What the Romans really did for British history

[Viggen]

...interesting piece from historian and author Guy de la Bédoyère

 

What the Romans really did for British history was provide the first manifestations of the sense of self among the ordinary. This way we encounter all sorts of people at random points in their lives, lives passed in Britain when it was a Roman province. The inscriptions and other records of the men, women and children for whom Roman Britain was part of their experiences, whether as immigrant or native, are the first ordinary people in British history that we can name.

 

However interesting the ruins of a Roman villa are today, it is easy to forget that it was once a home, a three-dimensional building in which all sorts of personal dramas and histories were played out. Hundreds of Romano-British villas are known, while modern excavation and survey work has shown that there were tens of thousands of simpler rural farmsteads and settlements across the green and pleasant land of Roman Britain.

 

via Irish Times