The study of Roman place-names has a long and respectable history, though littered with erroneous and strange identifications. Today we are generally agreed on the locations of the places listed in our ancient sources, though some defy identification. The military sites that we have ancient names for are largely frontiers, fortresses, and forts, but the Roman military also made use of much smaller installations, such as fortlets and towers. How were they referred to?
To take Hadrian’s Wall as an example, we know the names of its forts from a combination of literary sources, inscriptions, and even ‘souvenir’ pans referring to these military bases. But if a soldier was outposted to one of the approximately 160 turrets along the Wall, how did he know how to find it? If a civilian was commissioned to deliver goods to one of about 80 adapted fortlets known as milecastles, what information was available to ensure that he or she went to the right one? More significantly, in the face of a threat to a frontier, the officer in charge had to deploy his men, and these soldiers required clear instructions about which sites to protect. Did fortlets/milecastles, towers, and other kinds of outposts have names, or numbers, or some other form of identification?
This is not an arcane question, but strikes at the heart of how frontiers might have operated, and the answer is more subtle than a ‘one-system-fits-all’ approach. Many fortlets stood by themselves, filling a need in the landscape where an auxiliary fort was not required. But a frontier line or a frontier zone consisting of forts (occupied by different sizes and types of troops), fortlets/milecastles, and towers was an altogether different matter. Here, the officers in the ‘response centres’ – that is, the forts – would have to know the names or designations of the installations they were responsible for. On Hadrian’s Wall, it is possible that we can see a devolved structure through which orders were cascaded. The forts were about 11km apart, but at every mile there was a milecastle and between each there were two towers. Archaeological evidence suggests that soldiers did not permanently live in the towers: items of furniture and box fittings are not found there, but are recovered from forts and milecastles. In these circumstances, the milecastle might have had a name and towers identified in relation to it with the addition of ‘east’ or ‘west’.
