Hadrian's Wall

The most famous letters from Hadrian's Wall were written before Hadrian's Wall existed.

In 1973 an excavator at Vindolanda lifted two slivers of wood out of black mud and watched the ink fade as they dried. Under infrared light the words came back: somebody on Rome's northern frontier, early in the second century, had been sent socks, sandals and two pairs of underpants. More than a thousand leaves have followed. A cohort's strength report lists 752 men on the roll, 296 in camp and 31 of those unfit, ten with sore eyes. A trader complains that the roads are too bad for his wagons. An intelligence note calls the natives little Brits. Nearly all of it was written a generation before the emperor came, by Batavians and Tungrians holding a line of forts on a road. The letters describe the problem. The Wall was the answer.

In 122 Hadrian looked at that road and ordered eighty Roman miles of stone and turf from the Tyne to the Solway, with a gate at every mile, two turrets between, a ditch in front and forts on the line. Twenty years later his successor abandoned it for a turf wall between the Forth and the Clyde, and within a generation the army walked back. The Wall then stood garrisoned for close to three centuries, was rebuilt after a crisis in the 180s and again under Severus, and ended not with a legion marching south but with the pay failing to arrive. At Birdoswald somebody built a timber hall over the collapsed granaries and went on holding court.

This is the frontier's biography. Every chapter opens on an object or a site, a tombstone, a latrine, a well full of 13,000 coins, and says which kind of evidence each claim rests on. Where archaeologists disagree, and they disagree about what the Wall was for, you get the argument rather than a verdict.

What you'll learn:

• Why a defensive wall has eighty gates, and what that says about its real purpose
• Who the garrison was: Rhine delta, Syria, North Africa, Spain, and the British wives who stayed
• Why Rome built a second wall in Scotland in 142, and why it gave it up
• What the Vindolanda tablets say about daily life, and what they cannot say
• How a working border became a quarry, a military road, a Victorian cause and a National Trail
• How the frontier actually ended, fort by fort, after the coin stopped around 402

This book is for you if:

• You have walked the Wall, or mean to, and want to know what you were looking at
• You want garrison life and the people outside the gate, not another battle narrative
• You want three hundred years and the afterlife, not just the decade of building
• You want to be told what rests on a tablet, what on a stone, and what on a guess

A gate every mile. A trader from Palmyra burying his British wife. A timber hall raised where the granaries used to be. Three appendices, including a walker's gazetteer of every major site and twenty tablets paraphrased.