The Royal House of the Brigantes Sir Mortimer and Magnus

Sir Mortimer Wheeler endowed the huge Iron Age hill fort

of Stanwick in northern Yorkshire in 1951

as his contribution to the Festival of Britain.

As it turned out, it was his last major excavation in Britain,

but he brought to it the same originality that had marked

all his digs, the same unerring gift for making the past come alive.

They...the people we dug up were living at the beginning of the...

what we call the Roman period,

at, say...in the years immediately following the Roman invasion

of this country in 43 AD.

We know that for the pieces of pottery

we began to find in our digging already, quite early on.

We knew, also,

that involved in this affair were the local natives -

we call them Celts.

But they were the local natives,

to one of whom, to one of the chieftains amongst whom,

this sword I've told you of must have belonged.

But these were in fact the British?

They were British. The Brigantes were the Yorkshiremen of the period,

roughly speaking -

the great tribe which stretched from sea to sea across what is

now roughly Yorkshire and Lancashire,

cutting the whole island into half.

The Brigantes occupied that area,

the area in the midst of which we were digging.

It was a pastoral society.

It lived not on corn but on beef

and milk and things of that sort.

Secondly, by way of contrast to this,

the southern part of the island was agricultural.

It had an agricultural south and a pastoral north.

The island was divided roughly into two, and all this happened

in the pastoral north amongst the Brigantes.

The first thing they did on arriving here in 43 AD, the Romans,

was to, er...develop, exploit the south, where the corn grew.

You see, Roman soldiers in those days didn't eat much meat,

they ate gruel and oats and barley and so on.

They were vegetarians very largely,

and they wanted to develop the vegetarian area of England at first.

They did - places like Maiden Castle and so on.

Meanwhile, in order to keep the rest of the island quiet

they came to some sort of an agreement with the Brigantes

in the north whereby the Brigantes held their fire.

I remember Tacitus said somewhere that the Romans

thought that the men of Kent were the only civilised people

that they knew - presumably because they ate porridge!

Partly that and partly also, of course, they were nearer to the

Roman world. They'd been in contact with the Roman world up to a point.

They'd traded with Gaul, which was already Roman,

and so they had a better opportunity of advancement

than the people in the far north in the hills and moors of the north.

The uncouth Yorkshiremen.

The uncouth Yorkshiremen.

I won't go further north than that at the moment.

These Brigantes, were they the sort of equivalent of the kind

of partisans that you've got in the Second World War?

They were guerrillas who took to the mountains and carried

on attacking the invaders from these mountain fastnesses?

It's more this way, I think, Mag -

that having made this compact with the Romans,

they proceeded, at the first opportunity, to break it.

When the Romans began to march across Wales with their eyes on Ireland -

the Romans never got to Ireland, but they obviously intended

to at one time, they were marching towards Anglesey and Ireland -

and when they got far enough away from the main part of England,

what is now England,

the Brigantes, this northern tribe, rose behind them.

They had to therefore turn round and go back,

and bring them to heel again, bring them to heel,

and this state of affairs of, er...

come and go, as it were, continued for the next generation.

The Brigantes had a royal house

with a King Venutius and Queen Cartimandua.

Queen Cartimandua had handed over Caratacus to the Romans

when he took refuge with her.

Is this the Caractacus of the pop song?

It's Caract... Caractacus to the... so vulgar!

MAGNUS LAUGHS

But again, Caratacus...after all, if you can say Boudica,

I can say Caratacus.

Now, they...

She - Cartimandua, the Queen - became pro-Roman.

She was a quisling.

The King - this is around about the middle of the first century,

the King was anti-Roman and with him went the major part of his tribe.

His little original hill fort was enlarged,

first of all by the addition of 130 acres of new ground

which included a stream, now known as the Mary Wild Beck -

I don't know who Mary Wild was, nobody could tell me -

but a large part of her stream was included in the new defences,

so that his allies, whom he began to call in to his aid,

could bring their flocks and herds with them.

And then later, round about, shall we say, oh, 69-70 AD,

so we're getting on gradually into the century, Venutius

further enlarged this great place

by the addition of 400 acres more...600 acres more.

Why?

Because he was calling in more tribesmen.

He called in the neighbouring tribes to his aid.

They all flocked in to his colours, as it were,

bringing their food with them, bringing their flocks and herds

and their families with them - in that order, and they wanted space.

They wanted more and more of this stream to water their flocks at and

for their own purposes.

And so the place grew to the enormous size that it is today.

But we found in digging the...this final enlargement

that the work had never been finished.

It was stopped in the middle.

The great entrance at the south which I thought might produce more

swords and more relics was found never to have been used.

