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00:00Today we take for granted the motorways, A-roads and city streets, over 2,000 miles of them that form the skeleton road map of Britain, and all because of the Romans, with their ingenuity and dogged determination to conquer everything in their path.
00:22I'm Dan Jones and I'm going to retrace the story of our Roman past along six of their most iconic roads.
00:30Each road tells the story of our Roman legacy and its rich history, from their very first road across Kent, which powered their invasion, to the vital routes which helped them conquer most of Britain, before being beaten into retreat by the Scots.
00:47In nearly 400 years of occupation, the Romans changed Britain forever by bringing their armies, ideas, buildings and religion.
00:57But the Romans couldn't have done any of it without one thing, their roads.
01:02This week, I'm exploring Ermine Street, the Roman Stratus Road, which runs north from their capital in London to what became their second city in Britain, York, founded in around 100 AD.
01:26Most of Ermine Street is still in use today, though we know it better as the A1.
01:33This is Bishopsgate, right in the heart of the city of London, and it's the start of Ermine Street proper.
01:44Now, about 200 miles in that direction is the city of York, and that's where I'm headed.
01:51The Romans used their roads to transport their armies, and their culture and ideas.
01:57A journey along Ermine Street reveals a fascinating insight into Britain's religious past.
02:03When the Romans arrived in 43 AD, our ancestors, the native Britons, were mostly pagans, who believed in numerous deities.
02:12But during 350 years of occupation, we inherited a few Roman gods and beliefs, before eventually becoming a Christian country.
02:21Right at the start of Ermine Street is an important Roman religious site I want to see, but I'll have to go down a few stories to reach it.
02:31It's a remarkable temple called Amithraeum, and in its day, it was at the centre of a mysterious empire-wide cult.
02:41Just a few metres above my head is the hustle and bustle of the middle of the city of London,
02:47which pretty much any time of day is full of people, you know, rushing about their business.
02:52And then you come down a couple of flights of stairs and here you are, not only in the sort of peace and tranquillity and silence of this room,
03:00but also in a way transported back, you know, 1700, 1800 years to Roman Britain.
03:09I've been granted very special permission by archaeologist Sophie Jackson to walk on the floor of the temple.
03:16Right, Sophie, I know this is a Mithraeum, but what is a Mithraeum?
03:22Yeah, that's a good question. It's the temple, it's the space of worship associated with a cult of Mithras.
03:29So who was Mithras?
03:30Another good question. Mithras is a Roman deity who appears in the Roman world in the first century AD.
03:37By appears I mean people start worshipping him.
03:40We're standing in what we could call the nave.
03:43This is the sort of central part of the structure and it's where rituals would have happened, initiation ceremonies.
03:49This is where the sort of business happens.
03:51And we're actually at the moment right at the business end.
03:53This is the dais and here you'd have had a cult statue of the god Mithras.
03:59The sort of common image in almost all of these temples to Mithras.
04:04And it's Mithras killing a bull often shown within a cave or within a cave-like space.
04:09So these are the steps here going up to the altar where the parter or leader, the father of the cult,
04:16probably would have sort of coordinated the service, the rituals going on.
04:20It sounds a bit like Freemasonry and there's definitely an element of the sort of networking and male bonding going on as well as the spirituality which was definitely a very major part of it.
04:31This reconstruction shows what it could have looked like, the space lined with columns and with the image of Mithras himself presiding over the temple.
04:41Historians believe Mithras was based on an old Persian god, Mithra.
04:46Depictions of him differ but he's always young, strong and killing a mighty bull.
04:51Various animals are usually shown sort of feasting on the blood coming from the bull.
04:56And it's thought that this all means it's about fertility, it's about the creation of life.
05:01And sometimes we get astrological signs of the zodiac associated with it as well.
05:08So it's about our place in the cosmos. So it's a sort of creation myth, fertility myth.
05:13So was Mithraism just in Roman Britain or was it something that happened across the empire?
05:18No, not at all. It definitely spread throughout the empire.
05:21The first sort of evidence we have is in eastern Turkey and coming into Rome.
05:27But then it gradually spreads over the sort of first and second centuries into the rest of the empire.
05:32And it's a cult that's very popular with the army, with merchants and civil servants.
05:39Basically men who are operating across the empire.
05:43And it probably serves two functions really. It's a very good networking institution.
05:49It's a way you can be posted from North Africa to Britain and find something familiar.
05:54And people who you might even know or have connections with.
05:58So that's kind of an interesting image isn't it?
06:00We have the army which in its first wave comes to somewhere like Britain and Conquers.
06:03Then it builds these roads to connect the empire up and then it brings its kind of religious cults along with it.
06:09Yeah, to support it and to make people feel comfortable probably in this alien world.
06:15Wow.
06:16The Mithraeum was built around 1700 years ago, but fell into ruin and was buried when the Romans left our land in the 5th century AD.
06:25It was uncovered in 1954 when an office block was built near Cannon Street, though it's been moved to a new site in recent years.
06:34I don't think I was prepared for just how kind of quite moving this is.
06:44And there's something you can feel of the spirit of what must have happened here.
06:47The place that was alive with people worshipping, socialising together within what remains of these walls.
06:56It's a really strange feeling to be here.
07:02You know, we normally think about armies as this great destructive force.
07:06But in a way the legions who came here in the 1st century AD, well, they were the opposite.
07:12Everywhere they went they built things. They were quite literally empire builders.
07:18As the Romans expanded their empire north of Londinium, in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, they carried their cultures and beliefs with them.
07:28And as I continue my journey up Ermine Street, I'll explore more of their religious sites.
07:33And discover the secrets of these extraordinary landmarks.
07:38As it leaves London, Ermine Street travels through busy urban districts like Tottenham and Edmonton,
07:56and then leaves the metropolis far behind.
07:59It runs on into Cambridgeshire, where the terrain smooths out for agricultural use and flat Fenlands.
08:07Today the road may be overshadowed by the modern world, but from time to time we still see clues as to how our ancestors lived their religious lives.
08:16Especially during the time of the Roman conquest in the 1st century AD.
08:22If you really want to understand the Romans, you've got to go back a little bit further in time
08:27and look at the people who were here in Britain when the Romans arrived.
08:31Now, just down the road from where I'm standing, the native British tribes were busy with their own extraordinary creations.
08:42Twelve miles south of Cambridge and ten miles east of Ermine Street, close to the modern border with Essex,
08:48stand the Bartlow Hills, a group of colossal earth mounds.
08:52They're not hills at all, they're man-made burial mounds.
08:56It seems the native Britons may have had a fascinating attitude towards death and the afterlife,
09:02which continued after the Romans arrived.
09:04Historian and author Simon Elliott knows some of their secrets.
09:09This is an astonishing place, a place of true power.
09:12So you have here seven tumuli, seven barrow burials, and it's a way of showing how important they were.
09:18So effectively what you do is you have a flat piece of earth, you dig a hole in the earth,
09:23you put the burial in there with the grave goods including Samian ware, you cover it over with earth,
09:27but then you build these huge, huge barrows on top to show how important the people here were.
09:33These tumuli were constructed in the early part of the second century AD,
09:39around 60 years after the major Roman invasion.
09:42A truly mammoth project, but it's not just their size that's important.
09:47What do the finds made here tell us?
09:50The archaeological record here is fascinating.
09:53It tells us the status of the people in the actual burial itself
09:57is reflected by the grave goods more than the burial itself.
10:00Now here we have some really fine grave goods.
10:03We have glass, which is very expensive in the pre-modern era.
10:06Samian ware, really fine pottery from Gaul, really fine tableware.
10:10Jewelry and things like that, which show that the people who were buried here
10:14were at the top of society.
10:16They were elite aristocrats.
10:18Probably, given where we are in Cambridgeshire, for the Catevolone tribe.
10:22So this is the tribe, pre-Roman sort of native tribe,
10:25that broadly lived from around here through towards Hertfordshire,
10:28so to the north of London.
10:30But it doesn't tell us who they are, and it doesn't tell us who they worshipped.
10:36The religion of the native Britons is usually called paganism,
10:40but that doesn't translate into a set creed.
10:43They tended to worship forces of nature and the spirits of their ancestors.
10:47So we can say the Britons were polytheists, because they had numerous gods.
10:52Most barrow burials, let's say they're Bronze Age, pre-Roman, late Iron Age,
10:58all of them are smaller than this.
11:00So you just have this clash of cultures suddenly appearing here,
11:02where on the one hand you have the late Iron Age barrow burial
11:05for the family who lived here, but these are of a scale which is monumental.
11:10And the people who built things in a monumental fashion were the Romans.
11:15If you look all across the Roman Empire, the Romans were very tolerant of local religions,
11:20providing, of course, the people living here were willing to worship the Roman Emperor
11:24with the imperial cult.
11:26Perhaps the aristocratic Britons who built the Bartlow Hills around 100 AD
11:31were so inspired by the Romans who ruled their lives
11:34that they made these tumuli bigger than usual, but we'll never know.
11:38What we do know is that, like the Britons, the Romans were polytheists
11:43and created burial sites in a grand style, like the tomb of the Emperor Augustus.
11:48Reverence for the dead was a hugely important part of Roman thinking.
11:52Back in Italy, their tombs were the statement pieces of rich nobles
11:56and lined important streets, like the Street of the Tombs in Pompeii.
12:01There are no tombs along Ermine Street, but 30 miles north of the Bartlow Hills,
12:10I reached the town of St Ives.
12:13The museum holds a fascinating hoard that tells us something
12:17about the Roman outlook towards burials in Britain,
12:20a box of infant bones that was found in 1905.
12:24And there are the bones.
12:28There are possibly even two infants here in the bag.
12:32I mean, you can see the size of the bones.
12:34The child probably, or the children, are probably nine months old.
12:38Right. And where were they found?
