1035-1100: The Anglo-Norman Church

We have already seen the pattern by which English Kings, including Danes who became English Kings, consolidated their rule. Once they had established power by brute force and the support of the aristocracy they would make an accommodation with the English Church, the provincial branch office of Rome. Certainly since Charlemagne, English Church and, better, Roman Church approval of a succession added significant lustre to the Crown and made it very much more difficult for a challenger to make an alternative claim although we should be in no doubt that it was the sword that counted in the end. The question of whether the English Church was always to take orders from Rome was another matter, one which became very relevant in the power struggles before and after the Norman Ascendency that emerged after the abortive English revolts of 1069.

The Church may have had no role to play in establishing power but it had a considerable role in maintaining power securely. Its role was to ensure order (since disorder was generally crueller even than a cruel autocracy for most people most of the time) on behalf of its charge, the mass of the population, and on behalf of itself given the financial and landed patronage necessary to maintain its mission. The general population had, of course, little or no say in this authoritarian structure. It wanted the order of Kingship but not necessarily the consequent taxation. Sections of the wider population also needed the limited welfare, celibate employment and protection that the Church could provide.

The people's own resources were, as often in history, redistributed to its own poor through a bureaucratic mechanism for the sake of peace with a 'take' for the clerics that grew larger with time. The similarities with twntieth century bureaucratic European socialism are clear for those with a mind to see them. The clerisy and its economic claims would grow larger with time until this thing that was 'too big to fail' got gutted by Henry VIII who saw that a bit of redistribution back to the English middle classes might secure his own base more effectively than relying on the Church to do so.

The Church never, of course, offered the threat of potential rebellion - this is not what it does, at least not while kings remained within the faith - but it did legitimise royal rule through explicit divine sanction in the coronation. Its preaching of quietitude and submission sat alongside its delivery of alms and its creation of meaning for existence and death as guarantors of a conditional order. "You give us the people", implied the Church, "and we will give you their submission and, incidentally, also save them from your brute plundering". It is the perhaps unhappy and unsatisfactory compromise required for a society that remained poor in resources and education and within which there are still few constraints on the exercise of force by those with weaponry on their side. The history of the liberation of the people from the whims of aristocratic brutes is one story. It takes a lot longer to effect liberation from the hollow ideologies of the Church. This scarcely starts for another half a millennium.

The creation of national saints is an essential part of this process. Our period starts with the canonisation of Archbishop John of York (died in 721) in 1037, known for his kindly concern for the poor. This sent its own signal in the middle of the brutal infighting that took place between the reigns of Cnut I and II that the ruling elite cannot and should not sink to its habitual and instinctive 'pagan' barbarism. Similarly, within a year of the burning down of Worcester Monastery by Cnut II after a tax rebellion (with the rebels inside it), Bishop Wulfstan had started to rebuild it on a larger scale in defiance of the royal sacrilege. The relationship of the English Church to the English people, manifest in the war of defence against the Danes, seems to have created a problem for the Normans in 1069-1070 and to have resulted in the latter's call on the Papacy to help bring the Church to heel.

Westminster Abbey in the Eleventh Century

The Church is never not part of the struggles for power at the very heart of the dynastic State. As we have seen, its leadership could be decisive just as it was in the power struggle that started in 1051 between the Anglo-Danish interest of the Godwin family and the pro-Norman position of Edward the Confessor. The shift in that year (temporarily) to the Norman interest was expressed at the highest level with the appointment of the Norman Robert Champert of Jumieges to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. There is something going on here in terms of Edward the Confessor's own sense of what sort of cleric will support him and his vision of a 'civilised' (perhapsd Charlemagnic) European monarchy. Edward is very active in his patronage of the Church. He founds Westminster Abbey (completed in 1065), which will be the future centre of the royal cult in England, in 1052. Waltham Abbey is completed and consecrated in 1060.

Battle Abbey - ruins of the East Range.

