Under Another Sky (35 page)

One could put it down to chance that no scenes from Caesar or Tacitus decorate the Houses of Parliament. If Maclise had chosen to paint his martial series in chronological order, then perhaps the monarch would process past a scene of Iceni valour, rather than of Nelson’s death, as she opened Parliament. As it is, there is neither brave Briton nor glorious Roman. Instead, Saxon kings are converted to Christianity, Shakespearean heroes play out their stories and Good Queen Bess reigns again. Boudica must drive her chariot towards the Houses of Parliament from Westminster Bridge; she will never storm it. In a building whose fabric was conceived as an expression of national virtues and history, Britain’s four centuries in the orbit of Rome were felt to have nothing to say.

Perhaps the problem is, and has been since antiquity, that Roman Britain is too jagged and unsettling and ambiguous to be pulled into line. It will never settle into telling us one thing: it will just as soon
tell us the opposite. Like Edward Nicholson’s lead tablet, plucked from the goddess’s sacred spring at Aquae Sulis, Roman Britain can be read well enough if you stare at the traces. Turn it around, though, and it will offer another story.

One cloudy early summer day I went back to Sussex, this time to Pevensey Castle, one of the Saxon shore forts, built in the late third century. Like Burgh Castle, its vast expanse is circled by thick flint walls still standing to their original Roman height. Not far from here, Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared to the children of Kipling’s story, and brought them tales of a land formed by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans: a land drenched in old magic, whose ‘windy levels’ and ‘stilly woods’ held the scars of ancient battle, and were marked by the tread of gods.

Inside the Roman walls are the ruins of a medieval keep, gap-toothed and jagged and louring. William the Conqueror’s army landed here in 1066. Later, his half-brother Robert held it along with the Rape of Pevensey, a wedge of its hinterland. In the 1190s, Richard I paid for building work. Later, a stone-built bailey was constructed, and it held out for over a year when besieged by Simon de Montfort’s forces in 1264. In the fourteenth century it belonged to John of Gaunt; in the fifteenth, Henry V imprisoned his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, here. Under Elizabeth I, a gun emplacement was erected to ward off Spanish invasion. During the Second World War, the castle was refortified. A blockhouse for anti-tank weapons was built in the Roman west gate. Pillboxes were slotted in among the ruins. They were carefully constructed from the same flint as the rest of the castle, and so are inconspicuous. Look hard enough, though, and you will see the slits of machine-gun posts, moments of modernist rectilinearity among the collapsed angles of ancient masonry.

I think of Roman Britain and its curious bequest to us: how it has become a place where we may play out our uncertainties and anxieties about the perils of empire; a place where we might, if we choose, consider a meaning for Britain that complicates, and long pre-dates, the national boundaries and identities that are now so strongly reasserting themselves. I think of Roman Britain above all as the place where these islands were begotten in writing. In a landscape that vibrates with stories, where every crag and moor, city and suburb,
wasteland and industrial tract has been written into being, the Romans were the first to mould the land in prose. If it is to medieval literature that we owe the idea of Britain as a busy and productive and domesticated land, a ‘fair field full of folk’, then it was the Romans who first made it wild, a land of sudden mists and treacherous marshes, a territory of mountains and impassable rivers. A land as ferocious as its people.

As I wandered about the ruins of Pevensey, the village was preparing for a celebration, putting up a stage in the castle precincts and warming up a barbecue. A trunk road throbbed, out of sight. I walked across the levels, where a solitary cuckoo marked time, to the Martello towers by the grey and corrugated sea.

(
RIB
=
The Roman Inscriptions of Britain
. See Bibliography,
here
.)

• Page 5
epigraphs: Solinus, 22.1; Shakespeare,
Richard II
, II, i; Brenton. This is the first line of
The Romans in Britain
, which was first produced in 1980.
• Page 6
‘Terrified by the situation’: Caesar, 4.24.
• Page 6
‘many ages since absorpt by the ocean’: Stukeley, 1776, p.127.
• Page 7
‘sluggish and heavy’: Tacitus,
Agricola
, 10.
• Page 7
Britons had close links with their neighbours across the Channel: Caesar, 4.20.
• Page 7
‘
ultimosque Britannos
’: Catullus, 11, 11–12.
• Page 8
‘
toto divisos orbe
’: Virgil,
Eclogues
, 1.66.
• Page 8
the Cassiterides: Herodotus,
Histories
, 3.115.
• Page 9
Diodorus Siculus on Britain: the
Library
, 5.21 ff.
• Page 11
Roman road turns out to be Iron Age: Pitts.
• Page 12
Cassius Dio: only books 36 to 60 (inclusive) remain. The rest exists as fragments, or otherwise ‘epitomes’, or abridgements made in the medieval period. For Roman Britain, the most important figure here is Xiphilinus, a Byzantine monk, who in the 1070s made an epitome of books 46 to 80, and who is the main authority for books 61 to 80 (including the events after the invasion of Britain by Claudius).
• Page 12
‘
imperium sine fine
’: Virgil,
Aeneid
, 1.279.
• Page 14
Richborough in the First and Second World Wars: see Butler; Grenville.
• Page 14
‘
exo tes oikoumenes
’: Cassius Dio, 60.19
• Page 19
‘By laying all the circumstances together’: Morant, p.12.
• Page 21
Colchester’s chariot track: on the archaeology, see especially pp.1344 ff. in the report by Pooley et al.

• Page 25
epigraph:
The Tragedie of Bonduca
, 1.1.
• Pages 25–26
Tacitus on Caratacus:
Annals
, 12.33–8.
• Pages 27–28
Tacitus’s account of Boudica: ibid., 14.29-37.
• Pages 32–33
Horace’s Ode 1.37, ‘Nunc est bibendum’, on the defeat
of Cleopatra.
• Page 33
Cassius Dio’s account of Boudica,
History of Rome
, 62.1–6.
• Pages 33–34
Holinshed, 4.12
• Page 36
Elgar and
Caractacus
: I am grateful to the participants in the University of Bristol’s interdisciplinary Caractacus Day, held on 18 March 2012, for their penetrating thoughts on Elgar’s
Caractacus
; in particular to speakers Tim Berringer, Richard Hingley and Ellen O’Gorman.
• Pages 36–37
On the composition of
Caractacus
: Moore, p.230.
• Page 37
‘I made old Caractacus stop as if broken down’: letter of 21 August 1898, quoted in ibid., p.238.

I am grateful for help with this chapter to Jenny Hall, formerly of the Museum of London, who generously walked me around the Roman city; and to Roy Stephenson, head of archaeological collections at the Museum of London.
• Page 43
epigraphs: Camden, ‘Midle-sex’. Here, and throughout, page numbers for Camden are not given. Readers are advised to consult the searchable online text at
www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/
. Macaulay, p.453
• Page 44
‘
copia negotiatorum et commeatuum maxime celebre
’: Tacitus, Agricola, 14.33.
• Pages 44–45
on the heads in the Walbrook Stream: Geoffrey of Monmouth,
A History of the Kings of Britain
, 5.5.
• Page 46
‘great Plain of Ashes and Ruins’: Wren, p.267.
• Page 46
‘the most remarkable Roman Urns’: ibid., p.266.
• Page 46
‘Having rummaged all the Ground thereabouts’: ibid., p.296.
• Pages 47–48
Penelope Lively’s description of the bombed-out city comes at the very end of her memoir.
• Page 48
on ‘the new ruins’: Macaulay, pp.453–4.
• Pages 53–54
Roach Smith’s unpublished diaries are held in the British Museum.

I am grateful to the editors of the
Guardian
for allowing me to adapt material from the article ‘Re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s
The Eagle of the Ninth
’ (2 April 2011) in the latter part of this chapter.
• Page 60
epigraph: Propertius, 4.10.25–8.
• Page 62
Boudica on the foodstuffs of the Britons: Cassius Dio, 62.5.
• Page 62
Isle of Wight, as well as twenty hill forts: Suetonius,
Vespasian
, 4.
• Pages 62–63
‘Agricola gave private encouragement’: Tacitus,
Agricola
, 21.
• Page 64
Stukeley on Silchester: Stukeley, 1776, p.178.
• Page 64
‘sometimes surprizd the whole College’: quoted in Haycock, p.40.
• Page 65
‘a mighty conceited man’: Lukis, vol. 73, p.170.
• Pages 70 and 72
Novels readable by anyone from nine to ninety; ‘I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain’: Sutcliff interviewed by Raymond H. Thompson, 1986,
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/sutcliff.htm
.
• Pages 70 and 71
‘I don’t write for adults, I don’t write for children’; ‘Fortunately, I have got a very good memory’: Rosemary Sutcliff interviewed for the
Independent
by Giselle Green, 18 April 1992.