12:40Well, they found inside a Roman town, and that poses clearly problems
12:43because the convention was that you didn't bury inside towns
12:47to protect the water supply.
12:49I see.
12:50Because if you've got cemeteries inside towns, you're going to get polluted water.
12:53Of course.
12:54The exception, of course, are children.
12:56Right.
12:57So adults would have been outside the walls of the town.
13:00Children are an exception.
13:01And in fact, in the Roman world, children aren't really...
13:04It's difficult to explain what the concept was.
13:06They weren't considered to be members of society
13:09until they were perhaps two or three years old.
13:12Sometimes, if you were the child of a slave, for example,
13:16and slaves are pretty dominant in Roman Britain, the Roman Empire generally,
13:20you would have been owned not by your mum or your parents,
13:24but by your mum's owner, the slave owner.
13:27So if the child weren't considered worth bringing up,
13:30they would have been left out and exposed.
13:32That's terrible.
13:33And then interred.
13:34And then interred.
13:35Or...
13:36You know, that's the sort of concept you've got to think about, really.
13:39The fact these bones were jumbled up together
13:42suggests they may have been dumped on a Roman rubbish tip,
13:45too small to be a health hazard
13:47and not important enough to warrant a religious burial.
13:50It's strange, isn't it, because we often think about the Romans
13:54as these very sophisticated and, in some ways, admirable people,
13:57but their views on children are very different to my own.
14:01Yeah, pretty harsh, actually, sometimes.
14:03Shall I put them back as we found them?
14:06Yeah, please do.
14:07As carefully as I can.
14:09The bones were found a few miles further west, in Godmanchester,
14:16and they weren't the only historic discovery there.
14:19So this is my next stopping point.
14:24This is where Ermine Street crosses the Great Ouse,
14:27as well as another Roman road running down
14:29to the important legionary fort at Colchester,
14:32which is off in that direction,
14:34and you can tell the locals are quite proud of their Roman heritage.
14:38There's even a legionary on the town sign.
14:41The Romans called this place Duro Govatum.
14:44It was the site of a fort they built to quell local unrest,
14:48housing around 750 troops.
14:51Over the last 2,000 years,
14:53that small settlement has grown into a town of nearly 8,000 people.
14:59This pattern of development was repeated over and over again
15:02across the country.
15:03In the first century AD, the army built a fort here
15:06to control the strategic crossroads.
15:09Civilians settled around the fort,
15:11creating an informal town known as a Vicus.
15:15The disorganised Vicus settlement gradually evolved
15:18into something more formal.
15:20The fort was built around 45 AD,
15:23and within 20 years,
15:24when the local tribes were fully under Roman control,
15:27the troops were needed further north.
15:30As the fort was no longer required,
15:32a new building went up here that filled a new peacetime need,
15:36a way to aid communication along Ermin Street.
15:39Professor Steven Upex wants to show me a reconstruction of it
15:43on display in the local church,
15:45and it's made of a rather unique building material.
15:48Well, this has really taken me back to my childhood, actually.
15:50Look at this.
15:51All this Lego.
15:52It's, um...
15:53Fantastic, isn't it?
15:54But I don't think I ever built anything quite as fancy as this.
15:56Nice.
15:57What is it?
15:58It's the Mancio.
15:59A Mancio?
16:00And a Mancio is an inn along the Roman road.
16:04It all goes back to the Roman state,
16:07because they had what was called the Post Publicus,
16:10which is the Roman postal system.
16:12So if you were the governor in London,
16:14and you wanted to get a message to York, for example,
16:19you would write your message on a wax tablet,
16:21you would give it to a dispatch rider
16:23who would put it in his panniers,
16:25get on a horse, and gallop up the road.
16:27Gallop of Ermin Street.
16:28Mm-hmm.
16:29And when the horse became tired,
16:30they'd need a change of horse.
16:32And so how far can you gallop a horse before it gets tired?
16:35Well, they're roughly every 20 miles along the road,
16:38because they're based on the former military fort system
16:42that was here.
16:43That's where the embryonic Mancios would have started.
16:46So when you arrive, what do you need?
16:48You need a change of horse.
16:50You might need a meal,
16:51so there are kitchens over that side.
16:54You might need a bath, and you need a bed for the night.
16:57And were these open to anyone?
16:59I mean, could you just wander in?
17:00No, I think it's state officials,
17:03and those sort of people concerned
17:05with the organisation of the province itself.
17:08I don't think, as a member of public,
17:10you could just wander in and have a bed for the night.
17:12It's not like a hotel.
17:13Right.
17:14They're state-organised systems.
17:15Were these unique to Ermin Street,
17:17or could you find these all over Roman Britain?
17:19Not just over Roman Britain.
17:21Across the Empire.
17:22Everywhere you looked,
17:23there were these sorts of structures
17:25where you could simply jump along the road,
17:28taking your post or whatever else.
17:31Yeah, everywhere across the Empire.
17:33So things haven't really changed.
17:35I mean, if you're going on a long drive up the motorway,
17:37you've still got to stop and fill your car up
17:39and have something to eat and go to the loo and whatever.
