Vindolanda

HISTORICAL NOTE

This text excavated at the fort of Vindolanda was the spark that first inspired this story. It was written around the turn of the first to second centuries AD, and the second hand in the text was surely that of Claudia Severa herself, adding a personal touch to the invitation. This makes it the first surviving piece of writing by a woman in the history of Britain. The original text, written in ink on a thin wooden writing tablet, can be seen today in the British Museum.

We will talk more about Vindolanda and the texts discovered there in a moment, but it was this glimpse of something as routine as a birthday party in a frontier zone on the edge of the Roman Empire that made me want to create a story around it and bring that time and place to life. Vindolanda is a novel, and much of the story is invented because we know very little about what was really happening in northern Britain at this time. However, given that I have spent my adult life studying the Roman world and the Roman army in particular, I have done my best to place the story in as accurate a setting as possible.

Ferox and Vindex are inventions, although a later tombstone records a Brigantian soldier in the Roman army who was the son of someone named Vindex and in my imagination this is our man. Many of the other characters are also inventions, or people about whom little more is known than their names. Sulpicia Lepidina, Claudia Severa and Flavius Cerialis appear in other texts, but even so are only a little less shadowy. I have done my best to invent nothing that clashes with what we do know about them, but as characters they are essentially fictional. The same is true of the other people plucked from the texts found at Vindolanda.

Much more detail on the historical background can be found on my website – www.adriangoldsworthy.com – which also includes suggestions for further reading. In the meantime, it is worth looking at a few topics.

The story occurs at the start of the reign of Trajan, whose successor Hadrian came to Britain and ordered the construction of Hadrian’s Wall around the year AD 122. Our sources have little to say about major events in Britain under Trajan, although there is talk of major conflict, which may well have prompted the decision to build the Wall. The fort at Vindolanda (modern Chesterholm) lies a few miles south and within sight of the Wall and clearly was incorporated within the network of garrisons serving it. Much of our story takes place in what would become Wall country.

Vindolanda is set in AD 98, the first year of Trajan’s reign, and at this time the province of Britannia was just over fifty years old. Although Julius Caesar had landed in Britain in 55 and 54 BC, no permanent Roman presence was maintained, and it was not until AD 43 that the Emperor Claudius sent an invasion force across the Channel. In AD 60 Boudicca’s rebellion devastated southern Britain, but after her defeat there is no trace of any serious resistance in the Lowlands. This is not true of northern Britain, which was garrisoned by substantial numbers of troops for the remaining three and a half centuries of Roman occupation.

In AD 98 few would have guessed that the Romans would stay for so long. Their presence in the north was more recent, for it was mainly in the seventies and eighties AD that this area was overrun. During this time Roman armies marched far into the north of what would become Scotland, while a naval squadron for the first time circumnavigated Britain, confirming that it was an island. An entire legion – one of the four then garrisoning the province and one of twenty-eight in existence – built a base at Inchtuthil in Perthshire, the biggest site in a network of garrisons on the edge of the Highlands. Around the same time, a system of observation towers along a military road was constructed along the Gask ridge.

All of this activity, which to a great extent is known only from the archaeological remains, makes clear the Romans’ intention to occupy this region more or less permanently, but in the late eighties AD priorities changed. The Emperor Domitian, faced with serious trouble on the Danube, withdrew Legio II Adiutrix from Britain and did not replace it. It is probable that substantial numbers of auxiliaries were withdrawn at the same time, so that the provincial garrison was cut by at least a quarter. Inchtuthil and many of the other bases were abandoned, and the same thing happened a little later to the remaining sites and the Gask ridge line. No Roman base was maintained north of the Forth–Clyde line, and soon the northernmost outpost was at Trimontium or Newstead.

Several forts were maintained or built close to what would one day become the line of Hadrian’s Wall. A couple of years after our story, a proper road running between Carlisle and Corbridge was constructed and more forts and smaller outposts added. Today the road is known by its medieval name, the Stanegate or ‘stone road’, and archaeologists continue to debate its composition and purpose. By about AD 106 Newstead was abandoned in another withdrawal. Our paltry literary sources make no mention of any of this, so it is left to us to guess from the archaeology just what was going on.

A novelist has more freedom, and once again I have done my best to reconstruct these years for our purposes in a way that never conflicts with any hard evidence. At the very least I hope that our story is something that could have happened. Something made the Romans station significant numbers of troops in this area at the end of the first century AD, and then made them increase these numbers and develop the deployment along the Stanegate just a few years later. All of the forts mentioned in the story existed and were occupied in AD 98. (Precise dating is rarely possibly through excavation so it may be that the fort at Magna or Carvoran dates to a year or two later, but it is not impossible that it was there in 98). Syracuse is an invention, but typical of the many small outposts set up by the Roman army as needed. I see it as a predecessor to the excavated sites at Haltwhistle Burn and Throp, which were built alongside the Stanegate, although these were stone structures and larger than the fictional Syracuse. In the late first century AD most of the structures built by the army in Britain were in turf and timber. Some sites were being rebuilt in stone, and in the second century this became ever more common.

Vindolanda is one of the most remarkable Roman sites in Britain. The first fort was built there in the seventies AD. The fort from our period was the third constructed on the site, and I have stretched the dating by a year or so to have it there in AD 98. The remains visible today are of the later stone fort and the civilian settlement or vicus (a more organised version of the canabae) outside it. A level of laziness in demolishing the earlier forts when the new ones were built, combined with the waterlogged nature of much of the site, created unusual conditions that have allowed the preservation of wood, leather, textiles and other material usually lost. Over 5,500 shoes have already been found at Vindolanda, more than from anywhere else in the Roman Empire. For more information about the site and the Vindolanda Trust visit the website at http://www.vindolanda.com.

Although less impressive as objects, even more remarkable are the wooden writing tablets, hundreds of which have preserved some text. Papyrus was known and used in Roman Britain, but was expensive, and much everyday correspondence and record-keeping was written in ink on thin sheets of wood. Some were covered in thin wax, so that this could be smoothed down again and reused, but these tend to be impossible to decipher since scratches from numerous different texts overlap. The most useful were the plain wood sheets, which had been rubbed with only a thin layer of beeswax to prevent the ink from spreading and were then used only once. Even so, little of the ink survives, and it requires careful analysis of the scratches made by the nibs of the stylus pens to trace the outlines of letters. Deciphering the texts and then reconstructing and understanding them is a painstaking business. More detail and many of the texts themselves can be found online at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk.

The contents of most of the texts are mundane: private letters, accounts, daily reports of the units garrisoned there, lists of men allocated to various duties, etc. A significant number of the tablets are associated with Flavius Cerialis and his household. His name suggests that he or his father gained citizenship at the time of the Batavian Revolt in AD 70, presumably for loyalty. In one text, the decurion Masclus refers to him as ‘his king’. The editors of the tablets are inclined to see this as no more than sycophancy by a subordinate, but it is possible that he was from the Batavian royal family. Neither he nor his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, are recorded outside the tablets. The editors suggest that her family became Roman citizens through the favour of the short-lived Emperor Sulpicius Galba, who reigned for several months after the suicide of Nero. This is possible, but she could equally have come from a family whose citizenship was far older. There is no evidence that she was the daughter of a senator, but once again this is not impossible. A generation or so later, such a woman is recorded as the wife of an auxiliary prefect commanding the garrison of High Rochester.

Commanders of auxiliary units usually served with them for three or more years, and Cerialis and Sulpicia Lepidina seem to have been at Vindolanda for at least as long as this. Texts give us some idea of the food they provided for guests – with poultry and eggs common – and his taste for hunting. They also tell us of the social life of garrison commanders – in one letter Claudia Severa speaks of coming to visit Vindolanda, but requiring her husband’s permission to do so, and probably his assistance in arranging transport and, most likely, an escort. Elsewhere Sulpicia Lepidina appears supporting an appeal for assistance made to her husband, and it is clear that an officer’s wife behaved much as she did in more settled provinces, not simply running the household but trading favours in a very Roman way.

There are references to children in the households of commanders, and Cerialis appears to have had at least three. However, no letter specifically names Sulpicia Lepidina as their mother, so that I was able to make them offspring from an earlier marriage even though this is pure fiction. Shoes found associated with the praetorium from this period are of such high quality that they surely belong to the prefect’s family. This suggests that there were two boys and a girl, the older boy’s shoes wearing out in a strange pattern that may well indicate some physical disability, albeit one that did not prevent him from walking. Among the shoes likely to have belonged to Sulpicia Lepidina is one slipper that would not be out of place in a shop window today. On the whole the footwear from Vindolanda consists of enclosed shoes rather than the sandals we automatically associate with the Romans. Judging from finds of similar styles elsewhere, patterns in footwear changed throughout the empire every couple of decades. It is also clear than the majority of people owned more than one pair – something rare until the modern era.

Iron Age Britain was occupied by many different tribes and other groups, many of them only ever mentioned in Roman sources. It is likely that Roman and Greek observers misunderstood many aspects of the indigenous population’s sense of identity, but we have little more to go on. All of the groups mentioned in the book lived in the areas described, and as far as we can tell all shared a version of the same language. These days, some archaeologists are reluctant to use terms like Celtic or to assume that this linguistic group shared a common culture, and therefore that traits described in Gaul or elsewhere were also likely in Britain. This approach can be too dogmatic, and as a novelist I have drawn upon evidence from other regions as well as cultures from other lands and other periods to create a picture of the tribes. I have done my best to make sure that none of this material conflicts with what we do know.

Judging from the environmental evidence, in AD 98 the climate in the north was a little milder than it is today, closer to that of south-east England. This may well have changed and grown colder during the second century. There is evidence for widespread cultivation as well as pastoral activities. Several sections of Hadrian’s Wall were built on ploughed land. The population was considerable and this was far from being a wasteland, but most people lived in small settlements, often a few huts on their own, with larger villages and hill forts much less common. In spite of some attempts by scholars to pacify Iron Age Britain, all the evidence points to societies in which warfare, usually in the form of raiding, was an ever-present threat. This is true of most of the ancient world. The Roman Empire imposed on a large chunk of the world a much higher level of peace than it had ever enjoyed before. The famous Pax Romana was real, but it was maintained by force, and in some areas, especially near the frontiers, it was far from unbroken by outbursts of violence and warfare.

Archaeology is not well suited to charting political change among Iron Age peoples. Tincommius and his growing empire are both inventions. There is no evidence as yet for the appearance of so powerful a leader in this region, or for any reuse of an abandoned and slighted Roman fort in the way described in the story. However, his career so far and in the stories to come is based on similar charismatic leaders who appeared at other times in the lands around the empire. At the close of the first century AD, most observers in northern Britain would have surely seen the Romans as in retreat. In such circumstances, other forces quickly emerge to fill the power vacuum.

The druids have attracted a good deal of interest over the centuries, most of it highly romantic. Julius Caesar depicts them as important figures in the Gaul of his day, acting above and outside the tribes. He does not portray them as anti-Roman or as able to control the tribes. Under Augustus and the other emperors the druidic cult in Gaul was restricted and later suppressed, although it survived covertly. In Britain the Romans attacked the centre of the cult in AD 60, invading the island of Mona (or Anglesey) and destroying the sacred groves there. This does appear to have ended the formal structure of the druidic cult. In spite of this people called druids appear in Gaul and Britain in the centuries to come, but lack the status of the aristocratic priests of earlier years.

Conquest and occupation by an imperial power has often caused serious dislocation to the society and beliefs of indigenous peoples, and it is tempting to see the periodic appearance of druids with apocalyptic prophecies as similar to religious movements in more recent times. Among the most famous are the various Ghost Dance movements in North America in the late nineteenth century, but other examples include the various mystics who appeared among the Xhosa in South Africa, or what was popularly known as the Hauhau movement among the Maori. Very often, such leaders preached a mixture of imported beliefs alongside traditional ideas. This is the basis for the story, and I have presented the Stallion’s followers as using a mishmash of magical words and invocations, as well as Greco-Roman deities alongside old beliefs and gods.

The Silures lived in what is now South Wales. Tacitus described them as darker and different in appearance from other Britons. They first came into conflict with the Romans in the late forties AD, and were keen supporters of Caratacus, the leader from the south-east who kept fighting the invaders for years after his homeland was overrun. The Silures were known for raiding their neighbours, and exploited the hills and valleys of their homeland, using stealth, surprise and ambush in their long struggle against the Romans. It took at least twenty-five years to defeat them and substantial Roman garrisons remained in the area for some time. Ferox and his grandfather are fictional, but it was common practice to take hostages from defeated leaders, educating them within the empire. Many became Roman citizens and served in the army, so there is nothing implausible about Ferox and his career.

This is a vast subject, but it is worth making a few points for those new to the topic. In AD 98 the Roman army consisted of twenty-eight legions – two more would soon be added by Trajan – each with a paper strength of some 5,000 men. Each one was divided into ten cohorts of heavy infantry and had a small contingent of some 120 horsemen. Legionaries were Roman citizens. This was a legal status without any ethnic basis and by this time there were over four million Roman citizens scattered throughout the empire. We may think of St Paul, a Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor, but a Roman citizen and entitled to all the legal advantages that brought.

Supporting the legions were the auxiliaries who were not citizens, but received citizenship at the end of their military service. These were organised as independent cohorts of infantry and similarly sized cohorts of cavalry. There were also the mixed cohorts (cohortes equitatae) like the Batavians, which included both infantry and cavalry in a four to one ratio. Legionaries and auxiliaries alike served for twenty-five years. Most were volunteers, although conscription did occur and was probably especially common with some auxiliary units.

We know a good deal about the Roman army, about its equipment, organisation, command structure, tactics, ranks and routine, although it must be emphasised that there are also many gaps in our knowledge. As a historian it is my duty to stress what we do not know, but a novelist cannot do this and must invent in order to fill in these gaps. Some aspects of the depiction of the Roman army in this book may surprise some readers, but often this will be because some of the evidence for it is not well known outside academic circles. I have invented as little as possible, and always done my best to base it on what we do know. As an introduction to the army, I am vain enough to recommend my own The Complete Roman Army published by Thames and Hudson. I would also say that anything by the late Peter Connolly is also well worth a look. Once again, for more specific recommendations, I refer readers to my website.