ROMANISED HAS ADDED A LITTLE EXTRA CONTENT TO SPICE UP THIS PIECE FROM THE PAST, SHARING OUR EXPERT KNOWLEDGE OF LOST ROMAN REALMS…

This article is a brain poppingly long read, so we have split it into a 3 parter which we’ll drip feed to you over the next couple of days.

PART 1:

THE ORIGINS OF ISARA BRIGANTIUM

The Leeds of today is one of the most important cities in England, if not mainland Europe. For all this prestige it is not the capital of its own kingdom. However would you believe that there was a once a time when it was? 

1500 years ago what we now call Leeds was at the centre of an ancient kingdom called Elmet. Here follows its story – a tale whose origins may lie in a time long before the arrival of the Romans. 

QUEEN CARTIMANDUA OF THE CELTS

The name Britain first enters the world stage in the mysterious writings of a Greek Sailor. Around the year 300 BC Pytheas of Massalia, then a Greek colony, took a voyage of exploration to the ends of the known world. Many doubted his discoveries as were the fabulous exploits of Marco Polo considered fabrication of truth by many pea brained naysayers many centuries later.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Of course Massalia is better know nowadays as Marseille, that picturesque French coastal resort. This was approximately 2300 years  His description was of a records a triangular land mass, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Later on Brutus of Troy is claimed as the founding father of these sceptered isles. There is also a tantalisingly scant reference to these lands recorded in the Biblical Old Testament, where a distant land referred to as ‘the islands’ are cited in the book of Jeremiah.  The first written records for the north of Britain are the works of Greek and Roman historians. They tell how the Pennine uplands were occupied by a tribe called the Brigantes. They were ruled by a queen called Cartimandua. After the Roman conquest, Brigantia became a client kingdom of the Romans. Effectively this meant that the Romans had a friendly power between them and the openly hostile tribes further north while Cartimandua had a strong military power backing up her rule. This worked well until the mid 50s AD, when Cartimandua broke with her husband and took a new consort. The result was civil war. Eventually a peace was brokered between the two factions but it couldn’t last. When the Roman Empire descended into turmoil on the death of Nero in AD 69, Cartimandua’s husband tried again. The Romans had to step in to rescue Cartimandua and finally had to move north to suppress the whole region.

The story seems to suggest that the Brigantes were not really one tribe but several groups or clans brought together under the control of a strong leader. Some of these groups may have been pro Roman, some of them anti. This might in part account for the way in which the north descended into civil war. Cartimandua’s faction was broadly pro-Roman and her husband’s anti. We do not know how they were organized or where Cartimandua’s main residence might have been. Victorian antiquaries suggested places like Castle Hill at Almondbury or the hill fort at Barwick in Elmet to the east of Leeds. This seems unlikely and modern archaeologists would favour Stanwick in North Yorkshire.

MYSTERIOUS FORTIFICATIONS

It is possible that one of these groups or clans was centred in the area of what is now Leeds. Ralph Thoresby the Leeds antiquarian noted in 1715 that there was a large earthwork surrounded by a single deep ditch on Quarry Hill (the area where the Leeds Playhouse now stands). More on this later. Thoresby thought that this might have been Roman or Saxon, but the hill top location make it seem much more likely that it was probably pre-Roman, a Celtic hilltop fortress known as an Oppidum dating from the Iron Age, preceding the Roman invasion of AD. 43 There was a similar earthwork on Woodhouse Moor which is still remembered by the street name Rampart Road.

Thoresby was probably wrong when he suggested that this earthwork might be Roman in origin. Roman forts tend to have straight sides with rounded corners rather like a playing card. Geophysical surveys have located one near Adel. They also generally chose flat areas rather than on the tops of hills. Both these structures are likely to have been unoccupied by the time of the Roman invasion. This certainly seems to have been the case where similar sites have been excavated elsewhere in the north of England.

Check back on Romanised tomorrow for Part 2…