Tony Robinson's History Of Britain S02E01 - Under the Rule of the Roman Empire

our british history is rich with tales of wealth and power and all that political nonsense the glamour of our kings and queens the jewels and furs and charisma and all those heads being chopped off but what about the real people who made everything happen [Music] rig i'll discover what they ate it's a bit dodgy the challenges they faced stop this for a game of soldiers and how they built britain that's straight as i die i'm going to uncover the extraordinary lives of some of history's ordinary people romans it's quite a weight on the head i have to say edwardians breathe in madame breathing 1950s quickly needle only record oh really soft breaks takes ages to stop it and the middle ages there's the executive model inside the house whatever history from the bottom up this time i'm going back nearly 2 000 years to the great roman empire an empire that stretched all the way from egypt to hadrian's wall and brought people from europe asia and africa to live here in gloomy old britain [Music] a couple of thousand years ago there was no better way of seeing the world than by joining the roman army although it could be a bit of a lottery [Music] for one young man let's call him marcus this would have meant traveling thousands of miles just so he could do guard duty at a forlorn outpost of the empire in a distant and uncivilized place called britannia this is going to be our marcus he came from the other end of the empire in africa [Music] in search of adventure he would have taken a boat from his homeland along the nile sometime around the year 200 a.d adventure marcus you want to join the roman army okay change your cairo and take a chariot west across the desert until you see a lot of blokes with spears great what a mug the romans had been in north africa for centuries and africans traveled around the empire as soldiers traders and emperors but the army didn't take just anybody to qualify marcus had to be solid and strong alert straight-necked and broad-chested but it didn't matter how many fingers he had some lads had tried to avoid conscription by chopping a couple off but the army wasn't having that so having proved he was a sturdy country lad with eight to ten fingers marcus had to swear to obey the emperor and never run away from the army or the enemy then he was in every morning after a hearty breakfast of a pound of bacon marcus worked out with a wooden sword which sounds rubbish but it was heavier than a real sword to make him even more big and strong [Music] then he was dispatched over 3 000 miles from his homeland to blighty rome's most northerly colony for over 150 years now you might think that being a roman soldier simply meant getting into well-formed units and then smashing the daylights out of the barbarians but there was actually far more to it than that as marcus and his mates would soon discover for a start there was the marching you had to march for up to 24 miles a day which is certainly a lot more than the 4587 steps i've taken so far and if there wasn't a road where they wanted to go marcus and his comrades would just have to build one so how did that work this is historian dr simon elliott is it true that there were virtually no roads in england prior to the romans coming and then they banged in a whole lot of roads many of which are today's a-roads absolutely yeah if you look at the landscape of britain today you look at all the a-roads they're all the lines of roman road you think of wattling street which is the line of the a2 and the a5 you think of the a1 which is irman street and it's extension from york going into scotland which is deer street these are all roman roads built by roman legionaries they were serious roads with drainage and layered with rocks gravel and sand the luxury version even had cobbles so how did they make them so straight well marcus may have had to be handy with one of these strange contraptions agroma all you have to do is sight yourself on that plumb line yeah go through the central plumb line yeah and lock onto that plum line oh yeah and then you stick your stick in over there somewhere you just tell me where to go okay let's have a go so if i stop here tony for the first stick you tell me left or right uh uh right just slightly that way yep hang on there's the first one yeah then i go a little bit further yeah well could not a nat's knee that way oh too far that was an elephant's knee just a tiny bit right well that's straight either die there we are a roman road yeah how long do you reckon it would take to build a bit of roman road from here to those trees over there that's about 100 meters i would think to build 100 meters probably 40 man hours so if you had 40 men 40 legionaries then it would take one hour that's staggering is it to say the soldiers in the roman army were half fighting men uh and half builders absolutely spot on so if you look at the typical roman legion of 5 500 men you would have maybe 4 500 as the full fat legionnaires with his shield his helmet his javelins his gladius his spaniards are sword but this legionary was also a fully trained engineer so he didn't just carry that kit he always carried his engineering kit as well and then within the legion the other thousand were also specialists so you had uh stonemasons you had carpenters you had surveyor i joined the army for the killing not the building yeah stop this for a game of soldiers marcus's unit was on its way to hadrian's wall which had been