Agricola did much to make the Roman rule more palatable to the Britons by his wise ordinances for the government of the province. He tried to persuade the Celtic chiefs to learn Latin, and to take to civilized ways of life, as their kinsmen in Gaul had done. He kept the land so safe and well guarded that thousands of settlers from the continent came to dwell in its towns. His efforts won much success, and for the future, southern Britain was a very quiet province.
The Wall of Hadrian.
But the Caledonians to the north retained their independence, and often raided into the Lowlands, while the Brigantes of Yorkshire still kept rising in rebellion, and once in the reign of Hadrian massacred the whole legion that garrisoned York. It was perhaps this disaster that drew Hadrian himself to Britain in the course of his never-ending travels. The emperor journeyed across the isle, and resolved to fix the Roman boundary on a line traced across the Northumbrian moors from Carlisle to Newcastle. There was erected the celebrated "Wall of Hadrian," a solid stone wall drawn in front of the boundary-ditch that marked the old frontier, and furnished with forts at convenient intervals. This enormous work, eighty miles long, reached from sea to sea, and was garrisoned by a number of "auxiliary cohorts," or regiments drawn from the subject tribes of the empire—Moors, Spaniards, Thracians, and many more—for the Romans did not trust British troops to hold the frontier against their own untamed kinsmen. The legion at York remained behind to support the garrison of the wall in case of necessity.
The Wall of Antoninus.
A few years later the continued trouble which the northern parts of Britain suffered from the raids of the Caledonians, caused the governors of the province to build another wall in advance of that of Hadrian. This outer line of defence, a less solid work than that which ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, was composed of a trench, and an earthern wall of sods, drawn from the mouth of the Forth to the mouth of the Clyde, at the narrowest part of the island. It is generally called the Wall of Antoninus, from the name of the emperor who was reigning when it was erected.
Campaign of Severus in Caledonia.
Only once more did the Romans make any endeavour to complete the subjection of Britain by adding the Gaelic tribes of the Scottish Highlands to the list of their tributaries. In 208-9-10 the warlike emperor Severus led the legions north of the Wall of Antoninus, and set to work to tame the Caledonians by felling their forests, building roads across their hills, and erecting forts among them. He overran the land beyond the Firth of Forth, and might perchance have ended by conquering the whole island, but he died of disease at York early in 211. His successors drew back, abandoned his conquests, and never attempted again to subjugate the Caledonians.
Roman civilization in Britain.
Altogether the Romans abode in Britain for three hundred and sixty years (A.D. 43 to A.D. 410). Their occupation of the land was mainly a military one, and they never succeeded in teaching the mass of the natives to abandon their Celtic tongue, or to take up Roman customs and habits. The towns indeed were Romanized, and great military centres like Eboracum and Deva, or commercial centres like London, were filled with a Latin-speaking population, and boasted of fine temples, baths, and public buildings. But the villagers of the open country, and the Celtic landholders who dwelt among them, were very little influenced by the civilization of the town-dwellers, and lived on by themselves much in the way of their ancestors, worshipping the same Celtic gods, using the same rude tools and vessels, and dwelling in the same low clay huts, though the townsmen were accustomed to build stone houses after the Roman fashion, to employ all manner of foreign luxuries, and to translate into Minerva, or Apollo, or Mars, the names of their old Celtic deities Sul, or Mabon, or Belucatadrus.
