274-368: The Instabilities of Roman Rule

By the last quarter of the third century, south of Hadrian's Wall, Roman Britain was a fully romanised and prosperous occupied province under men who could become minor players in the bigger game of Roman imperial politics, using the resources made available by the need to have a significant military on hand to protect the asset from potential raiding on three of its four sides - Ireland, north of the Wall and across the North Sea.

The tension between Roman Imperial desire to control and maintain the asset and what local rulers and commanders wanted must be placed in its context - that local interests saw their primary needs as either being protected by Rome or being allowed to protect themselves on their terms if Rome could not do so for whatever reason. After the imposition of direct rule on Britain from Rome in 274, we see, within fifteen years, the rise of an independent 'British Emperor' Carausius, actually a Belgic-Roman naval commander who had been charged with clearing the English Channel of pirates. The propertied interests of Britain were wholly dependant on export of grain and manufactures to the wider Roman Empire. Rome itself was not doing much directly to keep the trade routes open and so the local military Commander clearly got himself the local mandate to keep the resources available to him on site and not have them weakened by interference from overseas, failures to provide resources or autonomy of decision-making or any attempt to have taxes or men diverted to Rome's needs rather than those of 'national' defence.

In fact, the Carausian Revolt had its opportunistic aspects as these things tend to do. Carausius was apparently about to be arrested and executed on charges of dealing with the Frankish and Saxon pirates and embezzlement. His independent Empire lasted a bare decade (286-296) but, based on observation of the dynamics of all Empires trying to hold on to their assets against the depredations of border tribes and organised crime (we see this in the struggles of our own Atlantic System to hold the line against migration and organised crime today), we might see these charges as charges of central Roman frustration at Carausius rationally following a local policy of buying off the enemy at a time when this was not the policy of the centre. It could easily have been the opposite position - the centre seeking to cut deals with the barbarians and a local commander commited to military action. This tension between military aggression against 'invaders', or building walls or bribery, accommodation and negotiation is played out today in the policy discussions about how to deal with Libyan trafficking gangs in Europe and even Mexican cartels. Under some Imperial administrations, whether Roman or Chinese, negotiation with 'terrorists' would have been regarded as self-defeating and morally culpable as much as it does today to Washington policymakers.

Carausian himself may have been called Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Valerius Carausius but he was actually a Menapian (Belgic) of humble birth and shows us another aspect of the Roman Empire by this period. Rome had run out of Romans and a distinctive hybridisation of Roman and native culture created a class of people who saw themselves as Roman but also detached from Rome itself. In power, Carausius appears to have actively worked to create a British national identity albeit within a Roman cultural framework. It is this tendency to integrate local elites into the processes of higher administration that permits, across Empire, the emergence in time of independent centres of power that come and go - entering imperial politics from the periphery, setting up temporary independent polities and acting as minor powers representing a preference for imperial ways of doing things as more efficient but choosing or forced to deal with the rapidly developing barbarian polities and organised ethnic criminalities (from an imperial perspective) at their borders. There are analogies for this in Chinese imperial history. Over-expansion in order to acquire maximun assets and push barbarian threats ever further outwards not merely reaches a certain natural limit of cost-effectiveness but creates its own nemesis as barbarian tribes cohere and adopt and adapt imperial military technologies. Observe the skilled adoption of Western techniques by ISIS in the Middle East and you see what the Mongols and Franks did in their time. The periphery creates unstable 'civilised warlords' who can threaten the centre itself and the costs of holding everything together increase. Does this not remind us a little of our current situation in the West as Washington, free trade, NATO and the 'Big Five' surveillance reach the limits of their expansionary capability? It is as if decline is built into Empire by its very expansionary and 'globalising' nature.

Carausius held the southern shore of the English Channel, inherited as local naval commander, until 293 when Constantius I isolated Boulogne and cut him off from his Frankish allies. Boulogne was taken and Carausius assassinated by Allectus (one of his own officers who succeeded him and was also Menapian). Allectus was defeated within three years. Britain returned to Roman rule under Constantius I, founder of the Constantinian Dynasty, who invaded Britain in 296 and defeated Allectus in 297, leaving behind a myth of British independence that would reappear in Geoffrey of Monmouth's work in the twelfth century, interestingly linked to Christian resistance to Diocletian's persecution. Somewhere in the sub-text is a story of resistance to centralised power being associated with the relatively new religion of Christianity since it would seem that the punitive operations of Julius Asclepiodotus, who Constantius appointed military governor after the revolt, involved some serious persecution of Christians (part of a much wider war on the faith undertaken by Diocletian in these years).

What we seem to have in late third century Roman Britain is an identifiable Belgic ruling class that had been fully romanised but is quite prepared to work with Frankish barbarians pragmatically, simply diverting some of the tax take perhaps from Rome to the barbarians in order to buy them off, and who were perhaps partially adopting Christianity as an ideology of resistance to Roman religious (and so moral and organisational) claims. It is soon after the revolt (304) that St. Alban is executed at Verulamium (later named St. Alban's). Alban was a converted Roman legionary. It is not difficult to see this as a political as much as a religious execution, if the story is not a later invention entirely. Despite the doubts as to veracity, the sheltering by a Roman Officer of a Christian dissident (Amphibalus, also caught and executed) and the story of his conversion seems to hide a deeper narrative of political and military defeat and of an attempt to root out the elite groups who had challenged direct Roman Imperial rule.

Meanwhile, we must not forget the North Britons who would have taken their own raiding opportunities from the fighting in southern Britain. Constantine the Great will cross the Channel to claim the Empire in another ironical reversal of the recent years of struggle only after Constantius I (Constantine the Great's father) had crossed the Channel in the other direction (305) and brought his son with him to mount a major and apparently successful campaign against the Picts in 306. Constantine's father died that year in Eboracum (York) but ensured the army accepted his son as heir - the second campaign against the Picts was thus aborted in order to secure the Empire for the family.

Christianity is a significant political factor across the Empire by this time. The story of St. Alban becomes even more suggestive when we find that Constantine the Great goes on to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire in a series of measures starting in 313 with the Edict of Milan. Christianity in the Empire is another story entirely but it is hard not to see Constantine responding to its ability to mobilise continued resistance in an important asset like Britain and elsewhere, and coming to the 'realpolitik' view that, ironically, just as Carausius might come to an accommodation with the Franks to allow the English Channel trading routes to operate securely so the Emperor might come to an accommodation with the internal dissidents and turn them from cause of instability to force for stabilisation.

Britain returns to being a relatively stable back water of the Empire for a while but we see the Emperor Constans having to cross to Britain in 343 (the visit was short and sharp and undertaken under dangerous sea conditions suggesting an emergency response to some event) and  in the 360s the Mildenhall Treasure was buried suggesting some further internal instability in the elite (though the narrative about this find remains unclear). The serious problems for Roman rule really start again with a run of raids on the Britain by Saxon pirates from 363 to 368, with a particularly large raid in 364 that seems to have been more than just piratical and another in 367 by a coalition of Picts, Scots and Saxons that almost brought Roman Britain to its knees.