The Wall E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 545

Beschreibung

Hadrian's Wall is the largest, most spectacular and one of the most enigmatic historical monument in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running 73 miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least 26 miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain's most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of The Wall, the vallum, is larger than any surviving prehistoric earthwork. Built in a ten-year period by more than 30,000 soldiers and labourers at the behest of an extraordinary emperor, The Wall consisted of more than 24 million stones, giving it a mass greater than all the Egyptian pyramids put together. At least a million people visit Hadrian's Wall each year and it has been designated a World Heritage Site. In this book, based on literary and historical sources as well as the latest archaeological research, Alistair Moffat considers who built The Wall, how it was built, why it was built and how it affected the native peoples who lived in its mighty shadow. The result is a unique and fascinating insight into one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Leseprobe

The Wall

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2008

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84158-789-9 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-481-2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

In memory of Malcolm Thomas

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Map

Preface

Introduction: Remembering the Empire

1 Caesar, Claudius and the Elephants

2 Britannia Barbarica

3 The North Road

4 Dinner on the Stone Road

5 The Day the Empire Came

6 Let One Stone Stand Upon Another

7 Abandonment, Invasion and Desertion

8 After Britannia

9 Days on the Wall

Appendix 1: Significant Roman Emperors During the Time of Britannia

Appendix 2: Significant Governors of Britannia

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Sandy Mackie – sorry, that’s Mr Mackie – taught me history at Kelso High School, and he certainly made an impression. This is the fourteenth history book I have written. Perhaps at last he should be seen to shoulder some of the responsibility. I gladly accept all of the blame.

Hugh Andrew and his superb team at Birlinn are blameless, of course. Excellent publishers, with great enthusiasms, thorough professionalism and always up for a laugh; they have had a great deal to put up with. Thanks to all.

My agent, David Godwin, also puts up with me and as ever I am grateful for his sage advice. Thanks to him.

Liz Hanson has once again adorned a book with her perceptive photographs. I am glad to have supplied an extended caption. Many thanks.

Paddy Merrall and Graeme Thompson of ITV Border and ITV Tyne Tees respectively and jointly commissioned a TV series based on this book. I am grateful for their faith and confidence. Valerie Lyon directed the series with aplomb – and tact. It gave me the chance to make a journey along the Wall with my co-presenter, Tanni Grey Thompson, and with Paul Dobson, Allan Tarn, Paul Caddick, and Beth Moffat. It was great fun, and very informative. Thanks to all.

Robin, Patricia, Andrew and Tony Birley are simply an adornment to the Wall and its history. Robin, Pat and Andrew’s stewardship of Vindolanda is inspirational and Tony Birley’s scholarship exceptional. I am very grateful to all of them for their patience and kindness.

And to everyone who listened to my incessant moaning as I wrote this book, I apologise. I enjoyed the journey very much. This never became that damned book at any time in its writing. Hadrian’s Wall is a fascinating subject, and I remain fascinated.

Alistair Moffat

Selkirk, December 2007

List of Illustrations

1. Chesters Fort

2. The remains of the vicus at Vindolanda

3. How the Wall might have looked – the reconstruction at Vindolanda

4. Barcombe Hill behind Vindolanda

5. Housesteads Fort

6. The south-west corner of Housesteads Fort

7. Buildings beyond Housesteads Fort

8. The only section of the Wall where walking is permitted, west of Housesteads Fort

9. Sycamore Gap

10. Part of the central section looking towards Crag Lough and Hotbank Farm

11. Stones for the arch at milecastle 37

12. The Whin Sill and the central section

13. Wall foundations with a dyke built from Roman stone in the central section

14. A detail of the Wall

15. The steep gradient of the Whin Sill

16. Detail of the Wall near Housesteads

17. The quarry at Walltown, which took a bite out of the Wall

18. The rubble core of the Wall at Walltown

19. The early turret at Walltown Crags

20. Milecastle, near Birdoswald

21. An impressive run of wall east of Birdoswald

22. Birdoswald Fort

23. Turret at Birdoswald

24. Poltross Burn milecastle, near Birdoswald

25. The garrison city of Dura Europos

26. Gonio, on the Black Sea coast in Georgia

27. Massive frontier defences along the Euphrates frontier at Halabiya, Syria

28. The superbly built stone praetorium at Halabiya

29. The frontier forts at Hallabat, Jordan

30. The Hunting Baths at Leptis Magna in Libya

31. The immense cistern at Rasafa

32. A magnificent stretch of Roman road behind Tarsus, Turkey

Preface

There is something about barricades, high ramparts overlooking long vistas, crenellated walkways patrolled by watchful soldiers, strong towers, formidable castles. Perhaps the attraction comes from years of television and film: American Indians charging across the plains, whooping and yelling, hurtling towards camera, loosing off arrows at the good guys safe behind the stockade; or baddies assaulting the walls of mighty castles while desperate defenders hurl everything and anything that comes to hand. Feeling safe inside from danger outside – probably a primitive instinct lurking in the shadows of many a subconscious.

Ramparts are attractive – and surely none more than Hadrian’s Wall. There is nothing else remotely like it west of China, nothing bigger, grander, more masterful and more impressive. Standing on the Whin Sill at Housesteads Fort, looking over the northern moorland, perhaps scanning the horizon for a flicker of movement, or up at Walltown Crags, where the Wall glowers over grey Thirlwall Common, there is a sense of borrowed authority, of let them come or, to paraphrase a little, let them gaze upon my works and despair.

Even though it nowhere rises to its original height, and long stretches of it have disappeared, power pulses from Hadrian’s Wall. Built by a culture galvanised by the will of one man, it is a miracle of self-aggrandisement and ancient disregard for practicalities. A mighty Wall which divides our island, devised by conquerors to limit their empire, it somehow still manages to play to the little boy and his toy soldiers in an imagined landscape.

Although it never marked a cultural frontier, or the line along which the border between England and Scotland would eventually run, Hadrian’s Wall nevertheless had an important early role in creating an idea of the north of Britain. For almost three centuries, savagery and danger lay beyond it. The north was threatening while the south was sunlit, civilised, sophisticated. It is impossible to say when or how these notions came into play, but they are there, as surely as the Wall. And its story is fascinating.

This book attempts to tell the story, beginning as early as seemed sensible. Along the way the text contains many boxed items of information which seemed interesting, even important, in themselves but did not necessarily fit into the narrative. They can be read as asides, skipped and read later, or ignored. The last chapter is also not part of the narrative. Having spent a lot of time on Hadrian’s Wall over the past two years and knowing it reasonably well, it occurred to me that an itinerary taking in the places I enjoyed most might be more helpful than an exhaustive list of internet addresses and opening times. Others will have different views, but I found the visits to the places set out in the last chapter very pleasurable.

As I was finishing this book, in December 2007, my father-in-law, Malcolm Thomas, died. He had been a regular soldier, a man with many old-fashioned virtues and few old-fashioned opinions. Cawfields milecastle would have made him smile with recognition of its daftness, and the whole enterprise of building and garrisoning the Wall would have prompted perceptive and informed comments. I am sorry not to have them, and out of the greatest respect and affection, this book is dedicated to his memory.

Introduction: Remembering the Empire

Hadrian’s Wall is the largest, most spectacular and one of the most enigmatic historical monuments in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land-wall 73 miles from east to west and a sea-wall stretching at least 26 and probably 50 miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain’s most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of the land-wall, the Vallum, is more monumental than any prehistoric earthwork.

And yet the story of the great Roman Wall, its builders and originators, was almost immediately misunderstood, confused or forgotten. Only five or six generations after the end of Roman Britain in the early fifth century the name of Hadrian had faded completely and been disconnected from his mighty creation, the dates of its construction had been got wildly wrong and the historical sequence of events had fallen badly out of kilter. The Wall still dominated the landscape, many thousands had lived along its length for three hundred years, a dozen great forts were still standing, inscriptions offering names and dates were everywhere – how did early historians fail to record even the rudiments of its story?

Gildas was probably a son of the Old Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde, born some time around AD 504 at Dumbarton on the Clyde. Having become a monk, he composed a fiery sermon On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. Calling them ignorant tyrants, he raged against the corrupt and feckless contemporary British kings who were allowing the Picts and the Scots to raid from the north and pagan Germanic warriors from across the North Sea to settle large swathes of eastern and southern England. It is a splendid froth of invective probably composed in the 560s, and is one of the earliest written British sources to survive in the post-Roman period. Interspersed amongst the insults are snippets of history, or at least tales which Gildas clearly believed were true. And some of them refer to Roman walls.

Magnus Maximus was an ambitious general in the late western Empire and in 383 he attempted to usurp the imperial throne. Having raised an army in Britain, he crossed the Channel to campaign in Europe, ultimately meeting defeat and execution at Aquileia in northern Italy. Gildas blamed Maximus for the troubles which then befell the old province of Britannia:

After this, Britain is left deprived of all her soldiery and armed bands, of her cruel governors, and of the flower of her youth, who went with Maximus, but never again returned; and utterly ignorant as she was of the art of war, groaned in amazement for many years under the cruelty of two foreign nations – the Scots from the northwest, and the Picts from the north.

After tearful and piteous entreaties from an embassy of Britons, Rome sent a legion which promptly came into close conflict with the cruel enemies and slew great numbers of them. On the advice of their Roman rescuers, the British:

now built a wall across the island from one sea to the other, which being manned with a proper force, might be a terror to the foes whom it was intended to repel, and a protection to their friends whom it covered. But this wall, being made of turf instead of stone, was of no use to that foolish people, who had no head to guide them.

Gildas was describing the Antonine Wall, built in turf between the Firths of Forth and Clyde on the orders of the Roman Emperor, Antoninus Pius, in the AD 140s. If he had been born in Dumbarton, very near the western terminal, Gildas would have known the old turf wall very well. His dating is badly wrong, reckoning its construction 250 years later, in the 390s. And Gildas also thought it the first great wall to be built in Britain, whereas it in fact postdates Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps the rapid abandonment of the Antonine Wall after 161 gave rise to the belief that it was of no use.

Another pathetic embassy to Rome, according to Gildas, produced a second expedition to Britain, and it was effective, planting terrible swords upon the shoulders of their enemies, they mow them down like leaves which fall at the destined period. This time the Romans set about building a second, much better, wall themselves.

With the help of the miserable natives, [they] built a wall different from the former, by public and private contributions, and of the same structure as walls generally, extending in a straight line from sea to sea, between some cities, which, from fear of their enemies, had there by chance been built.

This seems like a description of Hadrian’s Wall, with Roman Carlisle at the western end and perhaps Corbridge near the eastern. But it turned out to be no more effective than the turf wall, sighed Gildas. Once the Romans had departed, the assaults from the Picts and Scots resumed:

To oppose them was placed on the heights a garrison equally slow to fight and ill adapted to run away, a useless and panic-struck company, who clambered away days and nights on their unprofitable watch. Meanwhile the hooked weapons of their enemies were not idle, and our countrymen were dragged from the wall and dashed against the ground.

Even allowing for the fact that he was writing an invective, Gildas’ account is surprisingly poor. Only the persistent attacks of the Picts and the Scots appear to be historically accurate. Astonishingly, he believed that the construction of Hadrian’s Wall was recent, not long before his own lifetime, 400 years later than its actual foundation in AD 122.

Gildas saw himself as a beacon of learning in the dimming days of the Dark Ages, in a post-Roman Britain which was sliding into anarchy: as a paragon of literacy, Latinity and a devout Christian aware of European as well as British history. How did he get it all so wrong?

A truly great historian, Bede of Jarrow, was similarly confused about who built what and when and why. He lived in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall; his monastery and his church of St Paul’s were built with Roman stone robbed out of nearby forts and from the Wall itself, and, like the early church, the Northumbrian kings who were his patrons and protectors saw themselves in part as the heirs of Britannia, the Roman province which lasted almost 400 years. But in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, Bede still gets it wrong, although not as badly as Gildas. A superb researcher, a genuine scholar who checked his facts, looked for more than one source, he adapted the BC/AD system of dating and made it a standard so that he could get the sequences of events in the right order and make all clearer. He understood that the stone wall north of the Tyne was built first, but he believed that it was done on the initiative of the Emperor Septimius Severus, and nowhere mentions Hadrian. That places its construction in the early third century not the early second. Also Bede insisted that it was an earthwork first, a wall of turf topped by a timber palisade. Then he adopts Gildas’ version of events and adds some helpful personal observation:

This famous and still conspicuous wall was built from public and private resources, with the Britons lending assistance. It is eight feet in breadth, and twelve in height; and, as can clearly be seen to this day, ran straight from east to west.

