Synopses & Reviews
Peter Salway's Very Short Introduction to Roman Britain weaves together the results of archaeological investigation and historical scholarship in a rounded and highly readable concise account. He charts life in Roman Britain from the first Roman invasion under Julius Caesar to the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West around AD 500.
Review
"The present work was commissioned in 1967 as a replacement for the famous but idiosyncratic history of R. G. Collingwood, first published by Oxford in 1936 and revised a year later. It is a measure of the fast pace of Roman studies since World War II that Mr. Salway has written a wholly new book. Original approaches in archaeology, demography, and place name studies have yielded important results and have forced changes in commonly-held opinions. This is especially true in regard to questions on the extent of the population, military organization, Roman Christianity, and the continuity to Anglo-Saxon times. The author is at pains to bring the story up to date (to 1977, when the book was substantially finished), while he is, nevertheless, acutely aware of the enormous difficulties in arriving at a satisfactory interpretation of the mass of scattered evidence. But this is the most reliable survey to which we can now turn for the history of events in Britain from the invasions of Caesar to the fifth century." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-70) and index.
About the Author
Peter Salway, formerly a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and subsequently of All Souls College, Oxford, is an Emeritus Professor of the Open University and Chairman of the Oxford Archaeological Unit. His publications include
The Oxford Illustrated History of Roman Britain, published by OUP in 1993 (reissued in paperback by OUP in 1997 as
A History of Roman Britain). He has served as a Member of Council of the National Trust (appointed by the Society of Antiquaries), and was one of the editors of
The Remains of Distant Times: Archaeology and the National Trust (Boydell, 1996). He has also published a substantial number of articles and reviews in learned journals and publications for the general reader, mostly on Roman Britain and Classical Antiquity in general, a few on medieval and later British archaeology and architectural history.
Table of Contents
1. The beginnings of British history
2. Roman conquest
3. Britain under the Late Empire
4. The end of Roman rule
Further reading
Chronology
Index