12 - Exchanges between the British Isles and the Continent, c. 450 – c. 900

Summary

When the Vindolanda tablets, dating from between ad 90 and 120, were discovered on Hadrian’s Wall in the 1970s, they changed dramatically our understanding of the place of Roman Britain in the literate world of the Roman Empire. The range and variety of the texts represented on the hundreds of ink-written wooden tablets included military documents and reports, occasional literary texts and references (to Vergil and Catullus, for instance) and a wealth of personal letters exchanged with people elsewhere in Britain, north-west Gaul and Rome itself. These letters include autographs by individuals, even the wives of the military commanders, as well as professional writers. The several hundred men and women responsible for these remnants of the Vindolanda community were not members of the social and literary elites but were nevertheless people for whom the individual power to generate and control texts was important. The Roman capital and cursive scripts on the tablets, coupled with the evidence of stone inscriptions, are an eloquent witness both to the presence, and possibly the introduction, of writing to the region as a consequence of the Roman army’s occupation of Britain, and to the connection between the production of literary texts and of administrative documents. The collection as a whole is a salutary reminder not only of Britain’s communication with the rest of the Roman world, but also of the Romano-British population’s participation in the literary culture of that world. Further, the Roman script system survived and was in the process of development in western Britain and Ireland before the arrival of the English in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Italian and Frankish forms of Roman script were then introduced by the missionaries into the areas of Britain occupied by the English.