built over 50 years before to protect rome and britain from the tribes of caledonians and picts his destination some drafty fort facing sleet and snow we've got a remarkably vivid idea of what life would have been like for someone like marcus from some fantastic archaeological finds that were found at a place called vindalanda on hadrian's wall these are copies they're letters and they're written on wood rather than parchment because parchment would have been very hard to come by and they've got in them some lovely details like there's a request for more beer and there's another request for warmer underpants which i can quite understand and there's one which describes the local people as little britons which i suppose is meant to be derogatory although quite honestly i'm quite proud of being a little britain marcus also had a reputation for being a bit of a buffoon which probably kept his mates entertained in the long winter nights but one day in 208 a.d there was a surprising sight the roman emperor turned up coming up marcus meets one of the scariest emperors in roman history and makes the mistake of trying to crack a joke will he survive and the slave girl from france who became a goddess in the kitchen oh it's very nice [Music] hadrian's wall roman britain 208 a.d an african legionary marcus has a chance meeting with none other than the roman emperor [Music] this is him septimius severus the 21st to rule since the empire was first founded in 27 bc and who also happened to be the first african roman emperor severus was a hard man who turned the empire into a military monarchy when marcus met him the emperor's mind was on the war in the north severus wanted to sort out the problem of the troublesome scots once and for all but he needed to boost his defenses first and that meant that marcus and his comrades would need to rebuild the forts all the way along the wall another massive backbreaking job it was all go in the roman army [Music] despite their practical approach to life romans were extremely superstitious before launching an attack emperor severus wanted to know what the future held this could be done by reading patterns in nature like the way birds flocked or enlightening or even in the entrails of sacrificed chickens one day the emperor was inspecting marcus's fort and being a roman he was really superstitious so he was looking around for some kind of sign or omen which would guide him to victory and it was at that point that marcus stepped into the history books this history book to be precise roman historian augusta described an incident involving the emperor and an african soldier and he had got this wreath of cypress leaves and he said emperor you are a god mind you for a human being to be a god you have to die first so sorry about that and as you can imagine there was absolute silence and the emperor was not amused and sent the man out of his sight we don't know what happened to marcus after his ill-time joke he would have been lucky to get away with his life as for severus he died in york in 211 a.d [Music] at which point the romans suddenly lost interest in scotland but severus had left one legacy which marcus may just have benefited from [Music] before severus died he changed the law so that soldiers could marry local girls and when they retired they either got a little pension or a piece of land so i like to think that provided marcus wasn't executed for impertinence or killed fighting the scots he would have married the local girl and settled down and maybe to this very day his descendants are still living somewhere just outside carlisle at the other end of roman britain it started as a small trading post on the thames london londinium was its original name that was a roman town these were the original londoners nice couple rosie lee roman london grew fast and soon became a vital trading hub for the empire round about the year 1890 a young girl called fortunata made this journey up the thames but she wasn't selling anything it was herself that was on sale fortunately was a slave this could be her fortunata means lucky which sounds like a cruel joke she may have been either captured by the romans or sold to them by her parents she was from gall modern day france which to her must now have seemed very far away [Music] roman london was crammed with a population of around sixty thousand the riverside would have been bustling and noisy with languages being spoken from all over the roman empire a panda you find his sistine chapels please but there wouldn't have been any time for sightseeing for fortunata she'd have been shoved down the streets probably stumbling from the weight of the manacles on her hands and her feet and she must have feared the worst fortunata was on her way to be sold today we might associate slavery with the trade in african people taken by force to work in the americas but humans have been enslaving each other for thousands of years and the roman empire was no different it depended on slaves who made up about 20 percent of the population romans were happy to make anyone a slave whether they came from africa asia or europe slaves didn't only do tough physical jobs either they could be accountants actors scribes or financiers dealing with huge amounts of money but their individual lives are shrouded in mystery so how did we find out about fortunate did we just make her up no we didn't it was a great piece of archaeological detective work during modern excavations near the thames one sharp-eyed archaeologist spotted this a wax writing tablet except unfortunately the wax had disappeared originally it would have looked something like this this is a tablet that a scribe would have used in roman times to write on you see it's made of wood and this black inside is black wax and the scribe would write portugal into the wax and that was the message if the wax didn't survive neither would the message except fortunately for us there was one particular scribe who was very heavy-handed how do we know well examination of the wooden frame revealed the imprint of his stylus enhanced in this replica he pushed so hard that he gouged into the wood all the words that he was writing so you can actually read them today and they reveal that this is the bill of sale of the slave girl fortunata to a chap called vegetas who was a slave of another slave it says vegeta's assistant slave of montanus was also the slave of the august emperor has bought and received the girl fortunata for 600 denarii which is quite a lot of money at that time and she's in good health and she won't wander or run away the sale would have been a humiliating process which probably involved fortunately being stripped for inspection by vegetas her price was equivalent to two years salary for a roman legionary suggesting a highly attractive young woman one who probably offered special skills such as cookery fortunate's owner vegetas had been given this money by his owner in a sort of trust he could use it to buy whatever he wanted even a slave for himself so that one day if vegeta's earned his freedom he could set up home and if he chose marry his slave girl for now though fortunata belonged to whoever owned vegetas so she probably went to work in some kind of high status official residence maybe not unlike this one as a top end slave fortunato might have been given duties looking after the lady of the house oh cheer up girl for goodness sake [Music] she'd have had her own quarters with the other slaves but she wouldn't have had all the luxury of underfloor heating and tile floors and all the things we normally associate with roman villas she would have lived round the back or in the next field in quarters which were pretty cramped and basic she and the other slaves would be expected to run the place so that it was self-sufficient including growing all of their food and doubtless she'd have brought some of her fancy french cooking skills with her caroline nicolet is french and an expert in roman cookery oh caroline i can smell this from the other side of the room oh it's really lovely isn't it oh thank you did you have a toast yes please absolutely um so this is called a minuto egg spray coques which is a pork and apricot stew if you like combination of the sweetness of the apricots and the meatiness of the pork gorgeous it's very much like a moroccan tagine if you like but what is it about this roman stew that makes it so irresistible it's the fish sauce that we call garum garum is a sauce made by fermenting fish it's old dead fish that you lay out on the beach for days and the cats come and we on it it is a smelly affair it's mainly the guts all the heads and that are thrown in left to ferment with a lot of salt in the sun in the heat etc for about at least three months so fortunately herself wouldn't get any of it except if she cooks it and working in the kitchen you might have leftovers but you won't be served that as part of your daily meal if fortunately was brought here as a cook what products would she be able to cook with there's apricots we can't have them fresh in britain so they will have to be dried preserved in honey what about these cucumbers we don't have cucumbers as far as we know in britain before the roman conquest say the first century bc that's where things and fashions really begin to change onions here they would have been originally english wouldn't they no they are imported that's really hard for us now to think about a cuisine without onions but as far as we know before the roman conquest all types of valium are very mediterranean before the romans arrived the brits relied on a simple diet of meat barley beans and root vegetables fortunately i've always thought of her as a victim but actually at least for some of the time she would have been doing quite well being surrounded by exotic food probably having a little bit herself maybe getting a bit of respect from the fact that she cooked so well yeah absolutely um just the fact that she is so expensive she's a very respected slave because you are an asset to an estate it's horrible isn't it to think about the lack of freedom and the gross exploitation that and slaves leica would have suffered from but i'd like to think that fortunata might actually have lived up to her name and been lucky after all she was alive it seems as though she was living in quite a comfortable place maybe she ended up marrying vegeta and they had a couple of kids and they became free and were happy ever after i hope so [Music] coming up roman britain's showbiz couple the actress the glamour and romance and the gladiator sheer terror in roman britain's theater of death [Music] when the romans invaded britain they brought with them all sorts of radical new ideas some of them even more exciting than either roads or the mediterranean diet like for instance showbiz good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the show tonight the romans worked hard and they played hard among the impressive buildings that they built or got their slaves to build were