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00:00Today we take for granted the motorways, A-roads and city streets, over 2,000 miles of them that form the skeleton road map of Britain, and all because of the Romans, with their ingenuity and dogged determination to conquer everything in their path.
00:22I'm Dan Jones and I'm going to retrace the story of our Roman past along six of their most iconic roads.
00:30Each road tells the story of our Roman legacy and its rich history, from their very first road across Kent, which powered their invasion, to the vital routes which helped them conquer most of Britain, before being beaten into retreat by the Scots.
00:47In nearly 400 years of occupation, the Romans changed Britain forever by bringing their armies, ideas, buildings and religion.
00:57But the Romans couldn't have done any of it without one thing, their roads.
01:02This time I'll be looking at two important roads which intersect in the north-east of Britain, Deer Street and Stain Gate. Together they were integral to the expansion of the Roman Empire here.
01:25Deer Street runs for 226 miles. It heads north from York and loosely follows the route of the A1.
01:35When the Romans built Deer Street, their aim was to extend their territory as far as they could. This road goes to the furthest reaches of their entire empire.
01:44Deer Street runs all the way into Scotland, where it dissolves into a series of byways, but before it gets there, it crosses Stain Gate, a key east-west route.
01:54So when I reach that junction, I'll explore some of Stain Gate too, because the Romans built their great stone barrier across northern England right beside it.
02:04Hadrian's Wall is now recognised as one of the wonders of their empire.
02:08Deer Street, Stain Gate and Hadrian's Wall are part of a story about Roman military and colonial ambitions in Britain.
02:15Now, the Romans saw no reason that their empire should have any limits.
02:19While some of our native tribes were happy to collaborate, in Scotland there was a different story.
02:25The history of Deer Street is one of an invading army being tested to the very limit.
02:32I'll explore how the Romans, faced with forceful resistance from the native tribes, had to rethink their whole invasion plan.
02:41Its starting point, York, was founded in 71 AD by a legion of the Imperial Roman Army, known as the 9th Spanish Legion.
02:51Their name for the city was Ibaracum, which means place of the yew tree.
02:57My journey starts at a place of great significance to the Roman invasion.
03:02This is York Minster, one of the world's most magnificent medieval cathedrals.
03:07Where the Minster stands today was once the Principia, a military headquarters in the middle of a vast legionary fortress.
03:15Now, this column was found in excavations under the Minster.
03:19It's one of 16 that once held up the Principia's Great Hall.
03:23And I suppose it's ironic that a place where today people pray for peace was once filled with Roman centurions planning for war.
03:32When York was founded, the Romans had already been in Britain for 30 years.
03:37In that time, the southern tribes in our land had been mostly pacified.
03:42But the north remained a contested and rebellious region for centuries.
03:49York still bears the hallmarks of an army defending its territory from hostile tribes living nearby.
03:57This is the Multangular Tower. It once formed a corner of the fortress.
04:01Now, that top part was rebuilt in the Middle Ages, but you can still see the bottom section contains the original Roman bricks.
04:10Archaeologists believe it would once have stood nine metres tall.
04:14And for local people who mostly lived in single-storey buildings made of thatched wood and mud, that must have been quite a sight.
04:23Adam Parker of the Yorkshire Museum knows the history of the Roman civilisation here and of the tower.
04:31Why is there this massive wall in the middle of town?
04:34So, the Multangular Tower and the city walls that come off on the side of this, this is the legionary fortress.
04:39It was first constructed in AD 70-71 by the 9th legion and was originally a big timber fortress.
04:45And this is designed to house 5,000 to 6,000 men of the Roman legion whilst they're here in the north.
04:50So, this is the launch pad for the rest of the invasion further north past Yorkshire.
04:54So, why did the Romans need 5,000 or 6,000 men right here?
04:59Geographically, we're between two big Iron Age tribes in the region, the Brigantes and the Parisi.
05:05The Brigantes had a client relationship with Rome, which eventually broke down in the middle of the 1st century AD, requiring greater military invention on the parts of the Romans.
05:15So, you're between these two dangerous tribes. Are the walls then just to keep them out?
05:19This was a big monumental imposition in the north of Yorkshire.
05:23So, it's a place to house the troops and then they're going to move forward beyond it.
05:26It was never really designed to be a place where soldiers are fighting from the battlements down onto an invading group of people underneath them.
05:32So, the walls here just to impress people?
05:34They have several functions, one of which is to impose initially the dominance of the Roman Empire in this part of Britain.
05:41But they also serve to show the power and the importance of the legion in this part of Britain.
05:46And it had some pretty illustrious visitors as well.
05:49At least four times the city of Ibarakum was visited by Roman emperors.
05:54So, the Emperor Hadrian, he's the great builder, he's on a great tour, he visits different parts of the empire.
