IV

FLAVIAN WARS AND FRONTIERS

IV.  

CONQUEST IN BRITAIN

The accession of the Flavian House restored order in the Empire, and portended a change in Britain. Magni duces, egregii exercitus, minuta hostium spes: the work of conquest was renewed with vigor and consistently prosecuted for some fifteen years by able generals, Cerialis, Frontinus and Agricola, with the object of winning a shorter frontier in Britain and ultimately a reduction of the garrison. Where that frontier would run, exploration and time would show.

In contrast to other provinces of the Empire in this period, the written evidence for the history of Britain is both abundant and valuable. The survival of the biography of Agricola has secured to its subject that immortality of fame which the author so confidently predicted: otherwise, save for a lead pipe discovered at Chester and the brief and garbled remarks preserved by Cassius Dio the name of Agricola along with his exploits would have perished from human knowledge. Of the space devoted by Tacitus to the narrative of the seven campaigns of Agricola, one-half is engrossed by a single battle and its preliminaries; and only six geographical names illustrate those campaigns, a tribe, a harbor, a mountain and three estuaries—of all these only two estuaries (Clota and Bodotria) can be identified. Tacitus may have known more than he has told: but it is also possible that he neither clearly understood nor accurately transmitted some of the information which he had derived from the conversation of his father-in-law. Another danger besets the interpretation of the Agricola— it has the character of a funeral laudation.

What is lacking in Tacitus can be supplied, up to a point, by the results of archaeological research. One of the routes which the armies of Agricola followed in the invasion of Scotland can be traced beyond doubt. The sites of numerous forts have provided accurate evidence of the territory covered and the direction taken by his campaigns, and even an indication of the length of time during which some at least of his conquests in Scotland were subsequently maintained. South of the Cheviots, however, the archaeological evidence, while illustrating the methods by which the Flavian conquest was achieved, does not seem to be competent by itself to determine and delimit the shares of Cerialis, Frontinus and Agricola in the pacification of the Brigantian territory, and date yet more narrowly those forts which were presumably erected In the years 71-9, and are conveniently designated as “Agricolan”. The termination of the Batavian War late AD 70 liberated for service in Britain a legion and a general. The army, weakened by the withdrawal of XIV Gemina, was restored to its former strength of four legions by the accession of II Adiutrix, and Cerialis soon arrived to take in hand the subjugation of the Brigantes. This tribe, or rather confederacy of tribes, was the most populous and most powerful in all the island. The Romans had come into contact with the Brigantes as early as AD 50; since then, however, they had intervened only to supplement the resources of their diplomacy and secure peace by supporting the authority of the queen Cartimandua over her turbulent subjects. In the end the queen was dethroned. A Roman expeditionary force was able to rescue but not to restore her. And so the Brigantian War began: conquest was inevitable sooner or later, for no Roman frontier could have been safe with the untamed Brigantes beyond it. The campaigns in which Cerialis battered and broke the power of this tribe were marked by many stubbornly contested battles. He departed to assume a second consulate in Rome in the year 74. His successor, Frontinus, was not doomed to inaction—he turned his attention to the west and by subjugating the Silures completed the long-delayed conquest of Wales.

Here and in many parts of the Brigantian country the Romans had to deal, not with an agricultural population which could be harried and circumvented if it were not amenable to intimidation, but with the difficulties of forest and mountain and the indomitable resistance of tribes as fierce and as tenacious as those which so long delayed the progress of conquest in north-western Spain and in Bosnia. It was necessary to pierce the land with roads and cover it with a network of fortified posts, occupying the valleys that lead into Wales and separating the mountain masses from each other. This was the work of Frontinus in Wales. A single sentence is the only record of his activities—the subjugation of the Silures in South Wales: that would not be enough to justify the unworthy suspicion that he had neglected both northern Wales and northern England and had failed to consolidate or extend the gains of his predecessor. If the biographies of Cerialis and Frontinus were ever written, they have not been preserved.

In 77 or 78 a new governor, Cn. Julius Agricola, came to Britain, a province with which he was already familiar from his service as a military tribune and as a legionary legate. Though it was late in the year, Agricola at once took the field, and crushed the Ordovices in North Wales. This was not all. A surprise attack delivered into his hands the island of Mona, the haunt of Druids.

