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This chapter examines the intellectual context of Edward Gibbon's monumental and highly influential work The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and its role in the complex history and genealogy of imperialism. It also addresses the impact of the notion of ‘decline’ both on Gibbon's contemporaries and on later writers, thinkers, and politicians in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when imperialism and the idea of British imperial decline had become major topics for discussion and debate. As a historical work, The decline and fall particularly influenced the writings of the prominent Oxford ancient historian Francis Haverfield (1860–1919), whose publications absorbed many contemporary attitudes about imperialism. Haverfield's work, in turn, influenced the development of the discipline of Roman archaeology for decades to come, especially concerning the themes of cultural superiority and decline.

A narrative is provided stretching from the period immediately before the great attacks on Britain in the 360s up to the great Justinianic plague of the 540s. This is the period which saw the end of direct Roman authority over Britain and the settlements of the Anglo‐Saxons. It also saw the creation of a new Britannia (Brittany) in north‐west Gaul, which survived in spite of the military dominance of the Franks. In Britain, the wars between the Anglo‐Saxon settlers and the Britons extended over several centuries, whereas, south of the Channel, the Franks subdued other barbarian peoples, were converted to Christianity, and allied with the Gallo‐Romans.

In 400 Britain remained part of the Roman Empire and enjoyed the material benefits that came with an extensive market for goods borne by long‐distance trade. In the fifth century it suffered a catastrophic decline in material culture brought about by warfare; but, at the same time, it extended Christianity and a Latin‐based intellectual culture to Ireland. By the sixth century the Gallo‐Roman inhabitants of what was then Frankish Gaul thought of themselves no longer as Gauls but as Romans. The Britons, however, remained Britons, both those of the new Brittany, south of the Channel, and those of the island of Britain. The tensions between the Britons of Brittany (the Bretons) and the (Gallo‐)Romans were exported to Britain and played a crucial role in causing their neighbours to see them all, not as Roman citizens, but as barbarians.

The imaging of ancient document papers presents several challenges, the nature of which is determined by the character of the text, the material on which it is written and the state of preservation. This chapter talks about the struggle to read and interpret Latin manuscripts from Roman Britain. These manuscripts come mainly in three forms: texts written in ink on thin wooden leaves, texts inscribed with metal stylus on wax-coated wooden stilus tablets, and texts incised on sheets of lead. This chapter focuses on the problems of imaging and signalling process of the texts found on the Vindolanda stilus tablets. These problems in interpreting ancient texts arise from the two identifiable sources of difficulty. The first one is the problem of seeing and identifying, in abraded and damaged documents what is aimed to be read. The second is the problem arising from the character of the text itself which determines the ability of the reader to decipher and interpret it.

By the beginning of the fourth century, the Severan settlement in northern Britain was in tatters, and in the middle third of the century Roman Britain was probably mortally wounded. In the sole surviving native account, De excidio Britanniae, ‘On the Destruction of Britannia’, written by the sixth-century cleric Gildas, the end of Roman government in Britain is brought about in no small part ‘by two exceedingly savage overseas peoples’: Scoti or Gaels ‘from the northwest’, and Picti or Picts ‘from the north’. This sixth-century reconstruction of the end of Roman jurisdiction in Britannia is highly rhetorical, simplistic, and melodramatic, and a poor guide to that complex process. Its broad thrust is worthier of closer attention than the minute details.

This chapter examines the history of the empire of Roman Britain. It explains that Roman Britain began with Emperor Claudius' state-sponsored invasion to restore the exiled king and Roman client Verica to power during AD 43. It discusses the assimilationist policies of the Romans and the achievements of imperial Rome which served as a touchstone for succeeding western empire builders. This chapter also considers the causes of the collapse of Roman Britain and its implications for the study of empires.

‘In contrast to the Hellenized provinces of the East, the Western provinces—and especially those within the Libyan, Iberian, Celtic and Germanic linguistic zones—seem to present a relatively “barren” pre-Roman legal landscape….’ (Humfress 2011, 44). This observation by Humfress forms the central core of this chapter. The aim is to assess the current state of knowledge about Roman law in Roman Britain while exploring themes such as the existence of indigenous systems of knowledge; the Roman engagement with these systems; and the use of Roman law as an instrument of ‘Romanization’. Attention is also paid to the agents of transmission of the law in Roman Britain (the army, civilian traders and scribes). This will be done against a backdrop of recent research into the application of Roman law in the Roman Empire prior to 212 CE.

This chapter describes Roman Britain from AD 61–161. The period was one of the most remarkable in Roman Britain's history. Rebellion ceased shortly after the start of this period in most of what we call England. Either the Britons had given up the fight and accepted Roman exploitation and oppression or they decided that perhaps what the Romans had to offer was preferable to the instability of tribal politics. Britain developed in two ways. In the centre and south the towns started to take shape, hubs in a network of roads across which Roman communications and commodities started to proliferate. These roads also led to Wales and to the north to where the bulk of the army was now stationed. During the next century their building works would produce the greatest physical legacy of the Roman era, principally in the Hadrian's Wall system, which by the early 160s was finally confirmed as the northern border of the province of Britannia. The arrival of the codified legal system of Roman law, its enforcement through the Roman administrative system, and the appearance of legal documents also had a major impact on life in Britain.

Following the collapse of Roman imperial rule in Britain, a considerable amount of romanitas remained in the local communities: there was some Latin writing and a degree of spoken Latin in some parts of Scotland; a sense among a now Christian society that their faith made them Romani. It is during this period that various polities begin to appear with more clarity. Bede – a hugely important source for our period – offers a picture of Gaels, Britons, Picts and Angles with their own languages and political structures, which he seeks to explain by reference to a ‘migration-and-settlement’ view of ethnogenesis. But closer examination reveals a much more complex, fragmentary and fluid pattern of ethnic and political identity. The chapter traces some of the key conflicts and alliances, defeats and conquests, and the political processes out of which early national entities emerged, and how some of these nations (particularly the Picts) identified themselves. Chief among the transformations of this period is the gradual Gaelicisation of eastern Scotland or Pictland.

This chapter describes the Roman invasion of northern Britain. The most protracted campaigns took place in the late 70s and early 80s when governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola embarked on a war to conquer the whole of northern Britain. Agricola's campaigns involved the XX Legion and part of the IX. Thanks to the fact that his son-in-law was the historian Tacitus, much is known about the progress deep into the north, despite the inevitable bias. Archaeology and aerial photography have gone a long way to support some of the detail and there is no question that Agricola conducted an astonishingly efficient and sustained campaign which resulted in a huge development of the province's infrastructure. The war reached its climax in the summer of 83 in the Battle of Mons Graupius, somewhere in eastern or north-eastern Scotland, where the Caledonian tribal leader Calgacus was defeated. In the aftermath of the Agricolan war the northern frontier in Britain settled down to rather more than thirty years of inconclusive garrisoning. Vindolanda was one fort of dozens of new installations in northern Britain.

This chapter describes the Severan war of northern conquest in 208. Septimius Severus took total control of the Empire in 197 after defeating Clodius Albinus. Utterly ruthless and determined to establish his own dynasty, he arrived in Britain in 208 with a vast army and made his own fatal error. He embarked on a campaign deep into Scotland, determined to toughen up his sons, Caracalla and Geta, and involve them in a prestigious victory on Britain's northern frontier. The effort of leading the campaign and controlling his eldest son, Caracalla, would kill him in 211 at York. Thereafter, Caracalla's abandonment of any land Septimius Severus had seized rendered the whole effort entirely futile, but it marked the end of half a century more of sporadic warfare in the north, which only then seems to have quieted down.

This chapter describes notable individuals and events during the first few years of the Roman invasion of Britain. These include Caratacus, one of the sons of Cunobelinus, the king of the Catuvellauni who had died in or around 41. Caratacus and his other brother, Togodumnus, fought the Romans as soon as they arrived. They did not do well, but while Togodumnus was soon killed in the Roman war Caratacus proceeded to have a remarkable career by giving the Romans a monumental runaround. Claudius, who ascended to power in 41, after the murder of Caligula in Rome, made politically motivated decisions that had a staggering impact on the thousands of Romans who were shipped to Britain, and the hundreds of thousands of Britons and their descendants whose lives were reshaped by the invasion. The Boudican War remains the most emotive and memorable episode in the history of Roman Britain while the warrior queen Boudica is the one person in that period whom almost everyone has heard of, regardless of how inaccurately or inappropriately.

