Rome approaches Britain: First contactsLanding of the Romans on the Coast of Kent (Cassell&rsquo

Rome approaches Britain: First contactsLanding of the Romans on the Coast of Kent (Cassell’s History of England, Vol. I - anonymous author and artists) Why did the Romans invade Britain in 43 AD?The invasion of Britain was a war of prestige. The ‘mad’ emperor Caligula had been assassinated in 41 AD, and an obscure member of the imperial family, Claudius, had been elevated to the throne. The new emperor faced opposition from the Senate, Rome’s House of Lords. Claudius needed a quick political fix to secure his throne. What better than a glorious military victory in Britain?A century before, in both 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar had invaded Britain with the aim of conquest. But revolt in Gaul (modern-day France) had drawn him away before he had beaten down determined British guerrilla resistance. Britain had remained free – and mysterious, dangerous, exotic. In the popular Roman imagination, it was a place of marsh and forest, mist and drizzle, inhabited by ferocious blue-painted warriors. Here was a fine testing-ground of an emperor’s fitness to rule. For the Claudian invasion, an army of 40,000 professional soldiers - half citizen-legionaries, half auxiliaries recruited on the wilder fringes of the empire - were landed in Britain under the command of Aulus Plautius.Archaeologists debate where they landed - Richborough in Kent, Chichester in Sussex, or perhaps both. Somewhere, perhaps on the River Medway, they fought a great battle and crushed the Catuvellauni, the tribe that dominated the south east. Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, came close to expelling the invadersThen, in the presence of Claudius himself, they stormed the enemy capital at Camulodunum (Colchester). But resistance continued elsewhere. Pushing into the south west of Britain, the Romans fought a war of sieges to reduce the great Iron Age hill forts of the western tribes. Driving through and beyond the Midlands, they encountered stiffening opposition as they approached Wales, where the fugitive Catuvellaunian prince, Caratacus, rallied the Welsh tribes on a new anti-Roman front. Wales took decades to subjugate. Before it was done, the east of Britain exploded in 60-61 AD. Bitterness against Roman oppression had driven Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, into a revolt that came close to expelling the invaders. Later, under the provincial governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Romans occupied northern Britain, reaching what is now called the Moray Firth in 84 AD. This, though short of total victory, was to be the high water mark of the Roman empire in Britain.Map source -- source link

More pics about