The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  SKY-GODS

  The Roman pantheon survives overhead. The planets of our solar system are mostly named after gods venerated in Britannia and some have aspects of their ancient attributes:

  Mercury is the smallest planet and is named after the wing-footed messenger of the gods.

  Venus is seen as the Earth’s sister planet and is named after the goddess of love and beauty.

  Mars is the red, or angry, planet and is named after the god of war, the soldiers’ god.

  Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and is named after the king of the gods.

  Saturn is almost as big and is named after the father of Jupiter and the god of agriculture.

  Uranus was a late discovery (1787) and is named after a Graeco-Roman god of the sky.

  Neptune has the strongest winds and is named after the god of rivers and, later, of the sea.

  After the forts had been brought up to the line of the Wall and the ditch in front of it completed, Roman planners turned their minds to the problem of the south. If part of Hadrian’s intention had been to force apart a tight network of allies, then his dispositions at Stanwix, down the Cumbrian coast, at the western outpost forts, and the general focus of the Wall system appeared to cope with the threats rumbling in the north. But, to its rear, the barrier must have felt exposed. Another momentous decision was taken.

  In order to create a clearly defined military zone, a wide ditch would be dug in the area immediately to the south of the Wall. The Romans did not call the ditch the Vallum. This mistaken label was first attached by the normally meticulous Bede of Jarrow, the great eighth-century historian of the English, a man who knew the Wall well. Vallum may be the accepted name for the vast ditch system dug behind Hadrian’s Wall but, in the second century AD, it was the Latin word for a palisaded rampart. And it is the derivation of the English ‘wall’. Fossa is a ditch or trench, not Vallum. But the original misleading label has stuck.

  It was a remarkable feat of military engineering. So that it could present a really formidable barrier, the whole entrenchment measures 37 metres across: impossible to bridge and very difficult to traverse on foot. And it ran behind the entire length of the Land-Wall, from the Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway without interruption. In many places where there is no trace of any masonry and even the cleft of the Wall ditch has gone, the Vallum is still visible. Arrow-straight, much larger than any other element of the frontier works, it is perhaps the most enduring mark made by Hadrian on the British landscape.

  The line was chosen where the ground allowed a deep ditch to be dug, and occasionally that pulled the Vallum well to the south of the Wall. Between 5.4 to 5.9 metres across the top, it was excavated to a depth of 2.6 to 2.9 metres and, unlike the Wall ditch in the north, which had only a narrow bottom (known as an ankle-breaker), the Vallum was 2.1 metres across at its foot. This made for much steeper sides, a 60 per cent slope – very difficult to climb in and out of. All of the spoil was probably hacked out by gangs of auxiliary troops, rather than legionaries, and they piled it up in mounds on either side. These were separated from the edges of the steep-sided ditch by broad berms 9 to 12 metres in width. This much clearance was needed to avoid the danger of infill or subsidence. The spoil heaps were then revetted with turf to stop them crumbling. Anyone who approached the Vallum had to climb these banks and had no choice but to make themselves very visible to soldiers on the Wall.

  The Vallum was a very substantial obstacle. Over time the Romans allowed it to become even more of an obstacle as water pooled in the bottom of the ditch (there is no evidence of any drains) and were probably happy to see thorns and other scrub grow – except on the berms and mounds.

  The most telling effects of the creation of the Vallum were twofold. Most dramatically, it cut the number of crossing-points through the Wall from seventy-nine gateways through the milecastles to fourteen. These arched gateways, so painstakingly constructed only a short time before, became secondary as the focus of movement shifted to a series of causeways thrown across the Vallum near the forts. One of the most surprising and quirky sites along the Wall is a Vallum crossing just to the south of Benwell Fort. Half covered by a reservoir and a main road, and drowned by the redbrick suburbs of west Newcastle, the fort has completely disappeared. But at the bottom of a terrace of semi-detached houses behind the local Social Security offices, the causeway over the Vallum has miraculously survived. Protected by iron railings and stout gates, the ditch has been restored to something approaching its original depth. But most impressive is the causeway itself. The bottom stones of one of the piers of its massive gatehouse perch precariously right on the edge. They supported a free-standing massive structure, like a small triumphal arch, which had stout, iron-studded doors and was manned day and night. Behind it rise the cobblestones of several layers of the roadway which led to the vanished fort.

  The overall effect of the Vallum was to create a military zone which ribboned through the countryside, with such tightly and clearly controlled access that it was the ultimate authorised persons only area. It protected the forts from damage and theft (a good deal of gear, such as carts, and stock will have been left outside the walls of milecastles, turrets and even forts) and allowed much more secure and unhampered movement between the garrisons. Supply traffic must have been constant and, before the creation of the military zone, quartermasters will have had to secure their valuable goods every night, perhaps behind palisades, certainly under close guard. By excluding the native peoples so completely, this irritant diminished.

  What undoubtedly increased was frustration on the far side of the Vallum. One example will suffice. For millennia the stock farmers of the Tyne and Irthing Valleys had driven their flocks and herds up the hill trails on the ancient journey of transhumance. Summering out on the fells, their beasts grazing the upland pasture, shepherds and farm laddies had lived in shielings described by William Camden. North of the Tyne, the Wall and its Vallum stopped this time-honoured traffic in its tracks. The new zone had simply removed a wide swathe of land from the native agricultural economy, and made it extremely difficult for farmers to use land to the north of it. It is unthinkable that commanding officers would allow herdsmen to drive their beasts across one of the fourteen causeways, along the streets of a fort, through the northern gates and out onto the commons beyond. At milecastles it might have been easier, but since the Wall ditch shows no sign of having had solid crossings, it is hard to see how cattle and sheep might have been safely prodded and whacked across narrow wooden bridges – if there were any.

  VALLUMS GALORE

  Ditches and dykes were used to demarcate bits of Britain long before and long after the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. Offa’s Dyke (or Dike) is the most famous. King of Mercia from 757 to 796, Offa fought fierce campaigns against the invading Welsh princes and, to show where their territory ended and his began, he had a vallum magnum built from sea to sea. Stretching 220 kilometres, much longer than Hadrian’s and Antonine’s walls put together, it runs from the Severn to the Dee estuary. The largest earthwork ever dug in Europe, at any time, it is an extraordinary – and far from well understood – monument. Offa called on his people to give military service and work in gangs to dig a 2-metre ditch and build up a 7-metre rampart to the east of it. The whole layout is more than 20 metres across. Its sheer mass and height made it very difficult for the horse-riding Welsh warbands to cross, and near impossible for them to raid cattle and drive them back. In the north, Wat’s Dyke completed the line and its terminal is at Basingwerk on the Dee. Unlike the Roman walls, Offa’s Dyke appears to have contained the Welsh, and the modern border runs close by.

  As the great Wall project neared completion, the standard of mason work began to deteriorate markedly. It is as though there was a scramble to the finish line, perhaps a mad dash to complete before the departure of the Governor of the province, Aulus Platorius Nepos. At Housesteads, Birdoswald and Chesters, the piers and voussoirs at several gateways show poor craftsmans
hip. There is evidence of more than just hints of great haste. At Housesteads the lower piers of one gate are tidily enough finished but the capstones, where the arch springs, have scarcely been worked at all. In several milecastles some of the massive stonework is not so much badly finished as abandoned in situ. It seems that as long as the arches and gateways stayed up, at least for the moment, that was fine.

  Perhaps fighting broke out during the final phases of construction and, in the way that things often happen, the unfinished stonework was simply left in place. With the eventual departure of the legions, most of the really skilled masons in their ranks went too. It may well be that there were too few with sufficient skill to tidy up stonework that had been thrown up.

  Once the forts had been more or less completed (the work at Birdoswald seems to have been disrupted more than once), their garrisons moved in. The most common type of auxiliary cohort on the Wall was a mix between infantry and cavalry, the cohors quingenaria equitata. Many of these soldiers had marched north from their postings on the Welsh border and in the South Pennines, where it was hoped that the situation was stable. Not including the Sea-Wall, that added up to a total garrison of 9,090 auxiliaries, on paper.

  In the central sector, at Housesteads, Great Chesters, Carvoran and Birdoswald, all units were peditata, or foot soldiers. Why pure infantry should have been preferred in the countryside so well understood and beloved later by the horse-riding Border Reivers is not clear. If their ancestors had similar equestrian skills – and it is highly likely that their very many cavalry did – detachments of foot soldiers chasing them up hill and down dale sounds like a laughable tactical mismatch. The traditional raiding methods of hit and run will have worked every time. But the Romans were usually very astute – and there may well have been a clear but now lost justification for those dispositions up on the Whin Sill.

  In any case, the reach of cavalry was long and rapid. Reckoning that the link between the infantry of Housesteads and the troopers stationed at Chesters down in the valley of the North Tyne was not close enough, another fort was built between them. At Carrawburgh, surely the bleakest location on the Wall, Brocolitia was established. Brocolitia means the Heathery Fort, and it still is. Before the masons could begin, the Vallum had to be filled in, and that fact dates the new fort as an afterthought. A cohort of mixed cavalry and infantry appears to have been inserted in the gap.

  On the northern bank of the Tyne the original eastern terminal of the Wall may have been the fort at Newcastle, at the Pons Aelius. Under the medieval castle, the site of the Newcastle (and a later Roman fort whose traces have been found under the arches of the Victorian railway viaduct which slashes right through the precinct, separating the keep from the main gatehouse), a modern hotel, the Moot Hall and a pub, the remains of the Hadrianic fort may lie undisturbed for a long time. Little trace of the Wall has been found immediately to the east, but what there is suggests another afterthought. No broad Wall foundations, only narrow Wall building, probably means that the stretch leading out to Wallsend was begun after the drive westwards. It may be that the broad barrier of the lower Tyne was more porous than anticipated.

  The course of the Tyne was much wider and meandering in 122. The river had not been dredged and was not as deep as it is now. Perhaps the native peoples were simply ignoring all that impressive stonework upriver at Newcastle, going around the eastern end of the Wall by taking to their boats or wading across at low tide at fording places.

  The site chosen for the fort at Wallsend sits on the crown of a long and lazy bend in the Tyne with clear views both upriver and down. The Wall arrived at its north-western corner and then, adopting the fort’s ramparts, turned through 90 degrees to emerge as what is known as the Branch Wall. It ran south down to the riverbank and continued out into the current. And there Hadrian’s Wall terminated (or began) – but not before a final imperial flourish.

  Across the Tyne stands the ancient church of St Paul at Jarrow. Once it was part of a monastery (twinned with Monkwearmouth) which was home to Bede, one of Britain’s earliest and very greatest historians. When the first Abbot, Benedict Biscop, founded these communities, he was anxious to build in the Roman manner and brought masons from Europe with the necessary skills. Plenty of authentic Roman building materials were lying about near Jarrow, only a boat trip across the Tyne. Ready-cut stones from both the fort at Wallsend and the Wall itself can still be seen at St Paul’s, especially amongst the monastic ruins to the east of the church. In 1783 stonemasons were beginning to restore the fabric of the old church when they came upon two fragments of a Latin inscription. The lettering was very large and the panel it had been cut into must have been huge. Here is a translation:

  Son of all deified emperors, the Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, after the necessity of keeping the Empire within its limits had been laid on him by divine command . . . once the barbarians had been scattered and the province of Britannia recovered, added a frontier between either shore of Ocean for 80 miles. The army of the province built the wall under the direction of Aulus Platorius Nepos, Pro-Praetorian Legate of Augustus.

  Several historians have convincingly conjectured that these words were carved on the plinth of a massive statue, one which stood somewhere near Jarrow. Hundreds of kilometres away, at the southern end of Britannia, is a clue as to what the statue might have been. At Richborough, the massive triumphal arch erected during the reign of the Emperor Domitian was an imposing memorial to earlier conquests and an impressive welcome to the province. It seems that Hadrian planned an equally impressive goodbye. He was later to make a boastful but probably accurate claim: I have achieved more by peace than others [have] by war. More than the hated Domitian! At the end of the Branch Wall, where it had been built out into the midstream of the River Tyne, there probably stood a huge statue of Hadrian, the Emperor who had commanded a Wall to be built across Britain. For all who saw it, and especially those who sailed under its stern gaze, it must have been an awesome sight.

  As with every sensible and successful Emperor of Rome, Hadrian’s focus was on the army. Without its loyalty and discipline, he could not survive and nothing could be achieved. If the Wall was principally intended as a symbol, its message to the native peoples was incidental. Whatever they thought, the legions would crush them. Much more important was the army, its morale, the support of its senior officers. By erecting a colossus on the northern frontier of Britannia, subduing the landscape to his will, defeating and containing the barbarians, and having his policy inscribed beneath for all to read, Hadrian was reinforcing the radical strategic changes which he made during his reign. The age of an empire without limit was over, there would be no more conquest for the sake of it. But it would be a triumphant limit. The Roman army would now assume a defensive role, become the keepers of the peace rather than the makers of war.

  COLOSSI

  Massive statues of gods and emperors were not uncommon in the Roman Empire, but the most famous was probably the Colossus of Rhodes. A huge bronze representation of the sun-god Helios was created by Chares around 280 BC and was said to stand more than 30 metres high. Set up at the harbour, the great statue may have stood astride its entrance with ships passing between its legs. But more likely it did not. The Colossus was toppled in AD 224 in an earthquake, but Hadrian would certainly have seen it on his travels. The other famous Colossus of the ancient world has also gone, but its name survives. A huge statue of the Emperor Nero stood near the Via Sacra in Rome but, after Nero’s suicide, it too crashed to the ground. When Vespasian began to build a great amphitheatre on the site, the name stuck and it is still called the Colosseum.

  7

  Abandonment, Invasion and Desertion

  So that it would be instantaneous, or at worst very rapid, Hadrian drew a coloured line on the left-hand side of his chest, exactly in the place his doctor had shown him. Then he commanded Mastor, his huntsman, to stab him, to drive the blade deep and hard between his ribs, straight into his heart and put hi
m out of what seemed like an eternity of misery. With promises of great riches, of piles of gold and silver coins, and threats of dire consequences if he did not do what his Emperor instructed, Hadrian had brought his huntsman armed to his bedside. He begged for death. There would be no retribution, no prosecution, Mastor would be immune – if only he would do this last, desperate service for Hadrian. He bitterly lamented the state to which his illness and his helplessness had reduced him – notwithstanding that it was still within his power, even when on the brink of death, to destroy anyone else.

  No doubt terrified, Mastor lost what nerve he had and refused to kill the Emperor. He was not an aristocrat, not a Roman, but a tribesman from the Iazyges, from the Danube, a nobody who would probably be killed in the first frantic hours after Hadrian’s death. Wise to refuse his master’s pleadings, Mastor reported what had taken place.

  The pain must have been very hard to bear. It seems that by the early summer of AD 138 the Emperor was passing into the terminal stages of heart disease, suffering from increasingly severe haemorrhages, his arteries hardening and preventing proper circulation. It had begun as nose-bleeds and was quickly developing into something very much worse. Hadrian also had what was known as dropsy, a painful buildup of fluid in his body.

  After the failed attempt to persuade and coerce Mastor, Hadrian’s adopted successor came to see the dying Emperor. Here is the passage from the Historia Augusta:

  Antoninus and the Prefects went in to see Hadrian and begged him to endure the necessity of the disease with equanimity. Antoninus told him that he would be a parricide if, after being adopted, he allowed him to be killed. Hadrian was angry and ordered the person who had informed them to be killed – he was, however, saved by Antoninus. He at once wrote his will. But he did not lay aside the business of state . . . He did in fact try to kill himself again; when the dagger was taken from him he became more violent. He asked his doctor for poison, who killed himself rather than comply.