Landscapes of Roman Britain

We used to think Roman Britain was a largely untamed natural landscape of woodland with occasional opulent villas representing the houses of an alien elite, set side by side with scattered peasant settlements. Archaeological work since the 1940s has radically altered this understanding through a combination of large-scale excavation and a revolution in remote sensing techniques, revealing a more varied picture of housing, farming, settlement and industry.
This lecture will explore our current knowledge of the nature of Roman imperialism and the history of Britain.
A lecture by Martin Millett recorded on 15 March 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/r...
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[@frankwolstencroft8731]

When I visited Sweden some years ago I stayed at a small one story wooden weekend cottage on an island in the middle of a lake near Karlskoga and helped the owner build a wooden extension next to his sauna. He placed some Swedish coins inside the wooden beams as mementos, and just for fun I added some of my English two shilling and one shilling pieces to confound future archeologists.

[@rjmun580]

More than sixty years ago I had an annoying wart on my finger. A relative said that if I gave him a shilling then he would bury it in the garden. By `it` I took him to mean both the shilling and the wart. Some weeks later I realised that the wart had gone and it has never returned. In todays terms a shilling would only be worth around £2 but the coin had previously had a high silver content. Perhaps an archaeologist will find my shilling and wonder why it was buried in the garden.

[@barbararice6650]

Said he would bury it... I've got news for you, he didn't bury it 😁

[@curtiswfranks]

But, uh, how was the wart removed?

[@curtiswfranks]

​@@barbararice6650: Ha, probably. But we all can bury some coins for the fun of it.

[@barbararice6650]

@@curtiswfranks No one buries spending money for the fun of it unless they're some kind of deviant 😑

[@curtiswfranks]

@@barbararice6650: Hahaha! Maybe I am a deviant then. But I think that burying a few nickles is perfectly painless. :P

[@elas1234]

very interesting lecture!

[@peterfrankiewicz9379]

Thank you for the free english lesson.

[@thejmoneyshow]

Fantastic, I hope he has a follow up soon for more information

[@mdog111]

Thank you for this fascinating lecture.

[@GreshamCollege]

You're most welcome!

[@thegheymerz6353]

I love your videos. You should remind your viewers somehow to like the videos so the algorithm favors their visibility.

[@frankcorr6566]

Extremely interesting and stimulating talk.

[@kskssxoxskskss2189]

Given the pattern of settlement, I speculate that there must have been significant intermarriage. Romans sent over men, and even with families and camp followers, there would have been a need for more women. Contrary to widespread comment, large numbers of men wish to spend their one life producing, loving, and raising a family, as well as leaving that family something to live on with. Hence, intermarriage. Other lectures I've seen on post-Roman Britain have characterized the remnants of the Roman presence as mixed Brithonic-Roman families, which is what got me thinking about this.

[@frankwolstencroft8731]

The lecturer who gave this talk about Roman Britain looks as if he is descended from Viking stock. I look very similar to him, especially the white hair. My ancestors came from the area around Yorvic, previously named Eboracum by the Romans

[@waynemcauliffe2362]

Thanks mate very informative

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

On the third attempt I finally managed to sit through this without falling asleep.

[@davepx1]

I've no quibble with lowland Roman Britain being peppered with abundant small farms alongside more headline-grabbing but inevitably unrepresentative villas: the scale of urban sites alone shows that cultivation had to be extensive given that the island was also shipping grain to Continental garrisons. But that "virtually everywhere that has been examined in recent years has very high densities of sites" reveals an overall (or average) pattern only to the extent that excavations have been conducted randomly, which is of course inconsistent with the resource limitations archaeologists inevitably face. So while we can move beyond once-fashionable "low counts" of as few as half a million inhabitants, we need to be very wary of haring off into estimates of five million or whatever else may be the fashion of the time (exceeding or barely short of old low estimates for the whole of Roman Gaul or even Italy itself). That current estimate of 2m looks about right to me. Development archaeology is a case in point: it's a wonderful addition to our knowledge, but you don't generally go developing areas that are so unattractive to settlement as never to have been occupied before. It tells us more about likely settlement hotspots, but less about the places no-one wants to live in. Aerial surveys vastly extend our range, but while Cambridge might seem a no-brainer, even the Vale of Pickering's a prime candidate for relatively dense settlement: "I could have told you that" frankly springs to mind, though the evidence for nucleation is less expected. The indication of commercial exchange without monetary evidence is still more surprising, and could suggest a more decentralised distribution of conventionally "urban" functions. But that seems at odds with Roman enthusiasm for the city, especially when England is hardly inhospitable to urban concentration, later outpacing the rest of the world in that respect. It's consistent though with evidence for survival of indigenous ways, though why one community might accumulate coin and another not is an oddity. A fascinating talk, adding a wealth of detail and nuance, and I'll definitely be watching it again for further insights I'd overlooked. But my reservation of "Why aren't there more townspeople?" still stands in the way of embracing a high population count.

[@peterfreeman6677]

Nice to see the excavations at Hayton and Shiptonthorpe get a mention here. One thing I always wondered about the Romano-British settlement at Hayton was, how many veterans from the auxiliary unit stationed in the fort chose to remain close to the fort - and hence probably in the settlement - when they completed their term of service? If the fort was there for 25 to 30 years, and the auxiliaries signed on for 25 years, then the unit would have been there long enough to discharge up to 500 men, perhaps more. What effect on the immediate area would that have had? Some might have gone back to the places from which they were recruited, but others would have stayed; and you would expect then a sort of Romanisation to influence the local area.

[@Patrick3183]

Would’ve been many old oaks standing that would’ve sprouted in the BC era. Also many more elms.

[@whitepanties2751]

So they had enclosure of former common fields and annual sheep fairs in Roman Britain? Starts to sound almost like the early modern period. I would have liked more information as to how the evidence here of the landscape of rural Roman Britain is the same as or different from that of Gaul and other provinces at the same time.

[@kskssxoxskskss2189]

He has opened a wonderful door, eh?

[@Ulyssestnt]

You state :"we used to call it Romanization"..we still very much call it Romanization.. meaning the adoption of Greco-Roman culture, often in amalgamation of their own. It took many forms and it seems it seldom was imposed by force. You didn't even have to be inside what we today understand to be the borders of the Roman empire for this to take place. For example Germanic auxiliaries took Roman culture home with them and blended it with their own. We have very interesting burial site finds that points to this process in fascinating ways as far afield as Scandinavia for example.

[@myparceltape1169]

Land can be divided between the children of the family which is accepted to be the 'user'. Say a family had 3 sons. The daughters were married to local sons. That leaves one parcel of land and three workers :: apportion.

[@myparceltape1169]

Buried coins are a run on the banks or the servant burying the single talent his hard master gave him to invest while he was away.

[@willbick7889]

isn't most of this blindingly obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense? Does anyone seriously think Roman Britain was largely uninhabited woodland?!! Find it hard to believe historians ever thought that

[@Mrch33ky]

Well done. You completely missed the point of the lecture.

[@davepx1]

It evidently wasn't so obvious to past generations of historians who estimated Roman Britain's population to be as low as half a million - which isn't to say that later "high counts" of up to 5m are necessarily a great improvement.

[@RonJohn63]

54:48 Didn't know how to relate to shiny, pretty, decorative broaches? That's patently absurd.

[@JJONNYREPP]

Landscapes of Roman Britain 1603pm 17.3.23 redefining land borders and altering place names... gives the lie to a great many aspects of historical "fact"... Roman rural settlement of Britain? i doubt Britian would have been anything but.

[@elizabethford7263]

I would love to have learned more about this topic, but by half way through I couldn't stand the "uh" and "um"s anymore. It usually doesn't get to me, but if he is a professor, he should have better speaking skills. Maybe I'll read a transcript for the second half.

[@peterc2248]

Harsh but fair. I gave up on a post graduate course once because the lecturer was so bad at actually lecturing. He may have been a brilliant academic but he struggled to impart his knowledge (his books were pretty hard going too).

[@rogerhulme9494]

I agree. Jarring. Five minutes left me quite agitated.

[@barbararice6650]

Did the Romans have a planning permission and building regulations department or were they civilised 👈👀

[@emdiar6588]

Did the council reject your plans for a firework factory in your back garden again? Pesky bureaucrats!!

[@barbararice6650]

@@emdiar6588 Nope an artillery revetment large enough to shell France from a safe distance, the swines refused me on the grounds that I hadn't planned for enough bat boxes 😑

[@emdiar6588]

@@barbararice6650 XD

[@emptybook1458]

Have any Englishmen heard of Keelady archeology site in Thamil nadu state in India? Why did British rulers hide it so long ? Why Archaeologist are partial in their interests?

[@AudioPervert1]

Massive yawn