# Britain and Romania: nearly 2,000 years of links, and what each left in the other

Two countries of almost the same size, 2,090 km apart. Twelve stops, each a trace you can check and often visit: a hoard of nails, a bronze diploma, a stage joke, a painting, jets built in Bucharest, a census.

In the late 80s AD a Roman army left an unfinished fortress in Scotland and buried some 875,000 nails. One explanation for the withdrawal is a war on the Danube, against the Dacians, in what is now Romania. That is where this story starts.

## 86–87: Rome buries 875,000 nails in Scotland

At Inchtuthil, in Perthshire, the Roman army began a legionary fortress and never finished it. Coins suggest the forts of northern Scotland were given up in late AD 86 or early 87; a museum catalogue dates the garrison’s withdrawal to between 87 and 90. Before leaving, the army buried about 875,000 iron nails.
Some historians connect the withdrawal with Domitian’s war against the Dacians, whose kingdom lay in what is now Romania. Troops were sent to that war from Britain, among them a legion, II Adiutrix. In a list of the disasters of those years Tacitus writes of “Britain subdued and immediately let go” and, a few words on, of the Dacians who “won fame by defeats inflicted and suffered”. He does not connect the two.

*Tacitus, Histories 1.2; Hobley 1989; Davies 1977; ANU Classics Museum*

## 106: A soldier from Leicester becomes a Roman citizen on the Dacian frontier

On 11 August 106, Marcus Ulpius Novantico, son of Adcobrovatus, from Ratae (today Leicester), a foot soldier in the First Cohort of Britons, was one of the men Trajan made Roman citizens before their service ended, for loyal conduct in the Dacian war. His bronze diploma was found at Porolissum, a Roman fort in Sălaj County, north-west Romania.
A second diploma, from Gherla in 133, may name another Briton: Sepenestus, son of Riv(i)us, whom a 2017 study reads as a Cornovian, a British people.

*CIL XVI 160; Davies 1977; Ivleva 2012; RMD I 35; Dana 2017*

## 205: Dacians on Hadrian’s Wall

The First Aelian Cohort of Dacians was stationed at Birdoswald, on Hadrian’s Wall. The falx, the Dacians’ curved blade, is carved on stones that record buildings of AD 205–208, put up with a Thracian cohort, and of AD 219. A tombstone found just west of the fort remembers Decibalus, an infant, and Blaesus, aged ten; Decibalus is a Dacian name. At Inveresk, near Edinburgh, two dishes are scratched with the names Decibalus and Drigissa, both read as Dacian.
A unit’s name does not prove where its men were born, and by the third century many of its recruits were probably local.

*RIB 1909, 1914, 1920; Brit. 43.35 and 43.36*

## 275–1578: Thirteen centuries in which the Romanian lands appear mostly in English books

After Rome gave up Dacia in the 270s, the Romanian lands appear in the English texts that the standard works cite mostly as names from old geography. An Old English version of Orosius, about 900, places the Dacians, “who were formerly Goths”, east of the Vistula lands. In Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, about 1370, a lady is praised for not sending her suitors off “into Walakye”, one far-off place named among others.
One of the earliest English journeys on record through Moldavia and Wallachia is William Harborne’s, in September and October 1578, on his way to Constantinople.

*Old English Orosius; Chaucer; Hakluyt, vol. V*

## 1582–1610: A Moldavian pretender on the London stage

In 1582 the London merchant John Newbery went up the Danube into Moldavia and wrote one of the earliest first-hand English descriptions of the country. In 1588 Prince Petru Șchiopul granted English merchants the right to trade there for a duty of three ducats in a hundred.
Ștefan Bogdan, a claimant to Moldavia’s throne, came to England in 1601 and again after 1606; James I wrote in support of his claim. In February 1610 the Venetian ambassadors reported that Lady Arbella Stuart, the king’s cousin, had complained of an allusion to her and “the Prince of Moldavia” in a comedy, and that the play was suppressed. Scholars identify it as Ben Jonson’s Epicoene. Bogdan announced in Venice in 1608 that he was engaged to her; how far she had agreed is debated.

*Purchas, vol. VIII; Hakluyt, vol. VI; Țipău 2018; Calendar of State Papers, Venice*

## 1848: The face of revolutionary Romania was a governess from Guernsey

Marie Grant was born in Guernsey in 1819 and went to Bucharest as a governess. She met C. A. Rosetti there, later a leading Romanian revolutionary, and they married. In 1848, when he was arrested, she and the painter Constantin Daniel Rosenthal followed the ships along the shore. At Svinița, on the Danube, she persuaded the Austrian mayor that the Ottomans had overstepped their authority, the guards were got drunk, and the couple fled to France.
Rosenthal’s România revoluționară (about 1850), one of his best-known paintings, is also a portrait of her. The National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest, holds it.

*Priaulx Library, Guernsey*

## 1916: Oil wells burned at Ploiești, a Scottish hospital at Medgidia

In December 1916, as German armies closed on Ploiești, the centre of Romania’s oil industry, a British-French-Romanian detachment led by the British officer John Norton-Griffiths destroyed or badly damaged hundreds of wells, tanks and refineries.
In 1916 a Scottish Women’s Hospitals unit led by Dr Elsie Inglis, attached to the Serbian Division, worked for three weeks at Medgidia, in Dobruja, then retreated to Brăila.

*Golubinov; McLaren 1920*

## 1939: A warning from a legation in London, a guarantee, a radio voice

On 17 March 1939 Viorel Tilea, Romania’s minister in London, called on the US ambassador, who reported that Tilea said the German demands “really meant the end of Rumania”. Bucharest denied there had been an ultimatum, and historians still disagree about how far Tilea exaggerated. On 13 April Chamberlain told the Commons that if Greek or Romanian independence were clearly threatened and the government concerned chose to resist, Britain would lend “all the support in their power”. The BBC began broadcasting in Romanian in 1939.
At Tâncăbești, north of Bucharest, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission looks after 83 Second World War graves, 81 of them airmen.

*FRUS 1939, vol. I, doc. 67; Hansard, 13 April 1939; CWGC*

## 1978: Jets designed in Britain, built in Bucharest

On 15 June 1978, during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s state visit to Britain, British Aerospace and the Romanian government signed an agreement for 82 BAC One-Eleven airliners to be produced in Romania by 1995, the early ones with British-supplied parts. The House of Lords was told it was worth over £300 million to Britain. Romania completed nine. The first flew at Bucharest on 18 September 1982, the last in April 1989.
Reference lists record that Ceaușescu was made an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1978 and that it was revoked in December 1989, the day before his execution.

*Hansard, Lords, 21 June 1978; BAE Systems Heritage; Wikipedia (honours)*

## 1990: The children of the orphanages, in a British A-level

After the 1989 revolution, families in Britain adopted children from Romanian institutions, and researchers at King’s College London followed them into adulthood. Those who had spent more than six months in an institution were three to four times as likely as other adoptees to have emotional problems as adults; as a group, their IQ deficits had recovered.
“Romanian orphan studies” are named in the AQA specification for A-level Psychology, taught in England.

*King’s College London, 2017; AQA 7181/7182*

## 2014: The crossing: from one flight at Luton to half a million people

On 1 January 2014, when work restrictions on Romanians in Britain ended, two MPs, Keith Vaz and Mark Reckless, went to Luton Airport to meet the morning flight from Romania. Most of its passengers already worked in Britain and were returning from Christmas at home.
The numbers that followed: in the year to March 2015, 152,360 National Insurance numbers were allocated to adult Romanian nationals, more than to any other nationality (allocations lag arrivals, so they include people who came earlier). At the 2021 census, 538,840 people in England and Wales had been born in Romania, against 79,687 in 2011, and 471,954 gave Romanian as their main language. Each circle on the map is one local authority, sized by its Romania-born residents.

*HuffPost UK; DWP 2015; ONS Census 2011 and 2021*

## 2026: A Romanian-built car at the top of the British charts, and a plane back on the Isle of Wight

The Ford Puma, assembled at Ford Otosan’s plant in Craiova, was Britain’s best-selling new car in 2023, 2024 and 2025, says Ford, citing industry figures: 55,488 were registered in 2025. In July 2026 Britten-Norman rolled out at Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight, the first Islander built in Britain since 1968. Islanders were later built under contract in Bucharest by IRMA, now Romaero.
The BBC announced a pilot, BBC News România, to start on 23 June 2026, eighteen years after its Romanian service closed in 2008.

*Ford, January 2026; The Aviationist, July 2026; BBC via AIB*

## Where to see the traces

Most of the objects in this story are in museums, libraries or on the ground. Whether an object is on display this month is for the museum to say, so check before you travel.