Bede had obviously seen the Wall for himself. In fact some scholars believe that he was born at a place called Ad Murum, literally ‘At the Wall’, a settlement on the site of what became the city of Newcastle. Bede was naturally curious, and it is surprising that he did not undertake research into a phenomenon which lay so close at hand – and that he was content to accept Gildas’ garbled account.

After the eighth century the Wall seemed to pass out of knowledge, its mighty ruins mouldered in the landscape, overgrown and ignored. Medieval churches near the line used it as a quarry of dressed stone, and farmers made dykes for their inbye fields out of the tumbledown turrets and forts.

It would be many centuries before the story of Hadrian’s Wall became clearer, before its context was understood and before archaeology could begin to reveal an astonishing wealth of information. The sixteenth-century antiquary William Camden was greatly impressed with the scale and sweep of the Roman Wall but unable to see as much of the magnificent central section as he would have liked. Border Reivers – rank robbers he called them – had occupied at least one of the major forts and made the countryside unsafe for travellers. The study of Hadrian’s Wall developed real momentum in the eighteenth century when all things Roman and Greek were becoming generally fashionable. William Stukely and other scholars took a detailed interest and by the nineteenth century a formidable group of northern antiquaries at last began to uncover the real narrative behind this amazing monument.

Very little in what follows is original and much depends on the superb corpus of research and archaeology produced in the last sixty years. But there are differences of emphasis. The native British story of Hadrian’s Wall cannot be easily told: neither the archaeology nor written sources exist in any quantity. Such records as do are gossamer scant, mostly allusory or opaque. But an attempt must be made. How the native peoples treated the Wall and its builders and garrison is a vitally important component too often relegated to the background, only faintly heard as mood music behind the onward march of the legions. After all, the native kings and their warriors had a motive role in persuading Hadrian to build a wall, and not just any barrier but a truly monumental solution to a serious military problem. The following pages attempt to find more of a role for the British, the ancestors of many of most of us.

Another difference in emphasis is prompted by the remarkable letters and lists found at the fort at Vindolanda which lies a kilometre or so to the south of the central sector of the Wall. These unique records predate the arrival of Hadrian and his builders in AD 122 by twenty years but they shine a brilliant light on the everyday lives of the Roman garrison in the north – and even occasionally have something to say about the natives. The Vindolanda letters and lists insist on a central place in any understanding of Hadrian’s Wall.

Roman actions and attitudes are comparatively well documented and are rehearsed at some length at the beginning of the book. The where and the why of Hadrian’s Wall is much better understood by building a detailed context, and a long preamble attempts that, beginning with the first contacts through Julius Caesar and his expeditions of 55 BC and 54 BC, and leading up to the invasion of the north under Agricola more than a century later. Caesar is the most famous Roman of them all, and even over two millennia his dash and bravery is unmistakable; he begins the story of Hadrian’s Wall.

1

Caesar, Claudius and the Elephants

It was midnight before the wind turned. All day the soldiers of the VII and the X Legions had been embarking onto the transport ships. Only eighty were assembled in the harbour at Boulogne, and more than 100 men in full armour, carrying all their weapons and kit, had been crammed onto the decks of each ship. Legionaries were much happier tramping the metalled roads of the fast-expanding Roman Empire and may well have been apprehensive as their heavily laden ships bobbed at anchor, waiting for the entire expedition to be ready to sail. They faced a journey into the unknown, a voyage across the Ocean, a real danger of being swept out into the vastness of the open sea.

As evening approached and a waxing moon rose in the sky, the sea-captains at last made ready and hoisted sails to catch the freshening wind. It would, it should, blow the invasion fleet on a north-westerly course across the Channel. In the moonshine, lookouts hoped soon to make out the white cliffs of Britannia, luminous in the summer dark, and use them as a sea-mark to guide their steersmen. The late August of 55 BC, the 25th, was indeed late to be mounting such an audacious expedition, but Julius Caesar was indeed an audacious general.

Most of the staff officers and their daring commander sailed on warships, and they led the fleet out of the safety of Boulogne and the calm estuary of the River Liane. Powered by banks of oars, they depended a little less on the vagaries of the elements than the eighteen transports which had been allocated the more awkward business of taking a force of 500 cavalrymen across the Channel. Their embarkation had been delayed and, in order to catch up, the troopers rode north, up the coast road to Ambleteuse where they again failed to embark and join the main fleet. The wind and the tide had turned against them.

Caesar pressed on and, by dawn, his lookouts will have seen the ghostly shapes of the white cliffs looming out of the grey light. From East Wear Bay and around the blunt headland at South Foreland, the high chalk cliffs were often sailors’ first sight of Britain. By mid morning the little harbour at Dover had come into view. But there was no possibility of a landing. Strung out along the cliffs overlooking the harbour were thousands of British warriors. Battle-horns blaring, weapons rattling against their shields, chariots drawn up, the warbands of the southern kings had come to defend their island, roaring defiance across the waves.

LANDS LOST AND FOUND

Climate change in ancient times is difficult to discern but sea-levels appear to have fluctuated a good deal. Calais and its harbour are much nearer the Kentish coast than Boulogne, and on a clear day the white cliffs can often be made out. So why did the Romans prefer to sail from Boulogne? Because in 55 BC and AD 43 Calais and the area around it was under the sea. Now 40 kilometres inland, St Omer was then on the coast of Gaul. The English coastline also looked very different. Romney Marshes was probably under water in the winter and a waterlogged, impenetrable waste in the summer. East of Beachy Head a shallow bay cut inland where the town of Pevensey now stands. The Thames estuary had many more large islands, including Thanet, and further up the North Sea coast, the Wash reached down to Cambridge – and the Isle of Ely really was an island.

