The end of Romanitas and the coming of the English

How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons, Nicholas Higham, Yale University Press, £25

‘We always were English, and we’ll always be English,’ declares shopkeeper Connie Pemberton in the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. ‘And it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our rights to be Burgundians.’ It’s the paradox at the heart of a film about a small pocket of postwar London that declares independence on the basis of a newly uncovered historic identity. It also expresses some complex truths about nationhood: how it is at once passionately held yet also protean, shaped and reshaped by self-determination, by reaction to events, by opposition to others.

I found myself thinking about that quote and its tangle of Anglo-European tensions reading Nicholas Higham’s superb How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons. The book is a history of the country during the two centuries following the collapse of Roman power around 410, and Higham uses both archaeological and documentary evidence to piece together a more-or-less coherent narrative of the period – albeit one still fogged with wholesale absences in the record and other unknowns. It is also an exploration of the identities that characterised this long and painful transition: Roman and British, Christian and pagan, British and English. Those identities are sometimes competing and oppositional, sometimes overlapping and porous. Running through all of them is another binary that is less discrete than it seems: the insular against the incomer.

British insularity before the arrival of Rome was never absolute: in the south-east, the Catuvellauni were linked to the Catalauni of northern Gaul, while Caesar heard from Gaulish informers that the Belgae had settled on these shores. There is material evidence for such connections in burial practices and prestige goods. Likewise, Romanisation of a kind began before the invasion; the presence of Latin on pre-Roman coins attests to it. Imperial power did not require conquest for elites to feel its pull.

Insularity was still a powerful differentiating force once Rome properly arrived. British exceptionalism began in its geography. It was the only part of the Roman Empire adrift in the ocean at the western limit of the known world; it had the empire’s shortest days in winter and its most violent tides. On the continent, the empire’s northernmost reach was at Lugdunum Batavorum, now in the Netherlands – no further north than Milton Keynes. No wonder Tacitus thought Britain’s climate ‘objectionable, with its frequent rains and mists’.

That sense of extremity and difference had a moral flavour that seemed hard to shift. After 400 years of Roman dominion, in the late fourth century, the Greco-Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus could still write of Britons as ‘wretched provincials’, their island ‘the ends of the earth’. A few decades on and the poet Rutilius Namatianus dismissed them as ‘savage ploughmen’.

Britons found themselves excluded from the highest ranks in both the civil administration and the military; we know of no Briton in the Senate. Nor is there much evidence for Roman DNA among the Romano-British. The Roman identity of the elites was political and cultural, rather than familial. The British remained a people apart, separated by more than water from the wider empire, despite the grant of universal citizenship in 212. How Roman low-status Britons ever were is an open question. Discussing the spread of Anglo-Saxon hegemony two centuries after Rome’s retreat, Higham notes the truism that peasant culture changes slowly; it must apply here, too.

Difference persisted in other ways. Celtic languages elsewhere in the empire died out. Not so Brittonic. Of the 450 insular tribal, place and river names recorded in classical sources, over 350 are entirely or predominantly Brittonic in origin. Into the third century, Brittonic was still being used for fort names, as at Branodunum in Norfolk. (It means ‘crow-fort’.) Latin was surely beginning to dominate the southern and eastern lowlands by the fourth century, particularly among the elites, among whom it was the language of public discourse. The middling sort are likely to have been bilingual, retaining the indigenous tongue for domestic and private conversation. There is evidence that Brittonic remained a living language even in Kent into the fifth century. Conversely, Latin made few inroads into the uplands until the arrival of Christian, Latin-speaking refugees in the post-Roman era.

The empire itself made a virtue of porousness, certainly in its army. There is DNA evidence for the presence of men from the Rhineland and the Near East, and other evidence for recruits from as far afield as Dalmatia, Thrace and Sarmatia. West Germanic languages were spoken enough in the late-Roman military for some garrisons to have probably been bilingual. Higham argues that such use of ‘barbarian’ soldiers exacerbated the sense of imperial otherness for the indigenous population, but if the Britons had what he calls a ‘persistent subaltern identity’, it made little or no difference to the withdrawal of Rome when it came in 410 or so.

That was not as abrupt a decision as it might seem, however. Garrisons in the forts along the Saxon Shore were probably withdrawn around 407. No imperial salaries were paid after 409. The number of new coins in circulation dropped significantly, not helped by the removal of Roman mints south of the Alps. The London mint had closed around 326, its staff relocated to Constantinople. Moreover, there is archaeological evidence for the slow retreat of Roman culture in Britain before the empire itself retreated. Wheel-turned pottery declined in the uplands across the fourth century, exacerbated by problems with the coin supply, although it persisted elsewhere until the 420s, even later. Quarrying, mining and smelting tell a similar story: iron production in the Weald halted around 300 but continued in the Forest of Dean and the East Midlands for nearly a century. The shortage of new metal, however, affected the quality and quantity of everything from nails to blades.