17:41This is just the Roman equivalent?
17:42It's the Roman motorway service station equivalent.
17:45Yeah.
17:46Mancios were a key component of the way in which the Romans governed their world
17:52and ran their roads.
17:54Wherever the Romans went,
17:56their religious beliefs were never far away.
17:58In this god Manchester garden,
18:00there's a stretch of the original Ermin Street
18:03and evidence of a roadside worship stop.
18:08Right, Dan, here you are.
18:09Wow.
18:10So what's this?
18:11This is Ermin Street.
18:12This is the surfacing of Ermin Street itself,
18:15the great Roman road.
18:16This here?
18:17This...
18:18From here,
18:19right up to where the wall is over that side
18:21is the width of Ermin Street.
18:22I don't think I've ever seen anyone with a Roman road in their garden.
18:25No, that's one of the few sections of Ermin Street
18:27that I can remember being exposed and is still exposed, yeah.
18:32Well, over on the edge of the road,
18:34just here, there's a road ditch.
18:36You can find road ditches on the side of all Roman roads.
18:38And then you've got a building,
18:40because we're inside the town, Dan, here.
18:41Right.
18:42We've got a building there
18:43with the walling coming up and a large pier look there.
18:46And there were lots of finds on that side
18:48which suggested that you'd have come through a gateway
18:50and gone into a temple compound,
18:53a little shrine on that side within the town itself.
18:56So we're on the edge of the road here.
18:58We can imagine that just in front of us there's a Roman temple.
19:01Yeah, you'd have come off the road,
19:03gone through the gateway,
19:04and the temple would have been over there.
19:06The owner of this god Manchester garden discovered the road in the 1970s while digging.
19:13He called in archaeologist Michael Green to help to uncover a section of Ermin Street.
19:21These look like very deep foundations for a road.
19:25Well, you have to remember, Dan, there are 400 years of accumulated surfaces across the road itself.
19:32It's built up like an enormous layered cake, if you like.
19:35I think there are six major resurfacings.
19:38Right at the very bottom of the road is the Hadrianic layer.
19:43I mean, literally, the great and the good have walked along this very point.
19:46Roman emperors have walked right through this rather lovely little garden.
19:50So you've got people like Hadrian coming to Britain in probably 121,
19:54goes up north to Hadrian's wall, 122, because he organises the wall.
19:58He would have almost certainly, he wouldn't have walked along here.
20:01He would have been carried or come in a cart or a litter of some sort.
20:05You've got a guy called Constantius, father of Constantine,
20:09and he goes up to York in, what, 305?
20:12He dies the following July in 306.
20:15And Constantine, Constantine the Great, becomes the emperor.
20:19And he's one of the greats, actually,
20:20because he introduces or makes credible Christianity in Roman Britain.
20:25So all of these great Roman emperors from age after age of the empire
20:29have quite possibly walked up this road.
20:31Yeah, literally walked right the way along.
20:33It's incredible to find such a remarkable piece of history in someone's back garden.
20:38And to find out that early in its existence,
20:41this part of Ermine Street offered an informal collection of places to eat, sleep and pray.
20:46What more could a Roman need?
20:48By the third century, this higgledy-piggledy arrangement
20:51was formalised into a proper Roman town.
20:54They had a basilica to house government offices,
20:57a temple for worship and even a town bathhouse.
21:01As towns like Godmanchester sprang up in southern Britain,
21:05the Romans settled this part of the country quickly.
21:08And a few miles further north on Ermine Street,
21:11I'm about to discover they weren't just imposing their will on the locals,
21:15they were adopting some of the native beliefs.
21:18I'm travelling the Roman roads of Britain,
21:31and as I follow Ermine Street north from London,
21:34I've travelled around 100 miles into Lincolnshire.
21:37The Romans paved this route all the way to York,
21:40making one of the straightest roads they ever built,
21:43and shared their religious beliefs with our native tribes.
21:47Like many of Britain's Roman roads,
21:50Ermine Street has been adapted over the passing centuries,
21:53and it's now part of our modern road system.
21:56Thousands of us still use it daily,
21:58because it's the Great North Road,
22:00or to give it its official title, the A1.
22:06I don't think walking along the A1's can be that much fun,
22:08so I think I'll take the car.
22:17Pretty soon, I'm on an arrow-straight stretch of B Road,
22:21that follows Ermine Street to a Lincolnshire town called Ancaster.
22:26There's no town sign with legionaries here,
22:29but I know Ancaster was once a Roman settlement,
22:32simply because of its name.
22:34The word Casta comes from the Latin word for an army camp.
22:38Ancaster was once a Roman military base.
22:41But it's not just the name that identifies Ancaster as a Roman settlement.
22:45Local expert Richard Tindall is keen to show me a replica
22:47of a Roman religious artefact that ended up buried here.
22:52So this is a really curious thing. What is it?
23:02It is. It was found in the graveyard just behind it, in 1831.
