Part 5

This section includes the Roman inscriptions which have been found, or (perhaps I should say) first recognized to exist, in Britain in 1914 or which have become more accurately known in that year. As in 1913, the list is short and its items are not of great importance; but the Chesterholm altar (No. 5) deserves note, and the Corbridge tile also possesses considerable interest.

I have edited them in the usual manner, first stating the origin, character, &c., of the inscription, then giving its text with a rendering in English, thirdly adding any needful notes and acknowledging obligations to those who may have communicated the items to me. In the expansions of the text, square brackets denote letters which, owing to breakage or other cause, are not now on the stone, though one may presume that they were originally there; round brackets denote expansions of Roman abbreviations. The inscriptions are printed in the same order as the finds in section A, that is, from north to south--though with so few items the order hardly matters.

(1) Found at Balmuildy (above, p. 7) in the annexe to the south-east of the fort proper, some sandstone fragments from the top of a small altar, originally perhaps about 14 inches wide. At the top, in a semicircular panel is a rude head; below are letters from the first two lines of the dedication; probably the first line had originally four letters:--

Possibly DIO may be for deo. It is by no means a common orthography, but if it be accepted, we can read dio [s(ancto) Ma]rti.... The reading DIIO, deo, is I fear impossible.

I have to thank Mr. S. N. Miller, the excavator, for photographs.

(2) At Traprain Law (above, p. 8) a small potsherd from a second-century level bore the letters scratched on it

I R I /

These letters were on the side of the potsherd which had formed the inner surface when the pot was whole; they must therefore have been inscribed after the pot had been smashed, and the size and shape of the bit give cause to think that it may have been broken intentionally for inscription--possibly for use in some game. In any case, it must have been inscribed at Traprain Law, and not brought there already written, and the occurrence of writing of any sort on such a site is noteworthy.

I am indebted to Dr. G. Macdonald for a sight of the piece.

(3) Found about three and a half miles north of the Roman fort Bremenium, High Rochester, near Horsley in north Northumberland, beside the Roman road over the Cheviots (Dere Street), close to the steading of Featherwood, in the autumn of 1914, now in the porch of Horsley Parish Church, a plain altar 51 inches high by 22 inches wide, with six lines of letters 2 inches tall. The inscription is unusually illegible. Only the first and last lines are readable with certainty; elsewhere some letters can be read or guessed, but not so as to yield coherent sense.

VICTORIAE (only bottom of final E visible) ET....IVL (ET probable, IVL fairly certain) MEIANIC (only M quite certain) II........C (erased on purpose) PVBLICO V . S . L m

The altar was dedicated to Victory; nothing else is certain. It is tempting to conjecture in line 2 ET N AVG, et numinibus Augustorum, as on some other altars to Victory, but ET is not certain, though probable, and N AVG is definitely improbable. The fourth line seems to have been intentionally erased. I find no sign of any mention of the Cohors I Vardullorum, which garrisoned Bremenium, though it or its commander might naturally be concerned in putting up such an altar.

We may assume that the altar belongs to Bremenium; possibly it was brought thence when Featherwood was built.

I have to thank the Rev. Thos. Stephens, vicar of Horsley, for photographs and an excellent squeeze and readings, and Mr. R. Blair for a photograph.

(4-5) Found on July 17, 1914, at Chesterholm, just south of Hadrian's Wall, lying immediately underneath the surface in a grass field 120 yards west of the fort, two altars:

(4) 32 inches tall, 15 inches broad, illegible save for the first line

IOM

I(ovi) o(ptimo) m(aximo)....

(5) 34 inches tall, 22 inches broad, with 8 lines of rather irregular letters, not quite legible at the end (fig. 16).

Pro domu divina et numinibus Augustorum, Volcano sacrum, vicani Vindolandesses, cu[r(am)] agente ... v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito).

'For the Divine (i.e. Imperial) House and the Divinity of the Emperors, dedicated to Vulcan by the members of the vicus of Vindolanda, under the care of ... (name illegible).'

The statement of the reason for the dedication given in the first three lines is strictly tautologous, the Divine House and the Divinity of the Emperors being practically the same thing. The formula numinibus Aug. is very common in Britain, though somewhat rare elsewhere; in other provinces its place is supplied by the formula in honorem domus divinae; it belongs mostly to the late second and third centuries. The plural Augustorum does not appear to refer to a plurality of reigning Emperors, but to the whole body of Emperors dead and living who were worshipped in the Cult of the Emperors.

The vicani Vindolandesses are the members of the settlement--women and children, traders, old soldiers, and others--which grew up outside the fort at Chesterholm, as outside nearly all Roman forts and fortresses. In this case they formed a small self-governing community, presumably with its own 'parish council', which could be called by the Roman term vicus, even if it was not all that a proper vicus should be. This altar was put up at the vote of their 'parish meeting' and paid for, one imagines, out of their common funds. The term vicus is applied to similar settlements outside forts on the German Limes; thus we have the vicani Murrenses at the fort of Benningen on the Murr (CIL. xiii. 6454) and the vicus Aurelius or Aurelianus at Oehringen (ibid. 6541).

Vindolandesses, which is merely a phonetic spelling or misspelling of Vindolandenses, gives the correct name of the fort. In the Notitia it is spelt Vindolana, in the Ravennas (431. 11) Vindolanda; and as in general the Ravennas teems with errors and the Notitia is fairly correct, the spelling Vindolana has always been preferred, although (as Prof. Sir John Rhys tells me) its second part -lana is an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination -landa is a Celtic word denoting a small defined space, akin to the Welsh 'llan', and also to the English 'land'; I cannot, however, find any other example in which it forms part of a place-name of Roman date. Vindo- is connected either with the adjective vindos, 'white', or with the personal name Vindos derived from that adjective.

I have to thank Mrs. Clayton, the owner of Chesterholm, and her foreman, Mr. T. Hepple, for excellent photographs and squeezes. The altars are now in the Chesters Museum.

(6) Found at Corbridge, in August 1914, fragment of a tile, 7 x 8 inches in size, on which, before it was baked hard, some one had scratched three lines of lettering about 1-1-1/2 inches tall; the surviving letters form the beginnings of the lines of which the ends are broken off. There were never more than three lines, apparently.

O M Q L LIIND/ LEGEFEL

The inscription seems to have been a reading lesson. First the teacher scratched two lines of letters, in no particular order and making no particular sense; then he added the exhortation lege feliciter, 'read and good luck to you'. A modern teacher, even though he taught by the aid of a slate in lieu of a soft tile, might have expressed himself less gracefully. The tile may be compared with the well-known tile from Silchester, on which Maunde Thompson detected a writing lesson (Eph. Epigr. ix. 1293). A knowledge of reading and writing does not seem to have been at all uncommon in Roman Britain or in the Roman world generally, even among the working classes; I may refer to my Romanization of Roman Britain (ed. 3, pp. 29-34).