#corbridge

Roman Corbridge Hoard, The British Museum, London

It's a Hadrian's Wall trip, and Corbridge was a Roman fort, but it predated the wall, was not directly associated with it, and became a Roman town.

It's an interesting variation on the fairly standardized forts along the wall. It was at the intersection of the North-South road connecting York and Scotland and the East-West Stanegate. As such, it was on the Romans' major supply and transportation roads and a convenient invasion route for the Scots.

A nearby site at Red House Farm held a Roman campaign site from AD 77 to 85, before the founding of Corbridge.

The visible ruins are in the area of the Roman fort, but that's only a small fraction of the entire site which covered 40-50 acres. For a long while, Cobridge was the largest town in Northern England.

This is another damp site, which seems normal for Roman forts. A source of water was important to the Romans, and that often meant damp feet for their forts.

Like many forts, the layout of Colbridge varied over the years. But since Colbridge was built in stone early, stone forts were built on top of stone forts. Of course, the foundations of the older fort buildings had already settled and were more stable than the open areas in between. So later walls settled between the crossings of older walls, leading to buildings with huge differential settlements. This had to lead to great problems in the stability of the later buildings.

Another difference was the troops stationed here were Legions, while the wall was defended by Auxilaries. This is a big difference.

Legions comprised Roman citizens, while the Auxiliary comprised non-citizens from within the Roman Empire. Legions were higher paid, had better armor and weapons, and considered themselves much better than the Auxiliaries. The Auxiliaries worshiped a mix of Roman gods, the local Gods of their place of origin, and the local British gods. The Legions worshiped the ROMAN gods in official-looking Roman temples with carving that looked like official Roman carvings.

I can only imagine the Legions' distress when their buildings in Corbridge started settling.

Corbridge was also the site of a stupendous archeological find. When the legionnaires were moving to a new location, they packed up all the kit from the local fort. One crate contained all the odds and ends from the local storerooms. Apparently, there wasn't room for it on the carts. So the soldiers solved the problem by burying the crate. Inside were all kinds of military hardware that modern scholars hadn't seen. Most important of these were a pile of parts for Legion armor. It had been unclear how this armor worked, whether it was functional or just ceremonial, etc. But here they had bits and pieces from multiple sets of armor. So it was clear that they were actually used, and scholars could figure out how it went together. They could also build a modern reproduction and put British soldiers in it and have them do the various tasks that Roman soldiers would have done. It turned out that the armor was reasonably comfortable and the soldiers could work in it.

One thing I’ve always loved is living where I do.

Literally a stones throw from Hadrians wall.

(Fun fact, the masculine Latin version of my name is Hadrian)

The Corbridge Solid Silver Lanx or Serving Tray, 4th Century CE, Buried on the outskirts of Corbridge Roman Town, Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland.