D. J. Mattingly
Author of An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409
About the Author
Series
Works by D. J. Mattingly
Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Miriam S. Balmuth Lectures in Ancient History and Archaeology) (2010) 42 copies
Economies Beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society) (2001) — Editor — 11 copies
Associated Works
Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture (Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society) (1996) — Contributor — 19 copies
Side-by-side survey : comparative regional studies in the Mediterranean World (2004) — Contributor — 7 copies
Landscapes of Change: Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2004) — Contributor — 6 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1958
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Manchester
- Occupations
- historian
archaeologist
Director of Research, College of Arts, Humanities and Law, University of Leicester - Awards and honors
- Fellow, British Academy (2003)
- Short biography
- Following my BA in History at the University of Manchester, I completed a PhD under the supervision of Professor Barri Jones at the same University. I was a British Academy Post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford (1986-1989), then Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan before coming to Leicester in December 1991 as a Lecturer. I was promoted to Reader (1995) and Professor (1998). I held a British Academy Research Readership award from 1999-2001 and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2003.
I am currently Director of Research for the College of Arts, Humanities and Law (2009-2012). I also hold a major research grant from the European Research Council for the Trans-Sahara Project. - Nationality
- UK
- Places of residence
- England, UK
USA - Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
This remarkably complete history of Britain under Roman occupation is probably the only book an amateur needs if he wants a reasonably concise summary of what has to be an archaeological understanding of the period. Mattingly is rightly critical of texts authored by the conqueror.
He is careful to be clear that Roman Britain - essentially the large army of occupation and the ruling caste that made up 2% of the population - is not to be confused with a Britain available for plundering and show more exploitation by the Roman imperial machine.
He corrects the prevailing view of the Romans as a civilising force which was derived from the aspirations of our own past imperial caste (also perhaps 2% of the population) while retaining a balanced view of the occupation. This is not a polemic but a reasoned contribution to history.
Rome ruled Britannia and had its effects on Scotland and Ireland for just over 450 years from Caesar's tentative invasion in 54BC. The story is not one of stasis by any means but the exploitative nature of the Roman Empire is well argued on the evidence throughout.
To make the story manageable, having given us an account of a brutal invasion, he divides the Roman occupation into three aspects, the military, the urban and the rural, and looks at the economy and the unoccupied zones through these lenses before giving a cogent view of collapse.
The only word of warning to the general reader is that he is determined to give us as much data as possible. He writes clearly but this is only partly a narrative in the standard historical manner. It is also an account of the archaeology. This by its very nature means lots of detail.
The virtue is that he proves his points on the data. The book has many informative maps and lists of artefacts and buildings. The vice is that you are going to have to treat it in part as a reference work and be quite committed to the subject if you are to read it straight through.
There is much intellectual meat in the book. I find I cannot disagree with his judgements (or at least disagreements are a questioning of perhaps a bare 1%) and he is clear when he shifts into interpretation with sufficient data for us to come up with alternative explanations if we wish.
It is also good to find a contemporary history book that tries to get out of the ideological traps we set ourselves and just tell it like it is. For once, there is not the scurrying around trying to find a 'black Briton' to make a point about race that would have meant nothing to the era.
The one major lack perhaps, especially given his interest in the identity politics of Roman imperialism and occupation, is any serious awareness of gender in the broadest sense. Even a brief note on Roman attitudes contrasted with Iron Age ones might have been useful.
But this is a quibble. The essential story stands as one of a brutal invasion that would not have put the Nazis to shame, succeeded by a complicated settlement involving seizure of assets, sales and grants of land to carpet baggers and collaborators and taxation to keep the machine going.
My Nazi analogy is not entirely stupid - no, there was no racial extermination (though the destruction of the religious leadership comes close as does exterminatory strategies towards rebels) but the imperialist model was much the same with a militarised economic system like Himmler's.
Britain also comes across as particularly badly hit by Roman occupation compared to most other provinces, partly because it was at the end of the line for exploitation but also because exploitation was intensified in part by the lack of investment return compared to the costs of the military.
A Romano-British civilisation does emerge in due course outside the military but this is one of weak towns dependent on soldiery that cannot survive the collapse in the fifth century and of wealthy landowners. The vast mass of the population adjusts but is not truly Romanised.
The precursor to collapse was the Roman provincial military on one side and resentment at taxation on the other combining to drag the country into the struggles for power in the late Empire, Eventually when the military left, the spine of the economy collapsed.
The speed of events suggests what a top-down system it was with no roots in a 'nation'. The depradations of Scots and Irish and the handover of power to German mercenaries are not sufficient in themselves to explain what happened. This looks like a failure of the '2%'.
With the removal of centralised control, the towns declined rapidly without their Gallic, Rhenish and military market and the country seems to have shifted back to a sub-Roman variant of the Iron Age Kingdoms of the pre-Roman era, albeit now requiring different defensive tactics.
Mattingly points out the irony that it was the zones previously most resistent to Romanisation in the North and West that became most Roman in terms of cultural aspiration, owing a lot to Christian maintenance of Roman values, while the South and East fell to the Germans.
Mattingly does not discuss the Germanisation process in any detail, courteously leaving that to the next author in the series, but the hint here is that the incoming warrior bands did not face a great deal of resistance from a population that linked Rome to taxation and slavery.
Just as the Iron Age elite moved West to resist the Romans and may have ended up in Ireland or dead or enslaved, so the Roman elite followed a similar trajectory with fastnesses in the West. If they had had the love of their people, they would probably not have needed to do this!
The role of Christianity is interesting because the evidence seems to show that it was present but only lightly held under the Empire and that the association of Christianity with Romanitas was an elite and military game. Iron Age religious forms seem to have been sustained in the countryside.
The rapid subsequent trumph of Christianity in the face of attacks by assorted barbarians and then the capture of those barbarians by the Church in a sort of spiritual occupation, first in the West and much later amongst the Germanics, is a story for the next volume.
Rome is, in this sense, is like Schwarzenegger's Terminator. It ultimately never seems to let up, reinventing itself after its own crises - first through the medium of Christianity and then through the rediscovery of Imperialism in the Modern West, perhaps now as Washington's informal empire.
It is remorseless and, as always, those in occupied territories simply have to sit out and have the ordure dropped on them by whichever 2% of the population is lucky enough to get its fingers on the economic and cultural buttons. Christianity clearly made itself a useful button in bad times.
Not that Mattingly is inclined to romanticise Iron Age life but only to point out that the narrative of its primitiveness does not entirely stand up and that much of the vaunted urban civilisation brought to Britain by Rome was for the benefit of a select few and the occupying forces.
Nevertheless, once the initial punishing occupation was over and taking account of the vast tracts of land given over to the military's tribute and exploitation economy, it may be that there was a middle period when the country had some sort of equilibrium and progress was made.
Unfortunately, all imperialisms are like the oozalum bird. The sheer weight of the system and its demands for taxation eventually did for the Roman one as it has done for all others - as economic sclerosis and political revolt. From a certain point, Rome in Britain was stuffed.
This is an excellent and scholarly book that is highly recommended with enough detail for you to make up your own mind on the analysis. We have noted the superb maps and tables (although there are no photographs) while the notes for further reading are exhaustive. show less
He is careful to be clear that Roman Britain - essentially the large army of occupation and the ruling caste that made up 2% of the population - is not to be confused with a Britain available for plundering and show more exploitation by the Roman imperial machine.
He corrects the prevailing view of the Romans as a civilising force which was derived from the aspirations of our own past imperial caste (also perhaps 2% of the population) while retaining a balanced view of the occupation. This is not a polemic but a reasoned contribution to history.
Rome ruled Britannia and had its effects on Scotland and Ireland for just over 450 years from Caesar's tentative invasion in 54BC. The story is not one of stasis by any means but the exploitative nature of the Roman Empire is well argued on the evidence throughout.
To make the story manageable, having given us an account of a brutal invasion, he divides the Roman occupation into three aspects, the military, the urban and the rural, and looks at the economy and the unoccupied zones through these lenses before giving a cogent view of collapse.
The only word of warning to the general reader is that he is determined to give us as much data as possible. He writes clearly but this is only partly a narrative in the standard historical manner. It is also an account of the archaeology. This by its very nature means lots of detail.
The virtue is that he proves his points on the data. The book has many informative maps and lists of artefacts and buildings. The vice is that you are going to have to treat it in part as a reference work and be quite committed to the subject if you are to read it straight through.
There is much intellectual meat in the book. I find I cannot disagree with his judgements (or at least disagreements are a questioning of perhaps a bare 1%) and he is clear when he shifts into interpretation with sufficient data for us to come up with alternative explanations if we wish.
It is also good to find a contemporary history book that tries to get out of the ideological traps we set ourselves and just tell it like it is. For once, there is not the scurrying around trying to find a 'black Briton' to make a point about race that would have meant nothing to the era.
The one major lack perhaps, especially given his interest in the identity politics of Roman imperialism and occupation, is any serious awareness of gender in the broadest sense. Even a brief note on Roman attitudes contrasted with Iron Age ones might have been useful.
But this is a quibble. The essential story stands as one of a brutal invasion that would not have put the Nazis to shame, succeeded by a complicated settlement involving seizure of assets, sales and grants of land to carpet baggers and collaborators and taxation to keep the machine going.
