Civilization in Ruins? Romans Speak!
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD Real People Hide Under Rocks In the Hills
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Note from Annette
Welcome, everyone new to these parts! I hope Non-Boring History, with its serious purpose lurking behind its irreverent nonsense, will snuggle its way into your heart as well as your mind: This is what happens when a former history professor in America, who also happens to be a cheery Brit, goes renegade!
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A Load of Old Rocks
I’m a historian of the modern age (which, bizarrely to us 21st century types, starts at the end of the 15th century onwards—Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 if you’re American, Battle of Bosworth in 1485 if you’re a Brit, and everyone else, just pick a team). So you don't normally expect Romans at Non-Boring History, do you?
But when I'm on the road, I explore new places, and new subjects, and sometimes that lures me to the seriously old stuff. Even so, considering how I mercilessly tease beardy archeologists, you might be surprised by my sudden interest in their piles today. Piles of rocks, that is. Rocks put in Britain on the orders of Romans, originally in the form of buildings. Not other kinds of piles, although I do wonder how Romans coped with hemorrhoids, now I think of it.
Romans in Britain always seemed to me a mysterious and aloof bunch. Not exactly relatable. Their official language was Latin, which made them a bit hard for the rest of us to chat with (well, that, and their being dead). With their mad military skillz, they didn’t set out to be good neighbors. They attacked and intimidated. They imposed practical yet boring things like paved roads. Sewers. Central heating.
And then the Romans vanished from Britain without a by-your-leave, leaving behind them massive walls and buildings to fall down over time, plus Roman soldiers—many of them not really Roman at all, but from all over the Empire— who just sort of blended in and settled down. The Romans left behind little sense of the kind of people they had been, beyond a few elite writings that make them seem even more daunting and remote to us.
Or so I thought, for a long time.
Today's museum is what’s left of the Roman town of Vindolanda, a lonely spot on Hadrian’s Wall, the symbol of the limits of the Roman Empire in the remotest, rainiest, gloomiest bit of England (and it kind of still is, but this is modern Britain, with easy freeway/motorway access, so hey).
This grim area is where the Romans admitted they had met their limit: The Scots were too much for them! Maybe we Scots talked them to death! Maybe we overwhelmed them with cups of tea and sugary treats! FREEDOM!! SCOTLAND!! Sorry. Being a Scot, I find this rather a point of pride. Either way, the Romans, on the orders of Emperor Hadrian, plunked down a big border wall along what’s now the north of England, in Cumbria and Northumberland, to keep the Scots out. Forts like Vindolanda were stationed alongside Hadrian’s Wall at regular intervals.
I first visited Vindolanda with my son some years ago, several centuries after the Romans packed their bags. Hoosen, Jr. was about eight or nine at the time, and I was homeschooling him, on the grounds that I couldn’t do a worse job than the knowledge-free curriculum of public schools (Lord love the teachers who try to teach this mess). I even gamely tried to teach Hoosen, Jr. Latin until I ran out of competence: I had taken a year and a half of Latin in college, for the sheer heck of it, having missed out on the subject in school in England. I figured I could at least get Hoosen, Jr. started with a few basics, including Latin and Roman appreciation, and I wasn’t wrong. So, armed with a British Latin textbook for kids about a cartoon mouse named Minimus (means littlest) who lived in the British Roman town of Vindolanda, we had fun. How cool it was to actually visit Vindolanda!
This time around, many years later, I brought Hoosen, his father, and found Vindolanda got bigger in my absence: Busy beardy archaeologists have uncovered more of it with their little trowels.
Britain’s Pompeii, that’s what Vindolanda is often called, but don’t get your hopes up. This site wasn’t Hollywood-ready, a frozen-in-time miracle, bursting with amazing objects from gems to bread loaves, and even people, buried in a flash under volcanic ash. Vindolanda is much less dramatic than that. The Fort had existed through many points in time, and it had morphed: The Romans had repeatedly renovated/expanded/replaced to keep it ready for an invasion that didn’t happen (I mean, why would the Scots want this little dismal corner of England?) The first fort went up in AD 85, and the last in AD 213, which is after all, 128 years.
And Vindolanda wasn’t just the Fort: It was the village crammed up against its walls, a pattern repeated throughout history, because forts need supporting services, and civilians like protection. I think of the town of Windsor, hugging the walls of Windsor Castle, the royals’ residence near London, which started as a dirt mound built by William the Conqueror after his invasion of England in 1066, and was soon surrounded by shops and houses. I think of Hinesville, a slightly seedy town strung along the fringes of Fort Stewart, a huge US Army base in Georgia, where I used to lodge in a hotel each year while presenting my programs in nearby schools, and which lured in young soldiers to buy and eat. Vindolanda village, like Hinesville and Windsor, provided important services to its fort, plus employment and accommodation for locals and soldiers’ families.
I won’t give you a blow by blow account of the ever-changing development of Vindolanda’s Fort, because boring. The Fort, with its barracks, HQ, supply depots, etc, is all very well, but it doesn’t float my boat. The village is where I found my imagination stirring! With apologies to my readers who are all over miliary history, but just think of how I’m expanding your horizons!
And anyway, as my servicepeople and veteran readers know, logistics and supplies may not be as exciting as weaponry, but, boy, are good roads and decent grub essential. Military and civilian support are essential for mission success. If I speak passionately about this, maybe that’s because I have a certificate that a branch of the US military kindly gave me for having been a supportive spouse of a civilian worker, even though, honestly, I really don’t think I deserved it. It was much appreciated, though.
But I digress. The village of Vindolanda tells us a fair bit about its people. And ooh, you know I love people!
Back to Vindolanda
“I don’t remember this at all,” I grumbled to Hoosen, as we ended our hair-raising drive on narrow country roads, with me at the wheel. While I’m usually in the passenger seat on our American road trips, things are different when we’re in the UK. On British soil, this Brit is the designated driver of the Benotis (Hoosen Benoti being my long-suffering spouse). The museum car park was almost empty, and it did not look at all familiar from my previous trip. I later learned that there are two entrances to Vindolanda—one when you use GPS (UK: SatNav) and one if you follow the brown signs from the nearby motorway (US: Freeway).
Either way, there’s an uphill hike involved at some point between car parks, museum and cafe buildings, and the remains of Vindolanda. And it’s a wet walk across lawns, mostly, so in the very unlikely event that you do come here yourself one day, try to remember to bring your boots— not that I did, so I resigned myself to wet feet, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The Street Where They Lived
One thing I remembered best from my first visit to Vindolanda was the pavement, or, as we would say in the US, the sidewalk, although that’s a bit misleading, because the paved road through the village wasn’t just for pedestrians: It served all traffic, on foot or hoof or wheel. The paving stones are so cool, allowing us to walk where soldiers and civilians traveled two thousand years ago! I remember Hoosen, Jr. and me getting so excited about this!
In a stereotypical English village or American small town today, we might expect to find a pub/bar or two or more, at least one shop, a church, and a social hall/village hall. How did Vindolanda measure up as a service center, especially because it served a military fort?
Small workshops, light industry, lined the edge of the settlement—the sorts of establishments you might find on the edge of a town today— including a metal-working forge, where people made tools, armour, oh, and forged Roman coins for their own private use. Oops, yes, they did.
The heart of the action, though, was the part of Vindolanda closest to the Fort, the bit we see in the pictures above. Among the highlights of that center was the bath house. Splish splash!
Roman Rub a Dub Dub
Look, just like the info panel says, don’t just think of the bath house as a place to get clean. It was THE place for soldiers and family members alike to get rest, recreation, and time hanging out with their mates. And it also provided the only public loo in Vindolanda, in case you got caught short while out on your errands. Since public loos were also socializing places—no stalls— the conversation could flow.
We still see the influence of the sociable Roman bath house in the massive turn of the century bath house which Hoosen and visited in 2023 in England’s Manchester, paid for by massive cotton processing profits. That later bath house served many needs, and reflected its times: While Romans had been happy to let it all hang out, most later Victorian Manchester folk preferred to get naked privately, in a basic individual bath (few houses had their own), and to swim around in big pools segregated by sex and social class, making it clear who was a factory owner, who a clerk, and who a millworker, at least among the men—the women all bathed together, which must have made for interesting conversations. The Manchester baths also offered a place for people to wash and iron their clothes. But I reckon there was a Roman inheritance in Manchester’s baths: Check out its “Turkish” bath, in which patrons, for pleasure and relaxation, could move from pool to pool and steam rooms, experiencing different water temperatures, like Romans in Britain 2,000 years earlier:
By Jupiter!
