All Scholars

Francis Haverfield was trained in text criticism and annotation by Henry Nettleship (1839-93), whose Kleine Schriften and commentary (with John Conington-1825-69) of Virgil’s Eclogues & Georgics he would subsequently edit. During his years at Lancing he first began his study of Tacitus and also began his interest in the Roman remains in Britain. When he read Theodor Mommsen’s (1817-1903) Roman Provinces in 1885 he developed new insight into Rome’s management of distant provinces. He wrote to Mommsen, who responded with suggestions regarding Roman inscriptions in Britain. Mommsen’s student Emil Hübner (1834-1901), had edited the seventh volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum in 1871, which was devoted to British inscriptions, and later updated it with three supplements, but Mommsen found errors and offered the job of editing the next revision to Haverfield, then still a master at Lancing. Haverfield produced a fourth supplement in 1890, on the basis of which he was invited to Oxford. He produced a fifth volume in 1913.  He received encouragement from Henry Francis Pelham (1846-1907), who trained him on the dig at Cumberland and whom he would succeed as Camden Professor of Ancient History. That chair is named for the first man to systematically catalogue the Roman leavings in Britain, Wiliam Camden (1551-1623). Previously the study of Roman inscriptions in Britain were passed over as “the playground of the amateur,” hut it was Haverfield who professionalized the study. He regularly devoted summers to excavations, first at Cumberland with Pelham, and then Corbridge, then the Roman fort at Hardknott (Mediobogdum) in Cumbria. He regularly encouraging students to join him instructing them, “The spade is mightier than the pen.” He raised funds to support these and other projects and regularly published his findings in local archaeological magazines and histories of numerous counties in the Victoria County History Series. To be certain that his discoveries would be known internationally, summaries of his yearly finds appeared in the Jahrbuch des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Institut from1900 to 1913. Ancient Town-Planning was an expanded lecture that developed recently uncovered material from Miletus and Priene to affirm that the Greeks used a “chess-board” pattern in building towns, while Romans may have used a concept of square blocks set at right angles. In his lecture on the Romanization of Roman Britain, he declared that however much pf local provincial culture, custom, and religion might last after Roman occupation, each province became not a part of Rome, but Rome itself. His bibliography contains over 500 items. 

       Following the establishment of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Haverfield took a leading role in sponsoring the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies in 1910, which published the Journal of Roman Studies to which Haverfield regularly contributed. The Society collectively and Haverfield individually supported the British School at Rome, established in 1901 and given a Royal Charter in 1912.  At the end he had hope to produce an edition of the Agricola, but was only able to provide an introduction to a revision of Furneaux’s edition.