Britannia Prima: Britain's Last Roman Province

This important work counters the widely held view that the creation of the four provinces of later Roman Britain was an irrelevance - a short-lived hiccup on the way to the demise of the whole country as part of the Roman Empire. In fact Britannia Prima - broadly the West of Britain - had, from the fourth to the late sixth century, a distinctive Romano-British character and cohesiveness that the other provinces did not have or rapidly lost in the face of the Germanic conquest. For two hundred years the province successfully resisted significant Anglo- Saxon penetration, and parts of the province managed to hold out against full conquest and absorption until the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century. In short Romano-British urbanism was kept alive longer than anywhere else in Britain, and led to the development of strongly Christian states which ultimately became the kingdoms of Wales.