- **Tullie House Museum, Carlisle**: Holds the Birdoswald granary stone, RIB 1909, with its falx. (https://www.tulliehouse.co.uk/)
- **Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle**: Holds RIB 1914 (falx) and the Birdoswald tombstone RIB 1920. (https://greatnorthmuseum.org.uk/)
- **Birdoswald Roman Fort, Cumbria**: English Heritage site on Hadrian’s Wall, where the Dacian cohort was stationed. (https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/birdoswald-roman-fort-hadrians-wall/)
- **National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh**: Holds the Inveresk dish scratched “Decibalus”. (https://www.nms.ac.uk/)
- **Porolissum, Moigrad, Sălaj County**: The Roman fort and town where the diploma was found. (https://www.cimec.ro/)
- **National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest**: Holds Rosenthal’s România revoluționară. (https://www.mnar.arts.ro/)
- **SOAS Library, London**: Fifty letters from Constantin Brâncoveanu, prince of Wallachia, and Constantin Cantacuzino to Lord Paget, the English ambassador at Constantinople, 1693–1700, catalogued as open access. (https://library.soas.ac.uk/Record/PP_MS_4.02.59)
- **Bucharest War Cemetery, Tâncăbești**: Commonwealth war graves, cared for by the CWGC. (https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/54329/bucharest-war-cemetery/)
- **Sulina, on the Danube delta**: British graves from the Danube commission’s years; read the page on Sulina in 1856. (https://mariuscomper.uk/sulina-1856/)
- **Bembridge Airport, Isle of Wight**: Where Britten-Norman rolled out the first British-built Islander since 1968. (https://britten-norman.com/)

## Romania-born residents in your area

Type a council area in England or Wales. The 2021 census counted where people were born, so this is the number of residents born in Romania, not of Romanian ethnicity or citizenship.

England and Wales as a whole: 538,840 people, 0.9% of residents.

## About this page

Written by Marius Comper, International Editor at NewsNow and a member of the council of ACORD UK, the Advisory Council on Romanian Diaspora in the United Kingdom. ACORD describes itself as an independent, apolitical organisation that aims to advance the interests and boost the reputation of Romanians in the UK and to act as a connector between Romanian and other communities in the UK, and between Romanian and UK authorities. Its 2026 report says it was set up in 2025.
The council, as listed on acord.uk: Dr Alina Dolea (founder and chair), Adina Maglan (co-chair), Cristina Irimie (secretary), Dr Tudor Toma, Ramona Gonczol, Prof Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Marius Comper, Dr Oana Burcu, Mihai Bica and Bogdan Cronț.
In June 2026 ACORD UK and Bournemouth University published The Romanian Diaspora’s Contributions to the British Economy and Society. On 1 October two council members, Dr Alina Dolea and Professor Ruxandra Trandafoiu, summarised the findings in The Conversation: they write that Romanians are the fourth-largest foreign-born community in Britain, estimated at around 1.3 million people (a wider count than the census figure on this page, which covers only people born in Romania, in England and Wales); around one third hold university degrees; they rank ninth among all non-British nationalities in the NHS England workforce and make up 37% of EU construction workers in London; and ten people of Romanian heritage were elected in the 2026 local elections.

## What this page claims, and what it does not

- Every stop rests on the sources listed below. Where they disagree the page says so: coins put the withdrawal from northern Scotland in late 86 or early 87, a museum catalogue between 87 and 90; Hansard dates the One-Eleven agreement to 15 June 1978 and 82 aircraft, BAE Systems Heritage to 1979 and “as many as 80”.
- Some historians connect the withdrawal from Scotland with the Dacian war; that is an interpretation, not a record. Tacitus names the two in one list of disasters and does not connect them. The excavation record counts about 875,000 nails, and their weight varies by source.
- A unit named “of Dacians” or “of Britons” does not prove where each soldier was born. A recorded place of origin, as on the Novantico diploma, is better evidence, though an origin is not always a birthplace.
- Records of direct contact between 275 and 1578 are rare, and the evidence for them is mostly indirect; the page reports those found in the standard sources and does not claim there were none.
- Quotations from Tacitus follow the 1925 Loeb translation.
- Arcs on the map are schematic: they join the place a person or thing came from to the place it reached, not a route. Dashed arcs mark a link that historians infer.
- The census table counts people born in Romania. It excludes those born in Britain to Romanian parents, those of Romanian citizenship born elsewhere and all of Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose censuses are published separately. The 538,840 figure is the published total for England and Wales; the 331 area rows sum to 538,845, a difference of five that the source does not explain.
- The 2011 comparison uses areas whose boundaries did not change; where they did, no 2011 figure is shown.
- The honorary knighthood of 1978 and its revocation rest on secondary reference lists, not on an official notice. The BBC’s 2026 pilot is known from a trade summary of its announcement, and sources give the 1939 start of the Romanian service on different days, so only the year is stated.
- Pictures are public-domain or openly licensed; each caption names its author and licence.

