Hail, Cheeser!
Have you spent time during the COVID-19 lockdown digging through boxes in your garage or clearing out stuff from under your bed? The staff at the Vindolanda Fort and Museum in England have been doing something quite similar. And, they have found a toy that’s far older than anything you may have unearthed.
Vindolanda is the site of an ancient Roman fort just south of Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. Archaeologists at the fort have been excavating the site since the 1930’s and have amassed a large collection of Roman objects, including boots, shoes, armor, tablets (slabs of stone used to write on), jewelry, and even a 2,000-year-old toilet seat! With a tally of over 7,000 objects, detailed review of the collection is an ongoing process. It can take years after excavation for every scrap and item to be examined.
During lockdown, curatorial staff at Vindolanda have been taking a closer look at their vast reserve collection of leather artifacts. While sifting through bags of offcuts and scraps, some of which contain hundreds of items, they found a piece of leather that had been fashioned into a small animal, resembling a mouse.
The leather mouse measures 5 inches (13 centimeters) long and 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and has markings across the body to indicate the fur and eyes. The bag of scrap leather in which it was hidden was uncovered in 1993 during an excavation of a room inside a commanding officer’s residence, from a time when the first cohort of Tungrains (from modern day Belgium) were stationed at the site. This dates the leather to around AD 105 to 130. It is thought it may have been a child’s toy, or possibly even used as a prank.
The Vindolanda Charitable Trust’s curator, Barbara Birley, said “One of the most wonderful things about the Vindolanda collection is that we never know what we are going to find next. Even though we have had to delay the start of our 2020 excavations this year, we see the collection still has hidden treasures to be revealed. Although we have a significant amount of evidence of children at Vindolanda, we have very few toys. It would be wonderful if this little mouse had been a toy and a source of entertainment for a child here on the northern frontier”.
Britain became the northernmost province of the vast Roman Empire, which covered half of Europe at its height. In A.D. 43, the Roman emperor Claudius ordered Roman armies to invade Britain, which the Romans called Britannia. At the Battle of the Medway, the Romans defeated the tribes of southeastern Britain led by Caratacus. Claudius himself marched in triumph into Colchester, where many tribal chiefs submitted to his rule. The Romans then advanced northward and westward from London, building roads and establishing forts.
The Romans occupied the southern part of the island and made it a province of Rome for more than 350 years. Roman governors ruled the province, and Roman armies and fleets defended it. The Romans built towns from which they administered occupied areas. London became the capital.
Between A.D. 71 and 79, the Romans subdued western Britain. During the A.D. 80′s, the Romans completed the conquest of the southern part of the island, including present-day England and Wales.
The Romans built camps and forts throughout the land and constructed roads to connect the camps. The Romans also built walls and forts across northern England to protect the province from the warlike peoples of Scotland. The most famous of the walls was Hadrian’s Wall, named after the Emperor Hadrian. It was built in the A.D. 120′s and extended from Solway Firth to the mouth of the River Tyne. Remains of the wall and the fortified towers along it still exist. In some places, the ruins of the wall are still 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 meters) high and wide enough to walk on.