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Chapter Two

From Vindolanda, Greetings

You set off on a clear March morning from the Lake District. You take the road north from Penrith, go east at Carlisle towards Brampton, and then head high into the Pennine Hills. The road undulates and the roads are empty, and a driver will wonder whether this isn’t the stretch where car adverts are filmed. You keep going. There’s a B road south, and when you pass a village called Twice Brewed you’re tempted to stop the car to tweet a photo of the signpost. The road twists down to Winshields Farm and a guest house called Vellum Lodge, and then there you are, two coachloads of children ahead of you, at the historic site called Vindolanda, where the evidence of letters begins.

Here, between AD 85 and 130, a series of five forts made from timber and turf were built to defend the Stanegate, a wide belt of dirt road over the narrow neck of Britain, vital for the transport of men and supplies in the region. Londinium was a week away in the south, and it was perhaps a month to the heart of the empire in Rome. Vindolanda (its name is thought to mean ‘white lawns’) was one garrison among many: some 50,000 men were stationed around these ramparts, the unofficial northern frontier until Hadrian’s Wall started going up about a mile above it in AD 122. The forts were a vital communication centre too, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the autumn of 1972, the archaeologist Robin Birley cut a trench to drain off excess water from the southwest corner of the Vindolanda excavation site and unearthed the first evidence of a Roman treasure trove.

What was more surprising was how well some things had survived. About 2.3 metres into the soil, Birley struck a leather sandal that was in such good condition it was possible to read the maker’s name. He discovered other fragments of leather and textiles, and there were realistic dreams of further finds. Here was a moment that would, for decades to come, inspire young people to become archaeologists, a Tutankhamun moment 50 years on. But then the northern rains swept in, and Birley got another taste of the terrible challenges the Romans had faced in this remote valley. He was forced to close up the site for the winter.

Birley had digging in his blood. His father was Eric Birley, who, in 1929, had bought the Chesterholm estate on which the Vindolanda forts continued to stand and had made some of the key discoveries that had shaped the way we view the Romans’ early defence of northern Britain. But although his work had occasionally revealed a few coins and chips of pottery, there wasn’t much in the way of personal or domestic possessions that would enable us, some 2,000 years later, to bring the ancient world to life.

The road to Vindolanda.

Robin Birley on site.

His son’s excavation resumed in March 1973. There was more leather footwear, a gold earring, a bronze brooch, keys, hammers, rope, purses, tools for stripping hide, oyster shells, and bones from oxen, pigs and ducks. These things in the soil were found enmeshed within bracken, heather and straw, and further preserved by what appeared to be excreta. The Romans may have regarded all these objects as rubbish, and there were signs of attempted incineration. But of course their rubbish isn’t our rubbish. The waterlogged conditions of the soil, the matted foliage that enveloped it, and the man-made barriers from repeated building on the site provided ideal conditions for preservation.

There was something else amongst the detritus: lists and letters. These took the form of thin wooden writing tablets, some a sliver no thicker than a millimetre, most about 2mm, sliced from birch, oak and alder, a few folded over as one might fold paper for an envelope. Most appeared to be written with ink, though some were denser and had been hollowed out to hold a coating of wax to be inscribed with a metal stylus; in some cases the stylus had carved beneath the wax and had left a permanent mark on the wood. In 1973, a total of 86 tablets were recovered, made up of about 200 fragments, more than half with visible writing. The largest measured 8 × 6cm, the size of a credit card.

The word ‘tablet’ may suggest something solid and brittle, but these finds were as limp as wet blotting paper. Some fragments were sent to Kew Gardens for analysis, others to the department of photography at Newcastle University, and almost all ended up at the research laboratory at the British Museum. Here it became apparent that the tablets had lived a charmed life underground: had their discovery been made even two centuries earlier, our primitive capacity for scientific preservation would have distinctly limited their chances of longevity. As it was, the tablets encountered not only highly skilled conservationists, but a novel dehydration process developed on waterlogged wood only a few months before in Copenhagen and Paris.

‘The wood was reasonably soft and easily split if handled without care,’ according to Susan Blackshaw, who first handled the Vindolanda tablets at the British Museum, in Studies in Conservation in April 1973. She noted that the excavators had told her that the writing on the tablets was clearly visible when freshly exposed at the dig, ‘but that it faded rapidly upon exposure to light and the atmosphere.’

The tablets were photographed with infrared film, after which Blackshaw set about trying to make the writing as legible as possible. They were written in Latin, and possessed what one early report in the journal Britannia called ‘a fair range of styles and hands’, from the competent workaday script to a real attempt at calligraphy. It also noted, ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the potential value of a significant quantity of written material in Latin from this time and place.’

When the tablets arrived at the British Museum they were still soggy. A combination of methylated spirit and ether was used to dehydrate the wood, a complex process involving almost four weeks of soaking, evaporation and flattening. Splintered tablets were delicately treated with resin. The tablets were then re-photographed with infrared film, and, according to Susan Blackshaw, ‘it was thus established that the traces of writing were clearer after the treatment, and that no loss of writing had occurred.’

The contents of two tablets were then released to the academic community. The first, pieced together from four separate fragments and written with tall and slim letterforms, was an account of food supplies, almost certainly items purchased for consumption by the Vindolanda troops. The list confounded a common belief that the Roman soldiers ate little meat, although we do not know whether this was a standard diet or a spread for a feast.

In translation, with guesswork included, the tablet read:

. . . of spices . . . goat . . . of salt . . . young pig . . . ham . . . of corn . . . venison . . . for daily . . . goat . . . total [in denarii] 20 . . . of emmer . . . total . . .

Writing in the ruins: Vindolanda in 2013.

The second tablet, in two fragments, was a private letter sent to a soldier at the fort:

I have sent [?] you x pairs of socks and from Sattia [?] two pairs of sandals; and two pairs of underpants, two pairs of sandals . . .

Greet my friends [?] . . .ndes, Elpis, Iu. . .enus. Tetricus and all your messmates; I pray that you and they may enjoy long life and the best of fortune.

The notes accompanying the publication of these letters by the Roman scholars A.K. Bowman, J.D. Thomas and R.P. Wright were laden with uncertainties about the writing, the words and the meaning, as if they were completing a cryptic crossword: ‘If r and m are correct, however, we must have a vowel here and only a seems feasible. If ram is the right reading, we may well have a pluperfect ending . . . this would be an epistolary pluperfect with the meaning of the perfect.’

But they were just at the beginning of the task. The soldiers at Vindolanda fought many battles – against the hordes from Scotland above them and the rebels below, against the exposures of winter – but now their descendants faced another: to explain how fragile remnants of buried script may direct light upon a brutally enchanting past.

Still inviting: news of a birthday party circa AD 100.

In the years and decades that followed the first discovery, archaeologists have unearthed more than 1,000 letters and other accounts from Vindolanda, and there will be many more to come. The process has been slow and wet; every time a new trench is dug – a hard enough feat beneath the stone forts that were built upon the original wooden sites until the Romans departed Britain more than three centuries later – it floods. The stable environment that has preserved the tablets for almost 1900 years in perfect anaerobic conditions is stubbornly reluctant to give them up. But the sodden archaeologists have delivered to us our earliest letters. We now understand far more of life in Britain under the Romans than we did before 1972, and far more about what it was like to be a Roman in Britain.

The Vindolanda heritage site, the very spot where goat and young pig were once consumed in sandals, lies in a part of wild Northumberland that is most easily reached these days by fossil-fuelled chariots made in Swindon or Japan. There are other routes – a wind-cheating, two-mile walk from a station where the fast trains don’t stop – but the lure of getting ‘the authentic Roman experience’ in early March would, certainly for most travellers from London and the south-east, be merrily traded for arrival by car. There is plenty of authentic visitor experience to be gained upon arrival – a meandering stroll down a valley through the original stone wells, bathhouses, latrines, barracks, granaries, officers’ residence and headquarters building, all cleaned and secured and certainly vivid enough to bring the place alive in young minds.

