Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain: Solving a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery

By Roger Nolan

In this landmark study, an amateur historian tackles the unanswered questions surrounding Julius Caesar’s time in Britain.
 
Two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar came, saw, and conquered southern Britain, but exactly where he landed and the precise routes his army marched through the south of the country have never been firmly established. Numerous sites have been suggested for the Roman landings of 55 B.C. and 54 B.C., yet remarkably, the exact locations of the first major events in recorded British history remain undiscovered—until now.
 
After years of careful analysis, Roger Nolan has painstakingly traced not only the places where the Romans landed, but he has also discovered four temporary marching camps Caesar’s army built as it drove up from the south coast in pursuit of the British tribal leader, Cassivellaunus. This advance took Caesar across the Thames to Cassivellaunus’s stronghold at Wheathampstead in present-day Hertfordshire. These marching camps are placed almost equidistant from each other and, most importantly, are in a straight line between the coast and Wheathampstead.
 
Roger Nolan’s research has also enabled him to identify the place mentioned in Caesar’s Commentaries, where the Roman legions were ambushed by the British while foraging and where a large battle then ensued—the first known land battle in Britain.
 
Without doubt, this groundbreaking study is certain to prompt much discussion and reappraisal of this fascinating subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526747921

Book preview

JULIUS CAESAR’S INVASION OF BRITAIN

SOLVING A 2,000-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY

For Joseph and Charles

JULIUS CAESAR’S INVASION OF BRITAIN

SOLVING A 2,000-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY

ROGER NOLAN

Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain

Solving a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Frontline Books,

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd, Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Roger Nolan

ISBN: 978-1-52674-791-4

eISBN: 978-1-52674-792-1

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-52674-793-8

The right of Roger Nolan to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted

by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction

Chapter One Caesar’s own account

Chapter Two Rome in the First Century BC

Chapter Three Caesar the Man

Chapter Four The Roman Army in the First Century BC

Chapter Five The Invasion of Gaul

Chapter Six Britain at the time of the invasion

Chapter Seven The Invasion of 55 BC

Chapter Eight The Invasion of 54 BC

Chapter Nine Analysis of the conventional view

Chapter Ten The campaign in Britain – success or failure?

Chapter Eleven Britain after Caesar

Appendix One The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar, Book 4

Appendix Two The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar, Book 5

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

My initial thanks go to Peter Salway whose footnote in his excellent book Roman Britain was the catalyst which started me on the investigation which resulted in the discovery of the marching camps established by Julius Caesar’s army.

Although this book has by and large been a one-man exercise, I have had help from a number of people and organisations during the long period of research and investigation.

In the early days of my researches, I had much help from the staff at the museum at Canterbury.

In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jak Showell for his kind advice and wise counsel based on his vast experience of authorship and the means of bringing a book to publication as well as his encouragement during the writing of this book.

Many thanks to Kevin Diver of Thurrock Council for opening the Coalhouse Fort at East Tilbury to enable me to photograph the Thames crossing from the ramparts of the fort.

My grateful thanks are due to John Grehan at Frontline Books for guiding me through the complicated process of commissioning this book.

Finally, very special thanks to Sally Robinson who first suggested I set down in writing the results of my researches over the years and supported me and encouraged me throughout the process of writing this book.

Roger Nolan,

Littlestone-on-Sea,

2018.

Foreword

The great fascination of the early history of the British Isles is not what we know, but what we don’t know, for this opens up the opportunity for discovery. Such discoveries add to our growing knowledge and understanding of the past, though some sow confusion when they appear to counter previously-accepted theories. This is no more so than with the invasions of Julius Caesar in the first century BC. With seemingly little archaeological evidence to guide us, the landing places and routes through southern England taken by Caesar’s army have been determined more through calculated interpretation than hard facts. That was until the uncovering in 2017 of a massive Roman encampment at Pegwell Bay on the Isle of Thanet.

As is often the case, this discovery was made during archaeological excavations before a new construction programme, in this instance, the building of the new East Kent Access road. The site, which may be up to twenty hectares in size, includes a defensive ditch some four to five metres deep and two metres wide, has yielded finds that have been identified as first century BC, including a Roman pilum (javelin). It has been said by archaeologists from the University of Leicester headed by Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, that the shape of the ditch at Pegwell Bay is very similar to some of the Roman defences at Alésia in France, where a decisive battle in the Gallic Wars took place in 52 BC.

