Original subtitles

This is the story of how Britain came to be.

Of how our land and its people were forged over thousands of years of

history.

This Britain is a strange and alien world.

A world that contains the epic story of our distant prehistoric past.

For hundreds of years, regional tribes had fought for the land of Iron Age

Britain.

It was the time of heroes, of champions, men who could wield swords.

This was a world of powerful Celtic warriors, druids and kings,

before Britain was torn apart by an even greater force,

the Roman army.

These men, were executed and their heads were stuck on spikes.

This was what would happen to you if you got in the way of Rome.

Now, the journey continues with the next chapter in our epic story.

A time when our land was being recreated in the image of Rome itself.

This isn't just an abstract depiction of gladiatorial combat.

These people have names.

And its people had to come to terms with a bewildering, new and utterly modern

world. This is science fiction.

Britain. 200 AD The brutal violence of the Roman military campaign

was a distant memory.

Apart from the lands of the Picts to the north, all this was a far -flung corner

of empire.

Roman garrisons and administrators ruling over a land of more than 3

people.

The roads, buildings and cities were established and impressed the features

the landscape of Britain.

People no longer felt that they had been invaded.

Instead, they were part of the most impressive, most technologically

empire the world had ever seen.

Britain was being dragged from its ancient prehistoric past into a new and

modern world.

A world in which you could, perhaps, be both British, and Roman at the same

time.

Today, the relics of Roman Britain still lie buried right beneath our feet.

Here in central London, construction work is uncovering fragments of a city

once stood here almost 2000 years ago.

This building is completely derelict, as you can see, and it's shortly going to

be, well, almost razed to the ground and replaced by something new.

But at the moment, there's just this brief window of time that archaeologists

can take advantage of and dig deep into the foundations.

And what they're revealing deep down here is a rare glimpse of Roman London.

Alison Telfer and her team are uncovering the preserved remains of

buildings.

This is planned urban development.

Everything about this is amazing, Al. It's so recognisable. This is Roman

timber. Yes, and you can see the skill of the workmen who made this.

The timber survived very well because of the damp conditions, and that's really

helped, obviously, preserve it.

In just a few generations, Roman London had grown into Britain's most important

trading town.

What's being discovered here?

are some of the shops and workshops that stood right at its very heart.

Is that a fence line there? It is a fence line dividing this building from

one over there.

And then heading that way, there might have been shop frontages, and about 20

metres that way is probably the Roman road.

When you use words like shop frontages, it suddenly sounds modern.

Well, at the time it would have been. You probably could come and get your

latest leather shoes here, maybe get them made to measure.

It fascinates me that life down here is so vivid.

Yes. It makes people real, doesn't it?

Look at this. This is a bag of leather pieces that have been excavated from

here. How recognisable is that?

That's the sole of a leather Roman shoe. Look at that.

And you can see on the sides the holes for stitching.

And even more interesting in a way, given that we're in a workshop, is a

like this, which is an off -cut of leather.

That's been cut from a larger piece during the shaping and the making of

something. And it's a find like this that shows that shoes aren't just being

sold from these premises. They're actually being made here.

And it still smells ever so faintly of leather.

As early as AD 50, a bridge had been built across the River Thames, and

grew rapidly around it.

This was a trading hub, the Thames connecting Britain to mainland Europe

furthest reaches of the Roman world.

Not only to France, Italy and Spain, but Africa and the Middle East.

Nearly 2 ,000 years ago, all of this was green fields, as far as the eye could

see. because there were no Britons settled on either bank.

This is the actual site of the very first bridge across the Thames, built by

Romans in the first century AD.

It would have taken its line across the Thames, parallel to modern London Bridge

up there, and the settlement that grew up on either side they called Londinium.

a name that has such a profound and deep connection to the city we know today.

The Roman city of London was built on two hills, Cornhill and Ludgate Hill.

By around 200 years AD, it stretched all the way from where St Paul's Cathedral

is today to the site of the Tower of London. It was home to maybe 40 ,000

and it was Britain's very first metropolis.

