Name: Kids Rule! TV | Episode 2: The Romans
Uploaded: 2025-10-28T17:59:13.000Z
Duration: 26 min 43 s
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Hello, and welcome to Kids Rule tv, brought to you by English Heritage.

I'm Esme and I'll be your guide as we time travel through English history.

We'll be joined along the way by some fascinating historians and a few other helpers.

So if you've ever wondered if who built Stonehenge or how the Romans changed British history forever, then you've come to the right place.

In today's show, we're journeying back 2,000 years into the world of Roman Britain.

We'll discover how the Romans shaped our way of life today, including giving us fast food and a wall 73 miles long.

Joining us is curator Francis Mackintosh, who'll be sharing what life was like for children living in the Roman emp.

And we'll be sampling a Roman burger and showing you how to make a stunning Roman mosaic at home.

There's a lot to cover, so let's dive into this week's show.

Our journey begins back in AD 43, at a time when British history changed forever.

The Romans described Britain as a mysterious place inhabited by tribes of Britons and Celts.

They were attracted to Britain's precious natural resources, such as tin, gold and iron.

And Roman emperors, such as Caesar and Claudius wanted the glory of conquering Britain and adding it to their great empire.

Everything changed when the Roman army sailed over to Britain in wooden boats.

From Boulogne in France to the Kent coast, they first conquered the southeast of England before expanding west and north.

But the Romans didn't just fight, they also built.

As their territory grew, they expanded existing settlements into larger towns like London and Colchester.

They built stone forts, grand houses, and, of course, roads.

In fact, they built 10,000 miles of them, which, if laid end to end, would get you from London to Sydney in Australia.

They also brought with them great wealth, exotic foods and a new language called Latin.

Emperor Claudius hoped his army would conquer the whole of Britain.

But many tribes were unhappy about the Romans invading their land, especially those to the north.

So in 122 AD, Emperor Hadrian ordered a great wall to be built to separate Roman Britain from the land inhabited by tribes further north.

Let's find out more about life at the time.

And I know just the expert who can help us.

Can you tell everyone a bit about what you do at English Heritage?

That means I look after the objects from the sites that are in my patch.

And I cover an area including Hadrian's Wall and the north east, so quite a big area.

And I put together exhibitions, help researchers look at our collections and care for the objects alongside our conservators so that can use them to tell people stories about our sites and the people who lived here.

And I'm really lucky because no day is the same.

One week I'll be up a ladder cleaning bat poo from a 19th century organ at Brinkburn Priory.

The next I might be planning an exhibition, a house is full.

And then the next day I might be recording a program like this.

I'm curious to find out more about the Roman arrival in Britain nearly 2,000 years ago.

So the Roman army that came over consisted of about 40,000 men and that was split into two types of soldiers.

There was the Roman general at the time, he was Aulus Plautius, who was in charge, and

he had this invasion force and there were four Roman legions which are 5,000 men in each.

And then the other half were multi purpose auxiliary troops, which would include cavalry as well as infantry men on foot.

And so that gives that total of 40,000 men.

So it was quite the mission then, we think, with all the men, the animals that came with it, and

the supplies that the Roman navy probably needed, between 700 and 1,000 transport ships just to get them across the Channel.

And were the Romans welcomed with open arms by people living in Britain at the time?

And I think we probably can guess that by the fact they had to take 40,000 soldiers with them.

Britain at the time was ruled in different areas by different tribes.

One tribe is the Dubuni, who were based around Gloucestershire.

But a lot of the tribes really did put up a fight against the Romans.

Now, I've heard that the Romans brought elephants with them.

Well, if we believe Cassius Dio, it is true.

Cassius Dio says that once the battle at Colchester was almost won, Claudius was summoned by his general, Aulus Plautius, and

he came with his elephants and his bodyguards to kind of oversee the final defeat.

Really had a big impact, I think, on the Britons.

Who would never have seen something like that before.

And who were the key players in the invasion?

We've heard a bit about Emperor Claudius.

Claudius, or if we want to give him his full name, Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

He was an emperor who was never expected to be an emperor.

He came into power in 41 AD after his nephew Gaius, who tends to be known mostly as Caligula, was murdered.

When Caligula was murdered, Claudius was the only adult male of the Julio Claudian dynasty.

That wider family he was part of who was left alive and the bodyguard of the emperor, the Praetorian Guard, proclaimed him emperor.

Now, he'd never been expected to be emperor, but

because his family thought his disabilities, which included being slightly deaf and having a limp, made him unsuitable for public life.

So it was quite a big ask for him to become emperor.

And although his bodyguards supported him, he needed the wider support of the Senate, the governing body of Rome and the army.

And a really good way to do that was to have a military victory.

He only stayed as an emperor until 54 A.D.

when he died, but Britain remained part of the Roman Empire until 410 AD.

So that decision that he made to invade us in 43 had a really long lasting effect.

The other important emperor that people at home will surely have heard of is Hadrian, who famously ordered his army to build a wall named after him.

So Hadrian, also another big long name, he's called Publius Aelius Hadrianus and he was born in Rome and we know his actual birthday on the 24th of January AD 76.

Hadrian is known as a consolidated emperor.

So he stopped invading new places like all the emperors had before him, and

he focused on sorting out the borders of the current empire, so consolidating it, making it safer and drawing the lines.

Hadrian is also a really big fan of Greek culture, and

one aspect of this kind of culture was having beards.

So if you look at coins and statues of emperors before Hadrian, they're almost all clean shaven, no facial hair, but

Hadrian brings the beard in and that follows after him.

So what can you tell us about Hadrian's Wall?

I heard it only took six years to build the wall all by hand.

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Kids Rule! TV | Episode 2: The Romans

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