The story of Housesteads
Building Hadrian’s Wall began in AD 122. At first there were no forts on the Wall itself, only small fortlets and towers. Housesteads was added soon after. The builders started the fort before they had finished the Wall here, and a cremation burial was found under the fort’s north-west corner. Romans buried their dead outside forts, never inside, so that burial must be older than the fort. That suggests more than a year passed between building the Wall and building the fort.1
The fort covered 2.2 hectares and was planned from the start for a regiment of 800 infantry, a milliary cohort. These were auxiliaries: soldiers recruited from peoples Rome had conquered, not Roman citizens. By the end of Hadrian’s reign in AD 138 the Wall was finished, with 15 forts and nearly 10,000 men along it.1
Who lived here
From the late 2nd century to the 4th, the garrison was the First Cohort of Tungrians, raised among German-speaking tribes around Tongeren, in what is now Belgium. The same unit had earlier served at Vindolanda, two miles away.1
In the early 3rd century two more units joined them, both recruited beyond the Rhine in Frisia, now the north of the Netherlands: the cuneus Frisiorum, or “wedge of Frisians”, and the numerus Hnaudifridi, a band named after its leader, Hnaudifrid. A kind of pottery found at Housesteads from this time matches pottery from Frisia, so these men kept cooking the way they had at home.1
Outside the walls a village of traders and families grew up. It was at its largest through the 3rd century and largely abandoned near its end, when the barracks inside were rebuilt and the garrison probably shrank. People who had lived outside may have moved inside the walls for safety.1
A prayer against plague
One stone from Housesteads is a dedication by the Tungrians “to the gods and goddesses”, following the advice of the oracle of Apollo at Claros, in what is now western Turkey. Ten inscriptions like it are known from across the empire, and all have been linked to the great plague that broke out around AD 165. Soldiers at the far north-west edge of the empire were following instructions from a shrine nearly 3,000 kilometres away.1
Where the evidence is unclear
Was the Wall emptied in the 140s?When Antoninus Pius built a new wall in Scotland, it is often said Hadrian’s Wall was given up. Recent digging at Housesteads found no sign of that, and an altar set up by legionaries “on garrison duty” may date from then.1
When did the soldiers leave?The last dated inscription is from about AD 300. A late Roman list of army posts, the Notitia Dignitatum, still names a garrison here, but no one knows exactly when that part of the list was written.1