The growth of urban living wasn't only felt in the South East.

From Bath in the West to York in the North

Many early forts and garrison towns had evolved into civilian centres of

government and commerce.

The roads that had been built to transport troops were now carrying the

goods to growing centres of population.

Roman mass manufacturing was making decorative goods ever more accessible to

aspirant middle classes.

Innovation such as glassware would have been a modern marvel.

Look at that.

Instant product.

And it's so detailed just from the clay mould.

You've got the basis of mass production there, haven't you?

Even the idea of windows was new to Britain.

It's almost impossible for us to imagine a world without glass.

But try and put yourself into the mind of an Iron Age Britain for whom the

had only and always been glassless. And think of the impact for him of standing

inside a building and, while being proof against the rain and the wind, to still

be bathed in sunlight.

And glass was far from the only modern marvel that came with the Romans.

Look at this.

This would have been a wonder.

This is all that remains of a gigantic statue that stood 20 feet high.

And it wouldn't have been green either.

The figure would have been painted gold, even gilded.

The native tribes had never before seen likenesses.

Of human beings.

But to see that these people were accompanied by golden giants.

Three times the size of a human being.

What would that have said to you about what these people were capable of?

And then look at this.

So familiar.

It's exactly what it looks like. It's a padlock.

There's the keyhole.

This could well be the key that fits.

It shows the way in which the Romans quite literally brought the modern

They brought the future with them.

This is science fiction.

Of course, not everyone in Britain was so directly exposed to the wonders of

Rome. Away from the heavily Romanised South, the impact of Roman culture would

have been much less.

But if you were living in one of the new urban centres...

then the classical, civilised Roman world would have touched every part of

life. And it wouldn't necessarily have been threatening and foreign.

It would have been exciting and seductive.

But if the new urban centres weren't enough, the new commercial

the new technologies, then Rome had something else to offer the people for

first time.

And that was mass entertainment, often on a truly massive scale.

cycling along a piece of invisible Roman Britain.

Because where I am now used to be a racetrack where charioteers would hurtle

along racing against one another.

That's once around. Another six to go.

Colchester was the first Roman retirement town.

where old soldiers could settle with their own plots of land.

Its racetrack, or circus, was discovered by archaeologist Philip Crummey.

What we've found is the only circus known in Roman Britain.

Comparing it to these modern buildings, it's colossal even by modern standards.

I mean, look at this massive industrial unit there and the circus dwarfs it.

Well, this is the largest Roman building that we know of in Britain.

This is the real deal. This is a giant thing. It's a giant.

Despite knowing its layout, only fragments of the original structure have

been excavated.

It's half a kilometre long and we're taking out just this slot here.

That's right.

Inches beneath the ground, evidence of building work still remains from the

massive stadium.

Right, let's fire this up.

1 ,800 years ago, Romans and Britons, rich and poor, citizens and slaves,

would have shared in one of the greatest sporting spectacles of the ancient

world.

A chariot race.

What you'd hear is the sound of a chariot going seven times around the

barrier and the cheers of up to 15 ,000 people yelling and screaming. This was

the modern equivalent.

of football right so it's mass entertainment almost on an industrial

is where you come from there'll be excitement so that's mortared masonry oh

yeah look at that sit there that mortar coming up there

oh yeah that's good start of Roman stuff Roman brick there

These are the foundation remains of one of the greatest stadiums in Northern

Europe.

But in Colchester,

the racetrack wasn't the only math entertainment on offer.

People could also get a glimpse of some of the sporting superstars of the age.

Gladiators.

This piece of pottery, this vase, encapsulates so much of what we think

the Roman world.

It was found in Colchester, near the circus.

It's widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of Roman period pottery

found in Northern Europe.

These two men here are baiting what looks to our eyes like a dog, but it's

actually a bear.

And that is so much.

how we think about Roman sports, Roman entertainment, how it was all wound up

blood and cruelty.

But it's not just animals that are on the receiving end of the violence.

On this side of the vase are two gladiators.

This one here is a class of gladiator called a secutor.

