Intergration

[Guest spartacus]

Following on from my "leaving Brittania" post, when the Romans were here in Britain, some took up relationships with the local women and had children

 

Now my next question on this is when the Romans left, how many stayed behind to settle in Britain and also if they did would their offspring have been brought up the Roman way and learnt Latin OR raised in the British way and taught the local language?

[Primus Pilus]

The active legions left, but many people who had 'settled' certainly stayed behind. That would include large communities of retired legionaries, their local 'mixed' families, and other immigrants from all over the Empire. Add Anglos, Saxons, Norse Vikings and other Germanics to a diverse pre-existing population of many varieties of tribal Celts, Romans, Sarmatians, etc., and Britain is truly an early form of the 'melting pot'.

[Guest spartacus]

So we could have lots of different blood in our veins, well all I know is from my family tree I am pure english for 7 generations!

 

No Welsh, Scots nor irish and 3 generations Mancunian!

[Ursus]

This might be nitpicking, but ... since all freeborn males were granted citizenship after 212 or such, the urban British were Romans in a sense even if they didn't come from Italy. So even if the legions left, I'm sure there was still - in the urban areas at least - a sense of Roman identity and culture. In the countryside I'm sure people still thought of themselves as Celtic, or British or whatever. So after the legions left, it would be a matter of Romanized urban dwellers coping with the non-Romanized rural population without having the legions to enforce order, and all the while various "barbarian" elements starting to pentrate society. What we have is more a clash of cultures than ethnicities per se.

 

No offense, but a lot of the people (especially Europeans, it seems) on the site seem to think of "Roman" primarily in ethnic/genetic/bloodline terms, when really in imperial times "Roman" is a cultural and geopolitical designation. I'm not sure how much bloodlines are useful here.

 

For instance, most of us say that "Germans" and other "barbarians" invaded the empire. By the later Empire, much of the empire had been heavily Germanized anyway, with semi-Romanized Germans (and semi-romanized Celts) fighting non-Romanized German and non-Romanized Celtic elements. Thus to use ethnicity as a prism of history doesn't seem to be very useful; culture is more relevant. And when we say "Roman" we mean people who had some allegiance to a certain cultural and geopolitical paradigm no matter what tribal ethnicity they happened to have.