How Rome really conquered Britain

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast Summary

Episode: How Rome really conquered Britain
Date: July 14, 2026
Host: Charlotte Vosper
Guest: Ferdinand Addis (historian and author of Conquest: A History of Roman Britain)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Charlotte Vosper interviews historian Ferdinand Addis on the realities behind the Roman conquest and occupation of Britain. The conversation moves from Julius Caesar’s initial campaigns motivated by Roman power struggles, through the tumultuous process of conquest, assimilation, and resistance, to the enigmatic “Dark Ages” that followed Rome’s eventual withdrawal. Addis challenges familiar narratives, providing insights grounded in the latest research and evocative traces left by ancient voices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Julius Caesar’s Invasions: Motives and Mythmaking (02:52–07:12)

• Caesar’s Justification:

  • Caesar claimed military necessity: “The Britons were helping the Gauls, they were supporting rebels, that sort of thing. So I had to. I was compelled to cross the Channel and sort them out.” (Ferdinand Addis, 03:18)
  • Addis notes Caesar’s account is both strategic and unreliable, written with the intention to outshine his political rival, Pompey.
  • Roman Perceptions: Caesar paints Britain as a wild, unknown frontier, but in truth, Britain was well-connected to continental Europe through trade.

• Local Impact:

  • The brief Roman presence under Caesar altered Britain's connections, pushing it toward increased Romano-centricity and changing the island's balance of power.
  • Early forms of Romanization appear—Latin emerges on coins as local rulers seek to harness Roman symbols of authority.

“Britain is quite well connected to the continent... It’s not at all terra incognita. When Caesar says even the Gauls don’t know anything about Britain, this is nonsense.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 06:12)

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2. Interlude: The Century Before Full Conquest (07:12–12:26)

• Following Caesar, Britain existed in limbo: a century of tension, influence, tribute payments (debatable), and growing familiarity with Roman power but without full occupation.
• Augustus and Tiberius both decide against further conquests, as Britain is seen as “half-conquered already” (per Strabo).
• Local rulers start coming to Rome, sending hostages, and integrating Roman symbols into their rule.

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3. Claudius’s Conquest and British Resistance (12:26–17:51)

• Why Claudius Invaded:
  • Lacked military prestige and seized an opportunity when local British politics sent King Verica running to Rome for help.
  • Claudius’s invasion—a major military event—smashes opposition, with many British kings quickly seeking terms.
• On-the-Ground Realities:
  • Roman discipline and organization are contrasted with British warrior culture, emphasizing the psychological terror faced by less experienced local fighters.

“The Britons have a culture of war dominated by elite fighters... wonderful helmets, decorated fine clothes, colorful cloaks, blue war paint… On the Roman side: less glamorous, less high status. They don’t fight for glory, they fight for money... The Roman army is an incredibly violent institution.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 13:12–14:35)

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4. Occupation, Treacherous Deals, and the Boudicca Revolt (17:51–21:48)

• Britons’ Response:
  • Some tribes quickly seek alliances; Rome prefers indirect rule, but deals are unreliable.
  • The Iceni experience humiliation—disarmament, then the brutalization of Boudicca and her daughters.
• The Boudiccan Revolt:
  • Sparked by Roman atrocity, Boudicca leads a devastating—yet doomed—rebellion. Addis does not shy from describing the reciprocal viciousness:

“The Romans speak the language of violence. Boudicca speaks the language of violence right back at them. She massacres the populations of... three Roman towns... And then the Romans have their say... If a people rises up, they will exterminate that people if they feel that's necessary.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 18:39–20:54)

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5. Cultural Assimilation and the Complexities of “Romanization” (21:59–29:12)

• Religion:
  • Romans often interpret local gods as Roman ones (“interpretatio Romana”)—sometimes accommodating, often dominating.
  • Iconic example: the springs at Bath (Aquae Sulis), where Roman architecture and customs overlay ancient British sacred sites.
  • Everyday religious practices like “curse tablets” show the blending—and replacement—of traditions.
• Romanization as Domination:
  • Agricola’s policies encourage Britons to adopt Roman customs, but with ulterior motives:

“The Britons learned to call it civilization when really it was just a part of their servitude.”
(Ferdinand Addis citing Tacitus, 26:50)

• Military Integration:
  • At battles like Mons Graupius (AD 83), local auxiliaries fight for Rome against fellow Britons; Rome’s army becomes multi-ethnic, a sign of successful subjugation.

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6. Life Under Roman Rule: Day-to-Day Life and Infrastructure (29:12–32:11)

• Vindolanda Letters:
  • Ordinary correspondence provides rare glimpses of routine life, such as requests for warm socks or beer deliveries.
  • This everyday literacy and connectivity—enabled by roads and Roman infrastructure—vastly transforms British society.

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7. Hadrian’s Wall: Meaning and Efficacy (32:11–34:46)

• Purpose and Symbolism:
  • Ostensibly defensive, Hadrian’s Wall is “massively overengineered” and likely intended as much for visual power and psychological effect as for military utility.
  • The wall fails to create a true division—Roman influence and native resistance both transcend it.

“Hadrian wanted that division to be really crisp, really clear, but it’s never that crisp or clear.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 33:50)

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8. Decline and Departure: From Prosperity to the “Dark Ages” (34:46–41:55)

• Long, Uneven Decline:
  • Rome never fully “abandons” Britain in a single moment; withdrawal is gradual, muddied by local usurpers and shifting loyalties.
  • Despite turmoil, late Roman Britain enjoys periods of prosperity—mosaic-floored villas date from the so-called age of decline.
• After the Romans:
  • The term “Dark Ages” is contentious, but evidence vanishes for a time, and life likely grows harder.
  • Genetic studies reveal a massive influx of continental ancestry; Britain undergoes a profound demographic change with the arrival of Anglo-Saxon peoples.

“In short, this is a huge demographic revolution in Britain. We don’t know what that looked like... but it's a big change.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 41:30)

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9. Why the Roman Empire Still Fascinates Us (41:55–45:58)

• The viral “Roman Empire” meme illustrates continuing popular fascination.
• Dream and Nightmare:
  • Rome evokes contradictory legacies: law, order, monumental grandeur—but also violence, conquest, and exploitation.
  • These oppositions—conqueror and rebel, assimilation and resistance—remain relevant, echoing eternal human struggles with power and identity:

“History has always had conquerors... and it’s always had people who’d rather die than submit. We each have to choose whether to assimilate or resist.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 44:10)

• Significance for Today:
  • Studying the Roman conquest of Britain clarifies the dynamics of domination, adaptation, and survival which still shape societies.
  • New research (especially DNA and archaeology) continues to reshape the historical story.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

On Caesar’s Motivation

“He is always on manoeuvres, both in the military sense and in the political sense. And whatever he writes, he writes for a reason.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 03:22)

On ordinary lives in Roman Britain

“My favourite letter … just writes to his friend in London and he’s like, ‘Oh, tell me what’s up? How are the elders? How’s…’ It’s such idle chatter. But in the ancient world, it’s completely revolutionary...”
(Ferdinand Addis, 30:54)

On enduring relevance

“Conquest is still very real, and it’s worth knowing something about what it looks like and the sorts of compromise that may be demanded of a person under circumstances of conquest. How ought we grapple with the enormous forces that surround us?”
(Ferdinand Addis, 44:57)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 02:52–07:12: Julius Caesar’s invasions and myth-building
• 12:26–17:51: Claudius’s conquest and psychological reality of battle
• 17:51–21:48: Early occupation and the brutality of Roman rule (Boudicca’s revolt)
• 21:59–29:12: Assimilation, religion, Romanization, and the role of local elites
• 29:12–32:11: Daily life under Roman rule (Vindolanda Letters)
• 32:11–34:46: Hadrian’s Wall – reality versus symbolism
• 34:46–41:55: Decline, withdrawal, and the coming of the “Dark Ages”
• 41:55–45:58: Lasting fascination with Rome and its lessons for the present

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Conclusion: The Legacy of Roman Britain

Ferdinand Addis closes by urging deeper curiosity and humility about Roman Britain—a period more intricate, stranger, and more relevant than the simple stereotypes allow. Instead of a single moment of conquest, there was a long, messy process of adaptation, resistance, and change. The echoes of these transformations—and the choices people made when faced with overwhelming power—still speak to the present day.

“It’s intricate, it’s complicated. It’s fascinating. It’s full of weird little lives, people just trying to do their best. That’s what I think.”
(Ferdinand Addis, 45:49)

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Recommended: Conquest: A History of Roman Britain by Ferdinand Addis.

Transcript

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visit store for full terms. What was it like to be conquered by the Romans? In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Ferdinand Addis guides us through the complex process of the Roman invasion of Britain and the resulting occupation. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Ferdinand reveals what it was like to fight the Romans on the battlefield, why Hadrian's Wall was built, and what happened when The Romans left Britain.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Your book tells a story of the Roman conquest of Britain, which was begun by Julius Caesar in 55 BC. But why did he want to invade Britain?

[Ferdinand Addis]

I think what's really fun about Julius Caesar is that he tells you why he wrote a whole history. Well, a more like live reporting of his campaigns. So if you want to know why he invaded Britain, you can in a sense ask him and he'll give you this very boring reply. Blah, blah, military necessity. The Britons were helping the Gauls, they were supporting rebels, that sort of thing. So I had to. I was compelled to cross the Channel and sort them out. And then the other thing about Caesar is, you mustn't believe him. He is always on manoeuvres, both in the military sense and in the political sense. And whatever he writes, he writes for a reason. And the big context for Caesar is his great rival, Pompey the Great. He is Rome's greatest conqueror to that point, I think in 61 BC, he celebrates his third triumph. And it's his third triumph over a third continent. Amazing achievement. All the Romans are very impressed. But Pompey only got as far as the end of the world.

[Charlotte Vosper]

And where is the end of the world, can I ask?

[Ferdinand Addis]

Kabumpi. It's the Caspian Sea.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Okay.

[Ferdinand Addis]

An important bit of context here, actually. The classical view is that the habitable world is surrounded by a great river called ocean. And they think that if you go out to the edges of the inhabitable world, you reach ocean. And so Pompey gets to ocean in one direction, Caesar gets to it in another direction. But Caesar crucially goes further. He sees white cliffs in the distance and he says, right, that's how I'm going to outdo Pompey. And that's really bad luck on the Britons. They were just going about their business. Caesar turns up and for his own quite private political reasons, decides to invade them.

[Charlotte Vosper]

And that's 55 BC.

[Ferdinand Addis]

That's 55. So that's the first of his two expeditions. The first expedition, we normally think of it as a reconnaissance in force. It's not an attempted conquest. He's just showing off. I can cross even the great ocean. I can go to this island. Unknown to all. Anyway, he goes across. He actually finds it surprisingly hospitable, rich with people, lots of cows to steal, quite well cultivated. And so he thinks, okay, I'll go back in 54. And that's much more serious. He brings a much more substantial force. And there it looks much more like he is trying to impose Some kind of settlement on Britain.

[Charlotte Vosper]

I want to ask about when Caesar invades Britain in 55 and 54 BC, how did he understand Britain? We talk about it as, you know, a product of rivalry, but how was Britain understood in the Roman mind?

[Ferdinand Addis]

We have to be suspicious of what Caesar says. He likes to present Britain as totally unknown. And he carefully shapes his narrative so that he is really the first Roman ever to land in Britain. The inhabitants of the interior of Britain he describes as living on meat and milk, which is to say they haven't invented farming yet. This is his way of portraying people as unspeakably savage and primitive. So that's the picture of Britons that he wants to send back to Rome. They're wild, they're very primitive, and Rome basically buys this. So Britain starts showing up in Roman poetry, in Catullus, as a sort of figure for as far away as it's possible to be the loneliest, wildest island in the universe. And you know, it's funny that the Romans should accept this because of course, everyone knows more about Britain than they're letting on. Britain is quite well connected to the continent. The history of Britain is a long history of connection, of trade routes running through Gaul, around the Mediterranean. There's this enormous flow back and forth between Britain and the continent. It's not at all terra incognita. When Caesar says even the Gauls don't know anything about Britain, this is nonsense.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So Britain was much more widely understood and in touch with the rest of the world than Caesar presented them as.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yeah, it's much better connected than Caesar would have you believe. They have their own rulers, we don't know much about them. They have their own societies. They're complex societies. They build enormous monumental hill forts. Those are the most famous monuments of the British Iron Age. Maiden castle, you know, titanic edifice, millions of man hours to build. This is a society organizing labor at a large scale. A society with its own complicated religion and culture. That's what Caesar discovers. It's not sort of primitive, it's very sophisticated in its own way.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So Caesar comes back in 54 BC and leaves pretty shortly after. How much did life change for Britons now that Romans set their sights on Britain but hadn't necessarily established a full blown occupation?

[Ferdinand Addis]

I think life changes a lot. I think it's a big shock. Suddenly you have Romans just across the channel, your friends the Gauls, with whom, as we now know, you were doing all sorts of trading. They're now Roman subjects. So they vanish behind this Roman wall that's a big shock. You've had an encounter with this very overwhelming military power. The battles between Caesar and the Britons were reasonably hard fought, but the Romans very much won all of them pretty handily. So that's a lot for the Britons to chew on, let's say it's been a developing question over the last few decades exactly what Britain looked like after Julius Caesar's campaigns. How much Roman influence persisted. Caesar claimed to have taken hostages and to have exacted promises of tribute. Was the tribute ever paid? Hard to be sure. Caesar has to deal with a whole rebellion in Gaul and then he has to deal with the civil war. Then he gets murdered. He's quite busy, busy being murdered, being murdered. He's got a lot on. But then I a few more decades of civil war. We get Augustus Octavian Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and he does appear to have relations with British kings. British kings visit him in Rome, he's probably got British hostages, that is to say young princes being brought up in Rome. This was very normal for the Roman Empire. And Strabo, the geographer, ancient geographer, says of Britain that really they were basically conquered. They paid so much in taxes and tributes that it really wasn't worth Augustus trying to conquer them because they were half conquered already. I think the truth probably is a bit more complicated. Of course, Augustus would like everyone to believe that Britain's basically conquered, not worth conquering. I think the Britons acknowledge that Rome is a dazzlingly spectacular power and that Rome offers what you might call a language of power. You start seeing on British coins, Roman symbols, Augustine symbols, the Latin word Rex on a British coin. You know, why are British kings who rule over a population that should in theory be illiterate, putting Latin word, the Latin word king on their own coins, it seems very strange. The answer is that they're already responding to the presence of Rome and trying to learn how to adopt these new modes of rule, modes of expressing power, of asserting power. So, in short, how much does life change in Britain after Julius Caesar's expeditions? Quite a lot.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So after Augustus sort of says, oh, I won't be invading, they're conquered.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yes. And he can afford to do that because he has so much prestige from winning the civil wars that he can relax.

[Charlotte Vosper]

He doesn't need it.

[Ferdinand Addis]

He doesn't need it. Tiberius, his successor, kind of, same story, has fought for years in Germany. A well respected military leader, doesn't need to worry about Britain. Tiberius, successor, Gaius, AKA Caligula, Little Boot, that's his nickname, different Story he is raised to the purple that is made emperor quite young. He has no military prestige, we are pretty sure does think about invading Britain. But for whatever reason, if he had plans to invade Britain, they didn't come off. Gaius gets murdered. The next emperor is Claudius and he likewise is not someone with a lot of military prestige. Partly because Claudius has survived for as long as he has as a member of this rather murderous dynasty that he belongs to. It's partly by very carefully refusing to have any military prestige. If he'd had any, someone would probably have bumped him off. But Claudius is the family idiot. That's his role.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Right, okay.

[Ferdinand Addis]

He looks a bit funny. He sort of stammers. Apparently he's rather old. Anyway, if anyone ever needed some military prestige, Claudius did. And Britain is really the obvious place to look. There are two main powers in Britain at the time. We call them the southern and the Eastern kingdom, in the southeast of Britain, I should say. And these are the beginnings of sort of regional hegemonies. The eastern kingdom belongs to the great Cunobelin, Shakespeare, Cymbeline. And when you have kingdoms like that, that's something for you to take hold of. So what happens is the king of the southern kingdom, we think King Verica is being hard pressed by the king of the Eastern kingdom, first Cunebellon, and then his sons Caratacus and Togodubnus. Vereker runs away to Rome and it's striking that he should do that.

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Right.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Already Rome is seen as the great power. If you have trouble in your neighbourhood, go to Rome. He asks Claudius, you know, I'm in a pickle. Can you spare a legion or two? Claudius? Yes, absolutely. Perfect timing. Assemble the invasion force. So it's perfect. He sails across four legions, smashes the Eastern kingdom, occupies their Oppida, their main towns. It's a big triumph. Everyone hails Claudius as the great conqueror of Britain and that's the prestige that he needs.

[Charlotte Vosper]

I think what's important to highlight in that story is that Claudius is conquering in AD 43, isn't he? And Caesar began the conquest of Britain in 55 BC. This has not happened overnight by any stretch of the imagination.

[Ferdinand Addis]

No, not at all. They've had a hundred years to worry about it before it happens.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah, it's an important idea because often I think people talk about the conquest of Britain as one big massive military event.

[Ferdinand Addis]

That's true. That's right. And these dates that are all so long ago get flattened together. But no, it is important to remember there's that whole century of Britain being just on the edge, looking to Rome, worrying about Rome, the trying to reckon with Rome.

[Charlotte Vosper]

What would Claudius invasion have been like on the battlefield? What would it have been like to experience that kind of military campaign?

[Ferdinand Addis]

This is one of those things where we sort of know weirdly little. There is evidence, but it's hard to interpret it. Like no one alive today has any experience of what it's like to stand in a battle line with your spear trembling in your hand and your little shield sort of rattling and watch a line of Romans come towards you, meaning to kill you. So we really don't know what it felt like and we don't know how the psychological dynamics of battle flowed. But speaking broadly, the Britons have a culture of war which is dominated by elite fighters who are very well trained, very skillful at fighting, reasonably well equipped. They have swords, they have armor, wonderful helmets, decorated fine clothes, colorful cloaks, blue war paint. We think they would have looked spectacular, wonderful. And they fight for glory, for honor, out of loyalty. They're bound by bonds of friendship, by sworn oaths. It's a very sort of human scale way of doing war. And then on the Roman side, you have soldiers who are less glamorous looking, less high status. They don't fight for glory, they fight for money. They fight in obedience to orders. They take orders, they're subject to discipline. The Roman army is an incredibly violent institution. Internally, it runs on savage discipline. Whippings, beatings, executions, and then that violence gets redirected outwards. Because the key thing about Roman soldiers, it's not so much their equipment, although that's good. It's not so much their training, although that too is good. It's that they're very numerous and they're resolute. Mostly a British army is going to be made up of farmers with a spear and a shield. Not very well practiced at fighting. The Romans come towards you, they're very steady, they're all wearing armor, they move as one. I think psychologically that would have been extremely terrifying.

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[Charlotte Vosper]

Every style, Every Home when the Britons were conquered again in AD 43, more fully this time, did they simply sort of sit back and allow it? Allow this new level of Roman occupation?

[Ferdinand Addis]

No, they certainly didn't just sit back and take it. What I want to say is that they came to grips with it. We hear that after Claudius entered the great Oppidum or town of Camulodunum, 11 British kings arrived to seek terms to make a deal with him. Like, oh, okay, we'll be your faithful ally. And Rome broadly is up for making deals it likes to rule through local kings where it can. But Roman deals are treacherous, they're tricky. They will alter your deal. And so the great example here is the Iceni, right? Almost certainly. They arrive in 43, make a deal with Rome, AD 47. The Romans are campaigning in the west of Britain, in Wales, and so, for security, they want everyone's weapons. They want the Icene to give up their swords and spears. This is a lot to ask, asking a tribe to surrender its capacity for independent military action. And it causes trouble. The Iceni have a sort of mini revolt in 47. It gets squashed, the weapons get taken away. The deal is renewed, but worse. Fast forward a few more years. You have a king of the Iceni called Prasutagus. We don't know much about him, but he's a friend of Rome. He dies and what we think happens is he dies around 60. The dates are a bit uncertain. The Iceni live in East Anglia, sort of Norfolk. He tries to leave his kingdom, his territory to his daughters. And for the Britons, this was plausibly a fairly usual thing to do. The Romans are like, absolutely not. You know, we made a deal with you, you can be our friendly king. We're not dealing with daughters. Romans are not big on women, basically, in general. And what happens is they send essentially some thugs. The procurator, whose job is to collect taxes from the province, visits Prasuticus's widow, Boudicca, and beats her. And this is a sort of Roman style whipping. A very, very violent, brutal, bloody thing to do. And we here rapes the daughters who are children. So this is an atrocity. And I think even the Romans regard this as an atrocity. It's a horrible injury inflicted upon them. And it says, you are subjects, don't get the wrong idea about our deal. And for Boudicca and the Iceni, this is too much. This is an insult too far. No more deals. They rose up and they can call on quite a lot of help from around the new province because a lot of Britons are finding that the Roman deal is not that great. The Triniventes to the south, who are the tribe who live around Camulodunum, which is where the first Roman colony is planted. They're finding that the Roman colonists are pretty vicious. They'll beat them out of their houses. So they join the rebellion. We don't know how many tribes join the rebellion, but quite a few. And the whole thing is just extremely savage on all sides. The Romans speak the language of violence. Boudicca speaks the language of violence right back at them. She massacres the populations of, we think, three Roman towns, London, Camiludunum and Verulamium. That's St. Albans. And there's a famous atrocity that she's supposed to have perpetrated against the women of the conquered towns. I think honestly, like too grisly even to lay out in detail, but it's very appalling. And then the Romans have their say, there's another battle, they defeat Boudicca's army, they kill everything, every man, every woman. They kill the pack animals and then they go through the countryside burning villages. And what fire doesn't do, famine does. I think it's important to be clear about this. The Romans are very willing to do a bit of genocide. They don't do it for fun, but they're just very cold blooded. If a people rises up, they will exterminate that people if they feel that's necessary. And they do it to the Iceni. We think they do it in Wales, they think about doing it in Scotland. It's a regular thing. When a subject people are too unconquerable, the next move. If you can't conquer someone, if you can't make a deal, well, just wipe them out.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Despite the violent suppression though of Boudicca's revolt, do we have any evidence of cultural assimilation and integration of Romans and Britons about this time?

[Ferdinand Addis]

This is such a huge question.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah, it is, I know, sorry, it's

[Ferdinand Addis]

such a huge question. It's pretty controversial as so many questions about Roman Britain turn out to be. And I think the answer also changes over the period of the Roman occupation. The key and most contested word here is Romanization. So in religion, the Romans have this very convenient thing called the interpretatio Romana, where they'll arrive in your country, take a look at your gods and decide which Roman gods your gods actually are. In Gaul, Caesar's like, oh, they all worship Mercury. That's probably the Gallic God Eleugas. And in a way that's a kind of accommodation. It's like you can continue to worship your funny gods because actually they're just very gods. Yeah, there really is. And this works all right, so long as you're willing to worship in the right way. So if you build orderly temples and do nice animal sacrifices, not human sacrifices, that's forbidden. If your worship looks reasonably civilized to Romanize, it's okay. If you're a druid, say most famously, definitely not okay. Your religious practice looks a bit weird. Why do you hang out in the forest so much. Why do you have this enthusiasm for trees? What's that all about? What's that all about? This all feels a bit rebellious. And we know what we do with rebellions. We burn everything and kill everyone. That's what happens. Actually, in the same year as Boudicca revolts in the east, in the west, the Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus is just burning the sacred groves on the Isle of Anglesey and killing all the druids there. It was a great Druidic centre, we think. So, in short, you can practice your religion in a sense, but you have to do it in a Roman way. The great example here is what happens to the hot springs at. At Quae Sulis, or Bath, when the Romans arrive. They're these very spooky, marshy, steamy swamp on the Avon. And insofar as we can tell what was happening there, we think it's worshippers on their own going bravely into the steaming swamp and throwing little offerings into the water. And this goes back thousands of years. The Romans arrive and they certainly accept that there's some sort of divine activity going on, making the water be hot. Clearly that's a divine miracle. They're also very willing to accept the British account of which God is involved. So in this case, the goddess Sulis, they say, fine, okay, holy springs, Goddess Sulis. We're pretty sure that's Minerva, one of our goddesses. And now we're going to build an enormous temple to her right on top of your hot spring. So the point is you can worship your goddess Sulis, but in the Roman way. Big square temple, lovely pillars, bit of sculpture, Roman altar, Roman priests and whatever you used to do wandering around in spooky marshes, that's off. We're building a temple. And then next to the temple we're building a leisure centre. Perfect, lovely bathing complex. And so some people look at Bath, at Aquae Sulis, and they see a triumph of cultural fusion. A British goddess, a Roman temple, Britons and Romans bathing together. I see another act of domination, of conquest. The Romans stamping their religious practice onto a British holy site. But there is a sense in which you get a kind of religious fusion. You do get Romans and Britons at the Temple of Sulis and you do get Britons leaving offerings. And we know because among the kinds of offering you can leave in the water at the Temple of Sulis is what's called a curse tablet. These are really fun. A little strip of lead, and on the lead you scratch a curse and the inhabitants of Roman Britain, they'd write their curse, scrumple up the lead, chuck it in the water, and then Soulis hopefully inflicts the curse that you've chosen on your designated victim. And it's usually something really banal. I think my favorite one is, could the person who stole my hooded cloak please be inflicted with maximum death? What I like about that is that Romans and Britons, they suffer the same inconveniences. It's just really annoying if someone steals your cloak or if you get out of the hot bath next door and someone's taken your towel and then you reach for whatever levers you have to hand. And if you're a Briton, those levers are now roman levers. Maybe 100 years before you would have sought out your local druid. He no longer exists. You go to the Roman scribe, you say, I need one curse tablet, and into the water it goes. It's a very Roman way of doing things, this curse tablet. This is a Roman practice widespread over the Empire. Britons use it because that's what's available. The Britons, to some extent, Romanizing themselves in the sense that they are just trying to deal with this new reality. But there is also an amount of Romanisation from the top down. And the great exponent of this is the very famous governor of Roman Britain, Julius Agricola. And we're explicitly told in his biography that he deliberately encouraged the Britons in learning Roman ways, wearing the toga, enjoying Roman pleasures, living in Roman houses. And what's really interesting about this book is that it explicitly says that this process of Romanization was really the Britons learned to call it civilization when really it was just a part of their servitude. Really weird thing for a Roman historian to write, to explicitly draw that link between Romanization and servitude. And it's been very controversial. People disagree about how real this is, whether there really were official Roman efforts to Romanize and whether those efforts were to do with domination. I think that they were. So, you know, we see this process in a way, come to its triumphant conclusion with Agricola's great battle at mons Graupius in AD 83, probably 83. Again, dates always uncertain. And this is the culmination of the Roman conquest of Britain. Agricola leads his men to what he thinks of as the furthest tip of Scotland, it's probably Moray. And he fights an army there, a Caledonian army at the end of Britain, which is the end of the world. Beyond that, nothing but ice and dragons. Basically, and what's really striking about that battle, and the Romans are really proud of it, is that Agricola never deploys his legionaries at all. So the Roman army is made of at that period, has two classes within it. There are the legionaries and these are Roman citizens. And then there are the auxiliaries who are non citizen soldiers drawn from subject populations, Batavians and Tungrians. These are the two great auxiliary bodies. And at Mons Graupius he sends forward the auxiliary soldiers, the half Romanized subject soldiers. There are Britons in this Roman army. Rome has this army cobbled together out of subject peoples, people who've been compelled to some degree or other to serve in it. Why should they fight for Rome? Why don't they turn around, join with the Caledonians, wipe out the legionaries, win back their freedom, and yet they don't, none of them do. The auxiliaries fight just as well as the legionaries and they kill the Caledonians just as dead as the legionaries would have done. And that is a measure of conquest.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So once Rome had completed their conquest of Britain, then, or in Roman eyes, completed the conquest, what was life like under full Roman occupation?

[Ferdinand Addis]

Depends a lot on who you ask, of course, but we do have little snapshots from here and there. I think my favorite bits of evidence are these amazing letters that the tablets from the Roman fort at Vindolanda. It's a Roman fort in the north, just south of what would become Hadrian's Wall. And by an archaeological miracle of preservation, we have essentially the letters from their wastepaper basket, so to speak, a thin strip of wood and then you can write on it, cheap, disposable little note. And a lot of these notes got thrown away, chucked on the floor, they sank into the ground. And because the ground at Vindolanda was very waterlogged, they're preserved. And what's wonderful is they're incredibly ordinary. So it's like Romans were just writing to each other all the time. I say Romans, I mean Batavian auxiliaries and Tungrian auxiliaries, that's who was in the fort. So these were very ordinary Roman subjects, not quite citizens, but part of the Roman world. And they just write all sorts of nonsense like please can we have some more warm socks or I have got some beer to be delivered. When shall I deliver it? I think my favourite letter, maybe there's a soldier called Crautius, German name, who just writes to his friend in London and he's like, oh, tell me what's up? How are the elders? How's I forget her name? But you know, my friend Velbuteia, and it's such idle chatter. But in the ancient world, it's completely revolutionary that you should have a population where literacy is really widespread and there's enough traffic on the roads. Romans are famous for building. You have these roads going up and down Britain and the roads are trafficked all the time. There are post houses, inns on the road. People are always going up and down between London and the north. So nothing is easier than to just give your friend a little note for your friend in London. Or just, you know, give my friend this and ask him how Valbute is doing and you get a reply. And if you don't get a reply, you write another letter saying, why haven't you replied? It's a kind of information revolution, right? Like if you're a British king, a British ruler in 100 BC, you just don't have anything like this. You know, you can send the royal messenger, the royal bard or something, to go and deliver a formal embassy to a neighbouring ruler. But the sort of ordinary chatter that fills the roads is really new and it gives a wonderful picture of just people going about their business.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Like you say, it gives a snapshot on a window into a world that we otherwise might not know that much about. Cause the evidence is really scant and it is important to remember that when we're talking about this history. One piece of evidence, though, which it is quite hard to ignore for this period is Hadrian's Wall.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yes, very hard to ignore.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Very hard to ignore. There's been lots of debate about why it was built, what it was for. What do you think?

[Ferdinand Addis]

Another wonderful, controversial one. I suppose the two ideas are. You know, the first idea is it's a wall. Obviously it was built to keep people out. That's what the Romans said it was for, to separate the Romans from the barbarians. So there's a straightforward view. It's a wall that's defensive and I think there are signs that something a little bit more interesting is going on or a little bit more complicated is going on. It's quite a weird wall if all you want to do is keep out barbarians. In Germany they have a wall to keep up barbarians and they make it out of wood and it's fine. So you don't necessarily need to build an enormous wall out of stone. Hadrian's Wall is huge, it's monumental and it might have been, we think it might have been whitewashed, at least partially, so this thing would have gleamed.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah.

