Roman Britain A Timewatch Guide

No other era has captured our imagination

quite like Roman Britain -

you'd almost say it's become a cultural obsession.

And driving our fascination has been the work

of some of our greatest historians and archaeologists.

For decades, they've been attempting to answer

the really big questions about Roman Britain...

Who were these Romans?

How did they manage to rule here for nearly 400 years?

And why in the end did it all fall apart?

Over the last five decades, the BBC has been there as historians

and archaeologists try to answer these key questions.

ARCHIVE: Probably built the tower against which I'm standing...

At the forefront of documenting

and reporting this quest has been the history series Timewatch.

During its three decades on our screens, Timewatch investigated

some of the most intriguing archaeological discoveries.

These people were executed...

And examined cutting-edge historical interpretations.

And this must be the earliest example of Latin handwriting

by a woman in the Roman world.

I'll be using Timewatch and 50 years of BBC historical archive to

chart how our understanding, and view, of Roman Britain has

changed over the decades, thanks to fresh archaeological discoveries,

ground-breaking research and the latest in historical thinking.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Romans landed on our shores,

and they ruled here for some 400 years.

Our islands became known as Britannia - just a small part

of a vast empire stretching from Egypt to modern day Germany.

Their legacy is all around us today, from roads to ruins,

like these here at Caerleon in Wales.

Over recent decades, it's been archaeology that has driven

forward our understanding.

But it's important to remember that the story of Roman Britain is

always fiercely contested -

this is a period of our history wreathed in uncertainty.

And nowhere is this more evident than in how Roman Britain began.

Even today, we can't be sure precisely where the Romans invaded,

or what the political realities were at the time.

Was this a welcomed arrival, or a hostile takeover?

Historian Simon Thurley set out to investigate the hotly contested

debate about where exactly the Romans landed in 43 AD.

Two possibilities have been suggested - Richborough in Kent,

or the Sussex coast near Fishbourne Palace.

The first contender, Richborough,

was originally excavated by archaeologist Joscelyn Bushe-Fox.

In 1932, Bushe-Fox revealed the first solid evidence that

Richborough might be linked with the Claudian invasion.

This is actually the earliest thing that Bushe-Fox found on the site,

a pair of ditches, the classic Roman sort of V-shaped profile

with a square slot dug in the bottom, known as an ankle breaker -

so if you jumped into this you'd just turn your ankle in the slot

at the bottom - and a rampart on this side, so, you know,

a real defensive structure, which Bushe-Fox actually interpreted as

a hastily erected bridge head camp for the invasion army of AD 43.

And so the sea's over there?

Yes, the sea is over there, and this is a landward defence,

so it's defending effectively what's on the beach at this point.

And so that's the reason why he thought that this was

-a landing place of the Roman Army.

-That's right.

Bushe-Fox found a number of coins of the right date,

and pottery called samian ware.

This is some of the samian that Bushe-Fox found

in his Claudian conquest period ditch at Richborough.

It's a carinated bowl -

decorated samian bowl - absolutely typical of the mid-1st century AD.

But the interesting thing to me here is that the bowl looks new,

and of course it isn't new, because it's nearly 2,000 years old,

but the bowl seems to have had very little use -

there's no wear around the rim, and on the bottom here, on the base,

I can see markings from the bowl underneath it in the kiln.

It doesn't look as if the base has ever been worn away on tables

or anything like that.

So I suspect Bushe-Fox was quite right about thinking that this bowl

was relatively new and Claudian in date when it was lost.

Bushe-Fox's finds did suggest an early Roman presence

at Richborough, but they were not conclusive proof

of an invasion here.

Archaeologists can't date to the nearest month - quite often

we can't date to the nearest year.

So although we can say that these military stations

at Richborough belong to the Claudian period,

roughly the time of the invasion,

that's as far as we can go. Thereafter, it's speculation.

There is an alternative to the theory that the Romans first

landed here in Kent, and it stems from one of the most exciting

archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

In 1960, workmen laying a water main in Sussex uncovered ancient remains.

These exquisite classical mosaics ornament a palace at Fishbourne.

It was probably built for Togidubnus,

the king of the local tribe and a loyal ally of Rome.

The very fact that the Romans encouraged the palace to be built

here in the '70s of the 1st century suggests that there

was something special perhaps about the site, and about the region.

Professor Cunliffe led the Fishbourne excavations.

Beneath the mosaics, he found evidence of an early Roman

military presence. He now believes that Sussex, rather than Kent,

may have been the site chosen by the Romans for their invasion.

They had direct links to the ruling household of this area,

so that politically would have been quite a sensible place to land -

you don't land in enemy territory, you land in friendly territory and

then move out into enemy territory.

Whether the invasion was launched with the co-operation

of a local king or was instead entirely hostile

is still unresolved.

But each scenario gives a very different picture

of how it all began.

In almost every aspect of Roman Britain, historians

and archaeologists face the same problems time and again -

everything is up for debate,

and that's what makes this period of our history just so fascinating.

But when we look back at the past, we always see it through

the prism of our own times.

