The Wall Page 11
Marching camps had no wooden gates, only defended openings in each of the four sides. As darkness fell in the summer of AD 82, the Caledonian generals who watched the IX Legion light their campfires and settle down for the night will have noted that the gateways were heavily guarded but not blocked by anything solid. The ramparts were also not formidable, able only to slow down an assault but not to stop it.
To launch a night attack, it is likely that warhorns sounded the charge, and out of the shadows the Caledonian warriors raced towards the gates, roaring their war-cries. They cut down the sentries and burst into the sleeping camp, creating panic, wrote Tacitus. With little or no time to buckle on armour, the legionaries grabbed their helmets, shields and weapons and fought back as best they could, blundering amongst the tents and guy ropes. Earlier in the campaign the warbands had attacked forts and knew what to expect. It looked as though there would be a great slaughter and, just as three legions had been annihilated in the forests of Germany seventy years earlier, the IX would be wiped out in the fateful shadow of the Scottish Highlands.
But help came. Perhaps the commander of the IX had somehow got horsemen away out of the melee and they had found Agricola’s division. Perhaps Tacitus was telling the unspun truth, rather than promoting his father-in-law’s acumen, when he wrote that it was his scouts who had reported the enemy attack. But he seems to suggest that Agricola’s men were still on the march – at night? Whatever the reality, reinforcements arrived in the nick of time, and by dawn the warbands had been driven off. Memorably, Tacitus wrote: At first light the standards gleamed.
The ability of the fleet to supply his land army allowed Agricola to penetrate far to the north. But it also had another advantage. When Caledonian commanders saw Roman ships appear on the horizon again and again, keeping in step with the army pushing up from the south, they must have felt that there was no escape. So they began to turn their minds from guerilla warfare and night attacks to preparation for a battle, a mighty battle which would bring either revenge or enslavement.
In consecutive passages Tacitus talks of alliances, exchanges of embassies and a united front amongst the kings of northern Scotland. It was clearly a federation which fought the advance of the Romans. Ptolemy noted the names of its probable members. The kings of the Vacomagi ruled in Angus and the Mearns, and north of the Mounth, the Taexali were in Aberdeenshire and the north-east, and the Decantae, the Smertae and the Lugi in Ross and Sutherland. These peoples remain mysterious. Little sense of their personality has survived, only the occasional glint of meaning flickers. The name of the Lugi translates as ‘the People of the Raven’ and, as it hints, Smertae means ‘Smeared’, the warriors who smeared themselves in blood before battle.
Tacitus does identify one man, the first named Scotsman (forgetting the anachronism for a moment) in history. The Caledonian federation was commanded by a war-leader supreme over all the kings of the north. Calgacus may well have been his nickname for it means, simply, ‘the Swordsman’ or ‘good with a sword’.
In 83 the confederate army of the north chose its ground. Calgacus arrayed his men in battle order at a place called the Graupian Mountain. In time-honoured style Tacitus put a long speech in his mouth. It contains several ringing phrases: We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free, and They make a desert and call it ‘peace’, and there is much talk of the virtues of freedom and the evils of slavery. It ends with a telling exhortation:
On then into battle and as you go, think both of your ancestors and of your descendants.
The atmosphere in the ranks of the warbands will have been unmistakable. On the slopes of the Graupian Mountain there stood an army of families, of fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, and they had come to that place to fight for more than their lives. The land, those who had gone before and would come after them, their whole sense of themselves – for all of these they stood with all their courage and stared hard at the legions massing below them, at the most feared army the world had ever seen.
Almost seventeen hundred summers later another army of brothers, fathers and sons mustered to fight for the same things. There are of course many differences between what happened at Culloden in 1746 and at Mons Graupius in 83. But both were battles between a professional army and a host, people who fought with passion rather than for pay. They were contests between the power of a furious Celtic charge and a front of disciplined, trained ranks whose officers implored them to stand fast. But, most of all, these two battles were fought between groups of men who shared ties of blood and soil and an army of individuals who had been welded together by hard-won experience and comradeship. Before Culloden the sloinneadh began, the naming of the ancient names. Many of the clansmen recited their genealogy, remembered who they were and where they came from before raising their broadswords and tearing across the heather into the murderous hail of musket fire.
