This is the text of a (hitherto unpublished) paper presented by MCB to the Roman Finds Group Conference on Richborough, held at the University of Canterbury in 2018. We offer it here as a reflection on the development of Roman military equipment studies.

Introduction

The history of the study of a site like Richborough inevitably reflects developments in scholarship over time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that context and a sense of perspective are always necessary in reviewing how those developments have affected perceptions of the site and its assemblage. This is particularly true of Roman military equipment, which has not always enjoyed the same level of interest from archaeologists as, say, pottery or coins, for obvious and understandable reasons. It is therefore an interesting and, one might even argue, essential exercise to map the scholarly timeline of Richborough onto that of Roman military equipment studies and see what each has to say about the other and what, if anything, we can learn from this exercise.

Is this because Richborough is in any way special with regard to military equipment? The answer to that has to be for the most part no, but that is precisely the reason the exercise is valuable. All sites are unique, but most have enough in common with their fellows that methodological lessons can be learned that benefit all.

I hope you will bear with me whilst I outline the sunny uplands and slightly gloomier valleys of Roman military equipment studies and show how they bear upon Richborough and how, in return, it reflects the discipline back at itself.

Before Lindenschmit

I view all military equipment studies Before Lindenschmit (BL, if you like) as being essentially an extension of the scholarship of Trajan’s Column. Its gravitational pull seized the eyeballs of scholars from the Renaissance onwards and they inevitably felt drawn to relating everything they read or saw back to it as if it were the lodestone of truth. This effect should not be underestimated and, a bit like the throbbing Ark of the Covenant in the warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie, it has not gone away, but rather has been buried and largely forgotten about. However – throb, throb – we will encounter it again during what follows.

Possibly the first major work of scholarship to tackle Roman military equipment was the work of the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius, or Joost Lips, who wandered into the territory during his detailed exploration of the work of the Greek historian Polybios and, in particular, his consideration, from an outsider’s point of view, of the Roman army: the De Militia Romana from 1595. Lipsius it was who first used the term lorica segmentata. Nevertheless, in an age of little more than curious antiquarianism for actual artefacts, associating objects with his subject matter was not within his compass. His impression of the Republican Roman army was heavily coloured by his knowledge of – throb, throb – Trajan’s Column – how was he to know that Trajanic legionaries looked as different from their Republican forbears as their Late Roman descendants did from them? If at this point you are thinking ‘Gosh, Hollywood hasn’t moved on much further from this!’ then it is true that some might say you would not be far wrong. In defence of Lipsius, he was at least looking for vaguely Roman parallels, whilst the contemporary equivalent of reconstruction artists, the old masters of his time were, by and large, firmly committed to depicting Roman soldiers in contemporary dress; a modern parallel might be 1970s productions of Shakespearian tragedies with actors in roll-neck sweaters and wielding AK47s.

Lindenschmit’s illustration naming lorica segmentata

To look down on what might seem strange to us is to miss the point. Scholarship is forever developing. That’s why it is scholarship. We have to wait until the 19th century for things to move on beyond the Renaissance level of casual interest in Roman arms and armour and, when it does, it is verging on the revolutionary.

Tracht und Bewaffnung

Lindenschmit published four volumes of Die Alterthümer unserer heidnischen Vorzeit between 1858 and 1889. These featured lavish illustrations of key archaeological artefacts from Germany, including many items of Roman military equipment, such as arguably the finest of the Weisenau (or Imperial-Gallic) ferrous helmets, only a few fragments of which survived the Second World War, and the only known complete apron strap with leather, studs, and terminal pendant. When I first saw AuhV back in the 1970s, obtained for me from abroad by Bristol Central Reference Library on inter-library loan, the effect upon me was electrifying. It was not until much later that I saw his synthetic work Tracht und Bewaffnung des römischen Heeres während der Kaiserzeit and fully realised its significance. Here, for the first time, in 1882, archaeological artefacts were brought together with literary and iconographic sources to provide the first full insight into what Lindenschmit thought Roman soldiers looked like. As a book, it is now largely overlooked, but its significance cannot be overestimated: what followed was always essentially going to be an update of Tracht und Bewaffnung for each new generation.

Ludwig Lindenschmit

Lindenschmit’s influence, along with that of the work being undertaken on the Obergermanisch-Raetische Limes in Germany, was most clearly manifested in Britain in Curle’s excavation at Newstead in the Scottish Borders. Curle in turn kept in contact with the pre-First World War excavators at Corbridge in Northumberland, a project overseen by Haverfield but directed in the field by first Leonard Woolley but later by Robert H. Forster and William H. Knowles. Edwardian archaeology largely lacked anything resembling a career structure, but promising students could find work as supervisors on such projects and Corbridge boasted a fine crop, including Newbold, Cheesman, and Bushe-Fox. Finds notebooks in the hands of all three still exist from the Corstopitum project and it was there that Bushe-Fox learned his trade, subsequently applied to his work at both Wroxeter and Richborough. In an Edwardian game of six degrees of separation, it was easy to draw a line from many of the contemporary British excavators back to the doyen of Roman history, Theodor Mommsen, and the risen star of provincial Roman archaeology, Ludwig Lindenschmit.

Von Groller

Maximillian von Groller-Mildensee was an Austrian aristocrat and a surveyor. As an excavator, he is best known for his work on the legionary fortresses at Carnuntum and Lauriacum, and from the former for his investigation of a possible armamentarium, the Waffenmagazin. This provided the first major find of substantial fragments of lorica segmentata, which von Groller proceeded to attempt to reconstruct using Trajan’s Column – throb, throb – as his template, believing the plates were riveted to a leather jerkin. He was almost right, but at the same time very wrong. The volume he produced on that structure and its finds, Römische Waffen, was the next important step after Lindenschmit in the understanding of the importance of archaeological context to the understanding of military equipment.

von Groller

Couissin

At the this point, the Germanic thread was interrupted by a Frenchman. Paul Couissin was a classicist who came to archaeology because of his abilities as a draftsman. Born in 1885, he taught Latin first at Rennes before moving to the University of Marseille where, in 1927, he joined the Faculty of Arts and, in 1929, took over as conservator at the museum in Marseille. He is best known nowadays for the volume he published in 1926 derived from his doctoral thesis, Les Armes Romaines. Couissin had a much greater base of archaeological evidence to work with than had been available to Lindenschmit, but his origins as a classicist played an important and all-too-apparent part in forming the timbre of his work. Literary and iconographic sources were allowed to dominate the archaeological evidence and – throb, throb – the influence of Trajan’s Column is once again all too evident. It is probably no accident that early Hollywood’s Roman soldiers bore a striking resemblance to those of Couissin’s illustrations, but the influence of those reconstructions reached far further, arguably into the 1960s.

Paul Couissin

Make no mistake, Couissin’s work is not bad, as such, and much of what he writes still holds true, but instead of being, if you like, a comma or at least semi-colon, it turned into a full stop for thinking about Roman military equipment. What was needed was an archaeologist to shake things up once more.

Webster

Many might be surprised that I would not point to Russell Robinson as the key individual in the revival of interest in Roman arms and armour. After all, he gave us the ‘modern’ Roman soldier, to all intents and purposes. However, that is to misunderstand what Robinson was and what he contributed. Before the Robinson Effect could be produced, there needed to be a catalyst, and that was a museum and field archaeologist with an interest in Roman military equipment: Graham Webster. In 1988, I walked into a room in the Museum of London just in time to hear Graham Webster opining that the reason that so much Roman cavalry equipment was found in barracks in forts was because troopers slept with their horses. At the time, that seemed plain bonkers, but the subsequent discovery that stable barracks were more common than had previously been thought (and thus that cavalrymen did in fact sleep close to their mounts) only served to emphasise that it is worth listening to all ideas, however stupid they might seem at the time.

Graham Webster

Webster’s interest in military equipment meant he noticed it when excavating. At Wroxeter, Phil Barker’s open area excavation was seen at the same time as Webster’s traditional gridded box trenches and the inevitable comparison of the new against the old way of doing things was the meme that played most strongly and that has tended to drown out Webster’s significance in the study of militaria in the field.

In the library, apart from producing an important catalogue of military equipment from Britain in his paper on Ostorius Scapula, he struggled against the traditions handed down to him as he tried to make sense of one of the most complex issues of the day: reconstructing lorica segmentata. Using both the Bank of England and Newstead breastplates, Webster tried and failed to understand this elusive form of armour, largely because he was hampered by – throb, throb – the baleful influence of Trajan’s Column. Trying to reconstruct the actual finds so that they matched the reliefs on the helical frieze of the monument was an exercise in futility, but Webster, like Couissin, could not see that. His first practical reconstruction of his ideas – like so many stuffed Roman soldiers in museums, called Fred – was a manikin for the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and the armour was built to his specification by an armourer from the Tower of London Armouries, Henry Robinson, who always preferred to be known by his middle name, Russell. Now you see why I used the word catalyst.

Ulbert

To all intents and purposes a contemporary of Webster, Günter Ulbert in Germany was also interested in Roman military equipment. He produced a small booklet for the Aalen Limesmuseum on Roman weaponry in 1968 which was effectively a modern reworking of Lindenschmit’s Tracht und Bewaffnung. He also produced finds catalogues from the early forts of Risstissen, Rheingönheim, Aislingen, and Burghöfe, along with a consideration of the silver-inlaid dagger scabbards from Vindonissa and another famous dagger sheath from Oberammergau, which is now suspected to have been lost during a battle as part of the Alpine campaign of 15 BC. Ulbert’s importance lies not only in the fact that, out of all of the German archaeologists working on Roman provincial archaeology, he was one of the few who took military equipment seriously, but also that he nurtured a young Tom Fischer as a student of Roman military equipment. More uncharitably, like von Groller at Carnuntum, he was presented with what was probably a complete set of lorica segmentata from Risstissen and failed fully to understand or more particularly reconstruct it. The same may well be true of a set of segmentata fittings from Richborough, incidentally. Archaeologists are not always the best people to understand archaeology.

Robinson

Henry Russell Robinson was a practising British armourer, working as Assistant Keeper in the Tower Armouries in London. Most significantly, he was a specialist on oriental, notably Japanese, armour. He was not, however, an archaeologist and lacked any formal training in the discipline. Both his strength and his weakness lay there, hand in hand and side by side, and are important in understanding his contribution to the discipline. Oriental armour was articulated on a series of laces and his familiarity with that fact allowed him to identify what archaeologists had not until then noticed – that segmentata plates were mounted on, and therefore articulated with, leather straps. After working on the armour and reconstructing three sets in time for the 1969 Roman Frontiers Congress in Cardiff, Robinson moved on to the study of Roman helmets and here his methodology was to prove flawed and arguably still haunting us.

Typologies are useful tools, there is no denying the fact. Once they have been used to study a body of artefacts, however, they become increasingly less useful as new, previously unknown components are introduced. Preferring not to use the type-site system used on the continent, largely pioneered by Couissin for Roman helmets, he devised his own system which accorded with his way of thinking about the manufacture and development of helmets. The system is deeply flawed, with some types crammed with helmets, others with only one example, and the cracks show when new helmets come to light and do not neatly fit into his system. This is all the result of his lack of archaeological training and it means that, to this day, military equipment specialists on either side of the English Channel speak a different interpretative language. Appropriate though that may seem, in this day and age, it is not exactly helpful.

Robinson published his survey or armour in one magnificent volume, The Armour of Imperial Rome, and planned a second volume on weaponry, and although the notes and some of the intended illustrations for that volume survive, he died before he could begin it. His legacy is twofold: on the one hand there was what has become known as the Robinson Effect, inspiring a new generation of students of military equipment to take up the subject. On the other, his close cooperation with the Ermine Street Guard led to the burgeoning phenomenon of historical re-enactors who sought to combine the known archaeological finds into a coherent picture of what the Roman army may have looked like. The result of the latter was to prove very different from Couissin’s plates of soldiers and it was possible to interrogate a ‘Roman soldier’ and finds precisely which sites produced the finds he carried reconstructed upon his person.

B&C/Feugère

If the first results of the Robinson Effect were new synthetic works by myself and Jon Coulston in the UK and Michel Feugère in France (the originator of the phrase Robinson Effect, so far as I can tell), then the cascade effect from it ultimately led to the publication of catalogues of military finds from Dura-Europos, Vindonissa, and Siscia, along with a slew of derivative popular works on arms and armour. The foundation of the Roman Military Equipment Conference and the Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies owe much to the Robinson Effect (although the former sprang directly from an idea mooted to me by Margaret Roxan back in 1982).

Fischer

And what of Tom Fischer, that protégé of Gunter Ulbert? For years he quietly published papers on Roman military equipment, amongst other things, and – like Webster – excavated widely, but in 2012 he used his accumulated knowledge to produce an important new work on the Roman army and its equipment: Die Armee der Caesaren. Integrating Roman military equipment seamlessly into a broader account of the Roman army, it (controversially) combines data from archaeologically excavated material with finds from both metal detecting and the art market. An English edition will hopefully be out later this year and is sure subtly to shift how military equipment is viewed yet again.

First In, Last Out

Richborough has a special place in Roman Britain. Long seen as the first place occupied by the invading Roman forces in AD 43, at least one historical novel saw it as the last place from which Romans left the island. In the myth of the end of Roman Britain, the arrival of the letter from Honorius informing the British cities that they were on their own, and the ensuing departure of the legions, would both have passed through Richborough. We now have a very different view of the end of the Roman presence in this island which casts doubt on these mainstays of a bygone narrative, but, however else you view it, there remains a good chance that Rutupiae was one of the military bases occupied for the longest of any in Britannia. At a time when we are deluged with unprovenanced finds nestling in the corners of grid squares on HER maps, it is arguably one of the most important locations for the study of site finds of Roman military equipment, not only because of that longevity, but also for the way the study of the site evolved to match developments in the study of artefacts.