This episode forms the background for Kipling’s story of the centurion Parnesius, who is tasked with holding the Wall even though the bulk of the army in Britain has been led away to fight in the civil war. In fact we do not know what happened in the north during Maximus’s bid for power, although it is clear that he must have drawn away many soldiers from the provincial garrison. Some inevitably died in battle or from disease in the civil war, while others may never have been sent back to their bases in Britain. Any civil war weakened the defences of all the empire’s frontiers, and the consequences were inevitably worse for provinces directly involved in the fighting. Britain had a strong garrison for its size, so the men who controlled it were often confident enough to make a bid for imperial power. As an island, it also offered a fairly secure base and made it difficult for emperors based on the continent to launch a quick counter-attack in the early days when a new regime was especially vulnerable. Even so, it was not always easy for an aspiring emperor to control all of the troops stationed there.
Between 406 and 407, no fewer than three usurpers to the imperial throne were proclaimed in Britain, the first two swiftly perishing at the hands of their own officers. The third, Constantius III, gathered enough soldiers to invade Gaul and for a short while held sway over a sizeable part of the western empire. Influential men left behind in Britain clearly felt neglected, for they rebelled and rejected his rule. A late, and not always very reliable, source claims that in 410 a delegation from Britain went to the Emperor Honorius in Italy. They asked for help against barbarian attacks, only to be told ‘to fend for themselves’, according to the Byzantine writer Zosimus. By this time it is clear that the Roman state had ceased to function in Britain, so that effectively it had ceased to be part of the empire. Several years before this, newly minted currency had stopped reaching the island in any significant quantities, which is a clear sign of the end of military and civilian administration. Whatever the precise details of the process, formal rule of Britain by the Western Roman Empire ceased early in the fifth century.
By AD 300, military fashion had changed again, and these soldiers are fairly typical of the men who served on Hadrian’s Wall until the end of the Roman province of Britain just over a century later. Note the long-sleeved and decorated tunics, tight trousers, and shoes. The man on the left wears a simple mass-produced helmet, the bowl fashioned from two pieces joined together rather than a single piece of metal. Instead of the gladius, they have the longer spatha sword, in the past associated with the cavalry. The figure on the right reminds us that helmets and armour were not worn on all occasions. For many duties as well as in their leisure time, soldiers wore caps of various sorts and tunics and trousers. They were marked out as soldiers by their weapons’ belt and sword.
OVER TIME, THE ROMAN EMPIRE’S capacity to fight fires on several frontiers simultaneously had declined, rotting away over generations of internal power struggles and civil wars. Provinces were lost and not recovered, with no single event triggering the decline or marking the point of no return. The impression from the archaeological record is of units on Hadrian’s Wall continuing to do their job throughout the fourth and into the early years of the fifth century. Occasionally, new units arrived to reinforce the troops stationed there, but there were also periods of weakness, and these may well have been more common than in the past. Even so, there was no permanent collapse, and the Wall was maintained under Roman control until the very end of the province. As the empire declined, so did its capacity to maintain the army and garrison distant provinces. Civil wars again and again took soldiers away from Britain and disrupted its administration.
By the fourth century, the culture of senior army officers and senior civil servants was one of suspicion and fear, as they knew that accusations of disloyalty to the emperor would most likely be met by torture and death for themselves and their families. On more than one occasion, loyal and capable commanders felt that they had no option but to rebel because their very success had made the emperor consider them as a threat. It was not a climate encouraging talent or initiative, and the permanent insecurity and suspicion of officers and officials at all levels contributed to an inertia at the heart of the government that made it hard for the empire to marshal and direct its still substantial resources to deal with problems on the frontiers. It is difficult to say whether or not the threats from outside the empire had grown greater, but the ability to cope with them had certainly declined. Every successful raid encouraged more attacks, a snowball effect that rapidly magnified the problems faced by the imperial authorities. Given the chance, Roman armies were still very efficient, better equipped, disciplined, and trained than their opponents, and usually able to defeat them in battle. Yet the long decay of the administrative, financial, and logistical structures of the army and the state underpinning this effectiveness made it rarer and rarer for provincial armies to reach such high standards. It was often easier in the short term to hire allied warriors from the same sort of tribes and leaders who were attacking the empire. Controlling such forces proved difficult, not least because constant power struggles within the empire meant that it was easy for such bands to find themselves on the losing side of a civil war and suddenly without a paymaster.
