The Uley Curse Tablets

The temple on West Hill at Uley in Gloucestershire was dedicated to Mercury, and the excavation of the site between 1977 and 1979 recovered more than a hundred inscribed lead sheets and fragments. Preservation is worse than at Bath. Lead corrodes into layered oxide, folded sheets can no longer be opened without destroying them, and many of the Uley items survive as illegible lumps that are identifiable as tablets only by their form.

What can be read follows the British pattern that Bath established. The complaint is about property. The god is addressed by name and given the stolen goods. The wording of the transfer and the shape of the request are close enough to the Bath examples to indicate a shared convention rather than independent invention, and the god being different at each site makes that conclusion stronger rather than weaker: what travelled was the form of words, not a devotion to one goddess.

The tablets were published with R. S. O. Tomlin's edition in the 1993 report on the site by Ann Woodward and Peter Leach. Uley is the reason Bath can be treated as evidence about Roman Britain rather than as a local peculiarity of one famous spring.

The two British deposits also carry evidence about literacy that is hard to get any other way. The hands vary enormously. Some tablets are written competently in a practised cursive; others are laboured, badly spelled, and clearly the work of somebody who wrote rarely. A few carry marks that imitate writing without being writing at all, made by a person who could not write but understood that a tablet ought to have letters on it. Whether a petitioner inscribed his own complaint or paid somebody at the sanctuary to do it therefore varies from tablet to tablet, and the range within a single deposit is itself a finding about how far writing had reached into ordinary provincial life.

A substantial part of what is known about this material is a question of technique rather than interpretation. A curse tablet is a soft metal sheet scratched with a stylus in a cursive hand, folded, and then buried or thrown into water for between fifteen hundred and two thousand years. The metal corrodes from both faces. The scratches that carry the text are shallower than the corrosion is deep.

Conservation of the Uley and Bath groups involved unfolding sheets that had become brittle, cleaning surfaces without removing the inscribed layer, and reading letters that survive as differences in surface texture rather than as visible marks. Raking light, casts and radiography have all been used. Some tablets have been read only in part, and some readings have been revised.

That has two consequences for anybody using this material. The first is that the corpus is not fixed: what a tablet says can change with re-examination, and the published figure for how many tablets a site produced is not the same as the number that can be read. The second is that the illegible majority is not neutral. If short texts corrode to nothing more readily than long ones, or if a particular hand or metal thickness survives better, then the readable sample is not a random sample of what was deposited, and every generalisation drawn from it inherits that bias. This is why the atlas records the count of tablets recovered separately from the count that can be read.