Episode 164 - Hadrian's Wall part 4: legacy

This is the English Heritage Podcast. Hello and thanks for joining us for your weekly podcast into England's past, I'm Charles Roe. You can download or stream new episodes every Thursday. Today we're back for the last of our four-part mini-series on the story of Hadrian's Wall, on its 1900th anniversary. On the end of Roman control in Britain to the medieval period, and the rediscovery of the wall by early archaeologists, we're now looking at the legacy of Hadrian's Wall. We'll also consider how the remains of the wall and its forts are being conserved for future generations, and joining us to guide us on this journey back to the present day are Properties Historian Dr Andrew Roberts and Curator of Hadrian's Wall and the North East region Dr Francis McIntosh. Andrew, let's start off with you to bring us up to speed. How do you summarise the story of the wall that we've covered in this series so far, and its role in the Roman occupation of Britain? So the Roman Emperor Hadrian arrives in Britain in roughly 81-2-2. This is about 80 years into Roman rule of Britain, and he orders the construction of a continuous barrier across what is today the north of England. This runs 73 miles from the River Tine in the east across fields, hills and rivers to the Solway Firth in the west, and he does this to block off the existing frontier of the Roman province of Britannia, as part of his empire-wide policy of border consolidation. And about five metres high, with a deep ditch in front of it, it's an imposing barrier, and it's intensively occupied by military garrisons every 500 metres or so. The largest of these garrisons reside at the forts, which are sort of large communities of up to about a thousand soldiers, their families, and also others who come to the forts in order to take advantage of the spending power of the soldiers. And some of these people come to Hadrian's Wall from across the three continents of the Roman world. So Hadrian's Wall remains in place until the end of Roman Britain, and although its extent and some of its functions remain the same over the course of 350 years, subsequent generations sort of rebuild it, they reshape it, they adjust it according to their needs, and the people living there at the end of Roman Britain are quite different from those that built it and first occupied it. So what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Roman's departure? Roman rule of Britain formally ends in around 410 AD, and what this essentially means is that there's no longer governance, central governance, and most importantly for Hadrian's Wall, the army that is stationed in Britain is no longer being paid by the Roman administration. So as we discussed at the end of the previous episode, in general terms, this would have been economically catastrophic. So the various big settlements that are built throughout the province, there are various big cities, big towns, which could include, of course, the forts along Hadrian's Wall, are built around the spending power of the Roman state, they're built around the spending power of the Roman army, and they're not really sustainable in absence of this, this kind of cash flow. Also for military installations like Hadrian's Wall, there's no longer a strategic reason, there's no longer an entity for them to kind of protect, there's no reason for them to carry on functioning the way that they did under Roman rule. So we can nuance that picture slightly, you know, up until comparatively recently, scholars believe that there was something of a kind of a collapse of society in Roman Britain, and that the forts along Hadrian's Wall essentially ceased to be communities. But more recently, we've started to kind of nuance that portrait a little bit. We know that some communities did stay long after sort of the official end of Roman Britain, and some evidence for that comes from the thought of Badosport, where it seems that there was a continuity of usage of that space, and we might imagine that we had something like an independent community, perhaps based around a kind of a war band that was able to protect itself and live off its locality. And more widely, what's going on in the subsequent century after the end of Roman Britain is that we see an emergence of smaller kingdoms, where once there was this unified province. So for example, in the east, we see the emergence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, such as Benessia and Diere, which are going to coalesce into the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of the Thumbria, and in the west, and in the northwest, we see the emergence of what we term sort of British kingdoms, such as reggae, and this is going to be the sort of the basis of this political structure of medieval Britain. Our understanding of this is, period is quite fragmentary, and we have to kind of talk in fairly broad brushstrokes, particularly of the century or so immediately after the end of Roman Britain. Regarding then this early medieval period Francis, we're shifting our attention now to this. What historical records exist from this post-Roman era in Britain? And also, what do they tell us about the war? Well, we've got two really key pieces of writing from that early medieval period that talk about the war. One is by Gildus, who was a British monk who we think lived about 500 to 570. He was born in Strathclyde, what's now Scotland, and died in France, and he wrote, "We think about 540, something called the ruin of Britain," which is talking about this period of Britain, but the section on Hagen's wall, or what we call Hagen's wall, is very interesting. He thinks, and this is not much more than a hundred years after the end of Roman rule, so, you know, in our mind, you know, that doesn't feel very long ago, really. But by that point, there seems to have already been quite a loss of understanding. So he thinks the wall wasn't built until the late 4th or early 5th century, when we know, obviously, it was boiled in the 120s, and he thinks it was built when the British people requested help from the Romans to come and build a wall because of invasions from the north, and he also knew about the Antonine wall, so that wall further north in Scotland that lasted about 20 years, and he thought that the Antonine wall was a first attempt to keep what he calls the picks out of one of the northern tribes, and that failed, and then the Romans sent a legion to help the British build this wall. So that's quite interesting, you know, straight away. He knows that the walls linked to the Romans, but has completely, in a way, got the wrong end of the stick, he's, you know, a few hundred years out. And it sounds as though that he's sort of putting his own political impressions onto the story. Yes, I mean, we always have to think about people in their context, in their time period, in their geographical location, and he's presumably trying to fit the wall and the remains into kind of what he thinks was happening, and that's influenced, you know, drastically by troubles and things that happen at a time where there's allegiances and alliances and not. So Gildes is our first post-Roman source that talks about the wall, and then we have another monk, and that's where most of our literary sources come from in this early medieval period. The monasteries and Christianities, how the tourists see is kept going in Britain. Another monk that, who, in more people, have heard of and Gildes, is Bede. So Bede is very famous. He was born in Tyler Weir and moved to the monastery in Giro and died there. He was born about six, seven, two, six, seven, three, and died in seven, three, five. And he wrote a famous text called the ecclesiastical history of the English people. He wrote that in seven, three, one. So that's about two hundred years later, he will take from Gildes. Unlike Gildes, he does seem to have visited the wall because he's got detailed measurements. So we know that in seven, three, one, the wall was still in some places, standing 12 feet high, and