Under Another Sky (27 page)

Britannia Romana
: the very phrase ‘Roman Britain’ is uncomfortable, a hybrid open to all kinds of awkward questions. Historians and
archaeologists still intensely debate whether these islands became in any meaningful sense ‘Romanized’, to use the term elaborated by the historian Francis Haverfield. In his famous paper,
The Romanization of Roman Britain
(first published in 1905, and expanded in 1912), Haverfield argued that in the western Roman empire, the conquered peoples essentially became Roman. The relationship between imperial power and imperial subjects, he argued, was quite different from that which prevailed in contemporary empires, such as in the case of what he described as ‘the rule of civilized white men over uncivilized Africans, who seem sundered for ever from their conquerors by a broad physical distinction’. By contrast, ‘it was possible, it was easy, to Romanize these western peoples’.

The historical pendulum has swung, and the history of the Romans in Britain looks rather different from a post-colonial purview. The study of Roman Britain has, if anything, become more political, rather than less so, over the past fifty years. Some historians argue that the Roman-ness of Britain was at best a thin veneer imposed by the occupiers, the presence of whom made very little difference at all to these islands in the long term. The Romans have loomed disproportionately large in the vision of earlier historians and archaeologists, goes the argument, largely because previous generations were steeped in the classics and thus, naturally, found classical things when they went searching for the deep past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the argument continues, historians tended to overempathise with the Romans, because Britain’s empire found a model in Rome’s. This sympathy for the Romans – who, of course, won the propaganda war, with their great trail of histories and poems and stories and buildings and
things
– caused historians to underplay the true nature of the Roman encounter with Britain, which, in truth, was one of exploitation, violence and resistance. The literary equivalent of the historiographical argument is
The Romans in Britain
, Howard Brenton’s 1980 play, in which the Roman encounter with Britain is, literally, a rape (the scene in which a Roman soldier violates a young British man earned the work instant notoriety when it premiered at the National Theatre).

But I wonder whether this view is too simplistic. It is a little late, and a little naive, to think of the Romans in Britain as a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, in the style of
1066 and All That
. There is a fascinating
tendency now – both among historians and in popular culture – to imagine Roman Britain as a kind of inversion of Britain’s modern wars with faraway lands. One prominent historian has, slyly, called Britain ‘Rome’s Afghanistan’; and the identification has not been lost on storytellers. When film-maker Kevin Macdonald came to adapt Rosemary Sutcliff’s
The Eagle of the Ninth
into his 2011 film
Eagle
, he consciously cast it as a story of a vulnerable military keeping only a tenuous hold on a treacherous, barely understood landscape: it vibrated with modern resonances. Neil Marshall’s 2010 film
Centurion
also took the supposed massacre of the 9th Legion as its starting point; in genre terms it resembled a western, with Caledonians taking the place of Apaches. But it was also, Marshall told me, about ‘a superpower invading a country and encountering guerrilla warfare’; again, it was hard not to think of recent conflict in Afghanistan.

So much for post-colonial treatments of Roman Britain: but the pro-Roman fervour of Victorian and Edwardian writers has, it seems to me, been overstated. Even when apparently vainglorious assertions are produced – that they, the nineteenth-century empire-makers, are the new Romans, that Britain is the new Rome – there is frequently a lurking anxiety. Roman Britain became a place through which to express imperial doubts rather than imperial confidence. If British colonial administrators were marinated in the classics through a public-school education, they would struggle to find in ancient texts on Britain – especially if they happened to read Tacitus – a clear endorsement of the imperial project from a Roman perspective. And the Roman empire, even at a cursory glance, surely presents a troubling model: in the end it failed, and after becoming Christian, too.

Britain’s status in that empire, as a subjugated province of it – not very important and not very close to the centre – has also been far from straightforward. For example, the preface to Collingwood Bruce’s 1851
Guide to Hadrian’s Wall
compares the British to the Roman empire, sagging somewhat beneath the weight of its purplish prose. ‘In that island, where, in Roman days, the painted savage shared the forest with the beast of prey – a lady sits upon her throne of state, wielding a sceptre more potent than Julius or Hadrian ever grasped!’ he wrote, continuing: ‘The mighty people who reared these structures, and were masters of the world, have passed away. And why? Because they gave way to luxury, impurity, and sin of every kind.’ It is a formulation
that looks triumphal – we are not only the new Romans, but we have surpassed them – but is, in reality, a warning: if Rome fell, so too could Britain. ‘Luxury, impurity and sin’ – these are Collingwood Bruce’s fears about his own imperial world; just, in fact, the kind of anxieties that imperial Romans tended to harbour about themselves.

Nowhere, I think, is this anxiety expressed more clearly, and harnessed more knowingly, than in the opening passages of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. The novel begins with the narrator and his companions aboard a boat on the Thames. The river is a grand and, in its way, comforting sight – over the centuries, it has done ‘unceasing service’ for those who ply it. But then dusk falls. The landscape changes. As the light fails, so does the familiarity of the terrain, which quite suddenly appears brooding and unknowable. Now comes Marlow’s immortal line: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Marlow, recalls the nameless narrator, says he is thinking of the days of old, when the Romans came to Britain ‘nineteen hundred years ago – the other day …’ Imagine what it was like for a military commander posted here, he continues: ‘No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death, – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here.’ Or imagine some young Roman citizen arriving to trade, he says. ‘Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.’

