A History of Ancient Britain (56 page)

Boudicca’s self-righteous rage was not enough to protect her indefinitely. Suetonius Paulinus returned from Wales and, though outnumbered by his enemies, brought them to bay. The location
of that final battle is unknown, but many suggest it may well have taken place somewhere between London and St Albans. The Britons were blood-soaked and charged with adrenaline, and so confident of
victory they had brought their families to watch the predicted slaughter of the Romans.

According to Tacitus, Boudicca appeared before her warriors with her two daughters, riding a chariot. Just as he would do for Calgacus the Scot in the moments before the Battle of Mons Graupius,
he imagined what the wronged and vengeful queen might have said – what he presumably thought she should have said:

Those are the sentiments every leader wishes he or she might convey. Shakespeare would do the same favour for Henry V before Agincourt; Elizabeth I found her own words for her men when she
addressed them as ‘but a weak and feeble woman’ at Tilbury as the Spanish Armada loomed in 1588. There are echoes of it all in Churchill’s speeches to the British people during
the Second World War as well.

There would be no triumph for Boudicca though. Suetonius, seasoned warrior that he was, drew up his men with their backs to a forest, so they could not be attacked from behind. The Celtic
warriors sought individual glory on the battlefield and so had no concept of working together towards
a common goal. A disciplined wedge of legionaries advanced into the
high-spirited mêlée and slowly, but surely, cut their enemies to pieces. Roman writers would claim a death toll of 80,000 among the Britons, so that their army was virtually wiped out.
Boudicca fled the field and died, depending on what account is followed, either of self-administered poison or illness.

The events of
AD
60-61 are often referred to as the last British rebellion against Roman rule. That may have been true for the south, but there were other parts of the
archipelago – Ireland, for example, and in the north of Britain – where in some senses the rebellion never stopped. If the tribes of much of southern Britain were firmly under Roman
control by the end of the first century, there were peoples elsewhere living in territories beyond the effective reach of the Empire.

Mainland Britain is today split into unequal parts by the borders between England, Scotland and Wales. Imagining the Romans’ northward advance through their province of Britannia is
therefore complicated by our deeprooted awareness of those three separate nations. It is important right from the start to bear in mind that, to begin with at least, the Romans saw no such
divisions. As far as they knew and understood it in the early years, Britannia was one land populated by many disparate tribes. All would have to be confronted and dealt with sooner or later
– those in the far north as well as those in the south.

By
AD
71 there was apparently a Roman concept of Caledonia – encapsulating the
terra incognita
of the far north. It was in that year, under the governorship
of Quintus Petillius Cerialis, that efforts were originally made to push forwards into that unknown land.

First contact was probably with the Votadini tribe, occupying a vast tract of land on the eastern side of the country stretching from Northumberland in the south to the southern shore of the
Firth of Forth in the north. For their own reasons the Votadini decided co-operation was their best option and ushered Cerialis’s forces through their territory. They would be allies of Rome
from then on, growing ever richer and more powerful on wages paid in Roman silver. On the northern side of the Forth were the lands the Romans understood to be occupied by the Caledonii. Attempts
to make sense of the place and the people, far less bring them under Roman control, would continue without success and without conclusion for the next three and a half centuries.

Gnaeus Julius Agricola, father-in-law of Tacitus, took up the post of Governor of Britannia in the summer of
AD
78. He was more obsessive
about
the Caledonii than his predecessor and within two years he had built himself a base-camp for continued operations – a fort called Trimontium, ‘three mountains’, in the shadow of
the triple-peaked Eildon Hills near the modern town of Melrose in the Scottish Borders.

He finally got his wish, drawing the massed army of the Caledonians into a pitched battle in the shadow of another mountain, Mons Graupius, the Grampian Mountain, in the late summer of
AD
84. Their leader, Calgacus stepped out of the mists and into history that day. According to Tacitus ‘the swordsman’ had 30,000 men at his command and the
significance of the moment was not lost on him: ‘Battles against Rome have been lost and won before, but never without hope; we were always there in reserve,’ said Calgacus. ‘We,
the choicest flower of Britain’s manhood, were treasured in her most secret places . . .’

For all the fine, brave words, the battle that followed was a rout. Tacitus would later claim 10,000 Caledonian dead but he did at least concede that many more were able to disappear, back into
the trackless mountains from which they had come.

In many ways the victory at Mons Graupius was a high point the Romans would never reach again in Caledonia. They garrisoned tens of thousands of men in the northern territories, built forts and
roads and imported all the grain and wine and other foodstuffs required by an army of occupation. But the truth of the matter was the tribes of the north were unwilling to trade their independence
for Roman coins; and the occupation was costing the Romans more than they could hope to recoup in taxes or anything else. To some extent Mons Graupius had been a Pyrrhic victory and they had simply
bitten off more than they could chew (or even wanted to).

If the Romans started out calling the people of the northern tribes Caledonii, sometime during their attempted occupation they started referring to the locals as ‘Picts’, in
reference to their tattooed skins. Whoever they were – descendants of the Caledonii, or a confederacy of many hitherto unknown tribes brought together by a shared commitment to rid themselves
of the Romans – we do not even know what they called themselves. The Picts seemingly emerged from nowhere, a fully formed people who would feature in the history of Scotland until the tenth
century, when they were subsumed by the Gaels, to whom they were related.

Unable (or simply disinclined) to reach any sort of accommodation with the Picts, the Romans decided instead to shut them out – literally. Between
AD
118 and 122
the Roman Governor of Britannia was Quintus Pompeius
Falco and just as his term of office was coming to a close he hosted a visit from Emperor Hadrian. The Governor had
lately fought off yet another uprising by some of the northern tribes and the decision was taken to build a wall from one side of the country to the other. In honour of the visiting Emperor it
would be Hadrian’s Wall. The stubbornness of the Picts was therefore the inspiration for one of the most famous constructions of the ancient world – as well as the most northerly, the
most elaborate and the most heavily fortified and defended frontier in the whole of the Roman Empire.

Built between
AD
122 and 136, Hadrian’s Wall stretches 74 miles (or 80 Roman miles, based on
mille passuum
, ‘a thousand paces’) from Wallsend on
the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west. Constructed largely from limestone, it varies between 10 and 20 feet wide and between 11 and 20 feet high. The
original execution saw a stone wall between the Tyne and the River Irthing, 40-odd miles towards the west, and then a turf wall from the river to Bo’ness. At some point, however, the decision
was made to rebuild the turf section in stone. As well as the wall there were 80 ‘mile castle’ fortlets and perhaps as many as 17 full-sized forts, each containing between 500 and 1,000
soldiers.

Most of the construction work was completed within six years, all of it by the men of the three occupying legions. By any measure it is a wonder, striding for mile after mile up hill, down dale,
across rivers and over cliff tops. On the southern side of the wall a deep ditch called a
vallum
defines a broad stretch of no-man’s land preventing anyone even approaching the border
without permission. Once the entire length of the wall was rendered in white limewash so that it would have been a shining barrier, dazzling and humbling to any who laid eyes on it.

Hadrian’s Wall served many functions. For one thing it precisely defined the limits of what the Romans regarded as the civilised world. Beyond was perdition, the land of the barbarians
– here be dragons, as it were. Because there were gateways through the wall, it could function as a kind of customs control as well. Trade was permitted, actively encouraged in fact –
and in both directions – so the wall gave the Romans the opportunity to tax anyone heading north or south.

From time to time the Picts attacked the wall, sometimes breaking through, sometimes not; but usually it was a place where Romans and tame Britons co-existed peacefully. The threat from the
north may have necessitated the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers, but for the tribes
south of the wall the forts and their captive populations of soldiers were a
goldmine. The men needed food, drink and entertainment and around forts like Housesteads and Vindolanda whole settlements sprang up, populated by those able and willing to keep them supplied with
whatever they needed and wanted.

But if Hadrian and Pompeius Falco thought Rome had pushed as far north as was practical, they were followed within a few years by an Emperor and a Governor with different ideas. Emperor
Antoninus Pius ordered his Governor, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, to advance once more into the territory of the Picts and from 138 onwards much of southern Scotland was reoccupied. Lollius Urbicus
rebuilt old forts and added new ones besides, and by
AD
141 he was crowing about his success.

Part of the campaign involved embarking upon the construction of another wall – this one comprising a deep ditch and a steep-sided earthen bank stretching for 37 miles between
Bo’ness on the Firth of Forth in the east and Old Kilpatrick on the Firth of Clyde in the west. The Antonine Wall took took a dozen years to build. As well as the barrier itself there was the
matter of building a total of 17 forts – one every two miles – to keep it manned and operational.

So much talk of dimensions and years, the numbers blurring into one another, can somehow diminish the work involved. As an archaeology student at Glasgow I visited one of the forts on the
Antonine Wall – known today as Rough Castle Fort – and was stunned by the inventiveness of the builders. Located just outside Falkirk, it is the best-preserved of all the forts on the
wall. The main defences were built of turf, the same as the wall itself, but inside were once-substantial stone buildings including the commander’s house, the headquarters, a granary, a
barracks for the men and a bathhouse. A bathhouse! Think of that. Deep in the heart of Pictish territory, a hundred miles further north even than Hadrian’s Wall (which was, anyway, already
the back of beyond in the eyes of those posted there), every serving soldier had access to steam rooms and warm baths.

The attention to detail did not stop there either. Archaeologists excavating the gateway leading through the wall itself, out into the badlands beyond, discovered a regular series of row upon
row of pits. These were a defensive feature known as
lilia
– literally ‘lily pads’ – and would once have been filled with sharpened stakes, and camouflaged so as to
be invisible to approaching attackers. Just like the punji pits deployed by the Viet Cong
during the Vietnam War, the
lilia
were a cruel deterrent laid down to help
defend the most vulnerable point in the fort.

It was long assumed the Romans must have made a major impact on Scotland – almost by dint of the sheer force of imperial personality. That may or may not be the case. More recently
scholars have taken the view that Scotland was largely unaffected by its contact with Rome, and that society there continued to evolve along lines laid down in her own distant past. Those lines and
grooves were deep, as deep or deeper than any valley cut by ancient ice, and the people would not be jolted out of them by Rome or anyone else. For one thing, the Romans built no towns there, and
would never even have dared to try. The main story in the land that would become Scotland appears to be one of continuity, in which the Romans appear only as a minor disruption. In terms of agents
of social change they may have had less impact than the perennial midges.

I do wonder, though, what they made of Scotland, those soldiers, and what it all meant to them, if anything. Some of them were legionaries, full Roman citizens, while others were recruited from
among the peoples of the provinces. Many of those who spent time in Britannia would have been born and raised in provinces in northern Europe – France, Belgium, Germany and the like.