amphitheaters circuses stadiums and theaters [Applause] roman theater was inspired by classical greek plays and mainly consisted of dramas that were either tragedies or comedies they were performed by actors wearing costumes and masks to convey character and although we don't exactly know which plays were performed in britain we do at least know one place where they were performed this is the best preserved theater in roman britain at verilamium in hertfordshire back in roman times it would have been an entertainment hot spot with something for all the family [Music] but who were the stars of roman britain well we've got one fantastic clue which contains two intriguing names the clue is this gorgeous terracotta piece of pottery and the names are vericunder ludia and lucius gladiator vericonder the actress and lucius the gladiator this is a replica of the original which was discovered in leicester the small hole allowed it to be hung as a pendant surely a love token [Music] what we're looking at is a showbiz couple from roman britain and first i'm going in search of veracunda's story [Music] much as they enjoyed their entertainment respectable romans looked down on actresses like veracunda who almost certainly would have been a slave anyway she would have had to be a great actor dancer and mime artist and if these mosaics are anything to go by pander to the bawdy expectations of the audience she would have been part of a troupe of traveling entertainers performing at venues up and down rome and britain for them verilamium would have been a big tour date [Music] this area here where all the grass is now rectangular space would have been the stage and they wouldn't just have had this one pillar there would have been one two three maybe even four and behind them would have been some kind of cloth or curtain to access the scenery and over here that's where the musicians would have played behind them you got this curve all the way around that's where the audience sat and they'd have had tickets they'd have been led tokens which would have been stamped on the way in and what about veracunda well when she was waiting for the show to start she would have been up in the preparation room what we call the green room nowadays this is where she would have been getting a bit worked up wondering how tonight was going to go hanging up her frocks and dusting off her dresses i'm hoping that reading university's roman experts dr matthew nichols can reveal a bit more of vericonda's world what do you think of that name veracunda it does have a meaning in latin uh which is we could say something like modisti and her name is first it's before lucius the gladiator so they seem to me to be probably a couple i would have thought it looks to me like something these two people cared about and thought about if you and i were here for an evening's entertainment and veracunda was up on stage what would we be likely to see i suspect if it's a troop that's got eludia in it an actress that we're looking at mime which might be a series of farcical performances um caricatured situations from daily life there might be song numbers and dance numbers and so on it could be something a bit more raunchy [Applause] it could be something a bit more highbrow who would be watching it just the people who lived in the villas or the ordinary people and the goat herds if you look around at the building it's a pretty large structure it could hold a lot of people looking around i would say several thousand people so that's probably most of the population of the town lights and albums and we might imagine people coming in from the neighborhood as well from the surrounding villas and farms so i suspect you'd want to appeal to the villa crowd and to the goat hood crowd whatever their demographic romans likes an exciting end to the evening and if the playwrights struggled to deliver a suitable climax they could always resort to one time honored if not terribly subtle device sometimes a magic figure would just come in and wave a magic wand everyone would die end of play this sort of ending was known in latin as a deus ex machina or god from the machine but no one was really harmed of course it was just pretend veracunda could just go back to her tent and do exactly the same thing the next day for her boyfriend though the action was all too real ruthless bloodlust was a cherished roman value and one they exported around the empire to colonies such as britain this was the world of varakunda's boyfriend lucius lucius was a gladiator britain may have been a far-flung province but the romans here had to have their games they were very serious about their entertainment you could say deadly serious britain had his own modest versions of rome's theater of death today they've either been turned into shady glades or attractive traffic islands but don't be fooled the games were just as nasty they were put on for free by wealthy politicians or businessmen wanting to carry favor with the locals [Applause] men and even women would often fight to the death in front of the baying crowds i love you lad come on if you think you're hard enough during lucius's time in the second century defeated gladiators weren't always executed but very few lasted more than 10 fights [Music] it's hard to imagine anything more awful isn't it but the games are extremely popular both with the romans and with the romano british so how did lucius end up with a career as a gladiator well we can be fairly certain that this wasn't his preferred career choice lucius was most likely an enemy combatant captured from one of the british tribes and then offered a choice to either a be executed um i don't really like that one or b be enslaved and fight as a gladiator [Music] lucius's life was all about survival and fighting for a living and being prepared to kill and the center of his world would have been his training into which i'm about to get a crash course first i suppose i best get myself kitted out this is quite bizarre this is like a roman car boot sale isn't it very much so a gladiator car boot cell maybe john conyard is a professional reenactor it looks like all this stuff is designed to make it difficult to fight in there's a whole variety of different kinds of head gear here all the helmets are made of a copper alloy sometimes covered in tin it's quite a weight on the head i have to say the fight certainly won't last very long certainly in some of the helmets they're deliberately got small eye holes so it's going to be hard to breathe i like this wonky saw what would the function of that have been so the sword like this i can slide it over the shield inside the collar bone to the heart i can place it on your breastbone turn it around and then slide it upwards through the bottom of your chin up into your brain pan look at this you wouldn't want one of these up your bits and pieces would you the four-skewered dagger was devastating against knee or elbow joints on the days when lucius wasn't fighting what would he have been doing if he was a young gladiator i suspect he might have been kept to barracks almost chained up in his room or in the gladiator school after he's had some experience and he becomes a higher status gladiator he might be allowed into town where he could meet accuracies how often would they fight um certainly once to maybe eight times a year i thought it would have been more like football than you would have turned out once a week they were paid a very large sums of money for about anything from maybe 75 000 pounds to a quarter of a million in our terms so fighting one or two bouts a year would be an excellent way of having a very good living in the roman empire for lucius the secret to a good performance was not only to be handy in a scrap but also to get into character each gladiator played a different role and had his own arch enemy what with his glamorous girlfriend veracunda i reckon lucius was a pretty boy gladiator like this chap known as a retirees or a net man he had no helmet so he could show off his good looks his arch enemy was the secutor well armed but slow so what's tom doing here well tom's playing a gladiator for us you could take off john's son tom is dressed as a secutor so the retirees would be practically unarmored yeah they're using the trident the fishing spear it's a very powerful weapon i can use it to handle hang on it's a demonstration you're right the net would be weighted uh lead weights all the way around the outside and of course we could try to throw the net in such a waiter bring him down so you are the fisherman who has caught the fish yes with a high energy diet and a program of rigorous training every day lucius prepared for his next big fight when it came to the day of the games the whole thing would unfold a bit like a circus in a series of acts and if it was a really classy show then it would be accompanied by a soundtrack played by musical instruments just like a sort of horror movie and lucius would watch from the wings as the old warm-up axe came on and got the audience in the mood but i'm not really talking about a cheeky chappie and the spangly jackets first on were the best the aria fighters criminals given spears to have a sporting chance against very hungry big cats after the ferocious hungry animals there'd probably be a few executions just to get the audience his blood lust up then it's lucius's call he's had a few fights before so by now he's well known well seasoned and popular [Applause] and here comes the star of the show lucius the retirees and a great reaction from the crowd the secutor is striking at lucius with a chop to the head but lucius easily dodges out of the way quick elegant movements lucius makes the lumbering wrecks look a bit ridiculous oh another swipe from rex that was closer now lucius has come in on his blind side and it's back of the net the crowd is going wild oh my word was it really this bloody or is that just something we see in the movies [Applause] well not far from the prim tea rooms of york archaeologists recently discovered evidence for a huge english gladiator's graveyard 80 bodies nearly all men mostly killed in horrible ways including one whose bones showed he'd been savaged by a big cat presumably brought to britannia for the games the end for lucius ii was most probably brutal and grim we all know something about gladiators don't we the strange helmets and the weird weapons and the nets in fact they're so bizarre they're almost reduced to oddities aren't they rather than human beings and it's only when we learn the name of one of them or see their butchered skeletons that we realize that they were people just like us with lives like ours but with terrible brutal deaths coming up the britain who found a way of using his skill to make money out of the romans this is stunning the rest of the tribe would have looked at him with awe and wonder it was almost as though he was a magician [Music] in roman britain locals who became part of roman society often did so as slaves whether they were cooks