To the Letter - Simon Garfield

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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 . . .

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       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.

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       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 easily reached these days by fossil-fuelled chariots made in Swindon or Japan. There are other routes – a wind-cheating, two-mile walk from a station where the fast trains don’t stop – but the lure of getting ‘the authentic Roman experience’ in early March would, certainly for most travellers from London and the south-east, be merrily traded for arrival by car. There is plenty of authentic visitor experience to be gained upon arrival – a meandering stroll down a valley through the original stone wells, bathhouses, latrines, barracks, granaries, officers’ residence and headquarters building, all cleaned and secured and certainly vivid enough to bring the place alive in young minds.

      The small museum at the foot of the valley, newly outfitted in 2012, reflects perfectly the spirit of Vindolanda, not least the fact that it has completely subsumed an earlier construction. This was once the nineteenth-century cottage of Chesterholm, the home of the Anglican clergyman Anthony Hedley, the first excavator of the forts. The displays of sandals, pots, spears and gemstones give way to the writing tablets in a tall, darkened, climate-controlled cabinet of wood and glass, and one approaches it with hushed reverence and excitement. The letters are increasingly lucid:

      Masclus to Cerialis his king, greeting. Please, my lord, give instructions as to what you want us to have done tomorrow. Are we to return with the standard to [the shrine at?] the crossroads all together or every other one [i.e. half] of us? . . . Farewell. My fellow-soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent.

      At the side of the glass cabinet a film explains that this is just the beginning of the great discoveries; the excavations continue at a deeper level and in further fields, and the initial cleansing, photography and deciphering are no longer outsourced to Newcastle but conducted at labs onsite, a busy and excited cottage industry. On the other side of the cabinet Robin Birley has made a personal ‘Top Tablets’ selection of the letters, including the request for beer quoted above, and the detailed listing of troop numbers on one particular day. There is also an account of preparations for Saturnalia, a discussion of the value of hunting nets, an intelligence report on the strength of the opposing British tribes, and a letter about making friends on the frontier.

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       Hushed and revered: the Vindolanda Museum displays its treasures.

      Many more tablets are to be found at the British Museum. Partly it is their history

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