05:58And then this is the furthest fringe in the north.
06:00In the third century, Septimius Severus comes here because he's on a military campaign further north into Scotland.
06:06And Constantius Chlorus comes here to impose some more Roman dominance on the region.
06:11Why would an emperor feel the need to come all the way to the end of the empire?
06:16Why not just sit in the middle and send your generals?
06:18It's important to be able to deal with regions that are politically unstable as quickly as possible.
06:22York was founded because of this unrest with Brigantes.
06:26And it could very easily have...
06:28The history could have been very different if there were different political uprisings against people against Rome.
06:33Having the emperor here with leading the front of the army, bringing additional troops in as well, very much stamps that down.
06:41Ten years before York was founded, the Romans quashed a rebellion led by Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni tribe, at the Battle of Watling Street.
06:50They were determined to keep hold of their precious territory in Britain.
06:55York was a strategic place from which they could control the surrounding territory and, more importantly, launch expeditions further north.
07:03And to reach those wild lands, the Romans did what they always did. They built a road.
07:09This is more or less where Deer Street begins.
07:14Now, this archway is medieval. It stands on the site of an earlier gate, the north-west gate of the Roman fort.
07:22This is where my journey begins, and I'll be following in the footsteps of many a Roman legionary.
07:28As those soldiers marched up Deer Street to expand the Roman Empire, they hoped for glory.
07:36As I journey north through Yorkshire and beyond, I want to discover why the Romans met so much resistance from the local tribes.
07:44I'm uncovering the stories behind the great Roman roads of Britain, those famously straight routes that many of us still use today.
07:59Deer Street was built on the orders of the Roman governor of Britain, Agricola, as he set about conquering the territories north of York.
08:0717 miles beyond the city walls, my first stop is the village of Oldborough.
08:13In Roman times, it was known as Isurium Brigantum.
08:20This is what the Romans called a civitas, essentially a local town for local people.
08:25And in this case, the people were a native tribe called the Brigantes.
08:30In the early years of the conquest, they seemed to have had a sort of on-off alliance with the Romans.
08:35By the middle of the second century, that alliance had stabilised.
08:39And this town was built as a sort of Roman-style capital for the Brigantes.
08:45For the last decade, archaeologist Rose Ferabee has been uncovering the story of Isurium Brigantum.
08:52I've come to find out more about life here during the Roman occupation.
08:57So where are we standing now if this were Roman times?
09:00Well, we're on the edge of the Roman town, on the western edge.
09:04So this rather submarine-looking structure here is actually the town wall.
09:09And out where the conifer trees are, that was the defensive ditches.
09:14Okay.
09:15And it's dipping away down there.
09:16And then, if you imagine, that's the wall, that's outside, and here's inside.
09:21Our surveys have started to give us an impression of the road system and the governance.
09:27And what we've realised is that, basically, this is a town built fresh.
09:31So this is a sort of Roman new-built town, a bit like Milton Keynes in the second century AD.
09:37Why would the Romans build a town for this region?
09:41Oldborough is on a point where it's on a trade route.
09:44But also, it's when the Romans decide to go north.
09:46And we know that, as a town, it seems to have been established properly
09:50and built in its formal layout in about 120 AD.
09:54Would the people of this region ever have seen anything like this town before?
09:58I think this town itself would be unusual for the local population.
10:02We now know that the forum is about three times as big as the present church,
10:06and it's built of beautiful white limestone.
10:09It would have shone out in the landscape.
10:11So imagine coming out across the river and seeing this big town with its imposing red walls
10:16and its big forum and basilica in the centre.
10:19It's hard to imagine what Roman Oldborough would have looked like,
10:23but this artist's impression of a Roman forum gives us an idea of the kind of art.
10:27architecture seen throughout their empire.
10:31Oldborough was deliberately grand.
10:33It was meant to showcase the best of Roman life in an attempt to civilise the locals.
10:40Evidence of their lavish lifestyle was uncovered in the 19th century.
10:44Wow, that's incredible. I mean, I don't think I expected to see a mosaic out in the middle of, you know, a village in Yorkshire. What's the story?
10:57So what we've got here is a lion sitting underneath a palm tree, and all that's really left of him, you can see his tail, and sort of his crossed paws at the front.
11:07Yeah.
11:08So the story is that someone was burying a dead calf in here, and they dug a hole, and that's when they came across the mosaic.
11:13So actually quite a bit of the lion is missing because of that. But we can see the general outline of it sitting under his tree.
11:20And what this is telling us is that the residents of Oldborough, far from being at the far-flung edge of the empire, shivering in the cold, were well off.
11:29They were part of a sort of wider Roman culture. And they were doing things like bathing. They had underfloor heating.