Once Agricola had made his speech (oddly, not as rousing or poignant as Calgacus’), he put his battleplan into action. Facing the warbands directly were the auxiliary regiments, 8,000 soldiers in all, and protecting their flanks were 3,000 cavalry. The legions were stationed in front of the rampart, clearly near a camp, but behind the auxiliaries to act as a reserve. Tacitus was quick to point out that a victory was esteemed all the greater if no Roman blood was shed.
The preliminaries were dominated by charioteers racing back and forth on the ground between the two front lines. Volleys of javelins were exchanged. And then Agricola ordered the Batavian and Tungrian auxiliary cohorts to advance in close order. There appears to have been no Caledonian charge at this point. The long Roman shields and short stabbing swords were far more effective than the cavalry sabres and small parrying shields of the native warriors, and the auxiliaries began to gain ground, moving up the slopes of the mountain. Then Calgacus engaged the bulk of the confederate army in a flanking movement, an attempt to roll up the Roman line and encircle them. But Agricola sent in his reserve cavalry and they themselves not only prevented this but managed to work themselves in behind the warbands.
At that moment everything changed. Panic seems to have seized the Caledonian army. From Tacitus’ description, the battle broke into a series of separate rearguard actions. The warbands retreated, regrouped and fought back. But momentum was with Agricola’s men and by nightfall they had won the field. They could not follow victory with annihilation, the sort of mass slaughter which often disfigured Roman strategy. The bulk of Calgacus’ army vanished into their mountain heartlands. Agricola continued his march but, since the campaigning season was almost over and winter was threatening, the army returned to camp.
Domitian professed himself delighted at the victory at Mons Graupius (Tacitus was doubtful: what he dreaded most of all was for the name of a subject to be exalted above that of the Emperor) and awarded Agricola triumphal insignia, a public statue and an honorary triumph. At Richborough something even more spectacular was created. On the site where Claudius’ troops invaded Britain in 43, Domitian had a huge triumphal arch erected to mark the moment when he completed the conquest of the province with the battle at Mons Graupius. The arch was clad with Carrara marble and had gilded bronze statuary to decorate it. The imperial family, Domitian’s father, brother and uncle, had all served in Britain and it seems that he saw its final subjugation as a personal Flavian triumph. Perhaps a state visit was planned. It never happened and all that remains are some impressive foundations at Richborough.
Tacitus was bitter about Domitian’s shoddy treatment of Agricola on his recall to Rome:
So that his entry would not attract attention by crowds flocking to welcome him, he avoided the friends who wanted to pay their respects and came into the city by night, and by night also, just as he had been instructed, to the Palace. He was greeted with a perfunctory kiss and then dismissed without a word, into the crowd of courtiers.
TACITUS
Historians are never objective, and while Tacitus did not waver from his adulation of Agricola, his
father-in-law, he does sometimes make surprising comments – for a Roman aristocrat. For example, he affords some dignity to barbarians and is occasionally cynical about the motives and methods of the Empire. His own life story may offer some clues to the origin of these unexpected sensitivities. Publius Cornelius Tacitus was born around AD 58, and his father had been an imperial official of some sort in the Rhineland. The family may have come from southern Gaul, like Agricola, and may have spoken Latin with a slight Celtic accent. The name is unusual and was probably coined as a nickname – the Quiet Man. Tacitus did not live up to it. After being made a senator by Vespasian, promoted by Titus and even by the hated Domitian, he became famous as a public speaker as well as a historian. The ultimate accolade came in 97 when Tacitus served as a consul.
With the conclusion of the Agricola, the written historical record for Britain is plunged suddenly into darkness. After so much detail for the years from AD 77 to 84, there is very little surviving material between then and the mid 90s. Even the name of Agricola’s successor as Governor of Britannia is unknown.
It is clear, however, that Mons Graupius was the stimulus for a huge building project in Scotland. At Inchtuthil, on the River Tay near Perth, a legionary fortress was begun in 84. The XX Valeria Victrix, Agricola’s own legion, was to be stationed there and, much in the way that Caerleon glowered at the Silures of South Wales, Inchtuthil was to keep the defeated Caledonii in check. But the fortress was never completed. Trouble threatened elsewhere in the Empire and a legion was withdrawn from Britain. Deliberately and carefully dismantled (a million iron nails were found buried in a pit), Inchtuthil was abandoned in 86 and the edges of the Roman Empire retreated south from Caledonia – and stayed there. Tacitus could not restrain his disgust: Britain was completely conquered – and straight away let go.
Much further south Agricola’s consolidation and good government began to have its effect. The Romans were not only in Britain to stay, but they and their empire also presented opportunities. Those who wanted to do business with the garrisons had to learn Latin, and there is evidence that many merchants and manufacturers did. This process of acculturation is partly reflected in the nature of the 600 or so loanwords from Latin which are still detectable in modern Welsh. These were adapted for things new to Britain after 43 and they say something about cultural difference. For example, llyfr is from liber for a book, ffos is from fossa for a ditch, and ffenestr from fenestra for a window. Even Welsh christian-names remember the Empire. Iestyn is from Justinus and even Tacitus survives as Tegid.
In the Agricola, Tacitus relates how the Governor had fostered Romanisation as a matter of policy:
. . . those who had once shunned the Latin language now sought fluency and eloquence in it. Roman dress too became popular and the toga was frequently seen. Little by little there was a slide towards the allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, bathing establishments, and smart dinner parties. In their naivety the Britons called it civilisation when it was really part of their servitude.
4
Dinner on the Stone Road
Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On the third day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival . . . Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings.
I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. To Sulpicia Lepidina, (wife) of Cerialis, from Severa.
Only the names and the word hail give away the dates of this birthday invitation. It could have been written at almost any period in the last two thousand years of our history. The formalities, the gushing sign-off, the evident warmth and the slightly superior tone might as easily have come from the memsahibs of the British Raj as from a woman living on Rome’s northern frontier some time around the year 100.
Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the commander of the IX Cohort of Batavians stationed at the fort of Vindolanda. It lay on the Stanegate Road, the Stone Road, midway between Newcastle and Carlisle, a mile or so south of the line of what was to become Hadrian’s Wall. The invitation from Claudia Severa was miraculously preserved in the anaerobic mud of Vindolanda and, along with many hundreds of other wooden writing tablets, it was discovered in a series of brilliant excavations directed by Robin Birley, which began in the 1970s and are ongoing. The tablets form what is considered the greatest archaeological treasure ever discovered in Britain. Not gold, not silver, nor precious gemstones, the Vindolanda letters and lists are priceless because they allow us directly into the thoughts of people from the long past. In the cloying, black mud of soaking trenches, Robin Birley found Roman voices.
They whispered stories of remarkable immediacy. From the small change of everyday life – shopping lists, parcels of socks and underpants, schoolroom exercises – to the great affairs of state – a visit from the Governor of Britannia, a petition to the Emperor Hadrian, an assessment of regimental strength – the Vindolanda letters and lists take us into the Roman world of northern England, 2,000 years ago.
Their discovery was the result of a problem. When the Vindolanda Trust began life in 1970, its sole source of income was from entrance fees to the site. Excavation and its unpredictable excitements drew visitors and it was first undertaken outside the western gate of the fort, in the civilian settlement. To get at the Roman layers, Robin Birley and his team had to remove modern field drains. Water then collected in the hollow between the settlement and the long mound covering the western wall of the fort. Sometimes it was so deep that the precious visitors could not get into the fort. Something had to be done, and instead of Roman remains, a drainage ditch was dug.
