← Back to the map Aerial view of the excavated Roman fort and civilian settlement at Vindolanda

The excavated fort and vicus at Vindolanda · Wikimedia Commons

Vindolanda

Auxiliary FortBritannia · Chesterholm, near Bardon Mill, Northumberland, EnglandBuilt 85 CE

About

Vindolanda anchored the Stanegate frontier decades before Hadrian's Wall was built alongside it. Its timber-and-turf forts were rebuilt at least nine times, and the waterlogged ground beneath preserved hundreds of ink writing tablets from around 100 CE, including a soldier's letter recording the oldest known handwritten Latin by a woman, Claudia Severa's birthday invitation to a friend. Archaeologist Robin Birley found the first tablets in March 1973 while digging a drainage ditch outside the stone fort's southwest corner, and went on to direct excavations at the site for nearly fifty years. More than 1,700 Vindolanda tablets are now held in the British Museum, with new ones still turning up as digging continues each season.

What happened here

Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.

In ancient writing

Claudia Severa, Vindolanda tablets Tab. Vindol. II 291
A birthday invitation from the wife of a nearby commander, written on wood in the 90s CE — the earliest known writing in a woman's hand in Latin.