Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Any attempt to understand the economic life of Roman Britain must acknowledge at the outset the severe constraints imposed by the lack of relevant source material. While we can be reasonably certain from the range and detail of the information recorded on documents such as the Vindolanda tablets (Bowman and Thomas 1989) that there was considerable documentation of property and financial transactions, including records of taxes paid, such as those on provincial imports or exports, or of the contributions of individual civitates , precious little survives. A rare surviving observation, that of Appian writing in the second century ( Praefatio [to Roman History ] 5), implying that Britain was not yet paying its way, suggests the existence of records upon which such generalizations could be made. In reality there is a handful of surviving written sources distributed through the four centuries or so of the Roman administration, none exceeding a few lines in length; the Agricola , of forty-six short ‘chapters’, is the exception. Complementing these is a range of archaeological evidence derived from both material and biological sources. Each of these has to be considered in terms of its context and particular limitations before its potential significance can be established. To give an example: Strabo, writing towards the end of the first century bc observes that Britain had a reputation ... log in or subscribe to read full text