To the Letter. Simon Garfield

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