Dr. Francis McIntosh

I imagine, you know, you couldn't fit along there, just get rubbish and rats in there.

But it was a separate space.

And also...

The civilian settlements around the outside of the forts seem to go out of use in the 4th century.

Not everywhere, not exclusively, and more work is being done at the moment about whether they get reoccupied later.

But there is a thought that...

By the fourth century, the number of soldiers living on the wall has reduced because troops have always been recalled for bigger problems elsewhere in the empire.

Obviously, soldiers are allowed to marry.

And so perhaps the change that we see at Halsteads, which could be elsewhere, we've just not looked at it or found it properly yet, is that a soldier's family would move in with them.

And that's why they moved to these individual buildings.

But it's still sort of a lot of things that we don't know.

You know, the higher up archaeology is in the ground, the later it is.

And that means the later it is means it's more at risk for erosion, but also it is the first thing that's been excavated.

And while we had some great work done in the 19th century, it wasn't to the same standards.

So a lot of 4th century material, which will be a lot more ephemeral and harder to sort of understand, was, you know, sort of taken away by early excavators who didn't recognise what they were looking at.

And that's why sort of the work at Halsteads and then later as well at Bird Oswald has been really key because we haven't got those later layers yet.

Well, so that wall of shoes at Vindolanda, they're all late 1st, early 2nd century because that's where they've got their waterlogged layers.

So if you imagine the sort of range of people living there when it was supposedly solely a military space, and, you know, not that it was, we know, but once sort of the fort walls have opened even more in the 4th century, the change in the people who were inside the fort would be even, yeah, even more marked.

And it's really interesting because people think about Hadrian's Wall...

And imagine 300 years ago from today, 1725, how different life was.