[Ferdinand Addis]

We don't actually, strictly speaking, know what the top of the wall looked like. It survives nowhere, but probably it looked like a classical city wall. And I think this is very significant because it's a real trope in ancient Roman rhetoric to say the empire has made of the world a single city. And this wall that separates Romans from barbarians is really very strong symbolic gesture, which doesn't mean that there isn't a practical side. It has very concrete practical effects. It does kind of appear to work south of the wall. You get more and more prosperity north of the wall, increasing amounts of desolation. So the wall is having a very practical effect. Nevertheless, it's massively over engineered to do the job it supposedly does. You could have built it out of turf, would have been fine. And the answer, I think is because Hadrian, the emperor who builds it, he's a guy with big ideas. He wants to make the empire really neat and tidy with a good firm edge. And everything on the inside is Roman and everything on the outside as well. Forget about that. And the most important thing to notice about that is that it is totally unsuccessful. They keep having to rebuild the wall. They move north, they build another wall, they come back again, people start sailing around the wall. People on the inside of the wall are always rebelling. The division between Roman and barbarian, I think Hadrian wanted that division to be really crisp, really clear, but it's never that crisp or clear. Romanization extends far beyond the wall and beyond the frontiers. But resistance, which the Romans would call barbarism, is always boiling away within the frontiers behind the wall. So that's how I see the wall. Big statement that doesn't quite work.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So the wall was built or the building started in 122 AD. Some historians see that year as a bit of a turning point, because after Hadrian had defined the boundaries of the Roman Empire, we do start to see some decline. What does that period of decline mean for the Roman occupation of Britain?

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yeah, I think that's fair. It's a very slow process, I should say. Let's note that the empire expands again after 122, goes north to the Antonine Wall, which is in the middle of Scotland. So the story of Roman expansion and conquest is certainly not over, but it's a shift in vibe. You could say, okay, Rome has started to regard its limits as more and more settled. It no longer thinks necessarily, as Caesar thought, that it's going to get to the very edges of the world. And yes, very slowly the momentum starts to shift. And, you know, I Mean, there's a huge amount of history here and I don't want to get too much into the weeds. But what happens is the frontier peoples get stronger and stronger partly through contact with Rome, and they get better and better at penetrating Roman defences, at exploiting Roman riches. People love asking, why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? But I think in a way just as good a question is, how did the Roman Empire last as long as it lasted? The Roman Empire is so huge and it lasts for, depending on how you count, between four and 600 years. But that's an incredible innings and it should have fallen apart much sooner. There's this great crisis around 260 where the empire splits briefly into three parts. It loses the west and it loses the east to two breakaway empires. And that really should be it. You know, there are Persians rampaging around, Germans crossing the borders. And so you have 15 years or so where Rome is split into three. And yet after 15 years, new emperor Aurelian goes off campaigning. Sure, he wins some battles, but fundamentally he's saying, you know, shall we get the band back together? I mean, he's saying it at sword point, but I think there's a remarkable willingness on the part of the peoples of Europe, the scattered provinces, to be like, yeah, okay, let's continue to be Romans. And you see it in 283 when Britain does a little Brexit under this rather charismatic admiral called Carausius. Britain splits off. And again, you'd think Britain could just be on its own again. They've got a good navy, Britain's rich enough, good land. Maybe forget about Rome. But Carausius never does. He never can. His coins all have Virgil quotes on, as if to say how very, very Roman he is, or pictures of the three emperors. He wants to be one of a college of emperors, that's his idea. I'm in the emperor's club. But again, the language of power by that point is totally Roman. Even if you're ruling over Britain, you rule in Latin, you rule with Roman imagery. And once again Britain gets folded back in. Constantius, father of Constantine the Great, crosses over to Britain, defeats Carausius, successor Allectus, brings Britain back into the empire and then you get another hundred years of actually relative prosperity. A lot of the Roman villas that you can go and see with wonderful mosaic floors are from the fourth century, they're from the three hundreds, well into what we would think of as the period of decline, Empire wide. People in Roman Britain are doing fine. Roman dining with underfloor heating and mosaics of Ganymede and Roman gods. So it's a complicated picture.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So that's in the fourth century.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yeah.

[Charlotte Vosper]

When do the Romans leave Britain?

[Ferdinand Addis]

So the Traditional date is 410. This is very murky. There's a famous line from the Byzantine historian Zosimus in which he says that the cities of Britain, we think Britain write to the Emperor Honorius and say, help. And the Emperor Honorius says, look after yourselves. And that is the end. AD410. Really, the process is probably more long drawn out than that. And the problem with Britain, and this is always the problem with Britain, Right. In those days, probably these days, arguably, is that it's too close to the continent to ignore the continent. It can't live on its own, but it's too far away to be really bound very effectively into a continental empire. So, you know, for Rome, Britain always sits off in the sea with a slightly too big garrison, dangerously large garrison. The governors of Britain or the commanders of the legions all feel a bit out in the cold. They want to be closer to the imperial centre so they can receive the benefits of patronage. So they're always dissatisfied. Every so often they raise a usurper who says, I'm emperor now. But that usurper can never just sit in Britain, hold on to what he has. He always takes the legions, takes the garrison, marches off to the continent and goes and dies. That's the story. Happens like four times. So that's the paradox of Britain. It's too close, it's too far away. You can't really keep them happy. You can't stop them from invading. It's difficult.