The political significance of the Archbishopric is demonstrated when the return of the Godwin interest under Godwin's son Harold Godwinson, after a brief Norman ascendency at court, results in the expulsion of Robert of Jumieges and his replacement as Archbishop of Canterbury with Stigand who is also Bishop of Winchester, still the primary see of the Wessex interest. We have covered this elsewhere. When William of Normandy became King, he quickly used the Church to seal his position by commissioning the Abbey at Battle on the site of his victory over Harold but he initially lets the Church continue as it had done under Edward until the rebellions of 1069-1070 break out.

His response is to invite three Papal Legates to Winchester in 1070. These legates gave him virtual carte blanche over the English Church after a ceremonial crowning. He promptly called a number of Church Councils and undertook a purge of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, deposing Stigand as Archbishop of Canterbury and replacing him with Lanfranc, a celebrated Italian jurist. What is going on here is also perhaps a Papal-driven frustration with the independence of the English Church, represented by the 'Anglican' Stigand (who was to be imprisoned). The reasonable suspicion here is that Rome saw the Norman Ascendency as an agent for imposing its control on a Provincial Church that had shown too many signs of independence in the recent past. The war crimes 'up north' would not have figured in the Church's moral reasoning at this point.

Church-State politics continued to calibrate in the years after the Norman coup. A controversy over the primacy of Canterbury over York, initiated by Lanfranc, was settled in 1072 at the Council of Winchester although not finally (the dispute would continue until the Fourteenth Century) but it is clear that both King and Papacy found this tiresome. In 1080, Pope Gregory VII tried to push his luck with William I by demanding that the King do him homage as his vassal in an attempt to make feudalism work for the Papacy. William simply refused. Such homage had not been offered by his predecessors. This in itself is interesting. William remembers that his Conquest was based on a right of succession to a line of English kings. He does not allow the Papacy to make the mistake that his power was owed in any way to the Pope. This tension, similar to that emerging from medieval interpretations of Charlemagne's coronation, between the inherent right of kings to rule by dynastic succession and the right of the Papacy to give God's blessing on kings would be a constant theme in European history as the balance of power between Church and State shifted and changed. However both sides agree that thrones can no longer be seized by warlords claiming right by mere conquest.Or at least if a warlord does this, he would soon want the Church to sanctify his seizure as legitimate.

Canterbury Cathedral - Norman Arcade

Much as we have come to expect, when kings cut
deals with the Church the subsequent years see a massive redirection of funds to building major churches. Following a fire that destroyed the old Anglo-Saxon Cathedral in 1067, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt and 'Normanised' from 1070. Recompense is also made for the plundering of monasteries that took place in 1069 as the Normans put down a Saxon rebellion that may have had some succour from parts of the English Church. New cathedrals are started at St. Albans (1077), Old Sarum (1078), Winchester (rebuilding - 1079), Hereford (1079), York Minster (1080), Rochester (1082) and Ely (1083). The commitment continued under William I's successor, William II: Worcester (1089), Chichester (1093), Lincoln, Chester & Tewkesbury (1092), Durham (1093) and the completion of Norwich and the start of the Crypt at Canterbury in 1096. This commitment of investment is massive and it indicates the equally massive political comitment to partnership with the Roman Church that helped transform England into a catholic feudal dynastic State although much of these funds are not onlybased on land grants from kings but also from powerful aristocrats in a feudal state that was never entirely an autocracy.

It should not be assumed that the relationship between Church and State was ever an easy one. The tension over their respective rights between King and Papacy under William the Conqueror became something more serious in the four years after Lanfranc died and before Anselm finally agreed to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Relations between King and Archbishop worsened further. William II attempted to bring Anselm to heel in 1095 by convening a Council at Rockingham but Anselm defied him by appealing over his head to Rome, stating that he could not be tried in a secular court. In 1097, Anselm finally quit Canterbury, leaving the Church's estates in the hands of the King, in order to confer directly with the Pope. He chose exile rather than total submission and so left the problem of the relationship of Church and State to the next King Henry I. For Anselm, the Church was universal with the absolute right to maintain its own internal authority whereas for William II the issue was one of ultimate royal control of both Church and State. What we have here is a culturally strong Church but one not as materially strong as any warrior King, albeit that many warriors, worried by the immortality of their souls, would continue to bequeath estates and property to the King's main rival for power. This ideological tension will be one of the grand themes of English history until the Reformation.

