The era of Roman Britain from 44CE to around 409CE remains one of continuing fascination to many people. Charlotte Higgins captured this well in `Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain’ (Abrams, 2015), a contemporary description of her tours around the remnants of this period dotted across the UK. Some of them were in Kent – Richborough Castle (see entry for Ford Madox Ford), Dover and the remnants of the Pharos there, and then fragments, road lines left in the landscape, and the possible site of Caesar’s camp at Bigbury, near Canterbury being some of them. Even in their greatly reduced situation, they still have an almost poetic suggestiveness, of an era that ended as abruptly as it began, one which raises questions which have resonance today about the relationship between the British isles and continental Europe, and what it means to be British, what the nature of British, and English, identity is.
The much loved work of the children’s novelist Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992) offers one of the most powerful, and effective, attempts to imagine what the lived experience of life in the era of the Roman occupation might have been like. Books like `The Eagle of the Ninth’ (1954) and the `Lantern Bearers’ (1959) weave elements of history with her own narrative and descriptive skills to produce stories that maintain some historical credibility while making powerful appeals to the imagination.
Sutcliff’s father was a lieutenant in the Royal Naval, which meant she had an itinerant childhood. Born in Surrey, she spent part of it in Malta. Her autobiography from 1983, `Blue Remembered Hills’ (Hodder and Stoughton, London) records that after two years abroad, at the age of five she returned to Britain, living in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey where her father worked as the King’s Harbour Master, before, in 1927, he was posted for two years to South Africa. Rather than following him, her mother and she lived for 18 months in Westgate, Canterbury, before his return. They then lived till she was 11 in Chatham. After that, she moved to North Devon, and then studied at Bideford Art School, becoming a painter of miniatures before turning her hand to writing in the late 1940s.
Sutcliff suffered from Still’s disease, a juvenile form of arthritis, from when she was only 2, and was confined to a wheelchair for much of her life. Her work however is characterised by a strong sense of landscape, and of how difficult for people in the ancient world till modern times mobility was. An excellent example of this is `Outcast’, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1955), part of the Roman series of stories she started in the 1950s. This tells the story of Beric, adopted by a British tribesman sometime in the early period of the Roman era in Britain after being discovered washed up in a basket on the beach. Exiled as an adolescent from his tribe because of his assumed original Roman origin, he ends up being captured by slave traders, and bought by a magistrate on the Continental mainland.
By a number of adventures and trials, Beric finds himself a few years later as a galley slave, in a ship driving across the stormy channel back to Britain. Dropped into the sea because of rebelling against the Roman captain of the ship on the assumption he would drown, in fact he ends up on the coast of his homeland, in the area, we soon find, of Romney Marsh, then undergoing an early phase of its reclamation by the imperial overlords. Sutcliff’s story focuses on the Rhee Wall, part of the huge project running from today’s Appledore to close to New Romney, traces of which are still visible.
The very specific landscape of the Marsh, and particularly an attempt to see it as it was during its genesis, is beautifully rendered in this book. `The gentle life of the land was levelling out,’ she writes, as Beric orientates himself in this baffling landscape, part man made, part the result of forces of nature:
`ahead of him the thorn trees ran on, squat and hardy, and storm-shaped; but to the left was open turf, and there, standing out from the thorns as though feeling no need of shelter, with the pale wisps of mist curling almost to its terrace steps, with nothing but empty sky beyond, the long, low huddle of a farm-steading rose dark against the fading light. The place had an air of being wind-shaped, storm-stunted like the thorn trees among which Beric stood, by the winter gales that had roared across its low roofs; of being deeply and staunchly rooted, as they were, into the stuff of this high fringe of the marsh’ (Ibid, 220).
Later, as he settles in to his new home, Sutcliff writes of him walking along a track over the marshes:
`[It] led gently downward, and through the budding branches of oak and hazel and twisted thorns with their fleece of blossoms he could glimpse the sodden flatness of saltings and the silver gleam of mud flats left bare by the tide, and many waters winding down to the estuary. Presently the track curved left, turned sandy and ran out into gorse and stunted elder and harsh sea-grasses’ (247).
Walking over the Marshes today, along some of the public footpaths and narrow roads that criss-cross it, it is often good to think of the ways this landscape that looks like it has been here forever was in fact once under water, and how what exists now is a combination of human agency and non-human natural forces. In a unique way, Sutcliff catches this balance well – a very human voice, responding to a world of other, non-human phenomenon. Both speak, but in a very different way.