The Battle of the Medway AD43
Members of our Society will recall that two years ago the Council authorised by a large majority the erection of a monument to celebrate the battle which took place between the Romans and Britons on the west bank of the Medway between Aylesford and Rochester. It has been described as the most decisive battle, apart from Hastings, ever fought on British soil, for it led directly to the conquest of Britain and its occupation by the Romans for the next 350 years.
The memorial was put in place in March 1998. It consists of a five-ton block of Kentish ragstone (donated by the quarry owner, Pat Gallagher) and a vandal-proof board mounted alongside it to explain with the help of maps how the Roman army, sent to conquer Britain by the Emperor Claudius, landed at Richborough, advanced to the Medway, fought a victorious two-day battle there, crossed the Thames, and captured the tribal capital of Camulodunum (Colchester). For this last phase, Claudius himself joined the army for the sake of claiming a triumph when he returned to Rome.
It was not our intention to identify the exact site of the battle, but to commemorate the battle itself. We placed the memorial on the east embankment of the river facing Snodland church, and approached by a public footpath from Burham old church. We chose that site because it seemed possible that Vespasian, the future Roman Emperor, then in command of one of the army's four legions, may have been guided to the Snodland ford, and crossed the river at this point while other troops crossed nearer to Rochester. The inscription, which was cut into the stone by Karl Vizi, says simply:
'This stone commemorates
the battle of the Medway
in A.D. 43
when a Roman army
crossed the river
and defeated the British tribes
under Caratacus'
The Maidstone Museum, which co-sponsored the memorial with the Society, hope to arrange an opening ceremony in the spring of 1999. But there is a snag. Our sister-society, the Sussex Archaeological Society, have challenged the siting of our monument. They say that the literary, topographical and archaeological evidence suggest that the Romans landed not in east Kent, but in Chichester harbour, and that the battle took place not on the Medway but on the Arun.
We do not accept this variation of a story which has been upheld by every major historian of Roman Britain since Haverfield. Scholars as eminent as Collingwood, Freer, Richmond, Jessup, Salway, Detsicas and Philp have had little doubt that the main invasion forces landed at Richborough and fought on the Medway, allowing the possibility that a small detachment may have been sent to the Solent area in order to restore the pro-Roman ruler, Verica.
Our antagonists, led by Professor Barry Cunliffe, the excavator of Fishbourne Roman Palace, claim that 'a compelling case' can be made out for the main landing in Chichester harbour, from where the army would have advanced through the Weald, to cross the Thames near its estuary.
Such a strategy supposes that the Romans undertook an unnecessarily long sea-crossing from Boulogne instead across the Straits to Richborough, landed in a part of the coast which was relatively unknown to them, marched through an almost impenetrable forest, the Weald, and fought a major battle in the middle of it to dispute the crossing of the Arun, a negligible barrier compared to the Medway. The Romans planned the invasion as a combined operation, but if they had landed at Chichester, the fleet would have had no further role, compared to the support it would have given the army along the north shore of Kent, the Thames estuary and the Essex creeks.
It sounds most implausible. So we will defend our monument as gallantly as Caratacus defended his kingdom, relying not only on the Claudian ditches at Richborough, the Bredgar hoard and the account of the campaign by the historian Dio Cassius, but on the strategic instinct of a Roman general that you set your army ashore where its future operations will develop most easily, and not in a backwater separated from your ultimate objective, Camulodunum, by a vast, almost uninhabited forest.
Nigel Nicolson
