I owe English Heritage an apology. In last week’s column I was scornful of the content of the short historical documentary they show every half hour on a screen suspended above the ruins of Lullingstone Roman Villa. Specifically, I took issue with the idea expressed in the film’s narrative that Romans — or Romanised Britons — were social climbers obsessed with material gain, upward mobility and dinner parties. My objection was based not on historical knowledge to the contrary, but on a suspicion, sometimes amounting to wild paranoia, that our communist rulers are pointedly insinuating their miserable secular morality, their vulgar materialism and their anti-English sentiment even into the public pronouncements of cultural organisations such as dear old English Heritage.
But according to the Oxford History of Roman Britain by Peter Salway, which I turned to after my visit to Lullingstone, the narration was in fact spot-on.
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