MILITARY INSTALLATIONS

The army had a monumental impact on the character of Roman Britain, and was responsible more than anything else for those defining characteristics of Romanization. Its remnants dominate the archaeological record. The army was not a faceless mechanism made up of disciplined and programmed androids executing imperial military strategy. It was also not an exclusively military organization in the way we understand it. Evidence from around the Roman Empire, especially Egypt, shows that soldiers were often behind public buildings and engineering projects. They acted as administrators and policemen, tax-collectors, manufacturers and labourers, and even trapped wild animals for the circus. In other words, soldiers did more or less whatever was required of them by the state.

Units in the Roman army, legions and auxiliary regiments alike, were proud of their identities and loyalties to their respective commanders, and jealously maintained traditions of titles and ethnicity. Those identities were cumulative products of each unit’s individual history, and stretched back in some cases over several centuries. The XIV legion left Britain by around the year 70, but for the rest of its existence it basked in the titles Martin Vic-trixy won for suppressing the Boudican revolt. In the same manner, the RAF’s No. 617 Squadron is known to this day as the ‘Dambusters’ after its exploits in May 1943, and will be for as long as it exists.

The identity of a regiment, with its standards and battle honours, provided a solid psychological and social foundation [96].

Where it had been based and for how long, from where its numbers had originally been recruited, and what its duties had been, all helped to create a unique combination of military traditions and external influences. A unit that had been based for generations on a Hadrian’s Wall fort, for example, had over the years abundant opportunity to interact with the local population, affecting customs and language. A unit that had arrived in Britain after a period based somewhere else on the imperial frontiers brought its own ethnic traditions, absorbed from where it had been based, and perhaps soldiers born to women there.

96. An auxiliary cavalryman.

A rmxlern re-enactor poses as a second-century auxiliary cavalryman near the earth-and-timber Antonine fort at Drumlanrig (Dumfries and Gallowav).

97. Vindolanda (Northumberland).

Altar dedicated to lupiter Optimus Maximus by Quintus Petronius Urbicus, commander of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls. Early third centurv.

The army in Britain has been afforded much attention in traditional Roman archaeological and historical literature because of its visibility in the record. This is so crucial that its effects cannot be overestimated. Inscriptions provide us with more evidence than anything else for religious activities, individuals and families. In Britain, almost half of all surviving inscriptions come from the Hadrian’s Wall area, and most of these are explicitly attributable either to a military unit, or to individual soldiers [97]. The rest are usually attributable to probable soldiers or their immediate civilian associates. Most of Britain’s other inscriptions belong to the military zone. Even in the so-called ‘civilian’ towns of southern Britain, a grossly disproportionate quantity of the few extant inscriptions can be attributed either to soldiers from the military phase of the settlement’s existence, or to later soldiers in transit or on other duties. In other words, soldiers were far more likely to commission inscriptions, whether commemorative unit inscriptions, individual religious dedications, or tombstones. This raises the important question of how much soldiers were responsible for other examples of Romaniza-tion, such as the use of coinage or building of accomplished architecture, even where we cannot prove their involvement.

Since archaeologists necessarily use surviving physical evidence to understand and assess each community, this visible and tangible bias to the military raises all sorts of peculiar problems. The apparently higher levels of literacy amongst soldiers, testified in Egypt where documents survive much better than anywhere else, correspond with Britain’s epigraphic record. In a remote province, where literacy scarcely existed before the Roman invasion, the Roman military may not only have been the principal engine behind Romanization in all its forms, but may have remained so throughout much of the period.