Just back from travelling in the Scottish borders to find that Jean, Sam and Alice have kindly sent me a link to this story of Roman silver being discovered in Scotland.

It’s interesting that the experts think the silver is a bribe rather than a stash of plunder. The historian Cassius Dio tells us that a Roman governor of Britannia, Virius Lupus, was “compelled to purchase peace… for a large sum”. The people he paid were the Maeatae, who lived somewhere around the Stirling area. The silver was found in Fife, which isn’t very far away. I’m not suggesting that it IS that ‘large sum’ – it seems to come from a later date. But there are vast gaps in the historical records, and who knows how much treasure changed hands over the years as power and allegiances shifted?

The money paid by Lupus, incidentally, didn’t bring peace for long. Maybe the Maeatae asked for too much. Maybe they carried on causing trouble. Whatever the reason, the aptly-named emperor Severus arrived in Britain not long afterwards and conducted a vicious campaign against them and their neighbours. (I happen to know all this because by a happy coincidence, it’s the background to the story Simon Turney and I put together earlier this year: The Bear and the Wolf.)