23:07And it's a representation of the Dea Matres, or the Mother Godel,
23:13which was a religion or cult across Northern Europe in the Iron Age,
23:20prior to the Roman period.
23:22It was then adopted by the Romans and imported, we believe,
23:25into Britain with the Roman soldiers,
23:28perhaps with the Federati, the native troops
23:32that were hired from along the borders of the Roman Empire.
23:35This isn't the original. This is a replica.
23:37That's right. The original is in the collection in Lincoln.
23:40So this is a reproduction. Yeah.
23:43Something's missing, though. Where's that middle head?
23:46We don't know. It was found as part of a temple
23:50or a shrine complex just in the corner of the graveyard here,
23:54back in the 1830s, and it was found without its head.
23:57They never found that. It was found whilst grave digging,
24:00so the chances are that it's still somewhere underneath there.
24:03It just wasn't picked up.
24:05But it's basically the three-seated figures,
24:09although you can't see very clearly on this now.
24:12They would have on their laps, they'd have sheaves of corn,
24:15they'd have fruit, they'd have baskets of foodstuffs,
24:20and those are there, they're personifying
24:24sort of the natural world around us.
24:26The triple goddess dates back many thousands of years,
24:30at least to the 3rd century BC and the ancient Egyptians.
24:34She appears in mythology all over Europe
24:36and usually represents three stages of womanhood,
24:39the maiden, the mother and the old crone,
24:42and also the three phases of the moon, waxing, full and waning.
24:47The Romans were quite good at borrowing gods and goddesses, weren't they?
24:52Yes, we have other examples locally here.
24:54So there was a god completely unknown
24:57from anywhere else in the Roman Empire called Viridius.
25:00We only know it from Ancaster, from a couple of inscriptions,
25:05which were found in stones that were reused in Roman graves.
25:09It's really interesting, isn't it, how you have this Roman Empire
25:12where there's kind of pick-and-mix approach to gods.
25:14You know, you can have all sorts of different gods
25:17commingling with one another.
25:19Yeah, what we're seeing here is obviously the Romans are coming in.
25:22They're coming along the Roman roads here
25:25and they are finding pre-existing spirits,
25:31guardians of local features, of copses of woods,
25:34and we see lots of these gods and goddesses as personifications
25:38of these local features in the landscape there.
25:40So it's not the case then that you have this sort of Roman civilization
25:44which comes in, smashes and burns and says,
25:46this is the way the Romans do it and this is the way you're going to do it.
25:49It's actually a bit more subtle.
25:51Here's how we do it and then you mix it in.
25:53Yeah, very much so.
25:54And it's why we refer to the period as Romano-British,
25:56because to try and separate the Romans from the native population
26:00just isn't possible.
26:01In everything they do, in the pottery styles,
26:04in some of the metal work,
26:06and certainly in sort of their worship of the spirits and the gods,
26:12there's a melange.
26:16These jovial figures of fertility are clearly pagan.
26:20But from the same cemetery where they were found,
26:24here's an example of a new religious practice
26:27mingling with local traditions.
26:30A Christian burial.
26:34So, Richard, here we are in a cemetery,
26:36but this sarcophagus is above the ground.
26:39Who was it? Do we know anything about it?
26:42It's from the Christian period of the Roman occupation of Brinn.
26:46And it was found at the beginning of the 20th century
26:51when they were putting in a new cemetery in here.
26:53And they dug down and found that somebody already had a cemetery here.
26:56Wow.
26:57So, they found approximately 200 Roman bodies here,
27:01in many different forms.
27:02Some were buried in these stone sarcophagi.
27:04Some were just buried, as we would expect,
27:06in a normal hole in the ground.
27:07Almost all of them were Christian.
27:09How do you know that a burial is Christian,
27:12rather than traditional Roman?
27:14Two main reasons.
27:16One is the orientation of the graves.
27:17All the graves are oriented in the same direction,
27:19generally east-west.
27:21The other reason is the lack of grave goods.
27:23But in Christian burial, that's...
27:24In Christian burial, that's basically not the practice, yes.
27:27So, that's stopped.
27:29This modest site on Ermine Street
27:31reveals not only how the multi-god faiths of Britain and Rome
27:35were starting to merge,
27:37but also the earliest days of Christianity on our shores.
27:40It didn't take off here until the 6th and 7th centuries,
27:43when the earliest churches were set up by saints like Columba,
27:46Aden and Augustine,
27:48who founded Canterbury Cathedral in the year 597 AD.
27:52But there were pockets of Christianity in Britain
27:55from as early as the 2nd century,
27:58perhaps because of missionaries from other parts of the empire
28:01spreading news of Jesus Christ
28:03along these very straight roads.
28:06There's not much doubting that this is a Roman road.
28:09It just runs off into the distance as far as the eye can see.
28:13But although this was the main road north in Roman times,
28:17it quickly fell out of use
28:18after the Romans left in the 5th century AD.
28:21And it's easy to see why.
28:23There's nothing here.
