Vindolanda

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  Their blades met, and the centurion felt his arm jar with the shock. Both men jumped back, the soldier stumbling as he tripped over the tribune, but before Ferox could follow up one of the other soldiers came at him from the side. Vindex was fighting with the last man, which left him to deal with two. He gave ground, making room for himself.

  A spear hissed through the air so close that he felt its wind. It struck the soldier attacking on his right full in the stomach, punching through his mail cuirass and flinging him on to his back. The other man was struggling to free himself from the tribune’s legs, and raised his sword to deal with the annoyance. Ferox bounded forward, screaming, and slashed at the man’s head, heard the clash of iron on the bronze helmet, saw the man stagger, and then sliced low, hitting him below the knee with such force that he severed the leg. The legionary fell. He was still trying to hold his sword up protectively. Ferox kicked the man’s arm so that he dropped it. He leaned forward, took careful aim, and drove the tip of his sword through the legionary’s left eye.

  ‘Mongrel,’ he said under his breath.

  There was a grunt as Vindex cut down his opponent. Ferox turned and saw Gannascus sitting on horseback just a few paces away. The German was smiling.

  ‘Good throw,’ Ferox told him.

  ‘Only if I was aiming at him.’ The big man roared with laughter. He did not seem interested in an explanation. His men just watched.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ferox said. ‘Those men needed to be killed.’

  The German shrugged, then walked his horse over and retrieved his spear. ‘The horses?’ he said. ‘They don’t need them any more.’

  ‘You can take three.’

  Gannascus leaned down and offered his hand. ‘We go now.’

  Ferox took it, and felt his hand being crushed. ‘Thank you. Send our greetings to the high king.’

  The German shouted something and a couple of his men came to lead the horses away. Ferox saw them pick out Flaccus’ stallion, but did not stop them. Expensive though it was, there was no harm in letting it vanish along with its master.

  Vindex had helped Crispinus to his feet and cut him free.

  ‘I guess we are all on the same side,’ the tribune said. He was bruised and bloodied, but his anger subsided when he saw Ferox’s expression. ‘Did you know all along that it was him?’ he asked.

  ‘I needed to be sure. You could not have been at the tower and out hunting with Cerialis on the day of the ambush, so that was in your favour. When he didn’t ask questions and just let me order your arrest and death I thought that he must have a lot to hide. The threat of the witness made him nervous.’

  ‘What if he was merely stupid?’

  ‘That was a risk I had to take, my lord.’

  ‘You had to take!’ Crispinus rubbed his sore wrists. His tongue flicked out to touch his cut mouth. He spat and there was blood in it.

  ‘Well, I could have just killed you both to be sure.’ Ferox patted his sword against his trousers. ‘If you like, I still can.’

  ‘Thank you, centurion, that will not be necessary. And your oath to my father?’

  ‘Still binds me. Unless it clashes with the one to the princeps.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your plan?’ The tribune stared at the corpses all around them. ‘I guessed something was up. That’s why I babbled all that about Trajan not lasting the year. I could have helped more if I’d known what was going on.’

  ‘Was not sure I could trust you, my lord. Might have been hard for you to act surprised. This way it was natural and you were very convincing.’ Ferox rubbed his knuckles and smiled. ‘You take a punch well.’

  Crispinus shook his head and did not seem to know what to say.

  ‘Do you want to bury this lot?’ Vindex did not sound enthusiastic at the prospect.

  ‘Leave ’em.’ Ferox waved to Gannascus as he and his warriors trotted away. ‘Now our protection has gone we had better not hang around. Let’s take his head and go. Do you want to do it, my lord?’

  Crispinus found his sword and walked over to the pale corpse of the priest. He flexed his sword arm, looked down for a while and then stopped. ‘I am not sure how to do it.’

  Ferox grabbed the body by its limed hair and hauled it up so that the dead priest was sitting. The body was no longer stiff, but it felt heavy and clumsy. He knew that the fighting would have taken the best edge off his sword and wished that he had an axe. It took three cuts using all his strength to do the job, and they were all flecked with dark blood, even after all the wounds the man had received during his slow death.

  ‘There you are. A keen edge and a strong arm,’ Ferox said. ‘They solve a lot of life’s problems.’

  ‘Not all,’ Crispinus replied. ‘Not the ones that really matter.’

  Vindex brought a sack and he dropped the head into it and tied it up.

  ‘We had better move,’ Ferox said. ‘That is, with your permission, my lord.’

  ‘Of course, centurion.’

  They mounted, Vindex taking the reins of the three spare horses.

  Crispinus turned in the saddle, looking at the tree and the bodies of the Romans surrounding the priest. ‘I am just glad that it is all over at last.’

  Ferox thought about the sacrifice of a triple death, of the power that brought to the great druid who had hallowed this offering to the gods. If the Stallion was beaten and dead, the druid Acco was still at large, stronger than ever, and there was an ambitious and clever king in the north, and more traitors in the army, at least one who was senior and had given Flaccus his orders. Trajan was not yet secure, and from all Ferox heard showed no sign of leaving the frontier armies and heading to Rome.

  ‘Over, my lord? It’s only beginning.’

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Adrian Goldsworthy’s next book is coming in winter 2017

  For more information, click the following links

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present [?]. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him [?] their greetings. [2nd hand] I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. [Back, 1st hand] To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.

  Vindolanda Tablets II. 291.

  This text excavated at the fort of Vindolanda was the spark that first inspired this story. It was written around the turn of the first to second centuries AD, and the second hand in the text was surely that of Claudia Severa herself, adding a personal touch to the invitation. This makes it the first surviving piece of writing by a woman in the history of Britain. The original text, written in ink on a thin wooden writing tablet, can be seen today in the British Museum.

  We will talk more about Vindolanda and the texts discovered there in a moment, but it was this glimpse of something as routine as a birthday party in a frontier zone on the edge of the Roman Empire that made me want to create a story around it and bring that time and place to life. Vindolanda is a novel, and much of the story is invented because we know very little about what was really happening in northern Britain at this time. However, given that I have spent my adult life studying the Roman world and the Roman army in particular, I have done my best to place the story in as accurate a setting as possible.

  Ferox and Vindex are inventions, although a later tombstone records a Brigantian soldier in the Roman army who was the son of someone named Vindex and in my imagination this is our man. Many of the other characters are also inventions, or people about whom little more is known than their names. Sulpicia Lepidina, Claudia Severa and Flavius Cerialis appear in other texts, but even so are only a little less shadowy. I have done my best to invent nothing that clashes with what we do know about them, but as characters they are essentially fictional. The same is true of the o
ther people plucked from the texts found at Vindolanda.

  Much more detail on the historical background can be found on my website – www.adriangoldsworthy.com – which also includes suggestions for further reading. In the meantime, it is worth looking at a few topics.

  Before Hadrian’s Wall

  The story occurs at the start of the reign of Trajan, whose successor Hadrian came to Britain and ordered the construction of Hadrian’s Wall around the year AD 122. Our sources have little to say about major events in Britain under Trajan, although there is talk of major conflict, which may well have prompted the decision to build the Wall. The fort at Vindolanda (modern Chesterholm) lies a few miles south and within sight of the Wall and clearly was incorporated within the network of garrisons serving it. Much of our story takes place in what would become Wall country.

  Vindolanda is set in AD 98, the first year of Trajan’s reign, and at this time the province of Britannia was just over fifty years old. Although Julius Caesar had landed in Britain in 55 and 54 BC, no permanent Roman presence was maintained, and it was not until AD 43 that the Emperor Claudius sent an invasion force across the Channel. In AD 60 Boudicca’s rebellion devastated southern Britain, but after her defeat there is no trace of any serious resistance in the Lowlands. This is not true of northern Britain, which was garrisoned by substantial numbers of troops for the remaining three and a half centuries of Roman occupation.

  In AD 98 few would have guessed that the Romans would stay for so long. Their presence in the north was more recent, for it was mainly in the seventies and eighties AD that this area was overrun. During this time Roman armies marched far into the north of what would become Scotland, while a naval squadron for the first time circumnavigated Britain, confirming that it was an island. An entire legion – one of the four then garrisoning the province and one of twenty-eight in existence – built a base at Inchtuthil in Perthshire, the biggest site in a network of garrisons on the edge of the Highlands. Around the same time, a system of observation towers along a military road was constructed along the Gask ridge.

  All of this activity, which to a great extent is known only from the archaeological remains, makes clear the Romans’ intention to occupy this region more or less permanently, but in the late eighties AD priorities changed. The Emperor Domitian, faced with serious trouble on the Danube, withdrew Legio II Adiutrix from Britain and did not replace it. It is probable that substantial numbers of auxiliaries were withdrawn at the same time, so that the provincial garrison was cut by at least a quarter. Inchtuthil and many of the other bases were abandoned, and the same thing happened a little later to the remaining sites and the Gask ridge line. No Roman base was maintained north of the Forth–Clyde line, and soon the northernmost outpost was at Trimontium or Newstead.

  Several forts were maintained or built close to what would one day become the line of Hadrian’s Wall. A couple of years after our story, a proper road running between Carlisle and Corbridge was constructed and more forts and smaller outposts added. Today the road is known by its medieval name, the Stanegate or ‘stone road’, and archaeologists continue to debate its composition and purpose. By about AD 106 Newstead was abandoned in another withdrawal. Our paltry literary sources make no mention of any of this, so it is left to us to guess from the archaeology just what was going on.

  A novelist has more freedom, and once again I have done my best to reconstruct these years for our purposes in a way that never conflicts with any hard evidence. At the very least I hope that our story is something that could have happened. Something made the Romans station significant numbers of troops in this area at the end of the first century AD, and then made them increase these numbers and develop the deployment along the Stanegate just a few years later. All of the forts mentioned in the story existed and were occupied in AD 98. (Precise dating is rarely possibly through excavation so it may be that the fort at Magna or Carvoran dates to a year or two later, but it is not impossible that it was there in 98). Syracuse is an invention, but typical of the many small outposts set up by the Roman army as needed. I see it as a predecessor to the excavated sites at Haltwhistle Burn and Throp, which were built alongside the Stanegate, although these were stone structures and larger than the fictional Syracuse. In the late first century AD most of the structures built by the army in Britain were in turf and timber. Some sites were being rebuilt in stone, and in the second century this became ever more common.

  Vindolanda and the Writing Tablets

  Vindolanda is one of the most remarkable Roman sites in Britain. The first fort was built there in the seventies AD. The fort from our period was the third constructed on the site, and I have stretched the dating by a year or so to have it there in AD 98. The remains visible today are of the later stone fort and the civilian settlement or vicus (a more organised version of the canabae) outside it. A level of laziness in demolishing the earlier forts when the new ones were built, combined with the waterlogged nature of much of the site, created unusual conditions that have allowed the preservation of wood, leather, textiles and other material usually lost. Over 5,500 shoes have already been found at Vindolanda, more than from anywhere else in the Roman Empire. For more information about the site and the Vindolanda Trust visit the website at http://www.vindolanda.com.

  Although less impressive as objects, even more remarkable are the wooden writing tablets, hundreds of which have preserved some text. Papyrus was known and used in Roman Britain, but was expensive, and much everyday correspondence and record-keeping was written in ink on thin sheets of wood. Some were covered in thin wax, so that this could be smoothed down again and reused, but these tend to be impossible to decipher since scratches from numerous different texts overlap. The most useful were the plain wood sheets, which had been rubbed with only a thin layer of beeswax to prevent the ink from spreading and were then used only once. Even so, little of the ink survives, and it requires careful analysis of the scratches made by the nibs of the stylus pens to trace the outlines of letters. Deciphering the texts and then reconstructing and understanding them is a painstaking business. More detail and many of the texts themselves can be found online at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk.

  The contents of most of the texts are mundane: private letters, accounts, daily reports of the units garrisoned there, lists of men allocated to various duties, etc. A significant number of the tablets are associated with Flavius Cerialis and his household. His name suggests that he or his father gained citizenship at the time of the Batavian Revolt in AD 70, presumably for loyalty. In one text, the decurion Masclus refers to him as ‘his king’. The editors of the tablets are inclined to see this as no more than sycophancy by a subordinate, but it is possible that he was from the Batavian royal family. Neither he nor his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, are recorded outside the tablets. The editors suggest that her family became Roman citizens through the favour of the short-lived Emperor Sulpicius Galba, who reigned for several months after the suicide of Nero. This is possible, but she could equally have come from a family whose citizenship was far older. There is no evidence that she was the daughter of a senator, but once again this is not impossible. A generation or so later, such a woman is recorded as the wife of an auxiliary prefect commanding the garrison of High Rochester.

  Commanders of auxiliary units usually served with them for three or more years, and Cerialis and Sulpicia Lepidina seem to have been at Vindolanda for at least as long as this. Texts give us some idea of the food they provided for guests – with poultry and eggs common – and his taste for hunting. They also tell us of the social life of garrison commanders – in one letter Claudia Severa speaks of coming to visit Vindolanda, but requiring her husband’s permission to do so, and probably his assistance in arranging transport and, most likely, an escort. Elsewhere Sulpicia Lepidina appears supporting an appeal for assistance made to her husband, and it is clear that an officer’s wife behaved much as she did in more settled provinces, not simply running the household but trading favours in a very
Roman way.

  There are references to children in the households of commanders, and Cerialis appears to have had at least three. However, no letter specifically names Sulpicia Lepidina as their mother, so that I was able to make them offspring from an earlier marriage even though this is pure fiction. Shoes found associated with the praetorium from this period are of such high quality that they surely belong to the prefect’s family. This suggests that there were two boys and a girl, the older boy’s shoes wearing out in a strange pattern that may well indicate some physical disability, albeit one that did not prevent him from walking. Among the shoes likely to have belonged to Sulpicia Lepidina is one slipper that would not be out of place in a shop window today. On the whole the footwear from Vindolanda consists of enclosed shoes rather than the sandals we automatically associate with the Romans. Judging from finds of similar styles elsewhere, patterns in footwear changed throughout the empire every couple of decades. It is also clear than the majority of people owned more than one pair – something rare until the modern era.

  Tribes and Druids

  Iron Age Britain was occupied by many different tribes and other groups, many of them only ever mentioned in Roman sources. It is likely that Roman and Greek observers misunderstood many aspects of the indigenous population’s sense of identity, but we have little more to go on. All of the groups mentioned in the book lived in the areas described, and as far as we can tell all shared a version of the same language. These days, some archaeologists are reluctant to use terms like Celtic or to assume that this linguistic group shared a common culture, and therefore that traits described in Gaul or elsewhere were also likely in Britain. This approach can be too dogmatic, and as a novelist I have drawn upon evidence from other regions as well as cultures from other lands and other periods to create a picture of the tribes. I have done my best to make sure that none of this material conflicts with what we do know.