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On 4 February 211, L. Septimius Severus died at the city of Eboracum (modern York). The old Libyan usurper was the third ruling emperor of the Romans to set foot in their province of Britannia in southern Britain, and expired in the midst of his country's third major war in the north of the island. According to a History written some years later by Cassius Dio — a senator who had served in the emperor's advisory council during the war — Severus's enemies were two barbarian nations (genoi). One of these, the Calidones, had been known to the Romans for more than a century. Dio observed that in 197 the Calidones ‘did not abide by their promises’ to Rome, a pretext for war which reflected ongoing diplomatic contact stretching back for generations. The relationships cultivated between the Romans and the various barbarian peoples of northern Britain over that time were complex and variable. They remained so after 211, but Severus's achievement in northern Britain represents a watershed of significance for the whole period examined in this book.

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.

Óengus dominated northern Britain in the middle third of the eighth century like no king before him. His military and other interventions among the Gaels were unprecedented and unparalleled in (recorded) Pictish history. He seems to have negotiated successfully with the paramount king in Ireland and may even have invaded that country, a feat not matched until the fourteenth century. In some English records he was Unust, and in the Chronicle of 766 ‘a despotic butcher who stained the beginning of his reign with criminal blood, and continued likewise right up to the end’. He is the first Pictish king known to have invaded Northumbria, but he also established a peace treaty with his English neighbours.

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.

Bridei son of Der-Ilei offers first glimpses ‘on the ground’ of a powerful king in northern Britain whose suzerainty, if not his direct authority, is likely to have stretched from the Northern Isles to the Forth and from Buchan to Argyll. His realm remained an empire of many units, far removed from a single, centralised kingdom. There may only have been a handful of major kingdoms involved, along with a large number of smaller autonomous units, including ‘farmer republics’. The regime Bridei inherited in 696 or 697 probably owed much to the examples and achievements of the Aeðilfrithings in the previous two generations.

After seven centuries and so much change, we come full circle on the subject of relations and interlinkages between the inhabitants of northern Britain and the Eternal City. Eighth-century Pictish rhetoric and ethnicity notwithstanding, remoteness from the Romans was seldom achieved between the Flavian conquest and the flourishing of Northumbria and Pictavia. The northern reaches of Britain were penetrated by Roman soldiers, sailors and others during the Roman Iron Age, almost certainly more times than is recorded in our thin textual record. In the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, the Roman religion was flowering among the Picts, the Northumbrians, the North Britons and the Argyll Gaels. Far from the Mediterranean basin, northern Britain none the less wrote its own chapter in the story of the transformation of the Roman world in the late Antique and early medieval centuries.

By the end of the seventh century, northern Britain was in the midst of a transition from its late Antique period to its early medieval one. The status quo which had emerged by the end of the third century was becoming a thing of the past. The Maiatian and Uotadinian nations of outer Brigantia had become subsumed within the remarkable Aeðilfrithing imperium. The Calidonian nation had, perhaps, largely weathered that same storm, only to succumb to a new tempest from the Verturian north. A new breed of imperator had appeared, the greatest of whom — men like Áedán, Oswy, and Bridei — could meddle in the affairs of communities as far afield as Orkney, Tweeddale and Ulster. The first rumblings of a future of political, military and economic dominion by great lords based in lowland Scotland were being felt, the Bernicians perhaps representing the last in a long line of dominant groups in the North British zone stretching back to the Roman Iron Age.