Commodus sent Ulpius Marcellus to restore order and it may be that the siege-works at Burnswark were undertaken on his orders and date to the 180s, in an attempt to crush the Anavionenses. Even if it succeeded, the native kings could claim overall victory. The forts north of Hadrian’s Wall were never again occupied and despite the issue of coins in 184 with Britannia bowed and the assumption of the title of Britannicus by Commodus, Rome had been forced to retreat – and not by events elsewhere in the empire but as a result of native military pressure. It was a century after Mons Graupius and the kings of the north were once again resurgent.
Commodus’ chaotic reign marked the abrupt close of a long period of stability, the era of the so-called adoptive emperors. These were men appointed by their predecessors (often by a process of elimination – Hadrian had preferred several alternatives to Antoninus Pius) and not the result of the lottery of primogeniture, as it was with the succession of the crazy Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius. After his inevitable assassination on the last day of 192, Septimius Severus emerged as the new emperor, having disposed of most of his rivals. The only survivor, Clodius Albinus, governor of Britannia, was more tenacious and his claim to the throne lasted until his defeat and suicide at Lyons in 197.
The British-based legions had marched behind Albinus and the weakened provincial garrison quickly came under pressure from the northern kings. War bands raided in the south, according to the historian, Herodian, ‘laying waste the countryside . . . carrying off plunder and wrecking almost everything’. In 197 Septimius Severus sent Virius Lupus to Britain to calm the situation and secure the Hadrianic frontier. The two kindreds in the van of all that trouble were named as the Maeatae and the Caledonians. The former were new and place-names hint at their territories. Dumyat, the Dun of the Maeatae, is an impressive hill standing out from the southern range of the Ochils, and not far away is Myot Hill. These obvious geographical features with the name of a kindred attached are likely to have stood on a southern frontier. The lands of the Maeatae therefore lay to the north of the kingdom of Manau. They may have held the beautiful valley of Strathearn, the upper reaches of the Teith and the high ground to the north-east. And north of the Maeatae are two more place-names which might signify the southern marches of the Caledonians in a similar way. Dunkeld was known in the ninth century as Dun Chaillden, ‘the Dun of the Caledonians’, and the second element of the striking, singular peak of Schiehallion also contains a version of the kindred name. Both may have been so called because they lie on the edge of their lands.
Virius Lupus brought cash to Britain rather than soldiers. Dio Cassius reported: ‘Because the Caledonians did not keep their promises but had prepared to assist the Maeatae . . . Lupus was compelled to buy peace from the Maeatae for a large sum, and he received a few prisoners of war in exchange.’
These last may have been Romans or prominent native allies of Rome. And Dio’s report says something about diplomacy. It was the Maeatae who were raiding in the province and taking prisoners while the Caledonians had either supported them or were about to. In any event the deal stuck. For ten years there appears to have been peace in the north. Perhaps regular subsidies were handed over. No doubt the kings of the Maeatae were content with their gold, but Septimius Severus was a tough soldier with a long memory and an utterly ruthless nature.
Aerial photography has revealed evidence of his ruthlessness, a series of four extraordinary structures in southern Scotland – a string of temporary marching camps on the line of Dere Street, from Trimontium to Pathhead and the high ground south of the Firth of Forth. What is extraordinary is their size. Each extends to more than 165 acres and they are located only eight miles apart. They show the trail of a vast Roman army on the march in 208. Forty thousand men were being led by the Emperor himself on a spectacular mission to invade and pacify the north. Septimius Severus’ patience with the Maeatae and the Caledonians was at an end. Dio Cassius again:
The Britons having broken their agreements and taken up arms, Severus ordered his soldiers to invade their territory and to put to the sword all that they met, adding the Homeric quotation that ‘they should let nobody escape, not even the children hidden in their mothers’ wombs’.
Genocide was what the Emperor planned – a ruthless campaign of extermination. As the Grand Army marched down from Soutra Hill and saw the Firth of Forth in the distance, another measure of the might and reach of Rome came into view. Bobbing at anchor in the firth were no fewer than four imperial fleets brigaded together to join the invasion. Under the flagship of the Classis Britannica, the British Fleet, was the Rhine Fleet and two fleets from the Danube. Such was the scale and the sweep of Roman military planning that these last had sailed out of the Black Sea many weeks previously, travelled the length of the Mediterranean, up the Atlantic coast of France, through the Channel and up the North Sea coast. Perhaps 200 ships, triremes, biremes and liburnae waited in the Forth Roads. Signallers from the Grand Army may have made contact while they were on the high ground at Soutra.
Marching six men abreast, their eagle standards glinting in the sunshine and the low thud of their hobnailed boots thundering on the road, the British legions and their auxiliaries made up the bulk of Severus’ force. Because he led them in person, the Praetorian Guard had come from Rome, 9,000 strong, and there were also detachments from European legions. With their baggage train, the infantry column stretched for six miles. Out wide on the flanks, squadrons of cavalry, perhaps 10,000 troopers in all, swept the countryside for any hostile activity. As the rearguard left the camp they had dug the night before, the surveyors were pegging out the site for the next one. It was probably the largest army ever to invade Scotland and, as the foraging legions moved slowly across the landscape, they devoured all in their path, like a plague of locusts.
