Hadrian’s Wall, Part I: The Romans in the Britain and the Imperial Frontier

Hello. Welcome to "Have Toga, Will Travel", a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

And we're your hosts.

And today we've got a great episode. It's going to be the first of probably three episodes on Hadrian's Wall. If you don't know what Hadrian's Wall was, it was a Roman defensive fortification that ran from Wall's End near modern Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Bowness on Solway, basically through northern England, through Cumbria and Northumberland, built in the second century CE during the rule of the Emperor Hadrian.

It ran for 80 Roman miles, which is about 72 modern miles. The Roman mile was about 1,000 paces. The average length of a Roman mile was somewhere around 4,860 feet. So just over nine-tenths the length of a modern mile or a statute mile.

Still a pretty long way, especially when, as we did, you hike it a couple of times.

Yep. Well, and it runs coast to coast, basically.

Yes. So this episode is going to focus on the wall and its context. We're going to talk a little bit about how the wall got there, what it looked like, what it was for, and then the two following episodes will cover what it's like to explore the wall and its landscape today, like the Romans did, on foot.

Carrying all your stuff.

Carrying all your stuff, yes. We'll talk about that later.

So we've organized today's episode into four main sections. First, we're going to do a brief overview of the Romans in Britain up to Hadrian's day. Then we're going to talk about the wall itself, what it looked like and how it was built. Then we're going to talk about what the wall was for and how it functioned in the British landscape. And then finally, we're going to talk about the history of the wall after Hadrian and after the Romans.

Right. All sounds pretty good. So let's get started. And we'll start with a brief sketch of the Romans in Britain. And here, the place to start is with Julius Caesar. By the first century BCE, the Romans had been aware of Britain for a long time, but they definitely conceptualized it as some weird place way out on the margins of the world.

Kind of like how the Persians thought about the Greeks.

Right, exactly. This had changed a little bit by the middle of the first century BCE, largely thanks to Caesar. In the 50s, Caesar was the governor of Transalpine Gaul, what we think of today basically as southern France. And he used that position to launch a big military campaign throughout the rest of Gaul, the rest of modern France. And he spent a few years conquering and subjugating the Celtic peoples there to Roman power.

Now, this brought him into contact with the people in southern Britain, who were, of course, in touch with people in northern Gaul. I mean, yes, there's the channel there, but people were crossing it. And so Caesar actually decides to launch a short expedition into Britain itself as part of his war against the Gauls. Although, you know, he doesn't stay long and his own sort of military impact there is fairly temporary.

But the incorporation of most of Gaul into the Roman Empire as a result of Caesar's campaigns was important for later developments because it meant that increasingly Roman officials were present in Gaul. And that meant in its turn that increasingly there was a lot of direct communication between the people of Southern Britain and the Romans. And over time, some British rulers became formal Roman allies.

Yeah, even if they weren't actually part of the Roman Empire. So Caesar has his little invasion, And we're going to fast forward about 90 years to the middle of the first century CE with the emperor Claudius. So Rome at this point had been controlled by emperors for 70 to 80 years, give or take. Claudius is the fourth Roman emperor, as we count it. And at this point, members of the British elite had forged pretty strong ties with Roman governors in Gaul and with emperors themselves.

And the British elite who had forged ties like this included a named Verica, the son of Commius.

Of course, and Commius had been declared an ally of Rome by Caesar. So this goes back all the way to the...

Way back in the day.

Caesar invasion, yeah.

Nice long family connection. Anyway, our friend Verica was king of a people known as the Atrebates in southern Britain. And his kingdom was centered around what is now Sussex and East Hampshire. Its capital was at modern Chichester, a place that the Romans would come to know as Noviomagus Reginorum. And it seems that his power extended a little bit further north, possibly all the way to modern Silchester, which the Romans knew as Calleva Atrebatum, named after the Atrebates people.

Yes. So our friend Verica is on the losing end of a war. There'd been some territorial struggles with a people to the north, the Catuvellauni. And Verica's kingdom is actually conquered by the Catuvellauni under their king, Caratacus. And as a result of that, in 42, Verica is expelled. And so he goes to the Emperor Claudius for help, right? He's an ally of the Roman people. So he's going to bring in his big strong buddy to help him in the fight. This might sound familiar from things we've talked about in other episodes. Now, for Claudius, this is great because this gives him a pretext to invade Britain. The ostensible goal, of course, is to restore Verica to power, right? They're just supporting their friend. But the real reason is Claudius has his eyes on more military conquest, and now he has a casus belli to pursue.

Yeah. And in particular, he seems to have had his eye on an opportunity to establish some military glory and credibility of his own.

Yes, that as well.

But you're absolutely right to single out the fact here that this is something we've seen a lot when talking about other empires. This sort of pattern came up a lot in particular when we were talking about the Persians and their relationships with the Greeks. Anytime you get a state on the frontier of an empire, these relationships can form. You get people pro-empire, anti-empire, and those pro-empire people can often draw the empire in to support their own ambitions, always, of course, at the cost of a lot of violence directed at the rest of their people.

Yeah. And of course, the empire knows what it's doing. It's not like, oh, no, we're totally just here to help this person. They have their own imperial designs on expanding power. Yeah.

