Pomponius Mela would have been well aware of the dictates of the Claudian court in which he was writing. His presentation (3.6.49) of the conqueror of Britain as victor ignotarum gentium was a matching suit to ubiquitous contemporary representations of recently invaded Britain as a savage, unfamiliar island, lying beyond the boundaries of the orbis terrarum. Yet, by the first century CE, Britain was hardly the remote and barely-known ‘land across the ocean’ that Caesar had visited. Claudius invaded a region already moving towards Romanized forms of civilization, familiar, for example, from Gaul; one strongly attached to Roman politics of power, be it through informal personal relations, or by means of official action, such as diplomatic exchanges, religious dedications, and coin issues. The article underlines this long-enduring Roman ambivalence regarding Britain, and ultimately aims to explain a whole century of atypical imperial inaction.

A Brief Account of Political and Ecclesiastical Relations between Britain and Rome until the coming of St. Augustine of Canterbury.

Table of contents available here.

These three reviews give an idea of changes, and sometimes lack of change, in approaches to Roman Britain as judged by four major texts published in 1981, 1989 and 1995. They are clearly written from a personal point of view, in reasonably polite language, for established journals.

This is a part-pre-published work (parts 1-4). It is a six-part investigation seeking to explain the sub-Roman cult of St Alban in terms of the syncretic adaptation of pagan traditions, associated both with ‘Albion’ as the earliest recorded name for Britain and divine names in ‘Albio-’ or ‘Alb-’ from a broad swathe of the Indo-European languages. It suggests the cult was in some sense a response to political pressures, associated both with the aspirations of Verulamium to a pan-British dominance, and, allied to that, the fostering of a pan-British identity. As well as antecedents from the Indo-European tradition, derivatives of our cult-figure are identified in the medieval Celtic tradition (especially ‘Elen of the hosts’, Part II), suggestive of a likely role for the cult in the sub-Roman period as a focus for unity amongst the Britons in their struggles with invaders. In Part III, parallel cults (especially St Alban of Mainz) from the continent are explored while part IV seeks to analyse the etymon ‘albho-’ in terms of ‘al-’ plus ‘-bho-’, thus helping to explain the conflation in an early medieval cult context of ‘elv-’ from ‘albio-’ with ‘el-’ from ‘al(i)-’. On this basis saints and heroes in ‘El-’ are interpreted as derivative, or at least influenced by, the cult of St Alban and its likely role in the sub-Roman period (Part V). Part VI examines the implications of this hypothesis about the cult for sub-Roman history, together with other evidence for the achievement of, or aspirations towards, some degree of political unity by the Britons of that period.

This essay examines the diplomatic relations between Rome and the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing especially on the missions of Gregorio Panzani, George Conn and Carlo Rossetti. The author emphasizes the complexity and multifaceted nature of Roman politics and the function of Rome as a major node in the network through which political information on Britain spread throughout Catholic Europe.