Background Resources
The books I am writing are fiction, but the background has to be be based in fact (or at least acknowledging the facts). The stories are set in the period immediately after the Romans left Britannia (approximately 410 AD). This is a handy era to exploit for fiction as there are very few written sources for Britannia, and even those are suspect for partiality, namely it was in the interests of the revived Christian church to exaggerate the depths to which the land had sunk before they arrived on the scene. However, the archaeology of this era is constantly advancing and it is important to consider that dynamic provinces with their own history remained on the continental mainland. A good deal of this dynamism was a result of turbulent imperial politics and successive invasions by “barbarians”.
In this section I am intending to provide a selection of the literature I have consulted during my writing. I am not a professional historian, but I have spent many years practicing academic scientific research, and I still have need to show what material I have referred to when assembling my own ideas and putting them down in print.
This is a history of Roman Britain written by a well-known popular historian, and contains a lot of great illustrations. Villa Verdaris in “Memories” was based on the illustration on page 190.
This book is also a general introduction to Roman Britain. I used Chapter 4, “The end of Roman rule”, as a source in “Memories”.
Link to information on Roman Corinium. The Corinium described in Memories is imagined, not based explicitly on the illustration provided by the museum.