The Roman Conquest of Britain: Iron in the Fog
In the spring of AD 43, with the chill of the English Channel still biting and the winds sweeping low across Gaul, an armada launched from the Roman port of Boulogne—four legions strong, borne in warships and merchant vessels, a thunderous procession of imperial ambition. At its helm was Aulus Plautius, a seasoned general loyal to the Emperor Claudius. Behind him, more than 40,000 men stood in formation: legionaries, auxiliaries, cavalry, engineers—Rome’s finest instruments of subjugation. What lay ahead of them was not a province, but a mystery. Britannia, as Tacitus would later write, was “the last land, and the last liberty” (Agricola, 30).
The idea of Britain had gnawed at Roman minds for nearly a century. Julius Caesar had crossed the Channel in 55 and 54 BC, proclaiming a swift and theatrical victory before hastily withdrawing. It had been more a show of force than a conquest, and one that left a tantalizing question unanswered: could this wild, mist-shrouded island—home to fierce tribes, exotic animals, and vast mineral wealth—be drawn into the imperial web? Under Augustus, several invasion plans were conceived but never executed. Tiberius, more cautious, restrained his generals. But Claudius—needing military prestige to solidify his shaky claim to the purple—made Britain his proving ground.
Rome’s enemy was not a united kingdom, but a patchwork of fractious tribes—Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, Iceni, and dozens more—each with its own chieftains, feuds, and ambitions. Cassivellaunus had opposed Caesar a century earlier; now, Caratacus and Togodumnus, sons of the Catuvellaunian king Cunobelinus, took the lead. “These were not savages in skins,” writes Peter Salway in A History of Roman Britain, “but Iron Age aristocrats, well-armed, skilled in war, and bound by loyalties to kin and land” (Salway, 1993, p. 45). They fought from chariots, wielded iron swords, and drew upon deep-rooted traditions of resistance.
Plautius encountered fierce resistance as he pushed inland. The initial landings met guerrilla tactics and ambushes, not set-piece battles. At the Medway River, two days of fighting saw Roman engineers swim across the current to build a makeshift bridge under a hail of darts and sling-stones. The battle was brutal and close. The British were eventually driven back, Togodumnus killed, but Caratacus escaped into the west. When Claudius himself arrived weeks later—with elephants in tow, the imperial standard flapping above him—he marched into Camulodunum (modern Colchester) in triumph. Suetonius would later crow that Claudius had conquered eleven kings in sixteen days. The Senate, never shy with flattery, declared forty days of celebration in Rome.
But conquest, Manchester might have reminded us, is rarely the final act of invasion. “Victory,” he once wrote of another imperial campaign, “is a mirage that rests uneasily atop a shifting ground of resentment.” And indeed, as the Romans pushed deeper into the island, they encountered stiffening resistance. Caratacus, now a guerrilla leader, became the island’s symbol of freedom. For nearly a decade, he rallied tribes in Wales, exploiting the mountainous terrain to wage an insurgency that tied down entire legions. Tacitus, writing with admiration, tells us that even in defeat, Caratacus inspired awe. Captured in chains and brought before Claudius in AD 51, he delivered a speech so dignified that the emperor spared him and his family—a gesture of clemency and, perhaps, propaganda.
Politics in Rome swirled like autumn leaves in the Forum. Claudius, never a soldier by nature, had now draped himself in martial glory. The conquest gave him an enduring symbol—archways and coins commemorated the subjugation of Britannia. But in the province itself, trouble was simmering. The heavy hand of occupation—taxes, confiscations, and humiliations—would erupt in blood during the rebellion of Boudica in AD 60, but that firestorm lay just beyond the first phase of conquest.
By AD 47, the Roman military zone had reached the Severn and the Trent. The legions had built roads, forts, and colonies. Camulodunum became the first colonia; Roman rule was etched into stone, brick, and order. Yet the frontier remained contested. “This was never a total conquest,” writes Sheppard Frere in Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, “but a tide that surged and receded with the political tides of Rome itself” (Frere, 1987, p. 69). Even at the height of Roman power, Caledonia—Scotland—remained a thorn, unconquered and defiant.
The conquest of Britain was not a single war but a sequence of operations that stretched over four decades. It began in AD 43 with the landing of Plautius and ended, in essence, with the construction of Hadrian’s Wall nearly a century later. It brought Rome new mines, new slaves, and a new frontier. It also imposed a long, slow transformation on the Celtic world: towns rose where hillforts had stood, Latin mingled with Brythonic tongues, and a new Romano-British culture emerged.
Yet the conquest left scars. “We see in Britain,” writes Barry Cunliffe in Iron Age Communities in Britain, “a land violently seized but never fully subdued, where the rhythms of native life persisted beneath the surface of Roman veneer” (Cunliffe, 2005, p. 410). The war had expanded the empire, burnished Claudius’ reign, and brought Roman civilization—roads, baths, villas—to a distant shore. But in the glens of Wales, in the moors of Yorkshire, and in the highlands beyond Hadrian’s Wall, the ghosts of Caratacus and his kin never quite yielded. They lingered, like mist over stone, long after the legions had gone.
References:
- Salway, Peter. A History of Roman Britain. Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Frere, Sheppard. Britannia: A History of Roman Britain. Routledge, 1987.
- Cunliffe, Barry. Iron Age Communities in Britain. Routledge, 2005.
- Tacitus. Agricola, trans. Harold Mattingly. Penguin Classics, 1970.
- Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics, 1957.