This chapter describes the worship of gods and goddesses in Roman Britain. The late second and early third centuries in Britain provide the greatest body of evidence for real lives in Roman Britain due to the prolific quantity of inscriptions that were produced, with the majority being from the military zone. The majority of these are concerned in some way or other with gods and goddesses. Both soldiers and civilians lived in an unreliable world, and they sought some sort of security and spiritual sustenance in the vast and endless parade of deities. One source of relief was to be found in the cults that had sprung up around the forts. Soldiers had to endure a more or less continuous litany of official cult observances, usually involving dedications to Jupiter Optimus Maximus or the Imperial House. To this they added innumerable gods, which included those they had brought with them from their home provinces, local British gods whose cults they came across, synthesized British and Roman deities such as Mars-Cocidius, and exotic eastern cults which the Roman Empire had absorbed. It was not just the soldiers who indulged in this limitless pantheon. Religious cults in a Roman idiom proliferated throughout Britain, from towns to the remotest rural locations. Evidence for cult activity appears in just about every context possible.

This chapter describes Roman Britain in the fourth century. Topics covered include how Britons continued to be viewed by some members of the Roman Empire as belonging to the bottom of the ladder; the new military commanders of the Roman army in Britain; the high summer enjoyed by the Romano-British elite, with an exceptionally privileged few becoming owners of considerable wealth, much of which was ploughed into the construction or embellishment of extravagant rural houses; the lack of evidence for religious activity with the apparent end of soldiers' epigraphic habit; the dearth of information regarding the ownership of the great fourth-century Romano-British villa estates; and the increasing assault on paganism.

This chapter describes the Britain that was invaded by Julius Caesar. Britain was home to a complex tribal culture that had developed over millennia. Like most human societies, pressure on land and resources eventually generated the physical evidence of tension and conflict. Part of this was the emergence of a warrior elite who invested the surplus produce of their tribal communities in strongholds and weaponry. The remainder of the chapter discusses how Caesar's invasions of Britain were sideshows in his conquest of Gaul and his political aspirations; and the dearth of information about ordinary Britons of this period and their reactions to the invading army. As a result, much of what is known comes from Caesar's general observations.

This chapter sketches out two long-standing and ubiquitous material practices in Roman Britain: the reuse and refurbishment of old masonry buildings, walls, and foundations; and the repurposing of stone, brick, and tile. Both the reuse of buildings and building material, so I argue, were standard practices in Britain from the second century on, but both disappeared within a few generations of the Roman state’s withdrawal from Britain. So it is the process of the decline and fall of these practices and the reasons that stand behind their ending that are the focus of my chapter. Its emphasis reflects the fact that although I am very interested in ancient recycling practices, as an early medieval historian, I am more engaged by the story of their demise. This chapter is more focused upon the demise of such practices.

Chapter 6 examines what the presentation and responses to classical civilizations at the Crystal Palace might reveal about Britain’s perceived national and international status. It discusses how Greece and Rome figured in the national roles played by the Palace from 1854 to 1921: host to the Festival of Empire (1911), and the first incarnation of the Imperial War Museum. The Palace boasted a unique Natural History Department, curated by ethnologist Robert Gordon Latham, which exhibited tableaux of models of extra-European peoples engaged in ‘characteristic’ activities. The second section examines these models in the context of what were increasingly coming to be seen as representations of the ur-Europeans; the sculpture in the Greek Court, showing how the historiography of Greek sculpture intersected with Victorian racial thought. The final section considers the presentation of the Roman empire—and in particular, Roman Britain— in changing Victorian and Edwardian imperial culture.

This chapter describes Roman Britain from AD 410 onwards. The early fifth century was a very strange time for people in Roman Britain. While some of the institutional and physical paraphernalia of the province was still in existence, it is abundantly clear from the archaeological evidence that much was not, or if it was it was derelict. The townsfolk of Wroxeter used timber public buildings installed in the ruins of what had once been the imposing masonry remains of the town baths. Public buildings in other towns were falling into decay. Some villas were still being used but their once lavish mosaic floors were worn and damaged, sometimes serving as threshing surfaces. Many others were already in ruins, their owners already long gone and long forgotten. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the legacy of the Roman era in Britain.