There is, therefore, a high probability that this is one, and arguably the most important, of Caesar’s camps. As has been stated by the spokesperson for the University of Leicester dig, the Isle of Thanet had not previously been considered a likely landing place because it was separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel and this still presents us with a problem reconciling Pegwell Bay with Julius Caesar’s own detailed account of his invasion of Britain.

Looking at Caesar’s first invasion in 55 BC, we read that ‘he advanced about seven miles … and stationed his fleet over against an open and level shore. But the barbarians, upon perceiving the design of the Romans, sent forward their cavalry and charioteers, a class of warriors of whom it is their practice to make great use in their battles, and following with the rest of their forces, endeavoured to prevent our men landing.’ The question must be asked, how did the Britons move along the coast and then transport their horses and chariots across the Wantsum Channel in time to oppose Caesar’s soldiers before they had waded ashore. Movement along land, following simple tracks, was notoriously slow compared with sea travel, which is why, as Caesar states, the Britons sent forward their cavalry and charioteers as these were the only ones that could keep pace with the Roman fleet.

The Britons could not have known where Caesar would make landfall, which is why they ‘followed’ the invasion fleet. When it was seen that the Romans were going to attempt a landing on the Isle of Thanet, they would, somehow, have had to manhandle their chariots, along with what must have been a considerable number of horses, onto boats to cross the Wantsum Channel in time to be ahead of the Romans – if indeed they had a large number of suitably large vessels waiting for them to jump into. None of this could have happened.

Furthermore, there would have been no advantage to the Romans in landing on the Isle of Thanet, as they still had water to cross to reach the mainland. Some indication of the degree of obstacle the Wantsum Channel represented can be gleaned from the investigations of the Kent Archaeological Society paper presented by F. W. Hardman and W. P. D. Stebbing: ‘We conceive it as a natural arc-shaped stream of tidal water cutting off Thanet from the mainland with a breadth of about two miles and a depth of about forty feet and with wide open ends. It formed a safe roadstead for ships and a sheltered line of communication with the Thames.’¹ Likewise, T. Rice Holmes declared unequivocally, that: ‘Thanet, as everyone knows, was an island in Caesar’s time’², and as far back as Bede who wrote in the early eighth century that, ‘On the east of Kent is the large Isle of Thanet containing according to the English way of reckoning, 600 families, divided from the other land by the river Wantsum, which is about three furlongs over.’³

Equally, one would imagine, that the British would have waited on the mainland for the invaders to cross the Wantsum Channel before attacking, as this would have given them more time to bring up their foot warriors.

Lastly, as Roger Nolan has found, none of this ties in with Caesar’s account, which is in other regards, quite specific in its details.

Having landed and defeated the British (who had agreed to submit to Caesar) we learn many of the Roman ships were damaged by a high spring tide and a severe storm. The British decided to take advantage of this and renewed hostilities, by attacking a legion which had been sent out to forage. The legion was taken by surprise and almost overwhelmed. The Romans were very astute campaigners and it is hard to imagine that, while not expecting to be attacked by the Britons, they had not had sentries watching the Wantsum Channel. Indeed, according to Caesar, the approach of the enemy was detected by the dust they raised as they marched. Nothing about this account indicates in any way that the Roman camp was on the Isle of Thanet.

So we can safely discount Pegwell Bay as the landing place of the Julian invasion of 55 BC. But what of Caesar’s much larger expedition of the following year?

On this second occasion, Caesar wrote that he ordered all the ships ‘to assemble at Portus Itius, from which port he had learned that the passage into Britain was shortest, [being only] about thirty miles from the continent’. Pegwell Bay is much further from Continental Europe than thirty miles, so, clearly, Caesar had no intention of heading for anywhere near the Isle of Thanet.

Of the expedition, Caesar then wrote: ‘in consequence of the wind dying away about midnight, and being carried on too far by the tide, when the sun rose, espied Britain passed on his left. Then, again, following the change of tide, he urged on with the oars that he might make that part of the island which he had discovered the preceding summer had the best landing place or places.

From this we can see that Caesar had travelled too far north from his intended landing place, because the land was on his left and that when the tide turned he urged his men to row hard back to a place he had identified in 55 BC as being an ideal landing ground. There is not much land to be seen on the east-facing coast beyond Pegwell Bay before the coastline turns north, and the short distance to be covered from even its furthest extremity, North Foreland, to Pegwell Bay would hardly require the great effort from his men that Caesar comments on. We should look further south for the ideal landing place of the 54 BC expedition.

After landing, Caesar left his ships ‘fastened at anchor upon an even and open shore’. While such a description may seem quite clear, as Birgitta Hoffmann has pointed out, we might be taking Caesar’s words too literally. An even and open shore ‘plano et aperto’ described by Caesar as the place of the 55 BC landing, could simply mean one that was free of rocks or one that was a wide beach location, as aperto means open in every interpretation of that word.

Equally, ‘mollis et aperto’ Caesar’s description of the 54 BC site as ‘soft and open’, could also be interpreted differently, in that mollis can mean soft but can also mean gentle and pleasant. In this context, Hoffmann observes, Caesar might simply be stating that the place where he landed was an ideal beach location. Hoffman concludes that it is impossible, therefore, to identify the exact locations of the Julian landings based solely on Caesar’s account.⁴

Nevertheless, having landed, Caesar then marched inland to defeat the British once and for all. The route Caesar took, and the major battle he fought with the British, is the main subject of Roger Nolan’s discoveries which are detailed in this book.

Shortly after the battle, as the Romans were about to pursue the defeated enemy, Caesar received news that, ‘a very great storm having arisen, almost all the ships were dashed to pieces and cast upon the shore, because neither the anchors and cables could resist, nor could the sailors and pilots sustain the violence of the storm; and thus great damage was received by that collision of the ships’.

Quite why Caesar hadn’t learnt from his previous experience, and beached his ships, remains a mystery. Nevertheless, he rode back to the coast to see the extent of the damage, which was considerable. He then ordered the ships to be pulled up onto the shore and a large fortification built which would accommodate both his troops and the ships. For that, no better place could be found than Pegwell Bay. Remembering that the British had attacked his camp the previous year and that the bulk of his army had marched inland, relocating to the Isle of Thanet gave the troops left on the coast a far better chance of protecting themselves with the Wantsum Channel acting as a moat. It is quite conceivable that this is the camp which has recently been discovered. Roger puts forward an alternative proposal.

I turn next to the main thrust of Roger Nolan’s work, the discovery of Caesar’s temporary marching camps. Without anticipating Roger’s revelations, it is a fact that, until now, no one had found any evidence of Caesar’s camps, which is unusual as so many Roman temporary marching camps – around 150 – have been found in England alone, and none of those are in Kent.⁵ These discoveries are key to unravelling both the site of the first major land battle in British history – that which until now had been thought to have been at Bigbury Camp – and the place where Caesar crossed the Thames, usually assumed to have been at Brentford. Roger quite convincingly dismisses both locations, and his work would be significant for these two conclusions alone. But there is more. The temporary marching camps, the site of the battle with the Britons, the location of the ford on the Thames, all contribute to Roger Nolan’s identification of the probable place where Caesar landed in 54 BC.

John Grehan,

Shoreham-by-Sea,

May 2018.

List of Illustrations

1The coast of Britain on a clear day which is the view Caesar would no doubt have seen when planning his expedition.

2This plaque is on the beach between Walmer and Deal and it asserts Walmer’s claim to be the landing place for the first invasion in 55 BC.

3Dover from the sea. This is where Caesar rode at anchor after having seen the enemy lined up on the cliffs in 55 BC. It is also the probable site of the landing the following year.

4The defensive ditch on the western side of the camp at Denge Wood overlooking the River Stour.

5The defensive ditch on the eastern side of the camp at Denge Wood, looking towards Chartham Downs and Iffin Wood.

6The Long Barrow known as Julliberrie’s Grave where tradition had it that one of Caesar’s military tribunes, Quintus Laberius Durus, was buried.

7A view of Chartham Downs from Iffin Wood. As Caesar wrote, the enemy took up a position on the hills at a distance from the camp and then suddenly swooped down on the legionaries from all sides.

8Another view of Chartham Downs showing the steepness