The Wall Read online

  Vici, or civilian settlements, appeared early around forts and most, like the one outside the west gate of Vindolanda, were built very close to the walls. This is surprising because the presence of these houses removed a vital defensive advantage. Fort builders usually cleared wide areas on all sides, so that an attacking enemy was forced to approach over open ground, and thereby be seen and be vulnerable to fire from the ramparts, or at least be quickly seen. The houses of the vici huddle so close that they must have been the homes of absolutely trustworthy people. And who could be more so than regimental veterans? They would also understand if their homes had to be fired or levelled if there was war and the fort was threatened. In any case the vici were built on the territorium belonging to the army – portions of which could be granted to veterans on their discharge.

  These small villages set up an important link between the native and military communities. In addition to holding regular markets, they supplied services. The Emperor Hadrian disapproved of vici and, in listing his reasons, he outlined exactly what was attractive to soldiers: drinking booths, gambling halls and prostitutes. In most there were at least two buildings which appear to have been standard; a bath house and an inn, called a mansio. The latter is usually primly interpreted as a place where travellers or visitors to the fort might lodge. It was also almost certainly a whorehouse. With either 500 or 1,000 young and unmarried soldiers living mostly bachelor lives inside Roman forts, the notion that they were not serviced by a large number of whores is entirely absurd. Of course no trace of them remains, no archaeological or literary evidence has yet been found at Vindolanda, but its absence does not mean that the White Fort was populated by whiter-than-white, clean-living young men with a wide variety of hobbies to occupy them in the evenings. They were soldiers and they behaved in the way soldiers have always behaved.

  Gambling, by constrast, has left a mark, and it certainly went on in the bath houses. Many games revolved around dice and a throw-board. A favourite was ludus latrunculorum, or robber-soldiers. It was a battlegame like chess. At the fort of Segedunum at Wallsend a board and a set of counters were found, and it seems that pieces were moved according to throws of the dice. All of them moved in straight lines like the rook in chess, and could be captured and removed if both their advance and retreat were cut off. According to contemporaries, the wedge formation was most effective – just as on the battlefield. No doubt substantial sums changed hands as players bet against each other and others bet on them.

  The Romans seemed fascinated by gambling. A good deal of literary evidence survives – the Emperor Claudius even wrote a history of dice-games and was apparently devoted to them. Another game, called duodecim scripta, or twelve points, and resembling backgammon, inspired the poet Ovid to describe it: A sort of game confined by subtle method into as many lines as the slippery year has months.

  Played without a board, tesserae, or dice, were often marked with different values, and players would bet on how they landed. At Birdoswald four dice were found as a complete set and each face had I, III, IV or VI inscribed on it. The principle was the same as for modern poker dice. Venus was the best throw since it showed all of the different values at once, and Dogs was the worst with four Is. Poor throws were penalised by adding more stakes to the pot, which was scooped by the first player to throw a Venus. Sums could spiral. Gambling chips came into use: there were three denominations, I, V and X. As the stakes rose, a crowd must have pressed hard to watch the high rollers in the warmth of the caldarium. Perhaps it was not just the hypocaust that made men sweat.

  Snacks were served in the bath houses. Oysters, mussels and other titbits were on sale, and Hadrian’s third vice, drinking, must have washed down many a plateful. There is no doubt that overindulgence, sexually transmitted diseases and indebtedness through gambling were all a danger, but camp commanders were more than likely glad of the diversions of the vici. They allowed soldiers to let off steam, kept up morale and broke up the dull, quotidian routines of guard duty, route marches and cleaning out the latrines.

  Over time the fort-villages grew. Outside Chesters, which had a garrison of a thousand cavalry troopers, there were four streets arranged around a crossroads. And at Old Carlisle in North Cumbria surveys have hinted at a sizable settlement of several hundred souls. To the army one of the most attractive aspects of these villages was probably as a reservoir of recruits. Many sons of veterans will have followed their father’s footsteps onto the parade grounds. Batavian and Tungrian military traditions might even have been sustained by a second generation, perhaps a third as the army renewed itself. An inscription found in Egypt and dated to AD 194 records the retirement of forty-six veterans from the Legio II Traiana Fortis. Unusually it lists the origins of the soldiers, and more than half (twenty-four) said that they had been born at a fort. In order to enlist in a legion, they will all have had to be citizens, and they were probably enfranchised on the discharge of their fathers and their formal marriage to their mothers. As in modern times the names of the regiments never changed to reflect different recruiting grounds, and it would be a mistake to assume that the men of the Batavians or the Thracians later came from either of these places.

