Professor Rob Collins

So a great, great example here is the Franks along the middle and lower Rhine.

There are peace treaties with the Franks and many of those Franks are brought into the Roman army.

And so you get people that might be ethnically Frankish, but they're still professionally Roman soldiers.

And so what were formerly barbarian communities become, you know, new limited communities.

And that's a very plausible scenario here that within Northern Britain, they think, well, actually, you know what?

We know those barbarian communities that live north of Hadrian's Wall or some like the Votedini, for example, that we put into Ukraine law.

Those could be acceptable allies and they're shoring up the soldiers from drawing on those.

Yeah, there's certainly, whether they're friends or enemies, there's connections.

So we know that those connections exist.

We've always known those connections exist.

Roman generals, Roman governors are using diplomacy and trade and exchange as tools of power and leverage as much as they're using the sword and the spear.

The Romans are not silly or stupid people and they're also not particularly subtle either.

They know they're in charge and they want to stay in charge and so they'll use all those tools at their disposal.

We have to also think carefully around, well, who do we see as being local?

We can't necessarily just define local as Roman.

What is a Briton and what is a Roman Briton?

You might have someone who's not legally a Roman citizen, but is still considered Roman culturally.

Someone that might technically be a barbarian actually still might have greater wealth and legal status in the Roman Empire because they're an elite barbarian than the average Roman citizen would.

So it's not a black and white binary Roman barbarian soldier civilian mix.

It's much more nuanced.