13 - The Roman Army arrives

This was the situation in Iron Age Britain when the Romans launched their attack. Various suggestions have been put forward as reasons for this Roman Conquest.

In Britain, the situation in the south was beginning to tilt against the Romans as the anti-Roman Catuvellaunian expansionist policy was being put into practice with the over-running of those tribes who were friendly to Rome. The arrival of Verica, the Atrebatan king, in Rome with the news that the northern half of his territory had been lost to him in this way may have been a trigger but the situation in Rome was certainly a factor as well. Claudius, the Emperor, was looking for some bold stroke that would strengthen his position on the throne. The triumph of adding a fresh province to the Empire would suit him very well.

Other factors have been suggested: Britain was supposed to be rich in minerals; Britain was the last refuge of the druids who were a thorn in the Roman flesh in Gaul. Also, the occupation of Britain would provide a strong outpost beyond Gaul which would help to protect the mainland of the Empire.

Four legions were prepared to take part in the invasion. The Legio II Augusta, Legio IX Hispana, Legio XIV Gemina and Legio XX Valeria together with auxiliary cavalry and infantry all drawn from the Rhine and Danube frontiers. The force sailed from Boulogne, as Caesar had done, under the command of Aulus Plautius, an experienced and successful soldier.

The main landing-place was at Richborough in north Kent close to where in later times the military were to erect a fort. A beach-head was first constructed and work was also started on building a stores depot. Suggestions have been made that simultaneous landings took place elsewhere, particularly on the south coast in the neighbourhood of Chichester in the territory of the Atrbates. It will be recalled that the northern half of their lands was now in the hands of the Catuvellauni and the southern half under the regency of Cogidubnus who, of course, would have been ready to do all he could to assist the Roman army.

There is good reason to suggest, therefore, the landing of a detachment and the building of a storage depot near Fishbourne where a palatial villa was built by a British ruler, perhaps by Cogidubnus, in his declining years.

Aulus Plautius marched along the same north Kentish route as his predecessor, Caesar, and crossed the Thames but advanced on Camuludunum, not on the Catevellaunian stronghold of Verulamium for it seems that, after they had seized the territory of the Trinovantes, the Catevaullanian authorities had shifted their centre of power to Camulodunum. The Roman emperor, Claudius, arrived to be present at the crucial battle, took the surrender of a number of minor chieftains, and sped back to Roman to enjoy a triumph.

The Roman general then had the hard work to do in subduing the country. It may be that it was easier than it might have been since the Catuvellauni had been acting as tyrants and several British tribes had good reason to be glad of their defeat at the hands of the Roman army. Leaving the Legio XX to garrison the Colchester area, Paulus despatched Legio IX to the area of Lincoln, Legion XIV to the region between Cirencester and Leicester and the Legio II to the south-west.

This was the area where the hardest fighting was experienced. Vespasian, later to be Roman emperor, was in command of this legion and he had to attack and capture the hillforts belonging to the defiant Durotrigians. Actual attack can be demonstrated at Hod's Hill, Maiden Castle and Spettisbury as has already been described.

By AD47 the Romans had established a frontier across Iron Age Britain stretching diagonally from the estuary of the Humber to Exeter. It is through this zone that the first military road was built to provide good communication from one legional area to the next. This is the road that we now call the Fosse Way.

The frontier almost immediately proved to be untenable in the face of attacks from the north-western Midlands and from Wales where the defeated British leader, Caractacus, son of the old Catuvellaunian tyrant, Cunobelin, had taken refuge. During the period AD47 to AD51, the Romans pushed detachments forward into the north-west Midlands and established a fort at Wroxeter. At the same time units moved further west from Exeter to occupy the south-western peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. It was now that Caratacus chose to make his final stand and was defeated. He fled to the Brigantes whose queen handed him over to the Romans in AD51.

The next step was to push into Wales. This was under a new governor, Suetonius Paulinus. It was during this advance that the most serious British rebellion took place.

There were several problems that were coming to a head in East Anglia. One concerned the Roman settlement at Camulodunum which was being founded as a colonia, a settlement of retired legionaries. As a colonia it required a large territory around it in which the retired soldiers would be allocated plots of land. This territory was probably requisitioned from the Trinovantes who were compensated by other land on which they were to build a new capital at Chelmsford. However, this did not assuage the natives' wounded feelings at all for an important religious centre lay in the middle of the confisticated territory.

Another problem for the Roman authorities arose in the Iceni kingdom to the north which so far had enjoyed the status of a client kingdom. The Icenian king, Prasutagus, died and the Romans decided to reduce the kingdom to the status of a civitas (pl. civitatis), a tribal area under native civilian authorities ruled directly by the provincial governor.

The attempt at reduction was resisted by the king's widow, Boudicca, and her supporters and they broke out into active revolt, joined quickly by the Trinovantes. The soldiers' town of Colchester together with Verulamium was sacked and burnt.

