Housesteads. Birdoswald. Carvoran. Today these words are familiar to us as the names of forts along Hadrian’s Wall – but if you said them to a Roman soldier, you would be met with blank incomprehension. We have few contemporary written sources to tell us what these fortifications were called by the troops who garrisoned them, as most inscriptions from such sites name the resident unit and/or their commanding officer rather than their location. There are some rare exceptions, however. Thanks to the unusual wording of sandstone altars from Birdoswald and Housesteads (RIB 1905 and RIB 1594), we can deduce that they were respectively called Banna and Vercovicium. For the names of many others, though, we must turn to late Roman or even early medieval sources: the Notitia Dignitatum (a 4th-century administrative document), and the Ravenna Cosmography (a list of places compiled c.AD 700, based on a now-lost map). The date of these writings, however, and the fact that they have come down to us as copies preserved in late medieval manuscripts, mean that the nomenclature that they supply should be used with careful caveats.
There is another, rather more contemporary body of evidence to help confirm some of these names, however: a handful of small, bronze vessels dating to the 2nd century. Found scattered across England, France, and Spain, they are variously described as ‘cups’, ‘pans’, and ‘skillets’, or using the Latin terms trullae and paterae. Each has vibrant enamel decorations, most of which depict a stylised image of a turreted wall, and some of them also bear the names of forts featured in the manuscripts described above (albeit with some variations in spelling). With the discovery of a sixth member of this enigmatic group recently announced in the journal Britannia (see ‘Further reading’ below), this is a good opportunity to explore what they can tell us about Roman perspectives on the Empire’s northern frontier.
The fragments making up the remains of the Berlanga Cup (top pair of images) and (below) a digital reconstruction of the artefact. Recently found in Spain, it is the latest addition to the ‘Hadrian’s Wall vessels’.Image: 3D Stoa. Arqueología y Patrimonio
A colourful collection
The first artefact in this group is the Rudge Cup, which was found around 400km (250 miles) from Hadrian’s Wall in Rudge Coppice, near Froxfield in Wiltshire. It was discovered in 1725, during the excavation of a presumed Roman villa (the investigations uncovered the remains of a building with a fine mosaic floor), not within the structure itself, but in a nearby well whose unusual contents included coins, animal bones, and a number of human skeletons, perhaps speaking of a ‘special’ deposit. Now housed at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, the cup measures around 4.6cm (1.8in) tall and around 9.4cm (3.7in) in diameter. Traces of red, green, and blue enamel survive on its surface, including a regular, geometric pattern depicting a crenellated wall, outlined in red and filled with small squares evoking regular blocks of stone. Most significantly, it also has the names of five forts from the western end of Hadrian’s Wall moulded in relief just below its rim: Mais (Bowness), Aballava (Burgh by Sands), Uxelodunum (Stanwix), Camboglanna (Castlesteads), and Banna (Birdoswald).
