Saxon Shore forts and the later Western Roman Empire in Britannia

Chapter IV Saxon Shore forts and the later Western Roman Empire in Britannia We will start this chapter with the subject of the Saxon Shore forts, as this could be the key to understanding more fully the Roman occupation of Britain especially during the later empire. The detailed material on the forts in this part of the chapter comes from a CBA report, “The Saxon Shore” from 1977 edited by D E Johnson and the recent work by Nic Fields “Rome’s Saxon Shore”. As I indicated in the introduction this subject has been troubling me for over 50 years, in the text in my very first history book “HISTORIC BRITAIN” under a picture of the walls of Burgh Castle Gariannum was this vignette. Below is a relatively recent aerial photo of the castle which tends for me to confirm what was indicated in the text in that book. Here’s the 175  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia conundrum, we could consider it the first question. If this fort was built, as we learnt at school, to provide defence against the marauding Saxon pirates, why does the part facing the sea, from whence the pirates would come, have no wall. The second question is also as simple. Archeology shows that these forts weren’t all built at the same time; they date from a period between the early 3rd to the last half of the 4th century AD. This was the period when Roman villas were flourishing across Southern England, why do we have these massive forts when unlike in Gallia at this time none of the villas have defensive walls; they are all built in a similar style with complete openness. The distance between the forts would have allowed the Saxon pirates to move inland without being detected, once there they could fall upon these rich defenceless villas and plunder them. This doesn’t seem to have happened. The third question is why the overkill. These massive forts are mostly capable of hosting a complete legion, their auxiliaries and ancillary personnel, a number approaching 20,000 people. We have seen in chapter II that the Anglo-Saxon invasion was initiated by arrivals of two, three or at maximum five boats, it would be difficult to believe that the numbers 150 years earlier would have been any higher. The logistics are the same as we discussed in chapter II so we can expect the Saxon raiders to be of a maximum number of one hundred and fifty pirates at one time. The forts, at least the later ones, are fitted with towers set forward where artillery (ballista) was almost certainly mounted to protect against attack. They are set far enough forward as to be able to protect the walls from attack through enfilading interdiction. Even if there was only an eighth of a legion, with their auxiliaries stationed in the fort there would still have been 1,500-1,600 warriors in a very understaffed fort. But that would still be quite enough to deal with 150 pirates (a ratio of ten to one). The later forts are massive with walls as high as 8 metres plus. The Saxon pirates would have had to carry siege towers with them in their boats if they wanted to attack them. It just doesn’t make sense. There is a much fuller section later in the chapter on Saxon Shore forts. Before that we need to understand more about the historical background to this period. It appears that most of these forts were built to protect against attacks by unknown hoards, something it appears that never 176  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia happened. They appear in the end in, spite of their initial role, to have served the purpose of protection against other Roman armies, or Roman trained armies at the least. A few hundred Saxon pirates under the rain of the bowmen’s arrows and balista bolts would have all died well before they even started to blunt their swords on the massive walls. To reiterate, in the same timeframe rich villas existed nearby without defensive walls. Even in the early Tudor period some manors were still being built with fortifications. So why would the high status rich and powerful part of the local population not need defences when all the towns and garrison forts did? We could conjecture that perhaps they didn’t need protection from the people that citizens and soldiers in the towns, forts and garrisons needed to be protected from. As we move from the late 3rd into the middle of the 4th century there was a great increase in the use of native troops from outside the empire as auxiliaries, notably from the nearby bordering Teutonic nations. There is a section on this blurring of the frontier after the Saxon Shore forts. In the later empire there was a period of military and civil chaos from AD 235-285. From the death of the last emperor of the Severan dynasty, Severus Alexander, in 235 until the access to the throne of Diocletian in 285 there was a succession of sixty four emperors or usurpers in less than fifty years. This was a time of Teutonic invasions, military backed revolts, counter revolts and the bloody repression in the case of their failure. For a period of 14 years from AD 260-274 the Roman Empire was split in three, with a Gallic 177  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Empire, a Roman Empire and an Eastern Empire with its capital in Palmyra in present day Syria, Britannia was part of the Gallic Empire in that period. This division of the Empire coincides within the period when the majority of Saxon Shore forts were built in Britain and northern France. The first two Saxon Shore forts predate slightly this chaotic period they were built in Britannia around 230 AD. These were at Brancaster Branoduno in the north of modern day East Anglia protecting the entrance to the Wash and at Reculver Regulbium on the North Kent coast protecting the entry to the Thames. They were possibly built as new ports for the Classis Britannia (navy) whose older installations were abandoned around this time. These first two forts were built in a period of relative calm when Severus Alexander was the last Roman emperor to preside before the descent into the chaos that followed; he reigned from 222-235 AD. The previous boy emperor, Elagalbus (the cousin of Severus Alexander), had been murdered by the palace guard; on Severus’s mother’s orders; women dominated the Severan dynasty. By this time in Roman history it isn’t surprising to learn that Severus Alexander was born in modern Israel in the Phoenician city of Caesarea sub Libano. Severus Alexander was said by the Historia Augusta to have presided over a golden era of reform and the reinstatement of the Senators into a role in government through a sixteen man decision making council. However the army was already flexing its muscle. The Praetorian Guard killed Ulpian the prefect of Rome that Severus Alexander had appointed and dumped his body at his feet. When he tried to bribe the Germans so that they wouldn’t attack Roman territory members of his army assassinated him. He was the final emperor of the Severan dynasty and his reign was marked by the last great civil building spree in Rome before the period of chaos set in; no further major civil construction would take place at Rome for a further fifty years until the reign of Diocletian. Severus completed the aqueduct, named for himself, aqua Alexadrina which was the eleventh and final major aqua feeding Rome. Again at Rome Severus Alexander had the giant thermae Neronianae refurbished and renamed the baths after himself. The construction of a couple of 178  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia replacement coastal forts in the Britannia province wouldn’t have been that much of a big deal in this reign. Most of the rest of the Saxon Shore forts were built during the period of military chaos in the fifty years that followed Severus Alexander’s reign. We now, following his murder, move into the period of military anarchy. The next emperor was a man of very low birth, Maximinus I, he was a giant of a man originating in the Danube limes (limes being the militarised frontier districts) who had risen through the ranks and who in 235 AD was the commander a band of Pannonian recruits whose members murdered Severus Alexander. The Senate, knife at the throat, accepted unwillingly his nomination as Roman Emperor; he was the first emperor in Roman history to have been originally an ordinary legionary. Throughout the imperial history of Rome since the demise of the Roman Republic military power had always been a factor in the elevation of a candidate to the purple but never before in such a blunt and blatant way. This “new man” Maximinus was soon faced with plots to dethrone him by men from the Senatorial ranks. This made him turn against this patrician class of Roman society completely; he removed all the officers from the army who issued from Senatorial families and replaced them with professional soldiers that he’d promoted. In 238 AD the Senate finally found Senatorial champions, who they named Emperor, one after the other, Gordianius Afircanus, Balbinus and Pupienus all of whom died one after the other one in 238. In spite of these three nominations the usurping soldier emperor Maximinus was actually killed with his son not at the hands of Rome’s appointees. He was murdered by soldiers from one of his own legions, his crime was that he was too much of a harsh disciplinarian with his troops; maintaining order with an iron rod. The Roman Senate in 238 AD had named four emperors; this was the beginning of a period that would see, within a generation, vast swathes of the Roman Empire being overwhelmed by invading Teutonic peoples. Towns all across the Empire, when they weren’t wiped out, hastily erected town walls where none had existed for hundreds of years. These new fortifications were often made from the rubble of destroyed or damaged major civic buildings; life suddenly became unsafe after hundreds of years of the security of Pax Romana. In the Western 179  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Roman Empire life would never be the same again. Although the fourth century is one of relative calm before the next approaching storm, there is a return of wealth and peace but under very different circumstances. The open society that characterised most of the early period of Imperial Rome was finished. The times when town walls were demolished and sub urbs spread out into the countryside was over. This put to an end to the citizens’ abounding luxury housing as well as large public baths and amphitheatres. Town folk would now 180  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia come into the walled town at night and the town gates would be often bolted shut. It’s really strange how we can tell of an ancient tale of two cities from nearly two thousand years ago. Londinium was founded by the Romans; Lutetia had its origins as the Parisii oppidium. Their Iron Age Gallic citadel was on the Ile de la Cité. As we can see from the maps below Lutetia spread out to cover much of the modern day Parisian left bank (known as le Quartier Latin in France), Londinium stayed within its walls. After the period of chaos and invasions when Lutetia had to return to the confines of the Ile de la Cité, Londinium actually covered within its wall more than twice the area of the newly confined Lutetia. In Lutetia after the Teutonic invasions the whole un- defended left bank of the Seine (including the Thermes de Cluny and the Arènes) was abandoned. Masonry taken from the monuments in the openly laid out classical town was used to make the ramparts of the walls that surrounded the Ile de la Cité making it once again the citadel on an island that it had been in the times of the Parisii. If you visit the archeological museum situated under the square in front Notre Dame Cathedral you can see the vestiges of these hastily erected walls. In short the Western Roman Empire by dint of the Teutonic invasions, which occurred because of the unstable and chaotic political and military situation, became an entrenched military society. Although these Teutonic invasions took place across Western Europe in the period of 250-280 AD, there had been warnings of what was to come nearly a hundred years earlier in 166 AD. In that year the Teutonic Marcomanni tribe crossed the Alps and invaded Northern Italy. It has to be understood that what we had seen right from the loss of Varus’s legions (Augustus’s nightmare) in the Teutonburg forest in 9 AD an increase in the number of Teutonic tribesmen being employed by the Roman army as auxiliaries to the legions. It is to be noted that after Augustus the emperor’s body guard was almost invariably Teutonic, they knew that they would be slaughtered to the man if the emperor was harmed or assassinated. This permeation of the Roman army by Teutonic elements over a period of 200 plus years meant that many of these auxiliaries set up home when their service was complete on the Roman side of the limes. But they inevitably kept their contacts with their fellow tribesmen; possibly just across the 181  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Rhine. We have already seen that one of the elements that was a factor in the demise of the Western Roman Empire was this blurring of a specific line of differentiation on the frontier between the Teutonic tribes inside the empire and those outside it. This occurred from the Wadden Sea, down the Rhine to and along the Danube. In certain tribal areas such as those of the Batavians, the Frisians and the Franks the frontier had bisected their territories from day one of the Roman occupation. It becomes clear that if the central government embodied by the Emperor, the Senate or the Roman army became weak or nonexistent then in these Teutonic areas with blurred frontiers all along the lines, (along the Rhine or Danube), that invasions would occur. And occur they did with a fiery assertiveness born of tribal connivances between those within and without the frontier. We first see an invasion in the region of modern day Alsace Lorraine in Germania Superior in 259 AD; people in these lands have stayed partially German speaking until today even though they are in France a country with a Latin language. In the year of 259 AD there was a large invasion of Gallia Belgica by Teutonic speakers, probably Franks. In 258 and 278 AD the entire territory of Gallia is ravaged by invading hordes. Many cities in Gallia succumbed permanently and completely. As we have seen, in those cities and towns that survived the stones and rubble from the widespread ruins of unprotected suburban buildings that, supported lifestyles of Roman luxury, were rapidly thrown up as city walls. In 260 and 270 the Alaman tribe roamed freely through Italy putting town and country to the flame and pillaging all they could. The rest of the classical world wasn’t spared either, the Goths in a reign of terror from 258 to 269 raided Greece, Dacia (modern day Romania), Thracia (modern day Bulgaria) and even Asia Minor. We have to wait for the reign of Emperor Aurelian from 270-275 AD for Rome to retake possession fully of its Western Empire. Even then Dacia, modern day Romania, was lost forever for Rome. Within nine years with Diocletian in power we see the beginning of the complete reorganisation of the Roman Empire. His administrative and military reforms were necessary he believed to confront this “Brave New World”. He would create the biggest administration the Roman Empire had ever known. He would create the tetrarchy a system of two Augustus’s and two Caesar’s to 182  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia run the empire; a system doomed to failure after his death by bloody internecine struggle between the named successors. Above all he created four new regional capitals or major administrative centres at Nicomedia (modern day Zmit in Turkey), Mediolanum (modern day Milan), Antioch (modern day Antakya in Turkey) and Trier (Treves in modern day Germany). He reestablished the army on a more territorial basis; it became an army less like the mobile legions of old and more and more of a sedentary and hereditary nature. This new age of walled towns and garrisons was also one of extensive military construction, although most of the Saxon Shore forts were built during the years of chaos. With all this pillaging, death and destruction going on just across the English Channel during the period of military chaos the province of Britannia was surprisingly peaceful. What Invasions there were often were undertaken by Roman legions to put down revolts and bids for powers by a governor in Britannia with, in the later Empire, three legions behind him. It must be said that in Britannia after Boadicea towns even the size of and above all the openness of towns like Lutetia had never existed. At the time of the destruction and pillaging of the left bank “Quartier Latin” of Lutetia in the mid-3rd century by the Teutonic hordes, Londinium was safe behind its massive walls built nearly fifty years before. This enormous 5 Km defensive array, with a military citadel at its heart, stood 6 metres high and was 2.5 metres thick. These walls remained the mainstay of London’s defences for a thousand years after the Romans left. This military work was built at the beginning of the Severan dynasty in the period of 190- 220 AD. Severan Roman Wall outside of Tower Hill Station © Google Maps 183  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia As Britannia was always a military province and as we have seen Roman civilisation had never really flourished there, it was actually much less affected by the period of military and civil chaos than the more fully Romanised provinces of Gallia. As we have seen in Britannia there appear not to have been Teutonic invasions on the scale we have seen in this period across the rest of the Western Roman Empire. Once again we go back to our two cities. The Vicus (suburban settlements outside the city walls) of Londinium around the south end of the bridge over the Tamesis in what is today Southwark was miniscule in comparison to the size of the walled town it served. By way of comparison in Lutetia the original citadel on the Ile de la Cité was miniscule in comparison with the very large unprotected Vicus on the left bank of the Sequana Seine. The Roman population of the province of Britannia was therefore living in well protected walled towns well before the waves of Teutonic invasions caused such chaos across the English Channel. The surviving urban populations in Gallia had to take refuge in hastily protected towns and live a much less comfortable lifestyle which ironically the Romans in Britannia had always lived. Understanding the initial achievements of the Severan dynasty, especially in its connection with the province of Britannia, is another key in our comprehension of the province before, during and after the period of military and civil chaos. We started this part of the chapter with Severus Alexander who was the last of the Severan dynasty which was founded in the year of 193 AD. Septimius Severus, the first of the Severan female dominated dynasty, had come to power following a four year long civil war within the Roman Empire which finally, as in 69 AD, saw four emperors proclaimed in the year of 193 AD: Pertinax the son of a Ligurian (the Genoa region in modern day Northern Italy) freed slave was proclaimed emperor by the Army and then murdered by them after only 87 days. Didius Julianus a high born North African ex-governor of Gallia Belgica lasted even less time being killed by a soldier in the pay of disgruntled Senators after only 65 days in power. 184  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Pescennius Niger the Syrian governor refuses to acknowledge the accession of Septimius Severus and proclaimed emperor by his troops, supported by Egypt after many battles he is finally captured fleeing from besieged Antioch, then executed. Clodius Albinus governor of Briatin posed the gravest threat to Septimius Severus as we will see below. A little background, on the Severan dynasty, you will find two QR and web links in the bibliography. The first2 is a link to crystalinks.com web site which is one of the best rapid descriptions of the 3 dynasty. The second link is to spqrlive.com from which I copied the genealogy chart to the left. This site has all the Roman dynasty genealogy charts that will help with your understanding of Roman history. Once again it isn’t my aim rewrite Roman history; that’s already been done by much more erudite peers than myself, but I do try and identify the pivotal points that concern our narrative. Septimius Severus was born in 145 AD in Lepcis Magna (modern day Libya); he was the only Roman Emperor to be born in Africa He had had a fine Senatorial career at Rome being consul in 190 AD. At the time of the events of 193 AD he was in place as the provincial governor of Pannonia. He was pronounced to be Emperor by his troops at the provincial capital Carnuntum on the Danube limes; in the most eastern part of modern day Austria. In the same year Pescinius Niger was acclaimed emperor in the East by the 185  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia legions stationed there. Being closer to Rome Septimius Severus was able to persuade the Praetorian guard of his “legitimacy” as an imperial candidate, Didius Julianus was abandoned by all and then murdered to make way for the new emperor. Septimius Severus met little resistance when he entered Rome where one of his first acts was to completely get rid of the existing Praetorian Guard, and replace it with a force twice the size selected from his Pannonian legions. Now that he held Rome and controlled a sizeable part of the army he set about eliminating his rivals. In the East he eventually overcame Pescinius Niger (governor of Syria) and actually extended the Empire more into Parthia in the process. After he defeated Niger in 194 Byzantium, the city that would within a hundred and forty years become Constantinople, was besieged, defeated, burnt and rased by Septimius Severus for its continued intransigence even after Niger’s death. During his reign of eighteen years he had Byzantium rebuilt and he had it repopulated. But in our context what really interests us about Septimius Severus in the elimination of his rivals is his dealing with Clodius Albinus who was a very popular career minded Senator who was governor of the province of Britannia in the fateful year of 193 AD. By this time after Hadrian’s consolidation of the northern defences of the province, with the wall bearing his name, the number of legions stationed in Britain had been reduced from four to three. But even three legions with their auxiliaries are nearly 40,000 fighting men. The governor of Britannia province would also have effective control of Rome’s only major ocean going navy outside the Mediterranean basin, the Classis Britannica. We are here at the crux of the problem for Rome when it came to Britannia This Island where the province was located was never totally under the control of the Romans, and as we have seen even some of the occupied areas were prone to revolt. The distance between Northern Ireland and Scotland at its closest point is less than 20 km and during all the Roman occupation the Scots, an Irish tribe at this time, raided present day Scotland and the North West coast of England with ease. The Picts after the time of Hadrian circumvented his wall that was meant to deter them and they came by sea and raided communities in Britannia. To maintain order in face of these incessant raiders and to keep control of a subject native 186  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia population with a tendency to revolt there was a much greater concentration of legions and their auxiliaries in Britannia than in any other province. The province of Britannia at the beginning of the reign of Septimius Severus accounted for 10% of the Roman Army; a hundred years earlier it had been an even higher percentage when there were fewer legions in total and there were four in Britannia. The governor of Britannia had walled towns, control of this large army, the control of the only major northern ocean going Roman navy and was protected by the effective moat that the English Channel has always been since the end of the ice age; and was even up to the middle of the 20th century. A recalcitrant or revolting governor of Britannia would in theory and in practice be very hard to remove. How was Septimius Severus then to overcome Clodius Albinus. What was perhaps even more important for Septimius Severus was how was he to make this province less of a reservoir of military strength that could be used in the future as a power base for disgruntled or ambitious rivals and usurpers. As we will see, Septimius Severus did triumph over Clodius Albinus. But neither he nor or any of his successors as Emperor of the Western Roman Empire ever really resolved the issue of the dangerous concentration of military power in the province of Britannia; although he and many following him tried very hard to resolve this problem. It must be said that it was just such an attempt at usurpation of power from a soldier in Britannia that led to the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. In 407 AD a common soldier in the Roman army, in the province of Britannia was proclaimed emperor by his brothers in arms; he took the title Constantine III. In the same year he took the last Roman troops in Britannia to Gallia to try and press his claim as Emperor. After a long campaign he lost his last battle at Arles Arelate. He escaped and quickly became a priest, only to be executed afterwards in 411 AD on the orders of the current Emperor Honorius. The troops he brought with him were integrated into Honorius’s army and neither they nor any other Roman troops ever returned to the province of Britannia. Clodius Albinus crossed to Gallia in 195 AD with most of the Roman troops garrisoned in the province of Britannia; this reduction in 187  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia defences led to mayhem as the unprotected northern parts of the province were sacked and pillaged by the until then undocumented tribe of the Matatae. Clodius Albinus was popular in the provinces of Gallia and the legions there rallied to him, he set up his headquarters in Lugdunum, modern day Lyons, the regional capital of Gallia Lugdunensis. Battle took place between the two antagonists just outside this urbs, a clash that must have been between a total of about eight to ten legions with their auxiliaries roughly evenly divided between the two camps. Septimius Severus nearly lost the battle, he finally triumphed over Clodius Albinus in extremis with the help of reinforcements and the usurper then committed suicide. It is not clear whether or not Septimius Severus then proceeded directly north with his legions to cross to Britannia. What is clear is that Roman legions did eventually return in force to bring peace and a deal of retribution to the recalcitrant province. Once again this was the beginning of a recurrent series of events of this nature in the province of Britannia. This would not be the last time that the province would nurture imperial usurpers. Every time the revolt originating in Britannia was repressed, the often unwilling supporters of the revolt would forfeit their lands, their wealth and more often than not their lives. It really became a case of being damned if you did support the revolt and the risk of the same kind of punishment at the hands of the usurper if you didn’t. Under Septimius Severus the Roman Empire once again expanded (almost to its largest extent ever) he was a great and tireless military campaigner. In 197-198 AD he campaigned against the erstwhile supporters of the imperial claimant Pescinius Niger, the Parthians; this campaign led to the capture of their capital and the annexation of Mesopotamia. He twice at this time tried to capture the fortress of Hatra in the South Iraqi desert but failed both times thus limiting imperial expansion in this part of the East. He later campaigned in his native North Africa, not only embellishing with beautiful buildings his home town Lepcis Magna but also expanding the provinces there into the desert building many new towns and settlements. In the later Empire the lands of modern day Algeria and eastern Morocco become the bread basket for the Western Empire. Some olive groves planted in North Africa at this time still produce 188  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia olive oil today. In the years following the expansion of agriculture in North Africa the desert was pushed back. Gemellae M’lili, in modern day Algeria is today set in the desert; in Roman times it was a centre of agriculture a thriving classical Roman town with a large amphitheatre. To achieve all these military feats Septimius Severus increased the number of legions from the historic number of twenty eight to thirty legions to thirty three. He stationed one of his new legions close to Rome. This was a real break with imperial tradition and can probably best be explained by the mutual distrust and animosity between the Senate and Septimius Severus. He had after all on his accession to power killed at Rome twenty nine Senators and knights who supported his opponents and he had completely replaced the Praetorian Guard. Early in his reign, following the defeat of Clodius Albinus he undertook reforms that were meant to weaken the military hand of Britannia’s governors. He divided the province in two with from now on two governors and the legions divided between the two new provinces. The provinces were named Britannia Superior with its capital at Londinium and Britannia Inferior with its capital at Eboracum (modern day York). On a lighter note most people in Southern England today still believe this Roman nomenclature to be correct. In the years following the demise of Clodius Albinus in 195 AD the anarchy that had prevailed in Britannia, following the removal from the province by Clodius Albinus of the majority of Roman troops, had taken root and was difficult to eradicate. This was in spite of the return en force of the legions. In a message in 207 AD from Lucius Alfensus Senecio to Septimius Severus the situation in Britannia was described as being one of almost open revolt in parts of the province. In 208 AD the old warrior emperor at aged of 62 once again took to the field and moved north through Britannia to bring peace back to the province. By this time the Antonine wall on the Clyde/Forth isthmus in Scotland had been abandoned for forty plus years and although there were still occupied Roman forts north of Hadrian’s Wall Southern Scotland was no longer administratively or economically a part of the province of Britannia. His two year campaign, with twenty thousand troops, 189  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia through the Eastern plains of highland Northern Scotland broke his health. Scottish winters weren’t very suitable for someone whose origins are in sunny North Africa. The campaign was costly in money and men and in spite of the construction of many forts along the East coast of Northern Scotland it was not very successful at all. The Caledonian tribes that he was fighting conducted a hit and run guerilla style campaign. As soon as they saw Roman troops in large numbers the natives melted away and disappeared into the refuge of the nearby unmapped mountains. When the Roman troops were out in smaller foraging or scouting parties then they were attacked and picked off one by one. Once again a situation very similar to operations by NATO troops in Afghanistan. By 210 AD Septimius Severus was back at Eboracum, modern day York, in ill health and the frontier was effectively still no further north than Hadrian’s Wall. His son Caracalla continued the campaign north of the wall, but when his father died in 211 AD at Eboracum York he rushed back to Rome to make sure that his succession was safe effectively leaving the northern frontier at Hadrian’s Wall where it stayed for the rest of the Roman occupation. This was not the first, or the last for that matter, attempt by a Roman emperor to subdue the Caledonian tribes