The Roman Invasion of AD 43:
The Kent Case

Nigel Nicolson argues the case that the landing site of the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 must have been in Kent

During the past few years a controversy has slowly been gaining momentum concerning the site of D-Day in AD 43. Kent people assume that the Romans landed at Richborough; Sussex people say they landed near Chichester. Admittedly, a certain county bias affects this discussion. At a conference called in October 1999 by the Sussex Archaeological Society the audience voted overwhelmingly for Sussex. At the Faversham seminar convened by the Council for Kentish Archaeology in April 2001 the voting was 300 to 5 for Kent.

The Case for Debate
In this summary of the controversy, I will endeavour to present the evidence fairly, but must first declare an interest as the organizer, with Tom La Dell, of a monument which we raised in 1998 on the east bank of the Medway opposite Snodland church. It bears this inscription:

This stone commemorates
the battle of the Medway
in AD 43
when a Roman army
crossed the river
and defeated the British tribes
under Caratacus

The monument was co-sponsored by the Kent Archaeological Society and the Maidstone Museum, and the inscription was worded with the help of the county archaeologist, Dr John Williams. Alongside the stone was mounted an explanatory board which described, with maps, the course of the campaign.

The monument and board were erected in March 1998. A few months later, Professor Barry Cunliffe of Oxford, in his new history of the Fishbourne Roman Palace, wrote that there was a ‘compelling case’ for suggesting that the main Roman landing was not in Kent but in the Solent area, with its focus on Chichester. What better place, he asked, could there be for the invasion to begin than ‘in the heart of Verica’s territory, where the Romans might expect a friendly reception?’ Verica was a minor British princeling who had been exiled to Rome by his own subjects. Would the Romans receive a friendly welcome if they attempted to restore him? But Cunliffe concluded that it would make ‘good strategic and political sense’.

This statement, from so formidable a scholar, caused consternation among the backers of our Medway monument. Had we put it in the wrong place? We began to examine afresh the evidence which had convinced historians from Haverfield to Peter Salway that the Romans landed in east Kent and fought their major battle on the banks of the River Medway.

A Battle on the Medway?
The first argument for Kent is that the Roman commander, Aulus Plautius, would have chosen the shortest possible invasion route across the Channel from Boulogne. His fleet was huge, amounting to about 1,000 ships carrying four legions with their auxiliaries, horses and impedimenta. They needed a base in Britain which would have rapid communications with France and afford a large deep-water harbour with easy access inland. Such a base was Richborough, which lay above a channel of the sea, the Wantsum. It has long been known that a double-ditch cut off the peninsula, dated by pottery and coins to the reign of Claudius, and it has been suggested by Brian Philp that it is the remaining site of a vast camp, large enough to accommodate the entire army.

Richborough is the first and most important footprint that the invasion has left us; there are others. First, at Syndale near Faversham the Kent Archaeological Field School has discovered a small Roman fort, underlying Watling Street, which is datable to the same period. Secondly, in 1957 a hoard of golden Roman coins was found at Bredgar, near Sittingbourne, the latest minted in AD 42. It is reasonable to presume that it was deposited by an officer in anticipation of a battle that he did not survive. Thirdly, at Eccles, within a quarter-mile of the Medway, the late Dr Detsicas excavated a Roman villa and found beneath it Roman military ditches of the same period. The ditches had been left open a very short time, and it is unlikely that the Romans would have sited a fort there except in connection with a crossing of the river in AD 43.

Our chief classical authority for the invasion is the Greek historian Cassius Dio, who wrote some 150 years after the event, and seems to have based his narrative on contemporary campaign reports and the lost books of Tacitus’ Annals. He tells us that Aulus Plautius, after some minor skirmishes with the natives, came to a river which ran south of the Thames across the line of the Roman advance. It was wide, rapidly flowing, perhaps tidal, and the Britons were so confident that the Romans could not cross it without a bridge, that they assembled their forces ‘rather carelessly’, says Dio, on the far bank. Plautius attacked in two directions. First he sent a cohort of Batavians to swim the river and cripple the British chariots. Next he ordered Vespasian, the future Emperor, to find a crossing further upstream, and lead his legion, later augmented to two legions, to attack the Britons on their other flank. It is my belief that he crossed by the Snodland ford, where we have placed our monument. There followed a two-day battle in which the Romans were victorious. The Britons retreated across the Thames, to be pursued by the legions now under the command of the Emperor Claudius in person, who joined the
army for the capture of Camulodunum (Colchester), the main tribal capital in the south-east.

