When Julius Caesar led his legions across the channel to Britain in 55 BC, he found a land he described as populated by woad-painted warriors living in a cold and distant corner of the world. His two expeditions — the second in 54 BC with a larger force — were more reconnaissance than conquest, establishing Roman contact without permanent settlement. It was the Emperor Claudius who, in 43 AD, launched the invasion that would bring Britain into the Roman world for nearly four centuries, transforming it from the periphery of the known world into one of Rome's northernmost provinces.
The conquest was neither swift nor complete. The Roman legions under Aulus Plautius defeated the tribal armies of Caratacus and Togodumnus and established their first bridgehead at Camulodunum — modern Colchester — which became the first Roman capital of Britain. Over the following decades the legions pushed north and west, subduing most of what is now England and Wales, though Scotland was never permanently incorporated despite several major campaigns.
The most dramatic challenge to Roman rule came not from the unconquered north but from within the province itself. In 60 or 61 AD, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe in present-day East Anglia, led a revolt against Roman exploitation that destroyed Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium — modern Colchester, London and St Albans — killing an estimated 70,000 Romans and Romanised Britons according to ancient sources. The revolt was suppressed with enormous ferocity, but it demonstrated the fragility of Roman control and led to a more conciliatory approach to provincial governance.
At its height, Roman Britain was a sophisticated province of the Empire. Four legions were permanently stationed there, along with auxiliary units drawn from across the Roman world — Spaniards, North Africans, Batavians from the Rhine delta, Syrians. Roman cities — Londinium, Eboracum (York), Aquae Sulis (Bath) and others — were equipped with forums, basilicas, amphitheatres, public baths and all the civic infrastructure that Rome regarded as the mark of civilisation. A network of roads, engineered with a precision not matched in Britain until the turnpike era of the eighteenth century, connected these cities to the legionary fortresses and to the ports through which trade flowed.
Hadrian's Wall, begun in 122 AD on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian during his visit to Britain, ran 73 miles from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne. Built of stone and turf, punctuated by milecastles and turrets, fronted by a ditch and backed by a military road, it was the most substantial military fortification in the Roman Empire north of the Alps. It was not merely a wall but a managed frontier — a customs and immigration control point as much as a military barrier — that remained garrisoned and operational for nearly three centuries.
Roman Britain ended not with a dramatic conquest but with a slow withdrawal. The Empire was under pressure from every direction, and Britain was a distant and expensive province to maintain. In 410 AD, the Emperor Honorius responded to an appeal from the cities of Britain for military assistance by telling them to look to their own defence. The legions had largely already left. The Roman infrastructure remained — the roads, the cities, the villas — but the administrative and military power that had maintained them was gone. Within decades, the cities were decaying, the villas abandoned. Britain was entering the period its inhabitants would later call the Dark Ages, though the shadow of Rome never entirely lifted from the landscape it had shaped.
