Some of my Scottish friends have claimed that the Romans could never have taken Scotland and Hadrian’s wall is proof of this. I don’t think this is true - I know that the Roman’s built other walls further north (the Antonine wall?) and have heard that Roman camps have been found as north as Thurso. The real reason the Romans never took Scotland was that there was nothing really attractive there.
What’s the SD?
I would agree that the Romans simply were not interested in Scotland.
They had a thing about walls, partly they were a bit of a barrier to marauders, but also they acted as trading points.
Robert Frost might not have been the first to say ‘Good fences make good neighbours’
I read a couple of books talking about Hadrian’s wall, since I live in a city right at its eastern end. They both agree, mostly, to FRDE’s opinions: the wall was a way to stop raiders, giving them a hard obstacle to their movement. In addition to that, the wall and the Northern camps acted as a sort of early warning system, with its watchers in their observation posts “sensing” when someting was up and communicating with the nearest legion HQ south of the wall.
All of this would create a feeling of security in the population, improve their morale and make them less prone to rebellions. The Romans tended to use these tecniques in the early Imperial age after Domitian. In a way, it was simpler to defend the territory against an army than to ensure tranquillity to the population: you just need a chain of forts and a bunch of scouts to spot the advancing troops, and then you just collect the legions and give them a good whacking, but lower intensity threats, such as brigands and nomads, were trickier. You have to let them stay away from your territory, or the population wil be unhappy, and to achieve that you have to bar the way as much as possible.
Who made these claims ? Was it Simon?
As for the real purpose of the wall, I agree with FRDE and Lars. And would like to add that its positioning somewhat came about to take advantage of natural ridges. I cant remember of the name of the place, but the wall actually cut straight through some Roman territory.
If the Roman powers that be had chosen, they could have held the line further north - they built the Antonine Wall between the Forth and Clyde, but also had forts for maybe 20 years in a line through Angus and Perthshire (Tayside).
Page 2 of this pdf from Historic Scotland gives a concise summary…
Just a minor OT complaint: “Good fences make good neighbors” shows up in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”–as an old saying repeated by a small-minded yankee farmer. The narrator (& poet) believes: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/730.html
Yeah, he’s tried to claim it a few times.
Thanks for the replies.
Yes, but is it known to be an old saying, or is there a chance that Robert Frost created the saying in this poem? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I’ve never heard this phrase attributed to anyone but Robert Frost and The Mending Wall.
Prove them wrong. Hard bastards us Scots you know! 
Whit? Now hold on a minute…
Ehh, aye ok then, yer probably right.
I recently took an ancient civlizations course and was told (and I repeat it now to see how the Teeming Millions react) was one of the purposes of Hadrian’s wall was a simple make-work program to keep Roman soldiers busy after the empire stopped expanding. Idle hands and all that.
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The Mending Wall was published in 1914. The use of the phrase in the poem seems ironic and is used by the neighbor as a prefit response to the protaginists questioning of the process of rebuilding the fence.
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How high was Hadrian’s wall? Also, was it continuously manned? After the Romans left Brittania, how long before people started using the wall as a source of building materials. And, what did medieval writers know about the wall-did they know why it was built?
Actually, for this, Wikipedia will answer your questions
The stone parts were 16-20 feet high, the dirt/turf parts were about 12 feet high. The forts along the wall were permanently manned.
Here’s the Venerable Bede on Hadrian’s Wall (although he thinks it was built by Septimus Severus:
I think the purpose of the wall was to create jobs for the commander ordering it. So he could create a big budget and build his empire of underlings. All the rest was cover. I think this is what happens to this day. Programs are proposed with a hidden agenda, by people who see there is money to be thrown around and want a piece of it.
This Wiki article is quite interesting, although it does not cite its sources.
Building forts was a no brainer, they then needed a road to connect them. I’m sure I heard somewhere that the top of the wall doubled as a road. That article seems to say as much.
The Legionaires would have been a supply of cheap labour, and wall building and repair would have kept them out of mischief.
It strikes me as quite a sensible idea, plenty of advantages and few drawbacks.
Nope. For quite a bit of its length there would have been barely enough room for two people to pass on foot. (This was R.G. Collingwood’s argument against the wall being conceived as a simple defensive barrier: there’d not always be enough room for a unit of soldiers to easily operate along it if they were frantically trying to repel an assault.) The milecastles and watchtowers would also get in the way.
Furthermore, there was already a perfectly good Roman road, the Stanegate, running along the route of the wall just to the south. It’s also worth emphasising that, whatever purpose is assigned to the wall, it has to be seen as one part of a system of forts - such as Vindolanda - ditches and roads over a significantly greater depth.
True, they could have, but the largest occupied area not necessarily turns out to be the most convenient. According to a book I read, the tribes living between the two walls were more or less reliable neighbors until the time of Antonine, when they became more aggressive, so that prompted a military occupation. This gave the Empire a shorter frontier and a larger territory, but the population was low and unfriendly, the land was not really rich, and the new neighbours further north were not even remotely neighborly, if you know what I mean. So after things calmed down in the lands between the walls, a later emperor, I cannot recall which one, established client kingdoms and withdrew to Hadrian’s wall.
The Empire therefore had a longer frontier and a smaller territory for a while, but, after sorting out the security issues, there was not much of interest to keep the Romans there. After all, you want to occupy the optimal amount of territory considering your expenses and your gains, not necessarily the largest.
I seem to recall that a sizeable section of the wall was omitted, and that villages in the south near that section were periodically raided from the north by “private armies” specifically formed for indvidual incursions. Their main booty was livestock.
What I don’t recall is any suggestion of why that section was left unwalled.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
I popped in the small museum in my University, where they have a very good exhibit on Hadrian’s Wall. They also have a scaled-down reconstruction, and the wall was complete, from the Atlantic to the Northern Sea. I also asked, and the local expert confirmed it to me. He suggests that maybe what you read referred to what happened after the Romans left Britain for good and locals started using the stone from the wall to build.
So this story has a moral: Don’t Recycle Your Local Roman Fortification, even if you can’t be bothered to go shopping for bricks, or The Barbarians Will Get You!
Ah - thanks. Maybe it was post-Roman, but in that case it raises the question of why only that section was dismantled at the time. An unguarded wall wouldn’t seem to present much of an obstacle.