Image courtesy of the Vindolanda Trust, used with permission.
Have you ever heard of Vindolanda?
No, it’s not a new pharmaceutical. It’s also not a Victorian slang word.
When I visited the site, it initially felt like one big history lesson…until I encountered a tiny little shoe that had been preserved from nearly two millennia ago.¹
Image courtesy of the Vindolanda Trust, used with permission.
When I saw the shoe, I stopped seeing what I was looking at as a textbook history lesson. I realized that I was looking at fragments of the lives of real people, especially a real little person.
What would it have been like to be a mother at Vindolanda? Could I keep my girls warm, fed, and healthy?
Those questions have stayed with me since then, and now that I have Ruby's Library...let's go down the rabbit hole together.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Rome controlled much of Britain. Maintaining Roman control became more difficult farther north. Vindolanda was established as a military fort on Rome’s northern frontier.²
Did you know Vindolanda is built like lasagna? It was rebuilt again and again. As they rebuilt, earlier structures were demolished and leveled off, and new structures were built on top of what was left. Successive rebuilds buried layers of lost and discarded items from everyday life.³
Some of these layers were buried and sealed in wet ground, creating conditions that restricted the amount of oxygen reaching organic material (like wood and tiny leather shoes). With less oxygen, decomposition slowed dramatically, and some of these objects survived for us to find today.
When I encountered those everyday items, I felt more intimately connected to those people from so long ago. Ancient monuments have their own sense of wonder, but ordinary objects have more personal meaning for me. I have owned and loved many pairs of shoes. And more importantly, I have put tiny shoes on my own babies’ feet.
I imagine there was a mother who put that shoe on a tiny child’s foot. She cared for that little person, worried about them, and loved them. Were her concerns similar to my own as a mother?⁴
I used to live in northern England and I know how brutal British winters can be, so naturally that’s where my mama heart developed concerns first. How would these mamas have kept their babies warm? Some of the answers are found in the artifacts. Woolen clothing items, leather shoes, twill insoles, and…get this…LITTLE WOOLEN SOCKS!⁵
Image courtesy of the Vindolanda Trust, used with permission.
Socks! You can imagine the grin that crossed my face as a sock company owner when I learned about that connection. I thought of those sweet little babies with their toasty toes in woolen socks and leather shoes, and it made my mama heart rest.
My next question was how these mothers kept their children’s tummies full. I was surprised to find out that the people of Vindolanda had access to a varied diet. I learned that Romans brought their culinary tastes with them, importing luxuries and spices from across the empire.⁶ Which made me laugh because, judging by my experience living in Britain and enduring the cuisine, the spices must have gone home with the Romans.
And now, we enter my professional territory: health. As I looked into how mothers at Vindolanda kept their children healthy, I was impressed by how advanced Roman systems for water and sanitation were for the time period.⁷ BUT…I also learned that modern research at Vindolanda found evidence of Giardia, roundworm, and whipworm.⁸ These parasites can spread through microscopic fecal contamination that ultimately makes its way into someone’s mouth. Something as simple as proper handwashing could have interrupted some of that transmission.
Everything I was learning felt familiar. Some of the concerns of motherhood felt surprisingly similar. But one of the most delightful discoveries had nothing to do with motherhood at all.
They unearthed a birthday invitation! Claudia Severa was having a birthday and sent an invite to her bestie Sulpicia Lepidina. She wrote that having her there would make her birthday better. In other correspondence, she called Lepidina “my dearest and most longed-for soul.”⁹
BESTIES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A THING!! It made me so happy to see that girlfriends and girl talk don’t just belong to modern times. It delights me that nearly 2,000 years later, this tiny piece of evidence still feels familiar.
When I think about that tiny shoe now, I don’t worry about the little person who wore it quite as much as I did before. As I learned about the people at Vindolanda, pieces of their lives felt familiar to me. That tiny shoe was the start of all of my questions. My research left me feeling more connected to the people who lived so many years ago.
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Down the Rabbit Hole 🐇
1. Tiny Shoes, Big Rabbit Hole 👞
Vindolanda has an extraordinary collection of around 5,000 pieces of Roman footwear, from soldiers’ boots and sandals to women’s shoes, children’s shoes, and tiny baby footwear. The Vindolanda Trust estimates that around 40% of the shoes could have been worn by women and children, evidence that this military community was home to far more than soldiers.
Explore Vindolanda's collection
Go deeper into childhood at Vindolanda
2. Vindolanda Before the Wall 🏛️
Vindolanda was established around AD 85 to protect the Stanegate, an important east-west Roman road along an earlier northern frontier. Here’s the fun part: Vindolanda was already there nearly 40 years before construction of Hadrian’s Wall began in AD 122. When the Wall was built, Vindolanda and other forts from the older Stanegate frontier became part of Rome’s new defensive system.
If Hadrian’s Wall is new to you, it’s a 73-mile Roman frontier built across northern Britain on the orders of Emperor Hadrian. It wasn’t simply a wall: the wider frontier system included forts, milecastles, towers, ditches, roads, and other military infrastructure.