  Later altar dedications at four forts show that the villages were assuming a measure of self-government. At Vindolanda, Old Carlisle and Housesteads cash seems to have been contributed, perhaps through taxation, perhaps donation, to pay for altars. Two are dedicated to Vulcan, the god of blacksmithing, and the army may have been happy to see fire-hazardous smiddies set up outwith the walls of its forts. At Old Carlisle the inscription was specific: dedicated by the village elders with money contributed by the villagers.

  SMELLS

  To our sensitive noses the ancient world-would have stunk to high heaven. Worst, by far, were the leather-tanning pits. These used a disgusting soup of urine and dog turds to produce the tough, treated leather that the Roman army badly needed. Next on the scale was probably animal dung. Oxen splatted the streets of Vindolanda regularly, ponies piled out their muck, chickens shat their eye-watering guano, and no one bothered – unless it landed on them. Almost all the soldiers had been raised on farms and they were used to it. In fact, up until the early twentieth century, most people were – from the farm workers who shared their cottages with their cow in the winter (imagine steaming piles of dung dropped only a few feet from where people slept) to the dainty ladies of the cities dodging street manure of all kinds. There were good smells at Vindolanda too: cooking, baking, woodsmoke and someone who had just visited the bath house.

  A macabre discovery by Eric Birley in his 1930 excavation of the vicus at Housesteads suggests that civilian life on the Roman frontier was occasionally as wild as the equivalent in nineteenth-century America. Under a false floor he found two skeletons. One had a knife blade embedded in its ribs. The site became known as the Murder House, for no one doubted that was what had taken place. All Roman burials had to be located outside settlements and forts, and the obvious concealment of two bodies amounted, at the very least, to what the police are fond of calling suspicious circumstances. More resembling an incident from Tombstone or Dodge City, it vindicated Hadrian’s stern disapproval. The vici could be lawless, dangerous places. When Eric Birley reported his find to the coroner at Hexham, as he was bound to do, a verdict came back of murder by person or persons unknown shortly before AD 367.

  A hundred years before the dark deeds at Housesteads, the vicus at Vindolanda seems to have been abandoned. Around 270, it may be that the substantial reduction in the garrison allowed villagers to move inside the fort’s sheltering walls. There was plumbing, the buildings were better constructed, and there was running water. By 400, all of these settlements had gone. They existed only to service the forts and clearly made no economic sense without them. Only Carlisle sustained itself. When St Cuthbert visited in 685, the water supply was still working, and medieval chroniclers reported that Roman streets were still paved and buildings still standing as late as the 1200s.
But Tacitus’ cynical predictions did not come to pass in the north. Despite the four centuries of a large garrison along the line of the Wall, Romanisation simply did not take. Celtic culture was too powerful.

  All of this lay far in the future. Around AD 100 the IX Batavians were as busy as ever. Part of the reason why they had replaced the I Tungrians was their part-mounted capability. Their 240 cavalry troopers were also excellent intelligence gatherers and watchers, patrolling the countryside, asking questions, looking out for suspicious movement. Tagged onto their title, the regiment had the additional description of exploratorum, the scouts.

  The immediate vicinity of Vindolanda appears to have formed part of the territory of the Textoverdi. Only 3 kilometres from the fort an altar dedicated to the goddess Saitada has been found. It is unique. Like hundreds of other Celtic deities whose names appear only once in the historical record, Saitada sounds like the focus of a local cult. Perhaps she was the genius, the patron goddess of the Textoverdi, since the inscription informs that the altar was set up by curia Textoverdorum. This may be a mis-spelling of coria, the Old Welsh word found in the place-name of Corbridge and meaning the host or the hosting-place. Or it may mean something like council, perhaps in the sense of elders.

  The Textoverdi of the South Tyne Valley may have allied themselves with the Brigantes, been part of their federation. Some of the personal names of the people who appear in the Vindolanda letters and lists were almost certainly Textoverdi and will have spoken their dialect of Old Welsh. The name itself is obscure, but it may be related to the Celtic root-word teach, which meant something like fleet or fast. Maybe they and their ponies were famously adept at the gallop across the rough country they knew so well.

  Like all Celtic peoples the Textoverdi left no written record, no means of confirming such supposition. By contrast the ability of the Vindolanda garrison to use written communication was a distinct military advantage because of the way in which it spread precise information, and made the Roman army more efficient, better able to punch above the weight of its often depleted numbers. Messages could be written quickly and carried at speed along the Stanegate to neighbouring forts where they might be read and acted upon. A sense of this urgency and immediacy was captured in a remarkable record of a mistake. When Flavius Cerialis was dictating to a scribe, he did not make himself clear. Perhaps he stumbled over the words of what was after all his second language. The scribe first wrote tempestates et hiem, then scrubbed out the last two words (not well enough – probably because he was being hurried) and replaced them with etiam, what Cerialis had really meant to say.

  When the Governor of Britannia came to Vindolanda in 105, he may have brought orders from the Emperor, Trajan, who was fighting a ferocious war on a vast scale in Dacia (modern Romania) and against a formidable enemy, King Decebalus. Troop deployments would have to be reorganised to allow reinforcements to be sent to the Danube frontier. Flavius Cerialis and Sulpicia Lepidina packed their many belongings onto oxcarts and, after a long posting and very distinguished service, the IX Batavians left Britain in the summer of 105.

  The astonishing detail which careful archaeology can produce shows that much of Vindolanda lay empty for some months before a new garrison rumbled in through the gates in the late autumn. Blown off the trees fringing the fort, dead leaves had rustled into many of the rooms, piling up in drifts in some of the corners. Birds had flown in through the gaping windows and left some feathers and droppings on the floor. Squirrels had hopped into Cerialis and Lepidina’s apartments and buried their hazelnuts beneath the carpet of leaves and bracken. Seven caches were found.

  The contrast must have been baffling to the native peoples. At one moment the White Fort buzzed with the racket and clangour of soldiers, blacksmiths, wagon trains and parade-ground commands. The next, it was silent as the wind sighed through the buildings and the leaves swept into its rooms and blew down the via principalis.

  It was the I Tungrians who came back in late 105. Their commander was Priscinus and it is likely that his men occupied the fort until 122. Having no cavalry, the Tungrians were reinforced by troopers from the I Cohort of Vardulli, originally from northern Spain. There seems to have been serious trouble in Britain. The forts to the north, at Newstead near Melrose, Dalswinton and Glenlochar in the southwest, and Cappuck and Oakwood in hills above the Tweed basin, were all destroyed by fire, most of them deliberately. The army was retreating from the lands of the Selgovae and the Novantae. But it seems that the departure of the Romans was encouraged. Archaeologists believe that Newstead shows signs of having been attacked. Human bones were found charred amongst the wreckage as well as a great deal of valuable kit and some damaged armour. Perhaps the Selgovan kings led their warbands down the Tweed, roared their war-cries and launched themselves at the great army depot at the foot of the sacred Eildon Hills.

  High Rochester, impressively sited on the line of Dere Street and commanding much of Upper Redesdale, was also burned, but the flames did not stop there. Corbridge also went up in smoke. It seems certain that these two forts were attacked, possibly also by the Selgovae. Lying too far south to be part of any deliberate withdrawal from Scotland, Corbridge and its growing town presented too tempting a target. It looks very much as though a large and powerful warband rode down Dere Street, from Newstead to Corbridge, leaving fire and destruction in its deadly wake. As the Tungrian strength report showed, forts could on occasion be desperately short of manpower.

  After the Selgovan kings and their warriors had ridden back home over the hill trails through the Cheviots, no doubt lugging their plunder after them, the northern frontier grew quiet again. And its line seemed to settle along the Stanegate Road.

  Security at Vindolanda probably tightened in the wake of 105, its huge iron-studded wooden gates closed and barred at nightfall, the guards on the platform above scanning the darkening horizon. As a matter of routine each morning a daily password was agreed, written on a wooden tablet and given by the duty officer, usually a centurion, to an orderly. He then toured the gates, ramparts and the principia making sure all the soldiers on guard read and remembered it. This laborious business was designed to preserve the password’s secrecy, but it also suggests that ordinary soldiers had some ability to read. Simple words like courage or victory were commonly used.