11:37Well, the best rule in the world. I don't think anyone in Yorkshire, particularly in Roman times, had ever seen lions sitting under a palm tree.
11:44So this is probably giving us a sense of real cultural interchange within the Roman world.
11:49Exactly. And not just that, but the fact that there are very talented craftspeople coming through as well.
11:54The image of the lion may have come, that the craftsmen brought the image with them, but also there's the small chance that they may have seen lions in the amphitheatre, which Oldborough has.
12:04And the fact that Oldborough has an amphitheatre is another indication of just how well off its residents were.
12:11That's amazing. And what a picture this gives us of this town 15, 16, 1700 years ago, somewhere that was, you know, in its way, I guess, like a mini road.
12:22An amphitheatre with lions and gladiators, similar to these ruins, it shows how important the town was.
12:29The Romans were able to build it here because the queen of the local Brigantes tribe had agreed to their governance.
12:36She was called Cartimandua.
12:38According to the Roman writer Tacitus, Cartimandua had an affair with a Roman soldier, was kidnapped by her jealous husband and eventually had to be rescued by the Romans.
12:49Despite becoming a sort of client state, it seems that the Brigantes continued to revolt against Rome for more than a century.
12:59Now, it's hard to know exactly what lay behind the fighting, but seeing as the Brigantes controlled a vast amount of territory stretching from Derbyshire to Northumberland,
13:08it's unlikely that everyone within that was signed up to Project Rome.
13:16Like most native tribes in Britain, the Brigantes left no written records.
13:21Most of what we know about them was documented by the Romans, so the information is one-sided.
13:27Whatever the cause of the fighting, the Roman army was kept busy here well into the second century.
13:33Forts were built along Deer Street to try to quell descent.
13:40As I continue my journey through North Yorkshire, it's obvious that geographical and physical obstacles presented no issues for the Roman engineers who built this road.
13:51This is Pierce Bridge near Darlington, where Deer Street crosses the River Tees.
13:57Now, before Roman times, there would have been a ford across this river, but using it would have meant diverting the road.
14:03And that was simply not the Roman way.
14:06The Roman way was to build a bridge. In fact, they built two.
14:11The first was made of wood, crossing the river roughly where the George Hotel now stands.
14:16The second bridge, dating from the third century AD, was built of sturdier materials.
14:25These stones are all that's left of the Roman bridge that once crossed the River Tees here.
14:30Now, in its prime, it was 123 metres long, held up by a series of stone piers.
14:37It may have looked something like this artist's impression of a similar bridge in Kent.
14:43Where's the river gone? Well, over the years, erosion has gradually moved it that way, to the north, leaving this bridge stranded on dry land.
14:54Now, in Roman times, such a valuable piece of engineering would never be left undefended.
14:58So the Romans also built a fort here, staffed with hundreds of soldiers.
15:03One of their tasks being to maintain the bridge.
15:06That's a lot of effort to go to, just to avoid a bend in the road.
15:10Further north along Deer Street, the modern A1 heads off towards the coast.
15:16It's the A68 which now follows the Roman route, deep into Northumberland and towards the Scottish border.
15:23At the town of Corbridge, I find the junction where Deer Street, running north to south, intersects with that other important Roman road, the Stain Gate, which linked the east and west coasts.
15:35As so often happened, where the two roads met, the Romans built a fork to control the crossroads.
15:41Over time, the fork grew into a town.
15:43This town was a bit different, because this was a town right at the edge of the Roman world.
15:49Corbridge stands a hundred miles north of my starting point in York.
15:56It's probably one of the best preserved Roman towns in the whole of Britain.
16:00And over the years, some extraordinary finds have been made here.
16:04They tell us a good deal about the Roman legions who built it, and their plans for defending their empire.
16:10Dr Andrew Roberts is one of the historians who looks after the site, and he's going to give me a private tour.
16:17Andrew.
16:18Hi, nice to meet you.
16:19How are you doing?
16:20I'm okay.
16:21Bit cold, but...
16:22So here we are in Roman terms, right at the end of the civilised world.
16:26Why were the Romans here?
16:28Well, they were intending to conquer all of Britain.
16:33And Corbridge was an important part in a strategic network of forts that was intended to help that happen.
16:40So what came first, the town or the military?
16:42The military come first, and they build a series of forts in the late 1st century into the 2nd century.
16:49And then sometime, probably about after AD 160, the military don't need it in the same way as they used to.
16:57And so a town grows up where the fort used to be.
17:00And how was that town connected to Deer Street?
17:02Corbridge sits at an intersection between the major north-south road, which is Deer Street,
17:09and also the major east-west route, which we call the Stain Gate.
17:13What the residents did was that they created effectively a high street at the point at which these two major routeways connected.
17:21A Roman high street is pretty much like a high street is today.
17:25You're going to get the butchers and the bakers. You're also going to get artisans.
17:29You're going to probably have some pubs here.
17:31There would have been some temples here to Roman gods, and so travellers might want to stop in and worship.
17:36So even though we are right at the fringes of empire here, there's still a sort of connection with the centre of the Roman world.
17:44Things are fused with local culture and local styles, but this feels very Roman, even though we are right on the way to Scotland.
17:53It does, and I think part of that is because of the communication network, the road system.
17:57Because you still get the same kind of material culture, the same kind of objects, the same kind of clothing,
18:04the same kind of jewellery or pottery, and the same kind of cultural influences, such as architectural influences,
18:11travelling across the Roman world, and they even end up with a place like this, like Corbridge.
18:16Wherever you go in Roman towns across Britain, there seems to be quite a set pattern of town building.
18:22You know, it's almost like it comes off the shelf in the building.
18:25Is that a lack of imagination? Why not sort of vary it wherever you go?
18:29It's something of an archaeological joke, which is that the Romans did things the same everywhere,
18:34apart from all the exceptions, and we get a little bit of both at Corbridge,
18:38in the fact that they do try to establish that same broad pattern where you have a kind of a high street,
18:44and you have all the important buildings at the centre and different zones.
18:48But Corbridge itself is a little bit unusual because it doesn't quite become a town like any other in the Roman world.
18:57We've never, for example, discovered a forum at Corbridge,
19:01which is pretty much a standard building that you'd expect to find.
19:07There's more to Corbridge than the remains of a once-booming Roman high street.
19:12In 1964, archaeologists unearthed something extraordinary here, the Corbridge Horde.
19:18It's a remarkable set of personal effects from a soldier's life,
19:22dating back to the era when the town was still a fort.
19:27Sometime in the early 2nd century AD, a soldier, or maybe a group of soldiers,
19:33decided to pack away some of their equipment and personal effects into a box and to bury it.
19:40Any idea why?
19:41Any idea why? No. Well, possibly they were moving, they were posted somewhere else.
19:45They were moving on, they couldn't carry everything that they wanted to carry,
19:50and they probably intended to come back for it someday.
19:53I'm really interested in this armour. Now, obviously, on the left-hand side, that's replica.
19:58But tell me about what this was made up of.
20:03Well, what you're looking at is the famous Lorica segmentata, or the segmented armour breastplates.
20:10Now, until this was found, we didn't actually know how it worked.
20:16So we knew that they had segmented armour, we didn't really know how it was worn, how it fitted together.
20:20But because the cord was so carefully packed away, buried and preserved,
20:25archaeologists could figure out how it was worn and how it was fastened.
20:31There's a huge range of weaponry and other tools here. Just talk me through what we've got.
20:36Well, we have bundles of different spheres here. We've got some tools, including pickaxe.
20:42We have a scabbard from a sword.
20:46So, actually, it's a pretty complex life, and certainly a complex facility that you had here
20:51with an enormous amount of material needed to sustain a soldierly existence.
20:56Exactly. And a unit of soldiers was essentially almost like a travelling town.
21:01And you had to have all of the skills that you'd need for not just your military duties,
21:08but also for your life in general.
21:10So the soldiers who would have worn and used all this, would they have come from Italy,
21:14or would they be local lads, or who would they be?
21:17I think maybe from the soldiers from northern Spain.
21:19But you've also got to remember that some of them came from places like Germany and northern Europe.
21:22So the climate is not so different.
21:26Once they were here, they probably remained here for the rest of their lives, in many cases.
21:32And multiple generations of the soldiers and their families would have stayed here.
21:39By the early second century, those soldiers defending Corbridge
21:43and the northern edge of the empire were stretched to the limit.
21:47In the face of the constant raids coming from Scottish tribes,
21:51the time had come for a big military intervention.
21:54Next, I'll be finding out the plan devised by the Romans to take the battle to Scotland.
22:01I'm travelling the Roman roads of Britain, exploring two key routes that helped the Romans expand their empire here,
22:15in the first and second centuries AD.
22:17Deer Street and Stain Gate.
22:19I've travelled 100 miles north from my starting point in York, through snowstorms and strong winds.
22:25In a sense, we're only in the middle of the British Isles geographically.
22:30We're sort of in the centre of Britain.
22:33But it feels like the end of the world.
22:36And it must have felt like the end of the world to people coming to this most northerly frontier of the Roman Empire.
22:42I mean, sometimes it can be perfectly nice and sunny and warm and actually quite picturesque up here.
22:48But when it's bleak in the winter, it's really bleak.
22:53I've turned off Deer Street for a moment onto Stain Gate,
22:57the Roman road built sometime between 77 and 85 AD to run from east to west across Britain.
23:04The reason for this detour is that I'm approaching a key landmark,
23:08one of the most famous and imposing Roman remains in their whole empire.
23:13In year 122, the Emperor Hadrian came to Britain in person to sort out the problem of constant rebellions by the native tribes.
23:24His solution for peace was a particularly Roman one. Build something and make it big.
23:30And this is Hadrian's Wall. Stretching for 74 miles, it's so impressive that it's a World Heritage Site.
23:40Unable to conquer the northern territories which form modern Scotland,
23:46Emperor Hadrian built this long barrier running from coast to coast across the narrowest part of northern Britain.
23:53It's a strange thing really because today this is somewhere to walk the dog or go for a ramble
23:59or just come and inspect a piece of our ancient national past.
24:03But once upon a time, this was a really serious piece of military engineering designed to overawe people on both sides of it.
24:11In its heyday, this wasn't just a wall. It was an awe-inspiring defence system, manned by 10,000 soldiers and measuring more than four metres in height.
24:25Every mile along its length, there was a gateway and small watchtower called a mile castle, with a dozen soldiers guarding it.
24:32And every seven miles, there would have been a full-scale fort.
24:37I've come to a reconstruction of one of those forts, Vindolanda, to understand what life by the wall would have been like in Roman times.
24:45So in the 1970s, there was a replica of Hadrian's Wall built, using original Roman techniques, and this is it.
24:54And actually, this is the first time I've come face to face with what Hadrian's Wall really would have looked like
25:01for someone trying to get through it or even trying to get over it.
25:05I mean, there's just no chance. It's absolutely enormous.
25:08First of all, it's the scale of it, and then it's the sense that if you had only ever seen single-storey buildings made of timber, thatch, mud, basically,
25:21and then suddenly this foreign power, this invading colonial force, comes through using techniques and materials you've never seen before
25:31and just cuts a sway through the landscape from coast to coast.
25:35It must have been absolutely astonishing.
25:38You stand here, and even though this is a replica, you get the sense that Hadrian's Wall wouldn't just have been intimidating.
25:47It would actually have been terrifying.
25:53Dr Andrew Burley runs the trust which looks after the fort today.
25:57He's agreed to reveal some of the secrets of the wall.
26:02This really gives us a sense of what life on the wall would have been like.
26:07Yeah, it gives us a sense of scale, which is so hard to see on the ground when you just see a little mound or an inverted monument or just a few feet high.
26:14So here we've got a tower that's about eight metres tall, and this is what we think is a sort of typical height of the towers that are between the mile castles.
26:21So we've got the curtain wall itself, the main sort of barrier, the physical barrier, and then between every mile castle, and there's a little sort of fortlet or castle every mile with a gate, so you can go from one side of the wall to the other.
26:33We've recreated one of the towers here to give you an idea of scale and the sort of view you'd get from the top of the wall.
26:39So this is just really one of the smaller towers along the wall.
26:42Yeah.
26:43That's quite amazing to me because it's massive.
26:45How long did this take to build? This was built in the 1970s.
26:48This was 1974. It took about six months to put this up, with volunteers doing the bulk of the work.
26:55So when the original Hadrian's Wall was built, legions doing it rather than volunteers, how long would it have taken then?
27:02We can imagine that with their sort of whole military supply and scheme everything around about them, it would take them three or four months to put up an equivalent section to this little bit that we're standing on.
27:11And not just towers and bits of wall. They've got to do the mile castles and there are forts behind and the road and the infrastructure.
27:18This isn't something that just the governor of the northernmost bit of Britannia would do. This is something that's centrally planned.
27:26Every single person paying taxes in the Roman Empire, a little bit of their tax is going into this.
27:33Wow. Did people complain about the wall at the time? Do we know?
27:36Well, we know that tourists visited the wall because we have some tourist memorabilia that have been found as far away as Amiens in France,
27:43where you get little cups with Hadrian's Wall forts carved along the edge of them and the little names across the top.
27:50So, you know, as it is a tourist attraction today and a landscape and a monument people come to visit, the same thing happened 2,000 years ago.
27:57It was such a big thing, such an event in this landscape, that people all around the Empire got to know about it.
28:03How much did it cost to build this Hadrian's Wall? It must be massively expensive.
28:07Well, in modern terms, you're talking billions. Yeah, quite simply.
28:11Maybe it just sounded good. Maybe it's Hadrian's just like Donald Trump of the time.
28:15I want a wall, so build me a wall, and then we'll think through the reasons for doing it afterwards.
28:20Building this colossal wall required some 30,000 men, with a support network of a further 60,000 over the best part of a decade.
28:30For its entire length, a defensive ditch ran in front of the wall.
28:35This can only have increased its overwhelming appearance in the local landscape.
