High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Vindolanda tablets are "the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain". They are also probably our best source of information about life on Hadrian`s Wall. Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian`s Wall). Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley discovered these artefacts at the site of a Roman fort in Vindolanda, northern England.