My Nazi analogy is not entirely stupid - no, there was no racial extermination (though the destruction of the religious leadership comes close as does exterminatory strategies towards rebels) but the imperialist model was much the same with a militarised economic system like Himmler's.
Britain also comes across as particularly badly hit by Roman occupation compared to most other provinces, partly because it was at the end of the line for exploitation but also because exploitation was intensified in part by the lack of investment return compared to the costs of the military.
A Romano-British civilisation does emerge in due course outside the military but this is one of weak towns dependent on soldiery that cannot survive the collapse in the fifth century and of wealthy landowners. The vast mass of the population adjusts but is not truly Romanised.
The precursor to collapse was the Roman provincial military on one side and resentment at taxation on the other combining to drag the country into the struggles for power in the late Empire, Eventually when the military left, the spine of the economy collapsed.
The speed of events suggests what a top-down system it was with no roots in a 'nation'. The depradations of Scots and Irish and the handover of power to German mercenaries are not sufficient in themselves to explain what happened. This looks like a failure of the '2%'.
With the removal of centralised control, the towns declined rapidly without their Gallic, Rhenish and military market and the country seems to have shifted back to a sub-Roman variant of the Iron Age Kingdoms of the pre-Roman era, albeit now requiring different defensive tactics.
Mattingly points out the irony that it was the zones previously most resistent to Romanisation in the North and West that became most Roman in terms of cultural aspiration, owing a lot to Christian maintenance of Roman values, while the South and East fell to the Germans.
Mattingly does not discuss the Germanisation process in any detail, courteously leaving that to the next author in the series, but the hint here is that the incoming warrior bands did not face a great deal of resistance from a population that linked Rome to taxation and slavery.
Just as the Iron Age elite moved West to resist the Romans and may have ended up in Ireland or dead or enslaved, so the Roman elite followed a similar trajectory with fastnesses in the West. If they had had the love of their people, they would probably not have needed to do this!
The role of Christianity is interesting because the evidence seems to show that it was present but only lightly held under the Empire and that the association of Christianity with Romanitas was an elite and military game. Iron Age religious forms seem to have been sustained in the countryside.
The rapid subsequent trumph of Christianity in the face of attacks by assorted barbarians and then the capture of those barbarians by the Church in a sort of spiritual occupation, first in the West and much later amongst the Germanics, is a story for the next volume.
Rome is, in this sense, is like Schwarzenegger's Terminator. It ultimately never seems to let up, reinventing itself after its own crises - first through the medium of Christianity and then through the rediscovery of Imperialism in the Modern West, perhaps now as Washington's informal empire.
It is remorseless and, as always, those in occupied territories simply have to sit out and have the ordure dropped on them by whichever 2% of the population is lucky enough to get its fingers on the economic and cultural buttons. Christianity clearly made itself a useful button in bad times.
Not that Mattingly is inclined to romanticise Iron Age life but only to point out that the narrative of its primitiveness does not entirely stand up and that much of the vaunted urban civilisation brought to Britain by Rome was for the benefit of a select few and the occupying forces.
Nevertheless, once the initial punishing occupation was over and taking account of the vast tracts of land given over to the military's tribute and exploitation economy, it may be that there was a middle period when the country had some sort of equilibrium and progress was made.
Unfortunately, all imperialisms are like the oozalum bird. The sheer weight of the system and its demands for taxation eventually did for the Roman one as it has done for all others - as economic sclerosis and political revolt. From a certain point, Rome in Britain was stuffed.
This is an excellent and scholarly book that is highly recommended with enough detail for you to make up your own mind on the analysis. We have noted the superb maps and tables (although there are no photographs) while the notes for further reading are exhaustive. show less
I spent the first several months of 2025 working my way through the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperbacks chronicling English history. My plan is to work my way through the replacement series, the Penguin History of Britain, in 2026, beginning with this volume, which covers British history from the arrival of the Romans to their withdrawal. (Like with the Pelican History, the volumes were not published in chronological order; this came out sixth.)
The Pelican Roman volume show more was one of my least favorites; I wrote, "I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly reads like it was by an archaeologist." Unfortunately, David Mattingly is also an archaeologist and unfortunately, the book has much the same issue as its predecessor, in that it feels more like it jumps from place to place cataloguing things rather than telling a story about the time Britain spent under Roman occupation. However, the issues aren't as strong; presumably because of the greater space, I did have a better sense of the broader context and story. Of the Pelican volume, I complained, "But I often felt like I didn't know why things were happening: why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were just getting brief summaries of places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings." These questions are all ones that Mattingly actually does address here. On the other hand, I still do feel like we got a lot of description of what a villa's layout is without much of a sense why we might care to know this.
