The generalship of the British chiefs appears to have been contemptible. They staked everything on a wild frontal attack. Worse still, their movements were encumbered by hordes of followers and a vast train of waggons, which was parked confusedly in the rear. For the last time Boudicca drove along the line and bade her warriors strike a crushing blow. Paulinus, on his side, addressed his men in brief soldierly words, which Dion amplifies into an harangue covering pages.
The Britons, as they came on, were smitten by storms of missiles from the light troops, which made havoc in their dense masses, but the headlong charge, nevertheless, seems to have driven in the skirmishers and reached the legionaries. But they were received with volley on volley of pila; rush after rush recoiled from the steady line; and then, when the fury of their charge began to slacken, Paulinus ordered the advance. The legionaries pressed forward shoulder to shoulder, like a wall of iron; the auxiliaries charged manfully on the wings of their heavily-armed comrades. As the line left the defile the cavalry swept round the flanks and fell upon the Britons, and though bodies and individuals doubtless fought bravely to the end, panic seized the host as a whole, and it fled wildly to the rear. The fatal waggon park dammed back the flying horde, and the Romans closed upon it and slaughtered their fill. The massacres of the Britons were avenged by the butchery, it is said, of 80,000 men, women, and children. Like many of the semi-barbarous peoples of the past, and the Abyssinians of to-day, their armies were encumbered by a numerous following of women-folk. Boudicca poisoned herself in her despair.
With the victory of Paulinus the last united opposition to Rome ceased. The reconquest of the south gave much trouble, and Paulinus himself was soon recalled, rightly enough, for his harshness and lack of political wisdom were clearly not less than his warlike skill. Civilian governors set to work to heal, so far as possible, the wounds of Britain, and for eight years the new policy of conciliation and reorganization was steadily carried out. After 71 the conquest of the Brigantes in the North was taken seriously in hand by Petilius Cerealis, now governor of the province. The brave Silures of South Wales submitted in 78, and the northern tribes were by 80 sufficiently cowed to enable that brilliant but overrated figure, Gnæus Julius Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, to make his famous invasions of Caledonia. But in 86 they again broke out into revolt, and for thirty years gave continual trouble. About 119 they set upon Legio IX., the ever luckless ‘Hispana’—where is unfortunately not known—and annihilated it; never more does it appear in the Imperial muster-rolls. The subjection of the North seemed as far distant as ever.
So in 120 the Emperor Hadrian himself arrived in Britain to study the problem, bringing with him, to replace the lost troops, Legio VI. (‘Victrix’), whose headquarters were to be at Eboracum (York) for nearly three hundred years. He decided to draw a connected line of defence across the island from Tynemouth to Solway, which might serve at once as a bulwark against the North, and a base of operations against the Brigantes. The idea had been Agricola’s, thus showing that some at least of his relative’s overstrained eulogy is not misplaced. The line of forts which he had established was now reinstated, new ones built, and all connected by a solid rampart of turf, fronted by a deep ditch. While this was being carried out, and Hadrian was busy in the south, the field army, assisted by detachments from the Army of the Rhine, set to work to tame the Brigantes, and for a time succeeded.
THE ROMAN WALL FROM THE MILE CASTLE BETWEEN AESICA AND BORCOVICUS.
Hadrian’s policy, as is known, was to withdraw behind definite and easily defensible frontiers, and concentrate the energies of the government upon internal development rather than aggression. The trouble in Britain was that a true frontier was hard to find. Hadrian’s chosen line corresponded roughly with the Brigantian border, but it cut athwart the British tribes. To move on to the Forth was merely to add a large tract of very wild and sparsely peopled territory to the province, with the restless Brigantes still unsubdued far in the rear. As the conditions then were, Hadrian’s policy was sound; but it may be said, in short, that the original error of occupying the island was not to be redeemed by anything short of its complete conquest, and for this task, enormously difficult and entirely unremunerative, the Roman Empire, on the verge of decline in population and resources, had not the means.
Hadrian’s Wall is now crowned, except at one point, by the reconstruction in stone by Severus I. ninety years later; hence it was often supposed that the first wall was a stone structure. This idea may now be regarded as thoroughly disproved; the later wall stands upon and hides the foundations of the former, but near Birdoswald Severus’s engineers diverged a little from Hadrian’s line, and the earlier emperor’s construction may still be seen. The turf wall, replaced by stone, ran for seventy-three miles from Gabrosentum (Bowness) to Segedunum (Wallsend). In front of it, where it did not crown precipitous cliffs, was a ditch about 36 feet broad, and perhaps 30 feet deep. At each milestone there was a redoubt (castellum), and at more or less regular intervals along the whole line were fifteen large forts. Roughly parallel to the wall ran a military road, and a little way south of it a wide but shallow ditch between mounds, commonly called the ‘Vallum,’ the reason for which is a puzzle. It is best here to adopt Professor Oman’s very reasonable theory that it was the civil boundary of the province.
The wall and its forts were constructed by detachments from the legions, but it was garrisoned by the auxiliary cohorts, while the heavy infantry lay in reserve at the old military centres. Twenty-one infantry cohorts and six alæ of cavalry made up the original garrison, and some of them kept their stations for centuries. Nearly three hundred years later there were at least eleven, and probably more, of these regiments still on the wall. Behind, the legions occupied their camps for generation after generation, as if nothing could disturb them. For two hundred and eighty-two years after Hadrian’s visit, Legio VI. lay at York. The XXth ‘Valeria Victrix’ made its home at Deva (Chester) for more than three centuries; while Secunda Augusta, which had landed with Plautius in 43, did not leave Britain until 407, after a sojourn of three hundred and sixty-four years!