The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  At Suetonius Paullinus’ command, the legionaries and auxiliaries splashed into the Strait, attacked the Ordovices and defeated them utterly. In the days after the battle, the killing went on; Paullinus ordered his men to cut down the sacred groves of oak trees on Mona, and as far as possible extirpate the cult of the Druids. This was done not because of revulsion at the blood-soaked religion of a bunch of barbarians, but because the Druids were powerful, able to stiffen native resistance to the Roman invasion.

  3

  The North Road

  It was like a monster from a nightmare as it snaked through the countryside. Wearing uniforms, marching in columns, moving as one, almost certainly singing soldiers’ songs, the II Augusta Legion made its way westwards from the south-east coast, penetrating deep into the kingdom of the Durotriges. Those who saw the monster pass had never known its like. Cavalry had scouted the countryside ahead of the line of march, ever watchful for ambush, and the 5,000 crack troops of the Augusta were supported by many regiments of auxiliaries. Their commander, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, rode at the head of the column and, with his senior officers, he had considered all the available intelligence. Immediately following the invasion of AD 43, they had decided to strike at the heart of the territory of the Durotriges. It lay before them on the horizon, the huge hillfort of Mai Dun, now known as Maiden Castle.

  From the ramparts, the warriors watched their enemies approach. Four rings of deep ditches and a high timber palisade defended the capital place of their kings. Ammunition had been stockpiled. Thousands of slingshot pebbles the size of plums had been picked up on nearby Chesil Beach, arrows lay in sheaves, and in their hands warriors held spears at the ready. But when the legion approached the huge hillfort, Vespasian kept his men well out of range. No attack appeared to threaten. Instead oxen pulled forward a series of machines. Next to mangonels with throwing-arms the length of trees, ominous piles of large stones were set down. A battery of smaller engines was strung out in a line, and men took much trouble in adjusting their height. The Durotriges could do nothing but watch and wait. A handle on one machine was slowly cranked, and ropes made from sinew groaned and stretched as a bolt was placed on what looked like a large crossbow. More like a javelin than an arrow, it was suddenly released with a tremendous snap and, to the astonishment of the warbands sheltering behind the palisade, it flew more than 300 metres, clearing all the ditches and tearing into the grass paddocks inside the enclosure. Once the range had been found, Vespasian ordered a murderous volley fired into Maiden Castle. It struck home hard. Archaeologists have found the skeleton of a Durotrigan warrior with the iron point of a ballista bolt embedded in his spine.

  Once the defenders had been both thinned out and terrified by the Roman artillery barrage, an assault on the east gate was launched. Almost certainly using the testudo formation, which had served so well at Bigbury on the Medway, the legionaries got close enough to fire the gates and break into Maiden Castle. There followed the screams of a massacre. Near the gateway the bodies of men, women and children were found buried in shallow graves. Perhaps they were the Durotrigan royal family or aristocrats. Clinical, disciplined and ruthless, the attack of the II Augusta must have seemed like the wrath of the gods.

  Maiden Castle was in reality not a castle at all. With a perimeter far too long to be effectively manned, an outward military appearance more symbolic than practical, Maiden Castle occupied a huge 50-acre site. Also misnamed as hillforts, these elaborate rings of ditches and ramparts were very difficult to defend. More likely a combination of sacred enclosure and royal or aristocratic compound, the hillforts were probably believed to have power of a different sort. The occupants prayed that their gods could somehow descend and repel the Roman defilers. Their warbands could never hope to.

  Between the invasion of AD 43 and the summer of 47, Suetonius later wrote that Vespasian fought thirty battles, subjugated two warlike tribes, and captured more than twenty towns [meaning hillforts], besides the entire Isle of Wight. The armies of the southern British kings no doubt fought as hard as they knew how, but their strategists faced an irreducible problem. The legions were trained for combat in pitched battles across open ground and were near-invincible in close order. British armies depended on the impact of a tearaway charge and, when it became clear that the Romans could counter this very effectively with volleys of javelins and an iron discipline, native kings were forced to turn to guerrilla tactics. The rolling countryside of southern England, with many open fields, high ridgeways with little cover and few forests, did not make ambush or surprise attack easy. The British were compelled to retreat to their hillforts and the desperate hope that their gods would drive back the many-headed monster which trampled through their sacred lands.

  TWENTY-FIVE SKINS

  When a Roman army was on the march, its men carried all of their personal kit. But as the army penetrated further and further north, the men began to need tents to keep out the wetter and windier weather. Each leather tent slept a contubernium, a platoon of eight men, and had to be tall enough in the ridge to allow standing. Approximately twenty-five animal skins, usually goatskin or calfskin, were required to make each tent. It was very heavy and impossible for one man to carry, so a legion’s tents were rolled up into fat cylinders and loaded onto the pack-saddles of mules. The arithmetic and logistics are remarkable. Each legion had to have at least 30,000 animal skins to make its tents. The auxiliaries and the cavalry will have added greatly to that total. With a garrison of four legions, the Roman army in Britain needed around 120,000 skins to keep the rain off and the wind out. Statistics like these show the amazing scale of what Rome achieved.

  After the capture of Camulodunum in 43, the invading legions fanned out across the south. The IX Hispana pushed north towards Lincoln and the Humber estuary beyond. In the Midlands lay the kingdom of the Catuvellauni, the people of Cunobelin and the dominant force before the invasion, and the XIV Gemina marched to subdue them. The XX Valeria was left in reserve at Colchester while the II Augusta drove into the West Country.

  As they won victory after victory (at other hillforts the legionaries only had to set up a single ballista to persuade the defenders to surrender), Vespasian’s cavalry troopers searched for Caratacus, the son of the great British king Cunobelin. As the focus of resistance, and no doubt the leader of a substantial refugee warband, he could prove a source of continuing trouble, tying up much valuable manpower.

  By 47 Caratacus was doing exactly that. Having allied himself with the vigorous Silures of South Wales, he led raids into the Roman-controlled areas of the Midlands, possibly the kingdom of the Cornovii, around modern Birmingham. Showing immediate strategic flair, the new Governor of Britannia, Publius Ostorius Scapula, drove a wedge north-westwards, pushing the legions into the Cheshire Gap and to the shores of the Irish Sea. By the end of the campaigning season of 48, he had put his men between the Welsh kingdoms and those in the north.

  No frontier was created. Lines on a map mattered little to Roman army commanders. Control was what counted and, to make that effective, the legions began to build. Metalled, free-draining roads soon patterned the landscape of Britain and they connected mighty fortresses planted at strategic places – river-crossings, valley-mouths, trading centres. Speed in war, wrote the military theorist Vegetius, is more important than courage. And a highly mobile, well-trained and well-led army could hold down vast swathes of territory.

  When the Romans extended their reach further westwards and built legionary fortresses at Gloucester and Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury, Caratacus and his warriors retreated deeper into the Welsh mountains. The British king made an alliance with the Ordovices – but foolishly found himself forced to fight a set-piece battle at Caersws, at the headwaters of the Severn. After the inevitable defeat, a desperate Caratacus fled north. His support had probably begun to melt away.

  As the invaders’ grip tightened, the fleeing king made his last – and fateful – move. The most populous kingdom in all Britain, the
kingdom of the Brigantes, remained free of Roman occupation, and was as yet unconquered. While its queen, Cartimandua, had concluded an alliance, it was surely becoming clear to her that the Roman advance might continue north. Client realms might fall in its path. If Caratacus had hoped to persuade Cartimandua, or, more likely, detach some of her aristocracy, he was to be quickly disappointed. In 51 she had him arrested and handed over to the Romans.

  Caratacus had become famous. Throughout the Empire his exploits had been marvelled at. Few resistance leaders had been as successful and lasted so long against the might of the legions. Much in the way underdogs are still supported, it appears that the Roman public had taken to its heart this king from the edge of the world.

