Hadrian's Wall

Archaeology and history at the limit of Rome's empire

Nick Hodgson

• Publisher: Robert Hale Non Fiction
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719818158
• eBook ISBN: 9780719821592
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

Built around AD122, Hadrian's Wall was guarded by the Roman army for over three centuries and has left an indelible mark on the landscape of northern Britain. It was a wonder of the ancient world and is a World Heritage Site. Written by a leading archaeologist who has excavated widely on the Wall, this is an authoritative yet accessible treatment of the archaeological evidence. The book explains why the expansion of the Roman empire ground to a halt in remote northern Britain, how the Wall came to be built and the purpose it was intended to serve. It is not a guidebook to the remains, but an introduction to the Wall and the soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, who once peopled the abandoned ruins visited by tourists today. Contents include: Historical background to the Wall; How the Wall was built and its appearance on completion; The history of the Wall from Hadrian to the end of Roman Britain; The purpose of the Wall. This introduction to Hadrian's Wall, the most impressive and famous physical reminder of Britain's Roman past, will be of great interest to all students and keen amateurs of Roman history, archaeology and general history, and is profusely illustrated throughout with 60 colour and 30 black & white photographs and 10 Maps.

Chapter 1

HOW THE ROMANS CAME TO BUILD A WALL IN BRITAIN

The Limits to Roman Power

THE CITY OF ROME ACHIEVED COMPLETE military domination over the Italian peninsula by 272BC and embarked on a seemingly ineluctable whirlwind of external conquest. By 146BC the North African Empire of Carthage was eliminated, and Greece and Macedonia were Roman possessions. All of Spain except the far north-west of the peninsula was conquered by 133BC. By 121BC southern Gaul had been acquired and the province of Gallia Narbonensis created. The pace was ratcheted up again in the late republic, as ambitious nobles, theoretically acting in the interests of the state, used military power and conquests to buttress their own political positions: most famously, Julius Caesar overran Gaul north of Narbonensis in 58–50BC, in the process taking a Roman army to Britain for the first time and bringing the island into the Roman orbit.

The civil wars between such over-mighty magnates were finally brought to an end in 31BC when Octavian eliminated his last rival and became unopposed master of the Roman world. In 27BC he took the title Augustus and thus became the first princeps, or Roman emperor. So began the period of imperial government that lasted until late in the third century AD, which historians know as ‘the Principate’.

Now that the armies that had once followed this or that dynast were all brought together under the control of Augustus, they could resume their mission of war against foreign enemies. The idea of an empire without end (imperium sine fine) was trumpeted in Augustan propaganda. Augustus genuinely believed that the whole of the globe could in his time be brought under Roman domination (the Romans knew that the Earth was a sphere, although of course they did not know of the existence of the American or Australian Continents). At this stage the Romans did not think in terms of fixed frontiers and permanent limits to the empire. There were lands that were not in practice under their control, but that was a situation that would be remedied by further conquest, and Augustus renewed the process with gusto.

As Augustus entered the thirty-third year of his principate (AD6), the final pacification of the whole of northern Europe must have seemed just within reach. In Germany beyond the Rhine a Roman province was being formed under P. Quinctilius Varus – but it was not to be. In AD6 a serious revolt broke out in the recently ‘pacified’ Pannonia (the Balkan area south of the Danube), and this took three years of bitter fighting to subdue. In AD9, just when the situation seemed to have been recovered, the aged Augustus received the news of the destruction of three entire legions by the Germans beyond the Rhine. At a stroke the assumption that conquest could be carried on indefinitely was dead.

Augustus, shattered and disillusioned by the disaster, stipulated in his will that his successors should keep the empire within its existing limits. He was succeeded by Tiberius (AD14–37), whose son Germanicus carried out punitive campaigns in Germany in 12–16 in an attempt to restore the honour of the annihilated legions. But these failed to have a decisive outcome, and in the end Tiberius recognized the pointlessness of further ambitious offensives beyond the Rhine.

From the time of Augustus a series of legions was permanently stationed along the left (west) bank of the Rhine. It would be a little longer before legions were permanently placed on the Danube, but from the reign of Tiberius (14–37), successor to Augustus, it is certain that detachments of troops were stationed on and patrolling that river, and that it must have been regarded as a boundary. The basic pattern of the Roman imperial frontier in north-west Europe was set. There would eventually be further (though strictly circumscribed) expansion beyond the two great rivers, but no Roman would ever again seriously contemplate the conquest of the whole of Germany. It was in this period, by a murkily understood process, that the regularly planned forts to house permanently stationed army units evolved: these units are a consistent and conspicuous feature of the imperial frontier lines, and therefore familiar from Hadrian’s Wall. But to understand these military bases we need to understand the organization of the Roman army.

An Introduction to the Roman Army

The Roman army was organized into the famous legions. These were basically heavy infantry units, all Roman citizens. Originally these citizen-soldiers had been recruited on a temporary basis to serve in particular campaigns, but Augustus reformed the legions left over from the civil wars into a professional standing army. During the Principate a legion consisted of something over 5,000 men, and there were around thirty legions to meet the military needs of the whole empire.

Even before Augustus, legionary units had been supplemented by so-called auxilia – that is, allied, non-citizen troops. These ‘auxiliaries’ were originally raised from the very peoples that Rome found itself subjugating in its wars of expansion. Augustus also seems to have been responsible for organizing them into permanent standing units, and new units continued to be raised after his time. Often we see them supplying specialist military skills that the heavy infantry legions could not provide: notably fighting on horseback. Auxiliary cavalry ‘wings’ (alae) were essentially formations of mounted warriors from Celtic and Germanic societies that could be deployed against people very like themselves, but they would go on to become some of the most prestigious and formidable units in the Roman army.

In Augustus’ day the citizen-soldiers of the legions (known as legionaries in the English-speaking world, and never, ever ‘legionnaires’) would still have been largely Italian in origin, and for two hundred years they maintained a strongly Mediterranean character, though the number of actual Italians declined sharply over the first century. The auxiliaries must have cut very different figures, to begin with at least. On the reliefs of Trajan’s Column in Rome, carved in the early second century, legionaries are depicted building, manoeuvring and fighting in orderly fashion. In the same scene two auxiliary cavalrymen ride past, thrusting a pair of recently severed heads into the view of the emperor. Even allowing for cosmopolitan prejudice and artistic convention, this tells us a lot about the Roman perception of the contrast between legionaries and auxiliaries.

Originally auxiliaries were probably forcibly conscripted, but in the course of the first century a deal emerged by which after twenty-five years of service they were awarded Roman citizenship upon discharge. Citizenship and the legal and financial privileges it brought with it would be passed on to sons and daughters, so this was a powerful incentive that ensured a flow of voluntary recruits into the auxiliaries in the first two centuries.

Each legion consisted of ten cohorts, each of which consisted of six centuries of eighty men: so the whole was 10 times 480. Around AD70–80 the Senior, or First Cohort, was enlarged in size, to number 800 (ten centuries), although the size and structure of the first cohort in later times may have varied and is not well understood. The legion contained only a very small amount of cavalry, numbering 120. Individual auxiliary units seem to have been modelled on the legionary cohort: so a simple auxiliary unit of infantry (cohors peditata) consisted of six centuries and totalled 480 men. A 480-strong auxiliary cavalry unit was termed an ala (‘wing’) and was made up of sixteen turmae (‘troops’), each of thirty horsemen. Most common among auxiliary units was the part-mounted cohors equitata: 480 foot soldiers (six centuries) and 120 horse (four turmae). Larger, 1,000-strong (milliaria) versions of the ala and cohors equitata appear after around AD70, the ala milliaria having twenty-four larger turmae of forty-two horsemen each (in total 1,008), and the cohors milliaria equitata ten centuries of eighty, and eight thirty-strong turmae (800 infantry and 240 cavalry, therefore 1,040 men in total).

Fig. 1.1 Trajan’s Column in Rome illustrates the difference between legionaries and auxiliaries in the early second century AD; the legionaries (left), wearing plate armour, move in orderly fashion, while the mounted auxiliaries (right) present severed heads to the emperor.

These ‘paper strengths’ are based on fragmentary evidence and have been the subject of much controversy; they may also have varied according to time and place. Auxiliary units of the various types occupied the Hadrian’s Wall forts; so, for example, we find cohors IV Lingonum equitata (the Fourth Cohort of Lingones, raised in eastern France – part mounted) at Wallsend; cohors I Tungrorum milliaria (the First Cohort of Tungrians, raised in Belgium – ‘one thousand strong’) at Housesteads; and ala II Asturum (the Second Cavalry Unit of Asturians, from Spain) at Chesters.

Although the Roman army had existed for centuries, before the early first century AD, we have very little archaeological trace of any kind of military bases or forts. Before this the army had only ever possessed temporary accommodation in the form of seasonal camps. Nowadays archaeologists reserve the term ‘camp’ to refer to encampments without permanent buildings, which the army had always used in earlier times and which it continued to use when on campaign or on the move. In shape these ‘marching camps’ (to use another term from archaeological literature) can look, superficially, like the permanent bases. Typically in imperial times they might have had the same rectangular shape with rounded corners, but they came in a much greater variety of sizes, had much slighter defences, and inside, rather than any kind of buildings, were pitched rows of tents, made of leather.

Permanent military bases only appear clearly in the continental archaeological record in the early first century. A fair amount is known about the legionary bases built during the German campaigns of Augustus and Tiberius. These sites were still in the process of evolution from the temporary encampments that Roman armies used when on campaign, but already they contained massive buildings, their plans based on Mediterranean prototypes but constructed entirely of timber. By the reign of Nero (54–69) a more familiar fortress type for a single legion was emerging. Only under Claudius (41–54) do we see the first examples of smaller forts for auxiliary units or detachments of legionaries with auxiliaries, but these still have highly irregular layouts, still not well understood. It is only under the Flavian emperors (after AD70) that we see, in Britain and on the continent, the first classic plans of auxiliary forts that have the developed form familiar in the century and a half that ensued.

The types and sizes of units are reflected in the permanent bases they constructed. So a legion was accommodated in a great base some 20ha (50 acres) in area. This is conventionally referred to as a ‘fortress’ in English. The stupendous area covered by a legionary fortress can only really be appreciated by walking the perimeter of one where its outlines can still be made out, whether in the pattern of medieval streets or surviving earthworks, as at the British fortresses of York and Inchtuthil respectively. Just as an auxiliary unit was modelled on one tenth part of the legion, so its base was a microcosm of the great legionary fortress, often covering around a tenth of its area, typically around 2ha (5 or 6 acres). The auxiliary sites are known as ‘forts’ to English-speaking archaeologists.

Fortresses and forts had a rectilinear shape and an internal plan laid out according to standard principles that must have developed rapidly in the first century. But despite this, the plans of no two are exactly alike. The army did all its building itself. In the early days the legionaries, not the auxiliaries, were the builders – on Trajan’s Column the legionaries do the building while auxiliary soldiers stand guard. The materials used in forts and fortresses were mostly earth, clay, turf and timber, and it was only around the turn of the first and second centuries AD that stone came into more general use for defences and buildings, and then only very gradually.

It has probably not escaped your notice that the firming up of forts and fortresses in the archaeological record coincides with the flagging of the imperial project to conquer the world, and Tiberius’ recognition that advance had halted on the Rhine and Danube. A permanent frontier begets more permanent, more easily recognizable archaeological remains, and some of the legionary bases founded by Augustus on the Rhine would be occupied by the army for centuries to come.

So much for the army that made possible the hothouse growth of empire, and which, in some areas, had still further to advance. But what kind of peoples did the Romans encounter in their conquest of northwest Europe and, in particular, Britain?

The Pre-Roman Inhabitants of Britain

The peoples of the later Iron Age of north-west Europe were divided into two broad groups with different languages and customs, and these are still usually known as the Celts and the Germans. In the Celts of Gaul, Spain and Britain, the Romans were dealing with peoples of a common culture, although within this there were countless regional groups with their own peculiar characteristics and dialects of the ‘Celtic’ language. The Celts had no written form of their language. To generalize brutally, these Iron Age people lived in extended family groups in individual farming settlements rather than villages or towns, and operated an economy based on both arable farming and livestock rearing. They were divided into ‘tribes’ or ‘peoples’, though these did not cover extensive areas or have any significant degree of centralization – in 15BC the Romans recorded over forty-six named tribes living in the Alpine region alone.

Fig. 1.2 A typical enclosed settlement of the pre-Roman Iron Age in the fertile lowlands north of the eastern part of Hadrian’s Wall. TYNE & WEAR ARCHIVES & MUSEUMS

In the lowland parts of Britain, including those transected by Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman army invaded a landscape that was already predominantly cleared of woodland, cultivated and densely settled, at least in the lower lying and more fertile areas. Settlements typically took the form of ditched and banked enclosures containing timber roundhouses, evenly and tightly distributed over the landscape: typically around 900m (980yd) separated neighbouring fa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction: What is Hadrian’s Wall?
• Chapter 1 How the Romans Came to Build a Wall in Britain
• Chapter 2 The Wall is Built
• Chapter 3 Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall: AD122–60
• Chapter 4 The Heyday of the Wall: AD160–250
• Chapter 5 The Wall in the Later Empire: AD250–367
• Chapter 6 What was the Purpose of Hadrian’s Wall?
• Chapter 7 The Last Days of the Roman Wall: AD367–?
• Appendix I: A Basic Quantity Survey for Hadrian’s Wall
• Appendix II: Suggested Building Sequence and Manpower Requirements
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index