So what this means is that the Romans invaded Britain in force in 43 CE. It was initially thought that they landed their forces near Chichester itself, but that thinking shifted around 2008 when archaeologists found a couple of Roman-era ditches near Richborough in Kent, which have since been interpreted as defensive works on a fortified beachhead. That's interesting because that spot is sort of a natural destination for people crossing from the continent as it's on one of the safest routes from what is now northern France to the Thames estuary in England. And what we think now is that Richborough in Kent was possibly a stopping point for the Romans as they crossed what is now the English Channel before they moved west to Chichester itself.

Yeah, and it's actually kind of funny. I found some reporting in the Independent on this find, this excavation, and it had some pretty interesting sentences in the opening paragraph. I'm not sure that we are going to unpack them entirely, But its opening sentence is, "two meters beneath the Kent countryside, archaeologists have found the beginning of British history." So like British history starts with the Roman invasion. And then the paragraph concludes with the line, "the site represents the moment Britain's prehistory ended and its history began." Which is putting a lot—a lot!—on the Roman conquest of Britain, but it speaks to how formative this event is in British history. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. And we can drop a link to this article in the show notes if anyone wants to read about this find in The Independent.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Like you said, we probably can't get into it in nearly as much detail as it deserves. But there's a really interesting idea embedded in that comment, which is basically that people on the fringe of empire aren't legible until they're incorporated into the empire, right? They have no stories of their own until they become part of the imperial story.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it weirdly harkens back to the story that Bede, B-E-D-E (who we'll talk about later) when he writes his History of the English people, he traces actually the founding of Britain to a Roman refugee friend of Aeneas, like from Troy by the name of Brutus and tries to connect Brutus, the name or Brut, as it sometimes gets called, to Britain. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

There's a lot going on there. And like we said, we can't really get into all of that today.

We've already gotten into it too much.

Too much. Anyway, there's no real evidence that our friend Verica was actually restored to power by the Romans.

I mean, he probably was.

But we do have notice pretty soon afterward that there is a new ruler in charge of the Atrebates, a guy named Cogidubnus, who was probably Verica's son and heir, since at this point, Verica himself would have been well over 60, which, you know, is a pretty ripe old age for the period that we're talking about.

Yeah, I mean, he could have been much older, like just 60 is based on his father died in this year, so he had to have been born...

Right.

No later than that. So yeah, and he could have been significantly older. Now, this expedition under Claudius to conquer Britain is commanded by a man named Aulus Plautius. Now, it's unclear how many legions he had with him. We know one for sure that's named, which is the Legio Secunda Augusta, which was commanded by none other than Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who is the future emperor Vespasian. But we do know that there was at least one other legion there commanded by a man named Gnaeus Hostidius Geta. People tend to think that this is the Legio Nona Hispana, which would go on to have a long history in Britain.

The famous ninth, which you may know from all sorts of pieces of contemporary fiction, including the movie The Eagle, which we'll probably have to talk about at some point.

Oh, yeah. Let's not talk about Centurion, though, because, oh, wow. Anyway, and then we also know that Vespasian's older brother, Sabinus, or Titus Flavius Sabinus the Younger, also accompanies his expedition as one of Aulus Plautius's officers, possibly commanding a third legion. We don't know. It's unclear.

The resistance was led by Caratacus, ruler of the Catuvellauni, along with his brother, a guy named Togodumnus. Yes, these British names are pretty weird, even for people like us who are used to handling Greek and Latin names all the time.

Well, it's so clear that they are names coming from other languages that the Romans are trying to handle as best they can.

Yes, transposed badly into Latin. Anyway, Caratacus and his people fight a major battle against the Romans at a crossing on the Medway River near modern Rochester. The Britons lost that battle, and the Romans pushed them back essentially to the Thames. There was some more skirmishing and fighting along the way and Caratacus' brother was killed at some point. After putting the Britons on their heels, the Roman commander Plautius suspended things for a little bit while he sent for the emperor Claudius. Because of course, Claudius had reserved the honor of winning the final fighting for himself. He after all wants that military credibility. So Claudius leads the final march on Camulodonum, the capital of the Catuvellauni. And at the end of the day, 11 different peoples in southern Britain submitted to the Romans. The Romans established a new province, and the capital of that new province would be at Camulodonum, which we now know as Colchester in Essex.

So over the next 16 years, so from 44 to 60, during the reigns of Claudius and Nero, the Romans continue pushing north and west in Britain. And by 47, the Romans probably control all of the area south of a rough line from the Humber River to the Severn Estuary, so roughly up to the southern edge of Wales and Lincolnshire. There is an attempt during the reign of Claudius to conquer Wales, but they encounter some pretty tough resistance, and Claudius basically decides it's not worth a long, prolonged conflict for what he saw as very little gain in a mountainous part of Britain.

Yeah, part of the trouble with Wales was that it was a lot more mountainous than the lowland areas that the Romans had been fighting in before. And that always poses problems for imperial powers. That's a subject we'll come back to a little bit later. Now, in 54, a new emperor came to power, Nero. And under Nero, the Romans did renew their effort to conquer Wales. And in fact, they brought in a new governor who had experience dealing with mountain peoples in Anatolia, in what is now Western Turkey. But unfortunately for the Romans, the campaign in Wales was delayed by a major revolt. And that is the revolt of Boudicca, which broke out in about 60 CE.

So you may have heard of Boudicca. She's a pretty cool figure. Boudicca was the queen of a people called the Iceni, who were based in what is now Norfolk in East Anglia. And her reasons for leading a revolt really stem from a couple issues. One, her husband, Prasutagus, who had been king of the Iceni, had set up an agreement with the Romans that when he died, his daughters and the Romans would sort of inherit the power. So it was partly a goal of helping to keep his kingdom a little independent. The Romans don't honor this. And when, functionally, Boudicca protests this, the Romans violently attack both her and her daughters. And just trigger warning here on the details, so if you need a second, they have Boudicca publicly flogged, and they rape both of her daughters. So Boudicca is rightly angered by this treatment. And so she decides to revolt. She encourages a neighboring people to revolt with her. And she draws actually inspiration from a man named Arminius, who had revolted against Roman power in Germany about 50 years earlier. We haven't really talked about him, but we should at some point.

Yeah, if you're curious, you can always go onto Netflix and watch Barbarians, which is a pretty interesting series based on the Arminius story.

And Arminius actually basically left the Romans incapable of pushing further into Germany for a good long while afterwards.

So, Boudicca and her allies went on the warpath. They attacked and destroyed several Roman centers of power, including Camulodonum, the new settlement at Londinium, modern London, and another settlement called Verulamium, which is now Saint Albans. Archaeologists have also found a destruction layer at Calleva Atrebatum, modern Silchester, which may be tied to this revolt as well. Now, this was a pretty violent process. Boudicca and her commanders were said to have no interest whatsoever in taking prisoners. So what you have to imagine is that as they were taking places like Camulodonum, there was a lot of killing, probably mostly of Roman veterans and people living alongside Roman veterans, including a lot of native Britons. And that really meant that the Romans had to respond.

So the Roman governor at the time, a guy named Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, actually happened to be fighting in Wales when the revolt broke out. And in the immediate moment, when he comes to confront Boudicca, he realizes he actually doesn't have enough manpower to face them. And so that's part of the reason why Londinium gets sacked is basically sacrifices the city so that he can get more manpower there. And eventually he's going to set up his army in a narrow passage with a force behind it to limit Boudicca's army's ability to attack him from the flank or from the rear. And he is able to defeat Boudicca's army. Now, we do not know where this battle happened. We get this description of the terrain and our sources, but no location. And there's been lots of speculation about where it could have happened—in the Midlands along this famous Roman road that ran through there called Watling Road, and a place called Virginia Water on the Devil's Highway, and the Cuttle Mill area of Northamptonshire and Arbury Banks in Hertfordshire. The list goes on and on and on. We just don't know and we haven't found any evidence of the battle.

What happens to Boudicca herself is a little unclear. She died sometime after the battle, perhaps by suicide, perhaps as a result of an illness. And we don't even know where she ended up buried. There is a legend that holds that she was buried under what is now Platform 10 at King's Cross Station. So you can go see that spot, I guess, when you go visit Platform 9 1⁄2.

Nine and three quarters.

Nine and three quarters. Right station though, right? It's King's Cross.

Right, it's King's Cross Station. And some people actually think this legend around Boudicca and the battle happening there is part of the reason why the magical passage is between platforms nine and ten.

Okay, that's interesting. But anyway, there's no real evidence about this nor about where the battle happened or anything really.

Yeah, this tradition that the battle happened roughly where King's Cross Station is, is not really at all supported by the historical evidence, but was a longstanding sort of belief tradition. So in the wake of Boudicca's rebellion, the Romans continue campaigning further north once they had defeated her. And then similar to what happened prior with Verica, in 69, there was a queen of the Brigantes, a people in the northern part of England, who's an ally of Rome. And she calls on the Romans for help after a rebellion led by her husband, Which, yeah.

Who has not called in military support to help in a marital argument like that?

Yeah, it makes our fights seem pretty minor, doesn't it? Now, in this case, the Romans don't actually have the opportunity to intervene on a large scale, because at this point, the Romans are going through their own issues, basically a small civil war, back home. And so that complicates their ability to devote more time and attention to this.

Right. 69, called the Year of the Four Emperors, because that's how many came and went. That eventually stabilized, and we get a new dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, the first ruler of which is the Emperor Vespasian. We know a lot about the push in Britain under the Flavian emperors, mostly because Vespasian appointed a guy named Gnaeus Julius Agricola as the governor of Britain. And Agricola happened to be the father-in-law of Tacitus, the Roman historian, who wrote, among other things, a pretty lengthy biography of his father-in-law.

Now, Agricola is governor in Britain from 77 to 84. And during this time, he's a very active campaigner who is going to lead expeditions into Wales and Scotland. He fights and wins a major battle somewhere in Scotland, sort of late in his governorship. And he ends up actually responsible for a major road that runs north from Yorkshire to Scotland called Dere Street, D-E-R-E, as well as for a network of forts that stretch up to the Scottish Highlands and end in a sort of legendary legionary fortress at Inchtuthil, which is just north of modern Perth.

He's probably also responsible for another really important military road in northern England, now called the Stanegate. That's a name it gets in the Saxon period. It's how the Northumbrians referred to this road. And it ran from Corbridge in the eastern part of the island to Carlisle, following a line a little bit south of the future line of Hadrian's Wall. And that road connected a series of important forts that also seemed to have been established by Agricola during his campaigns in northern England and Scotland.

