Vindolanda Tablet 291: Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation

Before Hadrian’s Wall, the Stanegate road linked forts across northern Britain. At Vindolanda, near modern Bardon Mill, officers’ families turned a timber fort into a home. From this place, Claudia Severa wrote to Sulpicia Lepidina—a fellow officer’s wife at nearby Corbridge—inviting her to a birthday on 11 September. The ink is a warm brown, the hand elegant and intimate, the medium a wafer-thin leaf of wood [9][17].

The letter’s journey is easy to imagine: a messenger trotting past the River South Tyne, skirting the fields above the fort at New Castle Nick, the wind off the moors smelling of peat and rain. He would have heard the clack of gate hinges, Latin commands snapped under a gray sky, and in the commander’s house the muffled laughter of children.

Vindolanda’s waterlogged soil kept hundreds of such tablets—orders for boots, leave requests, duty rosters, lists of guests—as if the empire’s voice had been archived by the weather. Tablet 291 stands out because of its author: among the earliest Latin texts written by a woman, it draws the frontier into Rome’s social orbit. In her polite insistence—“I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us”—policy dissolves into hospitality [9][17].

Seen next to inscriptions at Housesteads or across to the future line of Hadrian’s Wall, the letter shows how administration and intimacy shared space. Along the Stanegate, supply carts carved ruts; in commanders’ quarters, wives planned meals for friends. The colors are domestic: brown ink, pale wood, a splash of dyed wool in a shawl.

Now in the British Museum and published by the Roman Inscriptions of Britain, the tablet lets us hear the empire not as trumpet calls in Rome or stone hammers at Segedunum but as the soft scrape of a pen and a quiet invitation [9][17].