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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| There were about 400+ Roman forts and towns in England and Scotland, almost all have a 'bury' next door within a mile or so |
No burys without forts, then?
400+ forts in 50,000 square miles is one every 10 miles or so. Same as hillforts, Roman villas and Norman castles, pretty much.
They all seem to be typical fixtures of English towns to me (from which nothing can be more than about 5 miles away).
| The spread right across Britain seems too uniform for the settlements to be post Roman and more likely represent a relationship to the fort. |
So the Romans built an array of forts where, previously -- in what proportion of locations, do you imagine? -- there was nothing/no one?
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| Ishmael wrote: | | berniegreen wrote: | | Convince us that you aren't all just sitting in a little corner enjoying a pseudo-intellectual mutual masturbation. |
Unfortunately, only one of us has proven he isn't. |
This is the sound of one hand flapping.
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | So the Romans built an array of forts where, previously -- in what proportion of locations, do you imagine? -- there was nothing/no one? |
Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Dorset/Devon, Cumbria and England north of the Tyne/Tees appear to have been well populated 'celtic' Hill forts at the time of the Roman arrival. The rest of England was probably well covered with 'don/down' settlements which I imagine reflected proximity to previously occupied Hill forts .
Thus the Romans likely put and maintained their forts according to need, with stopping stations roughly every 10 miles along the roads. Some became towns presumably for collecting produce and economic gain. I gather the energy out/energy in ratio was about 1.2 compared to today's 5:1 using fossil fuels. Hence the walling off of NE Scotland and Wales (Offa's Dyke) and no attempt to occupy Ireland.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Er, since we know that produce was collected and even exported, and the economy was well managed with a system of weights/measures and coinage etc., before the Roman occupation, then we know that putting/maintaining forts according to need means putting them where the towns already existed, already linked up by a network of roads. Don't we?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Any society that has settled agriculture is bound to have market towns and those market towns are bound to be half-day's-travel from everywhere (so that everybody can get there and back in a day). In other words market town will be a day's travel apart.
Settled agriculture also presupposes pastoral areas and cereal areas, hence droving routes must arise. Since drovers need to rest up their animals each night drovers' centres will also be a day's travel apart.
These facts apply to pre-Roman Britain just as they do Roman Britain. The only question is to what extent it is possible to combine the two systems.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | These facts apply to pre-Roman Britain just as they do Roman Britain. The only question is to what extent it is possible to combine the two systems. |
Presumably the Romans tried to agriculturally run occupied territory on full power, using more effective organisation offered by the better infrastructure laid down across the empire to expand and distribute production. The walling off of highland Scotland and Wales apparently define the 'profitable' extent of their attempts in this respect for Britain.
I guess the limits to the empire ultimately depended on economically managing an expanding area, given the forts, troops etc needed.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| frank h wrote: | | Presumably... |
Precisely.
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | before the Roman occupation, then we know that putting/maintaining forts according to need means putting them where the towns already existed, already linked up by a network of roads. Don't we? |
Quite so especially in parts of the Roman occupied continental region.
In England the lingering 'celtic' oppida in the coinage region seemingly developed into nearby Romans fort/towns eg. Cirencester, Winchester, Leicester, Chichester, Dorchester (both), Sleaford, Ilchester, Canterbury, Silchester, Colchester, St Albans, Braughing, Brancaster etc. Whether the A-S farmers in the rest of eastern England (ie. the don/down/worth people) had 'towns' is not very clear according in the archaeology.
The rest of Britain was rugged upland Hill fort territory until the Romans upset the show.
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| Donmillion wrote: | | Mick: you demanded an explanation of why Loeb translations of classical Latin texts were twice as long as their originals; please do the courtesy of reading it. |
The Bible translations into modern European languages seem to have happened after about 1500 AD, I guess when the printing press became irresistible.
Even so why would the romance languages translations not have been continuous modifications right back to the Roman period,
for example I gather the clergy even allowed vernacular French to be used in services by 800AD.So presumably recognisable French existed by then, as did Spanish by 1000AD.
It seems that the classical explanation is they all stem from moderated vulgar Latin used by the peasants. So who exactly spoke Latin,where and why ?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The closest analogy is the British in India. About one per cent spoke it as a mother tongue, five per cent spoke it as a second language, ninety-four per cent spoke only the language they speak now.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | The closest analogy is the British in India. |
Fine, but the British came from an isolated island that mostly speaks English.
Why did a small community of Romans seemingly speak and write Latin when surrounded by other tribes in Italy who presumably spoke something different e.g. vulgar Latin(s)?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| frank h wrote: | | The Bible translations into modern European languages seem to have happened after about 1500 AD, I guess when the printing press became irresistible. |
You mean of course that it was written around 1500AD. ;-)
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The people living in and around Rome, before there was a Rome, spoke Italian -- or at any rate a rustic eeh-aah version of Italian. [We associate eeh-aah sounds with ignorance because anytime a language starts getting written down, all the natural vocalisations start to get rounded off into forms that can be represented by letters.]
Some astute Central Italians, noting that the Greeks, the Punics, the Hebrews etc had done the same with great success to their native languages, constructed the artificial phonetic language Latin out of Italian. And like the Israelis in 1948 discovered that insisting people learn and speak an artificial language allows a) successful nation building and then b) to embark on empire building.
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Just some points
1. The Atlantic Celts- Ancient People or Modern Invention?
A book by Simon James
The title is self explanatory.
2. Time Team Special: Britain's Drowned World
Not on 4OD, it explains Doggerland, how the North Sea drowned the link to mainland Europe and evidence for human inhabitation for what is now the North Sea.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team-specials/episode-guide/series-3/episode-3
Doggerland had islands inhabited between 5000 - 8500 BC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Now, where would these people go when the sea inundated their land? They would disperse to coastlines around the North Sea. In my opinion it is just as reasonable to say that the Scandinavian languages, English and Dutch originate from the Dogger language. This has as much validity as saying they are "Germanic" for which there is no archaelogical evidence. Philologically, it is just so much speculation that German was the mother tongue for the rest. It is much more reasonable to suggest that dispersal caused by a massive water barrier caused the development of the Dogger language into separate languages.
3 The Angles
Supposedly, the Angles, a minor tribe from Angeln, left on mass and took over most of Britain, wiping out the "native" Britons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
Nobody else came with them and if any did, they had surprisingly little influence on future cultural development, which is why we are now English. Anglo-Saxon is now a pejorative term for the English in order to blame them for everything.
It is becoming increasingly evident that trade and cultural links between Albion (ie Britain, especially England) and Europe were significant and Albion was not a cultural backwater. Far from it. Therefore, it is more reasonable to assume that the Angles on mainland Europe were in fact a settlement from Albion (Angleland), perhaps taking skills with them that the Saxons did not have, rather than the other way around.
4 Genetic history of Europe - is history manipulating the facts rather than history being driven by the facts, especially where England is concerned?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Europe
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