He has armour, a helmet, a shield and a... classically a sword.

His opponent, however, is in all kinds of trouble.

He should be armed with a net and a trident, but he has lost both.

But what makes this bath so fascinating is that this isn't just an

abstract, notional depiction of gladiatorial combat.

These people have names.

Valentinius and Memnon.

Now,

Valentinius was an international superstar of his age. He was attached to

legion in Germany, so perhaps he was brought over to Colchester, to Britain,

the provinces, to entertain the locals here and give them a taste of European

glamour.

Nothing like this could have been seen, even conceived of, by the native British

tribes. Not at least until they had contact with Rome.

Ancient Britain had evolved gradually through thousands of years of

But in the centuries following the Roman invasion, the face of Britain was being

transformed.

And it was all part of a plan to feed and bolster the economy of an

bloated Roman Empire.

Look at this.

It's a silver Roman coin.

It's got the head of the emperor on one side. It's called a denarius.

And in its day, it was worth around £100.

And it was money and wealth like this that was key to the control of Britain.

Across an empire of perhaps 80 million people, the Romans needed to keep

resources circulating and coming towards them.

And so it's likely that Britain was taxed directly, the individuals, for the

very first time.

All the building, all the entertainments, the military forts, the

had to be paid for.

So another coin, like this one.

would have become a common fight.

It's called an ad, and it was the pound coin of its day.

We can imagine it being handed over reluctantly by a worker from Londinium

Roman tax collector.

It's usually the Roman military that gets all the attention, that has all the

glamour. But in truth, when it comes to controlling a province like Britannia,

keeping control of its economy, then the secret lies in Roman bureaucracy.

its civil service.

London, the commercial gateway to Britain, also became its political nerve

centre.

At the heart of the city, the Roman administration built a base for

in the shape of a vast basilica.

The one built here was three storeys high, so an enormous building.

In fact, It wouldn't have been much smaller than the building that's here on

site today.

The Roman Basilica, though, was part courthouse, part records office, part

office. So, all in all, a frighteningly imposing structure.

During the last 2 ,000 years, this ground has been built on over and over

But amazingly, a fragment of the ancient basilica still survives.

If you know where to look for it.

You are not going to believe what is behind this door.

Look at that.

Unbelievable as it may seem, this is all that remains of what was once one of

the largest, most impressive buildings of the Roman Empire.

One of the largest things they ever built north of the Alps.

It might have been a wonder of the empire. It was certainly a wonder of

Roman Britain.

In London, Rome had created a provincial capital.

The capital of a single territory.

The very idea of Britannia that endured to this day.

What you've got here is the start of something quite new.

Whereas Iron Age Britain was based around local tribal power bases, the

had imposed a single unified political structure. Look at this. It's a tile and

it's stamped with the letters PPBRLON. So it's from London.

It's stamped by the authority of the procurator of the province of Britannia.

What you've got here is the very start of the idea of...

Britain as a separate country, a single unit if you like, and it all starts with

Rome.

For Rome though, Britannia was just one part of something even greater still,

the Roman Empire itself.

And just like today's cities, Roman towns were cultural melting pots.

not only between the people of Britain and Rome, but people from all its far

-flung provinces.

As far north as York, just a hundred miles or so from Hadrian's Wall itself,

inhabitants would still have felt very much part of an exotic international

world.

This was about as far from Rome as you could get, and yet still feel that we

were in a civilised city.

But even this far north, you would still have been bumping into people from all

corners of the empire.

People who were either from or had their origins in Germany, France, the Middle

East, even Africa.

Here, languages would have been heard from across the empire.

But there was a common tongue.

Latin.

What made Latin special was you couldn't just hear it, you could see it.

Latin brought writing to Britain for the very first time, and that was a massive

shift. It took us from the prehistoric world into a world of records, names and

dates.

The trouble is so little remains of Britain at this time.

Most of what we have are abbreviated memorial slabs and gateways and

and the like.

So it's very difficult to know what ordinary people in Britain were writing

about.

A rare collection of wax tablets is revealing unique insights into ordinary

in Roman Britain.