If Dover had indeed been his preferred destination, then Caesar will have been unpleasantly surprised. The massing of two legions and the gathering of an invasion fleet at Boulogne could have been no secret. When Caesar’s plans had first become known in Britain, some native kings had sent ambassadors across the Channel. They pledged obedience to Rome and promised hostages to guarantee it. Commius, a king with some authority and influence in both Britain and northern Gaul, was despatched back to Britain with the ambassadors and a brief to negotiate on Caesar’s behalf. Peaceful submission was always preferable, cheaper, and almost as glorious as victory in war. It may have been Caesar’s objective to visit Britain with an appropriate show of strength, accept promises of loyalty, and then leave without a blow being struck. But on arrival Commius was immediately arrested and the detail of Rome’s plans presumably extracted. When he saw the British kings and their warriors in battle order, arrayed along the ramparts of the white cliffs, Caesar may well have had to change those plans.

Riding at anchor in the roadsteads off Dover, the Roman warships waited until the whole fleet had come together. The heavily laden transports had made slower headway. On board his flagship Caesar held a council of war, some time in the early afternoon. In the weeks before the expedition sailed, he had sent Caius Volusenus on a reconnaissance, his warship nosing along the Kentish coast looking for good landing sites. It seems that the Romans knew that the white cliffs gave way to beaches north-east of Dover, in Sandwich Bay. As the fleet weighed anchor and made for the new landing sites, the British army shadowed it up the coast.

Somewhere near Deal, Caesar signalled his captains to steer straight and fast for the shore and run their warships up onto the beaches. They carried artillery, and arrows, slingshot and crossbow bolts could be brought to bear on the British. When the troop transports attempted to rasp up onto the shore, their weight and deep draught prevented them from getting close enough. The sea-bed shelved away steeply into the Channel, and fully armed legionaries were reluctant to jump into deep water. Their kit weighed them down and they were forced to wade a long way before they could defend themselves from British missiles. Men who did risk the deep water were fighting their way ashore in small groups only, failing to form up into the disciplined close order which could be so effective on the battlefield.

Humiliation stared hard at Caesar and his legions. And then, as sometimes happened in battle, an example of extraordinary individual bravery proved decisive. Here is Caesar’s own account:

And then, when our soldiers were still hanging back, mainly because of the depth of the water, the standard-bearer of the Tenth offered up a quick prayer and then shouted out, ‘Jump down, soldiers, unless you want to give up your eagle to the enemy; everyone will know that I at least did my duty to the Republic and my commander!’ After saying this in a loud voice he jumped off the ship and began carrying the eagle standard towards the enemy. Then our soldiers called out to each other not to allow so terrible a disgrace [as to lose the standard] and leapt down from the transport. When those on the nearby ships saw them, they followed and began to close with the enemy.

In the long and narrow confines of the beach, the legionaries gradually formed a line and pushed forward. Behind the battle, watching from his warship, Caesar could see where his men needed reinforcements. Using rowing boats, he sent small detachments to wherever weak points threatened. Closing into a tight line, protected by their long, curved shields, thrusting with their short swords, the VII and X Legions gained control.

Chasing the Roman fleet up the Channel coast to the beach landing had meant that most of the British infantry had been left behind, and their cavalry and charioteers were finding it difficult to match the well-armoured and disciplined ranks of the invaders. As the battle wore on, more and more men landed safely and the British kings signalled a retreat.

Not for the first time in this short campaign, Caesar was lucky. Although his attempts at preparatory diplomacy had failed badly and Volusenus’ reconnaissance seems to have been sadly deficient, Caesar’s famous luck had held. But it was seen as more than luck by his soldiers: it was a sign of the gods’ favour. Well-omened is a clumsy alternative meaning for the Latin felix, or lucky, but it conveys something of how it was understood. Luck did not come from nowhere.

Once the beach had been cleared, Caesar’s tactical instinct would have been to pursue the British inland and inflict as heavy a defeat as possible. Most casualties in battle came in the aftermath when men were cut down as they fled. But the cavalry had still not arrived, and so Caesar was forced to secure only the immediate hinterland. Having fought long and hard, probably into the evening, the legionaries were forced to set to and build a marching camp on the beachhead to protect their position.

Beyond the freshly dug ditches and ramparts an unknown land stretched far to the north. From the Greek traveller Pytheas of Massilia, and other writers, the Romans knew that Britain was a large and long island. But it lay on the far side of the dangerous Ocean and, as the legionaries lay down exhausted in their leather tents, they will have wondered what the morning would hold.

TOUGH LOVE

A legionary’s training, experience, uniform and kit combined into a valuable investment, which Rome took care of. When her armies took the field, doctors and first-aid orderlies were right behind them. Medici, legionary doctors, carried a bag full of evil-looking instruments: fierce forceps, razor-sharp scalpels, hooks and clamps were all designed to deal with puncture wounds (and the removal of foreign bodies such as arrowheads), severe cuts and bone breaks. The doctors knew that the minutes immediately following a bad wound were critical, and their orderlies, capsarii, carried bandages to staunch heavy bleeding on the battlefield so that injured men could be safely removed behind the lines, where the medici set to work with their toolkit of alarming instruments. There was no anaesthetic, but more importantly no antibiotic. What the medici feared most was the onset of infection and, unlike modern doctors – and patients – they did not care at all if they inflicted pain as they cut away damaged tissue or cleaned out bad wounds. In fact, it would help if the agony caused a man to faint.

In the ranks of Celtic armies, medical help is not recorded, and no recognisable surgical instruments have yet been found. But the principles and practices of Celtic medicine have survived. Although the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the effect of wiping out much of Britain’s so-called ‘folk medicine’ – the herbal and traditional cures passed down through uncounted generations – in the Highlands of Scotland the Gaelic language protected the knowledge. The Celtic materia medica was used in very sophisticated ways: for example, decoctions and infusions of herbal drinks were given as anaesthetics; instead of injections, poultices were made up and applied where the skin is thinnest, under the armpits and in the groin. (St Columba famously applied a soothing poultice to a young monk by placing it in his armpit.) But, despite the medical care, Roman and Celtic soldiers fought in the knowledge that even the slightest wound could kill and that most men did not die outright in battle but in a lingering agony hours, days or weeks afterwards.