Saxons from northern Germany are said to have raided Britain in 367. By the beginning of the fourth century, there was an army officer with the title ‘Count of the Saxon Shore’ (comes litoris Saxonici per Britannias) commanding bases along the eastern and southern coasts. Opinion is divided as to whether he was there to defend against Saxon attacks from the sea or to command Saxon allies serving with the Roman army who garrisoned these bases. By this time, the units on the Wall were part of a separate section of the army, led by the dux Britanniarum, and Britain had been split into four or five provinces. An impression of insecurity is fed by the fact that every significant town on the island acquired defensive walls during the fourth century, if not before. As is so often the case, the evidence is so poor that we simply cannot gauge the scale and frequency of raiding or those areas most affected. Many attacks seem to have come by sea, which was no doubt easier than attempting to cross the Wall. The sixteen-year-old Saint Patrick was abducted from his home in Britain by pirates from Ireland sometime in the fifth century, although we do not know whether this occurred before or after the end of Roman rule. As we have seen, the details of precisely when and how Britain ceased permanently to be part of the empire are now lost. One source claims that representatives from British communities appealed unsuccessfully for aid from one of the western emperors in the middle of the fifth century. There was also continued contact through the Catholic Church for some time. The impression is that the former British provinces split into a number of separate states led by kings or warlords. These may often have been hostile to their neighbours, fighting on a smaller scale the same sort of power struggles and civil wars that had ripped the Roman Empire apart.
What happened on Hadrian’s Wall in these last decades is even less clear. At South Shields, two skeletons with traces of wounds were discovered and dated to the early fifth century. It appears that they lay exposed for some time before they were buried in a pit in the courtyard of the old praetorium. This violent episode, whatever its nature and scale, did not bring a final end to life at the fort, and some buildings remained in use. There is also evidence for continued occupation in several forts along Hadrian’s Wall for at least a few generations. Someone had enough power on a local scale to maintain these forts in a reasonable state of repair, and presumably kept armed followers to act as garrisons. Opinion is divided over whether these were the descendants of the old garrisons and leaders, or chieftains from the new kingdoms that began to emerge. Whatever their origins, they are more likely to have acted like the war bands of tribal noblemen than units of a formal army.
At Birdoswald, the collapsed granary building was used as the foundation for a large timber building, with old flagstones and other stones used as flooring. Another big timber building
was subsequently built on the same site, and the nearby gateway was repaired. Both look more like a chieftain’s feasting hall than a Roman military building, and generally the fifth century occupation tends to resemble a hill fort rather than the base of professional soldiers. However, the transition may have been gradual. The Wall itself and its milecastles were occupied and in good repair for most of the fourth century, but there is no hint that this continued in an organised way afterwards. Power and society had become much more local. Perhaps some communities still liked to think of themselves as ‘Roman’ and civilized, and did their best to maintain old practices, so that there was no abrupt change in lifestyle.
Yet change there was over time, and as wealth and stability faded, so did the technical capacity and skill they supported. The remaining towns of the old provinces shrank in size, and the villas and other communities declined. No one was able to build new bathhouses or aqueducts anymore, and before long no one was capable of maintaining the ones already in existence. An organised professional fighting force like the Roman army requires the support of immense political power and huge resources to sustain itself. These no longer existed in Britain, nor did they over time throughout the western provinces. Pockets of organized military and administrative activity may have remained for a while. The biography of Saint Severinus, who was active in the Danubian provinces in the fifth century, tells of an isolated garrison still doing its best to perform its duty even though it had not received pay or orders for a considerable time. The unit sent a delegation to Italy in search of both these things, but the men encountered a band of barbarians and were massacred.2
Over the course of the fifth century, the influence and power of groups of Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes in Britain increased. It should come as no surprise to readers that the evidence for this is poor, often confused, and its interpretation furiously debated by scholars. What is not in dispute is that over time, Roman law was replaced by Germanic law, the Latin language by Anglo-Saxon, Christianity by a Germanic form of paganism, and the kingdoms that emerged in the post-Roman period replaced by new ones ruled by Anglo-Saxon dynasties that centuries later would combine to form England. The Roman Empire had gone, and little of its legacy was left in Britain except in such western lands as Wales and Cornwall, where British kingdoms endured. It survived only in place-names like ‘chester’ and ‘caster’, both from the Latin ‘castra’ (camp), and more dramatically in the remains of the roads and monumental buildings left from the Roman era. Hadrian’s Wall was the greatest of these, but as time passed, it and all the others crumbled. Once Catholic missionaries converted the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, the drive of kings and aristocrats to raise up ever more grand churches and monasteries encouraged the population to see the Wall and other old Roman buildings as little more than ready sources of building stone. Much of Hadrian’s Wall was deliberately taken apart and its stone put to new uses as life went on in the lands and people farmed, tended their herds and flocks, worshipped in new ways, squabbled, and fought new wars.
Lying close to—and in part on—what would become the border between England and Scotland, the lands around Hadrian’s Wall have seen a good deal of warfare and violence since the end of the Roman era. Especially in the sixteenth century, these were the haunts of the Border Reivers, who raided and feuded for generations, exploiting the weakness of central authority. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie came south with his Jacobite army of Highlanders and Lowlanders, Irish and Scottish regular troops supplied by the French, and soon some English volunteers. Their route was down the west coast, and General Wade, commanding the government forces at Newcastle, was unable to march fast enough to Carlisle to block their path because there was not a road good enough for his artillery and transport. This failure prompted the construction of a new road in 1752 so that the same thing could not happen again. Unsurprisingly, the best route lay for many miles along the line of Hadrian’s Wall, the remnants of which were demolished in the process, down to the foundations, which were used to build the road. Today, as you drive along the B6318, you are driving along Wade’s road on the line of the Wall, often with the ditch on one side and the Vallum on the other.
History never stands still, and priorities change, as do memories. It was not that long after the end of the Roman era that the idea of what the Wall had been became confused—that is, when people bothered to think about it at all. Writing near the middle of the sixth century, the British monk Gildas gave a muddled version of its history, claiming that it was raised after the end of the Roman province. In this version, the Britons first built a turf wall to repel the Picts and Scots, but when this proved ineffective they sought aid from the Roman Empire. This led to an expedition and the construction of a more effective stone wall, which gave brief respite until its British garrison proved too weak to hold it. In the eighth century, Bede gave a marginally more accurate account, at least associating the first construction of a wall with Septimius Severus, but Bede was influenced by Gildas or a common source and has the fifth-century Britons building first the Antonine Wall of turf and then a stone wall with aid and encouragement from the Romans.3
During the Middle Ages there was some confusion, but it was gradually accepted that there had been a great wall built by Severus, even if this was often associated with the threat posed by Picts and Scots. In the Renaissance, scholars began to piece the story together from the meagre mentions in the literary sources and the knowledge that a great feature was still visible on the ground. In 1584, the German traveller Lupold von Wedel saw ‘a ditch, which the Emperor Severus had ordered to be made to separate Scotland from England, and the foundation of a wall, which the Emperor Hadrianus erected to hinder the Scotch from invading England, as they used to do before.’ Curiously, this reversed the belief of contemporary scholars that the Turf Wall—in fact the Vallum—was Hadrian’s work, and that Severus built the Wall in stone. This probably reflects the confused opinions of von Wedel’s guides. It was only in later centuries that antiquarians began to unravel the story of Hadrian’s Wall—a task that is still not complete.4
Ten
VISITING HADRIAN’S WALL
THE CENTRAL SECTION OF HADRIAN’S Wall is the most visited, and for a very good reason. The forts at Housesteads, Chesters, and Birdoswald give a good impression of such bases, and each has its own museum, as does the civilian town at Corbridge. Vindolanda (Chesterholm) deserves at least half a day, for its site and ongoing excavations during the summer months, and also for the wonderful museum. Priorities for excavation change year by year, but the excellent website run by the Vindolanda Trust will provide details of recent and current activity: www.vindolanda.com. Its sister site, the Roman Army Museum at Carvoran, is also worth a visit if you have the time.
There is good walking with spectacular views of the countryside throughout this area. The walk for all or part of the way between Steel Rigg (where there is a car park) and Housesteads is a particular favourite of mine. Not only is the landscape spectacular, but it also gives a very good introduction to the Wall, with the excavated Milecastles 39 and 37 and the unexcavated 38, as well as the additional turret at Peel Gap. If you begin the walk at Steel Rigg, then the hardest part comes a few minutes later when you have to scramble up the steps and rocks at Peel Gap, which can be slippery in wet weather. If you are capable of this, then the rest of the walk should present no difficulties if you go at your own pace. It’s also worth stopping frequently to admire the views and to turn and look behind you and see the wall running across the rolling land to the west. Walltown crags are another favourite stopping place for those wanting a quick look at the Wall, and these are also well signposted and provided with a car park. Walkers eager not to retrace their steps may want to take advantage of the bus service connecting many of the main sites: http://hadrianswall country.co.uk/travel/bus.
If time permits, Milecastle 48 at Poltross Burn is rewarding, as is the mithraeum at Carrawburgh—the narrow temple to the eastern god has casts of
the wattle-and-daub inner walls and copies of the three altars found there (the originals are now in the Great North Museum in Newcastle). The fort of Carrawburgh shows visitors what an unexcavated fort looks like, providing a good contrast with sites that have seen more work. There is a car park at both sites, although watch carefully for the sign to Poltross Burn as it is a sharp turn to the left, just before the railway bridge, when approaching from the east. Carrawburgh is on the Military Way, built by General Wade (the B6318), as is Limestone Corner. A drive along the road will give good views of the Vallum and ditch and take you past many of the key sites, so this is a good option for those without the time or inclination to do a lot of walking. Even so, sturdy footwear is a good idea for stops at the various sites. The path down to the mithraeum at Carrawburgh is usually muddy throughout the year.
In the east, a visitor relying on public transport could easily fill a day in and around Newcastle, visiting Wallsend and South Shields, each of which has reconstructed buildings and a museum, and the Great North Museum in the city centre, which houses a major gallery of material from Hadrian’s Wall. In the west, the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle is good, and on the Cumbrian coast, the Senhouse Museum at Maryport is also rewarding.
For walkers with more time and energy, there is the Hadrian’s Wall Path, running from coast to coast for eighty-four miles (126 km). The beauty of much of the countryside makes this a great pleasure even for those with little interest in the archaeology and history of the region. Several good guidebooks are available, and there are also plenty of details online, for instance, at http://hadrianswallcountry.co.uk /walking/hadrians-wall-path-national-trail. Be prepared for all weathers, even in the summer.
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