It's a most remarkable find for Roman Britain because until this material came

to light, we had nothing at all like this, either from this period or really

from the whole of the provincial era of Britain under the Roman Empire.

The tablets were discovered at Hadrian's Wall in 1973, but it's only now that

new imaging technology is able to decode them fully.

These are private letters, written around 100 AD and sent home from the

edge of empire.

I've got one tablet which mentions a price paid for a small quantity of

We have another example in which a writer refers to somebody who he's

trying to help as a man who is a lover of literary culture.

It's really quite a remarkable phrase to be using on the northern frontier of

Britain at this time.

These fragments reveal Britain on the cusp of a new age, the very beginnings

written history.

For Britain itself, of course, there were a large number in the pre -Roman

period of different tribal units and different small kingdoms and fiefdoms,

of course one of the things which the Roman presence did was to bring them all

under one political system, and that political system was run in Latin.

Latin language and widening literacy were yet more unifying forces across the

empire.

If you had the chance and you took the leap, Regardless of the heritage that

carried with you from birth, you could be Roman.

Even as far north as York, evidence can be found of the cultural mobility that

came with Rome.

The remains of a woman who died nearly 1 ,800 years ago.

This is the skull of a young woman.

When she died, she was around 22, 23 years old.

She was buried with fantastic wealth. This is just a few of the things that

alongside her in her grave.

This is a necklace made of blue glass beads.

The individual beads are so beautifully made.

Look at the way it allows the light through it.

Anyone who saw this, saw this woman wearing it, would have identified her as

someone of status, someone with access to real money.

But then the story takes a strange twist because alongside her in the grave were

bangles made of African elephant ivory with beautiful turned decoration

on it. Now, what on earth is an African ivory bangle doing in a grave

in York?

There are clues here in the skull itself.

First of all, she has a broad and quite flattened forehead, which suggests

someone of black African descent.

But when we look at her nose, her nose is typical of a white European.

So in the skull, we've got the suggestion of someone of mixed race.

And when her teeth were subjected to chemical analysis, it was found...

Possible, or even likely, that she grew up in North Africa, somewhere like Libya

or Tunisia.

Perhaps she's the wife or the daughter of a centurion posted to York.

She's this, to our eyes, exotic figure with this luxury jewellery, these luxury

items. And yet, in Roman York, when she walked around the streets, she wouldn't

have been so very unusual.

To be a Roman wasn't about where you were born, but about how you lived, how

dressed, how you spoke, the values you held.

There was a sense that within the Roman Empire, you could make your own way.

You weren't necessarily bound or handicapped by your ancestral class.

And whatever barriers Rome did put up, colour wasn't one of them.

But was it possible to be both Roman and British at the same time?

Or, 200 years after the invasion, did that distinction even matter anymore?

In Celtic Britain, tribal identity had always been central to who you were.

Now, under Rome, Who and what you were seemed to be becoming more of a choice

a matter of circumstance.

You could either act as a Roman or not.

You could either live an urban life or not.

And that's aside from class.

Whether you were wealthy and powerful, or a trader or craftsman, or at the

bottom, a slave, or even more grim than that, a slave slave.

Think of that.

Despite the growth of Roman towns, most of the population of Britain remained

rural.

But even out here, the influence of Rome was unmistakable.

The modern Roman ways weren't restricted to the townsfolk.

As a Roman citizen, you could own land with proper legal title, which meant

it could be bought, sold and inherited.

And in the South East, amongst the very rich, that was to lead to something

truly spectacular.

Rich agricultural estates surrounding big country houses.

The villas of southern England.

To our eyes, this is incredibly ordinary.

But it's as staggeringly modern as anything you would have seen in the

towns.

These buildings were built on top of the foundations of the original building

that stood here in the late Roman period, into the 300s.

And it's representative of a kind of architecture that had never been seen in

Britain before the Romans.

You have to remember that Iron Age houses in Britain were round, single

dwellings. They look ancient.

But this is a house.

You've got a rectangular floor plan.

