When the Romans first came to Britain, carried across the sea on a wave of ambition and curiosity in the middle of the first century BC,

they found there, at the edge of the earth, a land of dark forests, mysterious gods, and hostile natives.

As Julius Caesar's legions marched forth into the hinterlands, their defensive fortifications

complete behind them, warships arrayed along the shore. It soon became clear that a patchwork of chariot-riding Celtic nations

held sway over the island. Some of them were closely related to the Gallic and

Belgian tribes already well known to Caesar after his lengthy campaigns across the channel. The vast majority of them

didn't take too kindly to the Roman invasion of their homeland. After two concurrent expeditions

in 55 and 54 BC, each as bitterly contested as the last.

Caesar eventually succeeded in subjugating the natives of the extreme southeasterly region

of the island, exacting oaths of allegiance from the nobility and trade rights from the people

who lived there. Though before long, political events

in Gaul and at the very heart of Rome itself took him and his legions far away to the

south, never to return. The various chiefs and war leaders of the Britons might have honoured their oaths for a time,

though, as the years turned into decades, for many the Romans became little more than a lingering

ghost, a story to scare their children.

It would be a century before they returned again, though this time they were here to stay.

Making landfall in 43 AD, the armies of the Roman general Orlus Plortius, dispatched on behalf of the Emperor Claudius, and numbering some 20,000 legionaries, swept over the tribes of the southeast, making light work of the

still fragmented nations who held sway there. By 60 AD, the Romans had taken over all of the lands south of the Humber, gradually beginning

the Romanization of the natives.

But, of course, they didn't stop there.

Next, the lands of the far north were on the agenda.

For the Romans, the very ends of the far north were on the agenda.

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