Writing Londinium with the Seven Senses

Trying a garland made by Patty Baker (Kent)

by Caroline Lawrence

[This is a shortened and edited amalgam of two papers I gave in early-October 2018, one for the University of Kent and one for a conference called Sensory Experience in Rome's Northern Provinces hosted by the Roman Society at Senate House in London. Go to #SERNP2018 to see lots more about this]

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones, a visiting fellow at Newcastle University recently said, ‘It wasn’t until I wrote a book from the point of view of a Romano-British woman that I started to think about things like where did she keep her house key?’  

This is what I have discovered. As I write characters who have adventures in the ancient world, I have to imagine them moving through space with the sights, sounds, smells, and all other sensory experiences in order make it seem real to my young readers. This is especially important for children who need to be grounded in a sensory world. 

Here is how I used the seven senses to portray Roman Britain in my most recent series of books for kids, the Roman Quests, and also in my new work-in-progress The Girl with the Ivory Knife, in which a 12-year-old London schoolboy travels back in time to 3rd century Londinium (Roman London). 

SIGHT is the first of the five senses. For my Roman Quests I wanted to get an overview of what Roman London would have looked like. 

Model of London's port at Museum of London Barbican 

• Ruins aren’t so helpful to me… I need more
• Museums are useful, with their statues, inscriptions and artefacts. The Museum of London and it’s archaeology department MOLA gave me tons of material. 
• Models are very special. Storytellers know the power of the miniature.  
• Interactive maps like the one produced by MOLA are super.

superb Bath Roman Baths

• 3D computer walk-throughs on YouTube are too clean but often introduce light effects. 
• Google maps and Google Earth help me get a birds’ eye view of the terrain or walk along a road from Chester to Leicester, for example. 
• Alan Sorrell’s marvellous paintings and drawings. See my blog about him HERE. 
• Visiting sites like Butser Ancient Farm, Bath Roman Baths & Fishbourne provide 3D spatial and sensory experiences especially when they are peopled by re-enactors. 

Hard to Be a God (2013)

• Re-enactment events provide an abundance of unexpected revelations especially when they are performed by those who are passionate about getting details right. I particularly admire the members of Britannia, the Ermine Street Guard and Leg II Augusta. 
• Watching movies. For my book set in Roman London, a place you would NOT want to visit, I watched Hard to Be a God (2013), like Fellini Satyricon only with more mud, excrement and chickens. 
• Film sets can give you inspiration, too. 

London’s Mithraeum hadn’t reopened when I was writing the Roman Quests and besides, those books are set in the late first century. But I could use the Mithraeum for my new work in progress about the boy travelling back in time.

For my Time Travel book, I tried to think of things we don’t see today that would have been commonplace then. 
• A sky full of stars
• Crucified man on a cross
• People in rags and barefoot
• Indoor darkness – a world with no electricity
• Someone carrying a torch, a very symbolic object
• Someone with a staff (Main purpose? To beat off dogs!)
• The different stages of animal sacrifice
• A mind-boggling array of diseases & deformities
• Especially eye infections, skin disorders and toothache

For the first time I could relate ancient objects to modern ones. E.g.
• A tunic could be described as a big T-shirt and a toga as a blanket
• Mithras’ Persian cap is like a Smurf hat
• A Mithraeum initiation could be described as a flight simulator 
• And the seven grades as ascending levels of a video game...

Sophie Jackson on what smells to put in the Mithraeum

SMELL is one of the most evocative senses, and one of the hardest to convey in words. Giacomo Savani, one of the organisers of the conference, started with a quote from Rosemary Sutcliffe in which she speaks of the ‘blue reek of wood-smoke’. Evidence hints that my time travelling boy Alex might have  smelled burning pine cones in London’s Mithraeum, which he will use as the site of a portable portal to third century Londinium. However, Sophie Jackson (above), one of the key archaeologists involved in recreating the Mithraeum Experience, said the smell of men, cooked chicken and damp might have drowned out any pine freshness! 

A Saturnalia dinner with Stephen Cockings

Other scents from Roman London:

• To Alex, a girl smells like apple pie (clove oil for her aching teeth) and church (frankincense perfume)
• Someone’s breath smells of garlic
• Alex gets headache from breathing oil lamp smoke 
• He also smells the peaty smell of outdoor braziers
• And the roast pork smell of body being cremated 
• With an undercurrent of incense burned against demons

Smelly and Tasteable things

TASTE is one of the easiest of the senses to tap into.
• Posca, water with a splash of vinegar, was often drunk by soldiers.
• I make mine with red wine vinegar but you could use white, too.
(Adding even a little wine or vinegar to water kills bacteria. The Romans didn’t know about bacteria, germs or viruses but somehow they knew adding vinegar to water was good.)
• Honey was a hot food, prescribed for those of a phlegmatic humour. 
• Olives, especially the little bitter black ones are ‘a taste as old as cold water…’ (Lawrence Durrell in Prospero’s Cell)

ELMA mastic gum from Chios

• How did they serve a hot sausage in Roman London? Probably with a cabbage leaf wrapper. A clever idea I got from a fast food stall at a Reenactment event.
• Mastic gum. One of the sniffable objects at the Museum of London’s Roman Dead exhibition (on until 28 October) is something called mastic. I first discovered mastic while reading the first century AD epigrams of Martial. He talks about a man who picks his teeth with a mastic toothpick. But it was mainly used as gum to be chewed to freshen the breath. In fact, we get the word ‘masticate’ from mastic. Read more HERE.