actresses or gladiators but how about the brits who didn't get taken into slavery what were their lives like and are there even any records of them well we do have a name and it comes from the village of prick willow on the island of eels which is now ely in cambridgeshire and that name is border guinness which roughly translates as born of victory but whose victory well it could well be queen boudicca who was the tribe chief who smashed the romans on a number of occasions so calling your child born of victory could well be two fingers up to the roman empire tricky little britain so did body against live up to his name well not exactly however he did find a way of dealing with the romans on his own terms you see what you gainers had a job which gave him special value it was one which would have made the other members of the tribe look at him with a bit of awe a bit of wonder he was someone who seemed to have something to do with magic because he could conjure beautiful things out of the earth he was a metal worker [Music] this might be bodu again us hard at work after training under a mentor he'd become a traveling artisan or had a shop in the village but bajua gainers soon became an artist of the highest caliber we know about him because one of his products made in the second century a.d was unearthed in a bog near the village of prickwillow and it's kept in pride of place at the british museum this is stunning [Music] this strange looking thing looks like a little saucepan to me what's so lovely about it is these exquisite patterns on it dolphins playing sea beasts with scaly tales and what looks like a cupid popping up in the middle of it all [Music] it's just beautiful richard help me out what am i looking at yeah dr richard hobbs is western curator of roman britain in some ways the most important bit is the inscription that you can just see here yeah is that a bee there but yeah i know what that is that's uh like uh like fabricated yeah made yeah we know the name of the craftsman who made this extraordinary thing can i feel it yeah you can well it's got a bit of heft to it it does it's quite what is it actually made out of it's made out of copper alloy so it's made of it's made of copper alloys with other things now we we certainly know there's tin here that's why it's got this grayish look to the inner part of the bowl and there are some tiny traces of enamel which is like a type of glass the metal alloys would first have been cast in clay molds then the detail refined by delicate filing and engraving with tiny tools bodyweightness is clearly a very skilled and experienced man isn't he yeah he's really working at the top of his profession he also knows a lot about roman classical imagery so he's clearly learned the kind of artistic side of it as well as the skills needed to make this and body again has used his knowledge to create something romans would have used in sacred religious rights so this would have been commissioned by a priest who would have paid a lot something like a month salary for the average roman legionary do we know anything about the the kind of ceremony that this would have been involved in the decoration is all about bacchus bacchus is the god of wine he's also associated with rebirth you know the coming of the seasons the good things in life bacchus was a very important god to the romans and they held frequent festivals in his honor in a sacred ceremony body again as his skillet would have been used to offer wine as a sort of sacrifice to the god bacchus we can imagine that this is being used as part of one of those uh festivals the baccanalia which is all about the merrymaking of surrounding backers the drinking of the wine maybe the grape harvest itself once those ceremonies have been gone through then you can then you can all partake freely in uh in the baccanali and festivals themselves so although this wine is sacramental and it's been blessed you'd be able to neck it as part of the party absolutely you paid your dues to the god so you can then be satisfied that you're in harmony with the gods a bacchanalia was basically an excuse to have a good time and for some reason this roman god became very popular with many brits that's a bit shelley are you sure you should be going topless what about you oh yeah i got a bit carried away didn't i do you think he would have been a respected member of his society well the funny thing is a lot of metal workers were not viewed in that way they were kind of viewed with suspicion because of this amazing ability to you know bring together something from the earth with with water and fire and make these extraordinary objects so they were a bit magic they were sort of seen as alchemists [Music] great at last to find evidence for how brits could exploit the romans all brought together into one magnificent little saucepan by a craftsman called bodraganus nearly two thousand years ago the romans provoked such a mixture of emotions whatever the benefits of the roman empire i can imagine many little britons breathing a sigh of relief when the whole thing finally went down the toilet next time the edwardians when britain ruled the waves there you are in the ocean wave and a pampered upper class ruled over everyone else i love a high tea don't you the orphan who became the first black professional outfield footballer yes the 79 year old chain maker who took on the might of british industry and the titanic disaster upstairs and downstairs he had only one thought get out quick [Music] so [Music]