Vindolanda tablets
Ancient ways of life preserved In the mud Northumberland, 85-130 Ce
“one details A birthd Ay party
It’s a miracle that we have these tablets at all considering how thin and fragile they are. Found during an excavation at the site of the Roman fort of Vindolanda, today’s Northumberland, they were only preserved due to being buried in damp, aerobic earth. Wafer thin, the small wooden slabs are covered in a Latin scrawl detailing the daily lives of soldiers who spent their days at Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman Empire’s northernmost border.
The size of our postcards today, the Vindolanda tablets don’t look like much, but the details they hold about ancient Roman daily life are a rarity. One of the 1,600-odd tablets details work assignments – out of 343 men, 12 were making shoes, 18 were building the bath-house and the rest were collecting rubble, plastering, assigned to the wagons, tending to the kilns or working in the hospital. We also know what some of the soldiers specialised in aside from war.
Virilus and Ario were veterinarians, while Lucius’s trade was shield making and Atrectus was a brewer. We are also told about the opposing Celtic warriors and how the Romans looked down on their weaponry and tactics.
Not everything in the tablets is all business, though – one details a birthday party being thrown while another sees a soldier asking his brother for money. We also know what people ate – over 46 different foods are mentioned throughout the tablets, including venison, honey, spices and olives. Even ordinary soldiers could get hold of oysters and pepper.
The first tablets were found at Vindolanda in
1973 and since then, digs have been turning up several of the ancient documents, allowing us to create a better picture of what life was really like in a Roman fort. When they are uncovered, their preservation is of utmost importance so they are placed in water to clean them, then immersed in baths of methyl alcohol and ether to dry them out and make them easier to read. While they have been overtaken as the oldest Roman writings found in Britain by some tablets that have been found in London, they are still among the earliest texts produced in Roman Britain and hold a certain amount of significance on that merit alone.