This important and significant volume examines, for the first time, the ordinary people of Roman Britain. This overlooked group – the farmers, shopkeepers, labourers and others – fed the country, made the clothes, mined the ores, built the villas and towns and got their hands dirty in the fields and at the potter’s wheel. The book aims to rebalance our view of Roman Britain from its current preoccupation with – archaeologically visible – elite social classes and the institutions of power, towards a recognition that the ordinary person mattered. It looks at how people earned a living, family size and structure, social behaviour, customs and taboos and the impact of the presence of non-locals and foreigners, using archaeology, texts and ethnography. It also explores how the natural forces which underlay the use of agricultural land and regional variation in agricultural practice impacted upon the size, health and nutrition of the population. The Romano-British Peasant leads the way towards a greater understanding of ordinary men and women and their role in the history and landscape of Roman Britain. This title has been nominated for the 2014 Current Archaeology Best Book Award.

This important and significant volume examines, for the first time, the ordinary people of Roman Britain. This overlooked group – the farmers, shopkeepers, labourers and others – fed the country, made the clothes, mined the ores, built the villas and towns and got their hands dirty in the fields and at the potter’s wheel. The book aims to rebalance our view of Roman Britain from its current preoccupation with – archaeologically visible – elite social classes and the institutions of power, towards a recognition that the ordinary person mattered. It looks at how people earned a living, family size and structure, social behaviour, customs and taboos and the impact of the presence of non-locals and foreigners, using archaeology, texts and ethnography. It also explores how the natural forces which underlay the use of agricultural land and regional variation in agricultural practice impacted upon the size, health and nutrition of the population. The Romano-British Peasant leads the way towards a greater understanding of ordinary men and women and their role in the history and landscape of Roman Britain. This title has been nominated for the 2014 Current Archaeology Best Book Award.

An innovative, informative, and entertaining history of Roman Britain told through the lives of individuals in all walks of life The Britain of the Roman Occupation is, in a way, an age that is dark to us. While the main events from 55 BC to AD 410 are little disputed, and the archaeological remains of villas, forts, walls, and cities explain a great deal, we lack a clear sense of individual lives. This book is the first to infuse the story of Britannia with a beating heart, the first to describe in detail who its inhabitants were and their place in our history. A lifelong specialist in Romano-British history, Guy de la Bédoyère is the first to recover the period exclusively as a human experience. He focuses not on military campaigns and imperial politics but on individual, personal stories. Roman Britain is revealed as a place where the ambitious scramble for power and prestige, the devout seek solace and security through religion, men and women eke out existences in a provincial frontier land. De la Bédoyère introduces Fortunata the slave girl, Emeritus the frustrated centurion, the grieving father Quintus Corellius Fortis, and the brilliant metal worker Boduogenus, among numerous others. Through a wide array of records and artifacts, the author introduces the colorful cast of immigrants who arrived during the Roman era while offering an unusual glimpse of indigenous Britons, until now nearly invisible in histories of Roman Britain.

This book provides a twenty-first century perspective on Roman Britain, combining current approaches with the wealth of archaeological material from the province. This volume introduces the history of research into the province and the cultural changes at the beginning and end of the Roman period. The majority of the chapters are thematic, dealing with issues relating to the people of the province, their identities and ways of life. Further chapters consider the characteristics of the province they lived in, such as the economy, and settlement patterns. This Handbook reflects the new approaches being developed in Roman archaeology, and demonstrates why the study of Roman Britain has become one of the most dynamic areas of archaeology. The book will be useful for academics and students interested in Roman Britain.

Weaving together the results of archaeological investigation and historical scholarship in a readable, concise account, this text charts life in Roman Britain from the first Roman invasion to the final collapse of the Roman Empire, around 500 AD.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval. The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.

Considering that York was always an important Roman city there are few books available that are devoted specifically to the Roman occupation, even though it lasted for over 300 years and played a significant role in the politics and military activity of Roman Britain and the Roman Empire throughout that period. The few books that there are tend to describe the Roman era and its events in date by date order with little attention paid either to why things happened as they did or to the consequences of these actions and developments. This book is different in that it gives context to what happened here in the light of developments in Roman Britain generally and in the wider Roman Empire; the author digs below the surface and gets behind the scenes to shed light on the political, social and military history of Roman York (Eboracum), explaining, for example, why Julius Caesar invaded, what indeed was really behind the Claudian invasion, why was York developed as a military fortress, why as one of Roman Britain’s capitals? Why did the emperors Hadrian and Severus visit the fortress? You will also discover how and why Constantine accepted and projected Christianity from here, York’s role in the endless coups and revolts besetting the province, the headless gladiators and wonderful mosaics discovered here and why the Romans finally left York and Roman Britain to its own defence. These intriguing historical events are brought to life by reference to the latest local archaeological and epigraphical evidence, to current research and to evolving theories relating to the city’s Roman treasures, of which can be seen in the Yorkshire Museum in York, or in situ.

This comparison of the archaeological evidence from the fourth to seventh centuries AD in the Chilterns and Essex regions focuses on the considerable body of place–name data from the area. The counties of Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Essex, and parts of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire are included.

Un-Roman Sex explores how gender and sex were perceived and represented outside the Mediterranean core of the Roman Empire. The volume critically explores the gender constructs and sexual behaviours in the provinces and frontiers in light of recent studies of Roman erotic experience and flux gender identities. At its core, it challenges the unproblematised extension of the traditional Romano-Hellenistic model to the provinces and frontiers. Did sexual relations and gender identities undergo processes of "provincialisation" or "barbarisation" similar to other well-known aspects of cultural negotiation and syncretism in provincial and border regions, for example in art and religion? The 11 chapters that make up the volume explore these issues from a variety of angles, providing a balanced and rounded view through use of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. Accordingly, the contributions represent new and emerging ideas on the subject of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Roman provinces. As such, Un-Roman Sex will be of interest to higher-level undergraduates and graduates/academics studying the Roman empire, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and at the Roman frontiers.

This account of the changing relationship between lords and peasants in medieval England challenges many received ideas about the "origins of the manor", the status of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, the 12th-century economy and the origins of villeinage. The author covers the period from the end of the Roman empire to the late-12th century, tracing in post-Conquest society the continuing influence of developments which originated in Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on work in archaeology and landscape studies, as well as on documentary sources, the book describes a fundamental division within the peasantry: that between the very dependent tenants and agricultural workers on the "inland" of the estates of ministers, kinds and lords, and the more independent peasantry of the "warland". The study leads to the expression of views on many aspects of the development of society in the period.