SOUND is harder to replicate than taste in my opinion, especially music. Armand D’Angour has been doing fun experiments into ancient Greek music and I often listen to Indian music to try to get an idea of how exotic Roman music might have sounded. We do know about other sounds, such as: 

interactive sound at Museum of London Docklands

• The crowing of a rooster or cluck of chickens in the street
• Dogs barking in the night 
• The wailing of bereaved, more common and more audible then? 
• The shouts of peddlers, bread sellers, a rag-and-bone woman...
• Tepidarium echoes with the sound of slaps and grunts of masseuse
• Blacksmiths hammering
• Door hinges squeaking
• Bells and rattles to frighten off demons and cover unholy sounds

TOUCH can be experienced not just with fingertips and lips, but also with our bare feet. Here are just a few a time traveller might have encountered in Londinium. 

interactive touch at Museum of London Docklands

• Wet grass against bare legs in a tunic
• Bare Feet on a muddy, gravel-studded road
• Or on a mosaic floor or on London brick
• Glutinous mud of the south bank foreshore
• Warmth of a kiln and hard-baked earth around it
• A piglet snuffling at someone’s armpit
• Itchy mosquito bites on bare legs
• Stepping in squishy, still-warm manure
• loom-woven linen & woollen belt pouch
• Carbantinae (one-piece leather shoes) rub top of feet
(The Roman Dead also has a display where you can touch a replica hobnail boot, top and bottom.)

KINESTHETIC means the awareness of the position and movement of the body. Many of the objects I’ve been talking about are interactive. You have to engage with them in a kinesthetic way. 

Richard and Caroline Lawrence in Nimes

• Wearing the clothes including hobnail shoes on the cobbled streets of a Roman town like Nimes.
• Playing with an oil-lamp or a pigskin lamp
• A Saturnalia Dinner
• Leather bikini bottoms as worn by girl acrobats
• NO Bogus Roman Handshake
• NOT using a sponge stick
• Trying out a wax-tablet
• Using a strigil and oil

Tom, Giacomo and Patty try out a strigil and scented oil

At the Sensory Archaeology Conference, co-presenter Tom Derrick brought homemade oil-based Roman perfume. To demonstrate the difference of smell in the bottle and on the skin he borrowed my replica strigil to let people rub his scented olive-oil on their arms and then scrape it off. One conference member, Mr. Colin Gough, observed, One thing that surprised me was the amount of oil left after a good strigiling (is that even a word?). Unless the Romans were a lot better at it there must’ve been a lot of sticky people leaving the baths plus the oil slick on the water! 

THE SIXTH SENSE is the final sense I want to think about. 

A double flame lamp at a Saturnalia dinner

Have you ever meditated about your site, your text, your historical character, your artefacts, your bones? By meditation I mean a contemplation of your world, characters, etc using your non-verbal visual imagination. It's like a virtual reality game but with added sounds, smells and things you would feel? If you meditate, try it. If you find meditation hard, try writing a fictional piece about your subject. Maybe not the main subject but something peripheral. Someone or something on the edges of your topic. You can even do a poem or haiku. 

At the moment I’m involved in a marvellous project based around the archaeology of the House of Amarantus in Pompeii. I had the idea to write a scene from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old slave girl who has recently arrived in Pompeii from Britannia. She sleeps on a mat in the doorway of her mistress’s bedroom. My idea of showing not telling the kids about the layout of the house is that she wakes up one night in pitch black and has to grope her way to the loo. 

So close your eyes for a moment and imagine waking up in the peristyle walkway of a fairly posh Roman house. Think of five different things your fingers might encounter as you push yourself to your feet and start to grope your way along the corridor. Think of five different things you might hear. Think of five different things you might smell. Where do you have to avoid evil spirits in the house? Think of five different ways your body is reacting to this night-time grope. 


Whether we are scholars, writers, historians, teachers or all of the above, let us study the past not just with our heads but with our hearts and with all the senses.

My Roman Quests are perfect for kids studying the topic of Romans in Key Stage 2. My first time travel book, The Girl with the Ivory Knife, is out early April 2019. It is based on real bones and sites from Roman London. 

Saturnalia Chickens by Caroline Lawrence

Saturnalia chickens by Dr Helen Forte

My first post for this blog was back in July 2011, over five years ago. It was called History Chickens because one of my obsessions is trying to visualise the ancient world and not leave out any detail. I maintain there would have been far more chickens in Ancient Rome than historians usually allow for. 

Although I have never kept chickens, I will always remember something the late A.A. Gill once wrote: ‘It is virtually impossible to hold a hen and not smile.’ 

A white 'Silkie' hen via Wikimedia Commons

Recently at the Roman Society’s conference celebrating 50 years of the journal Britannia, I heard a couple of scholarly talks including one by Dr Naomi Sykes, claiming that in Roman Britain, chickens were so rare that they were cherished as pets rather than used as food (although the eggs were eaten). I didn't understand all the technical stuff, but it seemed plausible. That’s why we find some early and exotic chicken remains at Fishbourne Roman palace near Chichester, the opulent Roman villa that first brought fallow deer to Britain.  

Westbourne House School, Chichester

Yesterday I came out of ‘wribernation’ to speak to children in years 3 & 4 at Westbourne House School in Chichester, near where the first chickens landed, as it were. Year 3 are reading my book The Sewer Demon, for their Romans topic. Year 4 studied Romans last year.

Sewer Demon display at Westbourne House School

The Sewer Demon is the first of my four Roman Mysteries spinoffs, The Roman Mystery Scrolls.  This short series features a beggar boy by the name of Threptus who lives in the Roman port of Ostia. I told the children how I came up with the characters and their world. I explained how, after writing The Roman Mysteries, I thought it would be fun to write a spin off series with ‘less blood and more poo’ for younger kids. Artefacts like my famous sponge-on-a-stick would feature heavily. And of course the famous multi-seater toilets at Ostia. 

Roman tombstone of 13-year-old Threptus

The hero would be a beggar boy with a heart of honey. I got the idea for his name from a Roman tombstone at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The tombstone was erected for a boy named Tiberius Claudius Threptus who sadly lived only 13 years, 6 months and 22 days. 

I was also inspired by a fan of Italian ancestry with a sweet face named Marco. 

Mark Benton as Floridius in The Roman Mysteries

The beggar boy’s mentor and sidekick would be the soothsayer, created for the Roman Mysteries TV series by screenwriter Dom Shaw and actor Mark Benton. Floridius is a character I never even thought of, but immediately loved. Because Floridius has a fondness for spiced wine and gambling on the chariot races he is not a particularly good mentor. Luckily, Threptus will help Floridius as much as Floridius helps Threptus. 

One of the best things about Floridius is that he keeps sacred chickens, which gave me an excuse to put lots of history chickens in these books. 

Not knowing the least thing about domestic fowl, I read some books, watched some YouTube clips and called on the services of one of my former pupils, a boy named Ben Udy who kept exotic hens. Working with Ben, we came up with a lexicon of chicken-speak. It would make them fun for parents, kids and teachers to read aloud.

1. BROODY PURRING/VERY CONTENT
a) Brk-brk, brrrrk (very soft)
b) Wrr, wrrk, brrr (very soft)
c) Wrrroooww (very soft)

2. CONTENT/FEEDING/EXPLORING
a) Buuuuurk! (frog-like croak)
b) Buuurk, buurk-buurk (whiny)

Body language: loosely feathered, ambling inquisitively but not purposefully, stop to preen, cluck gently. 

3. INQUISITIVE
a) Brp, brp! (when not moving)
b) Bweerp, bweerp, bweerp (when moving)
c) Beweerp!

4. MEDIUM/COMMON ALARM
Bk-bk-bk... (varying repetitions)

5. HIGH STRESS, POST-DANGER
a) Bk-bk-bk, B’KAK!  
b) Bk-bk-bk, b’kak!  
c) Bk-bk-bk, bkaaaah! [sometimes forget final K]
d) Bock-bock-bock-bock-bock, begowwwwk! [big ]

6. HIGH STRESS, ‘DANGER’ STILL PRESENT
a) Bk-bk-bk, B’KAK!
nb) BK-BK-BK, B’KAK! [small hens]
c) BOCK-BOCK-BOCK, BEGOWWWK! [big hens]

Ben also told me about Silkie chickens, which have feathers that are as silky as hair. Thus was Aphrodite born, the hen who is like a pet for Threptus along with Felix the kitten. 

Threptus first meets Floridius and his  sacred chickens in the final story in my volume of Mini-Mysteries, The Legionary from Londinium. 

The sacred chickens go on to feature in all four Threptus books, which we’ve called The Roman Mystery Scrolls, but they really come into their own in the third book of the series, The Thunder Omen, set during Saturnalia. It starts out like this: 

It was early morning on the first day of the Saturnalia, the Roman mid-winter festival of gift-giving, feasting and dancing. It was a topsy-turvy holiday when anything could happen. In the port of Ostia, in a one-room shack behind a temple, eight sacred chickens were dancing on a table. 

Threptus has made each chicken a small conical hat called a pileus. Minimus illustrator and Latin teacher Dr Helen Forte made me a special colour plate showing seven of the sacred chickens plus Felix the kitten. They are all wearing the pileus, the freedman’s cap, to show that normal rules don’t apply.

Dancing sacred chickens by Dr Helen Forte

Long live the sacred chickens... 

... and Yo, Saturnalia!