The best part of the book is its first chapter, where Mattingly argues that the British have too often identified with the Roman conquerors of Britain, rather than the British that were conquered. Because Britain itself was an empire when many of the histories of Britain began to be written in the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to for writers to see the Romans as benignly civilizing a bunch of "primitives," because that was how the British post hoc justified their own invasions of "primitives." As Mattingly points out, "[e]ven today, more than half a century beyond the effective end of a British empire, mainstream views of the Roman empire are.... closely bound up with issues of national nostalgia for our own lost empire. As a result, we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination" (4). If we move away from this way of viewing Roman Britain, Mattingly claims, then we get a more accurate view of the power relationships: the British elite weren't "Romanizing" because they recognized the Roman way of life as better, but because they wanted to maintain what power they could in a time of Roman domination. It's not as strongly put, but it reminded me of Howard Zinn's first chapter in A People's History of the United States, revealing the self-serving stories our national myths are rooted in. I just wish this project had been better and more clearly carried out into the rest of the chapters of the book, which occasionally feel more like Mattingly is trying to score points against rival scholars rather than speak to a general audience. show less
The Pelican Roman volume show more was one of my least favorites; I wrote, "I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly reads like it was by an archaeologist." Unfortunately, David Mattingly is also an archaeologist and unfortunately, the book has much the same issue as its predecessor, in that it feels more like it jumps from place to place cataloguing things rather than telling a story about the time Britain spent under Roman occupation. However, the issues aren't as strong; presumably because of the greater space, I did have a better sense of the broader context and story. Of the Pelican volume, I complained, "But I often felt like I didn't know why things were happening: why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were just getting brief summaries of places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings." These questions are all ones that Mattingly actually does address here. On the other hand, I still do feel like we got a lot of description of what a villa's layout is without much of a sense why we might care to know this.
The best part of the book is its first chapter, where Mattingly argues that the British have too often identified with the Roman conquerors of Britain, rather than the British that were conquered. Because Britain itself was an empire when many of the histories of Britain began to be written in the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to for writers to see the Romans as benignly civilizing a bunch of "primitives," because that was how the British post hoc justified their own invasions of "primitives." As Mattingly points out, "[e]ven today, more than half a century beyond the effective end of a British empire, mainstream views of the Roman empire are.... closely bound up with issues of national nostalgia for our own lost empire. As a result, we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination" (4). If we move away from this way of viewing Roman Britain, Mattingly claims, then we get a more accurate view of the power relationships: the British elite weren't "Romanizing" because they recognized the Roman way of life as better, but because they wanted to maintain what power they could in a time of Roman domination. It's not as strongly put, but it reminded me of Howard Zinn's first chapter in A People's History of the United States, revealing the self-serving stories our national myths are rooted in. I just wish this project had been better and more clearly carried out into the rest of the chapters of the book, which occasionally feel more like Mattingly is trying to score points against rival scholars rather than speak to a general audience. show less
Even with quite an extensive reading of British history and some previous knowledge of the Roman Occupation this was somewhat of a tough read, requiring study and reference to OS maps and other resource to follow the rich details and – to steal from Eric Newby – a cast of thousands like a Cecil B De Mille Hollywood epic. Because I want to know more of the famous II Legion Augusta, “The Engineers” and their life in Britain, I persevered and did enjoy that same depth of scholarship of show more David Mattingly’s, that gave this reader such trouble in trying to keep up with the flow of this enormously well-researched history. The only residual criticism of the work is a reflection on those troubles of mine – the absence of maps that would have helped in the spatial placing of events in each chapter. There are maps and charts however – over 20 of them – but they are in specialist detail and did not help this particular reader in trying to grasp exactly where the specific action in the text occurred. Perhaps on a rereading which I already plan, things will become more interlinked.
There was also a tantalizing reference to the recently discovered trove of early Roman, and very human documents from the very region and legion of my interest, but sadly not much detail from those was used in this work. I understand that Guy de la Bedoyere’s book, Roman Britain contains more from this source. (http://www.librarything.com/work/966884/book/5352293) show less
There was also a tantalizing reference to the recently discovered trove of early Roman, and very human documents from the very region and legion of my interest, but sadly not much detail from those was used in this work. I understand that Guy de la Bedoyere’s book, Roman Britain contains more from this source. (http://www.librarything.com/work/966884/book/5352293) show less
There were three Britannias going on in this period, the "Official Roman Province, a Mediterranean commercial community and the remains of the indigenous society the romans had conquered. The author seems to advance the view that the three groups did not meld very successfully by the time of the Roman withdrawal. In short, this is the anti-colonialist view. A necessary corrective to Rosemary Sutcliff, but a little sad for me. Seems likely, though.
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