The next year saw Agricola active in the north. By force and conciliation he induced a number of tribes that had hitherto maintained their independence to surrender hostages and endure forts and garrisons. The Romans in their conquests followed methods of classic simplicity. They first seized the most important lines of communication, so as to cut off the more rugged and inaccessible parts of a country which, being thus isolated and encircled, could subsequently be reduced with less trouble. The tribes which so readily submitted to Agricola in the course of a single year are not described as strangers to the Romans: they were evidently members of the Brigantian confederacy which Cerialis had shattered. Cerialis had transferred the camp of the legion IX Hispana from Lincoln to York. Unless he had already carried the arms of Rome fur to the north, the events that follow are difficult to explain. In the next year (his third campaign) Agricola launches an invasion of Scotland. On any other hypothesis this would be foreign to his native caution and to the policy of which he was the heir and instrument.  Cerialis’ work must have been well done.

Between the Solway Firth and the mouth of the Tyne, the distance from sea to sea narrows to some sixty miles, and the valleys of the Irthing and the Tyne make a gap between the hill-country to the north and to the south of paramount strategic importance. Across this neck of land extends a perplexing variety of Roman frontier works, the wall of Hadrian, the flat-bottomed ditch erroneously called the Vallum, and a little to the south and apparently only from Carlisle to Corbridge a Roman road, the Stanegate. Of the date and purpose of this road, there is no definite evidence. Its construction has commonly been attributed to Agricola; and it is evident that to seize this line and provide it with a chain of forts must have been an integral part of the subjugation of northern England. The wall of Hadrian itself is not merely a defensive structure designed to ward off invaders from Scotland: one of its functions was to facilitate the control of the turbulent and ever-resurgent Brigantians. This being so, the line from Corbridge westwards to Carlisle might have been occupied even earlier than Agricola; and the operations of Agricola's second campaign will have consisted in the reduction of peoples farther south which had already been isolated—perhaps in Cumberland and Westmorland. Even here he was probably content to secure a route northwards from Lancashire by way of Penrith to Carlisle, thus encircling the district of the Lakes. Roade from south to north, however, were not enough, and Agricola might be given the credit for building some, but not all, of the roads that pierced the Pennine Chain from east to west—the most important were those that used the Aire Gap and the Gap of Stainmore (the latter providing the line of communication between York and Carlisle). But here as elsewhere the predecessors of Agricola must not be defrauded.

Whether or not Agricola was the first to occupy the line of the Stanegate, here was a point at which the northward advance of the Romans might have stopped and a frontier might have been found, though Tacitus gives no hint of that possibility. But Agricola himself—or the men who advised the Emperor in the affairs of Britain—had decided otherwise.

In the third year Agricola opened up new country. His columns swept northwards and spread devastation as far as an estuary called the Tanaus: the following season he spent in securing his hold on the territory he had traversed in the previous year. To this end he established a chain of forts across the narrow isthmus between Clota and Bodotria (the Clyde and the Forth). If it were certain that Tacitus wrote with a clear conception of the operations which he describes it might appear that the mysterious estuary of Tanaus should be either identical with Clota or Bodotria, or at least not far distant from them. Much short of them it cannot be—it may rather even lie beyond them, for the line which Agricola drew in order to consolidate his gains need not be as far to the north as the farthest point that his scouts and raiders had reached the year before.

The advanced base which Agricola used for the invasion of Scotland appears to have been Corbridge on the Tyne, from which a Roman road (the continuation of Dere Street) runs northwards, accompanied in its course by the visible relics of many camps and forts, by Risingham, High Rochester and Chew Green (Makendon) across the Cheviots to the important position of Newstead near Melrose in the fertile valley of the Tweed. From Newstead there was a choice of routes, northwards across the Lammermuir Hills to Inveresk on the Firth of Forth, a few miles east of Edinburgh; or westwards up the Tweed past the small fort of Lyne (near Peebles) to the valley of the Clyde. But there was another route, to the west, by which troops could have been moved forward from the line of the Solway and the Tyne—the valley of the Clyde could be reached from Carlisle through Annandale. To deny Agricola's use of it would be rash; for he seems to have been able to convey a large Roman army far into Scotland.

It is only in the east, however, that there are certain traces of the passage of Agricola. At Cappuck some seven miles south-east of Newstead a tiny fort of earth has yielded early pottery. Newstead itself provides full evidence of repeated occupations and repeated re buildings—the history of this site appears to fall into five periods of which three are earlier than the Antonine occupation of Scotland. The earliest fort was made of earth and, from its dimensions, was perhaps a winter camp for several auxiliary regiments. Of the forts constructed by Agricola across the isthmus between the Clyde and the Forth in his fourth campaign, many have been identified as small temporary posts near or beneath some of the stations of the Wall of Antoninus. They appear soon to have been evacuated—but not because Scotland was abandoned. On the contrary, the purpose of these forts was temporary and had already been served when Agricola decided to advance yet farther to the north.

