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Goods found in the 'Child's Grave' in Colchester
© Colchester Museum
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The first shopkeepers: Commercial life in Roman Colchester |
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Roman brooch
© Colchester Museum |
The historian Dio tells us that the Praetorian Prefect Seneca was into Britain for at least 40 million sesterces , a staggering sum equivalent to about 45,000 legionaries’ pay. This may in part have been a government loan to kick-start Britain’s money economy; but like post-Saddam Iraq, the Romanising of Britain must have seemed like an unparalleled marketing opportunity to the powers-that-be in Rome.
Then, in AD 54, the Emperor Claudius died, and his successor Nero made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with his uncle’s pet project. Suddenly, the bottom fell out of the British market, and investors like Seneca hurriedly called in their loans, leaving the bewildered British aristocracy up to their eyeballs in debt.
It was in this climate of recrimination that the new Roman Procurator, Decianus Catus, annexed the land of Prasutagus, the dead king of the Iceni, beating his wife Boudicca and ordering her daughters raped in order to teach her a lesson.
The lesson he learned, of course, was not to antagonise a warrior-queen when your army is away in Wales. The Roman colonies of Colchester, St Albans and London were burned to the ground before Boudicca was eventually stopped.
Colchester was rebuilt, and its new colonists gradually integrated with the native British community until there was no longer any distinction between Roman and Briton. Throughout its long history, the city’s wealth was always founded upon trade, especially that of pottery, and it flourished until the Roman Empire’s withdrawal in the early Fifth Century.
Over a thousand years later, another emperor, Napoleon, sneered at Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. This was true, but it was a source of Britain’s strength, not her weakness, and the first of those shopkeepers had plied their trade in Colchester.
FURTHER READING:
Philip Crummy, ’City of Victory: the story of Colchester’, (Colchester Archaeological Trust 1997)
Peter Salway, ’Roman Britain’, (OUP 1981)
John Wacher, ’Roman Britain,’ (Guernsey Press 1986)
Alan K. Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier’, (BM Press 1994)
Words: Dr Mark Ibeji
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