then it was eight feet wide. However, he seems to have followed with Gildes that the wall wasn't built into the late Roman or even the post-Roman period, but with Bede to get a bit more detail again in that the volume, so that huge ditch south of the wall, Bede thought was built by the Empress Severus and that the turf wall was also something to do with Severus. So they're separating out what we now know as one whole system of four stitches, male castles, turrets, et cetera. These are the first people who are starting to talk about the different parts of all being built by different people. And although these two are very early, their writings really influence thinking right up until the 18th, 19th century. So their impact is absolutely huge on the study of the wall and people's understanding, you know, Septimius Severus' linked the wall or the fact that both Bede and Gildes described the forts as Urbes, so the Latin Urbes, which led people quite a long time to think the forts were civilian settlements and not see them as forts and military occupations. So it gives us some hints about the wall, but also really shows how much knowledge had been lost quite quickly and also how important these writings are to the study of the wall right up until the 19th century. Just goes to show really that as long as you write something down in history, it immediately gets legitimacy even if it's actually demonstrably wrong and for centuries. Well, that's a thing, yeah, I mean, no one would have known that Bede and Gildes are wrong. They're with the only people writing at the time and obviously, if it's coming from a monk, you're presumably given a bit of, you've got some kudos because you're writing, you know, on God's side, it's a piece of paper. will believe you, and you can write, whereas most people can't. Exactly, yeah. It's remarkable, isn't it? How people misunderstood the wall for so long? Well, yeah, and you know, Gildus is what, 130 years after the official end of Roman rule, and you think, towards in some way, that doesn't sound very long, but actually, that's 1890. So, yes, we misunderstand a lot of things that happened in 1890, don't we? It's just that when you look back in time, it distorts what your kind of expectations are of people's memories. And it doesn't take long for knowledge to be lost, it takes a generation, perhaps even less, if the information isn't passed on. Yeah, you know, 130 years, what's that five generations potentially, isn't it? So, there's a lot of lost knowledge, effectively. A huge amount. Yes, bearing all that in mind, how did the wall fall into ruin after the key sites were abandoned? Do we have any working theory on that, Francis? Yeah, well, I mean, it's really easy, isn't it? If you don't clear your gutters, your gutters will probably fall down. One of the main things that would have affected it was simple lack of maintenance. As soon as something starts to need repair and not get it, it'll start to collapse. And then as soon as you get roof tiles missing, you can get rain into buildings, et cetera. So, that's one big thing. I went on holiday to Kofu, and there was a large earthquake in 1979 in Kofu, which drastically affected huge amounts of the rural settlements. Now, obviously, they'd had some damage from the earthquake, but I went to visit some of the villages in land, and you saw buildings that had only been abandoned for about 40 years, and already they've got trees growing through the roofs and through the windows. So, I think you forget how much, if you don't maintain a building, it will start to degrade very, very quickly. So, that's one big factor. Then there's also a huge amount of stone robbing, almost any building within a few miles of the wall, along its entire length. If it's built out of stone, and it was built after the Roman period, it's probably built out of the wall or the fort that's nearby. We even have some official sources that talk about Wilfrid, who is a Bishop of York, who in 674 ordered the building of a new church at Hexham, which becomes the Abbey at Hexham. And we know that Stoemasons came to Courbridge, the Roman town here, to take stone from the the remains. Lanacross Pryory, which is one of our English heritage sites, very close to Bedos World Fort, is all built out of Hexham's wall. So, people living along the wall, as well as not maintaining their buildings to live in, also helped out by here, taking away because they're lovely sized and shaped blocks to build yourself a new building or a new house, or a field wall, or a animal shelter. And I suppose it would have been just easier than to quarry them. Oh, absolutely. Ready made. Okay, so I suppose we can't blame them too much. No, you know, if nobody's looking after it, then it's seen as an easy target, and why would you go and quarry and cut your own stone if down the road is some stone that's already quarried, ready to go? It's recycling. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Very forward thinking by those early medieval people. Andrew, did the wall then serve any kind of strategic purpose during the medieval period? Well, as Francis indicated, that the reuse of the wall's material starts reasonably early in the early Anglo-Saxon period, and that actually, that process of reusing the wall continues throughout the medieval period up until the 15th century. It's a really interesting question, this idea of it serving a strategic purpose, and one that can be answered in a number of different ways, I'll start with telling you something that it wasn't, something that it didn't do. So one of the biggest misunderstandings about Hadrian's wall is that it was, and indeed in some people's mind still is, the border between England and Scotland. This is not true, and it never has been true. So the Anglo-Scottish border runs from, roughly from the the Solway Firth, so not too far from where the wall ends in the west, up the river Esk, and then sort of north westwards across Britain to just north of Barichabon Tweed. And that has been the case since roughly the 10th, 11th centuries. However, that doesn't mean that Hadrian's wall has not played a role in what we might term the Anglo-Scottish frontier, and indeed influenced the idea of the border, and people's conception of the border and what a border might be. So when I'm talking about a frontier, we're used to thinking perhaps about sort of modern day borders, which are pretty well defined. You know, generally speaking, the modern nation state has a kind of a line where its borders are, and they're very well defined. They are these sort of narrow barriers, either physical or conceptual. However, in the medieval period, Hadrian's wall exists in the middle of a sort of a frontier zone between these two sort of fledgling entities in England and Scotland, and actually the control of this area is reasonably fluid up until the 16th century. It's a kind of contested space, a contested region. So the role that Hadrian's wall plays in that is that at various different periods, there are kind of attempts to sort of tame or at least try to kind of mitigate some of the consequences of this being an area where there's no clear authority. There is raids by both sides of this area in this period. There's a degree of lawlessness. And so we do know that there is some evidence to suggest that certain parts of the wall are used as part of a system of night watches. So for example, Francis talked about Lannacos priory, which is about a kilometre south of Asia's wall, just around the corner from the Oswald, and it too is an English heritage site. Part of the extent of its territory is, the extent of its territory goes right up until the curtain wall at a place called Hare Hill, and it seems as though Hare Hill and the turret that was there was potentially reused in the medieval period as a sort of a watchtower, as part of this night watch. And we also have other potential evidence of this, for example, a place called Steel Rig. There was potentially a watchtower built there, and we know that the watch were based at other wall locations such as Headland and the Wall or Carrabra. And it makes sense to do this because the Romans often chose the path of greatest visibility so that they could see across the landscape. So it's a good place to watch out for raiders, or any anyone with sort of ill intent towards your castle or your farmstead. And you've also got all of this kind of physical fabric that you can either build with, or you can kind of adapt to suit your purposes. But it's important to understand that it's not working as a coherent border as it would have been in the Roman period. I think though, aside from the sort of the physical reuse of the wall, I think it's more profound contribution during the mid to sort of late medieval period, is how it kind of occupies a kind of a space in the idea of what the border might be in this region. So in sort of early maps that've been produced in the medieval period, they show England as this kind of place of civilization. I shouldn't alone that we're talking about English map makers here. Scotland is a sort of barbarous nation to the north, and Hadron's Wall is kind of the barrier between them, even though it's not necessarily the official border. And indeed, during the Tudor period, there is a suggestion that the border could be fortified, i.e., do something like what Hadron's Wall was in the Roman period. And at the same time, there develops this kind of pseudo-historical idea that Hadron's Wall was once the actual barrier between England and Scotland, even though we know that it never was the case. And this sort of idea is what kind of, I think, lingers into this day, and people still sometimes think that it was the border between the Scottish and the English. I think that that came up quite a lot during the Scottish referendum vote people were talking about, rebuilding Hadron's Wall to kind of partition the two nations. What about the thoughts, though, that surrounds the wall? What emerges on the sites of these in the medieval period? And did any of these have continued use? Yes, so within this context of this frontier zone, this kind of debatable land between these two kingdoms of Scotland and England. There's something of an authority vacuum, and also kind of an opportunity for those that might want to exploit the situation to engage in raiding behaviour, what we call "reving", and this went on throughout the medieval period, but particularly came to a head in the 16th century. And in order to try and cope with the possibility of, say, for example, having your cattle raided by somebody from across the border, the communities along the wall chose to sort of build structures that were quite defensively minded, and they came up with this very distinctive style of vernacular architecture. One example of this is what's called a "battlehouse", which is essentially a humble farmhouse that is extra fortified. So what you will have is you'll have a two-story building built from very thick stone, on the ground level, you have essentially a barn where you can keep your cattle safe, you can kind of herd your cattle inside at night or in the case of a raid, you can bar the doors, you have very, very narrow windows, and then up above that, on the first floor, you have the accommodation for the family, and the only access to that would have been via a ladder, which you then pulled up at night, and hopefully you'd remain safe from any raiders. Although there are some examples of rivers attempting to essentially burn people out of their vassals. And so we have examples of these right across the borderlands, really, including at a couple of agents' wall forts. So one of these stood at Birozwald, you can't really see very much of it today, you can only sort of see it, it's kind of footprint, but at house You can actually see quite clearly the remains of a battlehouse that was built. Essentially, they adapted the south gate of the fort and extended it slightly, reused the stone and built this sort of stronghold where they could be lived protected from any potential raids. And House Steads is an interesting example of the sort of the reefing culture because we do know of one particular family that lived at House Steads, the armstrongs. And they were known to actually form raiding parties, a meeting at a place called Busy Gap, which is about a mile east of House Steads. And they would go off and raid across the border into Scotland. And this kind of behaviour goes on throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. But then eventually, particularly with the unification of the crowns of Scotland and England, things start to be put in order. So by the 18th century, reefing behaviour was ended particularly because Nicholas Armstrong of House Steads was actually hanged for reefing in 1704. And from the 18th century, particularly, Hagen's War becomes a place which can be more, it becomes a bit more of a civilised place, it becomes, you know, a safer place to live, a safer place to visit. And we enter into a period where there's an opportunity to kind of rediscover Hagen's War's past. It sounds as though there was essentially a period of time when the Roman story of the war had been lost based on everything we've been describing up until this point. How did historians come to piece together the story that we kind of know today? Well, it's quite messy, so be prepared for that, but we'll do our best to kind of give you a reasonably clear sort of narrative of how it occurs. So by the end of the 16th century, so in Judder England, there's still this kind of memory of the Romans, they have the writings of, for example, bead. They have this sort of pseudo-historical memory of a border in this region. But the particulars are either lost or they're a little bit confused as Francis was outlining earlier. And I should also say at this point that there are communities along the wall, but they're not part of a kind of a unified community in the same way as Hagen's War was in the Roman period. In the Tudor period, there is essentially a developing interest in piecing together England's past. I think a good place to sort of start the story of the recovery of Hagen's War is with a guy called William Camden. So Camden was a classicist, and he published a work called Britannia, which is a sort of volume of mixture of geography, of history, of stories, of Britain's past, that goes back to Roman times. And his initial editions are very much a paper exercise as far as they pertain to Hagen's War, but the significance of what he did is that in 1599, he actually visits Hagen's War to sit for himself. He goes to Blanachost, Willaford, he doesn't go to Howsteads because at this point, it's a bit too dangerous, but he does go to also the Western end of the war to Newcastle, for example. And so in the resulting edition, he brings together the historical material that he's reading from accounts of Roman times, with also this detailed observed evidence, and he describes what the war is in its time. He describes the fact that there are turrets, and there are mile castles, and there are forts, and he finds some Latin inscriptions and things like that. And he essentially proposes that Hagen's is the first to build a wall. He, again, posits that Severus comes along and builds the volume. And it doesn't really matter whether he's right or not. The point is that he's trying to make sense of both the physical evidence and the literature. And this really defines the kind of the question and the discussion of Hagen's war for a century or so. And over the course of the next 150 years or so, Camden and then some of his successes, they kind of add more details at this portrait. And then by the 18th century, you've got various other antiquarians and travelers who start to come along and create their own descriptions of Hagen's war, and they add drawings and surveys, and they find more inscriptions, for example. And then this is sort of the beginnings of a far more coherent and evidence-based study of what Hagen's wall did. Would Camden have seen any of these turrets standing at that point in Tudor Times? Well, he describes them, so we must presume that he did. I think what you're sort of hinting at is how high standing is Hagen's wall in this time, and that's quite an interesting question, because on the one hand, as Francis has rightly suggested, buildings can decay and fall quite quickly. But then on the other hand, we do have some descriptions or some hints that even by the Tudor period, there are some bits of Hagen's wall which are still quite high standing, so it's possible to really get a sense of scale. I think it's probably going to be a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest. That's a really tantalising thought, isn't it? But when we get to the stage where we're actually doing proper archaeology, when did the early archaeologists, these so-called antiquarians, start to visit and excavate the remains of the wall, Francis? Well, I think we've got a long way to go until they're called archaeologists, or they're what we would recognise as archaeologists. No, as Andrew said, Camden in 1599, he's one of the earliest ones. I'll give a little plug to another guy called Reginald Bainbrigg, who actually made it to Househeads in 1599. He was more intrepid to the Camden and his friend Robert Cotton, and Camden actually used Bainbrigg's report in his update. But they're the starting point. And I thought what might be kind of useful is to use Chester's fort, does a bit of a case study to show the development of visitors and kind of the development of the study. And you see how it kind of snowballed. So Chester's was in the middle section like Househeads and wasn't visited super late, but someone called Thomas Matchel, made it there in 1691, and then Mr Smith of Durham, visited in 1708, and he passed on his description to Gibson, who wrote another large tone on Roman Britain. And this early stage, the 16th and 17th century, lots of these big reports are relying on local correspondence. And that's quite interesting, these antiquarians who are writing, say from London or elsewhere, are getting updates from there. And then it's really with the 18th century that we get more visitors able to access, particularly central section, as the troubles, you know, the weaving that Andrew talked about die down. And Chester's, we've got a report by Horsley in 1732, Warburton in 1753, Hutchison in 1776. You know, you see, they're coming almost thick and fast, really. In that sort of period, Chester's in a most of the places. There's no archaeological work, as we would know it. Sometimes, inscriptions are found by agricultural work, or purely by accident. Bishop Polcock, who did a lot of traveling and writing in Britain, Alan the Compton, and visited Chester's in 1760. And he talks about a building that had been recently discovered and also says tantalizingly, they now find very little coin at Chester's. So it seems that perhaps at some point, through gardening work or agriculture work, there was a lot of coins coming up, but it's not until we're the 19th century that you get antiquarians who are more interested in excavation before that there, kind of just reading the literary sources. Andrew says, viewing the monuments that they can see above ground and the inscriptions have been turned up. It's a real change, and Andrew talks about people living on the wall, but they know they're not really a big community. A lot of the people on the wall didn't really know very much about the wall or necessarily care about the wall, which, you know, a lot of modern people seem as unusual. But William Hutton, who is a fascinating man, he was a printer in Birmingham, and in 1801, at the age of 78, he decided he wanted to walk Adrian's wall. So he sets off on foot from Birmingham, goes up through the Lake District to where he drops his daughter with some family friends. She was on a horse and cart, and then he walks all the way over to Walsend and then all the way back again. He writes a book, which is wonderful. And it's a real insight into kind of life on the wall for a few kind of particular aspects, and then one really kind of interesting but also slightly sad thing that he sees is he says, "At the 20th milestone, I should have seen a piece of the wall seven feet and a half high and 224 yards long, a sight not to be found in the whole line. This is at plain trees, not too far from Chester's. But as he's coming along, the landowner, Henry Toulip, is having it taken down to erect a farmhouse." And he said, "Just in the week before he came, there's been 95 yards destroyed. So William makes that a impassioned plea." He says, "The servant who was doing it." And he says, "Could you give my compliments to Mr. Toulip and request him to desist, or he would wound the whole body of antiquities?" As he was putting an end to the most noble monument of antiquity in the whole island. And I think it shows that many of the people living on the wall at that point, since his 1801, for a lot of them, the wall still really was just either a quarry or, you know, something just to be there. And I think a lot of them were quite confused by these antiquities coming up. If not suspicious, at Birdoswald, it seems as though William Houghton might have been kind of run off. From his description, he says he entered into the house of Mr. Bowman. And he said, "I was received with that coldness, which indicates an unwelcome guest, bordering upon a dismission." Basically, they thought he was either a government tax collector or perhaps a spy. So quite often through his book, he talks about how people are very suspicious of him coming to view this. They couldn't understand why he'd been coming so far and wanting to look at the stone in their house or these lumps and bumps in their gardens. So William Houghton, you know, he's one of the antiquarians, come to visit, And here we go. he's finding that it's a bit of an oddity to the locals, which is very different today. Today, and many of the locals live on the wall are very interested and proud of the wall, but at that period, it still wasn't the case. Well, suppose at that time they didn't really understand what it was, and therefore they didn't understand the historical significance of it. No, exactly, because although, you know, some people, you know, the names that Andrew and I have mentioned are starting to try to figure out what this monument was. Much of that information, that understanding, that knowledge had been lost, so they couldn't get the head around why someone would walk a few hundred miles up from Birmingham to see this thing in their backyard. Yes. There's also probably a class differential at play here, because many of those people who are traveling are pretty wealthy, either sort of minor aristocrats or a kind of an emergent middle-class science community. Yes. Science intellectual community who have classical learning, they know their Latin, they know their history, so they're kind of steeped in it, whereas perhaps the more sort of what we would maybe turn more kind of working class or landed sort of farmers. Country, yeah, farmers, farmer class wouldn't necessarily have had that background education. Yes. They're just trying to make a living fundamentally, aren't they? Exactly. And to survive. So as we move into the 1800s, who are some of the key figures who took parts of the wall into their personal care, Francis? Well, the 19th century really sees the start of exploration and excavation, shall we say, on Hadron's wall. Before that, as we've discussed, any study on the wall was studying the visible remains or the chance finds or the literary sources, but as we move into the 1800s, people start actually putting spades into the ground and excavating and trying to answer some more questions and find more evidence to answer those questions. And one of the real figures in that is a man called John Clayton, who was born in 1792 to a wealthy family in Newcastle, a family of lawyers, the family had a country house, which had the fort of Chester's or Psyllernum in their front garden. And John inherited that one, he inherited the family estate in 1832. And by the time John died in 1890, he lived a very long life. He owned five forts and about 20 miles of Hadron's wall, and he bought them up as individual farmer states or individual fields. He brought them into his estate, so once they came into his estate, they came into his care. So once they were in his estate, you could no longer take the stone off the wall. He moved farmhouses off the line of the wall or out of the forts. So when John bought house debts in 1860, the battle house that Andrews talked about was still occupied, and there was still occupation and activity around the South Gate of House debts. John built what you see now as a museum and the Holy Cottage as a new farm house to take the farm away from the monument and stop it doing damage. But he also did a lot of excavation. And that was from 1840 right through until he died in 1890, and he excavated at most of his forts. It was, you know, workmen, but he instigated them and would come along and also published some of them, although another really key figure that many people have heard about along Hage's wall, if they've read anything, is John Collinwood Bruce. John Collinwood Bruce was a school teacher in Newcastle and was a great publicist in some ways. He published a lot of Clayton's excavations and promoted Clayton's work. He wrote something really nice in 1850, and I think he probably took this back later, but he said, "Some excavations recently made at Silenham and Borkavicus," which his Chester's and House says, "show us that where the requisite skill and labour bestowed, we might, in our own land, walk in Roman streets and traverse Roman temples, little inferior in interest to those of Pompeii." Now, Bruce had never been to Pompeii at that point, so maybe once he'd been to Pompeii changed his mind. But it shows the real excitement that was there in that early, to mid-19th century, as people started to excavate and realise what was still underground. There were small excavations by other landowners, say at Birdos, all to Maryport, but Clayton really was the beginning of this new season and this new era of investigation on the wall. I suppose if you weren't able to go on the grand tour, then there's this tantalising aspect that you could kind of visit Roman architecture and structures right here in Britain. Well, yeah, that's what got Bruce on the job, really. He wanted to go and do the grand tour with his son in 1848, wasn't able to, so went along the wall, and when he came back, he'd taken a couple of painters with him. They're rich at some brothers, and they did sketches and illustrations off his tour with his son, and he gave some talks to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, and everyone was absolutely astounded at the remains, almost in their backyard, and he then arranged the first pilgrimage to take people along the wall, and yeah, if there hadn't been the troubles on the continent, and he had been able to go to the continent, we might not have had the powerhouse of investigation and publication that is John Kleinwood Bruce. As Francis says, he takes people along the wall on this event known as the pilgrimage, which has taken place pretty much continuously ever since every 10 years, aside from maybe times of war, and the other thing that he does is that he publishes what we might call the first sort of guidebook to the wall, which was called the Roman wall, and then subsequent edition were known as the Wallet Book, which is essentially kind of like an itinerary of the wall, which is supposed to be carried, and that keeps visitors up to date with the history and also the kind of the latest results of archaeological excavations, and it's still being published today, albeit by modern scholars, it's still very popular, it's a very good source of reliable information on the wall. Baring in mind the name of that book, Hadrian's name is missing, so at what point in history do we start to call Hadrian's wall? Oh, there's no simple answer there. We go back, we talk about bead and gildess, and obviously they never have you mentioned. Hadrian, they talk about Severus, and the Roman Camden in his first edition of Britannia, which is 1586, calls it the Picts' wall. William Hutton, the guy he walked from Birmingham in 1801, calls it Severus' wall, because he thought a greekler, one of the generals who's in charge of the invasion of and settlement of Britannia, he thought he built the ditch in the bank, as Andrew said, Bruce calls it the Roman Wall, and kind of by the Bruce and Clayton there, the real argument is whether it was Hadrian or Severus, and who built what if they built parts of it, and it was probably finally settled in 1840s by an antiquarian called John Hodgson, that it was Hadrian who built the wall, and Clayton's excursions really helped to confirm this with more inscriptions, so Bruce followed that, and sometimes Bruce gets the credit for saying it was Hadrian and confirming it, but it was Hodgson, but there were still discussions as to whether the wall and the forts were separate, Bruce and Clayton themselves actually thought that Hadrian built the wall, but some of the forts were perhaps built earlier, when in fact or fact they were secondary dishes into the wall, so it's really quite recent that it's been settled that it was called Hadrian's wall, and it's had many names across its 2000 year history. And did the first professional excavation start taking place along Hadrian's wall? Well, let's say the turn of the 20th century, it's quite difficult, and it's also a little bit insulting sometimes when he tried to delineate the amateurs from the professionals, but I think by the early 20th century we're really talking about something approaching professional archaeology, and what that really involves is a more scientific approach, so you're working with the concept of stratigraphy that essentially you have this kind of layers of material that can be dated and certain periods in the Roman period, dating things via objects, more closely, looking at evidence that might have been overlooked and are thrown away, for example by someone like Clayton, and particularly trying to answer very specific targeted questions by targeted excavation, so rather than very unkindly people look back on Clayton and sort of thought of him as just someone who was basically kind of sort of haphazardly, uncovering things and just sort of revealing things and throwing things away, and whereas now in the 20th century that they've sort of been far more precise in where they dig, the extent of those excavations and the questions that they're really trying to answer. And so in the late 19th century and early 20th century they're really trying to pin down in a lot more detail, the sequence of how the wall was built, particularly the linear elements that the wall, the valum, the ditch, et cetera, and be a bit more precise about when and by whom, so obviously Hadrian's name gets attached to it in the 19th century, but then there's still some outstanding questions as to was it all sort of executed all in one go or was there sort of some kind of revisiting a bit over a period of years or decades? And so in this period you get confirmation of some of the details behind the building of the walls, so for example, an archaeologist called Francis Haverfield who excavated just west of Burdozwald, he discovered that prior to the Stonewall being built there, there was the turf wall, for example, archaeologists, JP Gibson, FG Simpson, they essentially prove archaeologically that the Stonewall is built under Hadrian and essentially established that all of its major elements of the wall were completed under Hadrian rather than under successive emperors, and this process of really sort of nailing down the big picture of, and the details behind the big picture of the wall is going on in the early decades of the 20th century, so I guess let's say by the end of sort of the 1950s, you have a very detailed and seemingly comprehensive consensus about the