IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 285

Roman writers were proud of the fact that their armies slept behind fortifications every night. Polybius, a Greek historian who described the Roman army in the second century BC, explains that when an army on the march reached the place chosen for its camp, a party was sent ahead to mark out the ground while the rest of the troops arrived and began digging. Even a single night's stay was enough to justify the work. Vegetius, writing several centuries later, repeats the rule.

The plan of the camp was as standardised as the drill of the soldiers who built it. Ideally the ground plan was a rectangle, divided by two main streets that crossed at right angles: the via principalis, running across the width of the camp, and the via praetoria, leading from the main gate to the headquarters. Between these streets the legions and their auxiliary troops were allocated blocks of tents in an order that never varied, so a soldier arriving at a new camp could find his unit's place without asking.

Defences were built from whatever the ground offered. The soldiers dug a ditch, or fossa, throwing the spoil inwards to raise a rampart, the agger. In open country this earth rampart was topped with a fence of wooden stakes, and each soldier on the march carried a stake among his equipment. Where the army expected to stay for a longer period, sods of turf were laid like bricks to give the rampart a solid face. Roman military writers also mention hurdles and sharpened stakes set in the ditch, though how often such refinements were used is unknown.

The gateways were the weakest points, and Roman surveyors treated them with care. Some gates were shielded by a short detached bank, the titulus, built a little way in front of the opening; others by a curved extension of the rampart, the clavicula, which forced an attacker to turn and expose his unshielded side. Earthworks of these kinds can still be traced on the ground and in aerial photographs, and they are among the surest signs that a bank of earth is Roman.

Inside the rampart the camp reproduced the institutions of a permanent base. At the centre stood the headquarters, with the commander's quarters close by and a space for the officer responsible for money and supplies. There was an open square for assemblies, a hospital area and workshops, and a shrine in which the legion's standards were kept. Much of this is known from excavation, since the positions of the main buildings were repeated so faithfully from one site to another that archaeologists can predict what lies under the soil before they begin to dig.

Life in camp was regulated by watches. The night was divided into four, each with its own guard, and a watchword was chosen daily and passed from unit to unit on a wooden tablet so that nobody who did not know it could pass the sentries. Trumpets gave the signals for the change of watch and for the start of the march. Before the army left a camp, the ground was purified by ritual, a reminder that the Romans did not regard these encampments as merely practical arrangements.

Because a camp could be built in a few hours, the practice gave the army an advantage that is easy to underestimate. A force that could entrench itself at the end of every day could not be attacked at night and could choose where to offer battle. A line of camps across a landscape also made the army's presence felt. Some historians have gone further, arguing that the habit shaped Roman strategy, encouraging commanders to march boldly through hostile country because by evening there would be a wall between them and their enemies.

The same techniques were used offensively. Surrounding a town with a ring of forts became a hallmark of Roman siegecraft. At Numantia in Spain, in the 130s BC, Scipio Aemilianus built a continuous line of fortifications around the hill town, and the remains of several camps survive. At Masada, the fortress above the Dead Sea, soldiers of the Tenth Legion and their auxiliaries built a wall and eight camps around the rock in the early 70s AD. From the ground these works look like nothing; from the air they are unmistakable.

Most of what survives today survives as earthworks. In Britain, where the pattern of farming has preserved many examples, camps are known from the Scottish Highlands to the south coast, and some were first identified from the air, as crop marks in fields of ripening corn. Excavation adds what the surface cannot supply. At Inchtuthil, a legionary fortress in Scotland abandoned before it was finished, twentieth-century excavators found a pit containing nearly a million iron nails, buried deliberately so that valuable metal would not fall into enemy hands.

Written descriptions, however, can mislead. Vegetius wrote his summary of military practice long after the army he described had changed, and the surveyor Hyginus, whose account of camp layout also survives, was describing an ideal rather than a camp he had seen. The result is a familiar archaeological problem: the plans in the texts differ from the plans on the ground, and no excavated camp matches any description exactly. What the texts and the earthworks do agree on is the principle itself — that wherever the legion halted, it slept inside a ditch and a wall.

