О.М.Елина, Н.С.Маринчук - Методическая разработка к фильму The History of Britain - Part 1 (1098532), страница 4
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To make the point about who exactly owned whom, Boudicca was treated to a publicflogging while her two daughters were raped in front of her. In 60 AD, Boudicca rose up infurious revolt, quickly gathering an army bent on vengeance. With the cream of the Romantroops tied down suppressing an insurgency in north Wales, Boudicca’s army marched towardsthe place which most symbolized the now-hated Roman colonization of Britain, Colchester. Ithelped that it was lightly garrisoned. After a firestorm march through eastern England, burningRoman settlements one by one, it was the city’s turn.
The frightened Roman colonists had tofall back to the one place they were sure they were going to be protected by their emperor andtheir gods – the great temple of Claudius. If the terrified Romans thought they were going toescape the implacable anger of Boudicca, they were seriously out of luck. With thousands ofthem huddled terrified in the temple of these foundations, she began to set light to it.
Theymust have been able to smell the scorch and smoke and the fire coming towards them, as thewhole of their sparkling imperial city burned down with themselves and everything else buriedin smoke and ash. Thousands died in this place. Boudicca had her revenge.But her triumph couldn’t last. The lightly-defended civilians of Colchester were one thingbut now she would have to face the disciplined Roman army, fully prepared for all she couldthrow at them. Sure enough, when the two forces met, Boudicca’s swollen and unwieldy armywas no match for the legions. Her great insurrection ended in a glory chaotic slaughter.
SoBoudicca took her own life rather than fall into the hands of the Romans.Lessons had to be learned in a hard way, at least for some. When the barbarians startedattacking Roman forts in the north, the Romans knew exactly what to do. On 79AD, anenomous pitched battle took place on the slopes of an identified Highland mountain, whichTacitus called Graupius. The result was another slaughter, but not before the Caledoniangeneral, Calgacus, delivered the first anti-imperial speech on Scotland’s soil. “Here at theworld’s end, on the last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day defended by ourremoteness and obscurity. But there no other tribes to come, nothing but sea and cliffs andthese more deadly Romans whose arrogance you cannot escape by obedience and self-restraint,to plunder, butcher, steal. These things they misname empire, they make a desolation and theycall it peace.” Of course, Calgacus never said any such things.
This was a speech written longafter the event by Tacitus and it’s entirely Roman, not Scottish. Yet this burning sentimentwould echo down the generations. Like Britannia itself, the idea of free Caledonia was from thefirst, a Roman invention.Segment 300:28:28,135→There was one emperor, Spanish by birth, who understood that even the world’s biggestempire needed to know its limits. And he of course was destined, in Britain at any rate, to beremembered by a wall.
When we think of Hadrian’s Wall, we tend to think of the Romansrather like US cavalrymen deep in Indian country, defending the flag, peering through thecracks and waiting nervously for war drums and smoke signals, a place where paranoia sweatedfrom every stone. But it wasn’t really like that at all. As fantastically and ambitious as this was,stretching 73 miles from coast to coast from the Solway to the Tyne, and though Hardianprobably conceived it in response to a rebellion on the part of those people the Romans loftilyreferred to as Brittunculi – wretched little Brits-almost certainly, he didn’t mean it as animpermeable barrier against barbarian onslaught from the north.
The wall was studded withmile castles and turrets and forts like this one at Housestead.But as Britain settles down in the second century AD, these places became up-countryhill stations more like social centres and business centres than really grim, heavily-mannedbarracks. So the purposed of these forts became not to prevent people going to and fro, somuch as to control and observe them. The forts in particular, became a place where a kind ofcustoms scam was imposed on those trying to do business on one side or the other.
It may bebetter to think of the wall not so much as a fence but rather as a spine around which control ofnorthern Britain toughened, hardened and prospered.If we can imagine Hadrian’s Wall as not such a bad posting, it’s because our sense ofwhat life was like at that time, has been transformed by one of the most astonishing finds ofrecent archaeology – the so-called Vindolanda Tablets. They are scraps of Romancorrespondence, jotting, scribblings and drafts of letters thrown away as rubbish by theirauthors almost 2,000 years ago.
For 25 years, archaeologists here have been digging up theseletters, some 1,300 of them, from seven metres below the ground. Up they’ve come, lovinglyseparated from dirt, debris and each other and painstakingly deciphered. At once poingnantlyfragile and miraculously enduring, the voices of the Roman frontier in the windy North Country,loud, clear and strong.From Masculus to Tribune Serianus: “Greetings, please instruct as to what you want usto do tomorrow. Are we all to return with the standard or only half of us? My troops have nobeer. Please order some to be sent.” “I sent you two pairs of socks and sandals, and two pairs ofunderpants.
