The Twentieth Legion in Chester

Who they were

The Twentieth was one of the four legions that invaded Britain in AD 43, and it spent the rest of its recorded history here. It was based in turn at Colchester, Gloucester and Wroxeter, and in the 80s at Inchtuthil, a new fortress in Perthshire. When the emperor Domitian moved the Second Legion Adiutrix to the Danube in 88, and Scotland was given up, the Twentieth came south to take its place at Deva.

Its titles, Valeria Victrix, are often linked to its part in crushing Boudica’s revolt in AD 60 or 61. Victrix means victorious; the sense of Valeria is less certain.

How a legion worked

At full strength a legion had around 5,000 legionaries, all Roman citizens and all infantry. They were organised into ten cohorts. Most cohorts were made of six centuries of 80 men, each commanded by a centurion; the first cohort was larger. Eight men shared a pair of barrack rooms, a cooking pot and a mule. Above the centurions were the legate, who commanded the legion, and his staff of tribunes; alongside it served auxiliary units, non-citizen troops who provided cavalry and archers.

A legionary’s kit

Around AD 100 a legionary of the Twentieth wore an iron helmet with cheek guards and a deep neck guard, armour of overlapping iron plates or mail, a woollen tunic and hobnailed sandals. He carried a curved rectangular shield, two javelins and a short stabbing sword, the gladius, on his right hip. On the march he carried his own kit and rations on a pole over his shoulder.

Builders as well as soldiers

A legion was also an engineering corps. The Twentieth rebuilt Deva’s defences in stone from around AD 100, and in the 120s much of it went north to build Hadrian’s Wall, leaving parts of the fortress quiet for a generation. It made its own roof tiles and pottery at a works depot upriver at Holt, and stamped its tiles with its name, LEG XX VV.

The soldiers’ tombstones

The most personal record of the Twentieth is its tombstones. Soldiers and their families were buried along the roads outside the fortress, and their memorials, carved in the local sandstone, named them, their age, their unit and sometimes the heir who paid for the stone. Many were later reused in repairs to the north wall, where they were found in the 1880s and 1890s. They are now in the Grosvenor Museum, one of the finest collections of Roman military tombstones in Britain.

The end of the legion

The legion's later history is hard to follow in the records. By the end of the 4th century the army in Britain was being drawn away to fight elsewhere, and a list of the empire’s units compiled around 395 shows no troops at Deva. By about 410 the Roman army had left Britain, and with it the legion that had given Chester its name.