The Norman Cathedrals

(Note that the original Norman (or Romanesque) element in these Cathedrals has sometimes to be extracted visually from beneath later Gothic accretions and in one or two cases has been largely overwhelmed. Nowever, Norman architecture can generally be recognised by its simpler 'blocky' and less ornamented style with more rounded arches.)

St Albans' Cathedral started in 1077

Ruins of Old Sarum started in 1078

Norman Transept of Winchester Cathedral started in 1079

Norman Nave of Hereford Cathedral started in 1079

Nave of York Minster started in 1080

Nave of Rochester Cathedral started in 1082

Norman Nave of Ely Cathedral started in 1083

Norman Arch of Worcester Cathedral started in 1089

Chichester Cathedral started in 1091

Norman West Front of Lincoln Cathedral started in 1092

Norman Arch at Chester Cathedral started in 1092

Norman West Front at Twekesbury Cathedral started in 1092

Durham Cathedral started in 1093

Norwich Cathedral completed as a Norman Cathedral in 1096

Norman Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral started in 1096

Saint Margaret of Scotland

There is an additional footnote of interest in the career of Margaret of Wessex, sister of Edgar Atheling, in exile in Scotland. Canonised in 1250, it was she who ordered the rebuilding of Iona Abbey in 1072 and was credited with civilising her husband Malcolm III and with bringing Scotland closer to Rome under the influence of Lanfranc. This alone suggests that it would be foolish to position Lanfranc as anything other than servant of the Papacy. Her story also reminds us that the Church was a solace to aristocratic women married to near-barbarian warlords and that the aristocracy of the day bore no ethnic petit-bourgeois grudges once it was clear how the power game had played itself out. We cannot read ethnicity back too easily into contemporary power relations where being part of a universal Church and of an aristocratic and kingly caste was of far greater importance than one's racial origin.

664-694: Imperial Structures and the English Church

I suggest we avoid talk of eclipses and plagues, comets and bad luck for prelates and monarchs and their alleged connection - this was an age of simple ideas about cause and effect and so an age of magical thinking. The religious life of the second half of the seventh century has to be partly seen in this context but also in terms of chance and necessity and rational struggles of power using irrational beliefs as tools and weapons - no different from today in fact. Bishops and archbishops could die of the plague as Tuda, Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury, did in 664, without any suggestion that they had incurred God's wrath. Bad things happen to 'good people'. Deusdedit's designated successor, Wigheard, the candidate of Oswiu of Northumbria and Ecgberht and the 'local man', also dies on arriving in Rome to be consecrated in 667. Deusdedit was to be canonised in the popular record.

Pope Vitalian, in the event, consecrated Theodore of Tarsus, a Byzantine Greek, in the following year. He arrived at Canterbury in 668 to undertake a programme of reforms which appear to have resulted in conflict with the incumbent Bishop Wilfrid of York who may here have represented a particular Northumbrian and localist interest within the English Church. The reforms are definitely 'Roman' - an orderly and strict system of parishes and a centralised episcopal structure, an imperial model that would be mimicked in due course by the secular state. These culminate in the Synod of Hertford in 672 which clarified the principle that bishops were sovereign in their territory but only in their territory, a principle that we can see working today in the conventions surrounding parliamentary constituencies, as well as greater control over the freedom of movement of the lower clergy. Theodore also brings with him a new appreciation for the culture of the Graeco-Roman world.

