Vindolanda: Roman Fort and Its Famous Writing Tablets

Vindolanda is a Roman fort in Northumberland, in northern England, just south of the line of Hadrian’s Wall. First built around AD 85, it is world-famous for the Vindolanda tablets: hundreds of wooden writing tablets from about AD 90–120 that preserve letters, lists and reports written by soldiers and their families. They are the oldest surviving handwritten documents from Britain and offer a rare, personal view of life on the edge of the Roman Empire.

Background: a fort on the Stanegate

After the campaigns of Agricola in Scotland, including the Battle of Mons Graupius, Rome pulled back its troops and established a line of forts across northern England. These were linked by a road later called the Stanegate, running between Corbridge in the east and Carlisle in the west.

Vindolanda was one of these forts. Its name probably comes from a Celtic phrase meaning something like “white field” or “white enclosure”. The first timber fort was built around AD 85, decades before Hadrian’s Wall was begun in AD 122.

A fort rebuilt many times

The site was occupied for centuries, and the fort was demolished and rebuilt repeatedly. Archaeologists have identified a sequence of at least five timber forts followed by stone forts, together with a civilian settlement, or vicus, outside the walls.

Each time a timber fort was rebuilt, the Romans levelled the old buildings and laid clay and turf over the debris. These layers sealed rubbish, timber, leather and textiles in damp, oxygen-free conditions. That is why organic materials that normally rot away survived at Vindolanda in large numbers, including thousands of leather shoes.

The writing tablets

In 1973 the archaeologist Robin Birley found the first tablets: thin slivers of wood, mostly birch, alder or oak, only a few millimetres thick. They were written on with pen and carbon-based ink, then folded. Many are fragmentary and the ink is faint, so scholars use infrared photography to read them.

More than a thousand tablets and fragments have now been recovered, though only some contain substantial text. The main group dates from about AD 90 to 120, when the fort was garrisoned first by the First Cohort of Tungrians and then, around AD 97–105, by the Ninth Cohort of Batavians. Both units were recruited from the lower Rhine area, in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands.

The tablets have been edited and translated by Alan Bowman and David Thomas, among others, and most are held by the British Museum. In a 2003 poll, British Museum experts and the public named them Britain’s top treasure.

What the tablets reveal

The tablets cover an astonishing range of topics:

• Military paperwork: a strength report of the Tungrian cohort lists 752 men, of whom only 296 were at Vindolanda, and 31 of those were sick, wounded or suffering from eye inflammation; the rest were posted elsewhere, including Corbridge and London.
• Supplies: accounts list grain, meat, spices and beer. One cavalry officer asks his commander to send more beer because the men have run out.
• Clothing: a letter mentions a parcel containing socks, sandals and underpants sent to a soldier, a reminder of how cold the frontier could be.
• Attitudes: one report describes the local Britons as “Brittunculi”, a dismissive term meaning roughly “wretched little Britons”, one of very few Roman references to them as individuals rather than enemies.
• Private life: letters between officers’ households discuss favours, visits, hunting and family news.

How the tablets were written and read

Two kinds of writing tablet were found at Vindolanda. A minority are stylus tablets: thicker wooden boards with a recessed surface once filled with wax, in which writers scratched letters with a metal point. When the wax is lost, faint scratches sometimes survive on the wood, but they are very hard to read.

Most of the famous texts are leaf tablets written in ink. Writers used a pen with a metal nib and an ink made of carbon, gum and water. A letter was usually written in two columns across a wide leaf, which was then folded in half, with the address written on the back.

The handwriting is a Roman cursive script, quite unlike the capital letters seen on monuments. Learning to read it was itself a scholarly achievement. Many documents were written by professional scribes, but the variety of hands shows that literacy reached beyond a small elite, at least among officers and their households.

The birthday invitation

The most famous tablet is a letter from Claudia Severa, wife of the commander of a nearby fort, to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians at Vindolanda. Written around AD 100, it invites Lepidina to her birthday celebration on 11 September.

The main text was written by a scribe, but the closing lines, sending warm greetings to her “sister”, are in a different hand. They are believed to be in Claudia’s own handwriting, which makes them one of the earliest known examples of Latin written by a woman.

Daily life beyond the tablets

Other finds bring the people of the tablets to life. Thousands of leather shoes have been recovered, including small shoes for children and fashionable shoes for women, proof that families lived inside the fort. Textiles, wooden combs, tent panels and writing equipment have survived in the same damp layers.

In 2017 excavators found two leather objects interpreted as Roman boxing gloves, a rare survival that suggests the soldiers practised combat sports. Animal bones, seeds and pollen show what people ate and what the landscape looked like. Altars and inscriptions from the later stone fort record the units stationed there and the gods they worshipped, from Jupiter to local Celtic deities. Together these finds make Vindolanda one of the most informative sites in the Roman world for everyday material culture.

Later history and excavation

Vindolanda remained in use after Hadrian’s Wall was built, serving as a supporting fort behind it. A stone fort was occupied into the fourth century, and there is evidence of activity continuing into the post-Roman period, possibly including an early Christian church.

Antiquaries noted the visible ruins from the sixteenth century onwards. Systematic excavation began in the twentieth century under Eric Birley, who bought the site in 1929, and was continued by his sons Robin and Anthony and grandson Andrew. The Vindolanda Trust, a charity founded in 1970, runs the site and museum, and volunteers from many countries take part in excavations each season.

Timeline

• c. AD 85: the first timber fort is built at Vindolanda on the Stanegate.
• c. AD 90–120: the main period of the writing tablets.
• c. AD 97–105: the Ninth Cohort of Batavians garrisons the fort under Flavius Cerialis.
• c. AD 100: Claudia Severa writes her birthday invitation to Sulpicia Lepidina.
• AD 122: construction of Hadrian’s Wall begins to the north.
• 1929: Eric Birley buys the site and begins excavations.
• 1970: the Vindolanda Trust is founded.
• 1973: Robin Birley discovers the first writing tablets.

Why it matters

Most of what is known about Roman Britain comes from ruins, inscriptions and the writings of elite authors. The Vindolanda tablets add the voices of ordinary soldiers, officers and women, in their own words. They show the frontier as a busy, connected community, part of the same world as villas such as Fishbourne Roman Palace in the south.