Living on the Edge of Empire: The Objects and People of Hadrian's Wall

By Rob Collins

Dr Rob Collins and the curators of the remarkable collections from Hadrian's Wall present a striking new contribution to understanding the archaeology of a Roman frontier.

Dr Rob Collins and the curators of the remarkable collections from Hadrian's Wall present a striking new contribution to understanding the archaeology of a Roman frontier. This highly illustrated volume showcases the artifacts recovered from archaeological investigations along Hadrian's Wall in order to examine the daily lives of those living along the Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire. Presented by theme, no other book offers such a diverse and thorough range of the rich material culture of the Wall. The accompanying text provides an ethnographic perspective, guiding us through the everyday lives of the people of frontier communities, from the Commanding Officer to the local farmer. This holistic view allows us an insight into the homes and communities, how people dressed, what they ate and drank, their religions and beliefs, domestic and military forms of security, and how they conducted their business and pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781473886438

Rob Collins

Rob Collins is Researc h Associate in the Department of Archaeology at Newcastle University. His principal research interests are in frontier studies and the collapse of complex societies, making use of archaeological remains of built structures and small finds to provide a social interpretation of the material record.

Book preview

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Introduction: Living in the Frontier

Approximately 1,900 years ago, the most powerful man in the world made a decision; he would not only define the edge of civilization, carving his dominion on the landscape, he would monumentalize it. Publius Aelius Hadrianus Augustus, or the Emperor Hadrian (Fig. 1.1) as most of us know him, commanded a wall to be built across the island of Britannia. Hadrian’s decision to build a wall, to consolidate a border zone with thousands of soldiers, created a frontier that stood for centuries.

But what did it really mean to live in the Roman frontier? Today, Hadrian’s Wall is a tourist destination, where visitors can gaze at the manicured remains of Roman military might set within a romantic landscape of steep crags and whimsical weather. But for a moment, forget everything you know – or that you think you know – about Hadrian’s Wall. Instead, think about what it meant to live in a frontier.

You may imagine life along Hadrian’s Wall as cold and windswept, full of danger with the glinting spears and war-cries of northern barbarians, or even as adventurous. But consider L.P. Hartley’s observation in The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. There was so much more to the frontier than bad weather and howling barbarians. The murdered child buried under a barrack floor at Vindolanda provides gruesome testimony to the danger of the frontier, but it could also be a place of comfort and friendship, as the invitation to a birthday party among the Vindolanda tablets attests!

Fig. 1.1: The Emperor Hadrian, pictured here on a sestertius coin issued during his reign from

AD

132–134. He ordered the Wall to be built, and may even have had a hand in designing the Wall. The obverse depicts the bust of Hadrian as a victorious commander with the inscription HADRIANVS AVGVSTVS, while the reverse shows an imperial barge with the inscription FELICITATI AVG(VSTI) CO(N)S(VLIS) III P(ATRIS) P(ATRIAE). The reverse inscription translates as ‘For the good fortune of the Emperor, thrice consul, father of his country, issued by the resolution of the Senate.’

This book is a modest attempt to consider life along Hadrian’s Wall as a cross-cultural experience. Understanding history is like immersing yourself in a foreign culture: the people speak a strange language; the food is ‘different’; things are both surprisingly cheap and ridiculously expensive; and it seems discordant to see a completely different order to life. For many people, this sort of experience is thrilling; for others, it is disorienting and alarming.

Our journey will be safe – technology has not yet made it possible to shoot arrows out of books at readers – but the intent is to present life along Hadrian’s Wall as a window into a foreign culture, almost like an ethnography. But our ethnographic experience is further hampered – our subjects are dead! Therefore, we must glean what we can through the objects and material traces they have left behind. It is my sincere hope that this approach will prove entertaining and illuminating, as well as injecting some humanity into our understanding of the past. It is all too easy to see a beautiful archaeological object and to completely ignore the significance (or insignificance) of its existence for its original owner.

Fig. 1.2: Vindolanda writing tablet 154, a draft version of a strength report that is a list of the soldiers available for duty in a unit. The report is dated to 18 May for an unidentified year. The report notes that of 752 men in the cohort, only 265 were stationed at Vindolanda and available for duty, with the rest in other parts of the country, sick or wounded.

This is perhaps the most important of all the Vindolanda texts and was found in a rubbish deposit beneath the floor dating to

AD

85–90 in the prefect’s house and had probably been delivered to the prefect for approval before a fair copy was made for dispatch to the governor’s office.

Before we can really begin, we must first establish a few basic facts, if only to provide some reliable baseline information:

Before Hadrian’s Wall was built, the Roman army had been operating in this part of Britain for decades. The earliest forts were found at Corbridge, Carlisle, and Vindolanda, the latter made famous by the discoveries of writing tablets (Fig. 1.2), predate the construction of the Wall. That is to say, the frontier existed before the Wall was built. Even once the Wall was built, it was only a part of a larger frontier zone.

Hadrian’s Wall was 80 Roman miles in length, or 73 modern miles (118 km if you are so inclined), and runs from the modern locations of Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west (Map 1). This created a monumental barrier to the north of the Stanegate road and the sites like Corbridge, Vindolanda, and Carlisle that could be found along it. West of the Wall, a cordon of forts and occasional fortlets and towers can also be understood as an extension of the Wall down the coast of Cumbria, extending as far as Ravenglass.

Construction of the Wall started under orders from Hadrian by

AD

122, and it took many years to complete, with a number of changes in plan made during the construction process. That is to say that the builders started with the original plan, but then the plan was changed, and changed again, and maybe a few more times, while the Wall was being built. Therefore, it is not really the tidy and uniform monument that it often appears to be, and we can be fairly certain that there was a lot of swearing and cursing during its