So our view of Roman Britain over the centuries has changed,

and evolved, with the fashion of the day.

One of the greatest questions for historians of the period

is how the Romans managed to dominate most of the known world,

which of course included Britain.

One of the earliest history series to investigate this idea was

presented by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the famous archaeologist.

The opening of the first episode found Wheeler clambering

amongst Roman ruins in northern England,

as he explored the legacy of the great Roman Empire on our shores.

The year was 1960, a time when Britain was starting to ask

questions about its own imperial past too.

In the beginning, there was a patch of hill and valley beside the sea.

That patch grew, through confidence, through ambition,

through a sense of adventure, but chiefly as the trees grow

while the sun shines, through a sort of obscure inevitability.

Ultimately, it stretched from the Atlantic to the Tigris.

It reached the Emperor of China. It was the world.

Then it crumbled - colony after colony fell away from it.

It continued to win wars, but more and more often lost the peace.

Its citizens worked less,

and depended more and more upon welfare and having a good time.

Its civil service grew larger and larger,

and interfered increasingly with everyday life.

Taxation ate out its heart. Even death was taxed.

It vanished into history almost imperceptibly.

I've been talking of an empire,

but I wonder whether you and I have the same empire in mind.

Perhaps we have.

I've been speaking, of course, of Ancient Rome -

the Rome which gave us London and York,

codes of law and highways and drains

and an alphabet and a few snatches of Virgil,

the Rome which gave us factories and post offices

and the changing of the guard and soap,

the Rome which first gave us civilisation,

and then taught us how to misuse it, the Rome which survives

in nostalgic romance and in enduring concrete and as a compulsory subject

in schools and universities, which is perhaps a part of that concrete.

Interpretations of Roman Britain have always provoked lively debate

amongst historians and archaeologists.

When Mortimer Wheeler is sitting

there on Hadrian's Wall, buffeted by the wind

and this heroic landscape,

talking about the collapse of the Roman Empire

as if it had been collapsed by a socialist government, of course,

um, you know,

this idea that it was the heavy bureaucracy of the Roman Empire

that did for it and these high taxes and so on,

this is, you know...

One feels, one knows, that Mortimer Wheeler wasn't a Labour voter!

Um, he, you know, he is continuing a strong tradition

of thinking about the British Empire with the Roman Empire.

The end of the British Empire certainly changes

our understanding of Roman Britain,

or at least the academic and then the popular understanding

of Roman Britain, in the same way

that it changed our image of the Roman Empire as a whole.

In 1900, if you were British,

you would inevitably compare the modern British Empire

to Ancient Rome, and you'd tend to feel that both were a good thing.

Wheeler and his generation of historians

and archaeologists had been raised on a very Victorian view

of the Roman Empire as a civilising force for good throughout the world.

But by 1960, with the British Empire crumbling before their eyes,

many historians began to view the Roman Empire in a new light.

Some now began to explore the uglier side

of Rome's imperial ambitions, looking at how greed

and decadence might have led to its decline and fall.

For many of this generation, the end of Roman Britain

served as testament not only to the incredible power

and reach of the Roman Empire, but also as a lesson to its limits.

For Mortimer Wheeler,

the Roman ruins of Britain were a warning from history about

the fate of empires, and nothing embodied that

quite like Hadrian's Wall.

It stood in our landscape as a ghostly skeleton of a lost empire.

But as well as being an enduring monument to Roman authority,

Hadrian's Wall has also provided historians

and archaeologists with a rich vein of information about what

life was really like in Northern England some two millennia ago.

In the last 50 years,

our understanding of the northern frontier has changed dramatically.

New information is overturning hundreds of years

of historical thought, which painted Hadrian's Wall

as a brutal military frontier.

This change in historical thinking is in large part thanks to new

discoveries made at one remarkable Roman fort - Vindolanda.

By 1973, when BBC cameras came to film the excavations,

the archaeologists were finding evidence

not just of the Roman military, but of soldiers' families,

and even other civilians, all living together in peace.

They were digging the vicus,

the small town that had grown up around the fort.

Leading the dig was Robin Birley,

who has spent his life working at Vindolanda.

Wives, children, merchants, craftsmen, priests, slaves,

servants - you name it, they're all out here in the town.

We weren't quite sure what to expect in the town,

because so little has been done on civilian towns,

not only in this country but anywhere else in the Roman Empire.

Um, but we were surprised to find that really

the standard of living in the town here is remarkably high -

they're quite a sophisticated group of people.

Admittedly, we've been examining so far

what you might call the posh area of town, you know,

the area near the west gate, dominated by this great mansio here,

this inn for travellers, and across the road, the military bathhouse.

I mean, this is a good residential area, with the big married quarter

blocks and so on, where anything up to 16 families would live.

And it's only now that we're beginning to move outside

this plush area into - well, where we are now. I mean, this building here -

it's a brewery. Now, it's when you get on to the breweries -

you know, move out to that part of town,

get on to your breweries, your reservoirs, your big sewers,

and all sorts of agricultural buildings, storehouses, that

you're really getting down to the facts of life in the Roman period,

and the thing begins to make sense.

