Product Description

This important work counters the widely held view that the creation of the four provinces of later Roman Britain was an irrelevance - a short-lived hiccup on the way to the demise of the whole country as part of the Roman Empire. In fact Britannia Prima - broadly the West of Britain - had, from the fourth to the late sixth century, a distinctive Romano-British character and cohesiveness that the other provinces did not have or rapidly lost in the face of the Germanic conquest. For two hundred years the province successfully resisted significant Anglo-Saxon penetration, and parts of the province managed to hold out against full conquest and absorption until the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century. In short Romano-British urbanism was kept alive longer than anywhere else in Britain, and led to the development of strongly Christian states which ultimately became the kingdoms of Wales.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81653 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
The author's previous book, with Graham Webster, 'Wroxeter: Decline & Fall of a Roman City' (Tempus 1998) received widespread critical acclaim. Roger White currently a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. He lives just outside Shrewsbury.

Customer Reviews

An interesting interpretation
This is a book that takes a much-needed look at a monumentally important period of British history that was to lead ultimately to the foundation of the identities of the Welsh and English nations, and is done so in an interesting and provocative manner. It is a perfect companion to K. R. Dark's "Britain and the End of the Roman Empire", and likewise puts forward a convincing argument for a continuation of a Roman identity in the native Britons long after the conventional dates given by Faulkner and others. It has it's weaknesses, particularly in late Roman religion and the early Christian Church, but it is reassuring to note that Roger White acknowledges that this is an interpretation of the evidence, and other interpretations exist, something other archaeologists should consider when putting forward their theories.

Dry, unconvincing, unsatisfying
This sounded like a fascinating book from the description, the idea that the Roman province of Britannia Prima had its own distinct identity which survived the collapse of Roman administration and continued intact for some considerable time afterwards. Being interested in post-Roman Britain, it seemed like a must-read book.

The problem for the lay reader like myself is that much of the volume is given over to very dry and dusty descriptions of archaeological sites which tend to make my eye glaze over, so I'm probably missing the point and never really made the connection between the evidence and the author's thesis. An archaeological student would undoubtedly make better sense of all this.

Most disappointing of all is that the very definition of what geographical region constituted "Britannia Prima" (and indeed the other provinces of Britannia) it turns out is based on very flimsy and tenuous circumstantial evidence (despite what historians might try to tell you, we really know so little about Roman Britain) - the whole evidence is described in not much more than a few lines of text. The whole thing therefore has a flavour best compared in an analogy to those Time Team programmes where Tony and his chums find one small bit of pottery and from that somehow extrapolate to the entire workings of a society.

(Update 18/10/2008: Stuart Laycock's Britannia - The Failed State: Tribal Conflicts and the End of Roman Britain makes a more convincing argument for the effects that lasting tribal cohesion throughout the Roman period had on the subsequent development of post-Roman Britain.)

(Update 28/04/2009: Have now also read Ken Dark's Britain and the End of the Roman Empire, which covers the same sort of argument with regard to continuity of Roman civilisation in western Britain as well as discussing the rest of Britain too, but is a much better presented and argued work.)

A good interdution to the post roman period
a good book that covered nearly all the bases but to be fair there was a lot to cover. the survial of Mediterrain contact on the west coast has indercated by many archaeological digs carried out over recent years and this is a very good attempt to bring in all together