When the empire pulled back its forces entirely, the elites still expected them to return. Why wouldn’t they? ‘The idea that imperial rule was over would have been unthinkable in 409-411, given that, in the wake of similar crises, continental governments had always previously recovered Britain,’ Higham writes. Moreover, the elites wanted them back. It was a worldview, and an assumption, shared in Rome. The Notitia Dignitatum, a list of posts within the Roman imperial system, retained its entries for Britain after 411, despite being updated until c.419. According to Gildas, the Britons wrote to Aëtius, the leading Roman general in the West, pleading for his help sometime around 450. As late as 469, according to the sixth-century historian Jordanes, the Roman emperor Anthemius summoned a British army to campaign against the Visigoths in Gaul.

If the sense of decline is palpable, so is the persistence of hope in return and the struggle to retain what seemed like normalcy, even as imperial culture faded from living memory. Higham makes good use of the lives of men such as Pelagius in the late fourth century and St Patrick a couple of generations later to sketch out continuities – a market for land and cross-border wealth transfer, for example – which may have seemed to contemporaries to be symptomatic of patience and resilience. Constantius, who came from Gaul – twice, probably – in the second quarter of the fifth century as part of a mission to stamp out heresy, found a buoyant polity in the lowland south, at least. The roads were under the control of the British and he noted churches, farmland, splendid clothing and large crowds.

If tax revenues ceased to flow out to the empire around 410, the province’s civil structures did not wither overnight. At some point in the years after 450, two generations after Rome’s departure, Gildas states that a ‘proud tyrant’, identified as Vortigern, recruited Saxon and other mercenaries to protect the British coasts in the continued absence of the imperial army. That he paid for them through taxation in kind, Higham writes, suggests that there was a ‘Roman-looking successor state’ and that at least some of the levers of government were still functioning well, even as material Roman culture crumbled around it.

The archaeological record has a similar story, albeit one that begins a little earlier: ‘a more recognisable stream of North Germanic material begins around the 420s, consistent with mercenaries being hired to replace the Roman army’, Higham notes. There was no mass Saxon invasion then, but an intermittent flow of individuals and small groups. The presence of gold and growing quantities of silver and gilt, together with rising quality goods in late-fifth century Anglo-Saxon burials, is, Higham writes, probably ‘the archaeological signature of wealth passing from British hands into those of incomers’, whether that transfer was expedited by payment for protection, by raiding or by conquest, or some combination of all three. Over time, the shift in economic and social status from indigenes to incomers saw the former’s contribution to the gene pool increase at the latter’s expense. The changing balance of power is evident in funerary practices: even where cremation had predominated in the south, the incomers’ use of inhumation became ever more widespread: the British elites were adapting to the norms of their new rulers.

Vortigern’s decision – or the comparable decisions of the wider Romano-British elites whom he embodies – seems in hindsight a horrific miscalculation. But what were the elites to do? As Higham points out, the Roman invasion made the later success of the Saxon invasion inevitable: it stripped military capability from the various indigenous regional polities and created civilian hierarchies that were barred from owning, let alone using, weapons. War and wider civic security functions were made the work of professional soldiers funded by taxation. The surviving elites had no experience of managing such men, and there were, in any case, neither enough indigenous soldiers left to train recruits nor enough weapons to arm them. Britain lacked even the raw metal to make those weapons and smiths skilled enough to forge them. All manner of expertise had rotted away. Besides, recruiting barbarians was standard imperial procedure, the Roman thing to do; the decision was, in a sense, as profound an expression of lingering Romanitas as you could find.

Higham relies heavily on Gildas and his De Excidio Britanniae (‘Concerning the Ruin of Britain’), probably written around 540, for documentary evidence of the transition from Roman to English control. Given the paucity of the sources he has little choice; every last trace of evidence is scraped from the bones. Gildas, who died in around 570, was probably part of the last British generation educated in classical literature, grammar, law and rhetoric. Such a training equipped him and his cohort for redundancy, being designed for careers – civil, legal, administrative – that were disappearing all around them.

The landowning British class, which Gildas represents, was steeped in Romanitas: he is an apostle of the civil elite, literate, sophisticated in his Latinity, and Christian. Indeed, Christianity had become a mark of Britishness in opposition to the pagan barbarian ‘stranger-guests’. But Gildas has so internalised those qualities, and Roman rule is so distant from his experience, that he regards them as expressions of Britishness: the Romans are outsiders to him and the distinctive Christian nationhood that he asserts for his people is built on its persistently insular identity.