The small museum at the foot of the valley, newly outfitted in 2012, reflects perfectly the spirit of Vindolanda, not least the fact that it has completely subsumed an earlier construction. This was once the nineteenth-century cottage of Chesterholm, the home of the Anglican clergyman Anthony Hedley, the first excavator of the forts. The displays of sandals, pots, spears and gemstones give way to the writing tablets in a tall, darkened, climate-controlled cabinet of wood and glass, and one approaches it with hushed reverence and excitement. The letters are increasingly lucid:

Masclus to Cerialis his king, greeting. Please, my lord, give instructions as to what you want us to have done tomorrow. Are we to return with the standard to [the shrine at?] the crossroads all together or every other one [i.e. half] of us? . . . Farewell. My fellow-soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent.

Octavius to his brother Candidus, greetings. The hundred pounds of sinew from Marinus – I will settle up . . . I have several times written to you that I have bought about five thousand modii [about a peck] of ears of grain, on account of which I need cash. Unless you send me some cash, at least five hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall lose what I have laid out as a deposit, about three hundred denarii, and I shall be embarrassed. So I ask you, send me some cash as soon as possible. The hides [of] which you write are at Cataractonium [Catterick, a tanning centre] . . . I would have already been to collect them except that I did not care to injure the animals while the roads are bad.*

At the side of the glass cabinet a film explains that this is just the beginning of the great discoveries; the excavations continue at a deeper level and in further fields, and the initial cleansing, photography and deciphering are no longer outsourced to Newcastle but conducted at labs onsite, a busy and excited cottage industry. On the other side of the cabinet Robin Birley has made a personal ‘Top Tablets’ selection of the letters, including the request for beer quoted above, and the detailed listing of troop numbers on one particular day. There is also an account of preparations for Saturnalia, a discussion of the value of hunting nets, an intelligence report on the strength of the opposing British tribes, and a letter about making friends on the frontier.

Hushed and revered: the Vindolanda Museum displays its treasures.

Many more tablets are to be found at the British Museum. Partly it is their history that charms us – the reckless disposing of the letter in AD 90 or 95, the glee upon discovery of the same letter in the age of the moon shot and mobile phone. Partly it is the simplicity and brevity of the letters themselves, and their relentless politeness, with so much of each one concerned with greetings and farewells. Partly it is the sense of efficiency they convey: the successful conquest and running of this vast Roman outpost depended on these tiny, delicate scraps.

And partly it is because we see ourselves on those tablets. We all still need warm clothes, hearty food, reassurances of health. And, as is the case in at least one letter, we still value bedspreads.

We do not know precisely how the soldiers at Vindolanda received their mail, but it does appear to be an ordered process orchestrated initially from Rome and then adapted to the spreading network of Roman roads in Britain. The primitive Northumberland postal service would have seen deliveries along the Stanegate road supplemented by personal messengers to and from London (in this sense the fort may have served as a central sorting office). Indeed, the Vindolanda network may have been one of the testing grounds for the new postal carrier service. A book called The Antonine Itinerary suggests that postal carriers would have had a detailed system of inns or stables on a network of roads where they could rest or change horses, and these ‘posts’ – the markers along any route that signified a resting place, storage place or a place to feed and maintain horses – gave the mail network its other name. The roads carried far more than mail, of course, but there is evidence that successive emperors ordered that military mail should take precedence over, say, the movement of clothing or cattle – an early example of express delivery.

However it travelled, we can imagine the anticipation, delight and relief experienced by the recipients of mail at Vindolanda, just as we can still locate the emotions felt by their families as the wooden tablets were folded over and trustingly dispatched. And it is worth considering that the letters that have been discovered, possibly purposely discarded 2,000 years ago, were not those held most dear; those may have perished in the possession of the owner and, of no value to looters, been left to rot. What value, for instance, would anyone place on a collection of birthday letters?* ‘Clodius Super to his Cerialis greetings. Most willingly brother, just as you had wanted, I would have been present for your Lepidina’s birthday. At any rate . . . for you surely know that it pleases me most whenever we are together.’

Beyond the fact that he was a centurion, and once requested a large supply of cloaks and tunics for his slaves, Clodius Super is little known to us. But Flavius Cerialis is a frequent presence in these tablets. An equestrian prefect (local governing general) of the 9th cohort of Batavians, he was married to Sulpicia Lepidina, who also features regularly. His presence enables scholars to date the tablets to AD 97–104. There was much coming and going among his men across the frontier, and there appears to be a lenient attitude towards sick and compassionate leave. The upper crust of his troops, if not the entire cohort, also appear to be generally well fortified: their larder included not only the goat and young pig from the earlier account, but specifically also pig’s trotters, roe deer, goose, garlic paste, pickling liquor, anise, fish sauce, thyme, caraway, cumin, beetroot, olives, beer and wine (alongside the staples – wheat, cereal, butter, barley, eggs and apples). Several letters reveal a fair supply of kitchen utensils and what is believed to be a recipe from Lepidina’s kitchen (involving an early mise-en-place food arrangement involving a small dish, a cup and a tray).

We learn that the soldiers’ wardrobe contains a large ensemble of clothes and sandals of all weights for all weathers (galliculae, abolla, tunicae cenatoriae – a Gallic shoe, a thick cloak, a fine wool tunic), along with decorative fabrics, blankets and cubitoria – an elegant evening ensemble. There is certainly an element of fashion consciousness: use of the term de synthesi indicates items of clothing that were part of a collection, items that could be worn either as separates or as a coordinating costume.

But having hosted a birthday party of one’s own, what should one wear to Claudia Severa’s?

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings. On the 3rd day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send you their greetings. [In another’s handwriting:] I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

This letter alone carries an undue weight of history. The bulk of it was written by a scribe, almost certainly a man. But the signature is by another hand, believed to be Claudia Severa herself, the earliest example of a woman’s handwriting in the Roman world.

The letters are usually isolated items, and only occasionally – as with notes to Flavius Cerialis and Lepidina – do they appear to form part of a logical sequence. But they should generally be considered as part of an ongoing correspondence, and the visible hiccups in these exchanges (the chiding for failing to reply) are as much a part of letters in the first and second century as they are of our own.

Solemnis to Paris, his brother, very many greetings.* I want you to know that I am in very good health, as I hope you are in turn, you neglectful man, who have sent me not even one letter. But I think I am behaving in a more considerate fashion in writing to you . . . to you, brother . . . my messmate. Greet from me Diligens and Cogitatus and Corinthus . . . Farewell, dearest brother.

Chrauttius to Veldeius his brother and old messmate, very many greetings. And I ask you, brother Veldeius, – I am surprised that you have written nothing back to me for such a long time – whether you have heard anything from our elders or about . . . in which unit he is; and greet him from me in my words and Virilis the veterinary doctor. Ask him [Virilis] whether you may send me through one of our friends the pair of shears which he promised me in exchange for money. And I ask you, brother Virilis, to greet from me our [?] sister Thuttena. Write back to us [?] how Velbutena is [?]. It is my wish that you enjoy the best of fortune. Farewell. [The back of the letter carried instructions to deliver it to London.]*

The letters at Vindolanda – so valuable to us now – were not written with an eye on posterity, and no one handling them in, say, AD 105, would have thought for a moment about their future value. Their brevity, immediacy and mundanity may appear to us closer to mobile phone texts or tweets than full letters. And no one would claim they were beautiful pieces of writing, or instructive beyond their specific historical details. They are often charming, but they rarely convey anything of a philosophical nature. For that we need to go back to other excavations, to letters written on papyrus and rediscovered in the last three centuries, and to the undisputed first masters of the form.

* Octavius was an import-exporter; the sinew he mentions is believed to have been an important element in the building of catapults. The word ‘brother’ in these greetings should often be read as ‘comrade’.

* See Chapter Fourteen.

* Both Solemnis and Paris are believed to be slaves in a cohort of Batavians, one of the two principal units at Vindolanda in the period AD 85–130. The other was the Tungrian cohort.

* The number of question marks in this passage exposes the translator’s dilemma. But the word ‘translator’ is in itself inadequate: a phalanx of historians, palaeographers and linguistic experts have pored over these texts in the past decades, analysing the smallest curvature on the faintest letterform, cross-referencing indistinct names and locations, and piecing together logical textual and physical combinations – the ultimate lexicologist’s jigsaw. And then there is the problem of wider contextual interpretation, a task akin to reconstructing a forest from scattered bracken. It is scholarship for which the inexpert modern enthusiast can only be inestimably grateful.