28:26No matter what gods they believed in,
28:28for the Romans the key was getting between major towns
28:31via the shortest, straightest route possible.
28:34They had little interest in joining up useful local resources
28:37like springs and woods.
28:39So after they left, the locals moved away.
28:42Ermine Street went from being a main Roman trunk road
28:45to being the B6403, otherwise known as the High Dyke.
28:50Well, now I've come so far, I've even run out of tarmac,
28:54so I guess I'm going to have to follow in Roman footsteps
28:58with my own two feet.
29:00I'm in the middle of the Lincolnshire countryside.
29:11The modern road has taken another route to the west,
29:14and the original Roman route of Ermine Street
29:16continues as nothing more than a track
29:18between farmer's fields and a local air base.
29:22Well, this isn't really a road any more, but it is still Ermine Street.
29:27It's as straight and as true as the paved section there behind me.
29:31And while you might get a bit wet and muddy walking along it,
29:34you're not going to get lost.
29:35In fact, if I was walking along here with a Roman legion
29:39in the 1st century AD,
29:41it probably wouldn't have looked that much different.
29:44The route continues north for around 14 miles,
29:50where Ermine Street once again picks up a major modern road,
29:53the A15, on the outskirts of Lincoln.
30:00In Roman times, Lincoln was known as Lindum Colonia.
30:03It marked the junction between Ermine Street
30:06and another great Roman road heading south-west,
30:09the Fosse Way.
30:11The city is packed with fascinating Roman finds,
30:14such as the Newport Arch,
30:16one of the oldest surviving arches still in use in Britain,
30:19and the city walls.
30:20I'll come back to Lincoln later in the series.
30:23But as Ermine Street heads further north,
30:25it'll take me to one of the great English counties.
30:30The Romans first made it to the place we call Yorkshire in 71 AD,
30:34but they quickly discovered that this was hostile territory.
30:38The dominant local tribe in the west and north of Yorkshire
30:41was the Brigantes.
30:43They fought the legions many times,
30:45and it took the Romans decades to pacify them completely.
30:48In the East Riding, there's a record of a smaller tribe,
30:51called the Parisi,
30:53who lived in the area surrounding what is now Beverley
30:55in the 1st century AD.
30:57In the town's museum, curator David Marchant is about to show me
31:02how it wasn't just religious ideas that were being swapped
31:05between the two civilisations.
31:07It was craftsmanship, too.
31:10This is an absolutely beautiful sword.
31:12Can you tell me where it was found?
31:14Yeah, this is one of five Iron Age swords that was found
31:18by a group of melted tetrists at South Cave in 2002.
31:23And do we know much about it?
31:25When it was made? Who it was made by?
31:28Well, they probably date to around about 70 AD,
31:32and they have a real variety of materials.
31:35A pommel at the end is actually made from a sperm whale tooth.
31:39Wow!
31:40Yeah.
31:41That's incredible.
31:42Incredibly unusual.
31:43And we've got some elephant ivory on there as well.
31:46Elephant ivory?
31:47Yeah.
31:48So, given that this was probably made around 70 AD,
31:51I mean, that's early in the Roman period in Britain,
31:54was it made by Romans?
31:57No, these are probably made by local people,
32:01and some of the materials, you know,
32:03they're going to have to have traded or imported.
32:06So, obviously, no elephants wandering around East Yorkshire.
32:09No.
32:10Not then and not now either.
32:12So, this is not the sort of thing that we would associate
32:15with kind of a backward barbarian tribe.
32:18I mean, this looks like it's come from
32:19a really sophisticated civilisation.
32:21Absolutely.
32:22These are really well-made artefacts.
32:24Would it be very expensive to make something like this?
32:26Lots, hundreds of hours of crafts and time, probably.
32:31So, these belong to, you know, significant people in the tribal society.
32:37This sword shows that 50 years after the arrival of the Romans,
32:40local people were making use of the finest material the Empire could provide.
32:45It's amazing that there's so many different parts to a sword.
32:50We sometimes think of a sword as just, you know,
32:52a bit of metal with a handle that you pick up and use the pointy end on someone.
32:57But actually, you've got the different materials in the scabbard, the hilt,
33:00in the blade itself, which you can see at the bottom.
33:03It's an astonishingly fine piece of craftsmanship.
33:08After more than 17 centuries in the ground,
33:10the original sword is far too delicate to be handled.
33:13But this reconstruction can give me an idea of what it's like to hold a weapon like this.
33:18Now, I can tell this one hasn't been buried for hundreds of years.
33:22It's a replica of this, right?
33:24It is, exactly, yes.
33:25Do you mind if I pick it up?
33:26Please do.
33:27I'll be very careful.
33:28Oh, it's heavy.
33:30So, I mean, is this made out of similar materials?
33:35What's the story behind it?
33:36It's made pretty much to the right scale.
33:40There are some compromises in material.
33:42We obviously couldn't use elephant ivory, for instance.
33:45Of course, yeah.
33:46We couldn't use whale tooth.
33:48So, we've actually used moose antler.