You've got separate rooms inside.

There's even glass in the windows. This is the future.

Wait till you see what's inside.

No one knows who owned this villa and its surrounding estate, but we can be

they were rich and that they enjoyed a life of luxury.

If this was my villa, this would have been the floor of my private dining

It's luxurious and lavish in the extreme. It's a real show of status.

My guests would have been arranged around.

the outside of this mosaic floor, and it's covered in scenes of myth and Roman

legend.

My guests would have listened to the soft sounds of the water tinkling in the

fountain.

They'd have been drinking wine, celebrating the god Bacchus.

Their eyes were probably drawn to the depictions of topless lady dancers.

And maybe if it was a really special occasion I'd have laid on real topless

dancers, make it a real party.

But in any event, this was and is a spectacular place.

Now, as well as all the grandeur, this room affords us a glimpse of something

else. Because at some point, this part of the floor has collapsed, revealing...

the underfloor central heating system.

It's called a hypocaust, which means heat from below.

And you can see in this void where all the vents have been positioned to

circulate the hot air. And the heat actually comes from a purpose -built

on the other side of that wall. All the hot air is just pushed through, makes

the floor warm. So the whole interior is heated. Very cosy.

The big man, the owner of the estate...

would have sat at that end of the room in pride of place.

He would have greeted his guests and visitors from there.

And he would have been close by where that mosaic of Venus is.

And that is regarded as one of the very finest Roman mosaics anywhere in

Britain.

Any rich landowner would also have enjoyed a rich Roman diet.

an aspect of life studied by Sally Granger.

We've got coriander and cumin. Now, they are the dominant spices in curry today.

Yeah. We've got lovage.

Lovage. Very bitter.

If you use too much of it, you make appalling food.

We can then add some fish sauce. It's rather fundamental to Roman... Fish

Yeah. That's quintessential Roman cuisine. It is, it is.

Oh, that's so potent.

Yeah, that's strong, whatever it is. Yeah.

Lentils in wine.

Are lentils wrong?

They are.

They came to Britain in the first 20 years after the invasion. You find them

sale in London.

So compared to the way that native Britons would have approached food, how

of a surprise would all this messing about with spices have been? I think a

great surprise.

Because, certainly archaeologically, we have no evidence for use of spices in

Britain. I think what they were doing is roasting a lot of meat and drinking a

lot of beer and eating a lot of bread, but not actually developing a cuisine.

And I don't think it comes until the Romans.

The Romans wrote recipe books and created the first fine dining.

Fruits from cultivated orchards of apples and cherries.

New green vegetables.

Cabbages, leeks and peas, as well as exotic herbs.

Even modern staples like chicken begin with the Romans.

For rich Britain, it was a culinary revolution.

Now we're going to flavour our pears. And we're going to also add the fish

sauce. The fish sauce? Fish sauce.

Goodness, why?

Why ever do that? It's all going so well. Sounds wrong.

It works.

I can't believe you put that in there. That just... God!

It's like varnish.

There we go.

Oh!

Fairly crunchy on the outside there, but on the inside there, you can see it

looks pretty... At least it's definitely cooked.

Very tender.

It's falling off.

Mmm.

I must say, it's good.

I must hold my hands up and say I can't taste fish sauce in that. Of course you

can't. Somehow all of this, you know, the variety, the spices, the care,

seems almost more civilising than so many other things that Romans

are famous for.

There's something about all this fine food that would be so pleasing to

You'd think it would lead to the betterment of society.

You'd think, yeah.

The trouble is we don't know how many people are affected.

It's very difficult to tell.

City life and some of the big villas, yes.

And I think as British natives became more Romanised and consumed more of this

stuff, yes, it was great, it was wonderful.

But always for the people with wealth and leisure.

And a slave cook.

I can't do without one myself.

Rome might have transformed the lives of many people, but it didn't transform

everyone's, not by a long way.

Of the three to four million people living in Britain, only a tiny fraction

lived in towns, even fewer around villas.

For over 90 % of the population, for all Rome's apparent impact, life carried on

much as it always had done.