The rocks were lying loose -

the great rocks which they chiselled away

in making their rock-cut ditch there

were still lying loose where the builders had left them.

So in fact, the Romans had cottoned on to what Venutius was doing

and attacked before he'd time to get it all ready.

Yes, but this time, the Romans had an advanced legion at York,

their Ninth Legion, the famous Ninth Legion.

The Ninth Legion always lost its battles except the last one.

And the last one is the one I'm just coming to, when about 70 AD,

just after 70, the Brigantes rose for the last time under their king.

The Queen had fled to the Romans for safety.

But the Brigantes rose under their king

and you can almost hear the Ninth Legion tramping up the road,

when you look at this unfinished entrance with the rocks still

standing there as the builders had left them. It's very vivid.

Very vivid indeed.

Now there was another bit that you yourself added

to the report of this excavation.

I remember reading in one of the footnotes, and in that you

describe a little bit what you thought about Queen Cartimandua.

You said that you thought in fact that she was a southern princess,

who had been living in a land of wine and honey,

and then she'd been married off to some uncouth cattle rancher from

the north, from Yorkshire, and that she resented this the whole time -

they were a totally incompatible couple

and that this, perhaps, is why they fell out.

That's it, you've got it well.

And she couldn't take these... these ranchers of the north.

I think you're perfectly right.

I was perfectly right, too, when I wrote that footnote, I think,

that Cartimandua almost certainly was

a member of Cymbeline's or Cunobelin's family,

came from the neighbourhood of Colchester,

the most civilised part of pre-Roman Britain,

and that she became a quisling -

for that reason that her sympathies were with her relations in the south

and she couldn't stand this hairy, this hairy...

Husband?

Well, husband is... Yes, or...this hairy husband...

This, what shall I say, pastoral...

pastoral shep...this shepherd, this great shepherd

in the north.

He's more than a shepherd because we know that he had not only sheep

and goats, but he had masses of cattle.

We've found their remains, the remains of their dinners,

and the dinners of his fellow tribesmen.

We found them all there. We've got the whole evidence.

Now you call her a quisling queen

but presumably there wasn't the same kind of sense of nationalism

during the Roman invasion that you had, for instance, in

the Second World War, because after all, it wasn't a nation, it was just

a series of scattered tribes that occupied large areas of England.

I think it's perfectly clear from one's reading of what is

left of Tacitus, that the anti-Roman feeling and the patriotic

local, tribal anti-Roman feeling were very strongly marked.

I've always been fascinated by the way in which

during your excavations you've come across the spoor of

great men of the past - men like Caesar, Vespasian and his attack

on Maiden Castle, and in Pakistan, Alexander the Great at Charsadda.

What do you feel about these people whom you're helping to dig up?

Well, you can't dig for them unless you begin to know them.

You can't follow them

unless you have a sort of idea of what they're going after themselves.

No, but the point is this - I have a bias.

We all have a bias in one direction or another

but my bias is in favour of the individual.

I like to know the individual.

There are those - and they're very good archaeologists -

who are content to know all that there is to know about

a collection of flint implements.

Anonymous flint implements - very important.

Gives you some idea of SOCIAL values at a certain period

or at a conjectural period, if you like, sometimes.

But I've always had -

and this probably goes back to my classical beginnings,

when, after all, you were dealing with individual writers, individual

poets, Horace and Livy and Tacitus

and so on - they were all individuals and as writers, they were

individuals and they were themselves interested in individuals

and that's probably why I have this little bias in myself for what

is called history and protohistory.

There's phases of man and man's story, man's history,

when you can pick out here and there a few odd individuals who have

contributed, more than others, perhaps, into progress,

what we call progress, or what they may have called progress, and so on.

Well, more recently, I've...

you know, small way, been treading in the footsteps of Alexander

at Charsadda in the north or north-west frontier.

You go up to the north of his frontier today, you know, it's...

there is in the atmosphere of the north-west frontier a certain

sense of open air - things may happen, an army may go by...

..almost invisibly, but you can sense it.

You find the actual landscapes through which

Alexander in his various moods galloped, was wounded,

conquered and never quite failed - very nearly, once or twice,

but never quite failed.

He's a success story but a success which he deserves

and to follow a man of that kind, of that calibre, through the landscape

which we know he penetrated,

to dig up an ancient city like Pushkalavati, Lotus City,

which we know that he conquered himself with enormous force,

where he himself went to receive the surrender of the inhabitants,

and where he put his own garrison in and so on.

A success story, but a success story on an immense field.

So you don't get lost in the personality.

The personality was always a figure in a wider landscape.

That's me.

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