## Sources

- [Tacitus, Histories 1.2 (Latin text; Loeb translation, 1925)](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Histories/1A*.html)
- [A. S. Hobley, “The numismatic evidence for the post-Agricolan abandonment of the Roman frontier in northern Scotland”, Britannia 20 (1989)](https://doi.org/10.2307/526156)
- [R. W. Davies, “Cohors I Cugernorum”, Chiron 7 (1977), pp. 385–392: n. 34 and p. 389 (German Archaeological Institute)](https://publications.dainst.org/journals/chiron/article/download/1439/5788/6313)
- [ANU Classics Museum: Inchtuthil nails](https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/classics-museum/catalogue/objects/five-roman-nails-201214)
- [CIL XVI 160 (the Porolissum diploma), with Ivleva, Britons Abroad (2012), appendix III](https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item:2964103/view)
- [D. Dana, “A hitherto unrecognised Cornovian on a Roman military diploma (RMD I, 35)”, Britannia 48 (2017)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/britannia/article/hitherto-unrecognised-cornovian-on-a-roman-military-diploma-rmd-i-35/36ECB41E6FD20FD05AE679A05F1120D5)
- [Roman Inscriptions of Britain: RIB 1909, 1914 and 1920 (Birdoswald)](https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1909)
- [RIB: Brit. 43.35 and 43.36 (dishes from Inveresk)](https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/Brit.43.35)
- [The Old English Orosius, geography section (transcription)](https://www.jassa.org/?p=3061)
- [Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, c. 1370](https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1374/chaucers-the-book-of-the-duchess-full-text--summar/)
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- [Foreign Relations of the United States 1939, vol. I, doc. 67 (Kennedy to Hull, 17 March 1939)](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1939v01/d67)
- [Hansard, House of Commons, 13 April 1939: the guarantee](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1939/apr/13/european-situation)
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- [Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Bucharest War Cemetery](https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/54329/bucharest-war-cemetery/)
- [Hansard, House of Lords, 21 June 1978, col. 1119: the One-Eleven agreement](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1978/jun/21/british-airways-re-equipment-programme)
- [BAE Systems Heritage: BAC One-Eleven (Rombac production)](https://heritage.baesystems.com/page/bac-one-eleven)
- [Wikipedia: list of revocations of UK honours (Ceaușescu, GCB 1978, revoked December 1989)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revocations_of_appointments_to_orders_and_awarded_decorations_and_medals_of_the_United_Kingdom)
- [Wikimedia Commons: CIL XVI 160, the Novantico diploma (find-place, date of issue, holding museum)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CIL_XVI_000160)
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- [AQA A-level Psychology specification 7181/7182, section 4.1.3 (Attachment)](https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/psychology/specifications/AQA-7181-7182-SP-2015.PDF)
- [HuffPost UK, 1 January 2014: Romanians on the first flight into Luton](https://huffingtonpost.co.uk/amp/entry/romanians-in-britain_n_4527298)
- [DWP: National Insurance number allocations to adult overseas nationals to March 2015](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/428250/nino-allocations-to_Mar-2015.pdf)
- [ONS Census 2021, table TS012 (country of birth, local authorities) via Nomis](https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/api/v01/dataset/NM_2032_1.def.sdmx.json)
- [ONS Census 2011, table QS203EW (country of birth) via Nomis](https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/api/v01/dataset/NM_524_1.def.sdmx.json)
- [ONS Census 2021, table TS024 (main language)](https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/api/v01/dataset/NM_2043_1.def.sdmx.json)
- [Ford press release, 9 January 2026: Puma tops the UK sales chart for the third year](https://mqa.at.ford.com/us/en/home/news-media/news/2026/1/ford-puma-tops-uk-sales-chart-for-third-successive-year.html)
- [The Aviationist, 31 July 2026: first UK-built Islander in nearly 60 years](https://theaviationist.com/2026/07/31/first-uk-built-islander-nearly-60-years/)
- [Natural Earth 1:10m country outlines (public domain); ONS Open Geography local authority centroids, December 2021](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/)
- [ACORD UK: The Romanian Diaspora's Contributions to the British Economy and Society (report, June 2026)](https://www.acord.uk/wp-content/uploads/go-x/u/245fcc78-2a1d-4df7-90d7-701d0a5e17c3/The-Romanian-Diasporas-Contributions-to-the-British-Economy-and-Society_Report.pdf)
- [A. Dolea and R. Trandafoiu, The Conversation, 1 October 2026: The great Romanian contribution](https://theconversation.com/the-great-romanian-contribution-research-reveals-just-how-britain-benefits-292618)