The conflict between Wilfrid, another example of a Northumbrian nobleman making himself part of the clerical structure and becoming a saint on the back off it, and Theodore is the defining conflict of the period. It is yet another proxy for what is becoming the defining motif of our history, one which is played out right up until the present day with the struggle over whether one empire, the United Kingdom, is to be subsumed within another, the bureaucratic, orderly but undemocratic European Union, heir to Rome. Bede says that Wigheard had not only the endorsement of Northumbria and Kent but that of all the clergy and the people, implying a national consensus around him. Although it is postulated that Oswiu was keen not to have Wilfrid as Archbishop in Canterbury, this still implies that Vitalian, in choosing his reforming associate Theodore, was coming up against some degree of nativist resistance to 'imperialism'.

This conflict between Wilfrid and Theodore is complex, too complex for our short summary of history and it involves a great deal of 'amour propre' and position-taking as well as church and royal factionalism, involving such notables as Hilda of Whitby. Wilfrid seems to have been quite good at rubbing people up the wrong way. Initially, there is no problem. Theodore deposes Ceadda Bishop of Northumbria in order to instal Ceadda's rival Wilfrid in the See (669) which is immense though soon to be whittled down in size. This is the point at which the claims of what will be the Archbishopric of York to equal status to and non-interference by the Archbishopric of Canterbury may be traced though this process does not really end until the Norman Conquest. Ceadda (also to be canonised as St. Chad after his death in 672)) was moved to the role of bishop to the relatively recently pagan Mercians.

Wilfrid gets driven out of his See in 678 by King Egfrith of Northumbria as part of a factional war of tortuous complexity. Off he goes to Rome to appeal the expulsion by way of the Frisian Kingdom based in Utrecht where he converted some nobles, at least for a while, but not the court. Wilfrid then makes it to Rome in 679. Pope Agatho orders his restoration (to no immediate effect) in a Synod but forces a compromise that substantially backs Theodore's diocesan reforms. He returns to England in 680 with a deed for the new monastery in Peterborough, which would have been pleasing to Ethelred of Mercia, and vestments and ornaments for the new church at Hexham. Regardless of the documentation, Wilfrid is virtually ignored and goes on his travels around the Kingdom concentrating on converting the recalcitrant South Saxons and Jutes of the Isle of Wight under the aegis of Caedwalla of Wessex. Theodore consecrates a reluctant Cuthbert as Bishop of Hexham (685) at the command of Egfrith who remains deeply opposed to Wilfrid, a situation only rectified by the death of the King at the Battle of Nectansmere in that year. Cuthbert is clearly uninterested in the job, retires, falls ill and dies in his monastic cell in 687. In the meantime, Wilfrid becomes reconciled with Theodore and he is allowed to resume his position in Northumbria albeit with his power somewhat reduced.

Eventually, in 690, Theodore, the last true Roman Archbishop of Canterbury dies and is buried at Canterbury, his legacy being the imposition of an imperial structure stronger than any individual incumbent and capable of being one day transferred as a 'methodology' to secular rule. Our history is often taught as if, when the Romans left in the early fifth century, Rome was no longer important to Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the secular imperial structure had gone, the Church of Rome ensured the reinstitution of its authoritarian imperial system and culture. Much of British history is about the creative tension between European or continental discipline and the more anarchic sense of local liberty and sovereignty of the natives - once again, the issue to be decided in a Referendum in 2017 or earlier.  If the ideology is different - replace God-fearing obscurantism with an attempted liberal totalitarianism - the system is much the same. Theodore was to be succeeeded by Brihtwold, Abbot of Reculver, the first native Anglo-Saxon to be Archbishop, in 692/3 who seems to have been a bit of a nonentity. It is almost as if the Church could now feel comfortable that a native could be given charge of a structure bigger than he could ever be. The story of the constraints made on free-born Englishmen by the forces of discipline and order are captured in that event alone.

Meanwhile, there were complicated issues of heresy and orthodoxy that had seemed to require the commitment to the imperial model in the eyes of Rome, with the Celtic Church remaining in the background as an issue only recently resolved. There is, for example, a new Synod (680) presided over by Theodore at Hatfield arranged largely to deal with the Syriac monothelite controversy. I suppose we may ask nowadays whether we really care about these obscure disputes - in this case about whether Christ had one will and two natures - but they mattered at the time and were intimately related to power struggles within and outside the Church. The matter exercised the Papacy considerably as a strategic threat from the East and, like all heresies, it had to be extirpated wherever it popped up its head.

The Crypt at Hexham Abbey [1]

This is also an era in which the Church becomes an ever more effective patron of building and the arts, in the North in particular, and so of propaganda. Hexham Abbey built by Wilfrid (beginning in 674) and using stones plundered from Hadrian's Wall could seat 2,000. Women also became more important participants in the Church - Aethelthryth, a female saint, founds Ely in 673. Hilda of Whitby who dies in 680 is consulted by kings and known for her wisdom. And more bishoprics are founded as order is put in place - Winchester in 674 for example.

And we should not forget our source for much of what we know about the period - the Venerable Bede, author of the 'Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation' (to be completed in 731), who was born in 673 and will report on the preceding centuries in the first part of the eighth century.

[1] The stones are from Corbridge and are recycled roman building material - photographic source: http://janusatthedoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/crypt-beneath-church-hexham-abbey.html

645-663:The Anglicisation of British Christianity

What we see now in English history is little more than perpetual conflict between relatively small Germanic states seeking overlordship in Southern Britain or seeking merely to survive, with the Church both tool and asset but one with powerful interests of its own. The three big players in the game are going to be Weseex, Mercia and Northumbria. Penda of Mercia drives Cenwalh of Wessex from his kingdom around 645, although nearly all dates are obscure at this time, yet Cenwalh is back in power to consecrate the precursor to the Cathedral in Winchester and found its Bishopric some time after 648.

Interestingly, Cenwalh arranges for the Bishop to be a Saxon having "grown weary of [Agilbert, the bishop of Dorchester's] barbarous tongue" suggesting a new phase for the Church in England, one of replacing foreign clerics with native clerics more in tune with the needs of courts handling people who spoke Anglo-Saxon dialects as their first language. The Church is still, however, an international corporation. Executives get moved around - the Frank Agilbert is neatly translated to become Bishop of Paris in 600. If there is a 'nationalisation' process, it seems not to be restricted to England. One suspects that Rome was having issues with Roman manpower as it expanded rapidly into barbarian territory.

A native 'spiritual sensibility' is also in evidence. On August 31st, 651, as Bishop Aidan is dying in the parish church at Bamburgh, a shepherd in the Lammermuir Hills, Cuthbert, sees a vision of angels which, connecting with the death of Aidan, he interprets as a call to religious service. Again, this 'shepherd' is not all he appears to be - he was almost certainly of noble origins and raised in the environs of Lindisfarne's sister Scottish establishment Melrose Abbey. This future patron saint of Northern England bears all the hall marks of a celebrity-driven propaganda operation but the outcome is still that the Church is no longer quite so reliant on outsiders for its maintenance.

The Church's symbiosis with royal power is beginning to nationalise it: in return for gaining royal protection, it gets political influence but it has to concede that the men who will run it in England will be of the same class and blood origins as their political allies. Though answerable to Rome, these men will interpret Roman ways according to the political, cultural and social needs of the local States. It is all very finely balanced. The unbalancing of the relationship will lead to periodic crises, excommunications and splits over the next thousand years that will lead ultimately to the breach with Rome of Henry VIII.

With exquisite timing in this context, Honorius, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury who had arrived to help introduce Christianity to Kent in 597 and was a Roman by birth, died in September 653. His successor in 655 was an Anglo-Saxon given the name Deusdedit, a transitional figure, a Romanised native, repeating the patterns of control of the old Roman Empire whose continuities have perhaps been underestimated.

Loyal natives can often be better governors of imperial systems than imposed foreigners after the first generation of charismatic leaders has passed - one might say that the entrepreneurs are being replaced by the managers and that the corporation is maturing. The fact that all this was achieved in only half a century suggests the degree to which the Church had provided some things very important to the small English states in their struggles with each other - legitimacy, administrative support, psychological management of the subject peoples and charismatic magical power.

Meanwhile kings come and go. Oswine of Deira dies in August 651 and is succeeded by Ethelwald son of Oswald. Anna, King of East Anglia dies in 654 and is succeeded by Aethelhere. The dynastic details are for antiquarians, The real action though is taking place in Middle England where Mercia's recent dominance comes under threat. Penda, the pagan mainstay of Mercia, is defeated and killed, along with a considerable number of allied royalty and nobles including Aethelhere of East Anglia (succeeded by Ethelwold), at the Battle of Winweaed (November 15th, 654).

Oswiu, King of Bernicia, brother of Oswald of Northumbria, seizes Mercia and holds it for three years as King. He follows up with the seizure of Deira in 655 and so becomes bretwalda. Peada of Mercia, brother of Penda, struggles on briefly but is murdered in 656 and succeeded by Wulfhere, son of Penda, who was king from 657 to 675. Wulfhere becomes bretwalda of at least the Southern English but not of the Northumbrians. It may not be unimportant here that Wulfhere converts to Christainity and abandons the ways of his father (Peada had also converted). His southern bretwalda role involved some support for his allies and attempts to clean up the anomalies existing on the borders between small states - in 661 he invaded the Jutish Isle of Wight (the Jutes seem to have been a problem for the dominant Saxons) and handed it over to Ethelwold, King of Sussex.

Nor should we forget the continued presence of the Cymry. King Cenwalh of Wessex is in battle with them at Penselwood in 658. Yet the real action is taking place in more prosperous England. The Cymry are largely an excluded side show to English state formation. The Church knows where power lies in that context. The monastery at Whitby is founded in 657 and an Augustinian foundation appears at Canterbury in 600.

Whitby becomes central to the history of British Christianity because it is here, in 663, that Oswiu of Northumbria holds the Synod of Whitby, ostensibly to deal with calendrical issues. In fact, it is an assertion of the dominance of Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity. It sets the cultural seal on two hundred years of Saxon victories over the Cymry and half a century of the Roman Christianisation of the victors in the post-Roman struggle for Southern Britain. Rome is back but not as it was - not as 'top dog' but as devious and powerful junior partner to brute barbarian power.

44-77: The Romans Occupy

By 47 (within four years of the initial invasion), the Roman military had occupied Britain as far west as the Severn and Cornwall and as far north as the Trent, moving far beyond a punitive action against Belgic tributaries towards a full-scale occupation of the most productive part of the British Isles. However, the occupation was not untroubled and this was no 'blitzkrieg', as we will see. The process was accompanied by 'Romanisation', the tendency to adopt Roman cultural forms which had already begun in the Southern trading ports and tribes long before Aulus Plautius had landed his troops. The Romans had pursued a policy in Gaul of destroying Druidry and now extended the policy to Britain, essentially doing to the Britons what the Soviets attempted in Eastern Europe - the elimination of the nearest equivalent to an educated pre-regime middle class, one that seemed to see the Roman threat as a profound cultural challenge and so stiffen local spines for ideological resistance. The elimination of this class, notably the invasion of their stronghold in Anglesey, was portrayed by the Romans as a civilising act. The enemy were presented as bloody sacrificers of human beings - an image rekindled for us in popular culture today by the 'Wicker Man'. The aristocrats were tolerated if they became Romanised but otherwise they would be extirpated by force if charm and self interest had failed.

