The Roman Invasion of Britain with Richard Hingley

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I am joined by the author and scholar Richard Hingley. Richard is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University and his research focuses on the history of Rome, including the archaeology of Britain in the Iron Age and Roman periods and the archaeology of the Western Roman Empire. Today though we're going to hear all about his new book, Conquering the Ocean, the Roman Invasion of Britain, published by Oxford University Press. So you are the author of Conquering the Ocean, the Roman Invasion of Britain. Do you want to tell us a bit about what the book's about? Yes, it's obviously about the Roman conquest of Britain but that takes some explaining because I suppose in the mind of the public sometimes the Roman conquest is quite a short-term thing, you know, perhaps it occurs over a few years. In reality it goes on for a long period of time and really the first significant episode is when Julius Caesar comes to Britain. Julius Caesar is campaigning in Gaul, which is largely modern-day France, and he decides to go over the ocean to Britain in 55 and 54 BC. So he travels twice with armed forces but he doesn't actually conquer anything, he ends up leading again with some agreements with leading peoples in Britain and they have to pay Rome tribute but he doesn't actually conquer anything. Then roughly 100 years later the Emperor Claudius, so Claudius is in a difficult position in Rome because the senatorial elite, the people who ruled Rome, didn't really respect Claudius and when he comes to power Claudius wants the victory and the best place for several reasons for Claudius to do that is Britain. So he sends a general and a large army across the ocean to follow up Julius Caesar 100 years after Caesar's being to Britain and he starts the conquest. But really that period of conquest goes on from 43 right down to late 1st century and at that point the Romans have conquered most of Britain and they have to withdraw and further campaigns occur. So my book goes right up to the building of Hadrian's Wall which occurred about 1900 years ago, so in the 120s, so it covers the whole period from Julius Caesar to the building of the wall. That's longer than I thought, that's a longer period of time than I would have thought. I haven't done a huge amount in Roman history but I feel like for some reason I didn't think it was such a long period of time. Is there a reason why that's something that people might think? Yes, I mean I think you have to think about what the Romans were trying to do. Initially Julius Caesar comes to Britain and Claudius has a very similar interest because Britain is a very distant fabulous place and Julius Caesar tells us that Romans really know very very little about Britain and by the time Claudius invades they have much more knowledge about the people of Britain because they're in contact with people in the south-east of Britain between Caesar and Claudius but they leave Britain alone effectively and just manipulate the needs of the people in south-eastern Britain for 100 years between Caesar and Claudius. When Claudius comes in he conquers the south-east very quickly so the whole of south-eastern and what is now England falls to the Romans within a few years but as they campaign further west into Wales particularly and when they get into central Britain the conquest is very difficult it slows down considerably and they have to actually expend considerable effort in conquering these areas and it takes them to the early 80s to reach what is southern Scotland. Now we have to be a bit careful I talk about Scotland and Wales but they're modern countries so they're medieval kingdoms and modern countries. We should really talk about southern Britain, western Britain, central Britain and northern Britain. I like to make that qualification that they're really medieval and modern terms those countries but we can't not use them. Why the Romans get slowed down in that process is to do with the complexity of dominating all these people and also the fact that they're always involved in military campaigns in other parts of the empire so we can't send an absolutely massive military force we actually send tens of thousands of soldiers to Britain but we can't send hundreds of thousands of soldiers because those soldiers are needed elsewhere in the empire. Of course so multiple prongs of attack which is so they don't have the whole force of the army was it just a more was it also more difficult than they were anticipating as well? Yeah I mean I think there's some indication that is true because at certain times during the conquest people make statements that they can complete the conquest quite quickly for instance one of the governors so the provincial governors are in charge of the campaigning and one of the provincial governors a very senior Roman man tells the emperor that basically he can complete the conquest of Britain in three or four years but he's campaigning in Wales and at that stage in the 60s they haven't conquered any of the central area of Britain or any of what is now Scotland so we don't know really the Roman military elite were very arrogant um we don't really know whether they thought they could do things which were unrealistic or whether it was just boasting and in reality you know the governor was trying to get the emperor's support by suggesting something that really wasn't practical um I think it may be well they do a lot of traveling around I mean they they have a important navy and the navy explores the coast and they also send people out to interview people beyond their frontiers so powerful people in communities beyond the frontiers they may actually only have a very vague view of the geography of Britain until they actually start campaigning further right and perhaps they don't realize how large the island is quite they don't really know how much land that they have left or how many more groups of people are actually going to come into contact with they just assume oh yeah we'll be fine you know a couple years and we'll have it all imperial powers can be like that so if you read some of British imperial history it's another interest of mine um you you have British administrators and commanders who actually think they can do things that are completely improbable when you look at what they were boasting about um imperial hubris or whatever if if you tell yourself that perhaps as a military commander you may you may be able to do things that otherwise would be very difficult but it can obviously get you into trouble as well one example of that is actually relevant to my book because um the Romans are campaigning in northwest Wales in AD 60 CE and the governor there has probably gone too far and we get this uprising in eastern England which is very famous the uprising of Boudicca and one of the reasons for that may be the governor has actually gone too far and has been too ambitious in conquest so he's right in the northwest of Wales at Anglesey the island of Anglesey and he seems to have gone too far and he loses control right stretched a bit too thin um why did you choose to write this book with this topic is it building on older research or is it just something that you're fascinated about well that's a very interesting question actually it's a new thing for me to write this sort of book um i've written uh eight books in total but this is actually a very different book from my earlier research a lot of my research has been on the history of the way that Roman knowledge is developed and I actually talk about that in the last chapter of my this book but it's only a short chapter this one is if you want a historical narrative okay I'm trying to tell a fairly linear simple story about the conquest that people can follow very easily the reason I wrote it really is because when I was young these sort of accounts were very popular in academia so we had a whole series of books coming out when I was in my formative years that tried to tell stories about the conquest of Roman Britain and the impact of Roman Britain but that tradition in archaeology has become very unpopular archaeologists these days including me tend to be far more interested in the lives of all sorts of people so our research this is true of a lot of academic fields our research tends to focus on quite detailed case studies of the lives of men who aren't members of the imperial elite and women and children and we're interested in slaves and agricultural workers we've sort of lost interest in archaeology in the actions of emperors and senior military men ancient historians by contrast still focus quite a lot of attention on the activities of the emperors and these things you know the emperors drive a lot of what happens in Britain and I as an archaeologist wanted to have a think about whether I could write a synthesis that integrated the ancient history with the archaeology so I tried to take forward quite a lot of the stories of people who aren't members of the imperial elite so they're women and children and auxiliary soldiers you know less important soldiers in my story but I also think what the emperors believe and do is really fundamental for our understanding of the conquest of Roman Britain so it was a challenge for me to do it and I'm waiting to see how it goes down with my my archaeologist colleagues and whether they like it or whether they feel it's rather it's rather a masculine tale of power the conquest of Roman Britain we can't we can't really write it any other way because the people who drive it are men and they're very senior absolutely well I think it's very interesting and I also think you know people get subjected to the actions of powerful men and we can try and do our research in a way that sort of looks at other issues but we can't avoid that in the Roman past or in the modern world so some of those things were the things that were really motivating me to write the book it's really it's an I like that the fact that you're still you're not you know disregarding the fact that it was the emperor and you know that is the power and that's the reason why you know they're going across the ocean but then bringing it back to how that affected sort of more normal people is because you're right I feel like a lot of my studies definitely was about the everyday lives and the people that weren't necessarily the you know the topics of the theses in the last 50 years it's definitely been a bit of a shift would you just say that it's because the powerful men are the ones that everyone was just so interested in and that is the most information about them is that why that was always the most popular thing to research yes in classical studies we have classical texts and those tend to talk about the activities and lives of the very very wealthy and powerful the classical texts that address the Roman conquest of Britain they're all written by members of the male Roman aristocracy and they tend on the whole to talk about you know the actions of their peers and some of them are quite critical of these accounts they're not all entirely positive they also write about people like Boudicca who's an anomaly you know because Boudicca is a woman and she rebels against Rome but the people who write about her we've got two authors they're both male um they write about another female leader in Britain called Carta Manua who they interpret as a very negative figure Boudicca is different she in Tacitus actually he writes two accounts but one of Tacitus's accounts Boudicca is quite a positive figure she rebels because she's really very badly provoked by the Roman administration and that's an attack on Nero who was the emperor at the time who was seen as a very bad emperor but that drives a lot of interest in sort of topics you know the elite attitude to Britain and why the Romans conquered Britain archaeologists used to follow that agenda quite closely until the 1970s and archaeologists are a bit more critical sometimes of power um so classics is a very elite subject you know in Britain or America I'm sure it is in your country too archaeology uh historically was also practiced by the elite but it's quite inclusive as a subject and we tend to be a bit more critical so we've had several generations of people in the archaeology of Roman Britain who's as I've said got much more interested in average people and actually I started my research really by looking at Roman rural settlement this is over 40 years ago and I was trying to get a perception of all the agricultural workers and slaves as well as powerful people um so again you have this attempt to create a balance um I think as I say we have to be interested in the powerful male elite but we also have to put that in context and you know I keep coming back to that don't I that's really the balance in the book I think yeah I mean it's impossible to look at the history of Rome and not look at the lives of the emperors and the people that ruled the empire that's that would just be an incomplete picture of what was happening regardless of where you are in the Roman empire surely but then I didn't have to write the book so I could have written a book about I suppose the agricultural economy in Britain I wrote the book because I'm also really interested in the conquest of Roman Britain obviously I wouldn't have taken it on board otherwise and I think the public I know we have novelists who write about the military occupation of Britain and we have a very good series of novels in Boudicca there's a considerable public interest but the archaeological consideration of the conquest the books are rather out of date so I can I've looked at up-to-date interpretations of the motivations of emperors and I've looked at the archaeological information for all sorts of people involved in so it's a much more up-to-date account so I suppose if there's a novelist writing a novel about the Roman conquest of Britain I'd hope my book would be quite useful in presenting an up-to-date account that's not 30 or 40 years old that's what we like to hear we like fresh new information new ideas new ways of synthesizing old information it's it's great it's it's really exciting really and so while you were researching it you said it's like a fairly new topic for you did you what did you find the most interesting or the most fascinating or something that shocked you something yes I mean I it's partly something I I kind of knew already but working through I think has been tremendously enlightening that I we've known for quite a while that Britain has a very special role in elite Roman society and this is why the emperors want to conquer Britain because Britain is an island and it's a very special island because there are islands in the Mediterranean which the Romans controlled too but when we look at the sea the Romans had a particular attitude to the sea now they inherited beliefs from the Greeks and the Greeks saw the ocean as endless so the world was a big island set within the ocean and they had some knowledge of the extent of the ocean Alexander the Great had gone right to the eastern extreme of the world that the Greeks knew about and the Romans inherited these attitudes Alexander hadn't gone to the west he hadn't gone west in the Mediterranean very much and he hadn't gone right to Spain or the west coast of North Africa however another myth is Heracles in Greek tradition or Hercules as the Romans knew him Hercules was reputed to have sailed right to the west of the Mediterranean and actually to have gone through the pillars of Hercules which form the twin sides of that channel which goes through from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and Hercules was a legendary traveller like Alexander now the Romans know very little we're told the Romans know very little about the Atlantic as you go north of Spain so by the time of Julius Caesar they've already conquered parts of Spain they know very little about the west coast of the Atlantic going up towards Britain and actually these traditions of Oceanus the endless ocean get attributed to Britain so Britain's really special though is it's an island in ocean and actually trying to conquer and dominate Britain is effectively getting the submission of this ancient Greek god Oceanus now Oceanus was one of the original Greek gods he was a titan and in Roman society he's very powerful and significant now there's an earlier book which looked at this in some detail by somebody called David Brawn and I found that very useful but following through the conquest of Roman Britain right from Julius Caesar to Hadrian I've managed to find some additional things to add and I think I've managed to reconceptualize this idea about ocean quite fundamentally and I also believe deeply that Hadrian's activities in Britain, so Hadrian comes to Britain 1,900 years ago in 122 CE with also deeply informed by the attitude to ocean because Hadrian is drawing on that oceanic propaganda and perhaps the reason Hadrian's wall is so significant and substantial you know it's a very very substantial Roman frontier a very famous Roman frontier is because Hadrian and the Roman elite have this special attitude to Britain as a barbaric and primitive place set beyond ocean or set in ocean and that's something that I've managed to follow through in the book and I know it's had a few early reviews which are going on the back of the book and one of the reviewers picked that up particularly because that story about Britain's location in the ocean really knits together the whole book if you want so I think I found that quite surprising because when I'd started off doing research that was a vague interest of mine and it became absolutely fundamental really to the book and I think it's a main issue that you know I'm really quite proud of that I've managed to bring out so all these actions the reason the Romans want Britain and the reason they do all this campaigning over the decades and the reason they have so many soldiers in Britain and the reason Hadrian's wall is so substantial all to do with their to oceanus and the sort of cosmology of the world if you want that's fascinating that is so interesting the fact that that was that sort of became a foundation after not really you know sort of in the periphery for you and then it became such a big thing that's that's awesome that must have been such a cool thing to work through yes I mean I think you write books or I write books by doing research and you know the ideas gradually cohere and one of the things that became problematic about some of the books on the conquest of Roman Britain 40 years ago so they became a bit repetitive because people were working on the same materials and perhaps the stories became rather you know you've read one book and it was a slight update on the previous one I think one of my advantages writing this book is there's been so long ago since somebody wrote a book on this topic we've had republications of old books so another thing that motivated me was some of the ancient historians whose work I really like are still quoting archaeologists who were writing 40-45 years ago and my subject you know I'm an archaeologist I work in classics too but I am an archaeologist my subject has really moved on you know in 45 years it's time to quote some newer publications it's updated bibliography going on yeah I wanted to show that and I again I think to be fair to ancient historians it's because archaeologists haven't really been writing about these topics I don't think I'm criticizing them I still find it frustrating but it's good now that now there's a new book to add to the to the corpus of old publications that's great you know some new