The buildings along the main street have all been uncovered

in the last three years. They've already yielded up treasures of gold

and bronze, suggesting a community that was both wealthy and cultured.

Orgies in the bathhouse, perhaps?

These double-sided ladies' combs were found alongside silver

hairpins in the drains beneath the cold plunge.

Soldiers marching about the countryside, fighting off Picts

and Scots - it's fairy tales. They're concerned with

more or less the same kind of things as a modern army's concerned with.

The little time they get off duty, they want to come into the town

here, to meet their friends, their wives, families, sweethearts,

go to the local pubs, gamble and so on and so forth.

And this is what we're getting down to now, and to my mind

the whole thing at last begins to sound like something natural,

something sensible.

For hundreds of years, Hadrian's Wall and the northern forts

had been seen as a brutal symbol of Roman power - a line in the sand

against the uncivilised barbarians -

but Vindolanda helps change all that.

Suddenly, a whole new world was revealed to have existed in northern

England - a world not of marauding barbarians and bloody battles, but

of a different sort of interaction - of trade and family ties developing,

in fact, a whole community forming around the Roman legions.

It seems that life on Hadrian's Wall wasn't like the stereotypes

of fiction at all. For much of the time, it would have been

less like a Roman version of the Berlin Wall,

and more like a bustling Wild West frontier town.

Vindolanda didn't just shed light on a whole community,

but on the individuals who lived there too.

The bit of the vicus where this year's research has unearthed

the strongest smell of the Romans.

Site 76, the deep pit.

Site 76 is no place for the amateur.

12 feet below ground level, knee deep in foul-smelling mud,

whoever digs here must know what he's doing.

Like so many important discoveries,

this one was stumbled upon by accident.

Robin Birley was digging a field drain here last autumn

when his spade unearthed a sandal.

It belonged to a lady of the 1st century AD,

and was almost unaffected by 2,000 years in the ground.

On the sole was the shoemaker's stamp, as clear as

if it had been made yesterday.

Apparently, the sandal had been thrown away

because the toe thong had snapped.

The deep pit was suddenly headline news.

They began to dig deeper into the slime,

and they found small pieces of woven cloth, some with buttons

still attached, and fragments of wooden writing tablets.

There were oyster shells too,

showing that whoever lived here had been something of a gourmet.

For centuries, antiquarians and historians concerned themselves

with the monumental ruins of Roman Britain

and the high politics of empire.

But in recent decades, the focus has shifted somewhat,

away from that grand sweep of history,

and on to daily life in all its wonderful mundanity.

I think what we do see in the post-Second World War period is

a shift, really, to an interest both in social history,

and an interest - because archaeology is growing -

an interest in the fabric of everyday life, of ordinary people.

That's basically of course what archaeologists are investigating.

And I think that's a good thing, that shift away from just

looking at the big political and military events

and the great men of history,

and trying to get to grips with ordinary human experience.

That's important, and it's a positive shift.

Social history rose and fell in the 20th century with

the politics of social democracy. I think if you have the idea

that we are a society - that we're all in it together,

we're responsible for each other,

we get more curious about each other.

With the rise of social history, whole new areas of study now

opened up, including everything from industry to commerce,

from dress to diet.

Some historians and archaeologists began to look for innovative ways

to explore these aspects of daily life,

and one new school of thought that sprang up

was experimental archaeology.

It would help transform our understanding of the period.

At the turn of the millennium, Adam Hart-Davis used experimental

archaeology to explore the Roman world,

and in one episode he investigated how the Romans in Britain

used new tools and techniques to transform farming.

Well, the Celts may have been doing all right on their own,

but they were in real trouble when all these foreign troops

moved in. It's been calculated that to feed one legion for a week

would have taken something like 5,000 litres of grain, which

would have corresponded to something like 7,000 loaves of bread.

What's more, there were four legions, and at least as many auxiliaries.

So obviously the output of grain was going to have to be increased.

The Romans set about introducing intensive farming methods.

They brought in new crops, like turnips and carrots,

and they drained marshes, so more land could be put under the plough.

They also made some significant improvements to farming tools.

The Celts may well have used a simple plough like this one.

It's called an ard, and you can see it's just two pieces of wood.

There's a point here which digs into the soil and makes a furrow,

a sort of drill into which you can sow your seed,

and then there's the handle, which simply slots in,

so it's very easy to make, and very easy to repair, if you break it.

The Romans almost certainly improved this by adding

an iron ploughshare.

Now, this would have been much better at cutting through the soil -

particularly the heavy northern soil.

And later on, they improved it still further by adding wheels

to stop the whole plough from sinking into the ground.

Experimental archaeology in theory, and very often in practice, is

extremely useful, we find out things that way we'd never otherwise know.

I think it does have its limitations, and one problem is

that it's actually very difficult to reproduce in an adult archaeologist

the kinds of skills and training that ancient people would have

had over years on the family farm, or in the family workshop and so on.

So there's a tendency to under-perform

in experimental archaeology.

And at the same time, there's got to be a temptation to over-interpret.

Just because it turns out you CAN do something,

doesn't mean that people did it.

While some used experimental archaeology to explore farming

and the rural landscape,

other archaeologists turned their attention to the urban environment.

It might be an obvious stereotype that the Romans built towns,

but their reasons for doing so often aren't so clear.

Decades of study have been devoted to creating a detailed picture

of the Roman towns that spread right across Britain,

but also looking at the reasons why they were built.

In the 1960s, with the construction of new towns like Milton Keynes

top of the political agenda, Barry Cunliffe examined how

the Romans also undertook a policy of deliberate urban planning.

Today, we're going to talk about towns.

Now, towns were far more than just convenient economic units,

they were in the hands of the Roman administrators essentially

a political weapon. Tacitus makes no bones about it.

He tells us how towns were put up to encourage these Britons -

well, he says "uncivilised, barbarous, scattered people" -

to live together, so that they could enjoy the pleasures

and ease of town life.

In southern England, there are a large number of towns,

these grew up during the Roman period.

England - that is, excluding Scotland, and Wales.

They grew up for a whole variety of reasons.

Some of them, such as Canterbury and Silchester here, simply grew

out of old native capitals, which were already in existence.

Others were deliberate plants.

Colchester, Gloucester, Lincoln and York -

these places were coloniae,

that is, they were built by the army for retired veterans

and the veterans lived here and farmed the land around.

There were of course other economic reasons why most of our other

towns came into existence. Most of them grew up for reasons

such as they were on good fords,

crossing places for rivers, or good harbours.

Some of them, such as Cirencester here and many others now in the

south, grew up out of the groups of settlers

who had squatted down outside the forts.

When the army moved off, the settlers,

with their good communications and trade contacts

with the neighbouring natives,

simply went on to form the nucleus of the town.

Towns were at the heart of what you might call

"Operation Roman Britain" -

the Romans deliberately used towns as a way of drawing the local

people into a Roman way of life, and so cemented their rule.

This idea has been built up over the past century through archaeology

carried out in urban areas right across the British Isles.

A generation of archaeologists have spent their careers

excavating our towns and cities, but it's been a challenging

and often frustrating process.

In Britain, we don't really have a Pompeii - a place that's

frozen in time, and ready to be studied at leisure.

Our Romano-British towns are often buried beneath modern streets,

so archaeologists rarely get an opportunity to explore these

crucial sites and make new discoveries.

It's a painstaking process,

but little by little they've been able to

build a picture of life in urban Roman Britain.

While Britain may lack a Pompeii,

that doesn't mean some discoveries aren't revolutionary.

Some of the most significant finds of the last century were

fragile wooden writing tablets found at Vindolanda Fort.

The first of them were found in the 1970s,

and since then over 400 have been recovered from the mud.

In the ancient classical texts, Britain was a rather

neglected place. It seems that our distant province was of little

interest to the powers in Rome, which means there's not

much in the way of written history to rely on.

But the Vindolanda tablets changed that.

For the first time, we have a written source

providing us with real detail of life in Roman Britain.

When discovered, the writing tablets showed faint ink handwriting,

but in the dry air, it began to disappear.

New techniques had to be hastily developed to recover

the Roman script.

The tablets were soaked in alcohol and then ether to preserve them.

It was discovered that the writing reappeared on infrared photographs.

In 2007, Timewatch explored what had been learned

after 30 years of work on the Vindolanda tablets.

Sometimes when you have letters or words

that are broken across different fragments, it can really be

quite crucial on the photograph. I think that's somewhat better.

The research has been led by Alan Bowman,

an expert in ancient writing.

He established that although the texts were in Latin,

they were written in cursive script,

using an early form of lower-case handwriting.

They're very difficult to read. Latin cursive handwriting

of this period is not an easy script.

One of the problems is that the letter forms themselves,

particularly some very common letters,

are really quite hard to distinguish one from another.

So, for example, in a particular hand you might find S and T

and P and even I -

those four letters really can look quite similar.

And if you think of the combinations in which those letters might

occur, actually figuring out what a particular word might be is not

in itself a trivial exercise.

Professor Bowman has been deciphering the Vindolanda

writing tablets for over 30 years, and new ones are still being dug up.

This letter has only recently been discovered.

Professor Bowman's eyes were the first

in almost 2,000 years to read it.

The clue lies here, I think, where you can read the word "linceas",

L-I-N-C-E-A-S. These are lances, pieces of military equipment.

It's one example of the incredibly detailed recording of cash,

commodities, the tracking of the way in which equipment

was dispensed and paid for, in this extraordinarily detailed way.

One of the most revealing tablets was a letter written to the wife of

the commanding officer at Vindolanda by a woman called Claudia Severa.

You can see here that this main part of the letter is

written in a very good hand, which is probably the hand

of a scribe, who Severa got to write the main body of the letter for her.

