A gentle ramble through English history’s neglected province

 
Richard Hobbs18 July 2013

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins (Cape, £20)

How does Roman Britain feature in the popular imagination? Certainly not as vividly as Rome herself, replete with Colosseum, Pantheon and triumphal arches, and umpteen other monuments that we readily associate with the greatness of the Roman Empire. For Rome’s most northerly province, we might reference Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps the springs at Bath, maybe, at a push, a villa such as Lullingstone or Fishbourne. Yet as Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer for the Guardian, reveals in her delightful book on the subject, those four centuries before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, considered by many as the “proper” start of British history — including the Victorians, who decided not to include any paintings reimagining episodes from Roman Britain when the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt — have much to offer, if one is prepared to scratch beneath the surface.

Higgins herself admits that Roman Britain has often felt like “an alien, irrecoverable place”, “too jagged and unsettling and ambiguous to be pulled into line”. And so she embarks on a journey of discovery with partner Matthew, a battered VW campervan (rather prone to breaking down) and a seemingly bottomless hamper for picnicking among Roman ruins, we can only presume — for her journey has a very British feel to it — accompanied by lashings of ginger beer. Her journey is loosely chronological, starting in Kent where Julius Caesar’s aborted invasion attempts were followed in AD 43 by the emperor Claudius, his soldiers (if Dio is to be believed) accompanied by elephants, a no doubt terrifying sight for the locals of Colchester. And she washes up in East Anglia, where there is evidence for the “shadowy, half-understood borderland” that is the end of Britain as a Roman province and the beginning of the now unfashionably termed “Dark Ages”, in the form of buried treasures, such as the magnificent silver vessels from Mildenhall, clawed from the Suffolk sod during the Second World War (on display at the British Museum).

There is much here to inform and amuse. She visits in London the remains of a luxurious waterfront villa and bathhouse beneath Centennium House, a reminder that even if almost the entirety of the capital’s Roman history is lost under later development it was the Romans who kickstarted it all in the first place. And Wroxeter, which inspired Wilfred Owen’s Ode to Uriconium, where that great archaeologist of Roman Britain, Sir Mortimer Wheeler — who unlike Owen survived the Great War, and ran his subsequent digs like military operations — first cut his teeth.

She eventually locates Silchester, described in 1879 rather optimistically as “the Pompeii of Hampshire”, but nevertheless one of the most important towns in Roman Britain, as sophisticated in its consumerist tastes (with its imported dates, Egyptian porphyry and Tuscan marble) as any British town today.

My favourite story concerns Edward Nicholson, or “Old Nick”, of the Bodleian library at Oxford — such a tyrannical figure that two of his staff committed suicide on his watch. In 1904, Nicholson decided that his holiday project would involve the decipherment of one of the lead “curse tablets” cast into Bath’s mineral waters, handwritten Latin appeals to the goddess of the spring to right a wrong.

Nicholson’s resultant translation was sensational: the tablet was nothing less than the earliest document in Latin written from one Christian to another, and thus “proof” that Christians were alive and kicking in Britain as early as the fourth century AD. Except that Oxford don Roger Tomlin, when revisiting the photographs of the tablet Nicholson used to make the translation, rapidly realised that Old Nick had made a fundamental error — but I won’t give the game away.

It is stories such as this which make Higgins’s book so special. In the 18th century, the great antiquarian William Stukeley bemoaned Roman Britain as a “neglected province”, his contemporaries instead favouring Grand Tour destinations on the Continent. As Higgins ably demonstrates, the archaeologists, Latin scholars and writers since have done Stukeley proud.

Richard Hobbs is curator of the British Museum’s Romano-British Collection.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in