Caesar's First Invasion: Landing in Kent, 55 BC
Who Fought
Two Roman legions (Legio VII and Legio X) carried in eighty transport ships, plus an unknown number of warships; eighteen additional transports of cavalry were to sail separately. British forces not specified in the sources.
History & Significance
In the course of his Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar invaded Britain twice: in 55 and 54 BC. On the first occasion, Caesar took with him only two legions, and achieved little beyond a landing on the coast of Kent. The second invasion was more substantial, consisting of 800 ships, five legions and 2,000 cavalry. The force was so imposing that the Celtic Britons did not initially contest Caesar's landing, waiting instead until he began to move inland. Caesar eventually penetrated into Middlesex and crossed the Thames, forcing the British warlord Cassivellaunus to pay tribute to Rome and setting up Mandubracius of the Trinovantes as a client king. The Romans then returned to Gaul without conquering any territory.
Caesar included accounts of both invasions in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, which contains the earliest surviving significant eyewitness descriptions of the island's people, culture and geography. This is effectively the start of the written history, or at least the protohistory, of Great Britain.
Britain had long been known to the classical world as a source of tin. The coastline had been explored by the Greek geographer Pytheas in the 4th century BC, and may have been explored even earlier, in the 5th century, by the Carthaginian sailor Himilco. But to many Romans, the island, lying as it did beyond the Ocean at what was to them the edge of the known world, was a land of great mystery. Some Roman writers even insisted that it did not exist and dismissed reports of Pytheas's voyage as a hoax.
Britain during the reign of Julius Caesar had an Iron Age culture, with an estimated population of between one and four million. Archaeological research shows that its economy was broadly divided into lowland and highland zones. In the lowland southeast, large areas of fertile soil made possible extensive arable farming, and communication developed along trackways, such as the Icknield Way, the Pilgrims' Way and the Jurassic Way, and navigable rivers such as the Thames. In the highlands, north of the line between Gloucester and Lincoln, arable land was available only in isolated pockets, so pastoralism, supported by garden cultivation, was more common than settled farming, and communication was more difficult. Settlements were generally built on high ground and fortified, but in the southeast, oppida (fortified towns) had begun to be established on lower ground, often at river crossings, suggesting that trade was becoming more important. Commercial contact between Britain and the continent had increased since the Roman conquest of Transalpine Gaul in 124 BC, and Italian wine was being imported via the Armorican peninsula, much of it arriving at Hengistbury Head in Dorset.
The ground they fought on
The site of Caesar's First Invasion: Landing in Kent, 55 BC lies on White Chalk Subgroup, bedrock that formed in the Maastrichtian. The rock here is chalk.
Before a single Roman soldier set foot on British soil, the man Caesar trusted with gathering intelligence about the island refused to leave his ship. The tribune Gaius Volusenus spent five days cruising the Kent shoreline in a single warship, peering at the beaches and cliffs but never landing, because he did not dare entrust himself to the barbarians waiting on the shore. He returned to Caesar with whatever could be observed from the water, and on that slender foundation of second-hand glimpses and the evasive answers of merchants who had no wish to see their cross-Channel trading monopoly broken, Caesar assembled eighty transport ships and sailed two legions into waters no Roman army had crossed before.
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- Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain · Wikipedia