January 24th in the year 76 is the reputed birth date of Publius Aelius Hadrianus the greatest wall builder Scotland can call a friend. 😉
Although now entirely in England it is in what was often called, ‘The debatable land’ the areas around it having changed hands on many occasions, work started on the wall was built in 122AD and stood as the northern frontier of the Roman Empire for over two centuries.
It is thanks to Hadrian’s Wall that the land which became Scotland was first considered one territory. It’s also a fact that we know more about Hadrian than just about every King of the Scots until Malcolm Canmore who reigned almost 1000 years later, and the emperor who in a real sense created Scotland turned out to be a fascinating character.
Hadrian is known as one of the Five Good Emperors, the others being Nerva, Trajan, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.
Hadrian’s family were from modern-day Spain and he may have been born there or in Rome in 76, as his father was the cousin of the previous Emperor Trajan, who looked after the boy when Hadrian’s father died when the future emperor was just nine.
I’ll skip the full story of his life and press on with the story of the wall.
Hadrian knew the east of the empire well, but not the far west. He travelled through Gaul to Britain and there he was told of the fierce barbarians to the north, so often portrayed on page and screen as savages, who frequently raided south deep into Roman Britain.
These “barbarians” were most likely the Picts who then occupied most of what is now Scotland.
As someone who commissioned or oversaw the building of bridges, aqueducts and temples and who made the Pantheon the greatest building in Rome – it survives largely intact even now – the solution to the northern problem was simple. He would keep out the barbarians, and thus ordered the construction of a wall right across the “waist” of Britain from Luguvalium to Coria, or Carlisle to Corbridge as we know them.
The story is told that he was informed that it couldn’t be done – Hadrian went to Eboracum (York) and supposedly drew up the first plans himself.
For the first time, the inhabitants of what we know as Scotland knew they had a southern limit – not that it stopped them invading anyway. It was 73 miles long and in places was up to 12 ft high and 20ft wide, with forts and fortlets spread out along the wall. It remains the largest Roman artefact still extant in the world.
So was it really the southern border of Scotland? Never officially called the border, the Wall still marked the extent of the Roman Empire with everything south being Roman Britain, especially after the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and Forth was abandoned only eight years after it was completed in 154. And the Romans did not leave until the 5th century.
So for centuries, everything north of Hadrian’s Wall was seen as the land of the barbarians, and that is why, when the land we know as England was invaded by the Angles, Saxon, Jutes, Danes and Norsemen, the peoples north of the Wall were left to their own devices.
It has been argued that no one has ever really “conquered” Scotland in that the country we think of as Scotland did not really come into being until the Picts and Scots joined together and later took back Strathclyde and the Lothians from the Britons and the Northumbrians respectively – it was only in 1018 that the Battle of Carham finally confirmed the land north of the Tweed on the east coast as part of Scotland. Various English kings claimed “overlordship” of Scotland, but the man who came closest to conquering this land was a commoner, Oliver Cromwell, and even he left alone the far north and the Hebridean islands.
Hadrian died in 138, having defined the limits of the Roman Empire in the West, limits that did not include Scotland, and we should be grateful to him, for it took a man of genius to realise that the people of this land are different from those south of his Wall.
