The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  The Persian Wars had another determinant consequence for the history of western Europe. In the summer of 490 BC the great Athenian dramatist Aeschylus put on his body armour, took up his weapons and marched to fight at Marathon, and probably at Salamis and Plataea ten years later. Not surprisingly these battles influenced his plays profoundly. In The Persians Aeschylus makes a new and sharp distinction. On one side stand the brave, freedom-loving and civilised Greeks. Opposing them are the seething masses of cruel, cringing, slant-eyed, alien Persians. Forced to fight, whipped into battle by their captains, they were ultimately shown to be cowardly, lesser beings. These were people not even in possession of a proper language, muttering an incomprehensible bar-bar-bar. These were barbarians.

  Before the Persian Wars, Marathon and Aeschylus’ play, the Greeks had seen foreigners as exotic, even supernatural outsiders, like the Titans or the Amazons. Homer composed verses about the Trojans without denigrating them. But after the first battles of the 490s a chasm cracked open and quickly began to widen between the Greeks and the rest, the barbarians. It was a set of attitudes eagerly adopted by the Romans in their turn. And when the Emperor Hadrian came north to Britain and decided to build a wall, its stated purpose sprang straight out of that way of thinking. The Wall ran across the middle of Britain qui barbaros Romanosque divideret, to separate the barbarians from the Romans.

  The ability to write down history, or at least a version of it, and the invention of the idea of barbarians have been enormously influential. Because written records survive, historians have naturally concentrated on the role of the Roman invaders in British history between 55 BC and AD 410. Less easy to understand is the readiness of many to adopt quasi-Roman attitudes to the natives, the barbarians, our ancestors, their own ancestors. Characterised as primitive, war-painted, wild and hollering, even gormless, governed in tribes by bickering chieftains, the British are often cast as little more than background. Taking centre-stage, the red-cloaked legionaries in disciplined ranks march north with their glittering eagles held high, sweeping all before them. Road-building, town-dwelling, they bring Mediterranean civilisation to a drab, rain-sodden straggle of shepherds cowering in muddy hovels. Perhaps an exaggeration, but not a wild one.

  The historical reality must be different. The truth is that the Romans found Britain impossible to conquer entirely. What they did hold was held with some considerable initial difficulty, and when Hadrian’s Wall was built its primary military meaning must have been as a huge reaction to real and persistent problems in northern Britannia. For most of the 350-year life of the province, a tenth of the whole Roman imperial army was stationed in that part of the island they were able to control. First-rate generals were usually appointed as governors. Such close policing by very large numbers of expensive legionaries and their commanders would not have been required for ‘gormless’ drabs. Determined, independent-minded, well organised and consistently courageous are much more apt adjectives. The difficulty is, however, glaringly obvious. Only Roman reactions to British actions survive in the historical record. The British barbarians have left little or no sense of what life was like under Roman rule, or of their successful resistance to it in the north. The impact of Hadrian’s Wall can only be surmised. Memory turns out to be much more fragile even than flaking, crumbling papyrus.

  Occasionally Roman sources do offer some inklings – but before these are considered, there exists one prime echo of what British society was like in the first century BC, a vivid sense of its atmosphere. At the same time as Julius Caesar was campaigning in Gaul, the four kingdoms of Iron Age Ireland were also at war. Ulster was defended against the armies of Connaught by one man, a champion, the boy-hero, Cuchulainn. Here he is inciting himself to battle:

  The rage-fit was upon him. He shook like a bullrush in the stream. His sinews stretched and bunched, and every huge, immeasurable, vast ball of them was as big as the head of a month-old child. His face as a red bowl, fearsomely distorted, one eye sucked in so far that the beak of a wild crane could scarcely reach it, the other eye bulged out of his cheek. Teeth and jawbone strained through peeled-back lips. Lungs and liver pulsed in his throat. Flecks of fire streamed from his mouth. The booming of his heart was like the deep baying of bloodhounds, or the growl of lions attacking bears.

  In virulent clouds, sparks blazed, lit by the torches of the war-goddess Badb. The sky was slashed as a mark of his fury. His hair stood about his head like the twisted branches of red hawthorn. A stream of dark blood, as tall as the mast of a ship, rose out of the top of his head, then dispersed into dark mist, like the smoke of winter fires.

