Notas del episodio
In 122 AD, Hadrian's Wall was likely plastered and whitewashed, a gleaming 73 mile barrier across northern England from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth. Emperor Hadrian took power in 117 AD with the empire overextended by Trajan and rebellions in Egypt, Judea, and Britain, so he chose defensible borders. With no coast to coast river in Britain, 15,000 soldiers of the Second Augusta, Sixth Victrix, and Twentieth Valeria Victrix legions spent six years building one. Midway the plans shrank from a broad wall of almost 10 feet to a narrow wall of about eight, often laid on the wider foundations, with turf in the west. The Vallum, a trench flanked by earth mounds on the south side, swerves around a milecastle, proving it was planned alongside the wall.
The wall filtered people more than it stopped armies, with pits of sharpened branches called cippi and gates that worked as customs posts. About 10,000 auxiliaries from places like Batavia and Pannonia manned it. South of the line, Roman life boomed, while north of it roundhouses and farm compounds vanished. Later emperors pushed north to the Antonine Wall and fell back again, the legions left around 410 AD, and the stones became a quarry until John Clayton bought the land to save it.
- The potter Aeneas making Roman mortaria in Darlington for the garrison market
- Veteran Velvo Tigernus, likely born into the local Celtic elite, retiring after 26 years in the Roman fleet
- The Roman siege camps and artillery bombardment of natives reoccupying Burnswark Hill
- General Wade grinding down miles of the wall for a military road after the 1745 Jacobite Rising
- The Staffordshire Moorlands pan and Amiens skillet, souvenir cups naming the forts and the wall as Vallum Aelium