wall's history its purpose. and its form. France is how long did these excavations continue for? How did they give people a better understanding of the war? Well I think countries kind of explained that from that early 20th century much of the excavations were small scale and really targeted looking at the chronology but we also have a few other key excavations that took place so in bed also we've already mentioned it quite a few times in our previous ones. The excavations in the 1980s were really important to understand what had happened at the end of the fall after the official end of Roman Britain. There was the famous excavations at Houses in 1898 which revealed the full outline of the fort and the plan but then we had excavations in 1959 to 1961 that looked at the development of the barracks and were really really key for kind of understanding the changes there and so there's the smaller and the larger ones that Clayton did. However the one really big excavation that did happen in the second half of the 20th century is up at Courbridge. So 1946 to 1973 there was a huge excavation led by Durham University, they used it as a training excavation at Courbridge and they were very interested in looking at what was happening at the site in the fort phases so the early phases of the site before it became a town which is what really had awarded excavations at a looked at. And one of the real legacies of that training excavation is how many people working in archaeology, in Roman archaeology, in Roman frontier studies came and dug at Courbridge. One of the reports from the time says it played a formative role in the training of many of today's archaeologists and historians and it really did, there's some names in there so the supervision was done by people like Eric Burley and Ian Richmond and Letras Charles Daniels and George Jobie who went on to do lots of work in the north of England but then people who came as students to Courbridge, there was David Breeze who wrote many of what I've become the books that you need to read on Hadron's Wall. Valerie Maxfield who became a professor of extern and did some really important work in Egypt looking at porphyry minds, quarries, the purple stone that she used around in high status buildings. There was JP Wild who is the expert on Roman textiles particularly in Britain but further afield Lindsay Elson Jones who many people have heard of who's done some amazing work on small finds as well as the evidence that they uncovered at Courbridge as to what was happening at this fort before Hadron's Wall was founded so Courbridge was founded in the late 70s, early 80s. Courbridge was the training ground for many, many people so it's had a huge impact on the wider Roman archaeology field because it's trained these people and sent them out into the world. Based on all that's investigation and the development of the study of archaeology as well and Roman studies in Northern England, what is the series of key understandings that we develop in this mid to late 20th century period? So up until about the 1950s, you essentially have this establishment of the detailed chronology, the function and form of the wall, and over the second half of the 20th century, you have sort of an evolution to consider far more about how life worked within, for example, the fort's Courbridge as this complement to the fort's along on Hadron's Wall as this frontier town and with a sort of a greater sophistication of archaeological techniques, we started to be able to answer different questions and be able to uncover the evidence from different periods. So for example, what happened at the bitter end at Oswald? Bearing in mind what we know so far as a result of these 20th century archaeologists, how many digs have there been since the end of the 20th century and up until the present day, and how much more do we need to learn? So there hasn't been a huge amount of excavation in comparison to say the previous 150 years. However, what the house been is a lot of catching up. So there's been a lot of sites that were excavated that had never been published or studied and there was a real concerted effort in the 90s and early 2000s to do that and that was helped. Published the corbid excavations, houses excavations and other forts on the wall. Kind of the bigger excavations that have been, there was obviously Bird Oswald, which was the late 80s and early 90s, on the site of the fort. There was also in 2009, there was some rescue excavations when it was realised that part of the cliff was disappearing with an earthing and they were extremely important on the cemetery site at Bird Oswald. Again, actually at Bird Oswald, Newcastle University in Historic England and we've done a podcast on that are excavating this year, 2022, again outside of the fort. There's been smaller excavations, particularly in the urban settings and time side when there's been developer funding excavations that have found things. Some of the key things have been pinning down the line of the wall in parts of Newcastle and investigating parts of the fort at Benwell when there's been housing developments. But I think it is very easy to say we should dig more to find more. But actually, huge amounts of our archives have not been properly studied. As Andrew was saying, we change our research objectives and things we're interested in, say we, the field, and there's a lot more that could be discovered by looking back through our collections. And also scientific techniques have come such a long way and there's always something new that we can look at. We're involved with a project linked to Cardiff University that's going to be looking at cattle supply to Hagen's wall compared it to the military sites in Wales. And that'll be using isotope data which, you know, wouldn't been possible 20 years ago. I think if there's one sort of area where excavation can potentially change our understanding of the wall, it's not so much within the fort's themselves or a study of the linear elements of the wall. It's outside the fort in the Serrani communities. So some of what Francis talked about there in terms of a Bados wall were excavations that took place in the civilian settlement or else in the burial, in the cemetery essentially around the fort. And that's where the ongoing excavations at Bados wall are really trying to make a difference to really understand what these communities were like and the people that lived there. If we shift our attention to the modern day then, how has the story of Hagen's wall been recorded in modern history and in popular culture and literature? So there've been plenty of creative responses to the wall that go all the way back to the late medieval period where it was kind of appearing in maps. It's also in the last 500 years appeared in various works of art, in literature, in film, even computer games. So it often turns up in the background or as part of visual media, most famously in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, filmed from the '90s. It turns up as a backdrop to Kevin Kostner's return from from Crusade to Nottingham via Dover and Hadrian's wall, which is not a route that I'd necessarily recommend and certain part of the action takes place at a place called Sycamore Gap, where you have a tree growing right on the line of the wall. It's very popular to this day with Taurus to come and recreate that moment. More recently, it turns up in the latest Assassin's Creed video game, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, where you're able to kind of visit the wall after the Romans have left, although the wall actually looks suspiciously more like the Great Wall of China, rather than Hadrian's wall as we know it. And it turns up often in various places in literature. The idea of a wall is something that is often played with by authors. The idea of having a kind of a boundary to a kingdom or to a society as a kind of a bulwark between that society and what is outside of it. And that idea kind of goes all the way back to the Romans who saw and to the Historia Guster, which records that Hadrian was the first to build a wall between the Romans and the barbarians and many creative responses to it, sort of take this idea of the wall as this sort of bulwark between civilisation and the dangers the other that live outside it. One of the most recent, very famous popular culture things that have taken inspiration from Hadrian's wall is Game of Thrones. You know, an absolutely huge phenomenon that has got a wall at the northern edge of its empire that separates, you know, the kingdom from the wildlings as they call them. It's written by a man called George R.R. Martin and he has stated that he came to house debts and stood at the northern edge of the fort, looked, you know, down, looked north, and thought about the soldiers stationed on the wall. Now the Ice Wall in Game of Thrones is quite a lot bigger than Hadrian's wall ever was. It's absolutely huge. But what's really interesting is that concept of other and he calls them the wildlings there, seen as less civilised, more savage. And, you know, that is how the Romans portray people outside of their empire. Game of Thrones has become a phenomenon and we do have people come into houses because they've read or seen Game of Thrones. But there's other bits and Bob, so Wajar Kipling wrote a book called "Puk of Pukes Hill" in 1906. Story of a soldier based on the wall. In 1937, Ordon wrote a poem "Roman Wall Blues" for the point of view of Centurion, who appears not to be very happy to be stationed along the wall. Ordon did not seemingly have a good idea of having nice weather on the wall. And actually, only last week, I was having a chat with an also who wanted some information because he's been commissioned to write a short story for young adults for the Hadrian's wall, 1900 Festival, and based on Hadrian's wall. So it's constantly inspiring people, you know, whether that's, as Andrew said, visual, audio, the modern digital video games. It just inspires people all the time because it's looms so large. Lots of estates, I've got street names of "Roman Thoughts" or "Roman Names". The "Metro Station at Walls End" is all in there. Latin, Sagadunum, you know, there's bits everywhere along the wall that reminds you your near Hagen's wall and on this Roman site. Yes, so the interesting thing about Game of Thrones, I find is that there's this idea that, as Francis says, that you can build this barrier that protects you to kind of civilisation from the other, the wildlings on the other side of it. But ultimately, what's quite interesting is that that is proved to be futile, not only to do eventually the night's watch, allow the wildlings through the wall and then ally with them. But the wall eventually is going to come crashing down because the true danger the white walkers will ultimately destroy it. So I think there's something of a lesson in that for those that would think that walls mean that you'll be protected. Looking beyond the walls present and into its future, how is English heritage ensuring that the ruins of the wall and its forts are conserved and preserved, Francis? Well, we're doing a lot, so English heritage, each region has what we call building conservation manager and they organise repairs to the wall of all sorts, that's what I was seen by a team of perpetrators who are usually archaeologists and extremely knowledgeable, because almost all the works to Hagen's wall require some sort of permission, known as scheduled amendment consent. We have to seek that permission from historic England, who's the public body that looks after, you know, nationally, England's historic environment and I think probably most visitors wouldn't realise or notice a lot of the work we do, but you would notice it if we didn't do it because the monument would start to deteriorate. So the main issues that we have to deal with across the wall are keeping on top of drainage, probably a mansion we have a fair bit of rain, re-bedding of loose stones and that can be due to people or sheep, both of whom we would discourage to walk on the wall, ground erosion, burying animals and vegetation growth and each one of those requires us to do different work. We've got four pay to enter sites and thirty free to enter sites all on the wall and they're all in slightly different environments, you know, some of the smaller ones upon the top of the basalt cliffs are extremely exposed to the elements, so each site has a conservation plan as well as a statement of significance and that helps the perpetrators and the conservation manager to understand the site and its needs, its priorities, you know, what's its archaeological potential and we do different things. So lots of our free sites are mostly within farmland, managed by farmers and they're grazed by sheep which in one way is great, it keeps a vegetation down, you know, vegetation can do a lot of damage, but everyone will have seen a photograph of a sheep climbing on Hagen's wall. You know, they do get curious or just cheeky in the climb on the wall and re-bedding stones on Hagen's wall is quite a large task as there's a countryside code. There's also a Hagen's wall national trail code that we sign up to which is about picking up your litter, closing gates, but also not walking on the wall. English Heritage alongside Historic England are coming to the end of a very long project which has been looking at types of mortar because you want to use the correct type of mortar both kind of historically but also to ensure that it's going to stay for longer and each of our sites have different weather conditions, the stone that the walls built from varies, so this research has been kind of about 20 years in the making because you have to leave mortar samples out to find out if they're going to last or weather and it'll really help our teams to use the best materials to protect our sites, they've even been trialing some of the mortar mixes that are similar to those ones the Romans used to see whether or not we could go back to kind of more Roman recipes to save for mortar. Another really hidden thing that people won't realise we do is drainage. Now many visitors to the Temple of Mithras at Karabrof will have gone and thought, "Oh, site's a bit boggy here isn't it? That's through natural springs have been kind of courses of change." But unfortunately we can't do very much about that, we've got drains already in, stalled and they do a lot to keep the site dry than it would be, but if we dried the site out completely then the archaeology that's underground would suffer because the archaeology just got used to being wet. So the propriety and conservation manage, it's a constant balance of what's good for the archaeology, what's good for the visitors, what's good for the environment. So lots of our central sector of Hagen's Wall is within a triple SI, so a site is special scientific interest. So decisions made there on those sections have to take into account the archaeology and the ecology. You know it's a constant juggling act. We mentioned earlier but also where in 2009 there was an excavation of the cemetery because the cliff was being eroded away by the river. Now there was a big study done on, could we shore that cliff up, could we protect the archaeology by stopping that cliff eroding, but it was a cost analysis was, you know, that it would be millions almost, you know, to shore that cliff up and then even then a big storm or another event could take it down. So the decision was taken to excavate and kind of sacrifice and accept the part of that cliff will collapse and that's the sort of decisions we make at all of our sites. It's, we have to repair the monument and keep it in good nick, but you're also trying to weigh up the costs and benefits and we're also really, what we're really looking to have and I wanted to give them a shout out here really in this section. There's a wonderful team of volunteers who are wall monitors and they go out not just, we actually have these nationally, not just on the Hagen's Wall, but to all of our free sites and they