The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  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 stand
ard 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 nothern 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.