It will be so indeed, since our prayers are with you and you yourself are most worthy. He is likely to have been a civilian, if two other documents are anything to go by. The fact that they had Roman names can tell us little, since anyone who wanted to get on is likely to have 'Romanised' by this time. Candidus was obviously so well known in the fort that his brother did not need to put his name on the back for whoever was delivering the note. An Empire of Letters: The Vindolanda Tablets, Epistolarity, and Roman Governance LIZ STANLEY University of Edinburgh Abstract: Around 800 Roman tilia—writing tablets made from folded slivers of wood ve-neer and a little over postcard size—have been found in archaeological investigations at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England. Visitors who were lucky enough to come to Vindolanda this summer watched in amazement as shoe after shoe was found in the ditch, each one a window into the life of type of person who might have once worn it. I ask that you think fit to commend him to Annius Equester, the centurion in charge of the region at Luguvalium, by doing which you will place me in debt to you, both in his name and my own. It had taken five Roman legions to subdue them, commanded by the veteran general Q. Petilius Cerialis. Other accounts indicate that the completed bath-house had a balniator, a bath-house keeper called Vitalis. Whilst the more exotic of these, such as roe deer, venison, spices, olives, wine and honey, appear in the letters and accounts of the slaves attached to the commander's house; it is clear that the soldiers and ordinary people around the fort did not eat badly. ...Rome followed a policy of not allowing native troops to serve within their province of origin. Yet the Vindolanda tablets can tell us some very interesting things about the way the Roman army was run on the northern frontier. These are a series of letters written on wooden bases and wax tablets. Later, in the 3rd Century, Rome saw fit to order a rebuild of the structure in stone.  © The details from Agricola’s recall to Rome in the 80s AD to the arrival of Hadrian in 122 were absent from the archaeological record until the discovery of the tablets at Vindolanda in 1973. In the wake of the infamous Year of the Four Emperors, the Dutch Batavian auxiliaries had mutinied against the emperor Vespasian, joined by their neighbours the Tungrians on the River Meuse. He probably stayed in the mansio, since he was on official business of some sort, and may have dropped off the shears which Chrauttius had asked him to get for him in the letter, which he discarded whilst he was there. More have been recovered from other parts of the site since. Vindolanda is the Roman name of a place in Northumbria in the north of England (its modern name being Little Chesters or Chesterholm). II.291): ...for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation... Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. And write to me what is with that wagon. The writers of the Vindolanda documents include soldiers, officers and their wives and families who were garrisoned at Vindolanda, as well as merchants, enslaved people, and correspondents at many different cities and forts throughout the vast Roman empire, including Rome, Antioch, Athens, Carlisle, and London. The thin, postcard-sized wooden tablets found at Vindolanda, with letters, inventories, and reports written on them in black ink, offer an intimate look at the life of this Roman military establishment. Its value lies in its very nature as interim material, used to write up the more formulaic official reports which we find elsewhere, such as at Dura and in Egypt. The tablets are thin slivers (.5 centimeters to 3 millimeters thick) of imported spruce or larch, which for the most part measure about 10 by 15 centimers (around 4 by 6 inches). The hundred pounds of sinew from Marinus, I will settle up. II 343). A letter from the cavalry decurion Masculus to Flavius Cerialis, Verecundus' successor in the fort, illustrates just how involved the commander could be in determining these assignments: Masculus to Cerialis his king, greetings. II.346): I have sent(?) This lends weight to what we have long thought, that Roman frontier units were not static entities stuck in one place, but had men all over the place. A new cache of well-preserved Roman writing tablets, some of whose contents have already been deciphered, has been discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda. Please, my lord, might give some indication of how Cerialis viewed life up on the cold north-west frontier, as does another letter to a fellow officer, an aptly named September, offering to send him some goods: 'by which we may endure the storms, even if they are troublesome.'.  © The centurion in London was probably carrying official correspondence to the governor's office. In Latin texts, such as those of Pliny the Elder, these kinds of tablets are referred to as leaf tablets or sectiles or laminae—Pliny used them to keep notes for his Natural History, written in the first century AD. I.154): '18 May, net number of the First Cohort of Tungrians, of which the commander if Iulius Verecundus the prefect, 752, including 6b centurions.'. In AD 84, Agricola had defeated the Caledonii of south-eastern Scotland at Mons Graupius, and was (according to his somewhat partisan biographer Tacitus) poised to conquer the rest of Britain when his army was recalled by the emperor Domitian, who needed it for his Chattan wars on the Rhine. ...rather like the American experience of Vietnam. A legionary centurion called Clodius Super asks Cerialis to send him some clothing Cerialis had picked up from a friend in Gaul, saying: 'I am the supply officer, so I have acquired transport'. From the time when you wrote about this matter, he has not even mentioned it to me. The regular allocations to Macrinus and Crescens are probably rations doled out to individual unit centurions: since a Crescens is named as a centurion of III Batavorum. He also left behind a leather offcut with his name inscribed upon it, and may have owned the magnificent chamfron which was found nearby. II.250): Brigionus has requested me, my lord, to recommend him to you. Into this thick, smelly carpet were lost a number of items, including discarded shoes, textile fragments, animal bone, metal fragments, and pieces of leather: and a large number of Vindolanda tablets. Hadrian's Wall... a permeable frontier, designed to control the movements of the tribes within the border zone and to regulate commerce between Roman Britain and its barbarian neighbours. Vindol. ...a Batavian nobleman of equestrian status... Flavius Cerialis was the praefectus in command of Cohors IX Batavorum, which occupied Vindolanda from around AD 97 onwards. The Vindolanda tablets (also known as Vindolanda Letters) are thin pieces of wood about the size of a modern postcard, which were used as writing paper for the Roman soldiers garrisoned at the fort of Vindolanda between AD 85 and 130. fortunate and be well-disposed towards me. The Roman army at this time was in a period of retrenchment. The memorandum above was probably written by one of the commanders at Vindolanda as informative notes to his successor.