[Charlotte Vosper]

What happened in Britain then, after Roman rule was over? There's often a suggestion that all of the evidence of Roman presence was just wiped out and that Britain was plunged into a period that's sometimes been called the Dark Ages.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Yeah.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Is that true?

[Ferdinand Addis]

Well, people hate the Dark Ages. They hate calling the early Middle Ages the Dark Ages. Yeah, I must say, I. I'm okay with it. I think that's not an unreasonable way to characterize what happened from two points of view. Firstly, as you say, the amount of evidence that we have dries up completely. So what happens after the Romans leave is very, very obscure. There's no writing anymore. There isn't really good pottery. No one's building in stone. People's houses are just vanishing into mud. But also, I think life after, in the immediate aftermath of the Roman departure, in the hundred years or so after the Romans left, was challenging. One of the great questions has always been the question of the Saxon invasion, right, so these are the ancestors of the English. You know, English is obviously a Germanic language, it's not a Celtic language, it's not like French, a Romance language, it's a Germanic language. Why do we all speak a Germanic language when the French speak essentially Latin? For a long time people couldn't agree, but the answer is there was a very meaningful wave of population movement from the continent, from the Low Countries and Northern Germany, peoples that we know as the Saxons, the Angles, the Jutes. And we've only discovered this in the last, I want to say in the last five years. This is all very recent because finally you can analyze ancient DNA cheaply enough and at scale enough to build a picture. And what we find is that if you analyze DNA from bodies in post Roman cemeteries in England, what you find is that the average continental ancestry is 75% with quite high variance. So there are people who are completely descended from continental Germanic populations. In short, this is a huge demographic revolution in Britain. We don't know what that looked like. It doesn't necessarily have to have looked like a sort of genocide or a conquest, but it's a big change.

[Charlotte Vosper]

In 2023 there was a viral TikTok trend, which I think you might have heard of, where many men admitted to thinking about the Roman Empire very frequently, often weekly or daily.

[Ferdinand Addis]

I think it was really frequently, wasn't it?

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah, it was like a few times a day. People were considering the Roman Empire. Why do you think we should be interested in this history today? Why does the Roman conquest of Britain matter now?

[Ferdinand Addis]

I mean, I was surprised, honestly, when that came out. I think Rome resonates very powerfully for all sorts of reasons, some better than others. Rome is weirdly familiar, right? It's accessible, it's so much part of our culture historically. And yet Rome has this, I suppose, distant grandeur that attracts people. I was trying to remember the line from Gladiator. There was once a dream that was Rome in Russell Crowe Voice sounds really good. And there is a sort of dream of Rome. It persists to this day. And the thing is, what's interesting about Rome and I think why it teases at people, why people come back to it, is because it can be a dream or it can be a nightmare. For some people it's a dream of law, of order, of monumental architecture. On the other hand, Rome can be a figure for violence, for conquest, for rapacity, for imperialism. And then you get a different dream, which is the dream of the Briton, wild, free, brave, romantic, Windswept hair flapping in the wind. And that, too, is a dream. These are both dreams, somewhat fantastical, but I think they do represent a real opposition that runs through history. History has always had conquerors, lawgivers, people who want to set the world in order according to their own personal idea of the good. It's always had rebels, it's always had people who'd rather die than submit. We humans at all times deal with empires and kingdoms and rulers making demands of us to deal with laws, conquerors. We each have to choose whether to assimilate or resist. You know, is Boudicca a hero or is she a villain? What did she achieve? Nothing. She got many thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people killed. Would it have been better if she'd just taken her whipping and gone off into the darkness? That's a live moral question. You know, that's the sort of thing that keeps me thinking about the Roman Empire. I mean, conquest is still very real, and it's worth knowing something about what it looks like and the sorts of compromise that may be demanded of a person under circumstances of conquest. How ought we to grapple with the enormous forces that surround us even now, all the time? We still live in a world of conquest. We might wish that we didn't, but we do. People are still conquering each other, people are still fighting wars. What do we do with that? What are our responsibilities? I find that plight, that human predicament, speaks to me all the time. Is it relevant to today? Yes, sure. But Roman Britain, just as a puzzle on its own terms. It's fascinating. And the history is changing all the time. We're learning so much. Roman Britain is so well studied, you'd think there'd be nothing new to learn. Completely false. We're learning. The picture changes all the time. In the last 20 years, it's transformed in various ways. The picture of who the Britons are, of who the Celts are people are always digging up wonderful treasures from the ground that change the picture a little bit more. So it's been really fun to try to get to grips with what I think is a neglected period of British history. At least people don't go beyond the basics. People think of Roman Britain, they think of painted warriors on a cliff and Julius Caesar on a ship, arriving with the forces of law and order and running water and straight roads, and that's it. And then, you know, 400 years, you're into the dark. Who knows? It's a huge amount of time.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah.

[Ferdinand Addis]

It's intricate, it's complicated. It's fascinating. It's full of weird little lives, people just trying to do their best. That's what I think.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Well, thank you very much for talking to us today about your new book. It's been really, really interesting.

[Ferdinand Addis]

Well, thanks so much for having me. It's been an enormous pleasure. That was Ferdinand Addis speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Ferdinand is an author and historian and his latest book is Conquest A History of Roman Britain.

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