But what's really interesting is that at the end of the letter,

Claudia Severa has added the closing greeting, you can

see four lines of rather crabby looking writing -

she's added this closure in her own hand.

"I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul,

"as I hope to prosper - and hail."

It is extremely rare to find a text in which you can be sure

that the handwriting is that of the author of the letter herself,

and the fact that it is a woman writing

is very unusual, indeed, as well.

This must be the earliest example, certainly from Roman Britain,

the earliest example of handwriting by a woman

and probably the earliest known example of Latin handwriting

by a woman in the Roman world.

The Vindolanda tablets are remarkably useful.

They are incredible documents that tell us a lot about life in this

particular military community.

This garrison, out on the frontiers, in the area where later on,

a generation later, Hadrian's Wall will be built.

And it tells us about the day-to-day life and it tells us

all sorts of things that we didn't necessarily expect,

like the famous birthday invitation from the wife of one commander

to the wife of another commander

and it gives you this whole impression of a military community

with its strict social hierarchy

and these sort of fairly aristocratic women there,

with their families out on the frontiers,

indulging in this little sort of social world of their own.

The Vindolanda tablets have this extraordinary

importance in ancient history.

Not just for what they tell us about Vindolanda,

or the history of Roman Britain,

but for the techniques that were developed to read them

and are still being developed today.

They really form the basis for a whole new world of reading

ancient documents from all over the world

and it means that nowadays we're still,

every day, reading words from the ancient world

for the first time and that's what keeps the ancient world alive.

The discovery of the Vindolanda tablets was a milestone

in the archaeology of Roman Britain.

But it was the harnessing of new scientific techniques that

allowed academics to decipher them.

Some of the biggest advances in recent decades

have been thanks to science.

Over the last 50 years, there's been a quiet revolution in archaeology,

both out in the field and in the lab.

From geophysical survey to DNA analysis, new technologies,

techniques and scientific breakthroughs have generated

fresh insights and even opened up whole new avenues of research.

Each new archaeological discovery can now draw on

these crucial technical developments.

In 2006, Timewatch investigated the mystery surrounding

over 40 headless skeletons found in one of York's Roman cemeteries.

The team working on the project would bring to bear

the latest scientific and archaeological techniques

to try to understand this grisly discovery.

Well, I'm looking here at what seems to be a very unusual burial,

with a skull sitting on its own there and then in this area

we've had the cremated remains of the rest of the body.

In this grave we've got a decapitated skeleton.

It looks as though the skull's been put down there,

between the right arm and the left leg.

It's a very curious body position.

So we've got a burial here which has been really badly treated

and the body treated with very little of the sort of conventional

respect that one expects.

It really is quite extraordinary.

Headless burials are often associated with punishments

meted out to slaves or prisoners.

They came as a surprise in a high status cemetery

where you'd expect to find the Romano-British elite.

Human bone specialists, Katy Tucker and Charlotte Roberts,

are investigating the remains.

So what have you found on this one?

Well, this one has got one very,

very sharp clean cut through the third cervical vertebrae.

-It's an absolutely wonderful cut, isn't it?

-It is, it's very nice.

A cut mark right across the vertebra there

and across here.

To help with the examination,

the very latest microscope technology is being used.

Its stunning 3D images

give new insights into how these men were decapitated.

So we're looking here at one of the neck vertebrae

which has been cut through from the back.

So you've got the cut mark going all the way down here

and you can see, even here, the detail...

..of the weapon that caused the injury.

I think that the injuries that I've seen on the neck vertebrae,

and elsewhere on the body,

suggest that they are perimortem injuries -

around the time of death these injuries occurred.

So could these men have been decapitated in battle?

There are no defence injuries on the hands or the forearms.

There are no perimortem injuries to the ribcage there.

There are no perimortem injuries to the facial area of the skulls.

I would think for many of the individuals it was a pretty

traumatic event for them

and some of the individuals have got multiple cut marks

on the neck vertebrae and elsewhere around the skull area,

suggesting these people were rather hacked around

to get the head off.

In my professional opinion,

these people were executed

by decapitation.

Such archaeological finds have the power to radically change our view

of what life could be like in Roman Britain.

Sometimes, it seems, it could be a brutally violent place,

even for the wealthy, pampered elite.

Despite some compelling evidence to the contrary,

we still have an inherited notion from classical historians that it

was the urbanite Romans who were the civilised inhabitants of our islands

and the Celts, especially those in Scotland,

were the barbarians.

But by the 1970s some historians,

influenced by Marxist historiography,

began to challenge this idea.

In 1976, Magnus Magnuson, an adopted Scot,

came to the defence of the ancient peoples of Scotland.

He examined a passage from the great English historian, Edward Gibbon,

with which he took particular issue.

'The Romans, the masters of the fairest

'and most wealthy climates of the globe

'turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest,

'from lakes concealed in a blue mist

'and from cold and lonely heaths over which the deer of the forest

'were chased by a troupe of naked barbarians.'

Well, I don't know so much about the naked barbarians

but Gibbon was certainly wrong about the weather here in Scotland

because, as you can see, it never rains in Scotland

except when it's wet, of course.

But Gibbon seems to me to represent

everything that's most objectionable in both the English and the Romans,

patronising, condescending about the inhabitants of other countries,

ineffably complacent about their own civilised values.

And, anyway, these savages up to the north

weren't all that savage, either.

Remember that this was the period of the building of the brochs,

these great stone towers from the 1st century BC onwards.

You can still see their ruins on our northern coastlines

and that alone argues a degree of social skill

and organisation which belies Gibbon's manifest contempt.

No, I'm not trying to belittle the Roman achievement,

especially since the Caledonians are once again part of a European

confederacy under a treaty of Rome.

I just don't want you to get the impression that the chaps out

there were all baddies and uncivilised baddies at that.

Anyway, the Romans themselves weren't so hot some of the time,

as even Gibbon would admit.

The popular image of the Picts and Scots

as barbarians, though, is an enduring one...

But this idea of wild savages didn't necessarily

come from the Romans themselves.

The Romans may have referred to the Ancient Britons as "wretched"

and tried to crush them,

but it's also clear from the literary sources

that they had a grudging respect for the Britons

and even admired their independent spirit.

In fact, our often negative image of the native Britons

has come to us from English historians like Edward Gibbon,

writing in the 18th century, who was reflecting less

the attitude of the Romans and more the prejudices of his own time.

It's very easy, when you come to the past, to look at earlier

historians, earlier archaeologists

and see the prejudices that are so - they're blatant to you.

So we look back and we see that when Britain had an empire,

scholars tended to look at the Romans,

equate themselves with the Romans, and they saw the Roman Empire

as bringing the light of civilisation

to the darkness of Barbarian Britain and Barbarian Europe.

And we can see that that's far too simple,

it's far too crude and it does downplay the sophistication

of the indigenous population.

We do have to be careful, though, empires are no longer fashionable,

they're now very much the bad guys, you know Imperialist, Colonial

oppression, all this sort of thing is not what should be happening.

The danger is that you then assume that the people that they defeated,

the people who are conquered, are somehow inherently virtuous because

they've been conquered. They have proved militarily weaker than

the Romans but they must be better people, they must somehow be nicer.

There's one ancient Briton

whose image has continually changed over time.

She was a British queen who led a bloody revolt

in southern England against Roman rule.

Boudicca, or Boadicea as she's often been called,

thanks to a Renaissance spelling mistake,

has undergone a revolution in image over the centuries,

from cruel tyrant to feminist freedom fighter.

In the early 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher in Number Ten,

and women's history very much in vogue,

Michael Wood made a programme In Search Of Boadicea.

He examined how new archaeological discoveries in London

showed just what this vengeful queen would do

if you got on the wrong side of her.

The financial heart of the Roman town under Cornhill,

the Royal Exchange here and the Bank of England,

was laid to ashes

and it's here that we get our first hard evidence

of the kind of atrocities

that were committed by both sides during this war.

Tacitus passes over the detail,

but the later writer, Dio Cassius, tells us that the

Britons hung up the Roman women that they captured,

cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths

and impaled them on sharpened stakes.

One's first reaction to that story is that whoever made it up

got it from some lurid Roman anthropology book.

It's got all the trappings of modern atrocity propaganda -

Huns bayoneting babies, Vietnamese Russian roulette, and so on.

But it may be as Tacitus implies that these atrocities were

committed in fulfilment of some religious ritual demanded

by the druids, which brings us to these...

A large number of these skulls have been found in the Roman silt

of the Walbrook stream to the west of the bank.

There are about 25 of them in the London Museum alone

and they're always found with no other skeletal remains.

Now we know that these Celtic rituals included

the use of the severed heads of the vanquished

and it does seems that these skulls are the heads of Londoners who

suffered at the hands of Boudicca's vengeful army of liberation.

Boudicca's story has everything -

a warrior queen, an underdog standing up to the might of Rome,

triumph and ultimately tragedy.

Over the centuries the persona of Boudicca has changed dramatically.

In the age of Shakespeare, she was imagined as a bloodthirsty savage.

The Victorians rehabilitated her as a symbol of British Imperial power

and, in recent times, she's become a bit of a feminist icon.

But despite numerous books and television documentaries,

there's actually very little evidence to go on,

to the extent that some people doubt she ever actually existed.

With so little to go on,

it's perhaps not surprising that over the years,

it's been possible to cast Boudicca in whatever mould suited

the prevailing attitude and politics of the time.

The lack of any tangible evidence means Boudicca remains an enigma,

leaving her persona and actions

open to constant interpretation and debate.

Some have even used her story

to imagine an alternate history of Roman Britain.

In the 1990s, a new breed of historian emerged.

They were interested in creating thought experiments,

coming up with alternative versions of events in the past,

and imagining how those might have changed the course of history.

Their work became known as counterfactual history

and Roman Britain provided fertile ground for study.

In an episode of the series What If?

Carenza Lewis explored what might have happened

if Boudicca's army had fought their campaign using different tactics

and how this might have forced the Roman governor, Paulinus,

to relinquish control of Britain.

If Boudicca had continued to use ambush tactics and avoid

direct contact with the Romans' well-honed military machine,

she could have forced Paulinus to retreat to the continent.

The Roman civilian settlers would have been left

at the mercy of British reprisals.

The Britons would have continued with the sorts of, um,

really purging and ransacking,

which Tacitus tells us about is happening at St Albans, for example,

and would have effectively driven anybody Roman out of the island.

If the Roman occupation had been cut short in its infancy,

a chain of events would have been set in motion that would take

Britain on a very different course through history.

Gone would be the towns, roads

and centralised government of Roman Britain.

In their place, the country could develop as a society

of warrior farmers earning allegiance to their tribal king,

rather than the Roman Emperor.

Speaking a form of Celtic, but still trading with the continent,

they could have gradually formed larger political units

under more powerful rulers.

The removal of four centuries of Roman occupation

from British history would have had other effects.

Britain could have been strong enough to repel

the Anglo-Saxon immigrants in the 5th century.

Without the Angles and the Saxons, English itself,

the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare would never have evolved.

I think the question of whether counterfactual history

is a useful exercise really depends

on what you think history is for.

If you think it's just about compiling a list of things

that happened in the past,

then writing about what didn't happen isn't much use.

But if you think it's about trying to work out why those things

happened, then it certainly is useful to think

seriously about what the alternatives could have been.

I think counterfactual history, um, is very recent.

I mean, I don't think people would have regarded it

as a serious endeavour 20, 30 years ago, to be honest.

I'm very dubious about it and the problem is this.

It misunderstands that everything is connected with everything else.

So if you change one piece of the mosaic of social reality,

if you like, everything else begins to change at the same time.

In ways that are completely unpredictable.

History is not like science.

It's not the case that if you alter one variable,

all of the other variables stay the same.

They don't. All of the other variables then change

because you've changed one element in the situation.

I think counterfactual history simply doesn't work.

As soon as one thing is different, there is such a cascade of

changes that it becomes impossible, actually, to make sense of how

society might have, might have developed differently.

Before the 20th century, there was a widely held idea

that the relationship between the Romans and native Britons

was often antagonistic - that it was very much rulers and subjects

and Boudicca's revolt seemed to reinforce this belief.

In recent decades, some historians have argued that the Romans didn't

always impose themselves so forcibly on the Britons.

The old notion of a clash of cultures,

with the Romans sweeping away everything that had gone before,

has been replaced with a much more subtle interpretation.

In some key aspects of life, including religion

and commerce, there's a real sense of continuity,

coupled with the fact the Romans seemed prepared to

adapt their own institutions in order to ease the transition.

In his landmark series, A History Of Britain,

historian Simon Schama explored this idea of a melding of cultures.

He visited the city of Bath, where there is one of the most

obvious examples of this integration.

For it was here that the British goddess Sulis was combined

with the Roman goddess Minerva to create a hybrid acceptable

to both Romans and Britons.

Bath became a symbol of this new unified culture in Roman Britain.

A world of garrisons and barracks

had now become a society in its own right.

And, from the middle of the second century, it makes sense to

talk about a Romano-British culture

and not just as a colonial veneer imposed on the resentful natives,

but as a genuine fusion.

And nowhere was this clearer than here in Bath.

Bath was the quintessential Romano-British place.

At once mod-con and mysterious cult,

therapy and luxury, a marvel of hydraulic engineering

and a showy theatre of the waters of healing.

The spa was an extravaganza of buildings constructed over

a spring that gushed a third of a million gallons

of piping hot water into the baths every day.

When you soaked yourself at Bath, you were washing your body

and your soul - ablution and devotion at the same time.

Much of the bathing, as well as the flirting, the gossip

and deal-making, went on in this austerely grandiose Great Bath.

But the spiritual heart of the place was the sacred spring,

a ferny grotto where water collected

and where the devotees of the presiding goddess, Sulis Minerva,

could look through an especially constructed window

at the altar erected in her honour

and occasionally could throw gift offerings in her way.

Through years of work piecing together

small fragments of evidence,

historians and archaeologists have established that

the fusion of a native goddess like Sulis

with her Roman equivalent, Minerva,

was a pattern that was repeated across Roman Britain.

But this notion of an integration

has been a source of real debate and contention.

There's a danger when you start talking about cultural fusion,

in Roman Britain, that you're really imposing modern ideas

of sort of multicultural society on the ancient past.

On the other hand, when you do look at the evidence,

Roman Britain clearly had a far more mixed population than Britain

had before or would have again for a very long time.

You know, you can find people from modern-day Syria

up on Hadrian's Wall.

People are travelling from one end of the Empire to the other

and there are all sorts of ideas imported with the Romans.

And the Romans were very good at respecting local traditions.

You find indigenous cults are taken on by the Romans.

They're sometimes changed slightly,

they're put in a stone temple context, whereas before

they've just been at a sacred spring or a grove, or something like that.

And elements like human sacrifice are suppressed

but other aspects remain the same.