  This passage comes from an epic poem know as the Tain Bo Cuailnge, the Great Cattle Raid of Cooley. Composed in Irish Gaelic, it sings of a pre-Christian society, of heroes and blood-spattered wars, of kings and scheming queens, of covetousness and the wealth in teeming herds of cattle, of gods, greed and revenge: themes equally vividly drawn by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Tain Bo is a splash of brilliant colour which scatters the grey mists of early Irish history and which describes a thoroughly Celtic culture. And across the North Channel a similar culture bloomed, perhaps even mediated in the same language along the Argyll and Galloway coasts. The rest of the peoples of Britain certainly spoke a cousin-language and they shared much with the warriors of the Tain Bo and the other poems in what is known as the Ulster Cycle. Cuchulainn and his comrades spoke Q-Celtic, what became Manx, Irish and Scots Gaelic, while the British described their islands in dialects of P-Celtic, the ancestors of Pictish, Old Cumbrian, Welsh and Cornish. Much of the evidence for the existence and use of these languages is, paradoxically, supplied by the Greeks and Romans.

  Herodotus had heard whispers of a remote island called Britain. The Kassiterides, the Tin Islands, lay somewhere amidst the storms and monsters of the Northern Ocean, but, said the cautious and scrupulous historian, I cannot speak with any certainty. Herodotus’ work must have been well known in the Greek colony of Marseilles, then called Massalia. Tin was much prized and much needed in the manufacture of bronze. Cornwall was a prime source. Greek merchants trading out of Massalia needed more precision than the hesitant Herodotus could supply (and they probably also wanted to cut out as many middle-men as possible), and around 320 BC one of their citizens, Pytheas, made the first recorded journey to Britain.

  Pytheas was intrepid. Arriving on the southern coast of the English Channel, he met sailors who had been to Britain, and he asked them what the inhabitants were called. Pretannikai is how he wrote down the reply. And the whole island? That was known as Pretannike. The Celtic-language version is Pretani and it means something very intriguing. The Pretannikai were the ‘People of the Tattoos’. It is the derivation of the Roman name Britannia, and it changed only a little into Britain.

  THE PERIPLUS

  Pytheas’ main aim appears to have been the creation of a periplus, a route-guide for those wishing to travel to the Kassiterides and beyond. His original manuscript is now lost and known only in fragments quoted by later authors. In addition to visiting Belerion (Cornwall) and circumnavigating Britain, he also went on to Thule (Iceland or Norway), reported finding precious amber on the coasts of Holland and Germany, and on an island which may have been Heligoland. Some classical historians cast severe doubt on the reliability of Pytheas’ discoveries, but the citizens of modern Marseilles had no such difficulty. On the facade of the city’s stock exchange, there stands an impressive statue of the great explorer.

  It may not have been a name the British themselves recognised, at least until the time of the Roman invasions. They knew the largest island by a very different name. Here is the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD:

  Across from this location Britannia Island, famed in Greek and in our own records, lies off to the north west, separated from Germany, Gaul, Spain and the greatest portion of Europe by a large interval. Albion was its own name when all were called the Britannias.

  Alba is the Gaelic
name for Scotland, and Yr Alban is the Welsh version. But its wider application as the native name for the whole island has persisted here and there. When Sir Francis Drake attempted to colonise California in 1579, he planned to name it New Albion, and in 1809 Napoleon’s propaganda was directed at Perfidious Albion. Modern football fans still chant the name Albion at West Bromwich, Brighton and Hove, Stirling and at Albion Rovers’ ground in Coatbridge. The name probably means ‘White Land’ and may be a reference to the rampart of chalky cliffs visible on much of the coastline between South Foreland in Kent to the Isle of Wight. This is the first sight of Britain for travellers crossing the Channel at its narrower points.