The church bell, though it appears a simple artefact, is among the most metallurgically demanding products of the foundry. It is cast in a single piece from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, usually in the proportion of approximately four parts copper to one part tin. Other metals would undoubtedly resonate, but none combines the same clarity of tone with resistance to corrosion and considerable tensile strength. Nor is a bell tuned like a string: its note is determined by the configuration and mass of the entire casting, and once the metal has solidified the pitch can be modified only by the removal of material from the exterior or the interior. Consequently bells are deliberately cast somewhat heavier than the note they are intended to produce.

Dimension and configuration together determine a bell's acoustic character: a larger instrument produces a deeper fundamental, yet the relationship is far from straightforward, because a bell does not generate a single note. Struck by its clapper, it gives out a low hum, and above that a series of higher tones which the ear blends into a single impression of pitch. Which of those tones dominates depends on the thickness of the rim relative to the bell's diameter. A founder who miscalculates that proportion produces an instrument that sounds confused however meticulously it is subsequently tuned. Medieval founders worked by eye, and by patterns transmitted within their workshops, so the results differ considerably from one bell to the next.

The fabrication of the mould constitutes the most protracted stage of the process. Upon a brick foundation a clay core is built up, and a clay profile is swept across it to correspond to the interior of the bell, using a board cut to the appropriate curvature and rotated upon a spindle at the centre of the base. The exterior is generated in the same manner from a second profile, but the two cannot simply be fitted together, because the space between them must equal the thickness of the finished metal. Founders resolved this difficulty centuries ago by means of a false bell: a model of the intended form, marginally smaller than the outer mould, is constructed over the core and enclosed within the outer case. The false bell is then broken away, leaving a gap into which the bronze will be poured.

The day of casting is brief and anxious. The mould is set in a pit in the foundry floor and packed about with sand, while the bronze, liquefied in a furnace nearby, is conveyed to it in a ladle and poured without interruption, since any pause would leave a weakness at the point where the metal cooled unevenly. Air must escape from the mould as the metal rises, and narrow channels are provided for it, but even so a proportion of castings prove defective. A founder who finds a hole in the crown of a great bell has lost months of work.

Tuning came last, and until the nineteenth century most founders adjusted an instrument only approximately, so that the intonation of a peal depended upon fortune as much as upon expertise. Then English founders discovered that the partial tones could be brought into agreement by shaving metal from the inner surface on a vertical lathe. The procedure is laborious, but it can lower the pitch of individual components without substantially disturbing the remainder. Because metal can only be removed, a bell must be cast sharp and tuned down, and a casting that emerges flat is necessarily scrap. The innovation made possible the true-harmonic bell, in which the notes above the hum stand in simple mathematical ratios to one another.

The great foundries were commercial enterprises as much as workshops. The Whitechapel foundry in London, which traced its foundation to the sixteenth century and closed in 2017, cast the Great Bell of the clock at Westminster in 1858. When that bell cracked it was repaired rather than replaced, and it still hangs today. The same firm produced the instrument commissioned from London in 1751 for the state house in Philadelphia, which fractured upon arrival and was subsequently recast in America. Further north, a foundry established at Loughborough in the English Midlands in the 1830s continues to cast bells and continues to tune them upon lathes.

Bells are also recycled, since the metal is costly: an instrument that is damaged, or merely unfashionable, is far more often melted down than discarded, so that numerous medieval bells survive only as the metal of their successors. In England the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s put a great many bells on the market at once, and parish churches that could never have afforded new ones acquired second-hand instruments that are still rung. A founder's name and the year, cast in relief around the shoulder of the bell, are frequently the sole record of a tower's bells.

The hanging of a bell is a distinct craft. A swinging bell is mounted upon a headstock, and in the English tradition it is fitted with a wheel, a rope and a stay, so that a skilled ringer can control it, stop it upside down between strokes and set it swinging again at will. From this arrangement developed change ringing, in which a band of ringers produces an uninterrupted sequence of mathematical permutations, never repeating a row until every possible ordering has been rung. The practice appeared in England in the seventeenth century and has remained almost exclusively English.