Paulinus was in Wales with the army. He marched post- haste back to the east, entered London, where he learnt that the rebels were on their way to the city and moved out to consolidate his forces. London suffered the same fate as the other two towns. Burnt layers in excavations demonstrate the ferocity of the attacks. In Camulodunum samian ware from a burnt-down pottery shop provides more graphic evidence. Eventually Paulinus was able to bring the rebels to battle in the Midlands and defeat them. Boudicca took poison.

The rebellion was a grave setback to the Romans who thought that with the Iceni and the Brigantes as client kingdoms on the northern boundary of the province and the tribes within the province organised into civitatis, they had only Wales to worry about. It was a disaster for the Iceni, too, for they lost their client status and were reduced to the rank of a civitas. The Trinovantes, however, seem to have regained control of their religious centre outside Camulodunum.

Wales was to remain another problem for the Roman authorities for the next thirty years. From AD74 to AD77 Julius Frontinus campaigned backwards and forwards across Wales and the final settlement was by Agricola when he became governor and commander-in-chief in AD78.

Meanwhile, problems arose in the north amongst the Brigantians. A quarrel had developed between Venutius and his wife, Queen Cartimandua. Venutius took up the posture of a British patriot while Cartimandua called on the help of the Romans who rescued her in AD70 but this left the kingdom to her husband who decided to raise the banner of revolt. In response, the Roman started a three-year campaign which, after some hard fighting, subdued the Brigantians. Their territory was covered by a network of roads and forts.

Clearly, the Romans' British policy had to be changed and a decision was taken to occupy the greater part of Britain. It was Julius Agricola who was responsible for the further conquest. We know a good deal about this period because his son-in-law was to be Tacitus, the Roman historian, who must have got first-hand information for his account of the events in his Agricola.

Agricola spent the campaigning season of AD79 consolidating the occupation of Brigantia and building a military road across the country at the Tyne-Solway line. At each end of this military road a fort was built and it provided a springboard for further advance in AD80.

Agricola marched as far north as the River Tay where he built another line consisting of a road and a couple of forts. Tacitus says 'This neck was now secured by garrisons, and the whole sweep of country to the south was safe in our hands. The enemy had been pushed into what was virtually another island.'

So far the Romans had met with slight resistance but when they moved forward again in AD82 along the eastern coastal plain beyond the Tay with the Roman fleet carrying supplies and reinforcements and keeping pace along the coast, they found resistance stiffening.

The Romans built an earth-and-timber legionary fortress at Inchtuthil in Perthshire. The advance culminated at a battle fought against the Caledonians, as the Romans called the inhabitants of the Highlands, at Mons Graupius in AD84. There were 10,000 casualties on the Brtitish side. Tacitus has this to say 'The Britons wandered all over the countryside, men and women together, wailing, carrying off their wounded and calling out to survivors. They would leave their homes and set fire to them....sometimes they would try to organise plans....sometimes the sight of their dear ones broke their hearts.....The next day revealed the quality of the vistory more clearly. A grim silence reigned on every hand; the hills were deserted, only here and there was smoke seen rising from chimneys in the distance and our scouts found no one to encounter them'.

This seems to have been as far as the Romans were prepared to go. Victory in the Highlands was politically imperative but occupation of them was deemed unnecessary so the Romans withdrew to the Forth-Clyde line. This appeared even more sensible when the victory in Scotland prompted the authorities in Rome to reduce the British garrison by a legion.

It made re-organisation of the military arrangements in Britain essential so the legion at Inchtuthil was withdrawn and new legionary fortresses at York, Chester and Caerleon occupied. In southern Scotland a new fort was built at Newstead on the Tweed occupied by a quick-response force of legionaries and cavalry. Here, incidentally, a collection of military gear was unearthed which is now in the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh and includes helmets, swords, spears, pioneers' axes and picks, cavalry harness and smiths' tools.

A change of plan took place during the early second century and the garrisons were withdrawn from the forts in southern Scotland behind a frontier established along Stanegate, the military road built by Agricola which was reinforced with extra forts. At the same time the three legionary fortresses at York, Chester and Caerleon were rebuilt in stone. Not long after there was an uprising in the north which resulted in yet another change of plan authorised by the Emperor Hadrian on a visit to the province. It involved the construction of the frontier work known as Hadrian's Wall.

The wall was constructed behind a ditch which was dug where natural slopes were inadequate to bar access to the wall. Along the wall were set vexillation forts (forts housing units less in size than a legion), mile-castles (every Roman mile) and turrets (two between wach milecastle). The milecastles served as controlled passages through the wall.

South of the wall was a military zone through which a service road ran and south of that was the vallum which consisted of two continuous banks, either side of a continuous ditch across which there were causeways opposite the milecastles where, again, controlled access was allowed. To the west, to prevent the Wall being outflanked, a series of milecastles and, later, towers, extended down the Cumberland coast and appear to have been associated with a palisade and a double-ditched road.

The milecastles contained small garrisons of soldiers accommodated in one or two barracks either side of a road which led through the small fort from the back gate to the front one in the wall. A wall walk ran round the wall of the milecastle and over the gate was a tower which allowed uninterrupted passage through it along the wall walk. The turrets consisted of a tower through which the wall walk passed and underneath which was a rest room for the half a dozen soldiers who spent their picket duty there.

The wall itself was about three and a half metres high with a breastwork on its northern side and was built in the main of local stone which varied according to the geology. Where a ditch was necessary in front of the wall, the stone came from there. The stones were roughly shaped into small blocks and used to build the wall in the normal masonry fashion and a suggestion has been made that the result was whitewashed.

Over seventy miles long, the wall was a tremendous achievement and must have placed an enormous strain on the resources of the military in Britain. Most units must have had a hand in building it and one can imagine that the talk in the barrack rooms and around the camp fires during the years it was a- building, between AD122 and AD126, would have centred around it.

The forts that had been built along the military road, Stane Street, a couple of miles or so south of the Wall, were abandoned with the exception of Corspitium (Corbridge) which lay on the Roman road now called Deere Street which ran northwards from York and through the Wall into Scotland. Corbridge became the main supply base for the Wall, housing the stores which were held in the granaries and storerooms whose foundations can be seen on the site today.

One other fort on Stane Street (all Roman road names are later, we have no idea whether they had names or not in Roman times) was Vindolanda whose vicus, civilian site outside its main gate, has been extensively excavated and is the best preserved example in Britain. The most outstanding find there was a collection of some 300 letters, the Vindolanda letters, which cover the last thirty or forty years of the settlement's life, and give us a unique insight into life on the Romano-British frontier before Hadrian's Wall was built.

The Wall seems to have fulfilled a number of functions: acting as a police post to monitor passage of traders and their goods from the north; with its forts, providing secure bases from which forces could operate north or south of the Wall; and acting as a barrier in time of war. The senior officer of the Wall garrison was stationed at Stanwix, just outside Carlisle and he was commander of the only military regiment of cavalry in Britain. Such units were usually stationed where need for both strength and mobility was greatest. Three forts were built forward of the wall in this area. All this suggests that the Romans thought that the western end needed to be the area of greatest security along the Wall.

The Antonine Wall between the Forth and the Clyde was built cAD140 in the reign of Antonius Pius, when a reconsideration of the northern frontier was carried out. It was constructed of turf laid on a cobbled foundation and in front of it was a large ditch. An indeterminate number of forts were built along its length and outpost forts were placed in front of it. When this was done, Hadrian's Wall was opened for free passage, gates were removed from the milecastles and small detachments only were stationed in the forts to act as caretakers.

This situation continued until AD154 when a serious rebellion broke out in Brigantia. The Antonine Wall was abandoned and reinforcements brought from Germany. We have an inscription from the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall that records the arrival of these legionaries to recommission it. When the rebellion was put down, the forts in Brigantia were rebuilt to hold garrisons and the northern border was held at Hadrian's Wall for the rest of the Roman period apart from a year or two from AD159 when the army once more advanced into Scotland.

The Classis Britannica was the Roman fleet based in the English Channel with headquarters at Dover and Boulogne. It was part of the army, not a separate service, and was principally concerned with the supply and carriage of stores and reinforcements. As a consequence we find it involved in making iron and other products and working on the repair of Hadrian's Wall. It was only later that it came to play a part in the defence of the province.

The Roman military was divided into two main categories. First, there were the legions, manned by Roman citizens who served for twenty-five years. Each legion was a fully self-contained unit and included specialists like surveyors, clerks, armourers, medical orderlies, carpenters, stone- masons, glaziers, hydraulic engineers, shipwrights, river pilots and probably numbered some 6000 men. Each legion was divided into ten cohorts, each cohort containing ten centuries commanded by a centurian. There were never more than thirty-five legions.

They were supplemented by auxiliary units of native troops who were usually granted Roman citizenship on discharge. They included cavalry units, infantry regiments and more specialised troops like archers or boatmen who were recruited from native peoples who had these special skills.

Marching camps were camps built by Roman troops while on campaigns and they entrenched every night, building a playing-card earthwork with entrances in each of the four sides and reinforcing it with a palisade of stakes. Examples can be seen at Blaen-cwm-bach in South Wales and at Reycross, North Yorkshire.

Vexillation forts housed units smaller than a legion or detachments from a legion and could be of any size. Perhaps the best-preserved examples are the forts on Hadrian's Wall. These, like all those that survive, were built in stone with buildings sometimes in stone and sometimes in timber. In the centre was the Headquarter's Building, alongside the Commandant's House, and behind them were rows of barrack blocks, granaries, stores buildings, workshops and a hospital. Apart from the four gates, there were bastions at the corners and sometimes mural towers along the walls. The gateways consisted of two towers with the gateway slung between them and a wallwalk above linking the wallwalks on the walls.

Fortresses is the name given to forts big enough to house a legion. Three of them were built in stone. At York, Chester and Caerleon they were reconstructed in this material during the early years of the second century AD and this consolidation might well be taken as marking the end of the Conquest period.

12 - From Caesar to Claudius
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14 - A New World