The occupation of the isthmus between the Clyde and the Forth severed the south from the north and banished, as it were, the enemies of Rome into another island: to the south-west, however, extended a vast region as yet untouched, wild, barren and difficult of access, and subsequently neglected by the Romans in the period of the Antonine occupation of southern Scotland, though it was a danger, because it admitted invaders from Ireland. Yet these unpromising tracts were not entirely devoid of population—in a later age they harbored the savage Attacotti, suspected of cannibalism. Whether or not Agricola was to carry his conquest of the island yet farther, it was perhaps time for him now to satisfy his curiosity about the region which his advance had isolated. If this was indeed the purpose of the fifth campaign, the vagueness of Tacitus does not permit it to be affirmed. Agricola made an expedition by sea. He encountered and defeated tribes hitherto unknown; he also marshaled troops on that part of the coast of Britain that looks towards Ireland.

That island had troubles of its own. An Irish prince took refuge with Agricola, the pretext for an intervention to which, so a sanguine observer might be tempted to believe, the natives would fall an easy prey. But Agricola did not choose, or was not permitted, to cross the narrow seas. In the years of his retirement at Rome he was often heard to say that a single legion supported by a few auxiliary regiments would have sufficed for the conquest and the retention of Ireland. It will be recalled that a similar estimate had once been entertained of the ease of a conquest of Britain.

Abandoning the seductive prospect of Ireland, in the sixth year Agricola resolved to prosecute his conquests among the peoples beyond the Firth of Forth. They gathered in force, and after assaults on some of the Roman fortified posts hung about the flank of the army, which marched in three columns of unequal strength. After a vain attack upon the weakest of these, the Caledonians broke and fled. Had they not been able to escape to the protection of their woods and marshes, the Roman victory, so Tacitus asserts, would have meant the end of the whole war; the troops of Agricola were all inspired with a new confidence. In spite of this favorable conjuncture, the operations of the year were not prosecuted.

The actions which are described as Roman victories do not always appear to have exercised a depressing influence upon their barbarian adversaries. No more dismayed than the warriors of Arminius after one of the memorable exploits of Germanicus, the Caledonians employed this respite to redouble their efforts. When Agricola again marched forth in the next year, the tribes had mustered under the command of a chieftain called Calgacus. They took up their station at the Mons Graupius. Here the armies met. After each side had been treated to one of those moral and patriotic discourses which generals—or at least historians—regarded as the indispensable preliminary to action, the clash came. The Caledonians were routed after sharp fighting. Agricola had been fortunate in his adversaries. The presence of a common danger induced the Caledonian tribes to compose their differences and combine their levies: had their experience of warfare against the Romans not been recent and superficial, they would have known that a pitched battle is not the most effective method of frustrating the advance of an army. Instead of reserving their efforts for guerrilla warfare in difficult country, for raids and surprise attacks on camps and convoys until winter or the shortage of food compelled the Romans to retreat, the Caledonians vainly spent their valor in a single disastrous battle.

The situation of the Mons Graupius must remain unknown, it is true: but the extent of Agricola's advance is sufficiently indicated by the existence of a large fortified post at Inchtuthill on the Tay, a dozen miles north of Perth, facing the gate of the Highlands— apparently the winter quarters for an army or a part of an army. It may well have been occupied in the year before this campaign: and it was held subsequently. It is therefore by no means improb­able that Agricola reached the neighborhood of Aberdeen, for after the battle he marched farther and received hostages from a tribe called the Boresti. Dispatching the fleet on a voyage of exploration, Agricola now led his army back slowly towards winter quarters.

Such was the end of the seventh campaign (83 or 84). Agricola had now been in Britain for six years and a few months, a long term: he could hardly expect to have his governorship extended indefinitely. If the reports which Agricola sent to Rome conveyed the impression that the victory of the Mons Graupius was decisive and final, he had the less ground for surprise at being superseded. His work was done. This more than an emperor's jealousy of military success too great for a subject, or the needs of the Empire on another frontier determined his recall. His services did not lack due recognition. On the motion of Domitian the Senate had voted Agricola the ornamenta triumphalia. He was still young— not over forty-four: and he may have hoped when he returned to Rome that further distinctions and further service might not be denied him: but the State had other generals, and the attitude of Domitian, even if not malevolent, was lacking in enthusiasm for the merit and talents of the conqueror of Britain. And so Agricola subsided into private life.

While Agricola was in Britain, the organization of the German frontier had been carried decisively forward by a war against the Chatti: and Domitian had celebrated late in 83 a triumph, the derisory nature of which was before long to be revealed (so Tacitus affirms) when Agricola's glorious victory at the Mons Graupius evoked the damaging comparison.