
“Kentucky fried Druid” Paulinus had left off two decades earlier, he proceeded
to fully subjugate the sacred isle of Anglesey. That winter, Agricola went on an
infrastructure spending spree throughout the territory of the conquered tribes,
building temples, courts of justice and Roman villas for the tribal elites who
obediently adopted the Roman way of life. By this time, much of Southeastern
Britain was well on its way to Romanization, as Celtic nobles whose mothers
and fathers had fought tooth and nail against Roman expansion developed a
liking for the toga, the lounge, the bath, and the elegant banquet. Interestingly
enough, Tacitus is somewhat cynical about this, remarking “All this in their
ignorance they called civilization when it was but a part of their servitude.”
Despite having a clear admiration of his father-in-law's military victories,
Tacitus was critical of the more hedonistic, luxury-loving elements of Roman
society and conveyed a begrudging respect for what he saw as the ‘untamed
barbarian,’ whose life, in his imagination, was brutal, yet more honest than the
Roman one. Tacitus’ fondness for the ‘noble savage’ trope will become evident
in how he depicted the unconquered Caledonians whose territory his father-in-
law was soon to encroach upon. With the south pacified, in the summer
campaigning season of AD, Governor Agricola launched his first foray into the
unknown and untamed lands beyond Imperial control. Tacitus doesn’t provide
the makeup of his father-in-law’s forces, but it is likely they consisted of the
Ninth and Twentieth Legions, based out of Carlisle and York, respectively, with
a contingent of Batavian and Gallic auxiliaries attached. The Roman expedition
advanced along two prongs, with Legio XX Valeria Victrix taking the western
route to Galloway and Legio IX Hispania marching along the eastern coast.
Surprisingly, the invaders encountered very little resistance from the locals, with
the Novantae, Solgovae, and Votadini tribes submitting quickly. Tacitus claims
that despite the legions being “battered by summer storms,” the natives were “so
petrified with fear that they did not dare attack.” It is easy to understand why.
The threat of the Roman army was not just the invincible image of its heavy
infantry but its monstrous logistical prowess. As Agricola advanced, he oversaw
the construction of a network of forts and roads to consolidate his gains,
maintain a reliable supply line, and pave the way for future campaigns. Put
yourself in the eyes of a lowland Scotsman in this era, and one can understand
why many decided it was ill-advised to bare arms against an invader which not
only outclassed them in arms and manpower but was capable of levelling hills
and clearing forests within days and erecting fortresses within the span of single
evenings. It is estimated that, throughout all his northern campaigns, Agricola
had over permanent wooden fortresses built across Scotland. After spending the
winter of in their well-provisioned forts, the spring of AD saw Agricola’s
legions advance onto the Firth of Tay, and reduce the Venicones tribe to
submission, extending his network of roads and castra into their territory. The
Governor’s conquest of Scotland was accomplished very slowly, hill by hill, but
by maintaining this glacial pace, he ensured his gains were stable and
logistically sustainable. By AD, the Forth-Clyde Isthmus had been fully
absorbed into the Roman frontier, with a line of forts running across its southern
coast. These forts were regularly reprovisioned by the Roman navy, which now
operated along regular supply routes along the coast. That same year, Tacitus
mysteriously remarks that Agricola embarked on a ship and defeated peoples
unknown to the Romans until then. This may just mean that he crossed to the
other side of the Firth of Clyde, but traditionally, it has been popularly theorized
that the body of water Tacitus mentions Agricola crossing was the Irish Sea.
This is supported by the fact that, according to Tacitus, at some point, a regional
Irish King had been exiled from his homeland and crossed the sea, where he
came under Agricola’s protection. We can imagine the Roman governor
entertaining the thought of using this exiled Gaelic chieftain as a pretext to
launch an invasion of Ireland. Irish folk legend tantalizingly waters the seeds
that Tacitus plants. Tuathal Teachtmhar, a legendary Gaelic King, is said to have
been exiled to Britain as a boy and to have returned to Ireland at the head of an
army to claim the throne. The traditional date of his return is between and , and
archaeology has found Roman or Romano-British artifacts in several sites
associated with Tuathal. Whether or not Agricola dipped his toes into the land of
the Gaels, by AD, he had definitely achieved a firm hold over the lowlands of
Scotland, making the jagged peaks and valleys of the misty highlands the only
part of Britain whose soil was unmarred by the footprint of the legionary’s
caligae. Here, the roaring Caledones tribe and their vassals dwelt, and here,
Agricola would finally come face to face with the Pictish ferocity that future
generations of Romans would learn to fear. As the campaigning season of AD
commenced, the intrepid governor resumed his northward creep, advancing up
along the highland boundary fault, where the gentle hills and steep crags of
Alba’s two geological zones meet. Ahead of his army, he deployed the Roman
fleet up the east coast to spread fear and confusion along the coastal settlements.
