The Wall Read online

  Lepidina was not to be outdone, and a remarkable correlation between the Vindolanda lists and archaeology at the fort demonstrates her awareness of fashion in an eerily vivid way. In the anaerobic mud one of her sandals has been found. The Jimmy Choo or Gucci of its day, the acme of contemporary Roman footwear for the wealthy, and something which would not look out of place in the streets of Milan or Paris today, it is something almost certainly worn at a very smart dinner party. Preserved by the black mud, it is almost complete, showing only a break in a small strap – probably while Lepidina was wearing it. Perhaps she threw it out of the window in fury? Stamped on the sole is the maker’s name, L Aebutius Thales, a shoemaker with a factory in Gaul – serving the luxury market. On the other side, there is enough wear to show that Lepidina wore the sandal for some time before the strap broke. In the Vindolanda lists, her expensive shoes are of course itemised.

  Footwear probably belonging to Cerialis has also been found. One pair of shoes in particular seems to reinforce the image of him as a dandy. The design for the uppers is a latticework pattern, and it would only have shown up if Cerialis had worn brightly coloured socks. Can there be any doubt that he did – and Brocchus too?

  If the talk at these smart dinner parties was of the chase, of fashions in Rome and of the politics of the wider world, there was sometimes someone whose decorum slipped, lowering the high tone. In a letter which may have been sent to Cerialis, a correspondent warns him about a difficult guest: you know that he is [often?] drunk . . . and kindnesses are ruined by envy. That last reference smacks of long-lost gossip. Other guests were more considerate. In a letter sent to Flavius Genialis, Cerialis’ predecessor at Vindolanda, an invitation is politely declined: . . . that I could not come, for a headache is affecting me very painfully.

  TOGA

  The principal garment of a free-born Roman, the toga, was huge; it must have been very warm in a hot Mediterranean summer. Usually made from undyed wool, it was shaped like a semi-circle and measured up to 5.5 metres along the straight edge and 2.75 metres at its widest point. Unlike the kilt, which in some ways it otherwise resembled, it was worn without a clasp or fastening – anywhere. As many Roman statues suggest, toga wearers had to keep their left arm crooked to cope with the volume of cloth. To put it on, one corner was laid at the feet while the straight edge was pulled up the back and over the left shoulder, then across the back, under the right arm, or over it, across the chest and then over the left shoulder again, leaving the other corner to hang down behind the knees. How it caught on is a mystery.

  Sulpicia Lepidina was almost certainly a Batavian aristocrat, possibly a princess. Her cognomen suggest that her family were granted Roman citizenship during the brief reign of the Emperor Sulpicius Galba (AD 68–9). Like most Roman brides, she would have been much younger than her husband. Analysts of the letters have calculated that Cerialis was about thirty years old in AD 100, but Lepidina is likely to have been little more than a teenager. In the ancient world, girls as young as 12 were encouraged to marry and begin bearing children. Inasmuch as the literary conventions of the letters allow an interpretation, the relationship between Lepidina and her friend Claudia Severa has the atmosphere of breathless intimacy and intensity associated with teenage girls. Here is another letter sent to Vindolanda:

  I, sister, just as I had spoken with you, and promised that I would ask Brocchus, and that I would come to you – I did ask him, and he replied that it is always, wholeheartedly, permitted to me, together with . . . to come to you in whatsoever way I can. There are truly, certain intimate matters which [I long to discuss with you (?). As soon as I know for sure(?)] you will receive my letter, from which you will know what I am going to do . . . I was . . . and I will remain at Briga. Farewell my dearest sister and my most longed-for soul. To Sulpicia Lepidina from Severa, wife of Brocchus.

  What is going on? What is this matter needing such urgent and private discussion? Such is the power of the Vindolanda material that the reader, at a distance of 2,000 years, wants to know. Perhaps these young women were very lonely, marooned in a sea of soldiers with little or no female company of the same age. Another letter, only a fragment, from an unnamed woman to the wife of the later Tungrian prefect Priscinus, whispers at a sense of isolation:

  [as?] my Lady has done, whereby you console me eloquently, just as a mother would do. For my soul . . . this state of mind . . . [during these(?)] days . . . and I was able to convalesce comfortably. As for you . . . what will you do with your Priscinus?

  There yawned an unbridgable social gulf between regimental commanders, their wives and families, and the men they commanded. It would have been unthinkable for Lepidina or Severa to have any social commerce with the men in the camp or any of the women associated with them. That made these letters and the meetings they facilitated all the more important.

  Letters were important to ordinary soldiers too. News was hungrily devoured in the forts and contacts kept up as good wishes were passed on the acquaintances in other units. Here is Sollemnis beginning a letter to his errant friend Paris:

  So that you may know that I am in good health, which I hope you are in turn, you most irreligious fellow, who haven’t even sent me a single letter – but I think I am behaving in a more civilised way by writing to you!

  The substantive part of the letter has been lost, but the sign-off survived:

  . . . you are to greet my messmates Diligens from me and Cogitatus and Corinthus, and I ask you to send me the names . . . Farewell dearest brother.

  Paris was another Batavian, stationed with the III Cohort at the unidentified fort of Ulucium. It is mentioned several times in the lists and letters and was likely to have been near Vindolanda. Perhaps it was at Newbrough, a few miles to the east.

  When Robin Birley unearthed the first letters in 1973, Alan Bowman and David Thomas deciphered the text. Because of what the first letter to be published said, public reaction immediately warmed to these discoveries and a flush of recognition lifted its contents and context out of the academic or abstruse.

  . . . I have sent you . . . pairs of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants, two pairs of sandals . . . Greet . . . ndes, Elpis, Iu . . . enus, Tetricius and all of your messmates, with whom I pray that you live in the greatest good fortune.

  Like the mothers and sweethearts of modern soldiers, someone had sent a welcome parcel to a loved one on a remote and chilly northern posting far from home. The letter conjured up images of knitting socks and scarves by the fireside for our brave boys. In fact it is much more likely that the letter accompanied goods ordered and was sent to Vindolanda by a fellow former soldier. But it was fortunate that the very first letter carried such a homely message and it allowed an interested public to relate immediately to the garrison of the Roman frontier two thousand years ago. It conveyed how different, and how important these amazing finds were.

  The socks and underpants in themselves also contributed new information – as often with the contents of the letters. Hitherto there had been no evidence that the Romans wore either, although bare feet in leather sandals in a Northumberland January would have demonstrated unimaginable hardihood. And underpants no doubt supplied much needed manly support.

  The reference to messmates, contubernales, suggested a male sender who understood something of army organisation. Perhaps he was a Batavian veteran who had returned home. In any case he knew that each century in an auxiliary regiment, and a legion, was divided into ten platoons of eight men. On the march they shared a tent, and at Vindolanda a barrack room. Bunk beds probably made these more spacious and congenial than the archaeological remains imply. Each platoon cooked its own meals, the men probably taking turns. There was no communal dining (although a club, the scola, existed for noncommissioned officers) and the army did not supply rations. The fort appears to have sold barley to its soldiers as well as chickens and eggs, perhaps through some accounting mechanism which reverted the cash to the commander or the army
. Not surprisingly, large volumes of beer were sold; one individual order was for the equivalent of 50 pints and it seems to have been very cheap.

  COOKING APICIUS

  Slaves usually ran the kitchens of the well-off in ancient times, and they also invented many recipes. The best-known collection is thought to have been compiled by Marcus Gavius Apicius, a gourmet who sailed the Mediterranean in search of giant prawns. In fact it is much more likely to have been written by a series of scribes who were given recipes by slave-cooks. Sally Grainger and her husband have translated many of these and, in an excellent new edition of Cooking Apicius, have made them very accessible to modern methods; blenders are unblushingly used. The recipes are superb and unnusual: favourites might include a starter of soft-boiled eggs in pine kernel sauce, a side dish of spicy mushy peas. The Romans made good vinaigrettes for salads and called them oeno-garum. In addition to several dipping sauces for meats, two of the best mensae primae are the roast lamb and the belly pork known as ofellae. Almond and semolina pudding is surprisingly light. As with modern Mediterranean cooking, the emphasis is always on the excellence of the ingredients.

  Far to the north of Vindolanda and built forty years later, Bearsden Fort in Glasgow revealed much about the diet of ordinary soldiers. Through painstaking analysis of the contents of a blocked latrine drain, strong-minded experts have been able to show that porridge was a staple. In season, wild fruits, berries and nuts could be gathered by soldiers and mixed in to add some variety and flavour. Hazelnuts, brambles, bilberries, crab apples and raspberries would have been almost farmed and protected by each platoon. This wild harvest also had the attraction of costing nothing, no deductions from pay. The men were probably allowed to fish, and to trap and snare small animals, but just as medieval kings guarded their hunting reserves, it is likely that commanders like Cerialis and Brocchus forbad the pursuit of bigger game by anyone else.

  The arrival of so many men in northern England at the end of the first century AD transformed the local economy. Although their numbers were small compared with the 30,000 or so who came to build Hadrian’s Wall in AD 122 and its subsequent garrison of 12,000 auxiliaries, the soldiers stationed at Vindolanda and the other early forts strung out along the Stanegate Road provided a substantial new market for goods and services. There were perhaps 5,000 of them – and they all needed something.

  Once the countryside had recovered from the initial shock of conquest – and this is not to be underestimated – trade began. But it must be remembered that the forts were built on good land which was worked by the native peoples. The Romans did not enter an empty landscape. Summarily driven off wide swathes of pasture and arable ground, the farmers will have nursed their fury for at least a generation. It is estimated that a cohort of 500 men needed the yield of 700 acres of cornfields each year. Add to this at least an equivalent amount of pasture for 200 oxen (used to pull the regiment’s carts), 200 or so ponies, and woodland for the fort’s pigs and chickens to root around in and the result is a very large appropriation of land, a dispossession and hardship on a huge scale. Vindolanda’s territorium may have run to 1,500 acres. This sort of deprivation took place all along the Stanegate, and on a renewed and greater scale when the Wall builders came. It will have taken some time before local producers began to trade significantly with the invaders who had evicted so many.

  But trade they did. Markets developed as goods and food were brought for sale to the gates of the forts. And while the occasional complaint about prices and supply surface in the Vindolanda letters and lists, it was in everyone’s interests for these markets to benefit both buyer and seller. Local goods were almost always cheaper than anything shipped from the south.

  Perhaps the most radical economic shift is nowhere explicitly recorded, or at least no record has survived. The Romans operated a money economy, and the natives seem to have used barter. In order for trade to function at all, cash must have been universally adopted. How else could transactions have been completed? The soldiers had little to offer in the way of goods to barter, and cash was what they were paid. The only hint of rapid adoption is in the Vindolanda lists where people with native-sounding names do write of the cash costs of items. But it must at first have been bewildering.

  In order for trade to transact smoothly – there was after all money and livelihoods involved – it is inevitable that the native peoples will have had to learn to speak Latin. Many loan-words made their way into Old Welsh but the linguistic traffic did travel in the opposite direction in one significant way.

  The names used by the Romans for their forts were almost all Celtic in derivation. And this process of adoption took place early. Within less than twenty years of the building of the first timber fort, letter writers marked their address clearly as Vindolanda. The meaning of the name is a rare insight into native reaction to the Roman invasion. From uindo (gwyn in modern Welsh), the first element means white or bright. This is almost certainly a native reference to the Roman habit of plastering their buildings with render to help keep out the weather. A deposit of wall plaster was found outside the northern rampart, and it more than suggests that the fort’s gatehouses were rendered as the IX Batavians rebuilt Vindolanda around AD 100. There are several other Vindo names in the Celtic regions of the Empire and at least four in Britain. They probably echo a similar reaction to the rapid appearance of bright, white buildings in the landscape; Vindobala is nearby at Rudchester in Northumberland, Vindomora is in County Durham, Vindogara in Ayrshire and Vindocladia in Dorset. These foreign, new and threatening structures stood in startling contrast with the earth colours of the native roundhouses built out of natural materials which blended into the soft greens and browns of the Northumberland landscape.

  The second element of the place-name is simpler. It comes from llan, a modern Welsh term for a church or, more correctly, a churchyard. Originally it described a fenced or walled enclosure. The White Fort is probably the native name for what its soldiers knew as Vindolanda.

  The Tungrians were first on the scene, perhaps around AD 85, and the earliest letters and lists say a good deal about their tenure of the White Fort. But some of the most detailed archaeological and documentary information is confusing. Excavation indicated a standard layout for the early fort, probably built for a cohort of 480 men. Significantly the ditching defending the western wall was deep and elaborate (the other three walls overlooked downslopes), a reminder that the Tungrians were digging in hostile country. So far, so predictable. But a fascinating list came to light early in the excavations. It is a strength report of the I Tungrian Cohort, and it describes the state of a regiment of 752 men, far more than could be accommodated in the new fort:

  18th May, net number of the I Cohort of Tungrians, of which the commander is Julius Verecundus the prefect, 752, including 6 centurions.

  Of whom there are absent:

  Guards of the governor

  at the office of Ferox

  46

  at Coria

  337

  including [?] 2 centurions

  at London [?] a centurion

  6

  including 1 centurion

  9

  including 1 centurion

  11

  at [?]

  1

  45

  total absentees

  456

  including 5 centurions,

  remainder, present

  296

  including 1 centurion

  from these:

  sick

  15

  wounded

  6

  suffering from inflammation of the eyes

  10

  total of these

  31

  remainder, fit for active service

  265

  including 1 centurion.

  Most striking is how few soldiers there were at Vindolanda fit and able to deal with any emergencies. Only a little more than half a standard cohort held down a wide swathe of, at best, unsettled countrysid
e. The neighbouring forts of Carvoran in the west and Newbrough in the east lay only 8 or so miles away, but too far to be helpful in the event of surprise or night attack. Morale amongst the native kings must have been low, to say nothing of their military intelligence.

  The dangerously sparse garrison at Vindolanda was probably in the process of being upgraded. The large detachment at Corbridge, 337 soldiers, may have been new recruits undergoing some sort of induction. Their origins are uncertain. They cannot have been local – too much bad blood had been too recently shed – but they might have been drafted from southern Britannia. More likely they were tax-equivalent Tungrians fresh off the boat.

  The Vindolanda letters and lists often provide a disconcertingly everyday background to the grim grind of the Roman military apparatus. While his soldiers were sweating at the bottom of deeper ditches dug below the western wall to protect their fort from a threatening hinterland, their commander, Julius Verecundus, was being very particular about the sort of apples he liked. Another aristocrat from the Netherlands, he owned at least one slave; here is the shopping list he gave him for what sounds like a trip to the more sophisticated market at Corbridge:

  Two modii of bruised beans, 20 chickens, 100 apples – if you can find nice-looking ones – 100 or 200 eggs, if they are on sale there at a fair price . . . mulsum [honey-flavoured wine] . . . eight sextarii [about four litres] of fish sauce [muria] . . . a modius of olives . . .