Dr. Francis McIntosh

So you'd have in a workshop lots of people making the scales, making the rings, depending on what you're doing, and then you'd need less skilled people.

It's in a triangle, and the higher up you go, that's where the skill is, and they are the ones that construct it.

So it takes a lot of time.

A lot of it is unskilled, and if you make it right, hopefully if a small section gets broken, you can place just that section, and sometimes you do see repairs in this chain and the scale armour.

But if you talk to reenactors, it takes a lot of looking after.

I'd like to say we do.

Yeah, we really don't.

The glimpses we get are from the Vindolanda tablets where they have what we might see as the register, or the roster for the day, where it talks about this many men out on patrol or this many men out escorting the governor doing something.

And then you can start to extrapolate and look at other records, particularly in Egypt, where Vindolanda, it's the wet conditions that allowed things to survive.

Egypt, it's the dry.

And we imagine, you know, particularly in an infantry barracks where eight men are sharing a small space, we imagine they're going to be split into shifts because they've tried all sorts of configurations about how the bunks would work and how you would all sleep.

And so, you know, you imagine that there'd be, I don't know, maybe there's three shifts of eight hours or two of 12.

And, you know, you might be on guard duty at the gates.

You know, there's four gates every fort, not more.

Chess is the sixth.

Maybe, and we know

We think we know that with one fort, they seem to be sort of responsible for a section of the wall either side of them, including the mile castles and the turrets.

So some of your troops might be stationed there.

At mile castles, they could sleep over.

It's not a sleepover, but because there's often barrack buildings.