Postscript Remote from the Roman Nation

Abstract

After seven centuries and so much change, we come full circle on the subject of relations and interlinkages between the inhabitants of northern Britain and the Eternal City. Eighth-century Pictish rhetoric and ethnicity notwithstanding, remoteness from the Romans was seldom achieved between the Flavian conquest and the flourishing of Northumbria and Pictavia. The northern reaches of Britain were penetrated by Roman soldiers, sailors and others during the Roman Iron Age, almost certainly more times than is recorded in our thin textual record. In the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, the Roman religion was flowering among the Picts, the Northumbrians, the North Britons and the Argyll Gaels. Far from the Mediterranean basin, northern Britain none the less wrote its own chapter in the story of the transformation of the Roman world in the late Antique and early medieval centuries.