ABSTRACT
What is beyond doubt is the fact that a total of more than 250 substantial written texts gives us a very great deal of new evidence. This information has to be teased out of material which is all too often barely legible, fragmentary or obscure (or all three at once). Our ability, such as it is, to read it depends on our predecessors in the field of Latin papyrology and palaeography and, as a token of our debt to an earlier pioneer generation, it is appropriate to identify two of the most distinguished British scholars in these fields by recalling the words of the late Sir Eric Turner in his obituary of Sir Harold Idris Bell, written in 1967: 'I remember Bell's telling me of his hope that one day he would find a letter on papyrus written by a soldier on Roman service in Britain, a hope that has not yet been fulfilled.'3 Bell would surely have derived pleasure from seeing that hope amply fulfilled in the 1970s and 1980s, even if on wood, rather than papyrus. He would certainly also have derived great pleasure from the fact that my responsibility for editing this material has been shared with the last and most distinguished of his pupils, Professor J. David Thomas of Durham University. That my name alone appears under the title of this publication should not obscure the fact that the credit for any sense which we have been able to extract from these often fragmentary and obscure texts belongs in at least equal measure to him. Our collaboration in this work has extended over two decades.