Vindolanda Trust: Why is Vindolanda south of Hadrian's Wall?
English Heritage: Explore the history of Hadrian's Wall
3. Archaeological Lasagna 🍝
Vindolanda wasn’t rebuilt once or twice. Archaeologists have identified at least nine successive forts at the site. As earlier timber buildings were demolished, their remains could be leveled and sealed beneath materials including clay, turf, bracken, and heather before construction continued above them.
In some of the deeply buried, waterlogged layers, this helped create anaerobic conditions, meaning very little oxygen was available for the bacteria that normally break down organic material. The result is extraordinary preservation of things that usually vanish from the archaeological record, including wood, leather, textiles, writing tablets, and, thankfully for this story, tiny shoes.
Vindolanda Trust: Why are the artifacts so well preserved?
4. A Note About the Mother I’m Imagining ♥️
I don’t know who actually put this particular shoe on its tiny owner’s foot. Childcare in the Roman world could involve mothers, relatives, wet nurses, servants, enslaved caregivers, and other members of the household. The mother in this paragraph is therefore exactly what I call her: someone I imagine when I look at the shoe.
What we can say is that surviving Roman evidence gives us plenty of reason not to assume that high infant mortality or different cultural ideas about childhood meant parents lacked affection for their children. Roman sources describe celebrations surrounding births and mothers wanting to hold, comfort, and protect their children from distress. At Vindolanda itself, children’s shoes, clothing, toys, and other objects preserve evidence of children being woven into everyday life. Roman childhood was culturally very different from childhood today, but care and affection were part of that world too.
Vindolanda Trust: Childhood at Vindolanda
5. LITTLE WOOLEN SOCKS! 🧦♥️
Yes, really. Among Vindolanda’s extraordinary textile finds is a child’s sock made from two pieces of woollen twill. Archaeologists also discovered an insole for a child’s shoe neatly cut from an older piece of twill.
Vindolanda is home to the largest collection of Roman textiles in Western Europe, woven almost entirely from the wool of northern sheep. Most survive only as fragments, which makes this even better: the child’s sock and shoe insole are the collection’s only complete textile objects.
I own a sock company. You will therefore understand why this discovery required capitalization.
Vindolanda Trust: Children, socks, shoes, and childhood
Explore Vindolanda's extraordinary textile collection
6. What’s for Dinner at Vindolanda? 🧂🍎
The surviving evidence suggests a surprisingly varied menu, at least for some of Vindolanda’s residents. Writing tablets and archaeological finds document foods including apples, beans, eggs, pork, beef, venison, chicken, beer, wine, olives, olive oil, fish sauce, herbs, and spices.
Some foods were produced locally while others traveled enormous distances through Roman trade networks. One record even mentions a soldier wanting two denarii worth of pepper, an expensive spice that had traveled from southern India to Rome’s northern frontier.
Apparently getting stationed at the wet end of the empire did not mean surrendering your seasoning.
Vindolanda even has a tiny wooden container that may once have held pepper, although testing of the surviving black material was inconclusive.
Vindolanda Trust: Roman Food and Drink, Part 2
Vindolanda Trust: Where did all the food come from?
7. Roman Plumbing Was No Joke 🚽
Vindolanda’s residents weren’t simply hauling every bucket of water around by hand. The site had wells, water tanks, an aqueduct, water pipes, bathhouses, latrines, and sewers. Water leaving the bathhouse could even be put to work again, flushing waste from a nearby latrine before flowing through the sewer system toward a stream.
Roman water and sanitation engineering was remarkably sophisticated for its time.
Unfortunately, impressive plumbing and an understanding of infectious disease are two very different technologies.
Vindolanda Trust: Explore Vindolanda's waterways
8. Tiny Germs, Plus a Public Service Announcement 🦠🧼
A 2025 study analyzed sediment from a drain connected to a latrine at Vindolanda’s bath complex. Researchers found evidence of roundworm and whipworm and detected Giardia duodenalis, the first evidence of Giardia identified in Roman Britain. All three are transmitted through the fecal-oral route.
What exactly is the fecal-oral route?
Despite the polite medical terminology, it means microscopic amounts of fecal matter from an infected person eventually make their way into another person’s mouth, commonly through contaminated food or water. Contaminated hands can also help complete that deeply unfortunate journey. Proper handwashing and sanitation can interrupt routes of transmission.
In other words: wash your hands, friends.
Read the 2025 Vindolanda parasite study in Parasitology
9. Ancient Besties 💌
Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation to Sulpicia Lepidina dates to around AD 97–105 and invites Lepidina to join her birthday celebration on September 11. Claudia tells her that her arrival would make the day more enjoyable and even sends greetings from her husband and “my little son.”
Most of the letter was written by a scribe, but Claudia added a personal message and closing in her own handwriting. Those additions are considered among the earliest known examples of Latin writing by a woman.
And this wasn’t their only surviving correspondence. In another letter, Claudia discusses trying to arrange a visit with Lepidina and signs off in her own hand:
“Farewell my sister, my dearest and most longed-for soul.”
Nearly 2,000 years later, I stand by my original assessment: besties.
