[406] Prichard's Natural History of Man.
CHAPTER II.
THE ROMAN INVASION.
The fashion of Scottish archæologists in dealing with our national antiquities has heretofore most frequently been to write a folio volume on the Anglo-Roman era, and huddle up in a closing chapter or appendix some few notices of such obdurate relics of primitive nationality as could in no way be forced into a Roman mould. Some valuable works have been the result of this exclusive devotion to one remarkable epoch; but since this has been so faithfully explored by Camden, Sibbald, Horsley, Gordon, Roy, Chalmers, and Stuart, there is good reason why we may be excused following the example of the Antiquary par excellence, and plunging, "nothing loth, into a sea of discussion concerning urns, vases, votive altars, Roman camps, and the rules of castrametation," with copious notations on the difference between the mode of entrenching castra stativa and castra æstiva, "things confounded by too many of our historians!"
To English archæologists the Anglo-Roman Period is one of the greatest importance; for the Romans conquered and colonized their country, taught its inhabitants their religion, sepulchral rites, arts, and laws, and, after occupying the soil for centuries, left them a totally different people than they had found them. There is something, moreover, in the very geological features of the south-eastern districts of England, which the Romans first and chiefly occupied, at once more readily susceptible and more in need of such external influences. It cannot, indeed, be overlooked, among the elements of ethnological science, that the geological features of countries and districts exercise no unimportant influence on the races that inhabit them. The intelligent traveller detects many indications besides the mere difference of building materials, when he passes from the British chalk and clay to the stone districts. To the Romans it can hardly be doubted that England owes the art of converting her clay into bricks and tiles; and that in all probability, the P. P. BRI. LON.—præfectus primæ [cohortis] Britonum Londinii?—stamped on recently discovered Roman tiles found on the site of modern London,[407] indicate some of the products of the kilns by which the inexhaustible bed of London clay was first converted to economical uses. The Roman mansion, with its hypocaust and sudatorium, its mosaic paving and painted walls, its sculptures, bronzes, and furnishings of all sorts, introduced the refinements of classic Italy into the social life of England; while the disciplined hardiness of legionary colonists tempered the excesses of Roman luxury. New wants were speedily created, and many dormant faculties excited into action among the intelligent native tribes. The older British pottery entirely disappeared, superseded by the skilful products of the Anglo-Roman kiln, or the more beautiful imported Samian ware. England might, and indeed did, greatly degenerate when deserted by her conquerors, but it was altogether impossible that she could return to her former state. The footmark of the Roman on the soil of England is indelible. It forms a great and most memorable epoch between two widely different periods, the influence of which has probably never since ceased to operate, and hence the important place which it still continues to occupy in English archæology.
The history of the Scoto-Roman invasion is altogether different from this. It is a mere episode which might be altogether omitted without very greatly marring the integrity and completeness of the national annals. It was, for the most part, little more than a temporary military occupation of a few fenced stations amid hostile tribes. Julius Cæsar effected his first landing on the shores of Britain in the year B.C. 55; but it was not till after a lapse of 135 years—as nearly as may now be guessed, in the summer of A.D. 80—that Agricola led the Roman army across the debatable land of the Scottish border, and began to hew a way through the Caledonian forests. Domitian succeeded to the throne of Titus in the following year, while the Roman legions were rearing their line of forts between the Forth and the Clyde; and the jealousy of the tyrant speedily wrested the government of our island from the conqueror of Galgacus. From that period till the accession of the Emperor Hadrian, in A.D. 117, the Roman historians are nearly silent about Britain; but we then learn that the Roman authority was maintained with difficulty in its island province; and when Hadrian visited Britain the chief memorial he left of the imperial presence was the vallum which bore his name, extending between the Solway and the Tyne. Up to this period, therefore, it is obvious that the Roman legions had established no permanent footing in Caledonia—using that term in its modern and most comprehensive sense; nor was it till the accession of Titus Antoninus Pius to the Imperial throne, and the appointment of Lollius Urbicus to the command in Britain, nearly two centuries after the first landing of Cæsar in England, that any portion of our northern kingdom acquired a claim to the title of Caledonia Romana. Lollius Urbicus, the legate of Antoninus Pius, fixed the northern limits of Roman empire on the line previously marked out by the forts of Agricola; and beyond that boundary, extending between the Forth and the Clyde, nearly the sole traces of the presence of the Romans are a few earth-works, with one or two exceptions, of doubtful import, and some chance discoveries of pottery and coins, mostly ascribable, it may be presumed, to the fruitless northern expedition of Agricola, after the victory of Mons Grampius, or to the still more ineffectual one of his successor, Severus. In this extra-mural region, indeed, lies the celebrated Roman military work, Ardoch Camp, within the area of which was discovered the sepulchral memorial of Ammonius Damionis, the only Roman inscription yet found north of the Forth. Such an exception is the strongest evidence that could be produced of the transitory nature of Roman occupation in the region beyond the boundaries fixed by Lollius Urbicus.
Here, then, we have the proprætor of Antoninus Pius established within the line of ramparts which bear the Emperor's name, A.D. 140. The Roman soldiers are busy building forts; raising each their thousand or two paces of the wall, and recording the feat on the legionary tablets which still attest the same; constructing roads and other military works; and establishing here and there coloniæ and oppida, with a view to permanent settlement. For a period of about twenty years, during which Lollius Urbicus remained governor of the province, peace appears to have prevailed; and to this brief epoch, when a Roman navy was stationed on the coasts of Britain, we may, with great probability, ascribe the rise of Inveresk, Cramond or Alaterva, and other maritime Roman colonial or municipal sites. With the death of the able Titus Antoninus, whom grateful Roman citizens surnamed Pius, all this was at an end. Calphurnius Agricola had to be despatched by the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to put down an insurrection of the British tribes. The reign of his successor Commodus was marked by a still more determined rising of the North. The Caledonian Britons again took to arms, assailed the legions with irresistible force, defeated them and slew their general, broke through the rampart of Antoninus, and penetrated unchecked into the most fertile districts of the Roman province of Valentia, as it was subsequently named, comprehending the whole district between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus which at a later period became the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Another legate, Ulpius Marcellus, had to hasten from Rome to arrest the Caledonian invaders, and a few more years of doubtful peace were secured to the northern province. Lucius Septimius Severus succeeded to the purple A.D. 197, learned that the Caledonian Britons were once more within the ineffectual ramparts; and after a few years of timid negotiation, rather than of determined opposition to these hardy northern tribes, Virius Lupus, the legate of Severus, was compelled to own that the occupation of Caledonia was hopeless. The aged emperor immediately commenced preparations for marching in person against the Caledonians. About A.D. 208 he effected his purpose, and entered Caledonia at the head of an overwhelming force; but it was in vain. He penetrated indeed as far, it is thought, as the Moray Frith, but only to return, with numbers greatly reduced, to fix once more the limits of Roman empire where they had been before marked out by the wall of Hadrian, between the Solway and the Tyne. It is possible, indeed, that the northern wall was not immediately abandoned. At Cramond have been found both coins and medals of Caracalla and Diocletian. The Roman tenure of the North, however, was manifestly insecure; and the successor of Severus was little likely to recover what that able emperor had been compelled to abandon.
A period of sixty-eight years is thus the utmost that can be assigned for this occupation of Caledonia as a Roman province, and the history of that brief era is amply sufficient to justify the oft-claimed title—whatever be its value—of the unconquered Caledonians. The tribes in the immediate vicinity of the garrisoned strongholds of the invaders might be overawed and forced into apparent submission; but the country was no more subdued and rendered a tributary province than when Edward made himself the arbiter between Baliol and the Bruce.
The successors of Severus were glad to secure the forbearance of the Caledonians on any terms; and for seventy-three years after the departure of his sons from Britain its name is scarcely mentioned by any Roman writer. In subsequent allusions to the restless inroads of the Caledonians on the southern province, they are mentioned for the first time in the beginning of the fourth century by the name of Picts; but it is not till the reign of the Emperor Valentinian, in the latter part of the fourth century, A.D. 367, that we find the Roman legions under Theodosius effectually coping with the northern invaders, and recovering the abandoned country between the walls of Antoninus and Severus. This was now at length converted into a Roman province, and received the name of Valentia, in honour of the emperor; and to this latter occupation should probably be ascribed the rise of most of the inland coloniæ, the traces of which are still recoverable. But its meagre history is that of a frontier province. The Picts were ever ready to sally forth from their mountain fastnesses on the slightest appearance of insecurity or intermitted watchfulness. Again and again they ravaged the southern provinces, and returned loaded with spoil; and it is chiefly to the notices of their inroads and repulsions that we owe the possession of any authentic history of North Britain in the fourth century. Early in the fifth century, about the year 422, a Roman legion made its appearance in Scotland for the last time. They succeeded in driving back the Picts beyond the northern wall, as a disciplined force must ever do when brought into direct collision with untrained barbarian tribes; but it was no longer possible to retain the province of Valentia. The legionary colonists and the Romanized Britons were advised to abandon it, and once more withdraw within the older limits fixed by Severus on the line of Hadrian's Wall. So ended the second and last Roman occupation of Scotland, extending over a period of about fifty years. It is to this latter era that we should probably assign the establishment of the Roman town near the Eildon Hills, as well as of other sites in the interior of the country, bearing traces of Roman occupation, which it has been customary to seek for among the stations mentioned by Ptolemy. Roy, for example, adhering to one of the names given by Ptolemy, while he rejects the locality which he assigned to it, fixes the site of Τριμοντιον, or Trimontium, in the neighbourhood of the Eildons, because "the aspect of the hills corresponds exactly with the name."[408] In this he has been implicitly followed by later writers. But Trimontium is a mere Latinized version of Ptolemy's Τριμοντιον, and does not necessarily signify Tres Montes, the supposed designation suggested by the triple summits of the Eildon Hills; unless, as is possible, the name is only a Greek rendering of the original Tres Montes, which has been anew transformed into the later Latin form. Still the mere resemblance of the name to certain features of an ascertained Roman site is very insufficient evidence in contradiction to the more precise information of the old geographer, as well as to the probability of the later origin of the Eildon town. We must therefore leave Trimontium where Ptolemy places it, in the district of the Selgovæ, not far from the military station at Birrens, although it will be shewn that very extensive Roman traces, unknown to General Roy, do exist in the neighbourhood of the Eildon Hills. The first period of the Roman presence in Scotland in the second century was obviously little more than an occupation of military posts; the second, in the latter end of the fourth century, was the precarious establishment of a Roman province on a frontier station, and within sight of a foe ever watching the opportunity for invasion and spoil.