Yet, unlike their lowland cousins, the woad-streaked Caledonians were uncowed
by the advance of the indomitable Imperial war machine. Under their leadership,
a large confederation began to form, consisting of nearly all the tribes of the
highlands, as well as contingents of lowland warriors who were not content to
bow down before Agricola as their chieftains had. Deep in the mountains, a
massive army gathered to oppose the Roman advance. This army was led by a
man named Calgacus, who Tacitus describes as a peerless warrior-king, “most
distinguished in birth and valour” among all the Scottish Chieftains. Calgacus,
whose name means ‘swordsman,’ is Tacitus’ ideal noble savage a man who
would die to preserve a brutalistic but free life rather than accept servitude
amidst the creature comforts of Latin civilization. The climactic clash between
Calgacus and Agricola occurred on a hill named Mons Graupius. Modern
historians don’t know where this hill was located, other than that it could have
been anywhere north of the River Tay. Wherever it was, it was there that
Calcagus led his massive host, and there he intended to make his stand against
the Romans. Agricola’s army happened to be encamped nearby, and when the
location of the Caledonian army was revealed to Agricola, he double-timed it
over, bivouacking his army at the base of the slopes. A stare-down ensued, with
the Romans at the bottom of the hill and the Scots at the top. Evidently,
Calgacus was quite the charismatic orator, for before the battle commenced,
Tacitus attributes to him a stirring speech “To us who dwell on the uttermost
confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has
up to this time been a defence. Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are
thrown open. But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and
rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is
vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by
their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be
rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the East
nor the West has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with
equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the
lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.” Not to be
outdone, Agricola turned to face the men who had followed him to the very ends
of the earth and delivered a rousing address of his own “Often on the march,
when morasses, mountains, and rivers were wearing out your strength, did I hear
our bravest men exclaim, ‘When shall we have the enemy before us? -- when
shall we fight?’ He is now here, driven from his lair, and your wishes and your
valour have free scope, and everything favours the conqueror, everything is
adverse to the vanquished. Better is an honourable death than a life of shame,
and it would be no inglorious end to perish on the extreme confines of earth and
of nature!” With courageous cheers on both sides, Roman and Scotsmen alike
began forming battle lines. The Caledonian Confederacy likely numbered
around , strong. Calgacus organized his massed infantry into two lines, one on
the lower slopes of the hill and one in reserve at the peak. On the flat plain at the
base of the hill between the two armies, he positioned his charioteers, who ran
their paces back and forth along the battle line, hurling insults and fearless
braggadocio toward their enemies. With an army of perhaps , men total,
Agricola was deeply outnumbered. His forces consisted of three proper legions,
ten wings of auxiliary cavalry, and eight cohorts of auxiliary light infantry, who
were made up of non-citizens from the Germanic Batavi and Gaulish Tungri
tribes. Agricola kept the legions and four wings of cavalry in reserve, with their
backs to the makeshift camp where they had spent the previous night. On the
front line, he positioned his Germanic and Gallic auxiliaries, with his remaining
cavalry units supporting them on the flanks. The battle began with both sides
hurling their javelins and throwing spears at one another. The Caledones stood
indomitable against this withering hail, deflecting the oncoming missiles with
their short shields or ducking away. After this opening salvo, Agricola ordered
his auxiliaries to advance. The Batavian and Gallic infantry moved forth to
engage the Scots while the governor’s frontline cavalry thundered ahead, tying
up the opposition’s charioteers. The main battle lines clashed with the
clamourous din of iron on steel. Although neither side lacked in bravery or
ferocity, Tacitus claims it was a discrepancy in equipment which was the
deciding factor. In this tightly packed contest, with men pushed up against one
another like sardines, the short-stabbing swords used by the Batavians and Gauls
were far more effective than the long-slashing swords used by the Caledones.
Slowly, the Roman auxiliaries began gaining ground on their Scottish foes,
pushing them up the hill. Soon, the front-line auxiliary cavalry, having chased
off the charioteers, joined in the struggle. However, fighting as they were on a
slope, the tactical advantage of their mounted mobility was nullified, and they
were assimilated into the bloody meat grinder. Seeing their comrades being
pushed back, the Britons farther up the hill, who had until then taken no part in
the action, now began gradually to move down the slope in an attempt to
outflank the advance, wheel around, and attack from behind. Agricola, who had
anticipated this manoeuvre, called up the four cavalry wings that he had kept
back in case of emergency to pull an uno-reverse and outflank this outflanking
attempt. So furiously did the reserve cavalry charge against the oncoming
opposition that what was intended as a push forward disintegrated into a rout.
Fully encircled, the Caledone’s lines broke. Carnage was the order of the day, as
Mount Graupius was dyed red with the Highlander blood. As for Calgacus, his
fate is ultimately unknown. Funnily enough, Agricola had achieved his military
magnum opus without losing a single Roman citizen. The legions had no active
fighting during the battle, and once again, it was the Batavians who provided the
hard carry in Rome’s prolonged quest for dominance over all of Britain. Modern
historians cast a thick shroud of skepticism over pretty much every aspect of the
battle of Mons Graupius, claiming that Calgacus’ speech, Calgacus himself, and
the battle as a whole are products of Tacitus’ overactive imagination, inventions
the historian came up with to create a compelling story that glorified his father-
in-law. Still, if events did transpire as Tacitus claims they did, then after Mons
Graupius, the Roman Empire could truly claim to be the sole master of all of
Britain, from its very southern tip to its most northern extremity. However, this
mastery would prove to be incredibly fleeting. By AD, Vespasian was dead, and
Domitian was now cloaked in the Imperial Purple. The new Emperor’s
relationship with Agricola was noticeably chillier than his predecessor. Tacitus
claims that Domitian, whose campaigning in Germany had yielded minor,
modest victories at best, was jealous of Agricola’s grand military triumphs. This
is a little hard to take at face value since, as previously mentioned, Tacitus is
hardly unbiased. Still, for whatever reason, a year after his triumph at Mons
Graupius, Gnaeus Julius Agricola was recalled from Britain and never again
held a civil or military post. Pretty much immediately after his departure, all his
land gains dissolved away like so many grains of sand. Over on the Danube
frontier, Rome was engaged in a long and taxing war against the Decebalus, the
King of Dacia, while also dealing with the emergent threat of the Germanic
Marcomanni, Quaci and Suebi confederations. To address the dire need for
additional manpower on that front, Legio II Adriutix was recalled from Britain
back to the continent. With one of its four legions gone, a total of % of its total
occupying manpower, the Roman authorities in Britain no longer had the ability
to hold on to their gains in the north. By the end of the st century AD, all the
forts built during Agricola’s tenure had been abandoned and destroyed. Over the
next few decades, the Caledones and their client tribes increasingly became a
persistent thorn in the side of the Romano-British regime, as fierce warbands
regularly roved south into occupied territory, plundering the countryside, seizing
imported Mediterranean treasures and valuable captives and dragging them back
to their inaccessible highland hillforts. Agricola may have singed their
moustaches at Mons Graupius, but by no means had the tribes of the north been
tamed. In fact, they had become a force that regularly imperilled Roman security
yet was too remote for the overstretched Empire to fully subdue. In , Emperor
Hadrian, a man whose geopolitical philosophy for the Empire revolved around
limes, or ‘boundaries,’ brought the situation in the north of Britain to its logical
conclusion. A conclusion that even today can be observed by modern hikers
exploring the trails of Cumbria and Northumberland. kilometres long and
extending from coast to coast, historians have long debated the true reasons
behind the monumental feat of engineering that was the construction of
Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps its sole purpose was to stymie Pictish raids into Roman
territory, perhaps it also served as an ancient parallel to the Berlin Wall, a barrier
which prevented the conquered tribes of Britain from colluding with their
unconquered brethren further north. Perhaps it was an -mile-long propaganda
statement meant to deter the barbarians beyond from any funny business through
sheer shock and awe. Whatever the case, Hadrian’s wall was a premonition.
Although future Roman Emperors would attempt to pick up where Agricola left
off, never would the Imperial Eagle manage to secure any kind of long-term
control over the wild and untamed north of Britain. The Caledonians were not
unconquerable, and Rome probably could have brought them to heel with
enough time, effort, and blood. However, the far north of Britain was too far
away from the Imperial heartland to rule effectively. Claudius had been pushing
it by conquering southern Britain, large parts of which, as we covered earlier,
remained loosely controlled at best. In the case of the Picts, it was better to just
build a giant wall to keep them out of the civilized world entirely. That is not to
say that future Emperors didn’t try to conquer the north anyway. For centuries,
the painted warriors beyond the wall were a thorn in the Empires’ side. As it
turns out, Hadrian’s wall only slowed them down, rather than stopping them
entirely. Raids remained a constant problem, and the Picts sometimes aided
tribes south of the wall in their constant rebellions. During the reign of
Antoninus Pius, the Romans responded to this by invading Pictish territory once
more, and erecting the Antonine wall. But this was abandoned a decade later,
and the Romans fell back to Hadrian’s old frontier. In AD, Emperor Septimius
Severus tried his hand at taming the Picts, resulting in a brutal campaign in
which his highland foes played a frustrating game of guerilla warfare. Here,
Roman writer Cassius Dio claims they inflicted , Roman deaths through attrition
alone. Severus later died of illness in Eboracum, and his son Caracalla forged a
peace with the natives, forcing the Romans to once more retreat to Hadrians’
line. The Picts were not the only Celts of late antiquity to be free of Roman rule.
It is now we take a brief detour to Ireland, home to a subculture of the Celts
known as the Gaels. The Gaels have so far assumed a background role in our
video, isolated as they were on their remote island, far away from the concerns
of classical Greco-Roman writers. Generally speaking, the Romans showed little
interest in the Gaelic homeland, which they called Hibernia. Although, when
Agricola was invading the Caledonians, he also made preparations to launch an
invasion across the Irish sea, but those probably never materialized. Like
northern Britain, Ireland was too remote to be worth conquering. Being a land of
wild forests, deadly bogs, and belligerent war-like tribesmen, it wasn’t exactly
prime real estate anyway. With that said, the island was not entirely isolated
from the ancient world. It was a common destination for Brittonic tribes fleeing
Roman rule, and the discovery of Roman artifacts in the area has led modern
archaeologists to believe that regular trade probably occurred across the Irish
sea. The Gaels could also be quite pestiferous, one of their tribes, the Scotti,
were basically sea pirates that regularly raided the western coast of Britain. And
yet, despite some trade links and a sprinkle of maritime war crimes, the Irish
Gaels would not take center stage in the history of the Celts until after the
departure of the Romans from Britain. After the abandoning of the Antonine
wall, the era of Roman land conquests in Britain Life in Roman Britain had
come to an end. From then on, the borders of the Imperial Province of Brittania
would go more or less unchanged until the final departure of the Legions in AD.
Thus, we will now temporarily move away from our broad narrative of war and
geopolitics and take a more intimate look at what daily life looked like for the
Celtic Britons living under Imperial rule. By AD, large swaths of land in Britain
had been reshaped in the ideal of Romanitas. Under Imperial auspices, the island
achieved a level of urbanization hitherto unheard of. Population centers such as
Camulodunum, Eboracum, and of course, Londinium offered all the amenities
one would expect from a Roman city. In these bustling entrepots, townsfolk
enjoyed clean water brought in from the local aqueducts and advanced sewage
systems. Austere temples served the people’s spiritual needs, public baths kept
them vitalized, while forums and basilicas served as the epicentre of public life.
Along gridded streets, the wealthiest of urbanites lived in townhouses decorated
with frescoes, mosaics, and courtyard gardens. Beyond city walls, a , -kilometre
system of paved roads served as the arteries which joined Brittania’s cities to its
bread basket. For aristocratic elites, life in the hinterlands was just as
comfortable as in the towns. Throughout the countryside, especially in the
domesticated southeast, wealthy landowners lorded over large swaths of fertile
farmland in Latin-style villas which ranged from modest farmsteads to huge
palatial estates that transplanted the sun-kissed grandeur of the Mediterranean
into the idyllic rolling hills of the English countryside. Many of these villas were
equipped with the same comforts and conveniences as urban homes, such as an
advanced system of central heating. Like elsewhere in the Empire, Roman
Britain was no stranger to spectacle. In amphitheatres outside towns across the
province, rabid crowds cheered on duelling gladiators, exotic performers, and
beast tamers, who brought with them ferocious wild animals from the edges of
the known world. Indeed, under the rule of the Augusti, Britain was more
globally interconnected than ever before. Britain had never been an isolated
land, its tribal elites having developed economic and cultural connections across
the Atlantic Coast long before the arrival of Rome. But it was one thing to be
part of an iron age exchange network, it was another to be part of a massive,
tricontinental Empire. In the nd century AD, a Romano-Celtic aristocrat in
Britain shared the same citizenship as a Berber in Mauritania, a Greek in
Byzantium, and a Copt in Egypt and had ease of access to the products of those
far-away places. The Roman Province of Brittania was a cosmopolitan land, and
throughout Roman rule, plenty of civilians and military men from Italy, Asia
Minor, Africa and beyond moved there. However, by and large, the majority of
people who enjoyed her theatres and baths and prayed in her temples were not
foreign transplants but Romanized Celtic natives, the direct descendants of the
Kings, Queens and tribal elites of the island’s indigenous population. Indeed,
society in Roman Britain was founded on a strong Celtic bedrock. The Romans
had not bulldozed over the human landscape that came before but co-opted it
and built upon it. Many Romano-British civitas were built directly on top of pre-
existing tribal hillforts and served as the administrative capital of a native tribe.
For example, Isurium Brigantum, near modern day Aldborough, served as the
capital of the Brigantes tribe, while Calleva Atrebatum, on the site of modern
day Silchester, was the capital of the Atrebates tribe. Many of the countryside
villas were also owned by Romanized Celtic elites. In fact, Fishborough Palace,
the largest and most opulent Roman villa thus far discovered in England, is
widely believed to have originally been built for Togidubnus, a King of the
British Regni tribe who served as one of Rome’s native client rulers. Celtic
religion too endured the coming of the Latin overlord. The Romans hated the
Druidic Order and violently suppressed it due to its practice of human sacrifice
and the political influence it wielded. Other than that, the Romans were pretty
tolerant of foreign cults. Throughout Imperial rule, many local British deities
took on new, Romanized forms and were equated to similar Gods in the
Olympian Pantheon. The most famous example of this is Sulis, a Celtic life-
giving mother goddess worshipped at a sacred thermal spring in Somerset. The
Romans equated her with their Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva, resulting in the
Romano-Britons worshipping the hybrid goddess Sulis-Minerva, a deity with
both Celtic and Latin aspects. The Roman Bathhouse built over her sacred
springs doubled as a temple for her worship. It is often said that language is the
soul of a culture, and if so, then the soul of the Celtic Britons remained alive and
well during Roman rule. Of course, Latin achieved a foothold on the island as it
did everywhere else in the Empire, but it was adopted only by people who could
afford a formal education and thus did not spread beyond the cities and the
social elites. Even then, Romano-British aristocrats were probably bilingual,
reserving Latin for use in legal matters, government, and business, while
speaking Brittonic within intimate family circles. In the countryside, Brittonic
remained the only language of the peasantry, for whom Roman rule had little to
no cultural impact. Indeed, before the conquest, % of Celts had been subsistence
farmers; afterwards, this figure did not change. Under Roman rule, peasants
lived in the same tribal villages as their ancestors, speaking the same Celtic
languages and cultivating the same crops. To the Iceni cooper or the Brigantian
shepherd, it must have made little difference whether they paid a portion of their
labours to a torque-wearing chieftain in a hillfort or to a toga-wearing governor
in a villa. This was particularly true of the island’s relatively untamed western
hill country, which was like a time capsule of an era gone by. Here, life
continued much the same as it had been before the Roman conquest. People
continued to live almost exactly the same way their Iron Age ancestors had, their
Celtic religion, language, artwork and oral tradition remaining more or less
unchanged from the time before the Legions had marched into their lands. The
nd century AD was the halcyon days of Roman rule in Britain, but over the next
two End of Roman Britain hundred years, as the Empire came under increasing
strain from threats both internal and external, its ability to maintain stable
control over its northernmost island province became more and more tenuous.
At its maximum territorial extent, the Roman Empire was so big that any further
land conquests would put intense strain on the state apparatus. As the Empire
shifted its geopolitical polity from outward expansion to inward-looking
defence, it became increasingly mired with threats, both internal and external. In
AD, Emperor Severus Alexander was assassinated, and for the next fifty years, a
period known as the Crisis of the Third Century, anarchy reigned. The Empire
collapsed into endemic civil wars as multiple would-be usurpers contended for
power, all while plague reaped a bloody harvest throughout the provinces,
Germanic tribes from across the Rhine and the Danube migrated en masse into
Imperial territory, and Rome’s most dangerous rival, Sassanid Persia, pounced
hungrily upon her enfeebled archnemesis like a lioness upon a wounded
antelope. In the s, internecine turmoil reached its peak, and the Empire broke
apart, with two breakaway states forming the Palmyrene Empire in the East and
the Gallic Empire in the West, of which Brittania was a core territory. Thus, for
a brief period, Britain fell out of Rome’s control and into the command of a
rogue Emperor acting in defiance of the central regime. This did not last long.
By AD, the Herculean Emperor Aurelian, “restorer of the world,” defied the
odds and glued everything back together. Thereafter, Brittania was embraced
back into the bosom of mother Rome. However, in AD, the Province was
severed from the Italian heartland again when a Roman naval commander,
Carausius, revolted, seized Britain, and declared himself Emperor of the Island.
This, too, was short-lived. By AD, Constantius, the Caesar of the West, had
lassoed Brittania back into the Imperial fold. Both of these British breakaway
states enjoyed only a fleeting existence but were nevertheless symptoms of an
overstrained Empire whose hold over Albion was becoming increasingly
insecure. Throughout these tumultuous decades, opportunists on the outside
looking in took advantage of the uncertain political and military situation, with
raiders roving into the province with increasing frequency. From the north,
Painted Picts and their tribal confederates skirted around a barely garrisoned
Hadrian’s wall with ease. From the west came the seaborne Gaelic pirates of the
Irish Scottii tribe. From the east, a new threat emerged a diverse coalition of
tribal Germanic peoples from the North Sea coast, who history remembers as the
Saxons, a familiar name for anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of
early medieval England. For now, though, they were simple fairweather pirates.
In an attempt to mitigate the threat of Saxon corsairs, a chain of fortresses was
built along Brittania’s eastern coast, headed by a Roman military officer known
as the comes littoris Saxonici per Britanniam, or ‘Count of the Saxon Shore.’
Why this line of castles was called the Saxon Shore seems fairly obvious, given
who they were built to defend against. However, as likely as it was that these
structures were built to fight Saxons, it is very likely that they were manned by
Saxons too. By the th century AD, the Imperial Military had been increasingly
reliant on foederati mercenaries recruited from friendly Germanic tribes on the
Empires’ peripheries. The Saxons were not a politically monolithic or even a
monocultural people, so it is very likely that while some West Germanic
warbands roved the British coastline as vandals and looters, others manned its
coastal fortresses as defenders under the Imperial payroll. Either way, over the
next two centuries, Britain became increasingly known to regional Saxon
warlords as a place an ambitious man could adventure to seek his fortune, either
as a raider or as a paid mercenary. Despite foreign invasions, barbarian
migrations, financial woes and constant civil war putting an immense strain on
its military power, the Imperial Court remained determined to ensure the
security of Brittania, which remained one of its more economically productive
provinces. In , Constantius, now senior Emperor of the western provinces,
returned to the island he had restored to Imperial rule ten years earlier to
campaign against the Picts, whose raids into Romano-British territory were
growing increasingly destructive. Constantius scored a crushing victory over the
ferocious Celtic woad warriors. However, during the campaign, the Augustus
grew suddenly ill and died in York the following summer. Immediately after
Constantius’ death, the legions in York declared his son, Constantine, as their
Emperor. Arguably the most capable and successful Emperor of late antiquity,
Constantine’s reign began where his father’s ended on Brittania’s foggy shores.
Picking up where Pops left off, the young Caesar drove the Picts back beyond
the wall and the Saxon pirates back across the sea. The reign of Constantine,
aptly dubbed ‘The Great,’ represented a renaissance in Roman authority over
Britain and a return to peace and prosperity for the Romano-British citizenry.
Moreover, after the enactment of the Edict of Milan in , his reign also presided
over the rapid popularization of a certain monotheistic religion imported from
the sands of the Levantine shore. Ultimately though, Constantine the Great’s
tenure proved to be naught but a brief reprieve in the slow decline of Roman
rule over Britain. After his death, hardly a generation went by without some
manner of attempted usurpation or revolt. As civil war became the de facto
method by which Imperial succession was determined, Britain became a
launchpad for various would-be Emperors, who would take the military
garrisons on the island to wage war against their political rivals in the Imperial
heartland, leaving the province vulnerable to barbarian raids. In AD, Constans,
the son of Constantine the Great, was overthrown and killed by the usurper
Magnus Magnentius, a man who may have been of Celtic Briton descent.
Magnentius then drained Brittania of its legions to wage a war against another
son of Constantine, Constantius II. Their climactic clash at the Battle of Mursa
Major was one of the bloodiest battles in Roman history. Magnentius was
eventually defeated, but so great were the losses on both sides that according to
the Roman historian Zosimus, Rome was left so vulnerable that it was no longer
capable of repelling barbarian incursions. In the case of Britain, he was right.
After Magnentius, the Roman Brittania was left tantalizingly rich in portable
wealth and perilously low on professional soldiers to defend it. Moreover,
devastating civil wars aren’t necessarily healthy for an Empire’s financial
stability vis a vis its ability to pay its troops, so what soldiers did remain in the
Province were probably not being compensated for their services. All these
factors piled up like a mound of dry kindling under a cauldron of disaster, and in
AD, the match was lit. That fateful year, the skeleton crew garrisoned on
Hadrian’s wall, who had been snubbed of one too many paycheques, mutinied
and threw open their gates, allowing the marauding Picts to flood into Roman
territory en masse. Simultaneously, the Saxons of Germania and the Irish Scotti
crashed upon the island’s eastern and western shores in full force, easily
bypassing the coastal defenses which had been built up to keep them out. The
Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus called this invasion the barbarica
conspiratio, or the Great Barbarian Conspiracy. As Brittania was invaded from
Ireland, Scotland and Northern Germany at the exact same time as the largest
garrison of Roman soldiers on the island revolted, its easy to understand why
dismayed Roman observers considered that to be coordination, not coincidence.
Southern Britain was completely overrun, and lawlessness was the order of the
day. Villas were plundered, cities were sacked, and the Romanized civilian
population were subjected to massacres and enslavement. Among the plunderers
were not just barbarian raiders, but escaped slaves and deserted Roman soldiers,
who were happy to jump on the anarchy bandwagon to enrich themselves with
plunder. For the better part of a year, Britannia was basically just “The Purge.”
Only in the spring of was one Flavius Theodosius, father of future Emperor
Theodosius the Great, able to deploy a relief force to the island. Fortunately for
Rome, the barbarian invaders had not come to conquer land, but merely to
enrich themselves with slaves, cattle, and portable wealth. So, by the time
Theodosius the Elder made landfall, what had once been a highly coordinated
invasion force had devolved into a bunch of small plundering bands, their
baggage trains heavy with loot. This made it easy for the Roman reinforcements
to mop up the island piecemeal. By the end of the year, the barbarians had been
driven back to their homelands; the mutineers had been executed; Hadrian's
Wall had been retaken and order had returned to Brittania. Crisis had been
averted, and a province seemingly on the verge of being lost had been restored
to Roman control. However, Theodosius’ triumph over the barbarian hordes was
ultimately just a delaying of the inevitable, for in the decades that followed, the
endemic problems contributing to the Empires’ weakening hold on the island
resumed in due course. Born a Spaniard, Magnus Maximus was a Roman
military officer who served under Theodosius the Elder during the de-Purgifying
of Britain in . In he returned to the isle to campaign against the Picts and the
Irish Scottii, becoming very popular with his troops in the process. You can
probably already tell where this is going. In AD, Magnus Maximus became the
latest in a line of Imperial usurpers to launch his bid for power from Brittania’s
shores. To raise an army against Gratian, the reigning western Roman Empire,
the pretender absorbed every fortress garrison in northern and western Britain
into his field army. These fortresses were never reoccupied, permanently ending
the Roman military presence in what had traditionally been the less developed
regions of the British province. The following year, Magnus Maximus defeated
Gratian, and became senior Augustus of the Western Empire. To replace the
Imperial troops he had stripped from the British hinterlands, Emperor Maximus
transferred authority in those regions to local Roman-aligned native chieftains,
entrusting them to safeguard the western British highlands on the Empire’s
behalf. This effectively gave autonomous home rule to the local Celtic Britons.
In traditional folklore, this moment serves as the genesis of medieval Wales.
Many of the Brythonic, Welsh-speaking Kingdoms of the middle ages
considered their royal dynasties to be directly descended from the native
chieftains originally appointed by Magnus Maximus to defend the British
frontier from Irish and Pictish raiders. Magnus Maximus occupied an honoured
role in the royal genealogies of Kingdoms like Gwynedd, Powys, Gwent and
Strathclyde, all of whom endured into the High Middle Ages, for nearly a
thousand years after Rome’s final departure from Albions shores. In , Emperor
Maximus’ reign came to an ignominious end after a civil war with the Eastern
Emperor Theodosius. In the centuries that followed, the security of the Romano-
Britons became increasingly imperiled, with Pictish, Irish and Saxon raids
renewing in force, ravaging not just the Roman confederated tribal lands of the
North and West, but marauding with impunity into the urbanized south-east,
which was still under direct Imperial administration. Some time around AD,
Stilicho, the de facto generalissimo of a decaying Western Roman Empire,
likely launched a naval campaign intended to stymie these seaborne raids. This
was a half measure, but it was all that could be done. Stilicho could launch a
punitive expedition, but he could spare no troops to permanently garrison the
island. His would be the last Roman campaign in Britain of which there is any
record. In AD, with the Visigothic King Alaric and the Ostrogothic King
Radagaisus baring down upon the Eternal City itself, Rome was increasingly
forced to withdraw yet more soldiers from Britain to protect its Italian heartland.
That year, Stilicho stripped the fortresses of the Saxon Shore of their military
manpower. Additionally, Hadrians wall, which had stood as an ardent symbol of
Roman dominance over Britain, was depleted of troops for the final time. In the
years that followed, the scope of raids on Romano-British territories increased.
Niall of the Nine Hostages, a legendary High King of Ireland, was said to have
ravaged the southern coast of Britain in AD. The last remaining troops in
Roman Britain, a meagre , or so men, were growing deeply disgruntled. They
had been left to defend an island which had been stripped of its defenses and all
but forgotten by their Imperial overlord, and they had not been paid for several
years to boot. In AD, they revolted, appointing a military officer named Flavius
Claudius Constantinus as their Emperor, who led them onto the continent in an
attempt to overthrow the reigning Emperor Honorius and his commander-in-
chief Stilicho. This insurrection was put down by one of Honorius’ gothic
foederati. After this, there were no more Roman army personnel remaining in
Britain. In AD, Alaric and his Goths became the first foreign army to sack the
Eternal City since Brennus and the Senones Gauls did so years earlier. Deep in
its death throes, it was all the Western Empire could manage just to stay alive
for another few decades. With Germanic invaders now overrunning Gaul,
Hispania and Africa, what thought could Rome spare for faraway Brittania?
With no other recourse, the province was written off for the last time, and left to
fate. Thus, Roman rule over the island of Britain had officially and permanently
ended, and first time in years, all of Albion, for better or worse, was free. Sub-
Roman Britain & The Age of Arthur The centuries immediately after this
departure are known as “Sub-Roman Britain.” As the Romans took with them
their habit of thorough record-keeping, this era is largely shrouded in mystery.
After the fall of Rome, Britain was the last bastion of the Celts in Europe. But as
the Empire retreated from Albion’s shores, it left the land vastly different from
how it found it. In the south and east, a cast of Christian, Romanized Britons
clung to the memory of the Emperors who had long abandoned them. In the
north, the unconquered Picts and Gaels now stood poised to invade their
acculturated cousins, eager to pick at riches left behind by the dead monster that
was Rome. But as the last Celts of Europe geared up to fight one another, a new
threat was emerging from the east. From the shores of the north sea, hardened
men were nearing the coast of Britain, with the hammer of Thunor hung around
their necks, and prayer to Woden on their lips. One thing we know is that even
after centuries of Latin occupation, Celtic society was alive and well in Britain,
enjoying a better fate than its continental cousins. From Cornwall to the Forth-
Clyde, the language of Queen Boudicca survived as a variety of P-Celtic dialects
broadly classified as “Common Brythonic.” Meanwhile, the Q-Celtic tongue of
Gaelic continued to thrive in Ireland. Finally, in the Scottish Highlands, the Picts
howled their war cries with words that distantly related to the tongues to their
South. It is also likely that in more urbanized areas, a form of Latin was still in
use as one of the many remnants of Britain's recent Imperial past. Indeed, many
Britons had grown exceedingly accustomed to Roman comforts and those habits
persisted even after Rome’s departure. But how ‘Roman’ was sub-Roman
Britain? Robin Fleming, author of Britain after Rome, poignantly describes this
post-Imperial world to us “In the year , there were still people in Britain who
had been born in a world shaped by the structure of Empire, people whose early
lives had been ordered by Rome’s material culture. There were those whose
childhood dinners had been served on pewter and glass, and middle aged men
who had been raised in heated villas.” Britain had once been connected to a
continent-spanning Empire whose infrastructure brought them the luxuries of
Italy, Egypt and Syria, allowing many Romanized Britons to enjoy an
aristocratic station in countryside villas and wealthy cities. But when Rome left,
so too did the means to make this way of life possible. Archaeological evidence
suggests that in the th century, the old world order began rapidly collapsing, as
former Roman cities either drastically shrunk in size or became ghost towns,
while the majority of the islands’ villas were abandoned. As Romanitas decayed,
older Celtic traditions emerged from its carcass. Some Britons seem to have
moved back into ancient Celtic hill forts, which had stood abandoned for
centuries during Roman rule. This massive shift in the standard of living
probably hit the south and east the hardest. The transition was probably easier
for the Britons of the north and the west, who had never been particularly
Romanized. It also stands to reason that the Picts and Gaels, who for the most
part had always been on the outside looking in, experienced barely any change
to their daily lives in this era. However, we should be mindful of the possibility
that the Roman lifestyle did not vanish from Britain as quickly as previously
thought. The archaeological record suggests that in the th century, traders from
as far away as Byzantium and North Africa still braved the long journey, most
likely due to the Islands’ valuable tin deposits. It, therefore, is likely that, for a
time, some Romano-Britons used this limited foreign trade to maintain a pale
imitation of Roman life. Material culture was not the only aspect of Celtic
society undergoing a metamorphosis. In centuries past, Roman Britain had been
a land of many Gods. Native Celtic deities were worshiped alongside Greco-
Latin ones, while Gods from the furthest edge of the known world established
mystery cults in Britain. These included Isis, an Egyptian goddess, and Mithras,
an Iranian God who became popular among Romano-British soldiers. However,
by far the most successful religion the Romans introduced to Britain was that of
the Levantine carpenter. Christianity arrived on the isle as early as the sAD, and
by the time Rome abandoned Britain, had become the dominant religion. While
the cross spread rapidly through the British isles, those who lived there never
truly forgot their polytheist roots. Even under the pressure of increasing
Christian zealotry, pagan cults probably survived throughout and beyond the th
century. There may even have been some Druidic circles still practicing their
occult rites in secluded groves, longing for a return of the old ways. Many Celts
also incorporated the rituals of their ancestors into their newly Christian lives.