  When Julius Caesar and his commanders sat down to plan the invasion of 55 BC, they talked of Britannia, but their enemies waiting on the white cliffs probably called it Alba and themselves Albans (perhaps in conjunction with their own tribal names). This is not a petty or perverse point to labour, but an attempt to resist accepting a purely Roman perspective and assert that there was a native point of view – even if it is very difficult to reconstruct.

  Nevertheless, the Greek and Roman habit of making a sufficient quantity of written records so that many have survived is useful. It has given us the names of British kingdoms, kings and place-names. Taken together with archaeology and helpful analogy from elsewhere, it makes possible some broad statements about Britain and the British, or Alba and the Albans, on the eve of the Roman invasion.

  As Caesar’s conquest of Gaul swept northwards, his military intelligence about Britain naturally multiplied. There were clearly connections. Diviciacus was not only a king in northern Gaul, but he also ruled part of Britain. The native merchants of Brittany traded in volume with the southern coast of Britain (Cornish tin being a key commodity) and, when that part of Gaul rebelled against Caesar in 56 BC, help came south across the Channel. A generation before, there had been a substantial migration to the area around the Solent from Belgic Gaul and contacts remained close. The southern British had much in common with the northern Gauls. Language may have been one of the most enduring links. Modern Breton is now thought to be a descendant of Gaulish and it has many points of similarity with Cornish, still stubbornly spoken by a thousand or so people.

  In an island as large as Britain, split into several highland and lowland zones and having many clearly distinct geographical regions within those, there will have been local variations of all sorts, most especially linguistic. The names of the small kingdoms which patterned first century In an island as large as Britain, split into several highland and lowland zones and having many clearly distinct geographical regions within those, there will have been local variations of all sorts, most especially linguistic. The names of the small kingdoms which patterned first century BC Britain hint at that. Probably first gleaned by passages of diplomacy and reconnaissance, many of these were plotted on a map made in the secnd century AD by the Greek cartographer Ptolemy. At first glance it looks wildly distorted. North of the line of the Tay, Ptolemy has bent Scotland through 90 degrees so that Caithness appears to extend east into the North Sea. In fact it was no mad mistake but the solution to a problem. In common with other Greek geographers (who lived far away on the shores of the Mediterranean, and had never travelled to northern Europe), Ptolemy did not believe that human beings could survive in the extreme weather conditions to be found in latitudes beyond 63 degrees. So, instead of extending Britain northwards to a clearly impossible 66 degrees, he bent it east to fall below the limits of survival.

  PS AND QS

  Much of northern and western Europe spoke dialects of Celtic languages in the latter half of the first millennium BC. In Spain and Portugal, Celtiberian was heard for many centuries, and until recent times a remnant clung on in the north-west. Galician has the root ‘Gael’ as its first syllable. Lepontic was spoken both north and south of the Alps, and across France and Belgium, dialects of Gaulish were used. Only Breton survives, again in the north-west. Modern Celtic languages are almost all found in the west of Britain and Ireland and they divide into two groups. Irish, Scots and Manx Gaelic are all Q-Celtic, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are P-Celtic. The three languages in each group are just about mutually intelligible but P-Celts cannot understand Q-Celts.

  South of this extravagant convulsion the map shows the names of several kingdoms in the area around what was to become Hadrian’s Wall. A few of them have a literal meaning and they offer some sense of how the native peoples saw themselves.

  The Wall cut through the wide territories of the Brigantes. Probably a federation of smaller clans, the kingdom straddled the Pennines, perhaps reaching down to both the North Sea and Irish Sea coasts. The Roman historian Tacitus reckoned the Brigantes territory to be the largest British kingdom, perhaps in area, certainly in population. In the years following the invasion of AD 43, their queen, Cartimandua, was a Roman ally, betraying the British rebel leader Caratacus. Cartimandua’s name means ‘Sleek Pony’. Perhaps Caratacus called her something else. The name of her kingdom is harder to parse. The Brig element may mean ‘Honoured’, possibly giving the meaning of ‘the Homage-Takers’.

