Army Cults and the First British Bishops

A province held by an army acquires the army's religion. Mithraism is attested in Britain at forts along Hadrian's Wall and by the mithraeum found beside the Walbrook in London, which fits the general pattern of a cult strong among soldiers, officers and officials. Alongside it stood the ordinary apparatus of Roman provincial religion: the imperial cult, temples to the standard gods in the towns, and the household observances of an immigrant population drawn from across the empire. Christianity was present by the third century.

Ramsay MacMullen's study of Christianisation is a reminder of how thin the evidence usually is for the early stages of that process anywhere, and Britain is no exception. What is documented is that Britain produced a martyr in Alban, whose date is disputed, and that bishops from Britain attended the Council of Arles in 314, which means that by then the province had an organised church with a recognised hierarchy. The atlas files Roman Britain as a polity rather than a region because it names a provincial administration with dates and boundaries, distinct from the island of Britain and from England, both of which are held here as regions. The province ends with the withdrawal of the field army early in the fifth century, and what happened to its religion after that is a separate and much murkier question.