Don’t think of a church as just for religious rites. Then, as in small towns today, Vindolanda’s local place of worship served a social function: The temple’s small hall was used for feasting. The sanctuary, meanwhile, featured little pillar-like altars found by archaeologists. Those in the photo (beige objects) are repros, because the real deals are in the museum:
To give you a better idea of the temple size, here’s a photo from the other end, looking toward the feasting hall, with the altars helping show what we’re looking at:
The temple was dedicated to a minor God called Jupiter Dolichenus, a kind of minority interpretation of the famous Jupiter. Jupiter Dolichenus very rarely got his own temple, so it’s cool that the lads and lasses in Vindolanda hadn’t forgotten him. The info panel told me he was a “weather god”, which makes me wonder if we’re going through all this weird weather because JD is a bit miffed that he never got the attention he deserved? Then again, Vindolanda is in the rainiest part of Britain, so maybe not. Jupiter Doichenus’s worship originated in Turkey, but he was super popular among the whole Roman Army by the time this temple was built in about 220 AD. No wonder he was popular, when feasting was a big part of his worship! Oh, wait . . . The Vindolanda guidebook tells me that the temple’s heated feasting room was where temple priests entertained important people. Figures. I’m not sure how often ordinary worshippers got to partake in the tasty grub. But surely sometimes?
Unlike the popular all-male Roman cult of Mithras (whose birthday of December 25 was appropriated by the early Christian church, which had no idea when Jesus was born, so just sort of borrowed Mithras’s birthday, and who also built churches on former Mithras temple sites), JD’s worshippers included women, and people of all backgrounds were welcome. But then Christianity came along around AD 320, and enthusiastic local converts burned down this pagan temple in Vindolanda. Not that all pagan beliefs went away: They blended with Christianity, as the early Church wisely saw the value of connecting their new faith with established religions. That’s why English cathedrals are full of often craftily-concealed images of pagan figures like the Green Man. And why we celebrate Christ’s birth at Christmas: Mithras is the original reason for the season.
A Typical Village House
A Typical Village House, said the info panel. It was a bit hard to see what that meant. But, yes, this is a house made up of a long strip of multiple rooms, likely with a retail shop in front. That also describes the Vindolanda butcher’s shop, which sold not only fresh meat, but also ready-cooked snacks to go, like meat pies. Very handy for grabbing a nice warm treat on your way between the baths and the fort!
The wider the frontage of a house/shop facing the street, the more it cost, so these Vindolanda houses were narrow, long and a bit dark in the middle. Reminded me of the 18th century hotel where Hoosen and I stayed this trip, not too far away, in Moffat, Scotland, built with minimal main street frontage for the same reason. It also holds the Guinness Record as the world’s narrowest hotel. Very cool!
The REAL Highlight!
These have just been Vindolanda highlights, because, as well as wanting to keep this post to a reasonable length, I have-as I have whiningly made clear— a limited appetite for rock piles. Still. It’s amazing what some good info panels and a snazzy museum will do to bring a collection of rubble to life.
However . . .
The highlight of Vindolanda is an exhibit in the site museum, interpreting a collection of what were once blackened sludgy piles that looked like mud. It would have been so easy for the professional archaeologists doing excavations way back in 1973 to have missed or dismissed these. But I really do have to give the beardy archaeologists huge credit here: They knew what they were looking at, and they were determined to save them. Much as I hate to admit it, their careful groveling around in the dirt with trowels has actually brought ordinary Romans in Britain into history by revealing documents, the raw materials of the historian. See, these sludgy piles, cleaned up, revealed themselves as Roman writing tablets, each about the size of a postcard, made from wood and wax, and preserved in the soil for two thousand years. Our beardy buddies and their great care have allowed all of us to meet British Romans as individuals, for the first time.
And the people of Vindolanda were a hoot.
But enough of telling you. Let me show you.
Vindolanda Voices!
Birthday Invite
Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings. I send you a warm invitation to come to us on September 11th, for my birthday celebrations, to make my day more enjoyable by your presence. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius greets you and your sons. I will expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest as I hope to prosper, and greetings.
Address: Sulpicia Lepidina wife of Flavius Cerialis from Severa.
Isn’t that awesome? Ooh, Claudia, she says, come celebrate my birthday with me! Hi to your husband, and mine says hi to yours, and your lads!
Nothing mysterious or distant about this. Lovely.
“If you can find nice ones . . .” Roman Shopping List
“bruised beans, two modii, chickens, twenty, a hundred apples, if you can find nice ones, a hundred or two hundred eggs, if they are for sale at a fair price, ....8 sextarii of fish-sauce.... a modius of olives.... To slave of Verecundus”
If you can find nice ones! A shopping list handed to a slave, likely by another slave, who then popped into village shops for groceries. The wording suggests that the shops were at least nearby, so this was an in-person trip, not Roman Amazon (Amazonicus?).
I love this! And yes, there were quite a few literate Roman slaves: This is one more indication of how very different slavery can be over time and place: Slavery is always awful, because it gives absolute power to a human being over another human being. But the slavery of the American colonies and the US was another world: Based on the bogus concept of “race”, passed on through generations with almost no chance of freedom, and the deliberate denial of literacy to enslaved people made it very different from what had happened in the Roman Empire.
And I have to love “if you can find nice ones”, and “if they are for sale at a fair price,” the kinds of instructions with which I send Hoosen to the store, not, I rush to add, that he’s my slave.
Can You Hook Me Up With Some Nice People Locally?
Flavius Cerialis, an army official originally from the Netherlands (many “Romans” were not originally from Rome), wrote to Crispinus, probably an important senator, to network: New to Vindolanda, he asks for help meeting people, asking his contact to use his influence to furnish me with friends that thanks to you I may be able to enjoy a pleasant period of military service.
Who is History About?
These letters are not just fun to read: They were a massive, major discovery. There’s nothing else like this collection, and they are a national treasure in the UK. They also matter to us, you and me.
Why?
Historians routinely run into a problem, you see. People of the pastwho leave behind documents are shockingly few, and the vast majority of them were wealthy and powerful, and determined to spin future understanding of what they were about. That shapes how we think about the past and the present. Old school historians—past and present—think only the important matter anyway, but most historians don’t, and especially not in early American history: We early Americanists figured out long ago, in the ferment of the American colonies, that everyone influences what happens. Take enslaved people in early South Carolina, for example, who successfully negotiated some independence, in the form of control of their working conditions and the right to small plots to grow their own veggies, in exchange for high productivity in the rice fields and not rising up in rebellion. People always have the ability to influence events, and we see them doing just that in American and British history.
But did ordinary Romans matter?
So long as ancient Roman history was only represented by famous, literate Romans, like Herodotus (the first historian) and Pliny the Elder (who wrote an eyewitness account of the Pompeii disaster—from a safe distance) we allow the past to be written by a privileged few, from the takes of a privileged few, which certainly doesn’t give us a full picture of the past. It’s misleading, not only about their worlds, but about our own, because when we think of the past like this, we don’t ask all the questions we should of the present.
These wonderful documents from Vindolanda are written by people on the ground floor of the Roman Empire. Some were more privileged than others, but these are not hugely important people, like emperors who were considered gods: These are ordinary people.
Yes, these Romans absolutely thought differently than us. They had views and beliefs that make them alien to us. But they were also, we learn, very much like us, and from the company commander at Vindolanda to the lads knocking out forged coins in the metal workshop (which surely helped stimulate Vindolanda’s local economy, because the dodgy money was spent on local goods), they supported the people and their settlement in the remote hinterlands of empire. They were human. They were wrapped up in everyday concerns, like food shopping. They cherished the company of friends. If we can cross two thousand years to relate to people whose worldview was so very different from our own, then, maybe, just maybe, we can relate to each other at least as well? I had to throw that in. I believe it. When I’m not communing with the dead through history, I chat with the living (including the NBH Nonnies I have been thrilled to meet on my travels).
This isn’t a new line of thought for me. I have spent almost my entire life as a foreigner: As a chatty wee Scottish girl growing up in an English town settled by tough east Londoners, to coming of age in California, to more than twenty years in the Deep South, I have been a stranger everywhere, needing to form community. That’s why I spent a decade writing four novels about three young and unwilling time travelers for whom survival meant crossing massive cultural gulfs, with miscommunication, misadventure, connection, and (according to others, not just me) an entertaining read as the result.
At the end of the day, the best history, the best life, is all about people connecting with people on the grounds of a shared humanity. Academic history—done properly—is all about doing our best to connect, to step into the shoes of others, even those we find incredibly alien, even individual people we detest, to try to understand what was going on. And it’s important—always—to reach out for the majority, the ordinary people, because they have huge influence whether they know it or not, and because they are us.
Farewell, Vindolanda
Roman Empire gone, Vindolanda continued as a settlement over a very long time, and what little was left after the Roman Empire collapsed was repurposed, and then thoroughly recycled, again and again, the very stones of the buildings. Then it was abandoned by people who realized they had better places to live than this rainiest corner of Britain, often raided by Scots. The next time Vindolanda drew serious attention was thanks to the Enlightenment, when a few people with time and money and curiosity got very interested in Hadrian’s Wall. By no later than 1715, several British gentlemen, the predecessors of the beardy archaeologists, were having a go at excavating Vindolanda’s site. And then the professionals showed up, and just as well: They saved the tablets that amateurs might have missed or destroyed. Since then, Vindolanda has been both an archeological site (the digs continue) and a tourist draw, which gives it another history to be written, the story of public history, of tourists, their visits, how they are accommodated, and the impact their visits had,
Dr. Annette Laing, historian, just one of many visitors, pops in briefly—twice—in the early 21st century, leaving little documentary trace of her own: a guidebook, tickets, photos, a purchase in the tearoom . . .
A Future Historian notes: A historian from the US called Annette Laing. wrote about Vindolanda for her newsletter, Non-Boring History. Hers is a minor account of visiting 21st century Vindolanda. And that was the start of the knee trouble she whines about in her records, wasn’t it? Going up and down those hills, while possessing the body of an aging 21st century historian who normally gets around America by private car. Hmm. Maybe Laing herself is worth writing about at length? She left a big archive of documents behind . . . Nah, probably not, and certainly not in this project. For me, writing about the history of the Vindolanda site, Laing is just a tourist who pops in for a paragraph, and writes something for her modest audience of 8,500 readers, and then exits, stage left.
A future historian may find me —and you—interesting. Or may only be concerned with the powerful. Or some other unimaginable possibility, like the collapse of historical awareness. The future was a mystery to Vindolanda resident Claudia Severa: Would Lepidina show up for her birthday party? The Vindolanda slave with the shopping list wondered if the apples he was looking at in the village were the “good ones” he had been told to buy. Were they good enough? Lonely soldier Flavius hoped his faraway contact would pull strings, and jumpstart his social life. The end of the Roman Empire? Unimaginable to them all, but obvious to us, thanks to hindsight: We know Rome fell. When it comes to our future, however, we are all Romans: Whether we are the Emperor in Rome, a slave in Vindolanda, or who each of us is today, we can’t predict the ending.
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Those wonderful relics of real life in Vindolanda reminded me right away of the ideal business letter cited by Fowler. "Apolonius to Zeno. Greetings. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell." A clay tablet found after thousands of years and used in Modern English Usage to ridicule the floral excrescences of "yours of the 18th ult received" and "Believe me sir your most obedient servant".
I'm with you. The people part of history is the most interesting and the most fun which is why we are still reading Pepys' diary and Boswell's writings and tearing up over birthday party invitations and baby shoes found in excavations in London.
Keep it up Annette. We're with you every (painful) step.
The stones laid on the ground, single layer, reminded me of my youth. I had to be about 3 or 4 and I would make my house outline with rocks.
When I was a teacher, teaching World History, I would divide the kids into groups and they would do a small play being peasants, scribes, government officials, priests, and artisans for the Egyptian world. I always looked at ancient history and wondered what did the ordinary person do.