Although the so-called vexillation fortress at Osmanthorpe (SK 678563) in the Greet Valley, Nottinghamshire, is a recent discovery, fieldwork in the immediate vicinity of the site has been conducted independent of it in the past. This paper reports the results of recent work connected with what we shall term the castra and brings to wider attention some of the earlier work in the Greet Valley, combined with a consideration of its possible implications.

In the course of research on the coinage of Carausius and Allectus I was prompted to a consideration of the word-forms used in the coin-legends with which I was dealing by an article of A. J. Evans in Archaeologia Cambrensis. In drawing a parallel between word-forms on coins and on contemporary inscriptions Evans comments that variations from classical Latin spellings are generally dismissed as ‘the mere haphazard blunderings of barbarous engravers’. That this is true in some cases is beyond doubt, but ‘many of the most characteristic forms occur on coins that are not otherwise of barbarous fabric’ and Evans goes on to make the point that ‘a large proportion of the forms common to these Roman-British coins and monuments are due to the influence of the provincial dialect, and exhibit undoubted characteristics of incipient Romance pronunciation and Romance grammatical simplification’.

In the course of the excavations at the legionary base of Haltern earlier this century, a lead lid some 10.5 cm in diameter was found near to the principia. The lid (PL. XIII) is inscribed EX RADICE BRITANICA (sic).

Seemingly dating some thirty to forty years before the conquest of Britain, this inscription is intriguing. Since the first publication of the lid in 1928 the contents of the vessel to which it belonged have been identified with the herba Britannica which Pliny the Elder described in the following terms:

‘Nor is it beasts alone that are guilty of causing injury; at times waters and regions do the same. When Germanicus Caesar had moved forward his camp across the Rhine, in a maritime district of Germany there was only one source of fresh water. To drink it caused within two years the teeth to fall out and the use of the knee-joints to fail. Physicians used to call these maladies stomaca and scelotyrbe. A remedy was found in the plant called britannica, which is good not only for the sinews and for diseases of the mouth, but also for the relief of quinsy and snake-bite. It has dark, rather long leaves, and a dark root. Its juice is extracted even from the root (sucus eius exprimitur et e radice). The blossom is called vibones; gathered before thunder is heard, and swallowed, it keeps away the fear of quinsy for a whole year. It was pointed out to our men by the Frisians, at that time a loyal tribe, in whose territory our camp lay. Why the plant was so called I greatly wonder,unless perhaps, living on the shore of the British ocean, they have so named the britannica because it is, as it were, a near neighbour of Britain. It is certain that the plant was not named because it grew abundantly in that island: Britain was at that time an independent state.’