ROMANIZATION – OBSOLETE?

Guy de la Bédoyère

Over recent years there’s been an increasing debate, or at least a so-called debate, about whether the word Romanization is a suitable one for describing what happened to Britain during the Roman period.

Some people think it’s an obsolete term, harking back to the time when British antiquarians and archaeologists of the late 19^th century saw themselves and their culture as the natural descendants of the Romans. They thought Britain was a fundamental force for good, bringing the benefits of British civilisation to other parts of the world, as the Romans had done in their own time. The most vocal critic of the term Romanization is Professor David Mattingly of Leicester University who, in his book An Imperial Possession, has suggested that we now see the impact of Rome in Britain as being a far more complex process. He’s suggested the term ‘discrepant identity’ to describe a Roman Britain with a much more varied experience of the influence, or rejection, of Roman culture.

To my mind the problem with this is that it expresses a very restricted understanding of what Romanization means, and it reduces the issue to little more than an argument about semantics. Essentially the Discrepantists (for want of a better word) only regard ‘Romanization’ as a very narrow concept: the imposition of Roman culture on another. But the word has been around for a very long time, and like most words, its meaning has changed to suit the times. Richard Hingley of Durham University’s Archaeology Department recently claimed in British Archaeology (July/August 2007) that Romanization was first used by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1885 as part of a ‘crisis of imperial confidence’. Dr Hingley sees it as British imperial society trying to bolster its own self-belief by seeing its own effect on the world as a mirror of what happened in the Roman Empire and creating the term Romanization to express this.

But in fact Romanization was first used by an American philologist and scholar called William Dwight Whitney in a book about the study of language in 1867. The phrase he used was ‘Italy after its first Romanization’. This is the primary use of Romanization listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Whitney was born in the United States and he worked in America so he hardly constitutes a member of British imperial society suffering from a crisis of confidence. That was a time when the United States was beginning to become a major world power. Whitney used it as a purely descriptive and convenient term for the process by which Roman customs and manners were adopted by others. Since many of the peoples in Italy accepted this, indeed even welcomed it, it is plain that this did not have to amount to forcible imposition. In other words Romanization does not necessarily have to mean what the Discrepantists insist that it does, and it is fairly remarkable that the 1867 usage seems to have been overlooked in the effort to shoehorn the evidence into a predetermined agenda.

Indeed Romanization comes from the very ‘to romanize’ which goes back to the early seventeenth century and comes itself from a medieval Latin word romanizare – no prizes for guessing what that means. Even the Romans themselves had the term romanitas which means essentially the same thing.

To my mind this is ultimately a futile and artificial debate. It strikes me that a cabal of academics are mildly desperate to show to themselves and the world that their subject is in a dynamic state of development. The truth is that the complexity of Romano-British society is recognised much more today than it was before, so I’m perplexed by the claims that it will take a new word to uncover this. Roman influences were colossal, and varied, and more to the point they are more readily detectable in the record we have to hand whether that means looking in Tacitus for an account, excavating a rubbish pit in a new Roman town, tracking the dramatic impact of Roman culture on an Iron Age rural farmstead or trying to understand a rural settlement where Roman influence is barely detectable archaeologically.

What’s happening is an attempt to make an archaeological debate somehow comparable with what goes on in History. There’s a parallel with almost all periods, but a good example is the historian J.R. Neale’s thesis that Elizabeth I was confronted by a Puritan group in Parliament who initiated challenges to the monarch that led ultimately to the Civil War in 1642. Neale had found a pamphlet of the era that referred to the ‘Puritan Choir’ – obscure is hardly sufficient to describe it. Neale’s thesis became the dogma and became routinely accepted as fact. More recent historians like G.R. Elton, keen of course to make their own mark on the subject and thus escape the anonymity of going along with existing theories, were delighted to discover that none of the individuals in the pamphlet really fitted the label ‘Puritan’ choir and the new dogma was born: Neale was wrong. However, as Keith Randell pointed out, not even Elton was able to explain why the pamphlet was produced in the first place and that ‘there is the theoretical possibility (unlikely as it may seem) that the “Puritan Choir” will re-emerge as the cornerstone of another interpretation of the politics of the early Elizabethan parliaments’ (Elizabeth I and the Government of England, Hodder Murray, London 1994, p. 82).

In short, that sort of debate gives historians something to talk about and a means to make their mark on their own times. You can guarantee that someone will have to come up with something ‘new’ (or rehash something old) if he/she is to have any chance of notoriety. The only difference in History is that there is so much documentary evidence that there is a chance of something substantively new being found that might really change the story. In Archaeology, and especially Roman Britain, that is a lot less likely.

The trouble for archaeologists is admitting that it isn’t really possible, from archaeological evidence, to distinguish a rectangular house owner who hated the Romans but liked the comfort, from another rectangular house owner who loved the Romans. Likewise one cannot distinguish a roundhouse owner who stuck to a prehistoric form because he despised the effete decadent comfort of Roman housing from another roundhouse owner who yearned for a stone rectangular house with a tessellated floor but could not afford one. Whoever they were, and whatever they did, they all used Roman money because that was what there was to use. You can’t distinguish anyone in Britain today by the money we use, or the taxes we pay. It’s even been suggested that native styles of sculpture were consciously retained and used as a means of refuting, resisting Roman classical styles. This may be true in any one instance but how could one ever know? And how would one distinguish that from someone who was simply not very good at carving?

Sadly we cannot normally extract motive from the archaeological record.

The fact remains that the decisive visual, textual and artefactual difference between the Roman period and others is the arrival of Roman material. That is what we have, and it’s how we define the period. Of course it doesn’t matter what we call it. But Romanization has been around a long time. It is a word most people can understand immediately. The closest we have today is Americanization – we all know what that means, and we all know it covers a multitude of possibilities from singing one’s favourite songs from Oklahoma! to pushing American goods on Third World countries and vast US military installations in strategically located parts of the world.

So rather than waste time or paper on arguing that the whole debate hinges on Romanization’s contemporary suitability or not (founded on a false idea that it only ever meant one thing), we’d do a lot better by being honest about the limitations of the record available to us than pretending that changing one word will open the door to new revelations.

It won’t.

Since September 2007 I have worked as a school teacher. I have reintroduced Classical Civilization at A level to a joint sixth form covering three schools. However, while the OCR board has retained Roman Britain as an option for the new syllabus (Specification), the AQA board has elected to drop it. This should be of a very great deal more concern to all of us, especially university academics, than attempting to redefine the study of Roman Britain by altering the terminology which is unlikely to do more than help propel it further into the oblivion of irrelevance to most of the population who care not one jot.

Roman Britain, as a subject, went through an initial phase where vast strides were made in recognizing the historical framework and then added to by recognizing the associated archaeology and epigraphy. This essentially went on throughout the 1800 and on into the 1900s. The 'modern' post-WW2 archaeology was bowled along on a rather smug and pretentious tide of self-righteous and self-satisfied of complacent superiority, defined by how 'antiquarians' (basically any archaeological predecessor) had indulged in borderline criminality with their negligent and ignorant techniques.

This neatly concealed the fact that new discoveries were essentially more of the same but now finds were hived off to specialists who publish (if they ever do) arcane and incomprehensible specialist reports packed into expensive and rambling archaeological publications that made all sorts of extravagant claims about the significance of the excavation being covered. Virtually no-one does any more than read the excavator's summary which neatly obfuscates the fact that the summary is no more than a theory based on very little and which, on close examination, usually makes little or no difference to what we already know or knew about Roman Britain. You only have to examine a few 'expert' opinions on some of the material to see that they often say diametrically opposite things which are founded on nothing other than what they happen to think. It's not even clear whether they really 'think' what they are saying, or whether they are simply posturing to have a 'point of view' where the only thing that matters is that it is different from the opinions of everyone else. This gives them an identity and the illusion of originality. The upshot is that we are very little wiser about anything to do with Roman Britain other than that we have a lot more finds, 99% of which are packed into boxes and stuffed into vaults where they have been since they were delivered from the original excavation. I possess a History of Britain published in 1723. It contains a brief section on Roman Britain. It is more or less the history as I know it, and such errors as it contains had been remedied by 1850.

I'm afraid Roman Britain isn't an intellectual growth industry, and neither is quite a lot of modern archaeology. It's frequently interesting but a recent Time Team featured hill-forts and included archaeologists who are now claiming they weren't forts but were really defended prestige chieftain settlements with town-like characteristics. Oh yes? That was exactly what I was being told at the University of Durham 30 years ago and what's more the textbooks from that era even quote Mortimer Wheeler as saying much the same thing even though the archaeologists on the film claimed he said the opposite. But then, you see, today’s archaeologists have to say that or else they would have nothing to say. And that would never do, would it?

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