in their highland redoubt; 190  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia but it was probably the one that got furthest and was most in depth. This Scottish campaign was a logistical nightmare. There was no way that this barren northern heath land with sporadic small farms in the sheltered areas and widely dispersed semi wild herds could support “off the land” 20,000 troops. Food to support the troops had to be brought up from Southern Scotland by cart or mule across barren lands with no roads often under driving rain. These essential supply trains would be subject to harassment by the Caledonian war bands that must have often eaten Roman grain or cattle. Septimius Severus was one of the great Roman Emperors who laid the foundation of a dynasty that would last until the period of chaos and anarchy that began in 235 AD. We can date the massive walls around Londinium from 190-220 AD. Although it has been said that these walls could have been constructed by Clodius Albinus as part of his defence against Septimius Severus this seems highly unlikely in view of their size and the obviously long duration that this construction would have taken. What is much more likely is that they were started, if not finished, during the reign of Septimius Severus at the time of his military action in Britain. Perhaps one the reasons for this military construction was to make Britannia defensible with fewer troops, or maybe it was just to give Rome a solid impregnable major fort that had easy access from the sea in a province that had historically a tendency to revolt, be it the natives or the Romans that were causing the problems. In view of a more modern understanding of this period of Roman history of the province of Britannia the walled city of London (the largest fort in the province) could in fact in this revised context be considered as being the first “Saxon Shore” type of fort in Britannia there is a section below on Saxon shore forts. Military chaos and inflation. From a historical point of view we have little contemporary written detail concerning the province of Britannia during the period of military and civil chaos from 235-284 AD. We do know however that the Roman Empire was struck by currency debasement during this period that lead to economically debilitating inflation. This produced a 191  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia situation where taxation may well have been in kind rather than coin. Long term inflation changes people’s relationship with money and that change is hard to eliminate. Severus Septimius started down the rocky road of inflation by introducing a 2 denarius coin that only had 1.6 times the silver that was found in two 1 denarius coins, which by then was only 65% silver anyway; meaning that the silver content of the new coin was only 40%. By the 270’s there was less than 5% silver in the “silver” denarius which had taken on a decidedly ”coppery” look. Was this currency debasement a cause or effect of the period of chaos? It was perhaps a major contributory factor to the half century that changed the Western Roman Empire forever. Outflow of silver from the Roman Empire had been going on for centuries this is attested to by the Indian ivory statuette of the Indian goddess Lokshmi found in an ordinary house on the Via dell’Abbondonza in Pompeii, the circumstances of its discovery means it must have been obtained through commerce pre-dating 79 AD. The Indian trade was almost purely one way the Romans sent silver and gold and received in return items of luxury such as: ivory statues, spices, perfumes, exotic oils and perhaps even silk. It was exactly the opposite of the one way Roman wine trade with Gaul under the Republic that we discussed at the beginning of the last chapter. More than two hundred years of this Romano/Indian trade had almost certainly reduced the amount of silver available for coins, silver tableware and ornaments. Silver mines within the empire in modern day Greece and Spain couldn’t produce enough to replace the losses. The effect of this currency problem on the armed forces cannot be underestimated. A horde of 52,503 low value Roman coins dating from the end of the 3rd century was found in a very large urn in Frome, Somerset in July 2010. It was considered in value to be the equivalent of a year’s salary for a Roman soldier at that time; the horde weighed 160kg! And, this was probably a soldier’s horde. At this time, around 300 AD, goods were bought by people bringing bags full of miniscule bronze coins. Without bank notes with lots of zeros over stamped on them, people had to cart around heavy bags of tiny coins. There were so many needed to buy say a bag of wheat that they weren’t counted but weighed. Even today it’s possible to purchase bagfuls of these coins on internet for next to nothing. It 192  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia reminds me a little of the cold war, of communist countries with their worthless money. You might have handfuls of the stuff but there was nothing to buy with it. Stores for tourists in these countries stocked luxury items, unavailable to the ordinary people, which could only be bought with hard currency. There was a phrase coined to explain the abysmal productivity of Warsaw Pact workers; “You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” How well this could be applied to soldiers in the late 3rd century Roman Empire who were being paid in buckets of tiny bronze and only very partly silver coins. “You pretend to pay us and we’ll pretend to be soldiers”. Being paid in almost worthless coin would make soldiers potentially mercenary to say the least. Against this backdrop of hordes of badly paid soldiers looking to get hold of hoards of real money, we cannot discount at all the effect of the debasement of the currency on the number of usurpers trying to become emperor. As we will see the pressure for change often came from below, many of the fifty plus usurpers or emperors in the period from 235-284 AD were exactly like the first of them, Maximus, just ordinary soldiers, not even officers. In 260 AD the emperor Valerian was captured by the Persian king Shapur; this triggered insurrection in the Western Roman Empire. This was the moment, as we saw on page 173 when the Empire split in three. A romanised Belgae tribal member of Batavian origin called Marcus Cassianius Latinius Postumu, who was governor of upper or lower Germany, was raised to the purple by his legions. This was because the praetorian prefect, Silvanus was trying to remove the booty from them that they had taken after defeating the German Juthungi who had been ravaging and looting Italy. The tribe was intercepted in Italy on its way home to their homelands in modern day Bavaria. Silvanus holed up in Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (modern day Cologne) with the emperor’s son Saloninus. After a siege Postumus was able to break down the city walls and capture the city. Both were put to death and Postumus went about successfully setting up Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium as capital of his own empire. This break away entity lead by a Belgae quickly started putting in place all the trappings of Rome: a central administration, a Senate and he even named himself pontifex maximus of his new state; it is said that this state was dominated by people from Gallia Belgica. Initially he was 193  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia recognised by all the provinces of Gallia excluding Narbonensis and Alpina, to which could be added Germania Superior and Inferior as well as Raetia (modern day Southern Bavaria). In fact this breakaway part of the Roman Empire was as far as I can ascertain the closest that a Romanised Belgae tribe member got to be Roman emperor. Saxon Shore forts We consider the Brancaster Branodunum and Reculver Regulbium to be Saxon Shore forts, even though they were constructed in the reign of the last Severan emperor, Severus Alexander. Why should we not therefore consider Londinium, which was heavily