Roman Briton

Britons abroad is a contribution to the study of ancient mobility in the Roman Empire with the focus on the mobility of materials and people and the ways objects and people interact dialectically when brought to a new environment. This study looks at Britons who, voluntarily or forcedly, moved overseas in the period of the first to third centuries AD and identifies the ways one can use to trace their mobility. It also explores the changes in the personal and communal identification as expressed by Britons, who settled abroad, and tries to locate a unified element in the (ethnic) identities when compared to those people who stayed put with those who migrated. The exploration of ‘Britishness’ abroad in the Roman Empire is set out on a variety of levels: individual (personal migration from Britain) and communal (the occurrence of British military units abroad); human mobility and mobility of artefacts; movement of British-born and Continental-born to and from Britain. This research approaches the study of mobility and social changes in moved communities through a province-by-province study of archaeological sites and their assemblages but is not limited to the physical borders of the Roman Empire.

Note: This was written as a pre-draft to a more major work coming up. Much of the information given in this essay I now disagree with.
According to the Chronica Gallia, in AD 440 Britain had yielded to a Saxon power which had arrived thirty years beforehand.1 How much of recognisably Roman Britain was left at this point? It has been suggested that, to follow Charles Thomas in using Eliot, the end of Romano-British culture was marked, not with a bang, but with a whimper. To understand how strong Romano-British society was before and after 410, we shall test the integrity of three important parts of late Roman society: military, urban life, and religion.