Questions on Constantius, Constantine and the Northern British Tribes

[Nathan Ross]

I am not basing my view on 'one line from Eusebius' Eusebius is fairly clear that Constantius was being taught by the British at the time and we can therefore establish that debate was prevalent.

To which lines of Eusebius are you referring? I'm assuming you mean Vita Constantini I.8: "he carried his arms as far as the Britons, and the nations that dwell in the very bosom of the Western ocean" and I.26: "he directed his attention to other quarters of the world, and first passed over to the British nations, which lie in the very bosom of the ocean. These he reduced to submission..."

Both of these discuss the exploits of Constantine, not his father. I would guess that the 'British nations' Eusebius refers to here are those same 'Caledonians and other Picts' mentioned by the panegryricist, rather than those peoples dwelling inside the Roman province. But Eusebius, a churchman from Caesarea, could not be expected, perhaps, to know more than the barest essentials of the political or social organisation of northern Britain!

These areas where named after the people who inhabited them... I also think it is significant that there was a lack of Roman villa development in the surrounding hinterland.

Yes, I believe the northernmost villa currently known is at Old Durham, and that features a 4th century bathhouse. Quarry Farm villa, at Ingleby Barwick, was occupied into the 6th or even 7th century, with evidence of high status occupants (gold brooches, glassware and ceramics, even an Egyptian glass polychrome dish). Who might have occupied these villas, though, is unknown: members of the military or administrative elite, or the 'Romanised' British elite? There certainly doesn't seem to have been a network of large villa estates, as there was in the south.

I haven't read Russell & Laycock's UnRoman Britain, which I think argues for the continuance of pre-Roman British society throughout the Roman era and beyond. I do think that 'Romanisation' is better seen as a spectrum than as a hard and fast distinction though: after the Antonine Constitution, all free inhabitants of the province would have been Roman citizens, and taken (at least legally) Roman names, but, as you say, the majority of the population, especially in the north, would probably have continued to live much as they had done before.

There are signs of change, though, and the apparent institution of the administrative civitatus or pagus is one of them, besides the change (in some areas) from native British roundhouses to rectangular buildings, and the spread of Roman coinage and domestic goods. As Harding (The Iron Age in Northern Britain) says, the polarisation of 'Roman' and 'native' in Britain (cf Richmond 1958) 'is now rightly regarded as obsolete'. The people of northern Britannia would have been added to the census, would have paid taxes and provided supplies and recruits for army. To what extent they would have regarded Roman culture or society (in its basic from) as 'alien' after several hundred years of occupation is unknowable, but perhaps they would not have regarded it as such.

Northern Britain, most particularly, was a heavily militarised zone, with a network of forts, roads and military installations maintained until very late in the Roman era, and in some cases far beyond it. As the civilian population was forbidden to bear arms, I would think the continuance of a 'native' tribal elite based on a warrior class highly unlikely (and nor, I think, is there any material evidence for one). There were no centres of study or learning in Britain, as there were in Gaul, and Britain does not seem to have produced any known senators or high-ranking military figures (although they may be disguised by their Roman names, of course). Whatever civilian administration persisted in the countryside, perhaps based on native tribal structures, the only real power in the land was the Roman army.

I tend to agree with Rob Collins (Hadrian's Wall and the End of Empire) that it was the army, rather than any remaining native infrastructure, that retained power in northern Britain into the end of the western empire. "The regionalisation of the late limitanei," he says (p.110), "occuring the last 30-50 years of the 4th century, increases the likelihood that the late Roman frontier units became the de facto warbands of the 5th century... The military occupation of the frontier does not seem to have come to a clear end."