Thirty or so years after they were first previewed in Ann Woodward and Peter Leach’s The Uley Shrines (1993), and forty-five years after they were excavated, we now possess the long-awaited publication by Roger Tomlin of the 86 curse tablets from the temple of Mercury at Uley. The texts of five of these were already published by Tomlin in Woodward and Leach, and fifteen more have appeared over the years in Britannia; the rest are new. The report also publishes the texts of two tablets ostensibly from the nearby site of ‘Tarlton’ and descripta of five more — I will return to these at the end.
The full publication of the Uley corpus is a major milestone in curse tablet scholarship. This is one of the two substantial known assemblages of tablets from Roman Britain, alongside the 116 tablets from Bath, which were published by Tomlin in 1988 in Barry Cunliffe’s report on the finds from the Sacred Spring. We can now at last compare practices across these two major sites — and Tomlin makes clear that The Uley Tablets should be treated as a companion volume to his Bath publication and consulted in tandem with it. As with Bath, the volume opens with several chapters that cover various linguistic and palaeographical aspects of the texts. These include chapters on formulaic language, attested personal names, language and spelling idiosyncrasies, handwriting, and internal textual evidence for possible scribal authorship and copying from handbooks or drafts. Comparison with Bath is made throughout, as well as with other tablets from Britain (less is said about continental parallels). We also get a chapter disclosing the local deity name attested in at least a dozen of the tablets: Aruerius or Arueriacus. (The presence of a local name in multiple tablets was revealed by Tomlin in Woodward and Leach, but the name itself was kept back on the grounds that ‘the reading and the etymology require further study’). The name is most often paired with Mercury, but stands alone in at least two texts, and is paired with Mars in at least one. One tablet (75) explicitly refers to ‘the temple of Mercury on the hill of Aruerius.’
From here, we move to the meat of the volume, the catalogue of texts with commentary. The (mostly) Latin texts are transcribed, and a translation provided for all but the trickiest to decipher or the most fragmentary. Each text is also accompanied by both a photograph and a line drawing. The Uley tablets suffer from much more corrosion than the Bath tablets, so many of the previously unpublished texts are highly fragmentary or entirely unreadable. Even so, there is much of interest here, both in terms of individual tablets and the overall feel of the assemblage. Some noteworthy texts include the pastorally evocative 24 and 83, on the thefts, respectively, of a beehive and of wethers, both of which have appeared in Britannia. Other tablets showcase a compelling variety of cursing practice at Uley, including 21, which has a drawing of a caduceus, 26, a pseudoliterate text consisting of seemingly random letters, 52, whose Latin text is written in Greek letters, and 59, where the text is written as a spiral. Two tablets, 7 and 35, appear to be in Celtic, something paralleled at Bath.
Here we come, however, to the ways in which The Uley Tablets can disappoint. Tomlin, of course, has an encyclopaedic and unparalleled knowledge of British tablets, and his commentaries give comprehensive insights into the unique aspects of the texts, or how they link to other tablets at Uley, Bath, or elsewhere. However, deep, synthetic, and contextualised analysis of the assemblage and its implications for ritual practice both at Uley and more broadly is lacking. Much has changed in Romano-British studies since the Bath tablets were published. Our understanding of Romano-British society, and especially the Romano-British countryside, has shifted and deepened in myriad ways. So, too, have our approaches to ritual action and religious syncretism in the Roman provinces. Curse tablets specifically have seen several monograph-length works (and even more PhD theses), which have launched a rich conversation on the social functions of tablet-writing and deposition and their complex relationships with the boundaries of ritual and magic. For the most part, however, The Uley Tablets ignores these developments. The opening chapter gives brief mention to some of the key monographs and corpora on curses that have appeared since the 2000s, but has very cursory engagement with the frameworks and arguments of those works. The vision of Uley — and its syncretic god — is mired in outdated conceptions of a simplistic rural social landscape, and Roman/Celtic binaries. One feels, unfortunately, that this is the same volume we could have had in the early 1990s.
Even some of the technical elements of the volume are disappointing, given its long gestation. One tablet (17) is left largely untransliterated because it was taken back to the British Museum too soon and inadequately photographed. No attempt has been made to parse the two Celtic texts, declaring ‘further elucidation must be left to the Celticists’. This is now in train — but surely collaboration with Celtic specialists could have been incorporated into the volume itself. Other difficult-to-read tablets may also have benefited from a wider team of collaborators. The Uley tablets are clearly exceptionally challenging due to their poor preservation, but this is all the more reason to put heads — and pairs of eyes — together.
Even so, the texts we have offer considerable scope for new interpretations and arguments by future scholarship. The corpus shows a complex, highly creative set of practices at play. The Uley assemblage, though smaller than Bath, is arguably more diverse. Visual imagery like the drawing of the caduceus is unheard of on British tablets, though very common in the Mediterranean. The sheer spectrum of literacy on display — and of playing with words and writing — also holds tremendous potential, especially when integrated with work like that of the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project, or LatinNow. It is also clear that the sanctuary as a whole, and how we understand its place in the social networks of the region, bears reevaluating. While there are missed opportunities to address these questions in the volume itself, the raw material gives us much to work with.
The volume concludes with the seven so-called ‘Tarlton’ tablets. The two tablets which Tomlin publishes in full both contain the name Aruerius/Arueriacus; the remaining five are descripta but clearly have substantial text surviving. The story of these as given by Tomlin is somewhat perturbing. They were reportedly metal-detected from ‘near Tarlton’ — about 16 km from Uley — around 1990. They were then sold to a collector in 1991, at which point Tomlin was given sight of them, drew and photographed Tarlton 1, and described the rest for the owner. Tarlton 1 was sold at auction in 1997; its whereabouts are now unknown. The remaining six passed to the Schøyen Collection, where in 1995 they were once again examined by Tomlin, and two more photographed and drawn. In 2019 they were sold at auction to an unnamed American collector who allowed Tomlin to reexamine them in 2024 and indicated ‘that he might even lend them to Corinium Museum, Cirencester’.
What site are these tablets from? At some point following their emergence, Tomlin concluded the most likely provenance was Hailey Wood Camp near Tarlton, which (although Tomlin does not mention this) has been a Scheduled Monument since 1949. The timeline for this identification is not clear. Tomlin’s account strongly implies that the Hailey Wood association was made by him from the beginning, i.e. 1991. However, it is possible the connection was not made until 1996, when geophysical survey by Tom Moore showed the site may have been religious in nature, or even 2001, when Moore’s results were published.
The other provenance possibility — which Tomlin acknowledges but dismisses because of the survey evidence from Hailey Wood — is that the tablets were illegally metal-detected from Uley itself. The presence of the syncretic name in the ‘Tarlton’ tablets strongly supports an association with Uley. It would be unusual — unique so far, in fact — to have a localised syncretic deity name of this nature appearing in tablets at two different sites. If the tablets do come from Hailey Wood, the site merits further investigation, especially since there is reportedly evidence of ongoing nighthawking there, at least into the 2010s.
Regardless, whether the ‘Tarlton’ tablets come from Uley or from Hailey Wood, they seem very likely to be finds looted from a Scheduled Monument. This possibility will have been clear from the beginning due to the syncretic name, which pers. comm. references in Moore’s report confirm Tomlin has known about since the 1990s — presumably since Tarlton 1 was read for its first owner. It would therefore have been good to see reflection in the volume on the associated ethical dilemmas of how best to study and publish them and on the role the antiquities trade has played in their history.