do regular checks. So they'll take photographs and sending reports of what the site's looking like to keep an eye out for erosion, rabbit holes that might be bringing up archaeology, vegetation, but also quite often they're picking up litter and reporting any acts of savandalism or damage by people and they're really key part of our conservation work is keeping on top of the monitoring and recording the state that our monument is in, agent's walls, not a small site to deal with and so there's a lot to do. Yes, 73 miles of conservation and preservation to potentially look after there. Bearing in mind all the work that goes into ensuring that the wall is as historically accurate and well presented as possible. How important is the wall to the overall economy of the north of England, Andrew? Well, it's vitally important. Hagen's wall gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. People come from across Britain and across Europe across the world to visit Hagen's Wall. They can range from coach parties to day trippers to those who are determined to walk the entire length of the wall. And it's part of the World Heritage Site, known as the frontiers of the Roman Empire, alongside it's the more northernly Antonin Wall and the Lemais in Germany. The reason why it can sustain this level of visitorship is because it's one of the most extensively interpreted ancient monuments in the world. English Heritage has a portfolio of four major sites, but Oswald, Hashtag's Chesters and Courbridge as well as 35 or so free to enter sites. But there are only one part of a wider offer along the wall. So there are half a dozen or so other museums run by different organisations along its length, which provide, again, more variety, different kinds of visits, different kinds of sites. And indeed, beyond the sort of the Roman story, there are various non-Roman sites. You know, there are low to castles, there are conservation areas, areas of outstanding natural beauty, and some other sites that we've also discussed today, I think places like Lanarkost and Hexham that kind of enrich the deep in the story of the wall and broaden it out to sort of the rich history of the North. So for example, it's role in the development of Christianity and Anglo-Saxon England. And all of this is really supported by an infrastructure, you know, such as hotels and restaurants and cafes and things. Good lateral rail links is a railway that runs along the frontier, a road that runs along the frontier. And indeed, you can visit many sites along Hexham's wall by catching the AD122 bus. So when you've put all these together, you've really kind of come full circle and you have a restoration of a community that could hear some extent around the line of the wall just as it would have done 1900 or so years ago. And in fact, the wall is surrounded by towns and villages just like settlements sprang up around the forts 1900 years ago. But what is Hadrian's wall like as a place to live near to today? Francis? Well, it completely depends where you live. If you're living in walls end, then there's not very much above ground to see, but you've got lots of your street names. I've got Roman names. You have a big museum, as I said before, your metro station is in signs of enlatin. So you never forget, I don't think even though maybe there's not huge upstanding remains to see. If you live in some of the tranquil parts on the time Valley, say, in Chester's, it's a beautiful place to live. You're on the brown, tourist stages wall route. You're going to see lots of visitors walking the wall. You might run a cafe or a B&B that depends on that. And then it changes again. You're living in some of the more remote places in a central sector or towards Burdos Ward. You'll still be seeing the visitors, but it's a rural, but a very different environment to what's around Chester's. And then when you get over towards Carlisle and the Western section, you have much less kind of upstand remains again because of the way that the monument remains, but you've got different sites. And you're all along, you're going to have visitors coming to the wall, walking the National Trail. I think it's probably a very unlikely you wouldn't know that the wall was here and at least that it was Roman. Most people who've grown up in this area have been to the wall on a school trip or with family. It's very much a part of the locale you live near Hadrian's Wall. So it's different, I think, to say the 17th, 18th, 19th century where the farmers perhaps don't know what the wall is or maybe don't care. I think most people know [BLANK_AUDIO] and are at least interested to some extent in that war and perhaps proud that they come from where the war is because it is so well known. - So it does continue to be a sort of fascination for local people, visitors and academics. That's a pretty impressive legacy 1900 years on after it's initial creation. But here's a final big question for you both. What would you say is the place of Hadrian's War in the wider history of Britain? - Oh. (laughs) - I mean, physically it occupies 73 miles of the British Isles from one river to another. So I think that's geographically quite an impressive thing to start with, but what else would you say? - I think it's the first large scale monument that has been put into the North of Britain for me and it marks such a change for the people in the area where the war is built. And even when the Romans leave, their mark has always been left with the war and no matter how misunderstood it is, there's always some sort of understanding it's always in people's minds, whether that's in literary sources or artisans. So I think it's, I don't know, it's longevity and it's the fact that it still fascinates people and one of the reasons I find it fascinating is that there's still so much we don't know. I think people love the fact that we don't know everything. Well, I do anyway. The mystery of history, as you might say, Andrew, what's your final thought about what Hadrian's Wall's place is in the wider history of Britain? - Well, I think the kind of initial episode centered upon how this material legacy was sort of initiated as part of this really impressive Imperial project. Our middle two episodes have really been about kind of adding more people to that picture and how they have adapted, perpetuated the war and left this deep and rich archaeological legacy. I think what this episode demonstrates is really the richness of what comes next and how the war provokes thoughts, not just about its specific history but about the nature of borders, how it kind of inspires creative responses. And ultimately comes an object of deep fascination to visitors from across the country in the world. And I think this is really crucial because it propels Hadrian's Wall to become what I would say is only really one of a handful of ancient monuments that kind of transcend the specifics of their original function, transcend the original history as it were. And thus it's kind of this touchstone in debates about the past, not just about Roman Britain but also about borders and also kind of an inspiration for people to make sense of Britain's past and present. So I guess I'd kind of leave you with this. I think that in its 1900th anniversary beads words are still apt when he wrote his ecclesiastical history, he said that this famous wall is still there to be seen and I would encourage visitors to go and see it to think about its history, but also to reflect on what it means to them or else let it inspire their creativity. And in doing so, move the story of the wall into a new chapter. (gentle music) You've been listening to the English Heritage Podcast. Next week we're introduced to Henrietta Howard who built Marble Hill in southwest London. After all that uncertainty going from lodging to lodging with her first husband then being taken around as part of the Royal household, it must have felt like thank goodness, perhaps I've got at least a little bit of stability. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]