• Page 75
epigraph: From Hardy’s
A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork
.
• Page 75
‘It lieth low near merry England’s heart’: Wilfred Owen, ‘Uriconium: An Ode’.
• Page 75
‘Hurry, Harold, hurry’: quoted in Jon Stallworthy’s biography of Wilfred Owen.
• Page 76
Charles Dickens wrote up his visit to Wroxeter in an article called ‘Rome and Turnips’, for
All the Year Round
magazine.
• Pages 78 and 80
Quotations from Owen’s letters: Owen’s correspondence can be found in full in Owen and Bell.
• Page 80
Wheeler’s memories of Housman are recorded in Wheeler, 1955, p.29.
• Page 80
Wheeler’s memorial address by Sir Max Mallowan: quoted in Hawkes, p.9.
• Pages 80–81
Wheeler’s taste in women: ibid., p.10.
• Page 81
I am indebted to Dr Lydia Carr for her generosity in allowing me to read her unpublished DPhil thesis on Tessa Verney Wheeler, which was an invaluable resource in the writing of this chapter. It has since been published by Oxford as
Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two
.
• Page 82
J. N. L. Myres’s memories of the dig at Y Gaer: quoted by Hawkes, pp.90–1.
• Page 82
Sir Flinders Petrie’s letter to Mortimer Wheeler: quoted by Carr, p.76.
• Page 84
South Wales News
reports the Wheelers departure: quoted in ibid., p.80.
• Page 85
‘Caerleon is of unquestioned antiquity’: Gerald of Wales, p.114.
• Page 86
Verney Wheeler’s to-do list: ibid., p.93.
• Page 88
Mortimer Wheeler discovers the ‘
minimi
’: Wheeler, 1955, p.86.
• Page 90
the
Daily Mail
on Verney Wheeler at Verulamium: Carr, p.188.
• Page 90
‘a satiety of Roman things’: Wheeler, 1955, p.91.
• Page 90
William Wedlake’s recollections of Maiden Castle: quoted in Hawkes, p.168.
• Page 90
Wheeler’s account of learning of Tessa’s death: Wheeler, 1955, pp.50–1.
• Page 91
‘the magic of the great hill’: Carr, p.288.
• Page 91
Wheeler’s description of the ‘massacre’ at Maiden Castle: Wheeler, 1943, pp.62–3.
• Page 91
The graves are no longer thought of as a ‘war cemetary’: see Sharples, pp.124–5: ‘[Wheeler’s] vivid description of the sack and slighting of the hillfort, followed by the hasty burial of the dead is not altogether consistent with the evidence on the ground.’

• Page 93
epigraph: from Carter.
• Page 95
‘There once many a man’: Alexander.
• Pages 95–96
On the benefits of the waters: Guidott, p.131; Stukeley, 1776, p.146.
• Page 96
Soft-porn Bath: the reader is referred to Anon, 1700.
• Pages 96–97
Jan Morris – from her essay on Bath in
Among the Cities
.
• Page 97
‘a grand place of Assembly’, Wood, 1749, p.232.
• Pages 97–98
Leland in Mearne, 1768, p.62.
• Page 98
Sylvia’s suicide: Wood, ibid., p.446.
• Page 98
‘a silly pack of stuff’: Lukis, vol. 73, p.337.
• Pages 98–99
Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bladud,
The History of the Kings of Britain
, p.81.
• Page 99
‘skipping from one remote Part of the Island to another’: Wood, 1749, p.14.
• Page 99
Bladud/Abaris riding on a sacred arrow: ibid., p.33. Abaris is in Herodotus’s
Histories
, 4.36; Herodotus claims he will ‘make no mention’ of this fantastic story.
• Page 99
Bladud and Zoroaster: Wood, 1749, p.36.
• Pages 99–100
Bladud and the Druids, ibid., p.137.
• Page 100
Strabo on Druids:
Geographia
4.4, 4–5
• Page 100
Suetonius on Druids:
Claudius
, 25.5.
• Page 100
Sibbald on flint arrowheads: see Piggott, 1989, p.9.
• Page 100
Stukeley’s Druidic temple in his garden: Lukis, vol. 73, p.208. The description comes in a letter to Samuel Gale, of 14 October 1728. Stukeley goes on to remark that the temple is near his treasured Roman altar, where once he buried his wife’s miscarried foetus, ‘about as big as a filberd’ (hazelnut), ‘with ceremonys proper to the occasion’.
• Pages 100–101
‘struck dead upon the spot’; Stanton Drew as a model of the planets: Wood, 1749, p.148.
• Page 101
‘furnish’d the various Sorts of Building’: Wood, 1741, p.74.
• Page 101
the Romans communicate architecture to the Britons: Anderson, p.27. I am grateful to Jacqueline Riding for the steer to Anderson, and to Mowl and Earnshaw’s biography of Wood.
• Page 101
‘If we were to scrutinize’: Wood, 1741, p.221.
• Page 102
the idea of a link between Stanton Drew and the Circus was put forward by Mowl and Earnshaw, in their fascinating biography of John Wood the elder. See especially p.179 ff.
• Page 103
‘whether pagan or Christian’: see Tomlin, ‘The Curse Tablets’, in Cunliffe, 1988, p.232.
• Page 103
theft of a cloak: ibid., p.198.
• Pages 103–104
eating, drinking, defecating or urinating: ibid., p.160.
• Page 104
the goddess can debilitate as well as cure: ibid., p.102.
• Pages 104–106
the whole story of Edward Nicholson here is indebted to Tomlin, 1994. I feel sure that his article, a splendid conjunction of razor-sharp scholarship and vivid pen-portrait, is the best (or nearest to) fun that can be had with the otherwise dead-serious journal
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
.