Huddersfield in Roman Times
By Ian A. Richmond

WHY THE ROMANS OCCUPIED YORKSHIRE

From the dawn of history Europe has feared invasion from the great plains of Asia, and folk-wanderings beyond the Urals have impelled wave after wave of fierce peoples to seek out and to terrorise the West. But when chance brought down great hordes of northern barbarians upon Italy at the close of the second century B.C., it set in motion events which freed the Western and Mediterranean world from wholesale invasions of this kind during the next five hundred years. To achieve this freedom, moreover, was then something unique. There is no evidence to suggest that it ever had been attempted before, and since the Roman Empire fell it has not been effected upon so large a scale. Thus to Roman statesmen and to the Empire which they founded the modern world owes a great debt. During four hundred years of peace Greek and Roman civilization, upon which is based much that is best in our modern world, gained time to develop and to become deeply-rooted tradition which has never ceased to animate and to invigorate succeeding generations. The great difference which it wrought may be appreciated by studying the handbooks which precede and succeed this volume.

It was Julius Caesar who took the first active steps in this great barring out of wandering and uncivilised folk. Before this time expansion north of Italy had been slow, and its extent had been limited to land south of the Alps and to the southern coast of France, then known as Gallia. In 59 B.C. Caesar received the governorship of northern Italy, southern France and the Dalmatian coast, and when his province was threatened by invaders from the upper Rhine he did not hesitate to strike at the root of the danger. In eight years he had done what indeed seemed impossible. Rome’s northern frontier rested upon the Ocean and the Rhine; all Gallia was conquered, and the conquest had stood the test of a rebellion led by Vercingetorix. Time even had been found for exploring southern Britain twice. At Rome Caesar celebrated with magnificence and amid great rejoicing a victor’s triumphal entry, recorded upon a coin now in the Museum. Immediate danger to Italy from the north-west was in a way to being removed at last. “Now let the Alps sink into the earth; their work is done,” commented the great orator, Cicero, who realised the importance of Caesar’s work.

Civil war and the re-organisation of the Roman world by Caesar Augustus delayed further expansion in the west for nearly thirty years. Then large annexations took place in the direction of the Danube, which made Italy safe in the north-east. Meanwhile Rome had to abandon as a northern policy the construction of a Germanic Province between the Rhine and the Elbe, partly for economic and partly for strategic reasons; racial distinctions also made the demarcation of a frontier from the Rhine to the Danube an easier project. But Caesar had noted with his usual acumen that the same facts did not apply to Britain. From northern Gaul, where Roman civilisation did not take root quickly, malcontents could look out on to a free world, inhabited in the south at least by kindred people. Such a possibility was a dangerous incentive to rebellion for those who were new to Roman government and dissatisfied with its methods. An occupation of Britain, therefore, was the logical conclusion of Caesar’s work, so clear that twenty-five years after his death, the poets Horace and Virgil anticipated its fulfillment in verse. And less cautious Emperor’s than Augustus and Tiberius would have undertaken an expedition which might have stirred discontented Gauls into revolt behind them.

Dangers of this kind, however, had ceased to threaten by A.D. 43, when the Emperor Claudius, a saner man than some historians have represented him to be, undertook in person the invasion of the island. The way was partly prepared, for the occupation of Gaul and Caesar’s expedition to Britain had brought Rome’s political influence and her attractive civilisation further northwards than ever before. Already cross-channel traffic was bringing in a considerable revenue to the custom-houses of Gallic ports, and more than a negligible amount of Latin Language and civilisation was known in south-eastern Britain. Political influence had created pro-Roman and anti-Roman parties within the native tribes and the restoration of a pro Roman chief among the Trinovantes, whose principal town, Camulodunum, lay in and around Colchester, formed an excuse for the Roman occupation.

The south of England and the Midlands were swiftly conquered and over-run with merchants. But it was more difficult to pass beyond the Severn, the Dee and the Humber. The hills were full of powerful tribes, which were either afraid of being conquered or ever ready to plunder the more civilised folk in the plains. Obviously such peoples could not be neglected, and it was clear that somehow they would have to be isolated and surrounded. Yet it was risky to undertake campaigns in such difficult country before the plains had been thoroughly pacified. For example, in A.D. 61 Suetonius Paulinus, the governor, struck at the Druids in Anglesey, but had to return in haste in order to quell a desperate rebellion. Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, chose this opportunity for avenging both insults to herself and the distress which Seneca, chief adviser to the Emperor Nero, had caused in certain British cantons by calling in much money which he had advanced to them in order that they might pay their taxes promptly. Before Paulinus could collect his armies to crush the rebels over seventy thousand Romans and friendly natives had perished amid unexampled atrocities. Such reasons as this kept the legions at Lincoln and at Chester from advancing into the hills before A.D. 71-74, when Petilius Cerialis was governor of the province. At this time begins the story of the Huddersfield district under Roman rule.

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