Roman Yorkshire

Yorkshire was part of the Roman Empire for about 340 years and the remains of the period are all around us to this day. They range from the Roman fortress walls at York to the sites of country villas and humbler farmsteads. The region’s museums are full of Roman objects from fine sculpture to the pottery and metalwork used in daily life. Place-names like Catterick and Doncaster remind many of us that we still live where the Romans once set up camp.

Patrick Ottaway has written an enthralling and authoritative account of these early years of our county’s history, which recounts not only the story of the soldiers and emperors, who usually figure so prominently in accounts of the Roman period, but that of the lives of the ordinary citizens, ploughing their fields, tending their cattle and spinning their cloth as they had done for centuries past and would continue to do until the modern era.

Topics include:

The environment and landscape of the Yorkshire region

The search for Roman Yorkshire

Romans and natives before the Conquest

The Roman conquest of the Yorkshire region

The Yorkshire region in the early Roman period

From Hadrian to the Severi

Septimius Severus in Yorkshire

From the Severi to the House of Constantine

Decline and fall

Yorkshire’s Roman legacy

170 illustrations, tables and maps

Review:

'This book presents an important and up to date synthesis of Roman Yorkshire. Patrick Ottaway has spent much of his career as a field archaeologist in York and this volume thus provides an up to date and well informed description of archaeological as well as textual evidence. Its comprehensive coverage will makes this a key work for all interested in the subject, and a starting point for any future study. The location of the area at the interface of the military zone and civil province of Roman Britain also makes Ottaway's study an invaluable account of issues of broader significance within Roman studies.'

Prof Martin Millett

Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge.