The Emergence of the English. By Susan Oosthuizen. Past Imperfect. 180mm. Pp viii + 140, 7 figs. ARC Humanities Press, Leeds, 2019. isbn 9781641891271. £16.95 (pbk).

Abstract

sections, themselves split into subsections. The main sections are: the Invasion of Britain in AD  and subsequent military operations (sections –); Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall (sections –); the later second and early third centuries (sections –); such topics as soldier and civilian, administration, the economy and religion (sections –) –which together cover approximately half the entries – and the final two sections ( and ), which return to the historical order and cover the third and fourth centuries. Items selected by Tomlin for inclusion are designated by main section number, and then numerically, so ‘.’ as quoted below means the nineteenth text in section , a system that is simple and works well. One difficulty that Tomlin faced will have been to decide into which section to put some of the items – thus the famous writing tablet from Vindolanda (.) written by Claudia Severa, the wife of the commanding officer, to Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of a fellow officer, is given in a sub section on Vindolanda in main section  – an early chronological section preceding the section devoted to Hadrian’s Wall – whereas it would have been tempting to put it in section  (Soldier and Civilian in the subsection entitled ’equestrian officers and their families’). There is only one case where this reviewer disagrees with Tomlin’s interpretation and that is the inscription round the mouth of the Ilam Staffordshire cup (.), and Tomlin’s taking the name Aelii with Valli – ‘the Wall of Aelius’, ie of Hadrian, while it almost certainly goes with Draconis ‘(the property) of Aelius Draco’. For this name, possibly the same man, see Henzen et al (, ,), Rome T Aelius Aug. lib Draco. Of course any second edition of Britannia Romana would also include inscriptions found after Tomlin’s closing date of , such as the inscription from Dorchester (Tomlin ), the tombstone of a veteran of Legion II Augusta comparable to the tombstone of the Veteran of the same legion from Alchester, Oxon (.), and, like that, useful in tracing the changing location of the legion in the first years of the Roman occupation. In conclusion it is often said that there are too many books on Roman Britain and readers – and possibly reviewers! – may well agree. However, if this statement is limited to books based on the historical or epigraphic source or one confined to the historical sources themselves, this is certainly not true; and it is hard to conceive of any other writer who would have the knowledge to produce a work like Britannia Romana or one who would have had the ability to have read texts like the Bloomberg documents or lead curse tablets from Bath or Uley in the first place.