Now, despite Agricola's successes in Scotland, the Roman military presence in Scotland is scaled back almost immediately. And this is partly because of trouble elsewhere in the Roman Empire, in this case, particularly along the Danube in an area the Romans called Moesia, which is modern day Bulgaria and Serbia. So one of the legions that had been active in Britain for many years is withdrawn and sent out to the other side of the empire to deal with that issue.

And what this meant in practical terms was that the Romans just didn't have the manpower in Britain to sustain the pace of conquests that they had been pursuing. So they had to pull back a little bit. They did maintain some smaller forts in Scotland, but the forts that Agricola had established along the Stanegate in northern England really became the main centers of Roman power in the north after this. And they were backed up by a major legionary fortress at York, which the Romans knew as Eboracum. And that fortress became the home of the 9th Legion.

So this is where things are going to stand for the next 20 to 30 years until our friend Hadrian shows up. So in the meantime, there's a succession of emperors who find themselves preoccupied with events and campaigns on Rome's eastern edge and northeastern edge, the Danube and further east.

And what this meant in practice was the next emperor to intervene forcefully in Britain was Hadrian, who became emperor in 117 CE and ruled the empire until he died in about 138. And importantly, he visited the province personally in 122 as part of a larger, I guess, inspection tour of the empire's frontiers.

Now, his visit to Britain might have possibly been in response to a crisis happening there. We have some scattered literary evidence that points to possibly a war in Britain in the late 110s or early 120s.

And on top of that, there are some inscriptions. In particular, there are a couple inscriptions celebrating the careers of Roman military officers that mention an Expeditio Britannica, a military expedition to Britain. And why that's significant is because in inscriptions, Expeditio is usually a word reserved for expeditions commanded by the emperor himself. So there are a lot of reasons to think that Hadrian was here in the 120s leading a military expedition.

And if this was the case, then it really is easy to see how Hadrian's decision to order the construction of the wall could be a direct response to the fighting that had broken out in Britain.

Right. So that's our whirlwind tour of Roman engagement in Britain up to the age of Hadrian. What we're going to do now is shift topics to the wall itself, and we're going to talk a little bit about how this thing looked, how it was built. And I'll start by saying that the wall seems to have been conceived of as a barrier that would run across Britain at one of its narrowest points, where the island was only about 78 miles or 126 kilometers across. The plan was that it would start from a spot on the north bank of the River Tyne, about five miles west of the Tyne's estuary, where it flowed into the North Sea.

And at this point, the Romans build a fort called Segedunum, which is now located in Wallsend— note that name, Wallsend—which is a suburb of Newcastle, or Newcastle-upon-Tyne, if we're being technical.

Yeah, and this fort would serve as the wall's eastern terminus. From there, the wall would run west for 80 Roman miles to a spot on the Solway Firth. So that's about 74 statute miles in length or about 119 kilometers. Here, at the western terminus, the Romans built another fort. This one probably called Maia, which now probably lies in the waters of the Solway Firth, just off the coast of the village of Bowness upon Solway.

In between these two points, the route was surveyed and laid out by the Romans, and it actually had to cross three different rivers along that route.

Not to mention a pretty craggy chunk, about 20 Roman miles long in the middle of the wall's course, where the terrain is defined by this thing, a big basaltic ridge called the Great Whin Sill, and gives you a lot of really sort of sharp cliffs and things like that.

Now, the initial plan for the wall called for a barrier built partly of local sandstone and partly of turf. So in the eastern and central sections of the wall, there was going to be a stone wall that was going to roughly run 49 Roman miles between the fort at Segedunum and where it crossed the River Irthing at the western edge of this Great Whin Sill.

And then the plan called for a turf wall, which would pick up on the opposite side of the River Irthing and run for 31 Roman miles to the western terminus at Maia, Bowness on Solway. Though eventually this turf wall would end up being rebuilt in stone as well.

Now in both the turf and the stone sections, the wall was to be punctuated by two kinds of structures.

The first of these structures were small forts that we now tend to call milecastles. We call them milecastles because they were positioned along the wall roughly every Roman mile. They projected from the southern side of the wall, leaving an unbroken facade on the north, the business end of the wall. And these...

Business up front, party in the back?

And these milecastles contained facilities to house garrisons of maybe up to 30 soldiers or so. Emily has lost her cool.

Sorry, I'm so proud of that joke. Oh my God, I'm cracking myself up. All right.

These milecastles had gates both on the north and in the south. So the north gate basically was built into the wall and it let people travel out from the milecastle onto the north side of the wall. And then in the south, that gave access to people coming up from lowland Britain. They would have also had a tower positioned over the north gate to allow the Romans to defend the gate itself. They were built in stone in the central and eastern part of the wall, like the wall itself. But in the West, they tended to be built from timber and turf initially.

The other feature were basically towers. So these are conventionally called turrets, although they are square and not round. And these would be positioned at intervals of a third of a mile between the milecastles. So there were two turrets between each milecastle. And these probably had room to accommodate about a half dozen soldiers. Now, unlike the milecastles, these were built of stone across the wall from the very beginning.

Right, even in the turf section.

Yeah.

Now, in the east and central sections where the wall was built in stone from the beginning, the width of the wall varied from about seven and a half to nine and a quarter feet. That roughly corresponds to eight to 10 Roman feet. It's a little wonky because there are two different gauges here with complicated building histories that we're not really going to get into. And that wall was probably about 12 to 15 Roman feet high from the base to the wall walk at the very top. And that wall walk was protected by a battlement on the north side. That is a parapet and embrasures. So it looked, you know, like sort of like you imagine the top of a castle to look like.

Now, the turf wall was slightly different. It was quite a bit wider. It basically had to be in order not to collapse. So at its base, it was maybe 20 Roman feet, so about six meters. And then the south side, the backside, if you will, sort of gently sloped down, but the north face was fairly steep. And it, again, was probably about 12 Roman feet tall, and it would have had a timber walkway and palisade on top.

And the entire wall was protected to the north by outworks. First, there was a big V-shaped ditch, which paralleled the wall in front of it. It sat about 20 Roman feet away. It was 8 meters wide and 3 meters deep, so it was a pretty big obstacle.

And then the second thing they had were functionally multi-pronged wooden stakes set in some places. And now these might have looked like a giant wooden jack, like the game you play, little kid game with jacks. And these would have been embedded in the ground between that ditch and the wall itself.

So that's sort of what this thing looked like. It is worth saying that there's a lot of debate about why the western part from the Irthing to Maia was originally built in turf. The most convincing solution is that this area was potentially most in need of intervention.

Right. And a turf wall could be constructed fairly quickly. So the entire 31 Roman miles of turf wall could be constructed in one season if necessary. Whereas the stone wall along the rest of the length took about three or four years to finish.

Yeah. And that observation leads, I guess, naturally to the topic of how the wall itself was built. We're not going to get into too many details here, but we do want to just say that we can state with confidence that the wall was built by the Roman legions who were put to work by their commanders.

So we have a bunch of stones from the wall along the wall that carry inscriptions recording the units and the individuals responsible for building it. And there are two kinds of inscriptions we find. So one we call legion inscriptions. And these inscriptions will often name one of the three legions in Britain at the time, plus one of the cohorts, which is a division of a legion. And these seem to commemorate the unit responsible for individual chunks of work on the wall. And these inscriptions are often elaborate, accompanied by reliefs, and they are generally taken as an indication that members of different units kind of competed with one another and took some pride in the finished product.

And then we find inscriptions of a more simple kind. These are what we call the centurion inscriptions. And they generally give us the name of an officer and just the number of a cohort with no specific mention of the legion to which that cohort belongs. These seem to have been inscriptions that were sort of made on the fly, as it were, basically sort of as an accounting system as the wall was built, just to keep track of where we were, what's been built so far, that kind of thing.

The stone that they're using was mostly quarried locally. Sandstone is fairly abundant throughout the area, and the wall is built mostly of either red or gray sandstone.

We've been able to find a few of the quarries where you can also find some inscriptions and Roman gaffriti. And there's a really famous doodle actually at one of these that says Petra Flavii Carantini, which literally means the Rock of Flavius Carantinus. So you can kind of imagine a Roman soldier bored at hewing stone out of the quarry, just sort of doodling on the side of the quarry to pass the time.

What's really funny about that, though, is the word he uses for stone is a Greek word for stone that has clearly come into Latin as a loan word, which is fun.

Yeah, he's trying to be witty here and trying to elevate the work, I suppose, right? It's not just a rock, it's a rock.

I don't know. Or maybe he was Greek speaking.

It's entirely possible, yeah.

Now, it may seem odd that the soldiers are the ones doing this work when they could have used forced labor of enslaved people or coerced locals into performing the labor. But the Roman army is actually used to doing this kind of thing, because traditionally they built structures ranging from temporary field camps to elaborate siege works.

Yeah, and they're depicted doing exactly this sort of thing on Trajan's Column in Rome. If you've ever been to Rome, Trajan's Column is a fairly famous monument right down in the Forum area. And it's covered in relief inscriptions that give snapshots of Trajan's wars along the Danube frontier during the early part of the 2nd century CE. Among other things, it really does show Roman soldiers building siege works. So this kind of construction work was really nothing new for members of the legions.

And we can also say a little bit about the building process and how things sort of changed as the construction process was going on. So first, it looks like construction started with the milecastles and the turrets. And we think that mostly because some of these structures were joined kind of awkwardly to the wall, especially in places where the milecastles and turrets were built to a different gauge than the wall itself.

Yeah, there are a lot of complicated details here. The very short version, though, is that the turrets and the milecastles had wing walls built to the broad wall gauge. That's the gauge at which most of the wall was built in the first 27 Roman miles or so of its length. But you can see at some point the Romans started switching to the narrow gauge. And so what ends up happening is a narrow gauge wall intersects with and is melded with turrets and milecastles that had already been pre-built to a different plan.

Second, at some point the Romans decided to add two new features to the project. Forts that were built into the wall and a complicated earthwork called the Vallum. So with the forts, it seems that 12 forts were planned fairly early on in the construction, but not at the beginning. And these would have been spaced about seven to eight Roman miles apart along the wall. These were fairly large forts, large enough to hold garrisons of about a thousand auxiliary soldiers. And auxiliary soldiers were non-Roman citizens from various parts of the empire that enlisted into units of their own to supplement the legions comprised of citizens. And these forts had barracks, headquarters buildings for the commander, safe rooms to store military pay, etc. Everything you would expect in a major fort—multiple gates, defensive towers, the whole nine yards.

These forts were integrated into the wall itself. Some of them basically straddle the line of the wall with multiple gates on the north side so that the Romans could deploy into the hostile area beyond, projecting both north and south. Other forts project from the south only, keeping the north face of the wall flush and intact. As we've mentioned, they were built early, probably before the wall was finished, but it's pretty clear that they weren't actually part of the original plan. And we know that because we can see places where chunks of wall-in-progress or milecastles or turrets were essentially demolished in whole or in part so that these forts could be accommodated.

And the thinking is that this decision was made to place the forts along the wall because the Romans realized that the forts they already had on the Stanegate to the south were just a little too far away from the wall for soldiers based there to provide support as quickly as they would have wanted them to.

Right. So correction midway through.

Yes.

Now, the other structure the Romans built that isn't part of the original plan is this thing called the Vallum. It was a complex structure on the south side of the wall with three features. A wide flat bottom ditch, which was about three meters or 10 feet deep, and then two earthen ramparts that flanked the ditch on its north and south sides. These were maybe about two meters tall. And the whole thing, the ValLum, ran behind the wall and parallel to it on the south side at a distance anywhere between about 50 and 100 meters. That's 165 to 330 feet, roughly, if you prefer thinking in imperial units.

Now, this Vallum was clearly planned at the same time as the forts. And it actually kind of wraps around the southern wall of many of the forts. And it's crossed only by causeways that lead out of the forts' south gates.

Right, and that means that the whole Vallum was apparently designed to create an exclusion zone on the south side of the wall, probably to make it easier for soldiers to move unimpeded from fort to fort, and to provide a further obstacle for anyone who happened to breach the wall at a milecastle. You have to imagine that the Vallum would have been particularly effective at complicating things for people on horseback, since a big, deep, flat ditch would have been really hard for horses in particular to negotiate.

And then the final stage of development of the wall, the western section made of turf, is eventually rebuilt in stone. Now, a big chunk of this work was probably done before Hadrian died in 138, which is about 12 years after the wall otherwise was finished. But parts of the wall were still turf probably until the early 160s.

When complete, this was a truly impressive piece of Roman military architecture. A viewer from the north would have seen a massive crenellated wall stretching for miles both to the east and the west, punctuated with impressive turrets and even more impressive milecastles with strong gates, all guarded in front by the ditch and these weird wooden obstacles between the ditch and the wall.

It's even possible that the wall was whitewashed and then incised to make it look like it was built of the same kind of massive stone blocks the Romans would have used on their bridges or on the gatehouses of the forts rather than of sandstone. But all in all, even if that wasn't the case, it was still a visible and forbidding monument of Roman imperial power.

All right, with that description of the wall and how it was built out of the way, let's go on to the next thing we want to talk about, namely a pretty important question: what was the wall designed to do? Now, at first, this may seem like a really dumb question. After all, the wall pretty clearly looks like a big fortification, built probably right after a major war, and it gives the appearance of a Roman border in North Britain that could be garrisoned and defended against anybody outside that border.

But there are a couple of aspects of the wall that may make things a bit more complicated than they seem at first glance. So one, what are we to make of the many, many gates that permitted traffic to cross the wall at the milecastles that dotted its length? And two, the wall was never the hard limit of Roman military power in the north of Britain. Now, granted, the Romans did mostly withdraw from Scotland in the 80s, but they did continue to occupy small forts north of the wall, although how deep into Scotland those forts reached kind of ebbed and flowed over the wall's history.

There are lots of explanations that have been put forward to explain both of these features and the purpose of the wall itself. The most persuasive ones are built on what we know about how both the Roman Empire worked and what kinds of social structures existed in Britain during the period of Roman occupation. So let's digress a little bit and talk about those.

So the Roman Empire. At its core, the Roman Empire was a structure that had developed in a world of independent city-states. So a small urban center and the rural area surrounding it that it controlled. So the Romans could go into a place, take the city, co-opt the elite of that city, and use that to incorporate that larger area into its imperial structure.

So what this means is that the Roman Empire looked a lot like other empires. You had a whole bunch of conquered states, often city-states, that retained some nominal autonomy as long as they honored obligations to give military service and/or tax revenue to the Romans. And these semi-autonomous states were often governed by their own local elites who were happy to cooperate with Roman governors put in charge of larger provinces as a way of cementing their own power and status.

Now, in Britain, when the Romans first invaded under Caesar, and this actually holds true for Gaul as well, these places didn't really have the city-states that the Romans were used to. Settlement there tended to be more dispersed. So lots of people living in clusters of roundhouses that accommodated maybe a handful of families. And these roundhouses were built within earthen enclosures, and the social structure revolved around a broad warrior elite in which members constantly vied with each other for power and status.

That said, this had started to change. So in lowland Britain, by the first century CE, the Romans would have encountered a growing number of settlements that they called oppida. These were pretty large fortified complexes that housed a lot more people than the typical roundhouse settlement. And they also served as rallying points for the nearby populations in times of warfare, and increasingly they functioned as power centers for growing states or polities that now had kings and aristocracies, and among other things, used these oppida as venues where they could display their wealth and power. In parts of lowland Britain that looked like this, where these oppida centers had started to emerge, the Romans were able to create the kinds of relationships that they used to spread their imperial power elsewhere with the growing aristocracies that they encountered here, although often, of course, after a fair amount of violence along the way.

However, in upland Britain—so Wales, Scotland, etc.—the older pattern of social organization still dominated of the broad warrior elite. And in these places, members of that warrior elite lived in a world of constantly shifting alliances and periods of friendship, alternating with raiding and warfare, and the growing lowland communities and Roman towns become tempting targets for warbands.