33:51Moose antler.
33:52Obviously, I think this is very fine,
33:54but this is really what it would have looked like in its prime.
33:57And, wow, is it sharp?
33:59No, it's not been sharpened, but it is still pretty heavy.
34:04Oh, yeah, look at that.
34:07I mean, you feel like a king just holding it, actually.
34:10This is a proper piece of kit.
34:13Was it expensive?
34:14It's about £3,000 for that.
34:16All right, OK.
34:17I might put it down again in that case.
34:19But that is really, really beautiful,
34:21and I suppose gives us a sense of just what a sacrifice
34:27it would have been to put something like that in the ground
34:30all those years ago, because if that was mine,
34:32I'd never want to put it down, let alone bury it for someone else to have.
34:37Weapons and religion were both expressions of Roman culture
34:41that were absorbed by the native population.
34:44The final stretch of Ermine Street will take me to the city
34:47where influences from all over the empire mix together
34:50in new and mysterious ways.
34:52Iboracum, now known as York.
34:55And it's where I'll find an ancient religious example of cross-dressing,
35:00a man buried wearing women's jewellery.
35:02I'm travelling the route of Ermine Street,
35:16the straightest road built by the Romans to run north of their capital, Londinium.
35:21For the last 200 miles, as I've passed through the fen counties
35:25of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire,
35:27I've seen how the Romans fused native British religious beliefs with their own,
35:31and even burial practices from the earliest days of Christianity.
35:36Now my final destination is in sight, the city of York,
35:40which was known by the Romans as Iboracum.
35:43In its day, it was the second city of the Roman province of Britannia.
35:48The great trading port of Londinium was all about the money,
35:52but Iboracum was about the military.
35:55This was, first and foremost, a garrison town
35:58founded by one of the finest fighting forces in the Roman world,
36:02the 9th Spanish Legion.
36:06It's a legion that's passed into myth and legend.
36:09It arrived with the invasion of AD 43
36:11and disappeared from the historical record 70 years later.
36:15The most popular theory is that it was wiped out by the native tribes in Scotland
36:20in around AD 120,
36:22possibly prompting Hadrian to build his famous wall.
36:27Eventually York outgrew its military origins
36:30to become a major city in its own right.
36:32Sometime around the beginning of the third century,
36:35it became the capital of its own Roman province,
36:38every bit the equal of London down south.
36:40And like London, it was a very cosmopolitan place.
36:47It drew soldiers and civilians from every part of the Roman world.
36:52And as we've seen all the way along Ermin Street,
36:55they brought some very distinctive beliefs and tastes.
36:59Adam Parker of the Yorkshire Museum is going to show me
37:02the remains of one rather unusual individual.
37:07So it's a skull of a man.
37:08It's a young man when he died.
37:10And he was buried wearing a lot of female jewellery.
37:13We know from looking at lots of the other graves in Roman Britain
37:15that men have got a certain type of jewellery that they're buried with
37:17and women have a certain type that they're buried with as well.
37:19And this is reflecting what they wore in life.
37:21So this chap, he's got a big, whippy jet bracelet
37:25that would have ran all the way round his wrist.
37:27A few other bits of jet jewellery.
37:29He's got a copper ally anklet on.
37:31And there are about three burials in Roman Britain
37:34of men with jet within them.
37:36This one had more than anything else.
37:38And why might it have been dressed like this,
37:41with this kind of jewellery?
37:42So we think he's probably a gallus priest.
37:44In the third century, there's a cult
37:46that comes from the eastern part of the Roman Empire,
37:48the cult of Kyberle. Kyberle's lover in the myth was Attis.
37:53As part of the myth, Attis castrates himself.
37:56And the priests do this as part of their initiation.
37:58So they richly castrate themselves in order to become this.
38:01Once they have finished their initiation,
38:04they then dress as women as part of their priestly regalia.
38:07So it might have been a man who was walking round
38:09in women's clothing and women's jewellery.
38:11And that sort of makes sense in terms of the archaeology.
38:13So this is quite unusual in Britain,
38:15but is it something we see across the wider Roman Empire?
38:19It would be...
38:20It's still an unusual find across the Empire
38:22because we know we have this sort of jewellery in Roman Britain
38:24that we can associate with women specifically.
38:26But the cult was Empire-wide.
38:29A really good piece of evidence comes from London
38:32where we have these big copper alloy castration clamps
38:35and they've got pictures of the twelve Roman gods along the top of them
38:38and they may have been used in the sort of rituals associated with this.
38:41It's something that would have been brought in
38:43as part of the Empire-wide cults.
38:45It's funny, isn't it,
38:46because we normally think about gender fluidity as a very modern concept,
38:48but here it is, you know, if not commonplace,
38:52then certainly alive in the Roman world.
38:54Yeah, and we're becoming more aware of these sort of stories
38:57that existed in Roman Britain and the wider Roman Empire.
38:59It's probably anachronistic to think that there is this male
39:02and female gender binary that's going on in the Roman world
39:04when we have graves like this that tell us a completely different story.
