It's kind of handy to have a word for that area between the two walls, and I don't think it has another name (could be wrong, am not a Scot)? In my head I had decided it was Valentia first because it was the land between the walls, then through a form of nominative determinism, it was made a province by Valentinian... :-D
The book is certainly worth a read, (it does go right through to the Saxon period, I've really only covered the first half of it above). Whether or not you agree with the grand theory, it has lots of good stuff about the regional differences drawn from the archaeology which most of the other books I've read have skated over a bit.
Laycock thinks that not only did they abandon the Antonine wall, but they stopped trying to hold Hadrian's wall in the same way: instead of holding the whole thing as a real obstacle, they just manned some of the forts and more or less surrendered control to the Brigantes. He tends to look at the local population without really considering the Roman politics at all, which is certainly an interesting reversal to the normal approach.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-02-03 09:26 am (UTC)The book is certainly worth a read, (it does go right through to the Saxon period, I've really only covered the first half of it above). Whether or not you agree with the grand theory, it has lots of good stuff about the regional differences drawn from the archaeology which most of the other books I've read have skated over a bit.
Laycock thinks that not only did they abandon the Antonine wall, but they stopped trying to hold Hadrian's wall in the same way: instead of holding the whole thing as a real obstacle, they just manned some of the forts and more or less surrendered control to the Brigantes. He tends to look at the local population without really considering the Roman politics at all, which is certainly an interesting reversal to the normal approach.