There are parts of six suits of armour, there are large bundles of spears that have broken
off their shafts. There are tools and personal possessions. And what we think is that it
was a soldier who buried it. We know it was buried around the second quarter of the second
century. What we think is he was a soldier who in his secondary job is an armourer, and
he’s packed these things up, presumably because he’s going off somewhere. He’s
not in a hurry as these things are absolutely amazingly well packed. They’re wrapped up.
Presumably he’s just been sent off and he think s he’s coming back, otherwise he’d
take it with him.
Whereas I think Corbridge the fort was a place of orders, loyalty, structure, what I like
about the Corbridge Hoard is that it indicates a certain amount of individuality. Here is
a man who has hopes. He has hope to return. He is making plans beyond what his immediate
orders are.
The most famous and really the most important part of the Corbridge Hoard is all the armour,
the lorica segmentata, these curved segments. Before it was found in 1964, archaeologists
knew the Romans had this type of armour but only small fragments had been found so they
didn’t understand how you put it on, how it was made, how it was repaired and how you
wore it in battle. But because so much was found and because the organic preservation
allowed them to see the leather straps that held the segments together, it was the first
time anybody was able to reconstruct a suit of this armour. And now if people find lorica
segmentata, it gets classified according to the three Corbridge types.
Here is an individual, presumably a soldier,
who is – yes, he’s got a job, he’s a blacksmith and he’s probably very good and
diligent at that job but he also has a social life as well. There’s writing equipment
– perhaps he wrote to members his family, perhaps still living at where he was posted
previously – and there’s also a tankard, and it’s quite a large tankard, so this
leads me to conclude he probably had quite a lively social life.
The Corbridge Hoard really is phenomenally
important. It’s among the most important finds in terms of Roman military history in
the Empire. It gave archaeologists so much information on this really key piece of equipment
that was vital to the empire expanding and its soldiers being protected.
The question I’d really like to answer is
why the owner of the Hoard never came back to retrieve it. We’re in the realms of speculation
here but we might imagine that he marched off to war and never came back. Or else he
was probably posted to somewhere else in the Empire, perhaps just to the north on Hadrian’s
Wall. This is essentially the life of a Roman soldier in a nutshell. He can make as many
plans for the future as he likes but ultimately he serves at the whim of his master, the Emperor.