D. J. MattinglyCritiques

I am a history buff and an Anglophile, but the length and repetitiveness of this book wore even me down after a while. There's a lot of good information here, but it could have been cut by a hundred pages without losing much, and I found myself longing to rearrange chapters and sections to make it flow better. The author's thesis is intriguing, but I wish it had been better argued.

There were three Britannias going on in this period, the "Official Roman Province, a Mediterranean commercial community and the remains of the indigenous society the romans had conquered. The author seems to advance the view that the three groups did not meld very successfully by the time of the Roman withdrawal. In short, this is the anti-colonialist view. A necessary corrective to Rosemary Sutcliff, but a little sad for me. Seems likely, though.½

A history of Roman Britain which changes the older viewpoint based on seeing the Romans as forerunners of the British Empire. Britain was a colony and an exploited one. The book is undoubtedly over long for its purpose as a general introduction to the period and part of a series on British history up to the present day. This is more of a commercial comment as it is worth the reading. The author pulls together the available information which is largely archaeological but he includes and analyses all the available written material. He analyses Britannia through the lens of three social groups – the military, the Romanised civilians and the non-Romanised. This gives a quite new perspective on the period. The military were obviously very Romanised, very literate and very much part of a larger organisation. While not necessarily identical to military units elsewhere they were very similar. Much of Britain’s trade was based around them and they were the big spenders of the colony. In the towns and the villas people were less literate, less ‘Roman’ (in their eating habits for instance). The non-Romanised British changed their way of life very slowly if at all.

The author doesn't shy away from the fact that it was a frequently bloody occupation run for the benefit of the conquerors not the inhabitants. This, oddly, gives you a more balanced view of the time.

Mattingly tries to consider Britain in the Roman Empire rather than the Romans in Britain. He wants to know what it was like for the people of Britain being on the receiving end of Roman imperial rule. Since Caesar forgot to also divide Britain into three parts, Mattingly does so looking at the military, the urban population and the rural population through their archaeological remains.

Although this book is meant to be aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist, I found it very heavy going. I suspect it might have worked better as an interactive website, with summarising texts accompanied by clickable maps so that one could then look at the archaeological evidence in as much or as little detail as one wishes

Even with quite an extensive reading of British history and some previous knowledge of the Roman Occupation this was somewhat of a tough read, requiring study and reference to OS maps and other resource to follow the rich details and – to steal from Eric Newby – a cast of thousands like a Cecil B De Mille Hollywood epic. Because I want to know more of the famous II Legion Augusta, “The Engineers” and their life in Britain, I persevered and did enjoy that same depth of scholarship of David Mattingly’s, that gave this reader such trouble in trying to keep up with the flow of this enormously well-researched history. The only residual criticism of the work is a reflection on those troubles of mine – the absence of maps that would have helped in the spatial placing of events in each chapter. There are maps and charts however – over 20 of them – but they are in specialist detail and did not help this particular reader in trying to grasp exactly where the specific action in the text occurred. Perhaps on a rereading which I already plan, things will become more interlinked.

There was also a tantalizing reference to the recently discovered trove of early Roman, and very human documents from the very region and legion of my interest, but sadly not much detail from those was used in this work. I understand that Guy de la Bedoyere’s book, Roman Britain contains more from this source. (http://www.librarything.com/work/966884/book/5352293)