When Severus and his officers reached the Forth, likely near Cramond, they divided the Grand Army into three groups. A legion was left at the base to guard the rear. Another, larger group marched north through the Stirling Gap and up to Strathmore before arcing round to the North Sea coast at the Montrose Basin where they could ultimately embark on the imperial fleet and be taken south. But, before that could happen, Severus sent the remainder of his army on by sea. Their landing point was at Carpow on the Tay Estuary where the banks and ditches of a large camp have been excavated. It was a classic pincer movement and it choked the Maeatae and the Caledonians into negotiation.
Possibly to the fortress at Carpow in 209, the kindreds sent a delegation. It was led by Argentocoxus. His name means ‘Silver-Leg’, perhaps a reference to a habit of wearing greaves in battle. The discussion prompted this surprising anecdote from Dio Cassius:
A very witty remark is reported to have been made by the wife of Argentocoxus, a Caledonian, to Julia Augusta. When the Empress was jesting with her, after the treaty, about the free intercourse of her sex with men in Britain, she replied: ‘We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’ Such was the retort of the British woman.
It is difficult to know what to make of this. Julia Augusta, better known as Julia Domna, was certainly in Britain with her husband. A powerful influence at the imperial court, perhaps too powerful to be left behind amongst the plots and conspiracies of Rome, she also had a reputation for licentiousness. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is the presence of wives at the peace negotiations – and, making sour remarks to each other, a Caledonian princess successfully besting a former Syrian aristocrat, the Empress of Rome. Contemporary commentators were always taken aback by the active roles of elite Celtic women. Queens Boudicca and Cartimandua had occupied centre stage at pivotal moments in the early years of the province of Britannia and here was another influential women – this time one very well informed about the shady rumours slithering around the imperial entourage. If not a fabrication of Dio Cassius (he was not an enthusiastic supporter of Severu
s), the anecdote is a good example of how much the leadership of the northern kindreds knew about their enemies.
* * *
Free Love in the Flat Highlands
Such is the sparseness of source materials for the early history of Scotland that historians are sometimes tempted into hypotheses that totter like inverted pyramids. The remains of Roman goods have been found mainly in high-status sites in southern Scotland, and around the North Sea coasts such goods are found in brochs, the extraordinary drystane towers built for the powerful between 220 BC and AD 100. On the Atlantic coasts and in the landward areas of the Highlands, fragments of Roman goods appear to be more evenly distributed with significantly less emphasis on high-status sites. The beginnings of a hypothesis but still a little blurry. C. Julius Solinus, the third-century Roman author of On the Wonders of the World, a title which might just include fables, reported that men in the Northern Isles shared their women in common and that the King of the Hebrides was an impoverished mendicant hoping ‘to learn justice through poverty’ and a man who shared the wives of his subjects. Add these scraps together and the vision of a less hierarchical, ‘flatter’ society in the north finally comes drifting into view.
* * *
At all events, the treaty negotiated by Argentocoxus did not hold and fighting once more broke out. While planning another campaign in Scotland, to be launched from the legionary fortress at York, Septimius Severus became ill. He suffered badly from gout. His son, known as Caracalla, led the Grand Army up the north road once more and this time appears to have carried out a merciless programme of destruction and killing, perhaps reaching the Moray Firth coastlands. But fate intervened to cut short the bloodshed when, in 211, Septimius Severus died and Caracalla hurried south to protect and further his own dynastic interests. His expedition was the last time the eagle standards were seen in the north.
5
After Rome
THE HISTORIAN Ammianus Marcellinus described dramatic events in Britain in 367:
After setting out from Amiens on a rapid march to Trier, [the Emperor] Valentinian was shocked to receive the serious news that a concerted attack by the barbarians had reduced the provinces of Britain to the verge of ruin. Nectaridus, the count of the coastal region, had been killed and the general, Fullofaudes, surprised and cut off . . . Finally, in response to the alarming reports which constantly arrived, Theodosius was selected for the task and ordered to proceed to Britain without delay. He had a great reputation as a soldier, and, getting together a tough force of horse and foot, he set out on his mission with every prospect of success . . . [A]t that time the Picts, of whom there were two tribes, the Dicalydones and the Verturiones, together with the warlike people of the Attacotti and the Scots, were roving at large and causing great devastation. In addition the Franks and Saxons were losing no opportunity of raiding the part of Gaul nearest to them by land and sea, plundering and burning and putting to death all their prisoners.
This pivotal episode in the history of Britannia is known as the Barbarian Conspiracy, ‘a concerted attack’ on the province by two Pictish kindreds, the Scots from Ireland, the Attacotti, perhaps from the Hebrides and war bands of Franks and Saxons in Gaul. These incursions were all the more devastating for having been planned and coordinated and their success seriously undermines the popular image of screaming hordes hurling themselves at the stones of Hadrian’s Wall. Clear leadership and precise military planning and timing appear to have achieved unprecedented success. It was a culmination of sixty years of intermittent aggression.