perspectives with the ones that I'm sure are still great but something new a different way to look at it I think my research is a lot of my early research is on the way knowledge is developed so I'm really really interested in I mean I look at things like Camden's Britannia which was published in the late 16th century and I look at things through history so we have some very powerful influential books published in the Edwardian period about a hundred years ago and you know I'm not criticizing the old books I mean I think a lot of them were I'm saying they got a bit repetitive I got bored with them if you want when I was young I wanted something new and different but I'm not criticizing them there were several books that were really very very influential I mean if I if I tried to be very grand I might imagine you know I could contribute something like that and I'd be very proud if I so I'm not being particularly critical I think that tradition of you know new things coming along and replacing other things they don't really replace them because anybody who's really interested in understanding does go back to old texts too because the way our knowledge evolves is really fundamental isn't it yeah for sure if someone's researching this topic this subject now they're not only going to read your book they're going to look at all the other ones as well and you know that that would just make sense one I think I have one more question what do you think people should really know about the conquering of Britain that's a really quite general question and I've thought about that quite a lot my my thing is really that we need to get a balance I mean that's probably been coming through all my comments but the reason I say that is because my experience of talking to people and I'm talking about members of the public in Britain and students and fellow academics in America and in Europe as well as in Britain is that people tend to split into two sides a lot of people seem to have a rather beneficial attitude to Rome I mean I I don't think anybody who knows much about Rome would feel Rome is entirely positive but a lot of people seem to feel Rome was you know what the Romans did for us is a concept which is very popular the idea they brought us all these things Monty Python's Life of Brian has a really good scene in which um you know Reg is being critical of Rome and one of his followers is going through all these things like sanitation and aqueducts and I don't know what else all sorts of things which are positive so what the Romans did for us is a generally very positive view and it's often nuanced by people you know having a critical take on it too you know Roman emperors were dictatorial they put some very bad emperors etc etc other people it may be more common in in the UK it may be more common in Ireland and Wales and Scotland have a directly negative view about Rome you know they were imperialists like the English and they dominated people they killed lots of people they enslaved people I think the truth is you know we can judge history a bit I think we need to get a balance because Romans produced um a lot of order I mean they did actually stop people fighting and they probably well we can document that they improved the economic productivity of the land and certain people did very well after the Roman conquest and made lots of money and got high status other people got marginalized and they killed a lot of people and enslaved millions of people across the empire their whole economy was based on slavery so I think what I say is my book is trying to look at those issues too and get a balance because when we look at Rome we can take some positive messages from Rome and we can take some negative messages from Rome and I think it really is important for the public to know that Rome you know was a complex thing if people have this very beneficial view I think one example I give is Roman re-enactment because we have a lot of Roman re-enactors I mean there are even Roman re-enactors in Australia there are quite a lot in Rome they're all over Europe and in Brazil really across a lot of the world I don't know about China in the far east I suspect they have their own re-enactors from their own history there may be some Roman re-enactors too but um they're they're usually very polite and nice people and if you go and talk to them they're very civilized and they'll tell you all about their equipment and what they do in reality in the Roman empire unless he was somebody pretty important they'd probably cut your head off I think you know we have things that push that positive attitude to Rome and I just would like to communicate a more balanced view and I think that is important because Rome is fundamental to our societies in the west I mean if we look at some recent history of America the presidents are always compared to the Roman emperors and that's usually a critical cynical thing I think but Rome just generally has I think this more positive image so nuancing that positive image I think it's something that's pretty important because the world is complex now and it was complex in the past we need to learn some positive things and the positive things we need to learn from history aren't all positive forces they're negative critical things too so that's a rather grand aim for a book I suppose but I think it's something I do try to communicate through my research that's that's a good overall thing to keep in mind for everyone who wants to read the book and if they do want to purchase the book there will be a link down below to Oxford University Press where they will be able to find it you know it's been a pleasure writing the book I'd say that I I think books are interesting things to write some authors have different reactions to writing books this one I found very challenging it's a new new thing for me to try and do and I think the next thing I might try and do is write a novel but I think that might be much more difficult for me I'm seriously thinking about that and that's the only other thing I wanted to thank you very much well that's exciting oh thank you so much for joining me it's been a real pleasure talking to you you too yeah thank you very much this video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia for more great articles and interactive content head to our website via the link below if you like my shirt you can find this design and a bunch more on our shop at worldhistory.store or you can find a link for it under the merch tab down below thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon with another video