More importantly, in areas like this, there weren't really deep power structures here that the Romans could co-opt or grab hold of in order to force people into submission. All they could really do was wage a series of campaigns of reprisal to attempt to deter raiding and things like that. And here it's just worth pointing out that this is not a problem exclusive to the Romans. There were mountainous areas like this all over the place in the Mediterranean, and empires as early as the Persians had had trouble controlling some of the mountainous areas in places like Western Turkey.

Or say World War II in Crete.

Yes.

Now, Hadrian's Wall was meant to help the Romans navigate the problems that they faced when confronted by populations that had no city-states with established power structures to dominate. The Wall was basically put down in an important transition zone between people who were organized into growing states and increasingly urbanized landscapes that the Romans were used to, and people who were not. And one of the things the Wall did was it made it much more difficult for raiding parties to move south from Scotland.

The Wall also made it possible for the Romans to respond quickly to stuff that happened to the north and to send out campaigns as and when necessary. The outpost forts to the north of the wall almost certainly functioned as early warning stations of a sort. And to the rear of the wall, the Vallum, this nice ditch with its two ramparts on either side, provided a protected corridor for rapid deployment and movement east or west from the wall forts. Those forts themselves, along with the many, many milecastles, provided plenty of gates the Romans could use to pop out from behind the wall and confront attackers wherever they needed to.

So in many ways, the wall functions as a solution of sorts to the problem of dealing with people that the Roman Empire, by its nature, simply wasn't good at controlling. And that partly helps to explain the wall's longevity as a defensive feature.

Now, at the same time, it's important to acknowledge that the wall did radically transform the social landscape of Britain, as in fact did the Roman occupation as a whole. And in the short term, among other things, the wall really disrupted the pre-Roman societies that had existed in this part of Britain before its construction.

Archaeology shows us settlements of the classic roundhouse type in the vicinity of the wall, but most of these seem to have been abandoned around the time the wall was built. And undoubtably, the wall messed with long-standing patterns of agriculture and animal herding that had existed in the area.

But in the long term, the Roman occupation of Britain, along with the wall, really transformed life in lowland Britain too. From the moment of initial Roman invasion onward, the British countryside seems to have become more Roman in character, as these oppida we've mentioned developed into something that looked more like Roman towns and new settlements inhabited by Roman were created.

Additionally, processes of social stratification probably continued, and you get the emergence of a new Romano-British elite.

What's really interesting here is that some of the evidence from skeletons in the Western Empire as a whole, including Britain, show that people under Roman rule, on average, suffered a lot more heavily from malnutrition and some of its consequences than they did before or after the Romans imposed imperial power over these areas. And that really seems to be a product of social stratification with an increasingly wealthy and small elite at the top creaming off a whole bunch of resources at the expense of people lower down that hierarchy.

Yeah. Now, people will often praise what's called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, as a period sort of without violence. But it is really important to acknowledge that that came at a steep cost. So not only the lower standard of living for many people, but also the initial violence of the conquest and this large-scale transformation of society.

All right, let's move into our final topic for the day, and that is the wall after Hadrian. As we've already sort of anticipated, Hadrian's wall remained a really important component of Roman imperial power in northern England for centuries, really, up until the early 5th century CE. There was a bit of an interlude under Hadrian's immediate successor, Antoninus Pius. When Hadrian died in 138, Antoninus Pius became emperor and made the decision essentially to advance this frontier zone by building another wall in 142, about 100 miles north, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. That's really the central belt of Scotland, where Britain is at its narrowest: it's only 37 miles or 60 kilometers across there.

Now, this wall was a turf wall on stone foundations, and it had associated forts and turrets and all those things. And basically, they abandoned Hadrian's Wall to go to the Antonine Wall instead. And it may have been possible that they eventually planned to replace that turf wall with stone. Although that doesn't happen, the Romans are unable to fully conquer the northern tribes, and the Antonine Wall doesn't quite work as well.

Right. And what ends up happening is that when Marcus Aurelius became emperor in 161, he essentially abandoned the Antonine Wall and restored and reoccupied Hadrian's Wall by the middle of the 160s.

Yeah. And then about 50 years later, in 208 to 211, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus temporarily reoccupies the Antonine Wall further north, attempts to conquer the north again, and then eventually withdraws back to Hadrian's Wall.

Yeah, he's a really interesting character, right? Rome's first African emperor, essentially. And the other bit of trivia here that's worth throwing out is he actually dies in England. He died at York, at Eboracum. Anyway, after Septimius Severus dies, the wall remained garrisoned and in use for another couple hundred years until the 5th century, when the Romans finally withdrew from Britain permanently in about 410.

Now, after 410, some parts of the wall do remain in use well into the 5th century as some local leaders take over and basically garrison parts of the wall. However, other parts are basically abandoned immediately and quickly fall into ruin.

Yeah, and one of the things that happens is the wall gets taken apart here and there, and many of the stones that were used to build it get reused in other buildings. Mostly those are stones from the forts and from the outer facings of the wall because they were well-dressed. The core of the wall itself tended to be rubble or other kinds of fill, but those external stones were nice building rocks.

Yeah. Now we get some interesting evidence in the 8th century from this man we mentioned earlier, Bede, who is a monk.

The venerable Bede.

The venerable Bede, even. Sometimes he is given that descriptor. He's a monk and a historian who writes a history of the English people. Now, he lived in a place called Jarrow, which is on the south side of the River Tyne, just south of the eastern terminus of the wall at Wallsend near Newcastle. So he lived within sight of Hadrian's Wall.

Yeah, and he had some interesting things to say about the wall. In his view, the Romans had built the wall before they abandoned Britain, and they did so to help their British allies protect themselves after they were gone. We know that that wasn't true, of course.

Yes.

And furthermore, he goes on to say that it was built on top of a rampart originally thrown up by Severus.

And that is Septimius Severus, the emperor.

Which is also not true.

So it's kind of funny, right? Because Bede here thinks that the earliest construction that happened on this site was done under Septimius Severus. So at this point, we've long lost the information about who built the wall and when the wall was built. And perhaps—we could probably assume that there was a fairly extensive refurbishment by the wall under Severus when they pull back from the Antonine Wall. And so maybe that's what gets attached to it. But yeah, doesn't know that the wall goes back almost a century prior to Severus. And Bede does tell us that in his day, one could still see the wall and see how wide it was, eight feet wide and 12 feet tall. So there are some pretty substantial remains still left in the 8th century.

That said, it was clearly in the process of being dismantled here and there. And one interesting point of detail here is that the church at Jarrow—I'm pretty sure the church with which Bede himself was familiar—was built partly from scavenged material, including fragments of a huge monumental inscription that celebrated the completion of the wall under Hadrian.

Oh, the irony.

Yeah.

Yeah. And of course, later on, bits of the wall are going to be used to build all sorts of prominent medieval buildings, including the castle at Carlisle and the Lanercost Priory.

Both of which we'll talk about in probably excruciating detail when we get to the travelogue portion of our episodes.

Yes, we will.

Anyway, the remnants of the wall were visible enough through the medieval period that they were actually still appearing as key feature of the landscape in maps created in the early 17th century.

So we have a man named John Speed in the early 1600s who drew a map, and it actually shows the wall running from Newcastle to the Irthing River, so not quite as far west as Carlisle. And he labels this as the Picts' Wall, P-I-C-T-S.

Right, the Wall of the Pictoi. That's a name that doesn't come into vogue until the late Roman Empire. It's not a word that the Romans would have used to refer to the people north of the Wall in the classical period. But anyway, the Vallum, the other feature that we've talked about, is clearly apparent on a map produced by William Matthew in 1610. And you can see it there on his map of Newcastle, just to the west of the city.

And then there's a map from 1788, a map of Newcastle that indicates the course of the wall on it, which they call the Severus Wall in that case. Although it's clear from looking at the map that the wall could not have been extant through much of the city, but they still knew where it ran.

Yeah, and it seems that there was still a bunch of stuff left, or at least, you know, traces of the foundations and things like that, in the 18th century. But in the 18th century, a lot of what was still left was destroyed, largely because it was used to build roads, especially what is called the Military Road, a major artery in northern England built in response to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The English wanted to be able to move troops and supplies quickly from Newcastle to Carlisle, so they threw up a road along the old course of the wall.

And the road is basically built right on the wall's foundations for much of its eastern section. And really, the only reason the wall was not destroyed entirely was because when the terrain became craggy, that was just not a good route for the road. And so the road was forced to go around the crags rather than over them as the wall does.

The Great Whin Sill becomes the hero of the story by saving some of the remnants of Hadrian's Wall from evil road builders. The preservation of what remains after this is mostly the result of the work of a guy called John Clayton, who was active during the 19th century. He was a lawyer and a town clerk based in Newcastle. And among other things, he inherited the land around Chesters, one of the Roman forts on the wall, which had belonged to his father's estate.

That's kind of funny. His father had actually covered up everything that was exposed still of the fort so that he could have this like nice, pretty level parkland on his estate. But when John inherits the property, John is sort of an antiquarian, and so he has the fort excavated, and he sets up a museum with the finds.

And to further protect remains of the wall, he started buying up additional pieces of land on which traces of the wall still stood. And he eventually came to own land stretching from Brunton through to Cawfields, which included the sites of four of the 12 Roman forts that had been built along the wall: Chesters, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, and Vindolanda.

Although Vindolanda is technically not a wall fort.

It's just off the wall, right, It's on the Stanegate.

It's one of the older forts.

Yes. And among other things, he had bits of wall restored. And you can still see his restorations in big chunks of the central section as you hike along them. And we'll talk about those a little bit, too, when we get to our travelogue episodes.

Now, John Clayton dies in 1890, and his heirs are a lot less careful. And they actually lose a lot of this land that he bought because of gambling.

But luckily, in the 20th century, the National Trust began buying up Clayton's former land from the 1920s onward, and are still caretakers of much of that land today.

Yeah. Hadrian's Wall became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. And then in 2005, it became part of what's called the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site that includes Hadrian's Wall, the Antonine Wall, and then some fortified sites in Germany at the edge of the Roman Empire there.

And as we'll see in the next couple of episodes, you can now tour a lot of this, at least in England, using Hadrian's Wall National Trail, which stretches 84 miles from Newcastle to Bowness on Solway. But that's a subject for the next couple of episodes.

Yes. So I've been Emily.

I'm Cam.

And this has been Have Toga, Will Travel.

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