And there's been a great historical debate,

that certainly became more vivid in the 20th century

about the extent to which Britain was Romanised,

as the word was employed by the great historian, Francis Haverfield.

You know, were the Romans

just casting a kind of faint veneer over Britain

that came and went, you know.

400 years is quite a long period in history

but some would argue that the Romans only left

a very thin veneer of effect.

If the Romans' legacy is still in question,

then there's another subject which has provoked even more debate.

And that's how, when and why Roman Britain ended.

It's a subject that has fascinated

and divided historians for centuries.

In the popular imagination there's a fixed date

when the foreign legionaries finally have enough and retreat back to

Italy to fend off the barbarians who were gathering at the gates of Rome.

But even if there was some sort of official withdrawal by the

Roman authorities, it's likely that actually only a few people left.

And amongst those remaining were probably many who still

thought of themselves as citizens of Rome.

In a 1970s documentary

exploring the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,

Barry Cunliffe and Magnus Magnuson interrogated

two different perspectives on the collapse of Roman rule in Britain.

The sea, which for so long

had offered Britain a degree of isolation and protection,

began in the 3rd century to take on a more menacing aspect.

Great fortresses, like Portchester Castle,

were now built to protect the south east from pirates and marauders.

For a while, throughout the first part of the 4th century,

the problem was contained.

In land, in the countryside, life continued often on a luxurious level

but the threat was always there.

Uncertainty and instability and impending danger

became a normal part of everyday life.

Well, here in Scotland, everything seemed to be going rather

quietly as far as we can tell.

The Antonine Wall had been abandoned 200 years earlier,

it was a dead letter.

There seems to have been a lot of trade between north and south

and presumably a bit of raiding on the side as well.

But one mustn't think that when the collapse started, that the Romans

had to give up the Antonine Wall and fight their way grimly,

step by step back to Hadrian's Wall in a series of rearguard actions.

No, when the first signs of collapse began to appear,

well, people just have an instinct for that sort of thing,

a smell for disaster and they're not idiots up here, you know?

They knew that there was booty and victory to be gained

and they moved south towards Hadrian's Wall,

not just the Caledonians,

or the Picts as the Romans would call them now,

but tribes from all over and from Ireland as well.

They overran the Wall by the simple expedient of sailing round it.

I wonder why these clever Romans never thought of that?

Right, Barry?

Well, Magnus, the simple fact was that the Romans never really

seemed to have got used to fighting in the northern seas.

And this, this Barbarian conspiracy,

it was a dreadful disaster for Britain.

There was chaos south as far as the Thames

and, for many people, it must have seemed like the end

but central government was still strong enough

and, within a few years,

it managed to re-establish order within the province.

A new force was sent

and they landed at Richborough in Kent and marched on London

and there started buying off the dissident soldiers,

building new forts. They built, for example,

a number of signal stations along the Yorkshire coast,

so that the wall couldn't be outflanked by sea again,

and so order was re-established.

But it was short-lived.

Roman Britain had only another 40 years or so to go.

I think the end of Roman Britain is actually quite sharp,

in the sense, not in the sense

that the legions packed their bags,

marched down to the White Cliffs of Dover

and sailed back to the continent.

Not in that sense, of course.

But fairly sharp in an archaeological sense,

in that if you look at a period of a few decades, really,

from the late 4th into the early 5th century,

you see dramatic changes in the record.

You see the forts abandoned, you see the villas abandoned.

You see the towns abandoned,

you see the end of a mass production, wheel-thrown pottery.

You see the end of coinage, nobody's laying mosaics,

nobody's painting frescos - that whole kind of infrastructure,

if you like, of civilisation of empire,

of Romanitas, of Roman culture,

disappears completely in a few decades.

This speaks to us in all kinds of ways.

It speaks to preoccupations that we see in fiction and film

and popular culture about, you know, what would happen

if there was a tremendous disaster, if there was a plague, war.

You know, this feeds into our fears about the collapse,

the potential collapse of society, the fragility of our own society.

The end of Roman Britain is one of the most contentious issues

in history and archaeology,

even within subjects where much of what we do know

is constantly updated and argued over.

Even after decades of research,

historians still don't know for sure how Roman Britain ended.

It remains a shadowy episode only half understood

and open to endless theorising.

But what we do know is that some time around 410 AD

something changed and the place we know as Roman Britain

became something else.

The age of the Anglo-Saxons had arrived

and a new chapter of our island story began.

From that point on, the image we have of Roman Britain has been

in constant flux, slowly changing with each new generation.

But in the last century, it's been archaeology that has driven

forward our understanding, and each new find and breakthrough

has helped to build a clearer picture of this fascinating period.

Over the last 50 years,

Roman Britain has never been far from our screens,

and it's been portrayed as

a myriad of different and often contradictory places -

violent yet civilised, multicultural yet deeply divided.

Well, I'm sure that Roman Britain will never be

far from our screens for the next 50 years

but I'm also sure that our perceptions and our understanding

of this crucial period of British history

will continue to change and evolve.