Rome ruled most of Britain for nearly four centuries — longer than the United States has existed — and the shape of the country still reflects it.
The invasion
Julius Caesar raided Britain twice in 55 and 54 BC and left. The real invasion came in AD 43 under Claudius, who needed a military triumph to secure his position, and it brought four legions and some 40,000 men.
Resistance was serious. In AD 60 or 61, Boudica, queen of the Iceni, led a revolt that destroyed Colchester, London and St Albans and killed tens of thousands before being defeated. She remains a national folk hero, with a statue on Westminster Bridge.
What they built
- Roads — around 2,000 miles of engineered, surfaced, straight road. Watling Street, Ermine Street and the Fosse Way. Modern trunk roads still follow their alignments.
- Towns — Londinium, Eboracum (York), Aquae Sulis (Bath), Deva (Chester). The -chester, -cester and -caster in English place names all come from castrum, a Roman fort.
- Hadrian’s Wall — 73 miles across the north, begun in AD 122.
- Baths, villas, mosaics, underfloor heating and drains — most of which Britain would not see again for well over a thousand years.
Where they stopped
Rome never took the whole island. Present-day Scotland was never subdued; the Antonine Wall was pushed further north for about twenty years and then abandoned, and the frontier settled back on Hadrian’s Wall. Ireland was never invaded at all.
The leaving
There was no single departure. Troops were progressively withdrawn to defend the crumbling empire elsewhere, and around AD 410 the Emperor Honorius reportedly told the British cities to look to their own defences. That is conventionally taken as the end.
What followed was a genuine collapse. Towns emptied, coinage stopped, mass-produced pottery disappeared, and building in stone ceased for centuries. Britain became materially poorer and less connected than it had been for four hundred years.
What survived
Less than you might expect. Latin did not take root in the general population, Christianity nearly vanished before being reintroduced, and the Anglo-Saxons who followed largely ignored the Roman towns and built their own settlements elsewhere.
What did survive was the map: the roads, the river crossings and the sites of the towns. When later kingdoms grew, they grew on Roman foundations because that is where the roads met.
Where to see it
The Roman Baths at Bath are the finest surviving Roman remains in Britain, still fed by the same hot spring. Hadrian’s Wall runs across open country and can be walked. Fishbourne in Sussex has extraordinary mosaics, and the Vindolanda tablets — letters written on wood, including a birthday party invitation, the earliest known writing by a woman in Britain — are among the most moving objects in any British museum.