fortified during the reign of the first Severan emperor, Septimius Severus, as a kind of Saxon Shore fort? As we move into to the period when most of the Saxon Shore forts were built we must remember that we derive our name for these forts from one document the notitia dignitatum. That is the only document or inscription that ever uses the phrase “Saxon 194  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Shore” litus Saxonicum. There are no other references in any other contemporary or later documents or writing to the litus Saxonicum. Once again this fundamental foundation of English history is based on, an undated document that could be interpreted in other ways. We have seen the ambivalence in the way that the term Saxon was used by the Romans. It could refer to the peoples that spoke Teutonic languages, and that the Dux of the litus Saxonicum was responsible for the coast where Teutonic speaking peoples lived. As we have conjectured that all the Belgae tribes in both Gallia Belgica and in Britannia spoke Teutonic languages it is perhaps no coincidence that all the Saxon Shore forts listed in the notitia dignitatum are in areas inhabited by Belgae tribes. As we can see below there were some forts existing at the time, equally liable to attack by piratical “Saxon” raiders but not in areas inhabited by Belgae tribes that didn’t make the list. If the “Saxon” raiders had covered the distance of nearly 1000km from modern Germany what would have stopped them going the additional 2-300km further north to modern day Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and yet the Roman forts there weren’t listed in the notitia dignitatum as being Saxon Shore forts. As we discussed above we can conjecture with a degree of certainty about the two roles that the Severan walls around Londinium could have played. Once again walls of this dimension would never have been built for an intermittent menace from a few boats of raiders. We could in fact project similar roles for all the Saxon Shore forts in general: Firstly the need for political and military reasons for the reduction in the size of garrisons needed to protect Britain. Secondly the ones built in the second half of the third century may have been built to be used as bastions against invading Teutonic hordes that were devastating the provinces of Gallia at this time. This mass Teutonic invasion of Britannia as far as we know never occurred. What is likely is that even if they were built for that role their major function ultimately probably became to be designated as defensive places against usurpers leading revolting Roman armies in Britannia or Gallia. In the case of an armed revolt in Britannia these forts, which could all be resupplied easily by sea, or river in the case of Londinium, would thus have been able to hold out until reinforcements arrived from across the English Channel. In view of 195  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia their locations all but one of these forts could serve as bases for the Classis Britannia, which could be a possible explanation of why some of them don’t have walls on the side facing the sea. Bearing this maritime connection in mind the Saxon Shore forts could have, on top of fulfilling these roles, had the additional effect of frightening off any piratical raiders. But once again this function could never have been their original role. Further, as we can see on the map on the previous page, they were only part of a major network of forts which by the end of the 4th century AD were omnipresent in the Roman provinces bordering the coasts of the English Channel and North Sea. We discussed above the period of chaos following the demise of the Severan dynasty and how this lead within twenty years of its end to massive Teutonic invasions of the Western part of the Roman Empire. We can date the construction of most of the rest of the Saxon Shore forts to a period just following this continental invasion event and their construction can be put in the context of the construction of military defences around towns in all the provinces of Gallia. We can see at exactly the same period similar trends between Lutetia and the construction of the fort at Richborough Rutupiae. To build this fort in the last quarter of the 3rd century they tore down the very large triumphal monument that had graced the site since just after the Roman occupation. This monument was the grandiose portal to the province of Britannia and as at Lutetia they reused the stone masonry and the rubble from the demolition of a grand Imperial Roman building to build the fortifications at this location; expediency indeed. However precise dating of the construction of these forts is not easy I quote Sir Barry Cunliffe in his first chapter of the CBA research report, “The Saxon Shore” from 1977 titled “The Saxon Shore – Some problems and misconceptions”. He indicates clearly “The dangers of using coin evidence too dogmatically cannot be overstated”. We can identify three building phases in the construction of these forts the dates are not precise but they are I believe pretty close, once again these dates are from the CBA research report. I have included in the list on this page five forts that are highlighted in yellow that weren’t included in the notitia dignitatum but which would have fulfilled 196  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia similar roles and were in the same area at the same time as the ones listed as Saxon Shore forts. All seventeen of these forts that I have listed were in areas that where Belgae tribes were settled. Name Name Built Comments English Latin By Britain Britannia London Londinium 200 AD Phase Ia – Partly extant Brancaster Branodunum 230 AD Phase Ib – Naval port ? Reculver Regulbium 230 AD Phase Ib – Naval port ? Walton Castle Dommoc? 276 AD Phase IIa – Washed away Bradwell Othona 276 AD Phase IIa – Partly extant Ricborough Rutupiae 276 AD Phase IIa – Massive ruins Dover Dubris 276 AD Phase IIa – Under town Lympne Portus Lemanis 276 AD Phase IIa – Partly extant Burgh Castle Garriannum 276 AD Phase IIa – Massive ruins Portchester Portus Aduni 285 AD Phase IIb – Massive ruins Pevensey Anderitum 370 AD Phase III – Massive ruins Bitterne Clausentum 370 AD Phase III – Partly extant Gaulle Gallia Belgica Boulogne/Mer Bononia 276 AD Phase IIa – Under town Near Calais Marcae ? Site not yet found Somme Estry Quartensis ? Site not yet found Canke Estuary Portus Aepatiaci ? Site not yet found Oudenberg Oudenberg 276 AD Phase IIa – Partial ruins As a little aside; in the Introduction to this book the two Saxon Shore forts that I was trying to locate in modern day France were the one in the La Canke Estuary and the one called in Latin Marcae near modern day Calais. There is confusion about the location of all three forts listed in notitia dignitatum on the modern day French coast. Neither of the two forts mentioned above or the fort and naval base in the Somme Estuary (which had the mouthful of a name in Latin of Locus Quartensis sive Hornensis) have been located physically. Portus Aepatiaci is often given as being be somewhere near the town of 197  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Etaples, my feeling is that this fort was much more likely to have been at the present location of Montreuil-sur-Mer (now well inland) which in Roman times was at the mouth of the La Canke estuary and was protected from the open sea by two or three large sand dune islands. Montreuil is a natural defensive point with a very large extant castle that has been built, rebuilt and enlarged over many centuries up until and including the First World War. It dominates the surrounding countryside and what was then the sea at the mouth of La Canke estuary. This is the largest castle in the whole region by far, it is set on such a good natural defensive point with its steep escarpments that it is difficult to believe that the Romans wouldn’t have used it. There was 198  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia a Roman settlement below this high promontory. I