The Real Lives of Roman Britain:A History of Roman Britain Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There

by Guy De La Bedoyere

Yale University Press, 2015

The subtitle of Guy De La Bedoyere's new book The Real Lives of Roman Britain is “A History of Roman Britain Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There,” and while such a thing is impossible, it bespeaks a very good intention, one the author pursues for all it can bear: to sift through the mountain of historical evidence in search of the ordinary folk who lived through Rome's centuries-long occupation of the British Isles, rather than concentrating, as so many histories of Roman Britain tend to do, on the major figures like Julius Caesar, Caractacus, Boudica, and the like.

We know quite a bit about those ordinary folk, the merchants and bakers and slaves and craftsmen and rank-and-file soldiers from the legions, and Bedoyere invests all that documentary and archeological evidence with a dramatist's instincts for the human element. He conveys with clarity and vigor the daily details of life in the periods where evidence can attest to it, and his frequent recourse to household inventories helps to sharpen his focus. “It is clear even from the lists of household goods and clothing that there was time enough for relaxation and enjoyment of a reasonable standard of living,” he writes at one point. “One document lists 'tunics for dining', while others mention a range of foodstuffs from chicken to grain, beans to cumin, and nuts to ham.”

Nevertheless, it's perhaps inevitable that the major figures do their best to elbow their way back to center stage. We get a lot more about Caractacus and the emperor Claudius than might at first be hinted by our author's approach, for instance, but it turns out he's every bit as engaging when writing the top-down version of his story as he is writing the bottom-up version. As another example, after a short but involving recounting of Boudica's rebellion against the Romans in AD 60, he refers to Boudica as “a dinosaur” and convincingly assesses the core weakness of her campaign:

The unfortunate fact was that too many of the Britons had ether resigned themselves to the Roman occupation or … taken advantage of it. The unavoidable fact is that the collapse of the rebellion, when it came, was total. The reality is that people join rebellions for many different reasons and, if Tacitus can be believed, many of the Boudican hordes had encumbered themselves with too much loot, which presumably had been their main focus rather than any political ideals.

Bedoyere's book is well under 300 pages, so he indulges in quite a bit of compression – often (especially given his narrative skills) to an extent that will leave his readers wanting more on particular subjects or time periods. But as with most writers on Roman Britain, he can't help but linger on the era's long twilight and aftermath, once the organized Roman occupation force had withdrawn in AD 410. His evocation of that long afterlife rounds out the book:

Not everything decayed into oblivion. In 685 St Cuthbert visited Carlisle and was impressed to see that the aqueduct still worked and fed an operational public fountain. In the late 1100s Gerald of Wales wondered at the startling vestiges of 'hot baths, the remains of temples and theatres' at Caerleon, formerly the fortress of the II Legion, by then around a thousand years old. Still later, vast stretches of Hadrian's Wall were standing and available for farmers and others to help themselves to stone well into the nineteenth century. This means that the remains of the Roman era must still have been hugely conspicuous in the fifth century, even if for many people living at that time it had become increasingly mythical.

The Real Lives of Roman Britain is not exhaustive, but in sustained and imaginative flashes it works hard to rescue the day-to-day existence of the inhabitants of a legioned and picketed island from mythologizing generalizations. As a short, accessible introduction to the subject of Roman Britain, the volume shines – and it's got considerably more heft than the author's The Romans for Dummies.