One example of this lies in Ireland, where the Spring Goddess Brigid was
rebranded as the exalted St. Brigid, patron of Ireland. Her feast day coincides
with Imbolc, a pagan festival celebrating the coming of Spring. Other pagan
rites survived Christianization as well, such as the balefires of Beltane and
Samhain, where Brythonic and Gaelic peoples alike would thin the lines
between themselves and the otherworld, known either as Annwn or Tír na nÓg
the land where the faerie folk dwelled. In the wake of Roman departure, Britain
became a patchwork of petty Kingdoms. Remarkably, many of these Kingdoms
appear to have been formed upon pre-Roman tribal lines, as ancient iron-age
identities re-emerged. Most of these realms are poorly represented in the
historical record, but others, such as Powys, Dumnonia, Gwynedd and
Strathclyde are better attested to by virtue of having endured well into the
middle ages, as opposed to the ones extinguished much earlier on by a certain
wave of Germanic migrations. Our main primary source on the wars of this era
come from an early th century monk known as Gildas. His work, titled De
Excidio et Conquestu Britaaniae, or “On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”, tells
a vivid story of chaos and invasions. De Excidio was not written by a trained
historian, but by a devout Christian clergyman writing a religious polemic.
Nevertheless, since Gildas’ work is the by far the most intact source from this
era, historians still find themselves reliant on the old monk’s writings. His
recounting of the th century begins with a scene of immediate havoc “No sooner
were the Romans gone, than the Picts and the Scots, like worms which in the
heat of mid-day came forth. inspired with the same avidity for blood.” At this
time, the Picts and Scots were probably still predominantly pagan, which would
explain why Gildas speaks of them so scathingly. The monk’s story continues
when the Romano-Christian Britons, beset upon by the relentless raiding of their
savage cousins, sent a plea to the declining Roman Empire. “The barbarians
drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the barbarians thus two modes of
death await us, we are either slain or drowned.” Of course, the Romans, only a
few decades away from the final collapse of their Empire, could offer no
salvation. Gildas’ tells a visceral tale. But his narrative of a victimized Christian
people in the face of pagan barbarity most likely tilted. The Romano-Britons
were probably just as warlike as their Celtic cousins, all too willing to invade
their neighbours, regardless of the shared culture, language, or faith. With that
said, there is some truth to the monks’ tale. The Gaelic peoples seem to have
established colonial realms in the west coast of Britain from the late th century
onwards. In most of these, they appear to have merged into the culture of the
local Brythonic peoples. But in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, founded by the Scotii
warriors of Ulster, they began slow cultural assimilation of the local Picts.
Consequently, the modern nation of Scotland derives its name from the Scotii
tribe, and the Scottish Gaelic language still spoken in the country today is a
remnant of those Irish roots. However, it would be neither Pict nor Gael that
would be the ultimate game-changers of Sub-Roman Britain. What exactly
defines an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a heated historiographic debate, but broadly
speaking, they were a diverse amalgamation of tribes from Scandinavian and
North German coastline, primarily consisting of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
They were hardy warriors who spoke west Germanic languages and worshipped
a pagan pantheon similar to the one made famous by the Norse Vikings
centuries later. Amongst scholarly circles, the ‘whens’ ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the
Germanic migrations are topics of intense debate. As we will recall, the presence
of Saxons on British shores can be traced back long before the fall of Rome.
Seaborne Saxon warbands had been intermittently raiding the eastern coastline
of the erstwhile Roman province for centuries, and as Imperial control over
Britain declined, it had become common practice for Roman officials or
Romano-British to hire Saxon warriors as paid mercenaries. According to
Gildas, the burden of the Saxon tide falls upon the historically dubious Romano-
British king named Vortigern. His reign was a tumultuous one, faced with
hordes of marauding Pictish raiders, Vortigern was forced to turn to soldiers of
fortune from overseas. Accordingly, help came from the Germanic warriors of
the North sea. Gildas does not elaborate much on the exact identity of these
foreign mercenaries, but another early medieval chronicler, the English Monk
Bede, claims they were led by two Chieftains of the Jutes Hengist and Horsa,
whose names translate to ‘Stallion’ and ‘Horse’ in Old English. Gildas colors us
with his opinion on this hiring “the British King and his councillors were so
blinded, that as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting
wolves into the sheepfold the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful to both
God and men.” Tradition has it that in the year , the brothers defeated the Picts,
then promptly betrayed their Romano-British hosts, conquering a swath of
south-eastern Britain that would become the Kingdom of Kent. More Germanic
migrants would follow in the brothers’ wake, and by , it seemed as if the western
half of England was firmly in Angle, Saxon, or Jutish hands. These territories
became known to the Celtic Britons as ‘Lloegyr’ the lost lands. It was likely
around this time that some Britons who lived on the islands’ southwest began
taking to the seas in flight from the Germanic invaders. They established
themselves in the Armorican peninsula, the first of several waves of settlers to
arrive in the region. Thus the peninsula became known as Brittany, after the
Britons who settled it. Anecdotally, a region that had been Celtic-speaking in
ancient times, but was then thoroughly Latinized by the Roman Empire, was re-
Celticized by British refugees centuries later, and retains its Celtic language and
identity to this day. The Saxons had established themselves in Britain, but it
appears that for a time, the natives were able to keep them contained by winning
a series of military victories, led, if legend is to be believed, by a certain Dux
Bellorum named Arthur. Herein lies the great mystery. Was Arthur a real
historical figure? If he did exist, it was not amongst the knights, wizards, and
castles of the high Medieval era, but the spears and hillforts of Sub-Roman
Britain. The name first appears in a th century compendium of Welsh poems
known as the Goddodin. Here, a Briton hero named Guaurdur was described as
“Not Arthur, amongst equals in might of feats.” This line implies that Arthur
was a well known figure to the th century Celts, and was considered the
benchmark for heroism in his age. Nennius, a Welsh monk writing in the th
century, attributed twelve great battles to the semi-mythical warlord, the most
triumphant one occurring in the early s AD at a place called Mynydd Baddon,
generally considered to be modern day Bath. Leading warriors’ from across the
Brythonic Kingdoms, the warlord of legend vanquished an army led by King
Aelle of the South Saxons, thereby breaking Germanic power in Britain, and
delaying their advance for an entire generation. With that said, Nennius’
accounts should be taken with a mountain of salt, as there is very little evidence
that anyone named Arthur fought in any of the battles mentioned. Gildas,
writing far closer to the time period in question, attributes Briton victory at
Mynydd Badon not to Arthur, but to a Romanized commander named
Ambrosius Aurelianus. With that said, when myth and folklore is stripped away,
it does seem that with or without Arthurs’ help, the Britons were able to fend off
the Anglo-Saxons, albeit only temporarily. Within a few decades of Mynnydd
Baddon, the Anglo-Saxons had evidently recovered, with powerful Kingdoms
established deep in Lloegyr, straddling the borders of unconquered Celtic lands.
The Angles and Saxons who lived in these Kingdoms were no longer transient
invaders, but had lived in Britain for generations, working the same land their
fathers and grandfathers had. In short, they were there to stay. Thus, in the
second half of the th century, the forebears of the English began to push
westwards once more, marching boldly into the lands of the men they called
Wealas- foreigners. In AD, one King Ceawlin of the nascent Kingdom of
Wessex met three British Kings Conmail, Condidan, and Farinmail, in a battle at
Hinton Hill near the modern township of Dyrham. Saxons routed the Celtic
warriors, and as a result, Ceawlin was able to expand his territories right onto
the Severn Estuary, severing the land connection between the Britons of
Cornwall and Wales. This invariably led to a cultural drift between newly
separated Celtic territories, resulting in the Common Brittonic spoken in those
regions evolving into the separate languages of Cornish and Welsh. A few
decades after the triumph of Saxon Wessex, the Angles of the North began a
campaign of their own. King Æthelfrith of Bernicia carved a bloody path of
Conquest deep into northern Brythonic Kingdoms like Rheged, Elmet and
Goddodin, and crushed the Gaelic King Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata at the
battle of Degsastan in AD, establishing the Angles as the most dominant people
north of the Humber. It must be noted that, in the land conquered by Germanic
peoples, native Celtic culture was likely not entirely wiped away. The names of
English Kingdoms like Bernicia and Kent have Celtic origins, and some Briton
blood likely ran through the veins of their earliest Kings. The remains of brooch
jewelry found in early Saxon graves have shown that the early Germanic settlers
borrowed from the artistic traditions of the Britons. As for the Britons
themselves, those who lived in Lloegyr were slowly assimilated into the Anglo-
Saxon culture over many generations. The line between Saxon and Celt was
often more blurred than we think. Nevertheless, a frontier still existed between
communities who spoke old English, and communities that spoke Brittonic and
Gaelic. By the dawn of the th century, this frontier had become more or less
entrenched, and would not move in any dramatic way for centuries. Be it by
Roman or Germanic invaders, the Celts had lost much over the last thousand
years or so. One can only wonder if a Welsh bowman in the th century AD,
looking across a dyke at a line of Saxon spears, would have been remotely
aware of the fact that his ancestors' culture had once spread across an entire
continent, a culture that was now confined to the westernmost edge of Britain.
The days when Gallic hordes marched into the heart of Greece, or dueled
Roman legions from Spain to Turkey were long gone. But, as territorially
diminished as the Celts were, they would not go quietly into the night. As late
antiquity transitioned into the middle ages, the stage was set for Europes’ most
enigmatic people to make their mark upon the Medieval world. In the east, the
ancestral home of the Brythonic peoples had fallen to Saxon invaders, but in the
west, the heirs of Arthur would defy the rule of the nascent English people for
centuries yet. Thus, the history of Medieval Wales and her sister states in
Cornwall, Brittany and Yr Hen Ogledd began. Meanwhile, with howling Picts
and Northumbrians on their doorstep, the Gaels of Dal Riata would write their
own saga of blood and battle, eventually giving rise to the Kingdom of Scotland.
Finally, across the narrow sea, Ireland would remain a relatively isolated land of
internecine chieftains. But in time, the outside world would come knocking on
their door, in the form of Vikings, Normans, and beyond. Indeed, the story of
the Celts was not yet over and in our current series on the Medieval Celts we
talk about the history of medieval Wales. To check those videos and beyond,
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Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one. Tiếng Anh