The Bath Curse Tablets

The hot spring at Aquae Sulis discharges continuously, and for several centuries people who had been robbed came to it and threw in a message. The messages were written on thin sheets of lead and tin, hammered flat, inscribed with a stylus, then folded or rolled. The excavation of the reservoir in 1979 and 1980 recovered about a hundred and thirty of them, along with thousands of coins and other offerings.

They are extraordinarily consistent in what they are about. Someone has stolen something, usually something small: a cloak taken while its owner was bathing, a pair of gloves, a bracelet, a ploughshare, a quantity of coins. The writer sets out the loss and, in the characteristic move of this deposit, makes the goddess the injured party by handing the stolen property to her. What was a theft from a bather becomes a theft from Sulis Minerva, and it is then her business to act.

The requested action is usually escalating and physical rather than fatal at once. The thief is to lose sleep, health, blood, the ability to eat, until the property comes back. Several tablets list the names of everyone who might have done it and ask the goddess to sort out which. That is not confident accusation. It is a person who does not know who robbed them, using the only investigative procedure available.

Before Bath, the Roman curse tablet was understood mainly from the Greek and Italian material, where the typical text binds a rival without giving a reason. The writer names an opponent in a lawsuit, a race or a love affair and asks that he be disabled. No wrong is alleged, because none has been done. The act is aggressive and the writer knows it, which is why the tablets are hidden in graves and wells.

The British deposits do something different, and the difference is systematic enough to have forced a category. The writer states a grievance, claims to have been wronged, addresses the god openly at a public sanctuary rather than burying the message in a tomb, and asks for justice rather than advantage. H. S. Versnel argued in the 1991 volume Magika Hiera that this constitutes a distinct class, which he called prayers for justice, occupying a space between cursing and ordinary petitionary prayer.

The boundary is genuinely blurred and the scholarship is not unanimous about where it falls. A text asking a goddess to deny a thief sleep and blood until he returns a cloak is a curse by any ordinary use of the word, and the fact that the writer feels entitled does not change what is being requested. What the Bath deposit established is that the entitlement is not incidental: it shapes the wording, the choice of a public place, and the willingness to sign. This atlas describes what the tablets do rather than reproducing R. S. O. Tomlin's readings of them, which remain in copyright.