Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor

two millennia or so when societies were less settled, but no less organised. Even in the millennia after the Ice Ages (around ten thousand years ago) the British population was thin, but the landscape was already being parcelled up by the people who inhabited it. Life for hunter-gatherer groups was by no means an anarchic free-for-all.

      It is simply wrong to suppose that the Romans brought civilisation to a barbarian Europe: they brought their own style of civilisation, which was founded on ideas that flourished in classical Greece in the fifth century BC, and they imposed it, with greater or lesser success, on pre-existing settled populations who possessed their own social rules and regulations. The landscapes that Caesar’s legions marched across were not dense primeval forests: most of them had been cleared of trees for several millennia. His men tramped their way through fields, roadways, farms and villages. I doubt whether the average modern person, if dropped into a rural village in pre- or post-Roman Britain, would be able to tell them apart. He would probably only spot that he was in Roman times if a visiting government or military official was in the neighbourhood, or if he happened to be shown a family’s best dinner service (which seems somewhat unlikely).

      If pre-Roman society consisted of a handful of skin-clad savages eking out a frugal existence on nuts and berries, its ideas and culture could not have survived into post-Roman times. There has to be a critical mass of people for their ideas to persist if their culture is overtaken by outsiders. In the case of pre-Roman Europe that critical mass certainly existed. Any lingering notions of skins, nuts or berries should be replaced by woven cloth, wine, beer, bread, cheese, mutton, lamb, beef and pork. Estimates of Britain’s population in the last centuries BC are hard to arrive at, but few would place it much below 1.5 million, and some would put it as high as 2.5 million.⁹ Whatever else it was, it was not a small handful. Who were these people, and what would it have been like to have lived in Britain during the century or so before the Claudian conquest of AD 43?

      The second half of the last century BC and the first half of the first century AD is sometimes seen as a period of ‘almost-’ or ‘proto-history’, because although written records had yet to develop in Britain, Julius Caesar and other Roman authors were busily writing in Gaul (France) and elsewhere; sometimes they even referred to Britain. In Britain there are early indications of writing that did not simply arrive, fully finished, from elsewhere: there are, for example, numerous examples of Iron Age coinage, some of which bear clear inscriptions, such as ‘CAM’, which we know was an abbreviation (much needed) of Camulodunum, present-day Colchester in Essex. Writing, rather like farming, seems to have been an idea that people wanted to grasp even before they understood precisely how it worked. Maybe members of élite society in southern Britain liked the concept of literacy before they possessed it fully themselves.

      The great Roman general and future Emperor Julius Caesar made two visits to England in 55 and 54 BC. These expeditions were essentially to gather intelligence, and should be seen as a part of his campaigns in Gaul, which began in earnest in 59 BC. Caesar’s first expedition to Britain in 55 BC involved ninety-eight transport ships carrying two legions (each of ten thousand men), plus cavalry and many accompanying warships. The landing in Kent was resisted, and there were numerous skirmishes with the British. Eventually Caesar retreated back to Gaul. The following year he did things on a larger scale. This time there were eight hundred ships, transporting five legions and two thousand cavalry. This huge force met stiff resistance under Cassivellaunus, leader of the Catuvellauni, a tribe centred on Verlamion (St Albans) and parts of what is today called ‘Mid-Anglia’ (Hertfordshire and areas around). Caesar had a hard fight through Kent. He crossed the Thames into the Catuvellaunian heartland, and eventually British morale broke down and Cassivellaunus sued for peace. Caesar returned victorious, with many hostages, but he had met fierce opposition, and was probably relieved to leave Britain with his honour intact.