"Bring Me Three Large Beers"
Vindolanda Tablets at Hadrian's Wall
Vindolanda was a Roman auxiliary fort north of Hadrian’s Wall which was built between Roman Britannia and unconquered Caledonia.1 It was under Roman occupation from roughly 85 AD to 370 AD.
In 1973 the Vindolanda Tablets were first discovered. The tablets were initially thought to be wood shavings an excavators found two stuck together and peeled them apart to discover writing on the inside. They were used for official notes about the Vindolanda camp business and personal affairs of the officers and households.
The Vindolanda writing tablets, written in ink on post-card sized sheets of wood were written by and for soldiers, merchants, women and slaves.2 Through their contents, life in one community on the edge of the Roman world can be reconstructed in detail.
The best-known document is perhaps Tablet 291, written around AD 100 by Claudia Severa, the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, to Sulpicia Lepidina, inviting her to a birthday party. The invitation is one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman3'
“Oh how much I want you at my birthday party. You'll make the day so much more fun. I do so hope you can make it. Goodbye, sister, my dearest soul.”
They also wrote a lot about their need for beer.4
Explore the Vindolanda Tablets online. This exhibition introduces the tablets, drawing on information from the documents themselves and archaeological evidence from Vindolanda. It is a full, searchable set of digital materials related to the tablets
including high quality digital images, texts, translations and notes.
The website is a project of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents5 at Oxford University.
The Wall was built by order of the Emperor Hadrian, who came to Britain in AD 122. Over the next six years, the army built a wall 80 Roman mile long (117km or 73 modern miles), some 5 metres (15 feet) high, east to west from Wallsend to Bowness.
Birley, Robin (2005). Vindolanda: extraordinary records of daily life on the northern frontier. Roman Army Museum Publications.
Mount, Harry (21 July 2008). "Hadrian's soldiers writing home". The Daily Telegraph
Sands, Rob, and Jonathan A. Horn. 2017. “Bring Me Three Large Beers: Wooden Tankards at Roman Vindolanda.” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 36 (1): 71–83.
The Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) was established in 1995 under the auspices of Oxford University's Faculty of Literae Humaniores to provide a focus for the study of ancient documents within Oxford. Over the years it has developed into a research centre of national and international importance. The Centre is located in the Ioannou Centre for Classical & Byzantine Studies in St Giles.
I discovered a few years ago my DNA is 98% British isles, with <2% Italian peninsula. I imagined some Roman soldier marrying a Celt, but feared it may have been more like a Roman rape/pillage situation. This post gives me hope that perhaps the notion of voluntary intermingling isn't such a fantasy.
Amazing. I didn't know about these tablets and birthday celebrations. Reminds me of "The History of the World in Six Glasses," which argues that it wasn't slaves who built the Egyption pyramids but workers paid in daily beer rations.