  The Emperor Claudius was delighted at Caratacus’ capture. It set the seal on his glorious conquest of Britannia, but a second triumph through the streets of Rome was out of the question. Instead the parade ground of the Praetorian Guard was chosen for a march past of all the British prisoners. Huge crowds gathered and the Guard turned out in all their menacing finery. Warriors from the royal warband, Catuvellaunian aristocrats, Caratacus’ brothers, his queen and his daughter were all laden with chains and forced to walk past a dais. There Claudius and his court sat, basking in all their power, making the unmissable point that Rome ruled the world, even to its farthest margins.

  The chained captives were awed and terrified by all the panoply and show. And they will have known the fate of those led in chains through Rome and its baying crowds. Many pleaded for their lives. But even great kings like Jugurtha of Numidia in North Africa and Vercingetorix, the resistance leader of the Gaulish rebellion against Caesar, had been humiliated in this way and then taken to the dungeons of the Mamertine prison. Under the Capitoline Hill, this dark and hellish place had witnessed many miserable ends. Originally a water cistern with two levels, it was entered from above. Bound in their chains, Jugurtha and Vercingetorix were lowered through a hole in the floor into the black darkness of the bottom level, where an executioner waited in the shadows to garotte them. It was said that their bodies were then despatched into the sewer system which led to the Tiber.

  Walking at the very end of the procession into the Praetorian parade ground, Caratacus knew that a sinister death in the Mamertine waited. When he reached the imperial dais, it was said that he turned and looked up at Claudius. In his Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus put these fine words into Caratacus’ mouth:

  . . . humiliation is my destiny, glory is yours. I had horses, men, arms, wealth. Can you be surprised that I am sorry to lose them? If you wish to rule the world, does it follow that everyone else should welcome enslavement? If I had surrendered without a blow before being brought before you, neither my downfall nor your triumph would have become famous. If you execute me, they will be forgotten. Spare me, and I shall be an everlasting token of your mercy.

  It is more likely that Caratacus spoke Latin than Claudius had a command of Old Welsh. And even more likely that Caratacus made no speech at all. But Tacitus’ invention does echo the politics of the time. Caesar had had Vercingetorix strangled after his triumph, but Claudius would not only exceed the deified Julius in actually conquering Britain, he would also show himself more merciful in sparing its most famous warrior-king. Politics had already decided Caratacus’ fate.

  However all that may be, the story of this failed rebel does have one illuminating effect. For at least a moment, it lifts the grey portrayal of native British kings out of the background shadows and puts words, albeit invented, into their mouths.

  While all this was being played out on the parade grounds of Rome, war in Britain blazed into life once more. Without their captured leader the Silures had nevertheless defeated a legion and struck back hard against the tide of invasion. Their own kings believed that they faced extinction – the Governor, Ostorius Scapula, had said that they must be annihilated – and they fought like a people with nothing to lose. In the north, Cartimandua’s consort, Venutius, took over Caratacus’ role and led opposition amongst the Brigantes. If it had been a matter of imperial policy in Britain to gain control of the fertile and wealthy south, and only contain Wales and the north, that policy was no longer tenable. Trouble was flaring on two fronts.

  In AD 54 Claudius died in suspicious circumstances, possibly from poison. His stepson, Nero, became emperor, and although it was said that he considered abandoning Britain, his actions spoke of the momentum of more conquest. Highly capable soldiers with experience of fighting in difficult terrain elsewhere in the Empire were sent as governors during his reign. Suetonius Paullinus led the assault on Anglesey in 60, and as his men ravaged the island in an attempt to extirpate the cult of the Druids, urgent messages galloped along the coast road. Far behind his lines, far to the south, in the heart of what the Romans believed was now a peaceful part of the province, a rebellion of extraordinary violence had exploded.

  In Colchester in 43 Claudius accepted the submission of the kings of the Iceni. Famously wealthy, they ruled the north of East Anglia and the Fens. Trouble had flickered briefly in 47 when Ostorius Scapula had been forced to campaign amongst the dangerous marshes and creeks in the east of the kingdom, but under King Prasutagus there had been peace. When he died in 60, the blundering ineptitude and sheer greed of Roman officials converted a difficult transition into the fire and slaughter of the great rebellion led by Queen Boudicca.

