In the last post, I began to explain a little of the background of the books in the Saxon Chronicles series, but why did Rome go there in the first place?
This is a more extensive map of the road system, but you get the idea of just how much work the Romans had put into building the road system. They’d first arrived about four hundred and fifty years before the book is set, but the first time they’d only stayed a few weeks and left again. That was none other than Julius Caesar, and he came twice!
Caesar tells us in his book “The Gallic War” (bet you didn’t know he wrote that account, did you?) that the Gauls were receiving help from across the sea, from a land that most Romans didn’t believe existed, from Britannia, so he set off with a couple of legions to teach these people a lesson. That was in 59 BCE
In 58 BCE, he was still getting trouble from the people across the sea. He’d gone back to Gaul, but troops were still coming over from Britannia, so he came back, and this time he brought four legions, about fifty thousand men, fought a couple of battles and went back to sort out a troublesome senate that was refusing to recognise him as ‘Dictator for life’. A few months later, he was dead on the Senate floor.
Claudius
Some of the British tribes realised that having Rome as an ally was probably good for them, and they set up relations with the Romans, even though the Romans were across the sea. Some parts of Britain had already been trading as far away as the Mediterranean for as long as 1,500 years (The Phoenecians were the first, and they’d been trading with Cornwall and Anglesea since 1,500 BCE). This article explains it a lot better than I could.
That’s when the Ancient world first took notice of Britain, but what about the Romans?
After Julius met his end, Rome was too busy fighting civil wars to worry about the small island off the coast, but that all changed in 54 AD
Caligula
Didn’t conquer Britain, but said he was going to. Then he lined up his soldiers on the beaches, had them pick up seashells and claimed a triumph over Neptune, he was quickly bumped off by his own bodyguards who looked for a inept patsy they could control, his name was Claudius and while the Praetorians liked him, he wasn’t anyone’s patsy.
More on that next time
Lawrence's letters 