Why building Hadrian’s Wall was a gigantic mistake
The expensive 73-mile barrier created a false sense of security to the south, encouraging corruption and plotting among idle Roman soldiers.
Hadrian’s Wall is the largest monument the Romans left behind in Britain, and it lies on the furthest-flung frontier of their Empire.
It was also a gigantic mistake.
Nothing else in Britain approaches its vast scale: running for a total of seventy-three miles from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth and another fifty miles down the Cumbrian coast, it took 15,000 men six years to build.
The Emperor Hadrian took the momentous decision in around 122 AD to halt the growth of the Empire and build Rome’s greatest borderline. He did so because the beginning of the 2nd Century proved to be deeply traumatic. An extraordinarily large number of Roman soldiers was killed by the British on Rome’s tempestuous northwest boundary suing Hadrian’s reign, the Roman writer Fronto observed.
Cumbria, in other words, was Rome’s Afghanistan. The locals fought back. The border force the Romans were compelled to deploy in Britain was the largest to be posted anywhere in the Empire. Yet it still could not control the local population.
The vast wall was manned by upwards of nine thousand soldiers for three hundred years. It was designed, in Hadrian’s words, to “separate Romans from the barbarians” and stop the ferocious Caledonians from making common cause with dissident tribes in the south.
But the question must be asked: did this vastly expensive infrastructure project, with its imposing stone masonry fifteen feet high and ten feet wide succeed? History gives us the answer.
The truth is that the elaborate structure, which tied up one in five of the Roman soldiers posted to Britain, was overrun several times by the northern barbarians. The exorbitantly expensive scheme failed in its purpose. It did not secure the peace and prosperity of a Romanised Britain. That is despite the vast investment of men, equipment and money that had to be permanently sunk into relatively unproductive Cumbria.
The wall was not even able to persuade most Cumbrians that there were benefits in Roman domination.
The precise reason why things went awry is not immediately obvious. Military experts say there was nothing wrong in principle with the wall that Hadrian designed, at least not as a piece of military kit. In fact, they argue, the concept was brilliant. The flaws that led to the wall’s failure are the same ones that brought the entire Empire down.
The trouble started at the very outset. Emperor Claudius made several false assumptions when he ordered a force of 40,000 legionaries, the most professional and highly trained soldiers Rome possessed, to conquer the island in 43 AD. He assumed he would win a rapid victory over what his advisors assured him were the unsophisticated and disunited British barbarians. In fact, the Britons’ sophisticated Celtic warrior culture, their tradition of mobile warfare and well-practised tactic of creating temporary stockades embedded in woodland proved very difficult for the Roman military to overcome.
Rome’s rigid military tactics involved deploying long lines of legionaries behind walls of shields. This approach assumed the enemy would obediently present itself in the open for set-piece battles - which never happened in Britain. When under pressure, the Brits could scurry back into their refuge forts situated on high ground such as the one 2,000 feet up on top of Carrock Fell which the Romans struggled to overcome during their conquest of Cumbria in 71AD. It is telling that, even after Rome swept into the north, the Romans took another twenty-seven years to conquer the most mountainous parts of the Lake District including the Celtic fortress on Castle Crag in Borrowdale.
Claudius thought Britain’s greatest weakness was disunity - with thirty squabbling Celtic tribes who refused to unite against enemies. But he underestimated the capabilities of the highly structured, aristocratic societies such as Cumbria’s Carvetii tribe. Admittedly the British Celts were a bit rugged as the climate and geography demanded, but their fighters were courageous, astute and disciplined.
The magnificent Embleton Sword found near Cockermouth, made in the La Tene style with intricate geometric decoration, dates from one hundred years before the Romans came. The find indicates that the local Carvetii tribe was led by a technically advanced, wealthy and discriminating elite with access to a sophisticated international culture and state-of-the-art weapons.
It turned out that those thirty separate British tribes were stronger than one unified force, not weaker. The Roman conquest of south and east Britain proved a gruelling fifteen-year slog, as the legions were forced to defeat every tribe individually, often through prolonged sieges. The catastrophic rebellion in 61 AD by the Iceni tribe leader, Boudicca, was caused entirely by Imperial heavy-handedness and saw London, Colchester and St Alban's burned to the ground with 80,000 Romano-British people slaughtered.
Once the bloodbath was over, Rome sought to heal the wounds with a campaign of Romanisation. Wealthier Britons below a line between Lincoln and Exeter were offered the advantages of baths, villas, hypocausts, roads, literacy and…peace. Yet the Romanisation policy ran out of steam once the military hit Cumbria and the soldiers regarded the locals with the contempt they reserved for barbarians.
Northern tribes were a different breed, the Romans decided. Their stubborn refusal to accept defeat for decades soured the acquaintanceship. In the south, the flavour of the occupation was civilian. In the north, and particularly in Cumbria, the taste was military. So there must have been a hidden flaw. What was it about Cumbria that made Hadrian’s wall fail?
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This is a short extract from a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. It is officially published on September 1 but you can pre-order now. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe in Cockermouth and Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.
You can also order by post instantly here:
https://www.bookscumbria.com/product/cumbrian-books/history/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom/