Ferox and Vindex are inventions, although a later tombstone records a Brigantian soldier in the Roman army who was the son of someone named Vindex and in my imagination this is our man. Many of the other characters are also inventions, or people about whom little more is known than their names. Sulpicia Lepidina, Claudia Severa and Flavius Cerialis appear in other texts, but even so are only a little less shadowy. I have done my best to invent nothing that clashes with what we do know about them, but as characters they are essentially fictional. The same is true of the other people plucked from the texts found at Vindolanda.

Much more detail on the historical background can be found on my website – www.adriangoldsworthy.com – which also includes suggestions for further reading. In the meantime, it is worth looking at a few topics.

Before Hadrian’s Wall

The story occurs at the start of the reign of Trajan, whose successor Hadrian came to Britain and ordered the construction of Hadrian’s Wall around the year AD 122. Our sources have little to say about major events in Britain under Trajan, although there is talk of major conflict, which may well have prompted the decision to build the Wall. The fort at Vindolanda (modern Chesterholm) lies a few miles south and within sight of the Wall and clearly was incorporated within the network of garrisons serving it. Much of our story takes place in what would become Wall country.

Vindolanda is set in AD 98, the first year of Trajan’s reign, and at this time the province of Britannia was just over fifty years old. Although Julius Caesar had landed in Britain in 55 and 54 BC, no permanent Roman presence was maintained, and it was not until AD 43 that the Emperor Claudius sent an invasion force across the Channel. In AD 60 Boudicca’s rebellion devastated southern Britain, but after her defeat there is no trace of any serious resistance in the Lowlands. This is not true of northern Britain, which was garrisoned by substantial numbers of troops for the remaining three and a half centuries of Roman occupation.

In AD 98 few would have guessed that the Romans would stay for so long. Their presence in the north was more recent, for it was mainly in the seventies and eighties AD that this area was overrun. During this time Roman armies marched far into the north of what would become Scotland, while a naval squadron for the first time circumnavigated Britain, confirming that it was an island. An entire legion – one of the four then garrisoning the province and one of twenty-eight in existence – built a base at Inchtuthil in Perthshire, the biggest site in a network of garrisons on the edge of the Highlands. Around the same time, a system of observation towers along a military road was constructed along the Gask ridge.