viernes, 10 de abril de 2009

The Romans (History - Night Shift)

THE ROMANS

For four centuries, Britain was an integral part of a single political system that stretched from Turkey to Portugal and from the Red Sea to the Tyne and beyond. Its involvement with Rome started before the conquest launched by Claudius in AD 43 (It had established diplomatic and commercial relations with the Romans since Caesar’s expeditions in 55 and 54 AC).
We are dealing with a full half-millennium of the history of Britain.

The name “Britain” comes from the word “Pretani”, the Greco-Roman word for the inhabitants of Britain. The Romans mispronounced the word and called the island “Britannia”.
The Romans had invaded because the Celts of Britain were working with the Celts of Gaul against them. There was another reason. Under the Celts Britain had become an important food producer because of its mild climate. It now exported corn and animals, as well as hunting dogs and slaves, to the European mainland. The Romans could make use of British food for their own army fighting the Gauls.

The Romans brought the skills of reading and writing to Britain. The written word was important for spreading ideas and also for establishing power. Further the toga (the Roman cloak) came into fashion. The Celtic peasantry remained illiterate and only Celtic-speaking.
Latin completely disappeared both in its spoken and written forms when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the Fifth century AD. Britain was probably more literate under the Romans than it was to be again until the fifteenth century.

Julius Caesar first came to Britain in 55 BC, but it was not until almost a century later, in AD 43, that a Roman army actually occupied Britain. They had little difficulty, apart from Boadicea’s revolt, because they had a better trained army and because the Celtic tribes fought among themselves.

The Romans established a Romano-British culture across the southern half of Britain, from the River Humber to the River Severn. The areas were watched from main towns. Each of them was held by a Roman legion of about 7.000 men. The total roman army in Britain was about 40.000 men.

The Romans could not conquer “Caledonia” (Scotland), although they spent over a century trying to do so. At last they built a strong wall along the northern border, named after the emperor Hadrian who planned it. At the time, Hadrian’s wall was simply intended to keep out raiders from the north. But it also marked the border between the two later countries, England and Scotland.

Romans control of Britain came to an end as the empire began to collapse. The first signs were the attacks by Celts of Caledonia in AD 367. The Roman legions found it more and more difficult to stop the raiders from crossing Hadrian’s wall. The same was happening on the European mainland as Germanic groups, Saxons and Franks, began to raid the coast of Gaul. In AD 409 Rome pulled its last soldiers out of Britain and the Romano-British, the Romanised Celts, were left to fight alone against the Scots, the Irish and Saxon raiders from Germany. When Britain called to Rome for help against the raiders from Saxon Germany in the mid-fifth century, no answer came.

 The most obvious characteristic of Roman Britain was the towns, which were the basis of Roman administration and civilization. Broadly, there were three different kinds of towns in Roman Britain. These were the Coloniae, towns peopled by Romans settlers, the Municipia, large cities in which the whole population was given Roman citizenship, and Civitas, through which the Romans administrated the Celtic population in the countryside.
The Romans left about 20 large towns of about 50.000 inhabitant, and almost 100 smaller ones. Many of these towns were at first army camps, and the Latin word for camp, castra, has remained part of many town names to this day (with the ending chester, caster or cester). This towns were built with stone as well as wood, and had planned streets, markets and shops. They were connected by roads which were so well built that they survived when later roads broke up. Six of this roads met in London, a capital city of about 20.000 people.

Outside the towns, the biggest change during the Roman occupation was the growth of large farms called “villas”. Each villa had many workers. The villas were usually close to town so that the crops could be sold easily. There was a growing difference between the rich and those who did the actual work on the land.

In some ways life in roman Britain seems very civilized, but it was also hard for all except the richest. The bodies buried in a Roman graveyard at York show that life expectancy was low. Half the entire population died between the ages of twenty and forty, while 15 per cent died before reaching the age of twenty.

It is very difficult to be sure how many people were living in Britain when the Romans left. Probably it was as many as five million, partly because of the peace and the increased economic life which the Romans had brought to the country. The Saxon invasion changed all that.

The Story of Boadicea/Boudica

Boudica (also spelled Boudicca, formerly known as Boadicea - d. AD 60 or 61) was a queen of the Iceni tribe of what is now known as East Anglia in England, who led an uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire.

Boudica's husband, Prasutagus, an Icenian king who had ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome, left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman Emperor in his will. However, when he died his will was ignored. The kingdom was annexed as if conquered, Boudica was flogged and her daughters raped, and Roman financiers called in their loans.

In AD 60 or 61, while the Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was leading a campaign on the island of Anglesey in north Wales, Boudica led the Iceni, along with the Trinovantes and others, in revolt. They destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester), formerly the capital of the Trinovantes, but now a coloniae and the site of a temple to the former emperor Claudius, built and maintained at local expense, and routed a Roman legion, the IX Hispana, sent to relieve the settlement.

On hearing the news of the revolt, Suetonius hurried to Londinium (London), the twenty-year-old commercial settlement which was the rebels' next target, but concluding he did not have the numbers to defend it, evacuated and abandoned it. It was burnt to the ground, as was Verulamium (St Albans). An estimated 70,000-80,000 people were killed in the three cities. Suetonius, meanwhile, regrouped his forces in the West Midlands, and despite being heavily outnumbered, defeated Boudica in the Battle of Watling Street. The crisis had led the emperor Nero to consider withdrawing all Roman forces from the island, but Suetonius's eventual victory over Boudica secured Roman control of the province.

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