McCarthy's intention in this book is to write a sort of Romano-British Fanfare for the Common Man. Most of these people — free, freed, or enslaved — made up 90 per cent of the Romano-British population and lived in the countryside. M. sets out his basic premises in ch. 1, arguing that human life in sedentary societies at marginally above subsistence level is dominated by three primary survival strategies — earning a living, feeding kith and kin, and believing in some faith. His focus is on the peasants of Roman Britain, who, he argues, have been neglected by archaeology's focus on military sites, villas and towns. Were the Romano-British peasants all passive? Did they even care who the emperor or governor was? Similarly air-brushed out of many accounts of Roman Britain, according to M., is the physical geography of our island, its constraints, the sheer physicality of making ends meet through cultivation and animal husbandry. Suitably forewarned, the reader anticipates a re-evaluation of the social history of Roman Britain.

Subsequent chapters do not quite deliver such a re-appraisal. Ch. 2 discusses in detail the physical geography of Roman Britain, the different farming regions, the nature of the province's soils, what could be grown where and when, and the climate. Ch. 3 introduces the people in general terms. It is not a promising start since we learn that they are ‘largely faceless and have no voice’. We know roughly how many people there were — ‘low millions’ — and something about their health — probably not good due to the physical and outdoor nature of working the land. Homes were either in strip-houses in the lowlands or in enclosures containing Iron Age style roundhouses in the uplands. M. remarks, quite rightly, that away from major roads, towns or military establishments, rural life seems to have carried on oblivious to the major political events of Roman annexation.

Ch. 4 deals with farming and we learn that the necessities of farming meant working according to some sort of calendrical system. Farming land must have been assessed somehow for taxation purposes but we have no means of interpreting how the provincial administration did this. A frequent feature of the book is M.'s resort to highlighting information from later historical periods, to offer at least some idea of what may have been present in Roman Britain. The Domesday Book categories of land classification would thus probably have been relevant a millennium earlier. The chapter concludes with descriptions of ploughing, harvesting, working with livestock and agricultural tools. Ch. 5 provides the non-agricultural counterpoint in the lives of Romano-British peasants. Topics such as salt extraction, quarrying and stone-working, iron-working, transport networks, and pottery and tile manufacture are fully discussed.

The people and peasants of Roman Britain finally make their entrance in a concluding chapter entitled ‘Society’. Again M. laments the restrictions of archaeological evidence and attempts to go beyond its constraints to draw some insight from the work of historians and social anthropologists. Some people in Roman Britain lived in hierarchical communities where family lineages, coercive power, and unequal access to resources were the norm; others, presumably in the uplands, lived in thinly populated landscapes with flatter social structures. Pre-Roman Iron Age society, especially in the South-East, was tri-partly organised — kings, commoners and slaves. In the Roman period many people were tied to the land and there seems to have been a progressive elimination of the free-peasant in later Roman Britain; even the emergence of payments and dues to a landlord looks suspiciously like an early form of lordship. Slave numbers are difficult to estimate. Foreigners comprised most of the military, especially in the early period, retinues accompanying the emperor on imperial visits, and traders. The final section of the book — ‘Envoi’ — poses questions about the knowledge of the Roman annexation in rural areas, and whether the élite or the commoners were at all politically conscious in the sense of overt or covert resistance.

The idea behind this book is a good one and M. is to be congratulated in shedding some light on the lives of the poorest in Roman Britain. The text is full of the practicalities of subsistence farming and craft-working. It is a very archaeological book however, dealing with the physical geography and the material remains. But these are somehow divorced from the peasants whom M. seeks to champion. A more difficult book, but one which might have been a little more revealing, would have been to start with the speculative social categorisations of the concluding chapter, then introduce the archaeological evidence, trying to effect links between the two along the way.