In 2022 the release of a census taken a century earlier was greeted in Britain with the excitement usually reserved for a royal wedding. The records, closed for a hundred years, revealed the households of the famous and the obscure alike, and among those who rushed to search them were people hoping to learn something about grandparents who had never spoken of their past. Nobody objected. Yet the same curiosity, applied to a person who died ten years ago rather than a hundred, strikes many people as improper, and the question of where the line should be drawn has become one of the livelier arguments in the humanities.

The law offers little guidance, because in most countries privacy belongs only to the living. Data protection rules stop at death: the European General Data Protection Regulation, for example, states that it does not cover the personal data of deceased persons. Defamation protects reputations, but only those who can still be damaged in the eyes of others who know them. What remains is a patchwork of professional codes, archive closure periods and the discretion of archivists. A hospital's records may be closed for a century; a writer's letters may be open a decade after the writer's death; neither period reflects a principle so much as a habit.

The intuition that the dead can be wronged is nonetheless widely shared, and it has serious defenders. The American philosopher Joel Feinberg argued that although a person ceases to exist, the interests that person formed while alive can still be fulfilled or frustrated afterwards. A reputation ruined after death, a wish about burial ignored, a confidence betrayed: in each case something that mattered to someone is damaged, even though the someone is no longer there to mind. On this view, privacy is not a possession of the living but a condition attached to information, and death does not dissolve it.

Historians have reasons to resist this. The evidence on which they depend is largely made of things people never intended to publish: letters, diaries, ledgers, medical notes, the records of institutions that would rather forget them. If every subject's unspoken preference could halt a project, a great deal of ordinary scholarship would stop. So would some necessary scholarship. Inquiries into abuse in schools, hospitals and churches have repeatedly depended on records of people who are dead and cannot consent, and on the determination of researchers to publish them.

Nor are the dead easy to protect in practice. They cannot be consulted, and they cannot correct what is written about them. Where a person left no clear wish, the researcher must guess. Families often claim to speak for them, but relatives may have their own reasons for wanting a story told or suppressed, and they may disagree among themselves. Some argue that the only reliable guide is the person's own conduct while alive: a writer who published intimate letters, a politician who courted publicity, may reasonably be taken to have accepted a degree of exposure.

The case of Richard III shows how tangled these questions become. The king's skeleton was excavated in 2012 from beneath a car park in Leicester and identified by genetic comparison with living descendants. Almost at once a dispute arose over where he should be reburied, with a group of his distant relatives arguing in court for York and the authorities insisting on Leicester, where he was interred in the cathedral in 2015. Nobody suggested that Richard had a right to privacy; he had been a public figure, and his body was of genuine historical importance. Yet the strength of feeling showed that the treatment of a dead person is still felt to matter.

Human remains raise the sharpest version of the problem. Archaeologists and museum curators now work under codes that require them to consider the feelings of descendant communities. In the United States, a skeleton found in Washington State in 1996 and known to archaeologists as Kennewick Man was claimed by local tribes, studied for years amid legal argument, and eventually shown by genetic analysis to be more closely related to Native Americans than to any other population; it was reburied in 2017. The case established that the wishes of the living may reasonably prevail.

How, then, should a researcher decide? Three questions seem to me more useful than the language of rights. The first is how recent the death is: an eighteenth-century merchant has no close relatives to wound, while a person who died in living memory may have children and grandchildren whose lives would be affected. The second is whether the dead person said anything while alive about what should happen to the material. The third is whether the research serves a purpose beyond curiosity. A study of inherited disease in a nineteenth-century family may justify disclosing what a purely prurient biography would not.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the dead have no right to privacy, and that it does no harm to say so plainly. What they have is a claim on the consideration of the living, which is a different thing. It follows that the claim can be weighed against others. It also follows that the claim is strongest where the dead are still remembered. Calling this privacy is a convenience, and perhaps a misleading one; respect would be a better word, since respect is owed by the living, can be given without consent and, unlike a right, cannot be claimed by the dead themselves.