Greet Elpus Tetricus and your messmates, with whom I pray you’re getting onwell.” “He beat me and threatened to pour my goods down the drain. I implore yourmercifulness not to allow me an innocent man from overseas to be beaten by rods as if acriminal. I warmly invite you to my birthday party on the third day before the Ides of September.Please come, as it will be so much more enjoyable for me if you were here.”A world of garrisons and barracks had now become a society in its own right.
From themiddle of the second century, it makes sense to talk about Roman-British culture, and not justas a colonial veneer imposed on the resentful natives, but as a genuine fusion. Nowhere wasthis clearer than here in Bath. Bath was quintessential Romano-British place. At once mod conand mysterious cult, therapy and luxury, a marvel of hydrolic engineering and a showy theatreof the waters of healing. The spar was an extravaganza of buildings constructed over a springthat gushed a third of a million gallons of pumping hot water into the baths every day. Whenyou soaked in a bath, you washed your body and your soul, ablution and devotion at the sametime. Much of the bathing, as well as the flirting, the gossip and the deal making went on in thisausterely grandiose Great Bath. But the spiritual heart of the place was the scared spring – aferny grotto where water collected and where the devotees of the presiding goddess, SulisMinerva, could look through a specially constructed window at the alter erected in her honourand occasionally could throw gift offerings in her way.Bath was not the only place where Romano-Britains could wallow in the well-being ofthe province.
In Dover, the Romans built this 96-bedroom hotel, now 20 feet below street levelbut the last word in luxury for any VIP disembarking from Gaul.Segment 400:35:13,175→By the fourth century, however, Rome was in deep trouble, attacked by barbarians andundermined by endless political turmoils. Britannia couldn’t remain detached from the fate ofthe rest of the empire forever. At some point, Dover’s significance for Britannia changed from aport of entry to a defensive stronghold, and the “Welcome” mat gave way to the “Keep Out”sign, in the shape of massive walls built snack through the Grand Hotel’s lobby. This is the sortof wall the Romans built at Dover.This is Portchester, a Roman port fort, a truly colossal structure that makes all too clearthe scale of threat the Romans felt the barbarians posed.
Inside it lies a Norman castle built1,000 years later and now completely dwarfed by it. It was one of several such forts strung outalong the southern and eastern coasts. But not even fortifications like those of Portchester orHadrian’s Wall in the north could work without adequate troops.
As more and more legionarieswere sent back to fight on the continent, and as Picts and Saxons, spotting the weakness,started their own raids from the north to the east, Britannia couldn’t help but feel the chill ofvulnerability. And when in the year410, Alaric the Goth sacked Rome and the last two legionsdeparted to prop up the tottering empire, that chill developed into an acute anxiety attack.This was one of the genuinely fateful moments in British history, the legions departed.Now it wasn’t like Hong Kong in 1997, no flags flying or pipers piping, the Governor was notdriving around his courtyard seven times pledging to return. Now, doubtless, the RomanoBritish did hope and expect to see the eagles back some day. The tax collectors, andmagistrates, and town councilors, poets, potters, musicians and the newly-Christian priests, allsaid to themselves, “Well, this couldn’t go on forever.
We couldn’t always look to MotherRome, and Mother Rome is half-infested with barbarians. Anyway, we can handle it. We’ve gotthe Saxons’ shore forts. We can hire barbarians to deal with other barbarians. We can handlethis. We CAN handle this.”EPISODE IIISegment 100:38:10,415→For the less confident, of course, there was only one thing to do: Bury their treasure andhead for the hills…planning, as refugees always do, to return when the worst was over and digit all up again. In the case of this particular hoard of 15,ooo coins, gems, medals, and thisexquisite silver tigress, they never did. It was instead discovered in 1992 at Hoxne in Suffolk andis now kept in the British Museum.Some sort of force was badly needed to stop the barbarians in the north and west fromexploiting the vacuum of power left by the exit of the legions.
At first, the warriors from northGermany and Denmark, sailing up-river in their wave forces, seemed a boon, not a curse. Well,when one local despot, Vortiger, naively imagined he could use the imported barbarians as hisown personal military muscle but neglected to pay them as per the contract, he made one ofthe more spectacular blunders in British history. Furious at being stiffed, the Saxons turned onthe local population they’d been hired to defend. When they finished burning and pillaging,they took land in lieu of pay, settling down amidst the understandably dismayed nativepopulation.
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