In 305 and 306 the Emperor Constantius Chlorus was in Britain campaigning against the Caledonians and ‘other Picts’. What sounds like a soldiers’ nickname for warriors wearing tattoos, it is the first use of this term for the northern kindreds by Roman historians. In many societies military body decoration, which in this case probably resembled early versions of the designs on Pictish symbol stones and jewellery, was used by bands of warriors not only to identify themselves as a brotherhood but also to invoke the power and protection of the symbols themselves. Roman soldiers also wore more modest legionary tattoos.
Trouble flared along the frontier again in 315 and, this time, Rome claimed victory. Nevertheless, coin hoards dating to the second and third centuries found in the north suggest that occasional successful military action was also mixed with regular subsidy. Britannia was seen as an important province and, in a period of relative peace, the Emperor Constans ‘clove the ocean’ and made what sounds like an impromptu imperial tour:
He sent no advance warning to the cities there, nor did he make any prior announcement of his sailing, or wish to create a stir with his plans before he had completed the venture . . . As it was affairs in Britain were stable.
By 360 the situation had deteriorated. Ammianus again:
[T]he wild tribes of the Scots and Picts broke their understanding to keep peace, laid waste the country near the frontier, and caused alarm amongst the provincials, who were exhausted by the repeated disasters they had suffered.
And four years later a momentum was building – ‘the Picts, Saxons, Scots and Attacotti were bringing continual misery on Britain’ which would lead to the disaster of the Barbarian Conspiracy.
When they crossed the Wall or landed in their ships in 367, the Picts, the Scots and the Attacotti had no intention of invading, occupying or settling. Raiding was what mattered to them – acquiring as much plunder as they could carry off. And, as their war bands looted, raped, burned and killed, the province began to bleed to death. Within fifty years, Britannia would cease to be part of the empire, becoming increasingly weak and vulnerable, and the damage done by the northern kindreds was an important contributory cause.
When Count Theodosius restored order in 369, he will have done his best to shore up the Wall defences. It seems that what remained of the garrison had been implicated in the Barbarian Conspiracy and the areani, the scouts who operated forward of Hadrian’s Wall, had been bribed. The Pictish kings will have wanted no reports of a build-up of forces to reach commanders in the south and so silence was bought. And it worked: ‘Fullofaudes was surprised and cut off’, probably ambushed.
Notable absentees in the reports of 367 were the kindreds who lived between the Roman walls. The Damnonii, the Votadini, even the Selgovae and the Novantae appear not to have been involved. Understandings of some sort with the Pictish leadership (unless they sailed around the walls) about neutrality may have been reached or threats issued. In any event, it seems that Theodosius himself reached a different understanding with those kindreds once Britannia and the wall had been secured.
For kings and royal families, genealogy has always been important. It conferred legitimacy and, in the sixth and seventh centuries, the rulers of the Celtic kingdoms of Britain seem to have valued glittering ancestors more than most. King lists compiled in early medieval Wales contain flights of historical fancy but four names appear around the period between 370 and 380 which speak of imperial policy rather than pretension. Quintilius Clemens ruled on the Clyde, over the Damnonii, Antonius Donatus over the Novantae in the south west, Catellius Decianus over the northern Votadini and probably Manau and, governing in the Tweed Valley, Paternus, son of Tacitus. Paternus had a nickname which has survived. Pesrut means ‘the man in the red cloak’. Who were these men?
Scholars have argued that the king lists are so late and corrupt as to be of little or no value – or that the assumption of Roman names was an affectation, probably signifying nothing more than a conversion to Christianity. If so, then these are very early Christians indeed. And four kings of the four principal kindreds all converting and all adopting the correct Roman form of nomen and cognomen at the same time? This stretches coincidence and a particular piety to breaking point.
Two years after he had pacified Britannia, Count Theodosius was in North Africa on a similar mission. Ammianus reported that he had calmed the situation ‘by a mixture of intimidation and bribery and put reliable praefecti in charge o
f the peoples he encountered’. Corroboration came from someone who lived in the region at exactly that time – St Augustine of Hippo: ‘A few years ago a small number of barbarian peoples were pacified and attached to the Roman frontier, so that they no longer had their own kings, but were ruled by prefects appointed by the Roman Empire.’
An intriguing and recent archaeological find offers support for very late Roman involvement with the four kingdoms between the walls of the north. At Springwood Park near Kelso, more than a hundred low denomination Roman coins have been found. They date to after the Barbarian Conspiracy and were turned up in a field just across the Teviot from the mighty, old castle of Roxburgh. Although no archaeology has ever been permitted, the shape of the castle mount and the ditching at its west and east ends strongly suggest a long history. Before it acquired an Anglian name in the early seventh century (Hroc’s Burh, meaning ‘the Stronghold of a Man Called the Rook’, probably the leader of a war band), Roxburgh Castle was known as Marchidun in Old Welsh. It means ‘the Cavalry Fort’. Were Theodosius’ prefects sent north to the kindreds with a squadron of cavalry to back their authority? And was Paternus Pesrut’s red cloak seen on the ramparts at Roxburgh as he ruled over the Votadini of the Tweed Valley? And were his soldiers used to being paid in coin?
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 10