That persistence is as important as the way that identity had evolved. To paraphrase Higham, the Britishness of c.500 is not the same as the Britishness of c.100; but it is still Britishness. It had been a political and cultural identity; but when the empire withdrew only the latter remained, itself to recede to a western pocket of southern lowland, an island within an island, its withering an agonisingly slow transgenerational defeat. De Excidio is in part an attempt to reassert a British political identity. As such, it failed. It seems both apt and poignant that Gildas himself might have ultimately been forced to flee his familiar and bountiful landscape of ‘wide plains and hills… excelling in cultivation’. The monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys on a remote peninsula in southern Brittany claims him as its founder; his remains are still believed to rest there.

If Romanitas had become a core part of the idea of what it meant to be British, certainly among elites, Englishness, Higham writes, ‘stemmed from incomers who considered themselves (and who were considered) to be racially, as well as culturally, continental north-Europeans’. This ‘Englishness’ was not just a European identity, but one forged from multiple continental peoples – Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and so on – into an ethnic and linguistic unity by the blank hostility of the indigenes.

There is evidence that for some of the incomers, Englishness accommodated some idea of Britishness, too. A number of Anglo-Saxon royal families had early kings with Brittonic names. Penda, the seventh-century pagan king of Mercia, for one. Most notably, perhaps, there were the West Saxons, from Cerdic in the early 500s to Cædwalla at the end of the following century. Higham characterises this as ‘ethnic ambivalence’, and it certainly suggests that the transition to English hegemony was complex, negotiated piecemeal. But the late seventh century seems to be a watershed: Old English law codes largely stop referring to Britons around the 690s.

Beneath the apparent accommodations of those first two centuries lay a deep racial antipathy that was not allayed as the English Christianised. Bede makes clear that, for the Anglo-Saxons, race trumped faith: he reserves his greatest execrations for the British king Cadwallon, a Christian. The contempt, on his account at least, was returned: ‘it being to this day the custom of the Britons not to pay any respect to the faith and religion of the English’, Bede wrote, ‘nor to correspond with them any more than with pagans’. It was the uniformity of this hatred, Higham thinks, that in turn ‘encouraged Germanic incomers… to downplay their diversity and consider themselves one people’, their identity a shield-wall against the indigenes, whom they called wealas, meaning both ‘foreigners’ and ‘slaves’.

It was the Christianisation of the incomers that enabled the last stage of the Britons’ long defeat. When the Augustinian mission arrived from Rome in 597 it found a functioning British church, Higham argues: seven bishops attended a synod in Chester around 600 AD, for example. In 601, Augustine reported to Gregory the Great that the indigenous priesthood required correction: ‘we commit to you in a brotherly fashion all the bishops of Britain’, Gregory replied, ‘that the unlearned may be instructed, the infirm strengthened by persuasion, the perverse corrected by [your] authority’. The insular church had developed its own practices distinct from Roman orthodoxy, notably with regard to the dating of Easter and the tonsuring of priests. As the Roman mission hardened, particularly with the installation of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury in 669, it was deemed necessary to stamp out such unorthodoxies. British Christianity, previously a bulwark of insular identity, a psychological defence against the heathen incomers, had become heretical. It was, Higham argues, ‘a quagmire into which the Roman missionaries seem to have stumbled uncomprehendingly’. As for the British in England, this second influx of Roman power compelled them to shed their Britishness to save their souls.

How England Began is a quite brilliant synthesis of the archaeological and documentary sources. Higham makes no political points, although he does note how strong the anti-English identity of the Welsh is, even today; after all, armed British resistance to English and then Anglo-Norman imperialism did not end until the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282. But it’s interesting that even the book’s very title and subtitle elide the presence in England of that persistently subaltern people, the British, as if modelling their defeat.

Modern Britain contains numerous overlapping and competing identities, mostly at ease with one another in their post-imperial porousness and multiplicity. Around a third of British people regard European-ness as part of their identity, perhaps spurning entirely the notion of insular exceptionalism – or perhaps echoing the Romanitas of the post-Roman British elites. And while it is commonplace to hear Englishness and Britishness conflated, surveys report that ethnic minorities in the UK find British identity a more comfortable and capacious one than Englishness. Might Britishness become a subaltern identity again, cleaving away from English hegemony?

In these ways and others, the early history of England, remote though it might be, offers in Higham’s telling an unsteady mirror in which to view the persistently complicated relationship that the modern British have with the mainland and the tensions that can arise here over geopolitics, migration, race, ethnicity, class and belief. Unhappily, the story of how the Britons became wealas in their own lands also suggests that not all of them can be settled as comfortably as that of Pimlico’s Burgundians.