39:07So there really is nothing new under the sun.
39:09No.
39:14So it's clear that Roman York was tolerant of some exotic beliefs
39:18from across the Empire.
39:20The city also attracted some seriously big hitters, emperors.
39:27York's size, its importance and its position close to the edge of Empire
39:32made it a desirable location for rulers looking to expand their territory.
39:37At least four emperors came here on military campaign,
39:40and two of them actually died here.
39:42But it was one emperor in particular who left a lasting mark on the city,
39:47only not in the way he intended.
39:49He was Constantine the Great, who was proclaimed emperor by the army
39:56right here in York in the year 306 AD.
40:01Constantine's most significant contribution to York
40:04actually took place several decades after he left.
40:08It happened on his deathbed hundreds of miles away
40:12when he became the first Roman emperor to be baptised a Christian.
40:20Constantine's initiation led to Christianity becoming the official religion of the Empire.
40:25Like Mithraeism before it, this new faith spread throughout the Roman world.
40:32The Romans had once viciously persecuted Christians,
40:35but now it was an approved faith.
40:38Adam wants to show me some more remains
40:40which prove how acceptable it had become.
40:47So who's this?
40:49This is the grave of the ivory bangle lady.
40:51She is a skeleton of a young adult female.
40:54She was between 18 and 23 when she died.
40:57And she's buried with this really high status grave goods.
41:00One of which is a jet bangle
41:02and one of which is an African elephant ivory bangle.
41:05So that's not cheap?
41:07It's quite unusual.
41:08It's a very exotic material to be able to get in Roman Britain.
41:11And it's interesting that we have this local material of Whippy Jet
41:15alongside this international material of the elephant ivory.
41:18We've had some interesting scientific research done on it.
41:21There's a process called stable isotopes,
41:24which checks the chemical signatures that are surviving in your teeth.
41:29Everything that you've eaten leaves a certain sort of signature.
41:32And we know from that that she grew up somewhere hot and arid,
41:35probably in North Africa.
41:36Yeah, Yorkshire's not hot and arid.
41:38Very much not.
41:39And then in her late teens she moved to Yorkshire
41:41and she's obviously died here and been buried here as well.
41:45Well that's pretty amazing isn't it?
41:46Because sometimes I suppose we think that, you know,
41:49nearly 2,000 years ago people didn't get about the world very much.
41:53But here's someone from North Africa possibly.
41:56She's ended up as living in Yorkshire, as it now is.
42:01In the 3rd and 4th centuries, it's not just emperors that are visiting York,
42:04there are people moving out all over the empire.
42:07So she's went from one furthest distance point of it
42:09to here in the fringes of the empire as well.
42:11But I suppose that given the grave goods,
42:14elephant ivory and Whippy Jet, you know, some local, some international,
42:18but they're all of high value,
42:20to move about the empire was a privilege in itself.
42:24Yeah, and it wasn't a privilege that was available to everyone.
42:27She may have been associated with the army,
42:29perhaps through a partner or a family member.
42:31Certainly the nature of her burial here suggests
42:34that she lived a very wealthy life when she lived in York.
42:37And there's also an interesting plaque up here,
42:40which reads,
42:41Soro ave vivas in Deo,
42:43which means,
42:44Hail, sister, may you live in God.
42:45This is Christian text.
42:47And that doesn't work entirely well
42:49with this traditional pagan sort of burial.
42:51It tells us that the Ivory Bangalady
42:54probably knew somebody in a Christian community,
42:56but not that she was herself Christian.
42:58But it still tells us that there was this time in the Roman Empire
43:01where you had pagan beliefs and Christian beliefs
43:03all intermingling with one another,
43:05and pagans and Christians rubbing shoulders together, right?
43:08Yeah, so Roman Ibarakim is definitely a boiling pot.
43:10We've got all the different cults of Britain,
43:13of the Roman Empire, of the East,
43:15comb England with the early Christian communities as well,
43:17and they're all getting along.
43:24The Romans abandoned York along with the rest of Britain
43:26around the year 410 AD, but they left plenty behind them.
43:30For one thing, Ermin Street,
43:32much of which remains a major north-south route today.
43:35And for another, this great city,
43:37which continued to grow and thrive for centuries
43:41as the effective capital of the north.
43:43That, in turn, led to the establishment of York
43:46as a major centre of the Christian faith
43:48and the building of this magnificent minster.
43:51In my journey along Ermin Street,
43:54I've seen how two cultures can blend and influence each other,
43:58creating new beliefs
44:00and bringing us the largest religion practised in the UK today.
44:04Who says the Romans never did anything for us?
44:08And there's more Walking Britain's Roman roads next Wednesday at 8.
44:13New Friday at 8, Susan Kalman uncovers an amazing secret
44:17at Castle Inverere that's not for the faint of heart
44:19as she continues her tour of secret Scotland.
44:22After the break, exploring the astounding work
44:24of a titan of 19th century engineering,
44:27Brunel, Building a Great Britain, is next.
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