Murder Most Foul
We are duly horrified at the slaughter of civilians during the vicious little wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that the vast majority of the dead have been killed by their fellow Muslims in a brutal series of car and truck bombs, beheadings and indiscriminate shootings tends to be overlooked in the fuss that breaks out - and rightly so - when the culprits prove to be American or British.
Regrettably, the military establishment seems reluctant to punish its own. British soldiers who murdered an innocent hotel worker, Baha Mousa, were declared innocent apart from one scapegoat who was gaoled for a year. The Americans were more robust when dealing with the sickening rape and murder of a 14-year old girl and the murder of her parents and brother. The perpetrators got sentences of 10 and 20 years, and life without parole for the ringleader. One cannot but regret the passing of the "bloody provost" who hung men caught looting without the bother of a trial and without enriching lawyers for the defence.
Unfortunately such violence is nothing new. Past atrocities such as the sack of Magdebourg in 1631, when 25,000 men, women and children - 85% of the population - were slaughtered by the army of the Holy Roman Empire, testify to man's brutality to man, and civil rights lawyers would do well not to read Caesar's "Gallic Wars". The account would probably be too painful for them to bear.
Now archaeologists at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall have discovered evidence which shows that occupying troops haven't really changed over two thousand years. In the corner of a barrack room a sharp-eyed volunteer noticed a change in the soil which indicated that a pit had been dug and filled in again. Such pits are usually rubbish pits and all sorts of treasures may be found in them - lamps, broken pottery, amulets, costume jewellery, ashes, animal bones and so on.
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| The bones of a 10-year old girl, discovered buried in the corner of a barrack room at Vindolanda. |
Surprisingly, the pit was pretty barren. The fill appeared to be nothing more than plain old dirt, until the excavator reached the bottom of the pit, when he found a cluster of small bones. When the dirt had been cleared from the first few bones there was a collective "aaah" from the watchers and the animal lovers among them prepared to shed a tear, for they thought that they were uncovering the remains of a large dog - someone's pet lovingly buried near where its master slept.
Unfortunately the damp soil had caused the bones to deteriorate and when all the bones and bone fragments had been carefully extracted from the soil, there was not a complete skeleton. In particular, the head was badly damaged - though it should have given the game away, for when the experts at Durham University were given the bones for examination and analysis, Dr Trudy Buck, a biological anthropologist, discovered that she was looking at the remains of a girl between about eight and ten years of age!
That immediately rang alarm bells among the excavators at Vindolanda. The stratigraphy of the pit showed that it dated from the 3rd century AD, a time when Roman laws and customs were in force in Britain - and among those laws was the rule that no one could be buried inside a town. Cemeteries were outside the town and tombs lined the roads leading up to the gates.
The fact that this child had been buried inside the town, inside a barracks, meant that she had been buried illegally. This was not a grieving parent wanting to keep his favourite daughter close to him, even in death. This was a secret, unauthorised burial - clandestine burial of a girl in a barrack room of soldiers!
What was even worse was that the position of the child's hands was such that she might have been tied up before being killed.
Various suggestions have been made to try and avoid the obvious answer. Dr Andrew Birley, director of excavations for the Vindolanda Trust, suggested that she might have been a slave and someone who had a grudge against her owner killed her in order to harm him financially. Possible, of course, though it is unlikely that a professional killer would have needed to tie up a 10-year old girl in order to kill her.
No, the most likely explanation is that she was raped and tortured to death and her grave, in the corner of a cramped barrack room, means that the eight soldiers who shared it must have been aware of her death. If she was a slave, then it is unlikely that any questions would have been asked: her owner would simply have carried the body out and buried it in the normal way. The death of a slave was not important and a slave owner could kill his possessions without any fear of condemnation. If she was freeborn, however, then her death would cause questions to be asked and clearly her killers did not want to have to answer those questions. Rather than face the guards on the gates of Vindolanda fort, they buried her in the barracks, smoothed down the earth over the body and pretended that they didn't know what had happened to her.
What will be interesting is if Dr Buck manages to extract any DNA from the bones. We know that at this time the garrison at Vindolanda was the Fourth Cohort of Gauls, foreigners brought over from France to man the ramparts of Hadrian's Wall. If the girl turns out to be Gaulish or African or even German, that will suggest one possibility and perhaps strengthen the idea that she was a slave. If, however, she turns out to be Pictish, then it will be almost certain that she was a civilian, belonging to someone from the local community. Her family may have lived in the town that grew up around the fort and supplied goods and services to the soldiers, or they may have been travellers passing through the checkpoints of the Wall whose child was taken from them, illegally and by violence, but faced with a squadron of armed men, they dared not protest and had to walk away, leaving the ten-year old girl to her fate.
There is, however, just a chance that her killer or killers may be identified, though it is too late to hope that they will be brought to justice. Excavations at Vindolanda have uncovered the earliest written records from Roman times - a series of birch letters that were preserved by being buried in water-logged ground. Experts are still reading and interpreting every possible nuance from these letters and there is always the chance that more will be found. It is conceivable, therefore, that one of these letters may contain a clue that will allow us to point the finger and say "He was the guilty man".
However, while we may never know who killed the girl, we do know who is guilty of murdering the English language. Dr Andrew Birley told the press that back in the 1930s his grandfather discovered two skeletons buried beneath the floor of a civilian building in Vindolanda, one of whom had a broken knife blade stuck between his ribs. In a wonderful example of pointless British bureaucracy, a coroner's inquest was duly summoned and the coroner intoned his verdict of "murder by persons unknown on or about the year 367 AD"! He then went on to say, "I'm sorry to say that Vindolanda has probably produced another Roman murder victim. I shudder to think how this young person met their fate."
Their fate? THEIR fate? PC idiots the world over choke and feel physically sick if obliged to used gender specific pronouns and poor Andrew Birley simply could not bring himself to say "her fate". Far too sexist for this age of women's lib and gender equality! So instead of acknowledging the fact that a young girl was brutally murdered in his fort, Birley has to mangle English grammar by linking a singular noun ("person") with a plural pronoun ("their") and lie through his teeth by implying that more than one body was found in the barrack-room pit.
Oh for the days of the bloody provost, when summary and exemplary justice could be meted out to barbarians such as these!
© Kendall K. Down 2010