This is a living space up here, I think.

Up these steps.

They're very simple.

Massively built of stone, circular in shape, cellular in shape.

You look at it and you can think or assume that it was built and lived in

a thousand years BC, during the Bronze Age, because the whole site resonates

with... Everything you think of when you think about ancient Britain.

In fact, this village was built right in the middle of the Roman period.

In 200 AD, these very ancient -looking houses were brand new.

Away from the Roman centres, away from the towns and the forts,

you would have had so much more choice about just how Roman you actually wanted

to be.

And so a village like Chisoster would be left behind as a kind of relic

of ancient Britishness, a kind of passive resistance, if you like, to the

centralised authority of the Roman Empire.

For many Iron Age Britons, Ancient Celtic identity was even more important

death than in life.

This is the skeleton of a man who was around 1920

-21 at the time of death.

He was buried in a very particular way.

He was buried in a crouched position.

with the knees drawn up to the chest, like a baby in the womb.

A Roman in death would have been laid out lying flat and furthermore would

been buried far away from any settlement in a dedicated cemetery.

It's fascinating to speculate that while in life this young man might have taken

on certain aspects of Rome, He was using the same tableware. He might have worn

a pin or a pendant, ate the Roman ways, but in death he showed his true colours

in his heart and in the heart of the people who put him in the ground. He was

Roman. He was a Briton.

have established Britannia as a single entity.

But behind the administration, this was a diverse, even fractured land.

The urban hordes and their mass entertainments, the village elite and

luxuries, the serfs and slaves who worked for them, and the lives of the

countless thousands of self -sufficient farmers.

And that's just counting the part of Britain that was actually under Roman

control.

We're talking about the territories that would one day be called England and

Wales. Because up here in Northumberland, beyond the edge of

an awful lot of Britain that the Romans never did control.

Ever since 136 AD, a defensive wall had stretched like a ribbon from coast to

coast. from Carlisle to Newcastle, guarded by 40 ,000 Roman soldiers.

This wall marked more than the limit of empire.

For Rome, it was the very edge of civilization itself.

Far beyond the wall, the Scottish Highlands still remained under the

Celtic Iron Age tribes.

Pictish peoples who were as fiercely resistant to Roman rule as they'd ever

been.

And at the National Museum of Scotland there's a relic of a proud and fiercely

independent Britain.

This fragment is the earliest, the oldest piece of tartan cloth ever found.

And for us in the modern world, it's also a potent symbol of Scottishness.

The people who made this, used this, wore this, had their own

culture, customs and traditions.

It wasn't by choice that Rome had drawn a line across Britain.

It had tried to conquer Caledonia a number of times.

But the Picts had repelled them again and again.

The name Picts means painted people.

And when it came to battle, the warriors were in the habit of stripping off

naked to reveal these tattoos or painted designs on their skin.

They believed that the gods would look down upon them, see the designs, and

confer their protection upon them.

The Picts generally avoided engaging the Roman army in set -piece battles,

preferring instead to employ guerrilla tactics, striking fast and then

disappearing into the forbidding landscape of mountains and forests.

And you can easily see, in terrain like this, Even a small group of lightly

armed men who understood this landscape could use it to turn it to their

advantage so that they could harass and even severely damage a much larger

force.

In the end, for the Romans, it simply wasn't worth the effort and the tribal

lands of Scotland always remained unconquered.

Even in the 2nd and the 3rd century AD, here in the north, the customs... The

tradition is the lifestyle of ancient Iron Age Britain continued stubbornly

beyond the reach of empire.

Rome still needed to make sure the Picts couldn't cause any trouble further

south though.

And back in Edinburgh, there's evidence of how they managed the slightly

friendlier tribes of southern Scotland and Northumberland.

Look at this.

It's a tiny part of a huge hoard of Roman silver that dates from around 400

The whole hoard, the whole collection, would fill several museum cases.

It's thought that all this was a massive bribe from the Romans to a local tribe

called the Votadini.

You can see how it's been crudely cut up with shears of some kind.

