Roman Britain: A New History

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Any history of post-Roman Britain will be speculative to some degree or other. At a certain point all explanations run up against the problem of evidence, its paucity or conflicting nature. Behind every theory lies the paradox of abandonment and continuity. For all the regions of Britain there is no one-size-fits-all explanation and for each region there may be competing versions of reality. If the “Dark Ages” are getting lighter, they are not light yet and perhaps never will be. Our Romans topic booklist for KS2 features a curated selection of books for your next primary school history topic. With fictional stories about life in the Roman Empire like classroom favourite The Roman Mysteries series, Romans picturebooks including Escape from Pompeii and Roman themed comic books including the graphic-novel-style Gods, Emperors and Dormice, there are plenty of quality text options for schools to choose from for this topic.

As Vita struggles to solve the mystery of who murdered her father, she must also decide where her allegiances lie. Through her journey, she discovers that people – like Brea, her gladiator friend – are not always what they seem at first and that there is often more that unites us with than divides us from our enemies. The absolute decisive shift in the history of eastern Britain in the fifth century may not be so much the willing or unwilling embrace of Scandinavian or Germanic cultures, but the rejection of much that was Roman: town life, villas, privatized wealth and display, conspicuous consumption, crushing centralized taxation, martial rule, corruption and absentee landlords. Plautius for his skilfull and successful conduct of the war in Britain not only was praised by Claudius but also obtained an ovation. I apologize for misunderstanding his theory of Roman historians fictionalizing her role as making her entirely fictitious. has seen a flurry of books published about early medieval Britain – The First Kingdom by Max Adams; Early Medieval Britain, c 500-1000 by Rory Naismith; and The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England by Marc Morris. While Adams focuses on the immediate post-Roman period from the fifth to the early seventh centuries, Naismith and Morris take the history of Britain from the departure of the legions to the threshold of the Norman conquest.Whereas the catalysts for the dissemination of Roman religion in Britain were obviously the Roman army and the administration, reducing Romano-British syncretism to the wholesale absorption of befitting local deities into the Roman pantheon would be overly simplistic. On the contrary, Roman Britain was characterised by the co-existence of religious cults whose interaction fostered continuity with the past while giving impetus to the creation of new ones. Such diversity reflects the multi-ethnic make-up of the Roman army stationed in Britannia whose members were not just from Italy but hailed from all corners of the Empire. This, in turn, fostered a two-way process of religious identity negotiation whereby existing cults were adopted and vice versa and their rituals enhanced through the import of typically Roman ‘worship technologies’ such as epigraphy and iconography. One way in which this occurred was through what John Creighton has called the ‘creation of the familiar’ in his book Britannia: The Creation of a Roman Province. Roman Gods were given Romano-British names and the same god was oftentimes depicted differently. Accordingly, there are two chapters respectively dedicated to the spread of oriental cults such as the introduction of Mithraism and the adoption of Christianity in Roman Britannia, both occurring around the fourth century AD. In both instances, these ‘new’ religions were initially taken up by high-ranking and wealthy Romano- Britons who may have been more receptive to monotheistic ideas than ordinary people, who may have been entrenched in their prejudice against mystery cults. While highlighting tensions between early adopters of Christianity and die-hard pagans, the chapter on Christianity also challenges the idea that early Christians were always straightforwardly radical, surmising that objects related to pagan cults may well have been dressed up in Christian clothes.

This is because the Irish language is a recent offshoot of British Celtic, probably as recent as the first century AD and possibly identifiable with the language of immigrants from the Brigantes area in northern England;In time the archaeological record may tell us otherwise; for the present, Naismith concludes with a bob-each-way: A second, more substantive thread relates to the development of the political landscape, where we find the common theme of the making of larger and more stable kingdoms, Christian in religion, out of the plethora of petty lordships, pagan and otherwise, that emerged to fill the power vacuum left by the Romans after 410. Of the fifth century, Naismith writes of “the mosaic of small worlds” and Morris of a “gaggle of small kingdoms;” likewise Adams envisages “incipient lordships” arising by different routes in defined geographical locations and subject to regional variations. For all three, the story is one of consolidation of power and administrative structures, secular and religious, nascent in Adams and more fully realised in the more extended treatments found in Morris and Naismith. For Morris, the spotlight is on England, whereas Naismith extends the argument to encompass the Pictish kingdom’s rise to hegemonic status in the north. Published in collaboration with The British Museum, this children’s information book offers a humorous and informative introduction to daily life in Ancient Rome and has a high appeal to readers in KS2. In this respect, Roman gods were essentially supernatural versions of human beings and people thought of their relationship with the gods in contractual terms. Summoners would ask for divine favour and, if the favour was granted, they would return it with a votive gift. By contrast, in Gallic and Britannic mythology, worshippers experienced a world much different from the human one; a sort of dimension represented by the crossing of the boundaries between realism and surrealism. This concept has its roots in the Iron Age tradition of otherness whereby divine forms dwelled outside the normal template of human and animal imagery. Therefore, the Gallo-British pantheon is populated by entities with shape-shifting abilities, such as people with horse heads or horns, and even bird men. Vita is a very relatable protagonist; honest about her fears and confusion, yet brave and fiery in moments of crisis. Young readers who are aspiring writers will also enjoy the fact that Vita’s passion is for stories – both hearing them and creating them – and that this is a central theme running through the novel.