28:40Where did the people who came to build the wall, to man the wall, what parts of the Empire were they coming from?
28:46They come from all over the Roman Empire.
28:48So this fort here has got mixed garrisons of Dalmatian mountain soldiers, but we've got Tungrians from Belgium, Batavians from Holland,
28:57we've got Spanish cavalry, we've got bargemen from the Tigris, we've got, you know, it's the whole Roman Empire distilled on this narrow bit of land in Britain.
29:08It must have been a bit of a shock to come from Dalmatia, that's modern Croatia, or that Adriatic coast,
29:13and come and be freezing your nether regions off up here in the wilds.
29:17Well, it would certainly help to keep you working, wouldn't it? You know, warm through work, absolutely.
29:21That's probably an imperial message as well.
29:24Emperor Hadrian himself came to supervise the building of this defensive structure, unprecedented in the whole Empire.
29:35In the very same way you get dignitaries inspecting, you know, big public works today, you can imagine the Roman soldiers put on a good show,
29:41and some of the most impressive sections in the middle here, no doubt he inspect it.
29:45So the emperor kind of shows up, puts his high vis and his hard hat on,
29:49yeah, lads, that looks all right, and off he goes back to Rome.
29:51And as soon as he leaves, they make some of the mildcastles smaller, they make the wall thinner, you know,
29:58they think, right, we've got to get this done.
30:00Forts along the wall would have been busy multicultural settlements.
30:04Vindolanda itself was built on a boggy site, which must have been unpleasant for anyone posted here.
30:10But the Romans' loss ended up being our gain,
30:14because waterlogged soil is ideal for preserving organic items like leather and wood.
30:20Andrew has unearthed a treasure trove of Roman items that tell us a lot about the people who lived in the shadow of the wall.
30:27Well, these look rather fine. Are they found here?
30:30They're found here, yeah. This is just a selection of the over 7,000 items of leather that come from this site,
30:38of which over 5,000 are shoes.
30:40Do we know who would have worn shoes like these?
30:42Yeah, and this is the... we do, and we get a really good impression of the sort of population that was here through the items of footwear.
30:48Partly because we're a dimorphic species, so men and women have different shaped feet, which is really useful, on average.
30:55But also the different shapes and sizes tell us of the different sort of type of population that's here.
31:00So, the first two examples here are both men's boots. Military boots from the first century.
31:08So this is just after the Stayingate Road has been built, and we've got these sort of open boots here,
31:14with the very fine lace work you see at the back.
31:16They look a bit too delicate to be tramping about around Hadrian's Wall.
31:20I mean, I'm not a military man, but I would want something a bit more sturdy.
31:23Well, I kind of agree with you. I mean, if it's a sort of daylight today and it's a bit sort of snowy out there, I prefer this one to this one.
31:30Yeah, for sure.
31:31But you can see this has actually been cut off a little bit. I'll hand it to you. You can sort of...
31:34I can hold it.
31:35Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can sort of get a feel for the weight of it.
31:38Can I have a sniff?
31:39You can have a smell if you want. Can you smell a leather?
31:41I can't smell a Roman's foot.
31:44The crowning glory of the collection is a set of small slices of wood known as the Vindolanda tablets.
31:50They give us an incredible insight into everyday Roman life and turn on their heads many of our ideas about them.
31:58And so, on the tablet, you've got, oh, it looks like someone's shopping list.
32:02Very simple. Actually, you're not too far from the truth.
32:05And what this tablet actually is, is a thin piece of wood about the size of a modern-day postcard, a couple of millimetres thick, covered in ink handwriting.
32:13Again, it's a message from 2,000 years ago. This is somebody's mail.
32:17Wow.
32:18It's a letter that's been sent to Vindolanda from a merchant in Catterick, who's called Octavius, and he's writing to Candidus.
32:26He's saying, hello. And he's talking about a business deal that they've got, involving a huge amount of wheat and leather goods, like the shoes we've got down here, hides.
32:35But he's got a problem. The roads that they talk about being so fabulous, the first Roman reference from Britain about those roads, he says,
32:43Duh mal et sunt. The roads are awful. Terrible.
32:47So, you know, everything we've taught at school, is that complete rubbish? According to the Romans, it might be.
32:52They're not impressed with their own highways. Wow. So they've got, what, potholes and ruts and what have you, have they?
32:58Too dangerous to send the wagons. Not prepared to risk the beasts pulling the wagons because of the state of the roads.
33:04These are people having to deal with the conditions on the ground 2,000 years ago to keep this base supplied on the edge of the frontier.
33:10Massive amounts of stuff have got to come up those roads. They've got to work.
33:13And for poor old Octavius riding to Candidus, they are certainly not good enough.
33:17Those are the everyday things which we can't get from any other way.