  In order to protect the integrity of his kingdom and preserve part of its wealth for his family, Prasutagus had named the Emperor Nero as one of the beneficiaries of his will. But not the only one. The king’s daughters, the royal princesses of the Iceni, also stood to inherit a great deal. The Romans ignored Prasutagus’ wishes. In their view the kingdom should revert entirely to the Empire and be absorbed without delay. In Roman eyes women had the same rights as children – and perhaps for that reason Boudicca’s vigorous objections to their takeover astonished them. Their reaction was brutal. The queen was stripped and whipped with rods while the young princesses were raped by soldiers. Wealthy Icenian landowners were cast out of their estates, and the rest of the royal family treated like slaves. Cash bounties thought to be gifts from the Emperor turned out to be loans and Roman aristocrats began to demand repayment. These included the surprising figure of the philosopher Seneca, Nero’s tutor. The Iceni had not only seen their queen humiliated and her daughters viciously defiled, they also felt they had been grossly deceived.

  The effect was incendiary. As the warbands of the Iceni armed and mustered to evict those who had attempted to steal their lands and possessions, they were joined by the Trinovantes of the south. When Colchester had been designated a colonia, a settlement where retired Roman veterans were given plots of land, much abuse had taken place. Not content with their allotted plots, the veterans had grabbed more, and were encouraged by serving soldiers with an eye to their own retirement.

  Boudicca’s growing army swept down to Colchester, a hated imperial symbol. There were no walls and few defenders. Suetonius Paullinus and his legions were far away in North Wales. The Iceni torched the streets of the colonia and drove all who could resist to take refuge inside the ultimate focus of their fury, the temple of the Imperial Cult. Built over a sacred native site, it was a desecration to be erased. The gods would smile as it blazed. Boudicca’s warriors surrounded the temple, but they had no equipment to besiege it. The garrison inside fought bravely and held out for two days before the Iceni stormed the makeshift defences and slaughtered everyone they could find.

  From the vexillation fortress at Longthorpe, near Peterborough, Petilius Cerialis hurried south with detachments of the IX Hispana and a squadron of cavalry. They were overwhelmed. The legionary infantry stood no chance and were surrounded and annihilated. Cerialis scrambled onto his pony and galloped for his life and the safety of the walls of Longthorpe. Rome’s hold on Britain was loosening.

  When he received news of the rebellion, Suetonius Paullinus immediately abandoned his campaign in North Wales, an
d with extraordinary speed he and his advance guard reached London before Boudicca could swing her army south. London had grown into the principal town of Roman Britain, but when Paullinus heard of Cerialis’ defeat he decided to abandon all hope of a successful defence. This ruthless but sensible decision was to prove a turning-point in the campaign, and without delay the Governor rejoined the main force of his legions somewhere on Watling Street.

  Meanwhile the Iceni rampaged into Roman London, the newly paved streets ran red with blood, and smoke blackened the skies over the banks of the Thames. Brimming with confidence, Boudicca led her warriors north and went to find Paullinus, probably to meet him head-on, and kill more Romans. St Albans was destroyed in her wake, and reports of appalling atrocities began to circulate. Dio Cassius wrote that female Roman captives were bound and taken to a grove sacred to the Celtic war goddess Andraste. There they were tied to trees, and had their breasts cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Then they suffered the unimaginable agonies of impaling, when a sharpened stake was inserted into their anus and shoved up through their bodies.

  Paullinus knew that a decisive battle was coming and he sent to Exeter for the battle-hardened II Augusta. But its commander, Poenius Postumus, refused to follow orders and leave his fortress. The Silures were not subdued, were near at hand and might join the rebellion. Perhaps Postumus believed the whole province would go up in flames, perhaps he had heard stories of the savagery of Boudicca’s warriors.