As the excavators moved south towards the slope and the stream running below, they were forced to dig deeper to achieve sufficient fall for the drainage pipe. And they ran straight into what was first believed to be a Roman rubbish dump. Then the stumps of two timber posts were uncovered and Robin Birley realised that they had come upon the buildings of the early timber fort. It being too late in the year to begin a comprehensive excavation, the trench was quickly backfilled for the winter.
In March 1973, Birley moved his team back into the drainage ditch. He quickly saw that, before each phase of rebuilding, soldiers had flattened the site, covering over demolition with clay or thick turf. This process had effectively sealed each layer, trapping material in an anaerobic, or oxygen-free, environment. All sorts of organic remains came up. The carpets of bracken which had lain on the floors of rooms were at first brightly coloured, brown, green and yellow, just as they had been 2,000 years before. But as they came into contact with the oxygen in the atmosphere, they quickly turned black and also began to smell and rot.
Wood was well preserved, as was leather and other normally rare sorts of finds. In a room of what appeared to be a timber building, some thin and oily shavings were noticed amongst much larger objects, like barrel staves. But because there was such a volume of material, much of which needed to be conserved urgently, they were ignored. Then one of the excavators picked up two of these shavings which seemed to be stuck together. Separating them, he noticed that the inside surfaces were covered with illegible markings. I had another look, wrote Birley, and thought I must have been dreaming, for the marks appeared to be ink writing. He later commented:
If I have to spend the rest of my life working in dirty, wet trenches, I doubt whether I shall ever again experience the shock and excitement I felt at my first glimpse of ink hieroglyphics on tiny scraps of wood.
Hastily collecting as many of these scraps as they could find, Birley and his assistant raced down to Durham to find a leading expert on ancient handwriting, Richard Wright. When they unpacked the shavings from their moss-filled box, they had turned black. Birley wrote:
We were shattered. But Richard Wright had faith in us, and suggested we contact Miss Alison Rutherford, a
t the Newcastle University Medical School, to see whether ultra-violet or infra-red photography could reveal the texts again. It took time, but the infra-red photography produced the images, and when we saw them, we realised we were no further forward, because it was impossible to read the scripts. Even Richard Wright had to admit defeat, but one of our Trustees, Professor Barri Jones, put us in touch with Dr Alan Bowman at Manchester University, who was an expert in dealing with papyrus records from Egypt, and with the assistance of Dr David Thomas at DurhamUniversity, the long process of reading the texts began. At the time, no-one realised the magnitude of the task.
But it turned out to be immensely rewarding. As scores of finds grew into hundreds and then thousands, a unique record of Roman life began to form. Life on the northern frontier only decades before the Wall was built.
The writers of all this extraordinary material, it should be made clear, were not in fact Romans, or at least not Italians. Flavius Cerialis was a Batavian, an aristocrat from the peoples who lived on what Tacitus described as the Rhine Island. This was the land lying between the old course of the Rhine and the River Waal, the area around the modern city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Batavi means ‘the Better Ones’ and the legacy of the name, a certain superior attitude, often leaps off the page at Vindolanda.
Considered exceptional cavalry warriors, Batavians formed the Imperial Horseguards and, from the reign of Augustus to Nero, a detachment was stationed at Rome. Very unusually, the eight cohorts and one purely cavalry regiment drawn from these people were commanded by their own aristocracy, and Flavius Cerialis may even have been a member of the royal family. Like most commanding officers in the Roman army, the Batavian officers were permitted to bring their wives and families to live with them wherever they were posted. It was not approved of by everyone. The stern Republican virtues of discipline and gritty sacrifice come through in this speech by the historian Tacitus to an old-fashioned senator, Caecina Severus: