Bloomsbury Academic (2021) 230pp p/b £19.99 (ISBN 9781350105348)
‘Why it was built, what was it intended to do, and what it really did’. These are the key points which form the aims and scope of S.’s latest book on Hadrian’s Wall. The first perhaps reminds us of the Pythonesque rhetorical question ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’; but S.’s question is anything but rhetorical because he has the answer. The book has 57 figures, 3 maps, a table and a full 7 page index. The bibliography runs to 13 pages with numerous entries for 2019 and 2020. As if confirmation were needed that S. is pre-eminent and prolific in Hadrian Wall studies, he has 14 entries stretching from 2005 to 2020.
The Introduction provides a useful and refreshing summary of past attempts to answer that seemingly intractable question relating to the purpose of the wall generally, and taking in a similarly controversial debate relating to mile castles. Were they constructed to facilitate sorties into the land of the barbarians or were they a diplomatic concession to the numerous barbarian tribes segregated at a stroke from family, customers and allies? One thinks of walls real and imaginary in Berlin, Israel and the EU and the disruptive effects they have had. If Hadrian and his staff simply wanted to maintain a level of free movement between civilisation and barbarism, but with the lucrative opportunity for the usual border checks, taxes and tolls, then the Wall becomes a symbol of Roman imperium and a clear demarcation of where that power began and ended. Or was it intended as a defensive barrier, as often thought, keeping out the barbarians and safeguarding Romanitas on the Roman side?
S. moves on to discuss the Roman literature which references the Wall, bewailing the lack of consistency and detail. The Romans concerned were always going to be prejudiced by Romanitas: the tribes on the other side were barbarians who by AD 120 had won a reputation on all borders of the vast empire for making a disruptive nuisance of themselves; they deserved nothing less than to be kept out. Procopius (6th century) is the most melodramatic, telling the civilised world that over on the wrong side of the ‘long wall’ you could immediately expect a change in soil, a hostile climate—and death by plague because you would be ‘unable to bear the pestilential air’. Soil and weather apart, Procopius may have had a point because evidence we now have points to the very real possibility of plague reaching the Wall during the Antonine Plague (AD 165-180); whatever, his comment is an early example of that age old clichéd misconception that infectious diseases were caused or caught by foreigners, by someone else.
Roman xenophobia, prejudice, stereotyping and arrogance all conspire to influence the various mythologies or facts relating to the Wall; they leave us with what we’ve got which is a view vitiated even further by what we haven’t got—the non-extant references. Subsequent ages have brought with them their own complicating factors, not least the tendency to trace modern British civilisation to the Romans as reflected in William Bell Scott’s painting ‘The Building of the Roman Wall’ and colonial Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. This in turn influenced the English education system to immodestly see the Romans as ‘rather like us’.
Chapter 2 addresses the question of what the Romans did do for us. S. shows how, until recently, the English history curriculum unashamedly appropriated the more civilising bits of the Roman offer, suggesting a direct line between us and them, between their achievements and ours when, in reality, the Romans of course were a very different society. Where, for example, are our bloody games, or military dictatorships? When did we ever base foreign policy on avian entrails? We had our flirtations with voyeuristic public executions and regicide and we institutionalised a long period of slavery—but nothing of any of these could compare to the Roman versions.
Cherry picking the best bits from a culture and eliding them into your own as if they were your own does not make for good history and the history of the Wall suffers from this as much as any of the Roman legacy. Given these confusions S. emphasizes the importance of archaeology in unravelling the mysteries of the Wall, but has to concede that ‘the profusion of cautious qualifications’ in his text confirms that ‘almost every reading of every aspect of the Wall is contested by someone’.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover the invasion history of what was to become Britannia, taking in the battles to subdue or pacify the locals and taking us up to the ‘tortuous’ construction of the Wall around AD 120. We learn about the revolving garrisons, about Hadrian himself, the Wall’s defence capabilities with S. concluding that it was, and showing how it was, a long term, dynamic work in progress, how it ‘served a practical purpose’ as ‘a radical theoretical concept of border security being progressively rejigged to overcome real world constraints’.
Chapter 5 addresses the military issues into the 3rd century and the vici, with Chapter 6 taking us into the Wall’s role in the ‘long 4th century’ in the context of what was going on in Rome and in the wider empire until the final withdrawal. The immediate impact of this on ex-Britannia is explored in Chapter 7 and the gradual drifting into Anglo-Saxonism. Chapter 8 describes the renaissance of interest in the Wall spearheaded in William Camden’s Britannia (1586). This is followed in Chapter 9 by a survey of the more contemporary attention paid by poet Walter Scott in 1797, through painter William Bell Scott (1857) to Kipling’s 1906 Puck of Pook’s Hill. Then there is Rosemary Sutcliff’s enduring Eagle of the Ninth from 1954 with sporadic appearances in, for example, such diverse platforms as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Auden’s ‘Roman Wall Blues’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and Beano.
In chapter 10, S. answers his question: ‘what did the Wall do?’ ‘It simultaneously divided some people—specifically those living to the north and south of the Tyne and Solway isthmus—and brought others together’. The detail behind this not altogether surprising conclusion can be found in the previous nine chapters.
Who is the book for? And why will it not just be noted as yet another book on the Wall? The answer to the latter lies in S.’s final sentence: ‘It is high time that the stories of both conquerors and conquered are embraced as essential to Wall narratives’. Indeed, it is S.’s holistic, comprehensive and non-partisan approach to the story of the Wall that sets it apart and gives the reader as rounded a picture of its origin and life from AD 120 to the present day as you’re likely to get. The book should enjoy a wide readership, taking in teachers and researchers of Roman Britain in universities and school 6th forms.
In addition, that ubiquitous ‘interested layperson’ will find much of interest and enjoyment: it is a good, accessible read with numerous interesting facts not in any way bogged down by archaeology of the dry as dust kind. Finally, the legions of ‘lapsed classicists’ will enjoy the author’s numerous facts and theories, many of which may well be new to them. I read the book shortly before a recent revisit to the Wall: it made my trip all the more enjoyable and informative.
Paul Chrystal
Paul Chrystal is author of The Romans in the North of England (2019) and The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics: from the Plague of Athens to COVID-19 (2021). www.paulchrystal.com