  A clan owing homage to the Brigantian kings and queens was the Carvetii. Occupying the Eden Valley, the area around Carlisle, the hill country to the east and probably the Lake District, they carried a name with a much simpler derivation. It means ‘the Deer People’. Some other British kingdoms also had descriptive names. The Catuvellauni were ‘Good in Battle’, the Atrebates were simply ‘the Inhabitants’ and the Ordovices of Wales were ‘the Hammer-Fighters’. Like the Carvetii many of the northern kingdoms of early Britain adopted animals as their talismans. The Lugi, the People of the Ravens, lived in Sutherland and Easter Ross, the Epidii, the Horse People, in Argyll and the Venicones, the Kindred Hounds, in Fife and Stirlingshire. If the habit of tattooing first identified by Pytheas had survived in the north (as the later name ‘the Picts’ suggests), then perhaps the warriors of the Carvetii wore stylised representations of antlers on their manly chests. A Celtic legacy lingered around the high fells of the Lake District and the Pennines for a long time. As late as the nineteenth century, Cumbrian shepherds still counted their flocks in a version of Old Welsh, and the name of Cumbria is itself is cognate to Cymru, the Welsh name for Wales.

  Further east, towards the Hexham Gap and the Tyne Valley, lay the lands of the Tectoverdi and the Lopocares. Their names appear to be impenetrable, but beyond them, nearer the mouth of the Tyne were the Corionototae. The first part of the name lives on in Corbridge, known as Coria in the Roman period. It means ‘a hosting-place’, a muster-point where armies gathered. Corionototae may be an elaborated version – the warband, even the Great Army. There are several Corias in the north, and hosting-places were always chosen by geography: accessible from several directions, near a good water supply and often at a fording place on a routeway. They remained traditional meeting places for centuries, often into the Middle Ages.

  North of the Corionototae, perhaps beyond the valley of the Aln, stretched the fertile territories of the Votadini. Probably taking in all of the Tweed basin and north Northumberland, the Lothians and part of Stirlingshire, it was a country of farms and corn production, much as it is today. Across the Firth of Forth, the Kindred Hounds, the Venicones, were almost certainly allied, and on the well-drained soils of Fife also reaped good harvests. When the Romans marched north, it appeared that the kings of the Votadini had struck a bargain. Across their lands there are few signs of intrusive military activity. Now called the Devil’s Causeway, a road ran from the fort at Corbridge northwards to Tweedmouth, and between there and Kelso are the faint outlines of five temporary marching camps. And that is all. Compared with the density of Roman military remains over Brigantian lands, it seems no more than the legacy of a reconnaissance.

  Votadinian kings controlled something that Roman quartermasters needed. If the north of Britannia was to be conquered, the army had to have a secure supply of corn available. Retreating enemies w
ould scorch the earth in front of an advance. Probably in return for client status and the right prices, the Votadini seem to have come to an accommodation.

  Their kings ruled from at least four centres of power, perhaps the places where they received Roman envoys. The Votadini held the Castle Rock at Edinburgh, Traprain Law (where a huge hoard of Roman silver was found) in East Lothian, Eildon Hill North on the banks of the middle Tweed and Yeavering Bell near Wooler in north Northumberland. On the summits of these impressive hills stood forts. Constructed by work-gangs using mattocks, shovels and baskets to shift the huge volumes of earth and stones, the outlines of their ditches and ramparts can still be seen – except at Edinburgh where a mighty castle has obliterated almost all ancient archaeology. On Eildon Hill North and Yeavering Bell the circuit of the ramparts is long, too long to be effectively defended. Inside, the footprints of hut platforms have been found – and yet there are no sources of water. On Eildon Hill North 300 platforms imply a population of around 2,500. If these really were strongpoints, forts, then their military rationale looks ill thought out. Other, smaller forts – and there are hundreds in Votadinian territory – look even less defensible. Despite elaborate rings of ditches and ramparts, some are overlooked from higher ground, places where determined attackers could rain down missiles. And at other sites the total area of the defences is significantly larger than the area defended.

  It is much more likely that hillforts were indeed power centres but were not built with a military purpose in mind, at least not in the sense that we would understand it. They were intended to impress, to make a show of power. Kings and their warbands may have lived in these high places all year round. Logistics did not matter if you had slaves and warriors. But the mass of farmers from the valleys probably climbed up to the summits only at the time of festivals.