33:21So to travel back 2,000 years into Britain, where we have so little, you know, recorded history from Roman authors,
33:30to get the people on the ground, the everyday person telling us what life was like, that's priceless.
33:37Roman roads like Deer Street were not just used for military purposes.
33:41They were also vital for postal services, keeping towns connected right up and down Britain.
33:47Some of the letters found at Vinderlander show us that the Roman army found time for social events.
33:54This is a birthday party invitation.
33:56No, no, no.
33:57Between a commanding officer's wife, who's not based at Vinderlander, inviting our commander's wife to her birthday party on the 11th of September.
34:04And she's finished off the letter in her own distinctive handwriting, which is the earliest female handwriting we have from Western Europe.
34:12That's astonishing.
34:13That is amazing.
34:14So you know, if we think of history as being the written word, this sort of stuff is stunning.
34:19We're learning this sort of stuff which we couldn't get in any other way.
34:23Wonder what the party was like?
34:24Oh, I hope it was a crack.
34:27The extraordinary items found at Vinderlander, a testament to the thriving communities travelling along Roman roads like Deer Street and Stain Gate, to the very edge of the Empire.
34:38What's more, Hadrian's Wall wasn't just a physical barrier against the native tribes, it was also a mystical one.
34:46Soldiers carved images of phalluses into it, and while it may seem like dirty graffiti to us, they would have intended it as symbols to ward off evil, which is how they might have viewed some native tribes.
34:59As I continue my journey along Deer Street into Scotland, I'll discover what impact Hadrian's Wall had on the Roman's colonial ambitions in the northernmost parts of Britain.
35:17I'm close to the end of my journey along Deer Street, the northernmost road in the Roman Empire, and not far from the border with Scotland.
35:25By the mid-2nd century AD, Hadrian's Wall had done its job in keeping the peace between the Romans and the native tribes in northern Britain.
35:34But Hadrian's successor, Emperor Antoninus Pius, wasn't ready to give up on the conquest of the whole of Britain.
35:41Once again, the Roman legions took to Deer Street for a long march north.
35:46When Hadrian's Wall was built, maybe this was supposed to be the end of the Empire, but actually, within the generation, under Antoninus Pius,
35:54they're pushing up further again into what we now call Scotland, and trying to build another wall even further north.
36:01It's just this incredible military infrastructure project, centrally planned, ordered not by a local governor, but by the Roman emperor himself.
36:11It just shows how important this part of the world was in the minds of emperors.
36:16Going beyond Hadrian's Wall takes me through the beautiful and rugged territory of Northumberland, and across the border into Scotland.
36:26From Darlington to Melrose in the borders, Deer Street gradually reduces in size.
36:31Having been the A1, it turns into the A68, and then a series of unpaved trackways.
36:38The lowlands of Scotland were never really part of the Roman Empire.
36:43But even here, Deer Street runs as straight and as true as anywhere.
36:49Even in the middle of hostile enemy country, legions stuck to their task.
36:53You've kind of got to admire them.
36:57The Romans called this region Caledonia, and they wanted it to be their own.
37:03In Scotland, Deer Street never outgrew its original purpose, which was as a line of communication for the army.
37:10So all the key Roman sites north of the border, like this one at Tremontium, relate to the military.
37:17After Hadrian's death in 138 AD, Antoninus Pius made a determined effort to try and conquer Caledonia.
37:27At first he was successful, and by 142 AD he started building the Antonine Wall, about 100 miles north of Hadrian's Wall.
37:37But unlike Hadrian's creation, this was a series of huge earthworks, mounds and ditches designed to slow attackers down.
37:45Antoninus Pius tried to secure this territory using a series of existing forts built by his predecessors Agricola and Hadrian,
37:55such as the fort of Tremontium, 60 miles south of Edinburgh.
37:59I've come to meet Dr John Reid to find out more about the type of resistance the Romans faced in Caledonia.
38:06So traditionally this has been a fortified area?
38:09Yeah, I mean this was a native stronghold. Every one of the hills around here has got a hillfort on the summit.
38:18This is one of the densest areas of a hillfort construction in Europe.
38:23So there are nearly 200 hillforts within a sort of 50 mile radius of this area.
38:30Now it seems to me that this was a very hard site for the Romans to hold.
38:33Even when they were here, they had massive troop numbers just to stay here.
38:37Why didn't they just leave it out and head back down south? Why didn't they keep coming back up north?
38:41I think it's to finish the job because Britain wasn't entirely conquered so they had to draw this line of Hadrian's Wall and as soon as you put a wall up you get bad feeling on both sides of the wall.
38:57So every generation, every 20 years there would be an uprising and the wall would be attacked.
39:03What was it about the tribes up here in what we call today Scotland? Boy, were they just harder?
