THE MUTINY OF the Usipi appears in a single source, Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law Cnaeus Julius Agricola, legate of Britannia from AD 78–84. His account consists of a single paragraph, and serves a stylistic purpose as a brief interval before he recounts the final year’s campaigning that culminated in Agricola’s victory at Mons Graupius. The text is not well preserved, so that his sense is not altogether clear, but in broad outline the mutineers sailed from somewhere on the west coast of Britain, circumnavigated the island. They raided, but turned to cannibalism, allegedly eating the weakest among them and then others chosen by lot. Eventually they ended up on the coast of north Germany east of the Rhine, where they were killed or enslaved, and some of the slaves were sold into Roman hands and told their story. Depending on the precise dating of Agricola’s operations, the mutiny occurred in AD 82 or possibly 83.
Little is otherwise known about the Usipi. Some of them were part of a group who came into Gaul in 55 BC and were attacked and defeated by Julius Caesar. Their homeland was east of the Rhine and by the end of the first century AD they were not under direct Roman rule, although like most of the peoples beyond the frontier there was presumably some form of treaty relationship. The incident in Tacitus is the only time a unit of Usipi was raised in their own ethnic unit. We do not know the cause of the mutiny and I have embellished the brief story in Tacitus a good deal. He makes no mention of Harii in the unit, but in his discussion of the German tribes, the Germania, he claims that this tribe liked to fight at night, carrying black shields and painting their bodies, relying on the terror caused by their appearance.
Tacitus implies that all the mutineers were killed or enslaved, so it is pure fiction to have one of their stolen ships break away from the others and survive. I have also given them triremes rather than the smaller liburnians in Tacitus’ narrative. This is novel, not a history, so I have felt free to add to the meagre information we have about these years, but have always done my best to set it all within the context of what we do know about Roman Britain, the army and the wider world in this period.
Apart from this short passage from the Agricola, this novel and the others in the series are inspired by the remarkable collection of texts discovered in the excavated forts at modern Chesterholm, once the Roman army base of Vindolanda. These provide fascinating glimpses of life on the frontier of Roman Britain at the very end of the first century and the start of the second century AD. Most deal with the routine and even mundane. There are daily reports made by junior officers of the garrison, requests for leave made by soldiers, accounts of purchases and sales, of goods stored or delivered. Some of the most striking come from the personal archives of the prefect in command of the army unit stationed at the fort, dealing more with their social life than their formal duties. Thus we have a list of food, especially poultry and eggs, consumed in their household to entertain a long succession of guests. We have letters written to and by other commanders, showing the rich social life of these important men. Even more strikingly, we have letters between the wives of these prefects, who accompanied their husbands, whose tour of duty usually lasted for several years. Just as in the more peaceful provinces of the empire, these women supervised the household and the raising of their children in the manner expected of wealthy and well-born wives.
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. 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 water-logged nature of much of the site, created unusual conditions that have allowed the preservation of wood, leather, textiles and other material usually lost. Over five and half thousand 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, the wooden writing tablets were an even more surprising and exciting find. Many are tiny fragments or illegible, but hundreds 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 re-used, 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/.
One of the most famous letters is the invitation from Claudia Severa, wife of Aelius Brocchus at Coria (modern Corbridge), asking Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Flavius Cerialis at Vindolanda, to attend her birthday celebration on 11 September. This formed the basis of the plot for the first novel. All of these people are real, but until the discovery of the tablets none were attested anywhere else. It is highly likely that objects excavated in the area of the praetorium of the third fort at Vindolanda belong to Cerialis and his family, for instance a fine decorated head-piece for his horse, fine shoes belonging to children and the broken and discarded slipper that surely belonged to Sulpicia Lepidina – all of which can be seen in the excellent museum at Vindolanda.
I have used the names of these real people in these novels, but in the main their characters are invented. There are snippets of information in the texts, and I have used as much of this as possible, and tried my best never to invent anything that would jar with what we do know, but even so their appearance and characters, let alone the events that befall them, are fiction. There is certainly no hint in the text that Cerialis’ and Sulpicia Lepidina’s tour at Vindolanda was as eventful as these stories make it. However, there is room for this because we really know very little about them and even less about what was happening in Britain at the time.
Cerialis was the prefect of cohors VIIII Batavorum milliaria equitata (the ninth double-strength Batavian regiment of infantry and cavalry), which at full strength ought to have numbered over a thousand men, a quarter of them cavalry. He was a Roman citizen and a member of the equestrian order, the social class ranking below the Senate. To give an idea of scale, there were tens of thousands of equestrians compared to around six hundred senators. We do not know even the names of the majority of senators in this or most other eras, so it is unsurprising that even fewer equestrians have left any clear trace of their lives. The Vindolanda tablets give us a hint of the vast amount of writing and record keeping in the Roman world, but also remind us that it takes exceptional good luck for such material to survive into the modern era.
An equestrian prefect in command of an infantry cohort or cavalry ala of auxiliary soldiers was a man of considerable importance locally and in his home community. Substantial property was required for a man to be registered as an equestrian in the census. However, by AD 100 there were at least 350 posts as commander of auxiliary units. We think that the average time spent by these officers with a unit was about three years (although there is a lot of guesswork in this), which shows how many of these officers there were and why we should not be surprised that such a small proportion appear in our sources. Cerialis is one of the best documented, and we really know little about him.