Tents, to be linen or not to be linen.

[Bran ap Maclou]

Hi,

With a classic leather papilio, you need 25 bovine skins or 70 goat or sheep skins to shelter 8 men. A full legion then need to slaughter more than 1250 bovines or 3500 goats or sheep just for papilios. That's pretty much for an all-leather hypothesis in some regions of the empire but it stays possible.

Martine Leguilloux says that this survey lead by Carol van Driel-Murray indicates that the making of the tent was ruled and legally standardized by the administration.
However we can remark that most of the discovers were made in northern Europe (wet and cold countries). Nothing identified as tent element has been found in southern parts of the empire AFAIK where leather and textile conservation is more difficult. Even Egypt which furnished a lot of leather artefacts did not furnished some remarkable tent artefacts for what I have been able to check.

In another hand, some few linen fabric fragments were found who never interested anyone or impossible to rely to tents or clothes. They are some of these directly shelved discovers. Some french archaeologists uses this example to point the difficulty to clearly identify a textile or leather fragment except some exceptionnal finds like Vindolanda or Valkenburg...

I can't find any other informations on tents but just a word about "sub-pellis"

Pellis is the word for skin with hairs not always a tanned one probably.
The sub-pellis appears in Caesar : Bellum gallicum 3.29 ; Bellum civile 3.13 and Tacite : Annales 13.35.

This word is strictly different from Corium, a tanned skin without hair (fur is a sign of barbarism during early empire except exotic and precious ones, not for tents)
Tacite in Annales 4.72 tells about Frisons who have to deliver ox skins for military uses (Coria boum ad usus militares)


Sorry, that doesn't make us progress but my opinion is that it's difficult to believe into a full leather tent army, particularly in hot parts of the empire and particularly when some high-rank use some "tentoria auguralia" really bigger and heavier. Hard to believe yes but no proof to gain certainty...

Bye