In 48, the Decangi of North Wales were subdued by Ostorius Scapula, who succeeded Aulus Plautius as Governor of Britain, and this helped split the Southern British Tribes from the Northern. The military policy was the standard brutal one of razing hill fort strongholds to the ground and generally massacring their inhabitants. This is not to say that British resistance did not continue for a while yet regardless of Roman ruthlessness. The Romans, having forced Caratacus out of Eastern Britain, founded their own Camulodonum (later Colchester), the first Roman town and arguably the first town in Britain, where Celtic Camulodonum once stood, and made it their capital. Londinium (London) was founded a year later and Verulamium the year after that. Caratacus had maintained the tribal confederation based in Celtic Camulodonum for a while but had then moved his base of operations to Wales, adopting guerrilla tactics, the only way to deal with the application of direct Roman military power if you could not inspire a levee en masse as Boudicca was to do later.

Defeated in battle in 50 at a still unknown location, Caratacus fled to the Brigantes, another confederation of tribes, in North Yorkshire. There, the Brigantian Chief Venutius, married to Cartimandua, prepared for a war of resistance. The story is worthy of a soap opera. His Queen Cartimandua seems to have found a new lover and a struggle for power had ensued. Cartimandua was inclined to the Roman cause (we are finding here a common pattern of internal tribal rivalries being expressed in terms of resistance or acceptance of Roman rule much as France was divided after 1940). Venutius seems to have taken up the cause of resistance more as a result of his wife's position than because he started out in a liberatory frame of mind. The upshot was that Cartimandua simply handed Caratacus over to the Romans. He was carted off to Rome as a prisoner where he was pardoned by Claudius, no doubt to ease the process by which the Southern British aristocracy would come to terms with Roman rule.

This pardon appeared to settle the matter of Roman control of Southern Britain for the while but the occupation was not all plain sailing. By the time of the fourth Governor, Quintus Veranius [57-58], orders had been given to go further and conquer the whole island. Although he died within a year, Quintus Veranius appears to have done a great deal to create the conditions for the conquest of Wales, a process continued by his successor against fierce resistance, notably by the Silures in South-Eastern Wales who were not subdued until the 70s. The point when war in this area was replaced with occupation might be set as the founding of Isca (Caerleon) in 75. Wales took a long time to deal with partly because initial campaigning had to be brought to a halt as troops were recalled to deal with a significant revolt in Eastern Britain.

The East British revolt of Queen Boudicca of the Iceni, in alliance with the Trinovantes (60-62AD) meant the sack of the new towns Camulodonum, Verulamium and Londinium with many thousands of death in each but she was eventually defeated in a battle at an unknown site near Watling Street. Boudicca committed suicide by poison. The slaughter had made the Emperor Nero consider withdrawing from Britain altogether but the victory, which demonstrated Roman military superiority against very much greater numbers, drove Rome to push even harder to suppress dissent and romanise the province. The Brigantes, now under Venutius, then became resistant to Rome. This was really little more than a family spat in which Venutius managed to throw out Cartimandua in 69 (interestingly, at the end of the chaotic year of the Four Emperors in Rome when perhaps some British aristocrats started to wobble over the viability of the Roman project). She promptly appealed to the Romans for assistance in winning back her throne. Whether they restored her or not, the Romans decided to deal with Venutius in battle, which they won of course, but the Brigantes themselves were not subdued for some years.

This is no simple picture of military might sweeping all before it in a few quick campaigns but something more like dogged attrition in which brute legionary force was used alongside diplomatic intrigue and probably bribery, with setbacks, to bring the valuable province into the Roman fold. The very fact that the murder of the citizens of the three first colonial towns of Britain led to considerations of withdrawal suggests that Rome was not always sure of its ground and that the benefits of its minerals and agricultural production could be offset by the huge cost of maintaining order over a rag-bag of squabbling tribes. Nevertheless, by the time that Gnaeus Julius Agricola became Governor in Britain in 77, some sense of order had returned, Rome was on its way to final uncontested occupation of South Britain and consideration could be given to conquering the North.