believe it is possible that as at Boulogne-sur-Mer Bononia and Dover Dubris that the fort here could perhaps be buried below more recent buildings, in this case the massive medieval and later castle that sits on the hilltop site today. It is to be noted that the late Empire Roman fort at Boulogne-sur-Mer Bononia was built on an easily defended hilltop; it has only recently been found under the old town inside the medieval walls. On the map on the last page I have tried to recreate the coastline in the area of La Canck estuary as it would have looked in Roman times. Since then a combination of land reclamation through dykes and drainage and a buildup of dunes from sand being blown in from the sea has put Montreuil, in spite of its name, 15km from the sea. This piece of coastline in the Roman period would have resembled very closely the coastline in the North Sea where the Frisian Islands are located today; the light blue shading being the equivalent of the Wadden Sea. The Saxon Shore fort named as Marcae listed in the notitia dignitatum is thought to have been located either at modern day Marquise 13km north of Boulogne or at Marck about 5km east of modern day Calais. I plump for Marquise for similar reasons that I plump for Montreuil. Marquise is situated today on the edge of marshland, it would have been in Roman times the head of the estuary of the small Slack River. Since then the mouth of the Slack has been completely blocked by large sand dunes blowing in from the sea; this has caused the river to back up like a blocked drain making the land behind the dunes marshland. The D940 coastal road from Ambleteuse to Wimereux crosses these dunes at the mouth of the Slack estuary and they are really quite beautiful. As I have indicated before I know this area of France very well, my brother-in-law owned a 16th century property in the seventies at Bazinghen about 3km North West of Marquise. The cellar of his house was half submerged by the rising level of the water table which indicated that this blockage of the Slack estuary by the dunes had been a reasonably recent phenomenon. If we now return to the period of construction of the majority of the Saxon Shore forts in Britannia, in the last half of the 3rd century, we 199  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia can note that they were constructed in a speedy and somewhat slapdash, if permanent, manner. As indicated above, construction of the forts at this time really smacks of military expediency. They used the roof tiles from local Roman buildings, which had either fallen into disuse or were demolished for this purpose, for bonding courses in the walls. In some of the forts the facing stones between the bonding courses were, where available, large split flint pebbles taken from nearby beaches. This use of split flint nodules and brick binding courses is a building technique still used today in many parts of Southern England. We can imagine that limestone blocks and marble facings from Roman buildings and monuments were cooked in kilns to make quicklime mortar for these massive military constructions. We know that the threat of Teutonic invasions at this period was very real in the provinces of Gallia and a lot of the rest of the Western Roman Empire and that the military fortifications and town walls built there were completely necessary. We cannot be so sure that this was the case for the province of Britannia. As far as I can ascertain there are no large burial sites near any of the forts that would be associated with large battles. No large quantities of spearheads and arrowheads have been found in their vicinity; as they have at the Iron Age fort of Maiden Castle, which would tend to indicate once again there were never any large battles associated with these forts. Further very few of the forts have any remains of permanent stone buildings contemporary with their construction within them. We must remember that these forts were mostly built during the period of military and civil chaos when what authority existed was above all military. In modern day military dictatorships the army gets the lion’s share of all the country’s resources to the detriment of the ordinary citizen. We do have modern parallels for such massive and precipitate military construction programmes that are comparable to the Saxon Shore forts. The first one that comes to mind is the behemoth that was the Atlantic western wall built by Hitler. Its construction took place in just a few years and employed hundreds of thousands of forced labourers and unbelievable amounts of material resources in the form of millions 200  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia of tons of concrete and steel reinforcing to construct it. At the end of the day it didn’t do its job very well, it was easily pierced at one of its weakest points by the D-Day landings in 1944. The Maginot line was built at enormous expense in labour and materials in the 1920’s and 30’s by the French to protect the nation against another attack by Germany after the First World War. These highly complex supposedly impenetrable fortifications hardly fired a shot in anger; the Germans sidestepped the defensive line by attacking France through the Belgian Ardennes forest. Another example is the Martello towers built to defend South East England against the Napoleonic invasion in the early 19th century. The design for these sturdy towers, stolen from the Corsicans by the British, was used all across the British Empire and like the Saxon Shore forts a lot are still standing today practically untouched by time. However the only military action the Martello towers in South East England have ever seen was being used as platforms for spotting the waves of German planes crossing the channel in the Second World War. We really have to ask the question whether the late 3rd century major military building programme of the Saxon Shore forts wasn’t similar to the modern examples of major military construction projects cited above; in short were these Saxon Shore forts a set of military white elephants? In two thousand years’ time, if the sea level hasn’t risen too much, will archeologists be poring over the remains of the Atlantic wall? The remains of this chain of defences stretch from the tip of modern day Denmark to the Franco/Spanish border. Will those future historians be asking themselves similar questions about these Atlantic defences that we pose ourselves today about the Saxon Shore forts? The blurring of the frontier and population movements As I have indicated before, the fact that this period of unrest is combined with the building of numerous defenceless villas across the South of England is a bit of a puzzle. We could perhaps draw certain conclusions in this chaotic period about the connections between the increase in the use of Teutonic non Roman auxiliaries, the Saxon Shore forts and the rich unprotected villas. Perhaps during the years of chaos 201  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia in the province of Britannia, when revolt was followed by repression, there was a rise in power of the local Belgae chiefs. This could be a reason for the spread of luxury villas in a time of military turmoil. Further, it could be easily imagined that during this period of disarray that local chiefs could have used this new found power for co-opting some of the retired auxiliaries with Belgae origins, very similar to their own, into a local land army or militia. The local chiefs would then have protection for their rich Belgae farmlands and villas in these times of lawlessness. If this was the case these ex-soldiers would be out of uniform almost indistinguishable from the locals and they would have been settled on lands with people who spoke nearly the same language as them. With Roman trained troops as a bodyguard rich villa owners wouldn’t need protective walls. As we have seen there was a tendency in the later empire in the German limes to use troops of local origin even if their ethnic range was spread across the frontier and therefore some