The economy

and social life of

Britannia
Ioana Aron

Dalia
Nistor
Radu Oancea

Ioana Sandu

Bianca Voiculescu
 Introduction
• The Province of Britain was the area of the island of Great
Britain that was governed by the Roman Empire, from 43 to
410 AD. It comprised almost the whole of England and Wales
and, for a short period, southern Scotland.

• According to Caesar, the Britons had been overrun or culturally

assimilated by other Celtic tribes during the British Iron Age.
 Economy
• Very little evidence of commerce survives in the archaeological record, except for pottery, which does not rot
and could not be recycled. So for the most part, we have to imagine the foodstuffs, livestock, textiles and other
perishable goods that would have formed the bulk of consignments.

• The growth of the economy of what was a peripheral frontier province was made
strikingly clear by the growth of the so-called small towns, a network of settlements
that did not have the same status or appearance as a city (or civitas capital).

• Most people in Roman Britain made their

livings from a mixture of subsistence farming
and exchange of specialist goods (like salt or
milling stones) with neighbours or more
distant communities. The only possible means
of meeting the supply requirements of the
immense army in Britain was the development
of a money economy. This was driven by
military pay and long-distance trade.
 Small towns
These urban centres were like nothing in the pre-Roman Iron Age.
They had sizeable populations performing well-developed
industrial or commercial activities, most commonly ironworking,
pottery and glass manufacture. They were places where agricultural
products and services could be exchanged.

Some were more obviously agricultural in character: rural

villages, essentially, of varying size. The small towns tended to
be on the road networks (like Wall in Staffordshire), sometimes
originating on the sites of former military bases.

The cities remained parasitic on the countryside. Except

London, with its cosmopolitan port, they were none of them
great makers of wealth, and their public buildings were out of
all proportion to their economic life.
The social life of the Province was divided geographically into
two parts: the Civil Zones, inhabited by a partially Romanized
society, dwelling among the gently undulating and fertile lands
of the Midlands, the south and the east; and Military Zone of
the more barren and mountainous north and west. In the Civil
Zone stood the towns and the villas that carried Roman
civilization into the countryside; it was a region of peace and
safety, with few armed men and few fortified dwellings. In the
Military Zone, on the other hand, the army of occupation,
based on the fortress towns of York, Chester and Caerleon,
patrolled Wales and the Peninnine moorlands, and guarded the
Great Wall that stretched from Solway to the mouth of Tyne.

The social life

 Sources

Wikipedia Englishheritage.com Nature.com