The Vindolanda Check

A generation before the Falkirk cloth was stuffed into its coin-pot, there was already checked wool being worn on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. It comes from the fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall, and it is one of the earliest checked cloths to survive from Britain at all.

The find

Vindolanda's waterlogged early levels are a textile archive: the anaerobic mud under the first timber forts preserved leather, wood, writing-tablets and cloth that would have rotted anywhere drier. Among the woollens excavated there is a simple two-colour check, deposited in the fort's earliest levels, around AD 100 — a full century or so before the Falkirk hoard was buried. The textiles were published by J. P. Wild in the Vindolanda research reports, and the fleeces themselves were analysed by M. L. Ryder.¹²

The cloth

Vindolanda's weavers favoured structure over colour. Roughly two-thirds of the site's cloth is 2/2 diamond twill — about 62% of it, against only some 5% of plain 2/2 twill — a patterned ground that, as Wild dryly noted, was "the preferred structure, despite the extra demands which it makes upon the weaver."¹ Around a fifth of the cloth was dyed. This is the older taste in tartan, before the interest migrated out of the weave and into the sett: the elaboration is in the structure, and the colour is comparatively plain.

The check itself Wild later described simply — a cloth "now showing as dark and light wool yarns," once carrying a touch of lichen purple.³ It is the same recipe as the natural-fleece checks of the period: one darker wool crossed with one lighter, the pattern made by the yarn rather than the dye-pot.

A judgement, not a measurement

Here honesty is owed. No thread count for the Vindolanda check has ever been published — Wild's own survey of Roman-British textiles says as much.³ The sett carried in the Dictionary is therefore a graphic approximation: its proportions and its dark-red-on-cream shades are drawn to let the find take a place on the history map, a considered reconstruction rather than a reading off the actual cloth. It sits in the Dictionary as the Vindolanda check so the timeline is complete, and it is labelled for what it is — a judgement, not a measurement.

Where it sits

Vindolanda belongs to the deep run of checked twill that this Dictionary traces from the Tarim Basin plaid and the Hallstatt salt-mines down into Scotland — the subject of the companion essay, The Origins of Tartan. On the Scottish thread it falls between the Oakbank crannog wool, older still, and the Falkirk sett of around AD 230. Three finds, one tradition: the diamond twills of Vindolanda, the herringbone of Falkirk, and behind them the whole 2/2-twill family that eventually simplified its weave and let the colour sett grow into the tartan we know.