Edge of the empire

Afrian Goldsworthy on the thrill of rebuilding Britain’s Roman past in his novel Brigantia

Was Roman Britain as wild and dangerous as we might imagine? Probably. I see these stories as Westerns set in c100 AD. Frontiers by their nature bring together different people and ideas, and this was the outer fringes of the Roman empire, not long after the Romans arrived. We now know they would stay for 300 years, but at the time the locals did not. So this was a time of real transition.

How were you inspired by the real Vindolanda fort and the tablets there? Vindolanda is an incredibly atmospheric place and the finds – of shoes and the like – make you feel much closer to those who once lived there. The writing tablets give you glimpses into the everyday life of officers, merchants and their wives, and the idea of weaving stories around them had been growing in my mind for a long time. The first novel in the trilogy, Vindolanda, is based on the famous birthday party invitation from the wife of one commander to another at Vindolanda.

Your book features Romans and Britons. Which did you find the most interesting to bring to life?

We know most about the Romans, though even then there is a lot we don’t know. For the locals, you have to invent a good deal. I wanted to have good and bad people on all sides, have them think and act differently, and create a plausible story that never conflicts with what we know.

Sources on this period are fairly scarce. Is that challenging or freeing? It’s very different from my ‘day job’ of writing non-fiction about Rome, but it’s liberating. We know next to nothing about the events in Britain in these years. That’s frustrating for a historian, but a great opportunity for a novelist – I have the freedom to make things fit the story. As a historian it’s my duty to admit what we don’t know; as a novelist, I fill in the gaps.