39:08This was a clan based society steeped in tribal warfare and this would have been a landscape where people were used to warfare between tribes.
39:21It's another part of the problem, simply the fact that we are now just so far away from the centre of the Roman Empire and even with great roads like Deer Street cutting a swathe through the British Isles, it's just really hard to keep in touch with this part of the Empire.
39:38Yeah, I mean you're right at the end if you like of a supply chain. The portrait in the fields here is coming from Spain.
39:45The oyster shells that were found down here have been brought in live in salt water from the coast so you've got a supply chain that kind of is stuttering to an end.
40:00The line of the viaduct there is where Deer Street crosses the Tweed and that is at the end if you like of a very long infrastructure.
40:11Beyond the River Tweed, Deer Street is really just a track leading through beautiful but windswept countryside towards the Firth of Forth.
40:20Even though this is the very edge of the Empire, that didn't stop the Romans from transporting their military equipment here for their battles with the native tribes of Caledonia.
40:30Their weapon of choice was the ballista. A few were found buried in the well underneath Tremontium and John has a working replica.
40:38What's interesting to me is to get something like this up to somewhere like Tremontium or do you need a road?
40:45Yeah, you're going to need a road, you're going to need carts and you're going to need transport because these are heavy.
40:52Although two people can lift it, you can't lift it very far and there's going to be a wagon train of artillery for every major movement of troops.
41:01And what does it shoot?
41:02Well, this particular one shoots large wooden arrows with a spiky end, armoured piercing, probably about two feet long, roughly two and a half feet long.
41:18Okay, what do I do?
41:22Well, you need to get the bowstring back. This is under pressure, under tension now. So you use a pulley system and there's a ratchet mechanism that stops the bowstring going forward until the trigger's pulled through you.
41:35So I'm just turning this round.
41:36Literally, just wind it.
41:39Ah, I see. So if I stopped it wouldn't...
41:42It doesn't go forward.
41:43Right, so we just keep going.
41:45Keep going.
41:46Okay, good. I can feel it getting tenser. Obviously that's what we want.
41:50Yep. One more.
41:52That's probably going to take out the barbarians.
41:54Oh my God.
41:55So that's it. So the trigger mechanism here releases the string, your arrow lies in the groove there, and the string just propels it forward.
42:04And someone about 250 metres down there falls over.
42:08Yeah.
42:09That's the idea.
42:10Shall we see if it works?
42:11Yeah, go on then.
42:12I'm just pulling this.
42:13Yeah, just pulling that.
42:14Should I be nervous? I am nervous.
42:15Yeah, you should be nervous, but just let it go.
42:21I mean, that's an amazing amount of power from a bit of string, isn't it?
42:24Yeah, it certainly is.
42:25But a lot of engineering that goes into doing that. I mean, how many of these would be operating at one time?
42:32In a legion between 20 and 30 of these.
42:35Right.
42:36Per legion.
42:37And rate of shooting?
42:38Well, the modern re-enactors can get up to three or four bolts a minute.
42:44Right, so you've got 20 or 30 in a legion, three or four a minute, that's, my maths isn't good enough, that's a lot of arrows all coming at you.
42:52Very, very fast.
42:53Very fast.
42:54Very fast.
42:58Despite having these lethal weapons, the Romans never got the upper hand over the mighty Caledonian tribes.
43:05The fighting up here was so incredibly fierce, it gave rise to a famous legend, that of the 9th Spanish Legion.
43:14Now, the 9th were a storied fighting force. They were the same legion that had founded York in AD 71.
43:20Sometime in the early 2nd century, they marched up here and never came back.
43:26Now, what happened to them is a mystery.
43:28Some people think there's just a gap in the historical record and they were actually reassigned to the continent.
43:33But others think they came here to fight and were all massacred.
43:38What we do know is that after numerous attempts to occupy Caledonia, the Roman army eventually gave up.
43:48Only eight years after completion, the Antonine Wall was abandoned in 162 AD.
43:55The Romans fell back to Hadrian's Wall, reinforcing it as a strong border.
44:00It still makes a vivid impression today.
44:05Back in the days of Julius Caesar, before the legions arrived here,
44:09many Romans expected that they'd be able to keep on conquering new territory forever.
44:14They even had a phrase for it.
44:16Imperium sine fine. Empire without end.
44:20But it turns out the empire did have a limit. This was it.
44:25Deer Street became a road to the end of the Roman world.
44:29And there's more with Dan next Wednesday night at eight.
44:39Autumn heralds the awesome power of nature.
44:42Don't miss brand new Atlantic, a year in the wild, Friday night at nine.
44:46A new next delve deep into the world of Lawrence of Arabia, Britain's great adventurer,
44:52the man whose impact can still be felt in the Middle East today.
44:55Stay with us.
44:59We'll see you next time.
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