  The most routine problem encountered by sentries was probably theft. The fort was normally full of supplies and valuable items. Hungry natives and greedy or needy soldiers may have raided granaries and other stores. The Vindolanda letters and lists occasionally complain of things going missing. After nightfall it is likely that four-man pickets patrolled outside the walls of the fort to keep an eye on stock and other movables, like carts. They could also have made out the shapes of anyone attempting to climb the rampart. Perhaps they had dogs on a leash. Watches rotated frequently throughout a 24-hour period with around a fifth of the garrison involved on any given day.

  Arguably Rome’s most dynamic and successful emperor, Trajan had succeeded Nerva in AD 98. His interests lay in the east, both on the Danube and in what is now modern Iraq. Unlike his predecessors, he showed little interest in Britain, certainly none in advancing up into Scotland. Glory lay elsewhere. During his reign the frontier stayed on the Stanegate Road and the forts along its length. It was a well-made, two-way paved road able to carry heavy military traffic. A clear outline of its camber and the drainage ditches on either side can be seen from the western approach road to Vindolanda. The number of Stanegate forts was increased, and the frontier seems to have been extended beyond Carlisle to Kirkbride and Bowness-on-Solway. Seaborne raids across the firth may have been troublesome. Lookout towers were built on the high ridges to the north of the forts in the central section, and one, at Walltown Crags, was certainly incorporated into Hadrian’s Wall. But sources for the period between 105 and 117, the death of Trajan and accession of Hadrian, are sparse. The name of the Governor who took over Britannia after L. Neratius Marcellus is not even known.

>   In the south of the province the legionary fortresses at York, Chester and Caerleon were all rebuilt in stone, and new colonies of veterans had been founded at Lincoln and Gloucester. More troops arrived in Britain around 105, perhaps as reinforcements after the attacks of the Selgovae. The prefect of the II Cohort of Asturians was buried in Alexandria, in Egypt. The inscription recalled his service in Britain with the Asturians when it noted that C. Julius Karus had been decorated for bravery, probably in the war of 105.

  THE BIRLEY DYNASTY

  Three generations of Birleys have found themselves at the bottom of Vindolanda’s wet and muddy trenches and, without their decades of hard work, the state of our knowledge of Roman Britain would be immeasurably poorer. It all began in 1929. The estates of John Clayton were put up for sale. The owner of Chesters, Housesteads, Carvoran, Vindolanda and Carrawburgh, he had done a great deal to rescue Hadrian’s Wall from nineteenth-century stone robbers and destroyers. A young Eric Birley had become fascinated by the Wall, and on being told that Vindolanda was a site of huge archaeological potential, he persuaded his father to help him buy the farm it stood on. The first excavations began. Then war intervened, and then Eric Birley’s academic career at Durham University took up more and more of his time. By 1950 he had sold Vindolanda. But family interest continued. Robin Birley started to do research in 1956 and became increasingly certain that the site would ultimately reveal a great deal, if only he could get at it. The farm came up for sale in 1970. Mrs Daphne Archibald, the mother of one of Robin Birley’s volunteer excavators, bought it and gave what was known as ‘the Camp Field’ to a newly formed Vindolanda Trust. Work began in earnest. Sustaining itself solely by receipts from visitors and the revenue from excavation courses, the site slowly fulfilled all that potential, and more. Robin Birley’s colleague, Patricia Burnham, became Mrs Birley and by 1974 the Trust began to expand. The nearby cottage at Chesterholm was bought and converted into a museum. The discovery of the first letters and lists built momentum, and the publicity they generated helped to bring in more than 100,000 visitors each year. A third generation now runs Vindolanda’s excavations. Andrew Birley has taken over from his father and, each summer, the distinguished Roman scholar Professor Anthony Birley finds his wellies and overalls and helps with excavation. Vindolanda is a remarkable place, dynamic and constantly adding to the store of knowledge about the Wall and Roman Britain. Without the Birleys, it might, as with several other important sites, have remained a green field with a few strange humps and bumps.