Marlow goes on to enumerate differences between the Roman and British empires: what saves the British project is ‘efficiency’; whereas the Roman, lacking a redeeming central idea, is simply ‘aggravated murder on a grand scale’, a phrase that Tacitus could almost have written. Conrad is using the Thames as an introductory foil to his main narrative to come, which concerns the savage, barbaric landscape of the contemporary river Congo – a landscape that will both cause, and form the backdrop to, Kurtz’s mental disintegration. But despite the superficial insistence on the difference between the two rivers, there is, as the novelist and critic Chinua Achebe put it, ‘a lurking hint
of kinship’ – for if the Thames too had once been one of the dark places of the earth, with its ‘jungles’ and ‘wild men’, could it not become so again? Could it not, as Achebe wrote, fall ‘victim to an avenging recrudescence’?

What Conrad recognised was the fatal fragility of human affairs. And all this, he seems to be saying, will fall away. Like Horsley, he saw that the Romans’ lesson to us is ‘the vanity of this world, and of all that is in it’. For Conrad was wise, and he knew that ‘nineteen hundred years ago’
was
‘the other day’.

Obscure provinces, like Roman Britain, always rather appeal to me. Their obscurity is a challenge; you have to invent new methods for studying them.

R. G. Collingwood, 1939

One hot June evening, Matthew and I brought the camper van north from Ribchester, a beautiful little Lancashire town on the Ribble, with an ancient churchyard dotted with solemn table-tombs. The town also has Roman columns to support its pub doorway, the remains of a Roman bathhouse near the banks of the river, and a lovely little museum of antiquities, containing, among other things, an altar dedicated to Apollo and his Celtic counterpart, Maponus, for the safety of a cavalry unit from Sarmatia, in modern Hungary. We drove from there up to the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria, where we found an empty campsite on a low-lying farm near a bend in the river, with friendly dogs nosing around. Later, under a midsummer-evening sky, we went for a stroll, along a lane tunnelling through deep hedgerows. They were thick with dog roses and honeysuckle that we could smell before we saw the elegant, curlicued blooms. Foxgloves – the interior of each thimble-flower freckled and downy – stood unbending amid the scrambling profusion of campion, vetch and Queen Anne lace. In the east, as the sky darkened to mauve, a swollen moon rose and paused heavy over the skyline. The night was so clear, and the moon so bright, that I could still write in my notebook at half past ten. Behind us rose the hills of the Lakes: Ulpha Fell, Whitfell, Stainton Fell. There was no sound but for a mournful curlew’s cry, till the creeping night stilled all.

The next morning we drove a few miles north to the estuary at the little village of Ravenglass, once an important Roman harbour, long ago silted up, though a few bright-painted fishing boats bobbed around. A short walk through a copse of birch brought us to a Roman bathhouse, so well preserved that the walls stood nearly four metres tall, some still with their Roman rendering. We wandered through the grass-carpeted rooms, our only company a couple of cyclists who asked us to take their photograph by the high red walls. These are the best-preserved Roman remains in the north of England: there was even a wall-niche intact, perhaps where a statue had once stood. From there we took the van and set forth along the line of the Esk. We stopped at a petrol station where, miraculously, they sold fresh Muncaster crab and local strawberries, which we bought for our lunch. We climbed and climbed along the route of the Roman road that runs from Ravenglass to Ambleside. Eventually the camper van began to complain at the steepness of the incline, and to stagger unnervingly at each change down of the gears, so we continued the climb on foot until we reached the Roman fort of Hardknott Castle.

It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever encountered in England. To the west, the road ribboned back down to the sea, over
hills whose harsh contours were muffled by bracken that collapsed down the slopes like green snowdrifts. To the east, the road unfurled higher and higher again, curling through a mountain pass into the peaks of the Lake District, which were lightly laced with clouds against a flawless sky. The camper van was a comforting blue rectangle a considerable distance below us. Around us stood the low remains of the fort walls, presiding over the pass. Lambs sheltered in their scanty shade; the sharp, hard stone of them looked as if it had been dressed yesterday. Near the ruins was a patch of artificially levelled-off turf, a parade ground 140 metres by 80 metres, built for the execution of military exercises. Around most Roman forts have been discovered the traces of a ‘
vicus
’, or civilian settlement. No such evidence exists in this isolated spot. A fragmentary inscription, now in Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, tells us that the fort was built during the reign of Hadrian by a cohort of Dalmatians from what is now Croatia, and abandoned perhaps twenty years afterwards, its building presumably relating to the consolidation of the northern frontier at Hadrian’s Wall. Camden described Hardknott as ‘an high steepe mountaine, in the top whereof were discovered of late huge stones and foundations of a castle, not without great wonder, considering it is so steepe and upright that one can hardly ascend up to it’. It was here that R. G. Collingwood had his first experience of archaeology. It was the spring of 1889; he was three weeks old and his father was excavating the north-west gate of the fort. ‘They took me in a carpenter’s bag,’ he wrote in
An Autobiography
.

Collingwood is a significant, but in many ways curious figure in the history of British scholarship. He was a major contributor to the study of Roman Britain: with J. N. L. Myres, the Anglo-Saxon expert and sometime youthful admirer of Tessa Verney Wheeler, he wrote the first volume of the
Oxford History of England
; and he collated much of the material for the exhaustive collection of epigraphic material called
The Roman Inscriptions of Britain
(published posthumously, it remains an essential resource for historians of the period). But he was also the Waynflete professor of philosophy at Oxford; a metaphysician; a writer on philosophical method; a philosopher of art and, most significantly, of history. Such was the breadth of his learning that many people now working in one of his disciplines barely know of his work in the other; or even, sometimes, realise that Collingwood
the philosopher was the same person as Collingwood the Roman Britain expert.