The literary, archaeological and topographical evidence all point to a Kentish campaign with its decisive battle on the Medway. We must now examine the alternative theory, that the main body of Roman forces landed in the Solent near Chichester.

A Roman Invasion near Chichester
First, let us consider the difficulty of transporting so vast an army to the Solent. Gerald Grainge, the foremost authority on this aspect of the controversy, has estimated that the voyage would have taken between two-and-a-half and three days, given the contrary tides and prevailing wind. What Roman general would have chosen this route, which had been largely abandoned since Julius Caesar defeated the Veneti, when he had the shorter, easier and better-known route to the Kent coast?

Moreover, if Plautius had disembarked his army near Chichester, he would have put it at a double disadvantage. First, the fleet would have had no further role in south Sussex. As the army advanced inland, it would have been unsupported, compared to the ease of reinforcement and supply through the Thames and Medway estuaries if the campaign had been directed through Kent. No general of his experience would have been guilty of such a strategic error.

Secondly, he would not have landed his army at a point where it was separated from its ultimate objective, Camulodunum, by the impenetrable forest of the Weald.

Combat in the Weald
J. F. Hind, who was the first to argue the case for a Sussex landing, assumed that the army would have little difficulty in marching through the Weald, and Cunliffe seems to agree. Both historians place the two-day battle on the Arun. When we examine the condition of the Weald in the 1st century, both assumptions seem untenable. According to Frank Jessup, the deep clay and tangled forest had always made the Weald an impassable barrier to movement across it. Ivan Margery, the authority on Roman roads in the south-east, supposed that there may have been a few east-west tracks along the ridges, but none south-north. Cleere and Crossley, in The Iron Industry in the Weald, assert that the western Weald was left untouched until Tudor times.

Significantly, Dr David Bird, a foremost supporter of the Sussex landing, in his article on the Claudian invasion in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology (19.1 2000), concludes that ‘a crossing of the Weald would have been out of the question’. He suggests that the Romans skirted it to the west, and fought the two-day battle on the Wey and the Mole, a long way from the estuary of the Thames.

Senior Roman commanders would have remembered how, in AD 9, Varus lost his three legions in the Thuringian forest because there was no room for manoeuvre. How much greater the difficulties would have been in the Weald. The Arun is not the formidable river that Dio describes. It is narrow enough to be bridged by felling tall trees on both banks, but if, as proposed, the Romans crossed it near Pulborough, the battle would take place in dense forest, impossible terrain with cavalry on the Roman side and chariots on the British. After victory, the Romans would have to force their way with wheeled vehicles across swamps and fallen thickets. The quick dash to the Thames estuary, which Dio describes, would have been impossible.

There is one argument on which the pro-Sussex school have relied. Dio tells us that in its initial advance to the river, Plautius accepted the surrender of part of the Bodunni, a tribe usually equated with the Dobunni whose territory was centred on Cirencester. As this is a long way from Chichester, Hind supposed that a flying column was detached from the main army to conquer this remote province. If so, why did only ‘part of’ the Dobunni surrender, as Dio says? Could he not mean a detachment which had enlisted under Caratacus in Kent?

But say that Hind’s hypothesis is correct, and that the bulk of the Roman army remained round Chichester preparing to march through the Weald. What would they have been doing? What would they have done in any case on first setting foot ashore? They would have constructed a vast stockaded camp, as they did at Richborough. No such fortifications have been found at Fishbourne. There are only minor unfortified buildings which could be associated with Vespasian’s subsequent conquest of the west. In short, a survey of the area and the Weald has discovered no footprints of
a Sussex invasion such as we find in Kent.

Does it really matter? Yes, I think it does. The Roman invasion of Britain was an event of supreme importance in our national history, and the river battle, wherever it took place, was the most decisive of all battles on British soil except Hastings, since it led directly to the Roman occupation of Britain for the next 350 years. We need to know as much as possible about it, not solely as an academic exercise, but for the same reasons that we wish to know what happened at Naseby and Waterloo. If the Sussex hypothesis were to prevail, it would be necessary to rewrite the first chapter of all histories of Britain, all school text-books, all local guidebooks.

Formidable new evidence is required to overturn the consensus of every scholar until Hind that D-Day lay in Kent. I do not believe that this evidence has yet been forthcoming, or that it is likely to be found.