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Glynn Burrows is the owner of Norfolk Tours in England - If you would like advice about tracing your family history, need someone in England to do some look-ups or take some photographs for you, or are thinking about taking a vacation to England, contact Glynn and visit www.norfolk-tours.co.uk

Roman History in England

Friends, Romans, Countrymen - Lend Me Your Ears

By Glynn G. Burrows - English Historian, Family
History Buff & Owner of Norfolk Tours in England

It is fantastic to think that we, in England, can stroll along some of our roads, knowing that they have been there since Roman times. We can walk across our fields and meadows and know that we are walking where Romans lived and worked. We can pick up Roman pottery and artifacts on our farms and we can dig up Roman coins in our gardens. For us, we have such a long and varied history but many of us don't appreciate it.

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Glynn Burrows discusses Roman History in England!

In the village where I spent my childhood, there are Bronze-Age Burial Mounds which are over four thousand years old, the Churches in the village, (actually two villages), date back, in parts, to the twelfth century. There are houses that are four hundred years old, my parents' house is on a site where there was a house in 1590 and parts of that house may well be inside the present house. We used to dig up medieval pottery in the garden and my Dad dug up a Roman coin in the garden of a house in the village where we lived when I was a baby.

So who were the Romans who lived in my village? Were they from Italy? Did they return to Italy after the Roman period?

The Romans arrived in England in 55 and 54 BC, but they didn't actually take over until 43 AD according to most of the books I have read. At that time, Norfolk was a rich farming area, and the Romans obviously decided to make use of the area as both farmland and as a link to the other countries of Northern Europe as the coastline of Norfolk was an excellent area to use to access the North Sea. They built roads across Norfolk, to the ports that they set up as well as to the major towns and fortifications that they constructed. Norfolk became a very densely populated area during the Roman period and many fields in the County are scattered with the remains of Roman cooking pots and other Roman debris.

Although the Romans settled in the area, it is generally believed that the people who lived here during this time in our history, were mainly what is called "Romano British" that is, local people who adopted the Roman way of life. There would have been people from other countries in the area, but most of the population would still have been local people, living the Roman life instead of living in mud huts! If we see how other countries soon adapt to the ways of invaders in more recent history, perhaps we can understand this better.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, it is also believed that the reason that the way of life deteriorated, was because the systems of communication broke down. The people could no longer rely upon the government to carry out the administration and the infrastructure soon collapsed. Soon, the people in charge left the area and went back to where they came from and left the locals to carry on the best way they could, but without the backing from the local governors, they were lost. The Romano British soon found their systems falling down, as well as their properties and without the knowledge and international trade, their supplies dried up too. The only thing to do was to revert to the way things were and they soon ended up living in mud huts again!

It is amazing to think that there were towns, cities and villages, houses with central heating, plastered walls, bath-houses, plunge pools, indoor gardens, Temples, theatres, public buildings, proper roads and many modern facilities when the Romans were here, yet after only a very short time, these had all gone and many of these luxuries were not to return till the late twentieth century!

Yesterday, my Dad and I did a little field-walking to show you how lucky we are to live surrounded by such history - you can see what we found and how we found it in the photos and video. If any of you are interested in the Romans, or other periods of archaeology, please do drop me an email, I'd be very happy to give you more information. If you would like to experience this exciting hobby, I can even arrange for you to take part in an archaeological dig! (This is at set times in the year and organized by a professional body of archaeologists.)