Saxon Shore

A little about the book, and the background.

How and why Rome came to Britain.

The first Roman to set his eyes on the conquest of the British isles was the great general and the man who would transform Rome, Julius Ceaser.

He had been at war in Gaul with the tribes there and claimed that the Gallic tribes of Gaul had been receiving aid from ‘Britannia’ a mythical Isle across the sea that could be seen on a clear day from where present-day Calais is.

At the time, the Island was thought to be mythical like in the ancient Greek legends, but others in the Republic knew that something was there, why? Because the Phoenicians, known to the Romans from ancient times had been trading with people from across that water for about a thousand years.

Ceasar came in 51 and 49 BCE to subjugate the tribes in the south of the country, but then had to return to Rome and was subsequently assassinated before he could come back and finish the job, though we don’t actually know whether he intended to come back.

Rome’s ruler and first Emperor, Octavian who changed his name to Augustus decided that the Empire was big enough and didn’t need any more territory, so he ordered that the borders of the Empire (it transformed from a Republic to an Empire under him) be fortified instead and that they should concentrate on governing what they had rather than expanding. Besides, Rome had enough trouble with the civil war that had resulted in the assassination of Julius Ceasar and the falling out Octavian had with Mark Anthony that had resulted in a second civil war.

Not long after the Second Civil War Rome suffered a crushing defeat in ‘Germania’ at the hands of a one-time Roman soldier turned rebel leader Arminius who ambushed and massacred three Roman Legions in the Teutoberger Forest. Rome had her hands full!

In the mid 40s AD Emperor Caligula planned for the invasion of Britain only to have the troops line up on the beach and pick up pebbles. He claimed victory over the sea and was soon dispatched to the afterlife by his own Praetorian guard (the Emperor’s bodyguards, elite troops taken from the retired Roman soldiers who wielded incredible power).

Incidentally, did you know that in Rome no one was allowed to carry weapons except the Praetorians? Even regular soldiers were not allowed into the city! The city did have a ‘police’ of sorts, but they were a militia and had far inferior weapons to the Praetorians.

The Emperor who invaded Britain and made sure Rome stayed was the one Emperor that everyone didn’t expect to last more than a few weeks on the throne. He was the one that the Praetorians thought they could control because everyone thought he was a ‘nobody’ and had a bad stutter, Emperor Claudius.

Why did they come? Copper, Tin, Gold and food!

Copper, Wales had been supplying the ancient world with the precious metal for 1,500 years. The largest copper mine in the Ancient world was in the Island of Anglesea off the Welsh coast. Cornwall was also supplying copper from about that time, plus around that time a new metal was discovered that required the mixing of copper and tin. That metal gave the name to the age it was discovered in, the Bronze Age, and the biggest deposits of both metals were in Cornwall and Wales!

Gold and Silver were also there, and Rome always wanted more of those two metals, but more importantly, she had large Armies in the north of Europe but the winters there could be severe where in Britain, being closer to the moderating sea the winters were milder and growing seasons longer, in the first two centuries of Roman Britain she fed all Rome’s garrisons in northern Europe

But all this had nothing really to do with the book, except to explain why the Romans were there in the first place!

The books (there’s another coming soon) are set at the end of the time of the Romans in Britain because no one is really sure what happened!

Here’s what I put in the last newsletter

410 to 600 AD

There’s almost nothing written in the records, and strange things happened. You see in 410 AD the British Isles had Romano Britons living there and the Saxons were in Germany, but by 600 AD my ancestors were in Britain and in charge, but no one really knows how they got there, or why they went, or do they?

I reckon we do, and the novels are an attempt to tell the story. They’re not the actual history, that we’ll never know, but they’re an exciting way to look at what our forbears dealt with

A Multi-ethnic Army

Did you know that the Roman Army was multi ethnic? I’m not talking of the Legions, soldiers in the Legions had to be Roman citizens, but if a teenage boy wanted some adventure in his life then joining the Army guaranteed him good pay, travel and security if he made it to fifty years old!

Good pay in that he’d be paid a decent wage for what he did, and it wasn’t just soldiering as the Army also built the roads and forts, it was the soldiers who did it, that meant a profession and an education. He was never posted to his own area where he grew up, so that meant travel.

Hadrian’s wall in Britain had soldiers from Spain, Romania, Germany and even what is modern day Turkey stationed on it, often in the same forts. Soldiers from Britain often ended up in Germany or North Africa.

At the end of their service (twenty five years) they got a plot of land to farm, three years wages and Roman citizenship which gave them rights and priveliges that the average local didn’t have, they were set for life. in 410 AD all that went away when the Romans withdrew from Britain.

But what happened? Why did Rome leave?

We’ll discuss that in further posts on this site, but for now it’s time to say bye.