Legions operating together in Britain?

[mcbishop]

Thank you for the insights gentlemen.....

Best not to assume all members of discussions are 'gentlemen' but Happy New Year anyway ;-)

I was under the impression that effectively auxilliaries were added to a legion when it was deemed necessary therefore making for a very flexible fighting force.

The relationship in fact seems to have been much closer. Nearly all legionary fortresses had auxiliaries based either within the fortress or immediately adjacent so that the distinction between 'vexillation' and ordinary legionary fortresses that archaeologists have preferred over the past few decades are not quite as straightforward as once thought. There was indeed a time when it was fashionable to speculate that certain auxiliary units were always brigaded with 'their own' legions, but that view came to be denigrated (for no good reason, in my opinion).

At the same time, legions were fragmented and outposted from those legionary fortresses, so they seldom operated alone, either in the field or in garrison. In fact, take everything you've read in the standard textbooks, invert it, mix it all up, and only then do you come close to our present understanding of how the Roman army operated in the field and in garrison. Websterian Hindsight Goggles[sup]TM[/sup] tend to make us think what was done in earlier periods was abnormal, practice in more settled times being normality. That would not be the Roman perception of things (the same thing applies to interpreting early cohort forts as always being 1 fort = 1 auxiliary unit, a meme driven by Edwardian scholarship on and interpretations of Hadrian's Wall).

Mike Bishop