In the middle of the first century BC Britain was a shifting patchwork of small kingdoms, each with its own political interests and priorities. Rome seemed a colossus by comparison, a juggernaut which had rolled over the vast territory of Gaul. Some Britons had crossed the Ocean to fight against Caesar’s legions alongside their Gallic neighbours, many knew that Rome was a world power, capable of any action, no matter how merciless, in pursuit of its aims. Still more will have seen the Empire as a golden opportunity. The trickle of luxury goods which had come into Britain from the Mediterranean spoke of wealth and glamour, and a much wider world.

For whatever reason the British kings did not attack again. Instead their envoys sought peace, promising hostages and freeing Commius, possibly in the hope that he might mediate. The British army, mostly levied from farms and settlements, melted back into the countryside leaving the native kings with only their warbands and charioteers.

BATTLELINES

Roman infantry training was tough. Those who failed to follow commands properly or show sufficient stamina were punished by being put on poor rations, which seemed to consist of a foul-smelling barley porridge. But it was vital that soldiers reacted instantly to commands in the heat and noise of battle. Roman legionaries had five basic formations. A single battleline was most common and, through its shield-wall, spears and short swords bristled. A double line was sometimes called to withstand the weight of a charge. There was also a square, not unlike that used by British armies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The flying wedge was used in attack. Probably led by a centurion, a wedge charged at an enemy line and tried to smash through it, widening the breaking point as the wedge went in. Most famous was the testudo, the tortoise, with shields held overhead and to the sides. It was said that its strength was tested by having carts driven over it.

Four days after the battle on the beach, lookouts at last sighted the cavalry transports. Five hundred troopers would transform Caesar’s options. But a storm blew down the Channel and prevented the transports from landing, and a high tide had an even more devastating impact. It refloated the beached transports: some smashed into each other and onto the shore, others were swept out to sea. Suddenly Caesar’s expedition found itself dangerously exposed. The legionaries had brought little in the way of supplies, and food was fast running out. They were stranded, unable to get off the island and back to the sanctuary of Gaul. Seeing at first hand all that happened, the British envoys in the Romans’ camp stole away quietly to inform their kings that the gods were smiling.

Forced to send out forage parties into the Kent countryside to find food, Caesar was in a very precarious position. But once again luck and good soldiering came to the rescue. As the VII Legion was harvesting fields of ripe wheat, a British ambush erupted out of nearby woods. The Romans, many of them armed only with sickles, were quickly surrounded by charioteers and cavalry. Very fortunately a sharp-eyed lookout at a forward watchtower saw a cloud of dust rise in the distance, in the direction the VII Legion had gone. It was too much dust for marching men to make and Caesar quickly realised what had happened. With a small troop of riders brought by Commius, and his own men, he dashed to the rescue. With only a thousand men, a potentially disastrous outcome was averted. But more trouble was coming.

The British kings massed their host again and attacked the beachhead camp. The legions had time to form up in battle order outside the rampart and, in the close-quarter fighting which followed, the British were driven back and defeated. This time Caesar did not delay. Most of the transports had been repaired and the legions squeezed onto them and sailed back to Gaul. Hostages had been demanded but Caesar did not wait for them to be delivered. September often saw bad weather in the Channel – and enough risks had already been taken to stretch the favour of the gods beyond breaking point.

News of Caesar’s expedition electrified public opinion in Rome. What had in reality been a lucky escape from near disaster became a propaganda triumph. Rome had reached out to the very ends of the Earth. Her armies had crossed the dangers and mysteries of the Ocean and subdued the savage primitives who lived at the edge of the world. The Senate rejoiced and voted twenty days of public thanksgiving, five more than for the much more significant conquest of Gaul. Caesar’s many enemies were silenced. Marcus Porcius Cato embodied all of the stern old Republican virtues of honour and fairness, while attacking what he saw as Caesar’s wild ambition – a man who would be king! – and his disregard for the law. He probably spoke against him in the same Senate meeting which voted for the thanksgiving, and was probably drowned out by catcalls and insults. Pompey and Crassus, both rivals and immensely powerful and wealthy, had been elected consuls, the leading political offices in the Roman constitution, in 55 BC. But Caesar’s coup in reaching Britain, as far from Rome as it seemed possible to be, eclipsed them. How they must have seethed amid the celebrations.

CAMPS AND FORTS

Roman camps were usually temporary defended bivouacs thrown up by a detachment of soldiers at the end of a day’s march. A Roman fort was more permanent and the Latin word for it, castellum, is the root of our ‘castle’. Both camps and forts were laid out on a standard grid pattern on a reasonably flat site near a water source. Milecastles were small forts positioned at intervals of exactly one mile along a Roman wall. On Hadrian’s Wall, Cawfields milecastle is a monument to Roman uniformity and obstinacy. The site slopes steeply and must have been very rocky, but it was exactly one Roman mile from its neighbours on either side. Cawfield’s northern gateway opens onto a sheer drop. There is a much better and flatter site 30 metres further to the west. But no, if it had to be a mile, exactly a mile from the next one, well, that was were it had to go.

The reaction to the expedition has much to say about the political atmosphere of the times. Britain began to occupy a special place in the collective imagination of Rome. Roman legions could march around the shores of the Mediterranean, to the deserts of the east, and north into the dark forests of Germany. But to reach across the Ocean at the edge of the world, to land and defeat the warriors of Britain, showed Rome at her very boldest and mightiest. Nowhere and nothing was beyond her power.

By the early years of the reign of Augustus, the first emperor and Julius Caesar’s heir, the expansion of the Empire had found divine support. The poet Virgil put these words in the mouth of Jupiter, Rome’s supreme god:

I set upon the Romans bounds neither of space nor of time: I have bestowed upon them empire without limit . . . to impose the ways of peace, to spare the defeated, and to crush those proud men who will not submit.

TOFFS AND PLEBS

The Roman constitution evolved over an immense period and was very complex. It is the most likely extended explanation of why it was that Rome, an otherwise inconsequential central Italian settlement, came to be the pre-eminent European power for five hundred years, whose influence lasted long after its decline. Originally the city was governed by kings. Their tyrannical behaviour prompted a coup d’état, and from around 500 BC they were replaced by two elected magistrates known as consuls. Roman society remained rigidly hierarchical, and the consulship was at first the exclusive preserve of the patrician families, an aristocracy which had retained power despite the demise of the kings. They made up the membership of the Senate, originally an advisory council of elders (the name derives from senex, Latin for ‘an old man’). Other magistracies developed. Praetors were one step down from consuls, and below them aediles had legal power inside the city of Rome. The most junior magistrates were quaestors. As Rome grew, its patricians were forced to cede some power to the poorer citizens, the plebs. They could turn to a Tribune of the Plebs, who had the right to veto legislation. In times of emergency, one man could be appointed dictator, with absolute power for a term of six months. Religious affairs were in the care of the Pontifex Maximus, and below him and the others a forest of minor offices grew. The lawyer and orator Cicero developed the idea of the cursus honorum, a career path for ambitious men. But by then it was a bit too late. Once Augustus had established the power of the emperors, all of these magistracies became more or less honorific. The years were still named after the consuls who held office and, as with the modern honours system in Britain, people enjoyed fancy titles. Augustus obliged by having consuls elected for only a part of the year so that more men could hold the largely meaningless office.

All of this boundless, supposedly god-given ambition was founded on a remarkable phenomenon – the Roman army. One historian has characterised the history of the Republic and the Empire as the long, drawn-out and ultimately unsuccessful process of political institutions attempting to keep pace with the extraordinary and continuing string of victories won by Rome’s soldiers.

They won because they were different. Every army that Rome faced in western Europe and around the Mediterranean was largely recruited from amateurs, part-time soldiers with an obligation to fight when their aristocracy called upon them. Great hosts were mustered against the legions, often out-numbering them by many times, but they were comparatively poorly equipped, untrained, frightened farmers doing their duty. Rome’s army was professional. Killing was its business. Its soldiers were well paid, well trained, well armed and very experienced. When the VII and X Legions faced the warhorns, the hail of insults and the massed ranks of the British army in Kent in 55 BC, they will not have blinked. In Gaul and elsewhere the legionaries had seen it all before. If they kept their discipline, remembered their training and fought as a unit, they would cut these hollering savages to pieces. And, almost always, they did.

It was the long drive for empire which forged the Roman army into a highly professional and deadly force. After Africa, Spain, Greece and Asia Minor had been conquered, the urgent need for an efficient, and permanent, military capability was recognised by the great general Gaius Marius. In 107 BC he was elected consul and immediately abolished the outdated property qualification needed to fight in the army. From landless men and his own supporters, Marius began recruiting full-time soldiers. Many signed up for sixteen years, an unheard-of commitment, and in that time grew experienced and hardy. Training became mandatory, equipment better and standardised, and clear organisation was imposed.

Like all talented tacticians, Marius saw mobility as a key to victorious campaigning. From the moment they joined their units, Roman soldiers were trained to march. For four months centurions put them through intensive square-bashing so that they instinctively marched in step and reacted instantly to commands. In battle this sort of collective conditioning could be crucial. To arrive at the battlefield quickly and in good order, recruits were put through a punishing schedule of route marching. Once trainee legionaries could march 30 kilometres in five hours, they were appalled to discover that they needed to maintain the same speed – but in full armour and carrying all their kit and equipment. On average this weighed about 50 kilograms. Before Marius’ reforms, the Roman army had been followed – and slowed down – by a baggage train of mules. After 107 BC the legionaries carried everything and began to call themselves Marius’ Mules.

Weaponry evolved and adapted at the same time. Most conscript armies, especially those raised amongst the Celtic peoples of Europe, used their large numbers in a simple but effective tactic – the furious charge. It worked for millennia, even after the introduction of muskets and cannons, and was last seen on British soil as late as 1746 at Culloden Moor. The Roman response was the javelin. Carried by each legionary, it had a long, slim and very sharp point attached to a wooden haft. As the enemy ran within range, a dense volley was thrown. Javelins broke up a charge but were not accurate enough to halt it. By the time survivors reached Roman battlelines, shields had locked together and the short sword known as the gladius was drawn. No more than 60 centimetres long, it was much more effective in close-quarter fighting than the long, slashing sword used by Celtic warriors. Thrusting, stabbing, pushing and staying together in a tight formation, the legions literally rolled over their enemies. Winning again and again, marching long distances quickly, Roman armies dominated western European warfare for 500 years.

CARRY ON, SERGEANT

Roman soldiers spent most of their time not fighting. Many were skilled tradesmen able to apply themselves to a wide variety of tasks. The most hated peace-time job was road-building. And in the early years of the province of Britain there was a great deal of that to do. Many men got out of breaking roadstone, digging ditches and laying paving by developing other skills and no doubt sucking up to officers. For example, if they found an inside job as a clerk, they moved from being a mere miles, or soldier, to becoming an immunis. The next step up the ladder was to the rank of principales, the lance-corporals of the Roman army. That meant one and a half times the pay of, say, an orderly in a century. Standard-bearers and optiones (second-in-command of a century – roughly equivalent to a sergeant) were on double pay and centurions got even more. In a legion of roughly 4,800 men there were ten cohorts. The first contained five double centuries and the remaining nine had six centuries each. The best that a common soldier could do in his legion was to rise to the rank of primus pilus, literally, the first spear, and in reality the senior centurion. Aristocrats held a monopoly on high command. The legate who led a legion was usually a senator, and his six staff officers were men from patrician families setting out on a career.

As professional soldiers who trained, lived, fought and died together, the legionaries developed a tremendously powerful esprit de corps. The sort of bravery shown by the standard-bearer of the X Legion on the Kentish beaches was by no means unusual. Three years later, Caesar’s men led an abortive attack in the Gaulish rebellion led by Vercingetorix. At Gergovia they were forced to retreat downhill and could have suffered terrible casualties. But the centurions of the VII and X Legions made a line and fought a brave rearguard action to allow their men down the slopes to safety. Forty-six centurions fell, but they prevented a disaster. Almost always the toughest soldiers in a legion and used to leading from the front, these men stood fast on the slopes at Gergovia, prepared to buy the safety of their comrades with their lives.

After the Marian reforms, loyalty became an immensely powerful bond, but it was loyalty to their generals which mattered to soldiers, far more than any loyalty to Rome itself. The state paid and equipped their legionaries but crucially, and catastrophically, refused to make any provision for their discharge or retirement. Instead commanders like Marius, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus bound their soldiers to themselves personally by promising to provide for each one of them when their army service was over. This was always expensive, and the need for cash to pay for veterans’ retirement, land for them to settle on and booty to help them enrich themselves was one of the most important motives behind continuing conquest.

Roman law was surprisingly inexact when it came to be applied to what the historian Tacitus called the pretium victoriae, the wages of victory. This vagueness allowed Caesar and others to become fabulously wealthy as they, nominally at least, acted in the interests of the state. When Gaul was overrun, fortunes were made and as the legions advanced they knew that military success would bring them booty now and a guaranteed retirement later. Their success bound them ever more closely to the likes of Caesar and also gave them powerful incentives to fight hard and earn the wages of victory.

Momentum developed naturally. It is difficult to discern much in the way of coherent policy from the Senate in Rome. The Empire expanded through accident and opportunism, but also because great men wished to become even greater. In Rome there was no meaningful distinction between soldiers and politicians. Senators led legions, generals were senators. Military and political success were largely the same thing. Julius Caesar needed to turn his attention to Britain because he had conquered Gaul. Like a shark he had constantly to move forward.

The reaction in Rome to what amounted to little more than an armed reconnaissance in 55 BC, and the loose ends left when the legions departed quickly, meant that Caesar had to return to Britain. A year was a very long time in politics, and a fresh expedition, perhaps a sustained conquest of the fabled island, would keep his name in the limelight. And, to feed Caesar’s coffers, there might be more tangible rewards. The imperial economy had an insatiable appetite for slaves, and war always produced plenty. Britain had mineral wealth: tin certainly, lead, and perhaps gold and silver. Corn was less shiny but always welcome to the quartermasters of the huge army in Gaul and the Rhine basin. But in truth it was prestige, the promise of glory, which drew Caesar back to the shores of the Channel.

TALKING MACHINES

The unseen, unheard and rarely recorded hands, muscles and brains which underpinned Roman society belonged to the vast number of slaves who lived all over the Empire. In Italy alone in the first century AD, it is thought that there were more than 3 million. With no rights of any kind, they were treated as objects, an instrumentum vocale, a talking tool, or, more brutally, a res, a thing. On Greek pottery, their distinctive shaved heads contrast with the aristocrats they are serving. A slave collar found around the neck of a skeleton carried the message ‘If captured return me to Apronianus, minister in the imperial palace . . . for I am a runaway slave.’ The Roman legal system only allowed slaves to give evidence if they had first been tortured. Otherwise what they said was thought to be inherently unreliable. Roman soldiers had slaves, and Britain was seen as an excellent source. A beautifully made iron chain with collars attached was found at Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey. It had been designed to restrain a chain gang of five and it shows that native British aristocrats also had slaves.

During the winter some tactical lessons were learned. Transports were designed differently. More than 600 were built with a shallow draught to allow them to be beached more easily. To augment their sails and make them more manoeuvrable, banks of oars were added on each side. These modifications were important because the new expedition was planned on an altogether different scale. Five legions and 2,000 cavalry troopers would cross the Ocean in the summer of 54 BC. And Britain’s defenders could not hope to match such a force once they had gained the safety of the shore. But they had to gain it without all the problems of the previous year. Significantly several private vessels were to accompany the fleet. Merchants perhaps, people who hoped to profit from an assured success.

Archaeologists have not yet found the site of Caesar’s second landing, but it is likely to have been close to the first, on the beaches near Deal. Once ashore, Caesar attacked immediately. Having learned that the British had retreated inland, probably at the approach of such a large invasion force, he pursued them hard. With four legions, including the VII and the X, more than 20,000 men and 1,700 cavalry, Caesar at last found part of the British army drawn up behind a river. It was probably the Stour near modern Canterbury. The bulk of the native forces had taken up a defensive position behind the ramparts of a hillfort, almost certainly at Bigbury.

After his cavalry had scattered the skirmishers along the riverbank, Caesar launched the VII Legion in an assault on the fort. Under the protection of the testudo formation, where the legionaries locked their shields over their heads and sides to form a protective shell, the VII built a ramp up to the walls. After a sharp attack, the British fled. Sending his cavalry in only a brief pursuit, Caesar had his men build a marching camp. From there they began the business of subduing the countryside.

So far, so good. But familiar problems surfaced back at the base-camp on the Kentish coast. Despite the redesign of the transports and all the hard-learned lessons of the previous expedition, the same mistakes were made. Left riding at anchor out in the Channel roadsteads, the transport fleet was badly damaged in a storm. Belatedly, a huge ship-camp was dug and the fleet beached well above the high tideline. The new fort took ten days to raise.

Meanwhile the British kings had held a council and managed to suppress their differences in the face of the Roman threat. Cassivellaunus was appointed war-leader. The conflict quickly intensified and, as Caesar advanced through Kent towards the Thames, the British attacked at every opportunity, but were not tempted into pitched battle. When the Roman army halted at the end of a day’s march, Cassivellaunus saw his chance.

The digging of a temporary marching camp in hostile countryside was absolutely essential, but it presented a short period of dangerous exposure – despite elaborate precautions. As evening approached and the army halted, most of the legionaries deployed in battle order, facing the most likely direction of threat. Behind this protective screen, others dug a deep ditch (three and a half metres wide and two and a half deep) and built a rampart from the upcast. Each man carried two stakes sharpened at either end and with a narrow waist which allowed them to be easily tied together. Made from hard-wearing oak, the stakes might have been lashed in threes and set on top of the rampart like large caltrops. If each were tied to its neighbours, these spikey clusters would have made a very formidable obstacle to an enemy charge. Once one side of the camp was complete, the legionaries in battle order moved behind it, and more men could be released to complete the remaining three as quickly as possible.

Cassivellaunus’ soldiers attacked at that moment. And it was only with the aid of reinforcements that they were beaten back. But it was a hard fight, and one of Caesar’s senior officers, a tribune, was killed. Pressing on almost immediately through northern Kent, the Roman army arrived on the banks of the River Thames, their first really formidable natural obstacle. It is likely that Cassivellaunus was king of the Catuvellauni, and the river flowed through the heart of his territory. No doubt with local help, Caesar’s scouts found a ford, possibly a place now in the centre of modern London. When the Romans waded across the Thames, swept resistance aside and advanced northwards, the British commander changed tactics. Wisely refusing a set-piece battle (and disbanding the bulk of his army – it was harvest-time), he used chariots to skirmish and drove flocks and herds out of the line of march and beyond the reach of legionary foragers.

At this moment, when a long process of attrition threatened and lines of communication with base-camp seemed set to stretch to breaking point, Caesar brought domestic British politics into play. Some time before the invasion, Cassivellaunus had had the king of the Trinovantes killed. Their territory neighboured his own, and the removal of their ruler probably expanded his kingdom into East Anglia. The heir to the Trinovantian throne, Mandubracius, had fled to Gaul to seek Caesar’s support, and appears to have accompanied the Roman army in 54 BC. Once across the Thames, it seemed the right time to play this political card. With an agreement to restore Mandubracius, and presumably throw off Catuvellaunian control, the Trinovantes surrendered to Caesar, supplying hostages and much needed food and supplies.

Cassivellaunus countered with an audacious move. Showing that he had both good communications and a long military reach, he ordered four Kentish kings to combine forces and attack the Roman base-camp on the Channel shore. But they failed. Left to guard the precious transports, Quintus Arius and his men defended the ship-camp successfully and inflicted many casualties on the British.

INFANTS

In Western Europe a tradition of hierarchy in battle has grown up and it places the infantry, the foot soldiers, the squaddies, in a lowly position. This is almost entirely a consequence of the rise in the importance of cavalry, especially the heavy cavalry of the Middle Ages. It continued into the Victorian period, and even when the Light Brigade charged into the wrong valley it was considered somehow glorious. If the infantry had marched on the Russian guns, it would just have been thought daft. This pecking order is summed up by the word ‘infantry’. It is cognate to enfant in French, infante in Italian and in essence was a term for the boys, too young or too poor to afford a horse. This attitude would have made tough old centurions smile. For Rome the infantry were the elite, the core of the army, and flapping around the wings were the horse-boys, the cavalry.

Meanwhile Rome’s new Trinovantian allies had betrayed the location of Cassivelluanus’ headquarters to Caesar. Once they had broken through the defences – which appear to have been long and difficult to man – his soldiers were no doubt delighted to find herds of cattle.

It was enough. Cassivellaunus sued for peace, and once again Commius mediated. Time was pressing hard on Caesar: it was late September, and his commanders in Gaul had sent word that rebellion was in the air. Punitive terms would take too long and might be difficult to enforce. Hostages, an annual tribute and the security of the Trinovantes were quickly agreed, and the Roman army embarked once more to brave the dangers of the Ocean.

This time there were no celebrations in Rome, no vote of public thanksgiving from the Senate. Caesar’s political enemies had regrouped. The great orator and lawyer Cicero had been in favour of the expedition to Britain but was becoming increasingly uneasy about Caesar’s ambitions. By a stroke of good fortune, Cicero’s brother, Quintus, had been a staff officer in 54 BC and he wrote letters home full of disappointment at the lack of booty. In the Senate Cicero could report that there was no silver to be had, no cartloads of loot, only slaves, hostages and a vague promise of tribute. The pyrotechnics of 55 BC and the daring crossing of the Ocean had turned out to be a damp squib. Added to these disappointments was a sense of non-fulfilment. Some of Caesar’s actions in Britain hinted that he had planned a thorough conquest (of the south, at least) and was in the early stages of establishing a new province. The whispers of insurrection in Gaul which took him back across the Channel seem to have been an unwelcome interruption.

It would be almost a century before a Roman legionary would again set foot on British soil. Between 54 BC and 50 BC there was almost continuous war in Gaul as Caesar’s army criss-crossed the centre of the province suppressing opposition. After the murder of the great man in 44 BC, civil war turned Rome in on itself, and even when Augustus had established himself as the first emperor, it was to Germany that he directed his legions.

Propagandists and apologists nevertheless wrote of Britain as though it was a semi-detached satellite, not a formal part of the Empire but certainly within its control. Rome had only to reach out and take the island if the need arose. As a facet of his self-appointed role as Caesar’s heir, Augustus felt that he should complete what his uncle had started. Three expeditions were planned. But in 34 BC, 28 BC and 27 BC other priorities prevented the legions embarking at Boulogne.

While British kings will not have recognised it, the Greek geographer and historian Strabo’s view was that there was no need for the Romans to cross the Channel and conquer: Britain was too weak to pose any military threat in Europe (perhaps implying that that had not been true in the past), and in any case the tax yielded by trade was already substantial and cost little effort to collect. So why bother?

Despite this patent political spin, Strabo’s observations had some substance. British kings showed themselves acutely sensitive to events inside the Empire. The Catuvellaunians had ultimately ignored Caesar’s insistence on the independence of the Trinovantes and overrun the kingdom. But when Augustus was in northern Gaul in 16 BC, the Catuvellaunian king, Tasciovanus, thought it prudent to withdraw. And, as disaster struck Rome in AD 9, when three legions were ambushed and annihilated in the German forests, the Catuvellaunians promptly retreated.

The British economy also saw some profound shifts as it reacted to Roman imperial policy. After the expeditions of 55 BC and 54 BC, the major points of contact with continental commerce moved eastwards. Much evidence of a busy trade in Roman and European goods had been found at Hengistbury Head, near modern Bournemouth, and in the kingdom of the Durotriges. Business appears to have dried up there and the points of entry shift to the Kent and especially the Essex coasts. Around AD