Wednesday already?
The weekend vanished in a flurry of preparing for and attending one of the largest Christmas Craft Fairs in Aberdeen, Scotland. The AWA (American Women's Association) has been organising very popular Fairs for more than 2 decades and generally have very high turnout of shoppers. Sunday past was one of the good days. I had a great time, sold 25 novels and maybe a few ebooks.
But to the matter in hand...
For too long I’ve been struggling to write Book 4 of my
Celtic Fervour Series. There was the not being disciplined enough thing. Not
allocating enough of my ‘free’ time to the task. But my slow rate of progress hasn’t really been
an inability to type lots of words. My not feeling satisfied with what I was
writing, and the path that the story arc was taking, was the crux of the
matter. Till recently, it just wasn’t working for me—my ‘dump’ bin being larger
than the current manuscript of around 80 thousand words is a bit telling.
Is that civilised, I ask you? Not being refined enough is exactly the
problem!
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| A Roman Art Lover - L. Alma Tadema Wikimedia Commons |
One of the main issues I’ve had to ponder (A LOT) about is
what the Ancient Roman General Gnaeus Iulius Agricola found worthwhile during
the invasion of Northern Britannia (Northern Scotland) in the autumn of AD 84,
and what wasn’t worth bothering about. As a patriotic Scot, that phrase ‘worth
bothering about’ is a hard one for me to swallow but the truth, in my opinion,
is that Northern Britannia i.e. the
lands of the Caledonian allies, would not provide Rome with the revenues it
needed for the territory to be part of the Roman Empire.
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| ww.123rf.com |
So what did Agricola actually do in Northern Britannia? He
marched his armies to the current
Moray Firth
(
reasonable ground evidence for this).
He maybe
had a big battle at the elusively referred to battlegrounds of
Mons Graupius
(biased written evidence for this)… and then he left quite soon after to go
back to
Rome.
From written records we know Agricola was back in
Rome by late A.D. 84 (or perhaps early A.D.
85). That, of course, does not necessarily mean his whole army retreated southwards with him because there’s ground evidence, as at the supply fortress of
Inchtuthil, to suggest the Roman legions remained in parts
of the north for about a couple of years after Agricola was recalled to Rome.
Lovely questions loom. Was Agricola recalled because his
efforts in subduing the Caledon
allies were unsuccessful? Was it because he could find nothing worthwhile to
send regularly back to Rome?
Was it purely political in that the current Emperor Domitian didn’t like the
success Agricola was having in Britannia? Those answers remain enigmatic but
give me plenty of leeway for writing my fictionalised version!
Essentially what it boils down to is that northern Britannia was going to be far too expensive for the Roman Empire to deal with. To ensure that sufficient future revenues were going to pour into the Roman Empire coffers from northern
Britannia, the Roman Empire was going to have
to spend a huge amount of effort, and loads of money, in maintaining thousands
of troops in the north. It is notable, though, that Agricola (or whoever organised the building of Inchtuthil) seemed to be making long term plans for using it as a campaign and supply base- probably for the invasion of the rest of the north and for maintaining order after such events.
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| Wikimedia Commons |
For years, one of the touted reasons for the retreat of the Ancient
Roman armies from northern ‘
Scotland’
was that the Caledonian tribes and their allies were so fierce, and so good at guerrilla
warfare, that
Rome
couldn’t handle them. That has to have been partly true, there’s enough written
references and some archaeological excavations on the ‘Gask Ridge’ to likely
back this up. But I believe that
‘Society’ or more specifically a lack of
‘Civilised Society’
was the reason for 'Rome' choosing to retreat.
Amalgamated Dictionary Definitions
Society: - the aggregate of people living together in a more
or less ordered community. Synonyms: the
community, the public, the general public, the people, the population….band,
federation, union, alliance,
Civilised society: - marked by well-organized laws and rules
about how people behave with each other. A civilized society must
respond to crime with fairness and justice; has a well developed system of
government, culture, and way of life and that treats the people who live there
fairly: A fair justice system is a fundamental part of a civilized
society.
What the Caledons, Taexali, Venicones
and all of the other northern Late Iron Age tribes lacked was a ‘Civilised
Society’. An already established society that Rome could plunder with relative ease, without huge
expenditure of money, without entailing major ‘military man hours’ of effort, and a society that could be forced to do Rome's bidding afterwards.
The Late Iron Age tribes (I use the broad term Celtic to
describe them) of the north were not structured in a way that Rome would call Civilised Society. However,
in no way were they barbaric.
In northern Britannia, the population of the
tribes would have been relatively small compared to some of the tribes in southern
Britannia (the south of England). Approximately 2000 years ago, living off the
land was a harsh life. If the farmers didn’t have sufficiently good harvests
they starved, especially if they had no other means of survival like stored commodities. An average lifespan was
much shorter than now and early death from disease, or some other nasty reason,
was common. Surplus stock, of anything, was probably a rarity.
And surplus stock was what Rome needed from the lands across its Empire because the City of Rome some 2000 years ago had a population of around 1 million inhabitants. The countryside around Rome could not provide enough for feeding the City of Rome so they needed stock from the wider empire. A massive grain supply, and other foodstuffs were also needed to feed the thirty plus Roman legions stationed across the whole Roman Empire.
According to the most recent archaeological excavations in
northern Scotland
the iron age tribes lived in small communities, perhaps a half dozen roundhouses,
farming a small workable area that had been cleared of forests and the boggy
land having already been drained. (It seems that the north east was generally
pretty swampy, mossy or unproductive scrub land.) There would have been rules of
behaviour and a code of conduct but within what would have been mostly an
extended family situation, any infringements being locally dealt with.
Did northern
Scotland
not have any larger settlements, larger than a small village or a hamlet?
According to finds by recent archaeologists it seems that no large Roman era towns have
been identified. There’s no dated evidence of ‘kingship’ or larger tribal
centres in the north /north-east of Scotland till after the Roman period in Britannia.(post A.D. 400) Since northern Britannia seems to have had no
'Ard Righ' (high king) to establish Roman society, the only way to ensure that future production was plentiful and
civilisation of the tribes took place would have been to leave a huge amount of soldiers in situ i.e.
'Rome' doing all the work of civilising the natives.
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| The Baths at Caracalla |
The lack of a local ‘king’ or tribal leader of a considerable
amount of people would have been a huge disappointment: a severe frustration
for Agricola. In previous invasion campaigns, after a Celtic tribe was subdued and treaties signed,
the Roman general would have appointed the tribal chief as the person
responsible for conducting Roman Law in a proper and just manner. That same
chief (along with Roman officials) would have been responsible for ensuring
that Roman ways were adopted in a relatively peaceable manner, and they would
have been responsible for collecting the taxes due to Rome (harvest products,
goods, and slave labour rather than money).
I'm glad as an amateur history enthusiast that the Romans came to my part of
Scotland...but in a way I'm also very glad they didn't stay!
- Civilised:
-behaving in a polite way instead of getting angry
What price civilisation? I'm not sure what they would have
done to the local natives during their 'take over' bid would have been polite
and I'm very sure some tempers would have been raised -A LOT!
Of course, there might have been sumptuous baths like those portrayed here by L. Alma Tadema.
Wikimedia Commons. Have I ever mentioned I love his paintings- even if they are not quite what would have happened at the baths.
Slainthe!