Experts believe that before the Romans handed the silver over, they themselves

cut it up so that it was only going across a scrap silver.

Now, the Romans weren't bribing the Votadini because they had trouble with

Rather, they were determined to keep that tribe on side.

Because with the Votadini inside the tent, as it were, the Romans were free

concentrate their attentions on the tribes, the people.

Further north in Scotland, people considered potentially more dangerous.

It's about undermining inter -tribal allegiances. This is classic divide and

conquer.

Much of the success of Rome was down to the number of levels on which it

operated.

At first, military might could crush you.

And then a finely tuned administration would control you.

The trappings of Roman civilization could seduce you and turn you Roman

yourself.

And if all that failed, well, the empire could simply exclude you.

When Rome came, it changed your land.

It changed your entire way of life.

But the Romans were used to dealing with culture clash.

After all, they'd been doing it all across Europe, in parts of Africa and in

Middle East.

But they were also pathmasters at dealing with something much more

Religion and the clash of beliefs.

Rome might have transformed the land of Britain and the lives of many of its

people.

But religion was something else altogether.

Ancient and heartfelt Celtic traditions and beliefs.

Every tribe might have had its own set of gods controlling a specific part of

the countryside.

Their hills, their woods, their rivers.

And then between the individual tribes were the Druids, the great priesthood of

the Celtic world, trying to make sense of it all.

The Romans worshipped very different gods.

Jupiter and Mars.

Apollo, god of the sun.

And Saturn, god of time.

Powerful supernatural beings that held sway over the mortal world.

The Romans had imposed all sorts of ideas on Britain.

Would they impose their gods on the people as well?

The city of Bath offers clues to how the Romans dealt with the most sensitive

cultural invasion of all.

Because it was here that a spring producing a magical flow of hot water

sacred, venerated by the Britons.

As far as we can tell, the ancient Britons believed that this spring was

domain of a goddess called Sulla.

And she was all about wisdom.

and healing and insight, and she had to be appeased with gifts and offerings.

When the Romans conquered Britain, they were presented with a choice.

Either they could leave the local gods and goddesses alone, or they could seek

to obliterate goddesses like Sulith and replace them with their own Roman

deities.

The Romans found a pragmatic solution.

Often they chose one of their own Roman gods who seemed similar to the local

British god and combined the two.

This is a depiction of the Roman goddess Minerva.

What's happening here is something very interesting.

It's really about the union of two goddesses, one British and one Roman.

The Roman goddess Minerva here is all about healing and about wisdom,

particularly military wisdom.

And that made her the perfect partner for the British goddess Sulis, who was

responsible for a lot of the same areas of business.

So what you've got here is a combination.

And when it came to naming the goddess of the spring here in Bath, they called

her Sulis Minerva.

This combined deity inhabited the sacred spring and continued to attract

acolytes who communicated with the goddess Sulith Minerva through

lead tablets that give a rare insight into their beliefs.

Classicist Roger Tomlin has been studying them for 25 years.

Exactly what are these, Roger?

Well, in very crude terms, they're called curses.

They're a specialised sort of curse. They're really letters written to the

goddess asking for ill health or misfortune to people who've done someone

This one is this woman, Basilia, who's lost her silver ring, tells the goddess,

I've lost my silver ring.

Curse the thief who did it. The thief should lose his eyes. He should have his

intestines utterly eaten out. This is a wonderful exotic phrase.

Intestinis excommasis, his intestines utterly eaten out, and so on. Just for

theft of a ring. Yes, just for the theft of a ring. You can't be exactly certain

the ring's going to come back. You tend to overreact, I think. If you were

certain the ring was going to come back, you might say, well, I'll give him

dinner afterwards.

There's always an element of uncertainty whether the God is actually going to

react. So people come up with this horrific language. Also, it's a bit like

letting blood.

It reduces the pressure a bit.

Right. OK.

This one is written backwards in a rather peculiar way.

Each word is written backwards, but the whole text isn't written backwards.

It makes it a devil to read, because you never know where the word is ending.

And what's the logic?