of their tribe members on the other side of the frontier could be considered “barbarian enemies of Rome”. As we have seen above this situation would quickly gnaw away at the edges of the empire as the frontiers guarded by these local troops became more porous. The Franks were a tribe that was a case in point and we can but postulate to what extent it was the same for the Batavians or the Frisians. Even in modern times we have seen this kind of phenomenon in the context of the post World War Two cold war. Both Germany and Korea were split in two with their almost identical peoples aligned on different sides of the ideological and physical divide. In Korea’s case it came to a murderous conflict which was ended by a tenuous ceasefire without any treaty that has lasted nearly sixty years. When we look at Frisian history in the next chapter we will see that the Western provinces of Frisia were well within the confines of the Roman Empire. The Frisians covered a coastal range as far south as the Scheldt estuary (modern day Antwerp), but they also peopled the islands and coastline outside the empire as far north as the Saxon and Jutish lands in what is today the German/Danish frontier region in 202  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Schleswig. This is an important factor in trying to understand Frisian migration to Britain in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries AD. Climatic change is cyclic and variations in temperatures can occur relatively quickly and can have dramatic effects on agricultural production, especially the further north you go. In Europe northern lands in warmer periods saw the rapid growth of largish populations because they were in areas that were usually less affected by disease than those in warmer climes. These places rapidly became marginal from an agricultural point of view when it got colder; the land was no longer able to support the large number of people that it did in more balmy times. Variable climatic cycles has been a major factor in the expansion, mass migration and sometimes contraction of the Teutonic peoples. The movement in the 1st millennia BC of the Teutonic peoples from their Scandinavian homelands southwards into modern day Germany, Holland, Belgium, Northern France and England was probably caused by a cooling of the climate putting migratory pressure on these originally Nordic peoples. There was a marked downturn in Northern European weather around the middle of the 4th century. One of the side effects was a great increase in storm activity caused by this climatic change. On one bad day a big storm with the help of spring tides caused a massive maritime transgression around the Southern part of the North Sea coasts (circa 350 AD), this event is called Dunkirk II. As we will see in later chapter, it is almost certain that the extent of the damage caused by this maritime transgression was multiplied many times by the quasi destruction of the protective dune ecosystem through excessive agricultural exploitation, especially overgrazing and forest and brush removal in the dunes. There is no more dramatic or certain instigation to migration than having your farmland and home permanently drowned under the sea. After the 350 AD event the Frisians migrated in some numbers to what is today Flanders in NW Belgium and to the South-East of Britain. The Frisians migrated from all the coastal parts of their region and we must remember that most of Frisia was outside the Roman Empire. Frisian 203  Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia style burials have been found in England in continuously used graveyards from this period onwards until the 8th century AD. We will cover this subject in much more depth in the next chapter, VI the Frisian Enigma. I love this map from the 1852 “The Celt, The Roman and the Saxon” By Thomas Wright Esq., I think it’s just about out of copyright. 204 Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia 205 Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia 206 Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia Bibliography – Later Roman Britain 1. GRC – hyperinflation in slow motion a local example In post Second World War Europe, except in Germany a country scarred by the hyperinflation of the 20’s, we have seen inflation that was caused in this case by the servicing of massive war debts. A small paperback book in the UK in the late fifties would have cost 3/6d (£0.175p) the same book by the mid- seventies cost £0.45p while today the same book will cost £8-10. In the meantime the coins in Britain became smaller and smaller and worth less and less. In 1960 when I started a coin collection all “silver” coins predating 1948 were still 50% sterling silver. By the early sixties collectors were taking pre 1948 British coins out of circulation by about 1962 there were none left at all. Even when I started frequenting pubs in the late 60’s a half a crown (2/6d or £0.125p), a big silver coloured coin, with by now little or no silver in it, would buy a pint of bitter. That same pint in the same pub in London today would cost well over £3. The 10p piece (equivalent in size and value of the florin then in circulation, worth 2/-) was introduced just before decimalisation in February 1971. Today the 10p piece is half the size and less than half the weight than what it was in 1971, and you would now need 35 of these little tokens to buy a pint whereas you would have got more than 5p change from two 10p coins for the same measure in February 1971. The almost worthless “silver” coins in the UK have long since had no silver in them at all. To put this in perspective the inflation in the Roman period of chaos was about the same rate as that seen in the UK since the Second World War, although it occurred over 40 years rather than 60. In post war Britain this devaluation of the money has meant that property prices have become inflated, as only bricks and mortar are seen as a way of saving compared with a currency that becomes more worthless every year. 2. The Severan Dynasty from crysrtalinks.com – a very good short description. http://www.crystalinks.com/SeveranDynasty.html 207 Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia 3. Genealogy charts from spqrlive.com http://spqrlive.com/# 4. You will find a downloadable pdf version of the CBA report at address below. Abstract - Title page of report 18 The preface to this volume of papers given at a conference in 1975 contains a critique by R M Reece of the way that historical and archaeological evidence are mixed together when they should be kept separate. Barry Cunliffe's paper (1-6) summarizing the problems calls for a much more rigorous approach to excavation, analysis and publication. M W C Hassall (7-10) discusses the historical background, principally the Notitia Dignitatum, and the problems of identifying units and forts on both sides of the Channel. J C Mann's contribution (11-15) is on the military organization of duces and comites in the 4th century, plus a note on the Reculver inscription. The Classis Britannica is treated by Henry Cleere (16-19) from its beginnings in AD 40 or 43, through its iron-producing activities in the Weald, to its disappearance from the record in mid-3rd century. There follow papers on the detailed archaeological evidence: Dover (Brian Philp), Brancaster (D A Edwards and C J S Green), Lympne (Barry Cunliffe), the Channel Isles (David Johnston), Boulogne and coastal defences in 4th-5th centuries (C Seillier), Alet (Loïc Langouët), Brest (René Sanquer) and Oudenburg (J Mertens). The interpretation of the term 'Saxon Shore' is discussed by Stephen Johnson (63-9), and the evidence for religious missions in the shore forts is Stuart Rigold's subject (70-75). The absence of informative inscriptions from the shore forts is taken by J J Wilkes (76-80) as significant and possibly providing a date of AD 260-96 for the system. 208 Chapter IV – Saxon Shore forts & the later Roman Empire in Britannia http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/cba_rr/rr18.cfm 5. 209