I suppose it's to encrypt the text, to make it personal between you and the

goddess. No one else can read it. That's, again, why you fold these things

you throw them into water, you put them into graves.

They turn up in all sorts of places, particularly in this hot spring.

It doesn't really sound like religion.

It does make more of an appeal to the authorities.

It's almost like a...

trying to sue someone or seek legal redress rather than something to do with

faith. I think there's a strong element to this legalism. I mean, the Roman

world is somewhat under -policed, and if earthly authorities can't work, you

appeal to a heavenly authority instead, and using the language you might well

use in addressing your patron.

Those healing pools...

And the temple to the combined gods of Sulith and Minerva are a good

illustration of how to handle a clash between religions.

And the twinning of gods would be tried again and again all across Roman

Britain. But that cosy religious relationship that had served the Roman

so well was about to be seriously disrupted.

In the first century AD, far away in the Middle East, a new religious cult had

started spreading that many Romans found absurd.

Because this religion demanded faith to just one god.

A Christian god.

Look at this dazzling collection.

All of these spectacular items.

The finest early Christian.

artifacts found anywhere in the empire all come from Britain

look at this magnificent glorious

silver cup, silver vessel it's quite possible that it was made and used

for the quintessential Christian act, that of turning wine into the blood of

Christ and if that's what this was for then it's the earliest such vessel found

anywhere in the world

But as Christianity expanded, it was outlawed, and its followers had to

in secret.

Look at this piece.

The symbol here is called the Chi Rho.

It was like a secret sign that let early Christians recognize one another.

Chi and Rho are the first two letters of Christ's name.

Also within the symbol are the letters Alpha and Omega.

showing that the person who used this or made this believed also that Christ was

all -powerful from first to last.

Part of its popularity was the central tenet that anyone who believed in Christ

would never die, would have everlasting life, even slaves.

And that was a truly subversive thought.

Despite the threat of persecution, there was no stopping such an enticing

message.

Nevertheless, it wasn't until AD 313 that Christianity was finally legalised.

The Roman Emperor Constantine was sympathetic to Christianity.

And then there came a day when his army secured a key victory.

And while doing so, they had carried at their head a cross, a Christian cross,

as a symbol to bring them good fortune.

From that moment...

Constantine decreed that Christianity would be tolerated throughout the Roman

Empire.

It was actually another political move.

With Christianity within the fold, a religious hierarchy could be

controlled by the state.

Look at this ring. Like the plaque here, it has on it the Cairo symbol.

Whoever wore this was obviously a Christian, a believer.

may even have been a bishop in the country while Christianity was

Beautiful.

Christianity continued to flourish, and in AD 391, it was the old pagan

religions that were banned.

The ancient spring of Sulith Minerva was abandoned, left to become filthied up

and to overflow.

its temples left to collapse.

It was the end of yet another ancient prehistoric tradition.

Tens of thousands of years ago, the first nomadic hunters came to Britain.

Ever since, the people and the land they inhabited had been entwined.

Mountains holding up the sky.

The seas that made our land an island.

And the sacred springs and rivers that were so central to ancient religious

beliefs.

all had shaped our history.

But with Rome, and the modern world it brought, a new world had been forged.

Not of nature's making, but of man's.

The rule of Rome couldn't and didn't last forever.

By 410 AD, The empire was collapsing and the Roman rule of Britain was at an

end. The cities decayed and people in many ways returned to the rural lives of

the past.

But some of the ideas that had emerged under Rome couldn't be undone.

Christianity, writing, the very idea of Britannia, ideas that are still very

much alive with us today.

When the Romans arrived, We didn't just start a new chapter.

We started a whole new story.

One that would be written down in the history of our land.

And when people look back 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 years from now, perhaps they'll see

the beginning of our world in that sudden break with prehistory, in the

of Rome.

And here we are.

occupying this fleeting moment of time with our hopes and fears, pasts and

futures, living our lives, just one more generation in a story that continues,

the story of Britain and her peoples.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, then go to the

bbc .co .uk to find out how to connect with ancient Britons in your area.