CHAPTER 9
THE OUTRAGE AGAINST BOUDICA
“What better than a woman who stays at home, manages the house for you and raises your children; who gives you joy when you are healthy and comfort when you are sick; who shares your successes and consoles you for your failures…”
CASSIUS DIO’S REPORT ON THE EMPEROR AUGUSTUS’S SPEECH ABOUT FAMILY LIFE
While Suetonius Paulinus was heading west to tackle the Druids of Mona, over in the far east of Britain in what is now Norfolk, a tragedy was unfolding of Greek rather than Roman proportions. The Icenian King Prasutagus died after a long and prosperous reign of at least thirteen years. On his death, he left behind two daughters and a wife whose influence would be felt for the next two thousand years: her name was Boudica, queen of the Iceni.
By now, my search for Boudica had led me across the UK and Europe, through many hundreds of books and papers and scores of interviews – but finally I had arrived at the woman herself. As Philip de Jersey had warned me: “The more we learn, the less we often know” – and there was the inevitable tension that the queen’s true story would not live up to my hopes or expectations. If my journey had taught me anything, it was to beware of sentiment and always look at the agenda behind the histories. But would this lead to rejecting the very elements of her story that had attracted me to it in the first place? Like a child letting go of a favourite blanket, it was time to leave behind our old school histories, our emotional connection with this icon from the past, and the cultural confusion that credited the Romans with bringing us civilisation – yet made their enemy a national heroine. One thing had become all too clear: the Boudica story is as much about us as about an Iron Age warrior queen.
King Prasutagus was a “client king” of the Romans; he was allowed to keep his kingdom as long as he maintained a pro-Roman stance and paid his dues to his conquerors. It is likely that the Iceni were one of the tribes (or a confederation of tribes) who submitted to Claudius after his invasion of Britain in AD 43 and the fact that they were still under indirect Roman rule by AD 60 suggests that the Iceni rulers maintained their friendly relations with the Romans ever since. As a client king, it is likely that Prasutagus was considered to be a full Roman citizen; he was certainly sufficiently Romanised to have left a will when he died which laid out his wishes for his lands and his family. The trouble was, while that may have been appropriate for a citizen in Rome, it was not deemed appropriate behaviour from someone who was to all intents and purposes a vanquished ruler of a barbarian tribe.
Prasutagus’s will left half his estate to his offspring and the other half to the Roman Emperor, Nero. On the surface, the conditions of the will sound perfectly reasonable, for the Iceni had retained control of their kingdom following the Claudian conquest of Britain and had seen wealth (at least for some) and stability as a direct result. Undoubtedly, there had been those in the tribe who were against the political union but the ordinary people had no freedom to make their voices heard; the client relationship had been sealed and cemented shortly after the invasions, seemingly by Prasutagus’s predecessor, King Antedios, who ruled from around AD 25 up to the time of the conquest and possibly until the first Icenian rebellion of AD 47. At the time, Britain was seething with native fury against the Roman invaders; Caratacus was still on the loose launching his guerrilla attacks on the anxious legions and the Britons were damaging the credibility of the supposedly invincible foreign army. This first revolt amongst the very tribe who should have been pro-Roman was reportedly triggered by some heavy-handed policy by the provincial Governor, Ostorius Scapula; he demanded that Iceni homes should be searched and all weapons confiscated to prevent them joining in with the general dissent that was bubbling up throughout Britain. The Icenian anger at being treated like enemies was enough to cause an uprising in the form of a battle, probably based around the Iron Age fort at Stonea Camp which was then an island in the Cambridgeshire fens. However, the warring Icenian factions did not stand a chance against the might of the Roman army, particularly when the latter would have been able to draw on loyal Britons to swell its ranks. The rebellion was quickly crushed and the insurgents annihilated; from then on, the Iceni may have still smouldered in resentment, but they did not let the Romans see it.
We know very little about Antedios: he comes to light only as a result of some gold and silver coins bearing his name, so we know nothing of his motive – if he did indeed sign the client treaty with the invading army. However, from the Roman point of view, the arrangement would have suited them well: a client relationship with the Iceni created a vital buffer zone to the north of Camulodunum (modern Colchester), the Romans’ capital in their newly occupied territory. This provided the army with added protection against attack and cost very little in terms of military personnel, freeing soldiers to be deployed to the battle zones. Meanwhile, the client king would have been provided with privileges, wealth and the promise that they could continue in power on behalf of the Romans. In theory, at least, it was an arrangement that suited everyone.
The lands of the Iceni stretched across most of what is now East Anglia, covering today’s Norfolk, north Suffolk and north-east Cambridgeshire. The tribe’s origins were typical of many Iron Age groups in Britain at that time – an apparent amalgam of native Britons who had lived in the area since at least the Bronze Age together with some immigrants from the Belgic tribes of the Low Countries and then later, more aristocratic immigrants from the Marne valley in north-eastern France who brought with them their warrior skills, superior iron swords and also their speedy war chariots.
While the bulk of the tribespeople were subsistence farmers, there were also specialists in metalworking, pottery and other manual trades; the archaeology of the period discovered to date also suggests that the horse played a crucial role in society. The horses bred and broken by the tribe were much more than a means of transport or carriage; they were visible emblems of wealth and power in a culture already well known for its love of decoration and display. They were also intimately linked via the spirit world with the Celtic mother-goddess, Epona, who embodies the earth’s fertility and whose name derives from the word for horse. With its central role in both the practical and the spiritual worlds, it is unsurprising that the horse was a popular icon – but the Iceni take this a stage further: horses predominate on Icenian coins while the accoutrements of chariots and riding survive in archaeological finds. To have four legs or wheels was the ultimate status symbol – and the Iceni paraded their horses just as their modern neighbours, the so-called “Essex boys”, do with their souped-up, alloy-wheeled, go-faster-striped cars today.
There is one intriguing piece of evidence from Iceni coins that sets them apart from every other tribe in Britain at the time: they minted the only coins that appear to bear the tribal, as well as their rulers’, names. Were the Iceni, then, a people of uncommonly strong tribal pride? Did they have a level of political cohesion and identity unheard of in the rest of Iron Age Britain? When writing about the widespread revolts that bubbled up against the Romans, inspired by the actions of the rebel leader, Caratacus, Tacitus describes the Iceni as “a powerful tribe, which war had not weakened”, so it is clear that they did have a strong identity not only among the British tribes but one that was apparent to the occupying Romans as well. It is just possible that their self-sufficiency and pride might be behind the widespread absence of any large amounts of Roman imports prior to the invasion of AD 43; in fact, notwithstanding their Romanised elite, some academics have gone as far as suggesting that the Iceni people actively resisted the dilution of their own culture by the Romanisation that was happening elsewhere in Ancient Britain and Gaul.
A silver unit bearing the inscription ‘ECE’ – an expression of pride in Icenian tribal identity?
As for the tribe’s political cohesion, evidence from coins marked AESV and SAENV – perhaps the names of other kings – along with evidence from Roman texts certainly hint that there might have been factions within the Iceni and that it might have been one of these factions that led the first revolt against the Romans in AD 47. However, there is a distinct lack of supporting evidence from the ground of any large-scale in-fighting between Iceni tribespeople or even between the Iceni and their neighbours. The local population appear to have lived in the traditional Iron Age roundhouses made of woven branches with watertight thatched roofs. These were clustered together in open and undefended settlements throughout their lands; hillforts, relatively common elsewhere in the southern half of Britain, are few and far between in the territory of the Iceni – though, admittedly, in this low, flat landscape, this might have had more to do with the local geography than politics. There was, however, a series of defended enclosures clustered in the west of the Iceni lands, presumably marking the area out as in some way special – and enclosures only need to be defended if there is a perceived threat. Ultimately, though, we can only speculate as to why what appear to be tribal coins were minted; they remain an interesting anomaly and a reminder that our understanding of this tribe and its people is very much incomplete.
What we do know is that not long after the Roman invasion of Britain by Claudius, and certainly after the revolt of AD 47, a king whom Tacitus called Prasutagus appears to have been on the throne. He may even have been minting his own coins (possibly the last Celtic coins ever minted in Britain) which bore the inscriptions merging both Latin and Celtic in the form of the words “SUB” the Latin for “under”, “R” or “RI” symbolising the Celtic for “Ricon” or King, and “PRASTO” for Prasutagus. However, this reading of the inscription on this very rare coin has recently been challenged to give instead the name Esuprastus, apparently the name of a king from the neighbouring Corieltauvi tribe to the north-west. Did Tacitus (or the coin maker) get the Iceni king’s name wrong? It cannot be denied that mistakes were made both by the people inscribing the coins and Romans correctly “hearing” British names. The coins might still relate to Tacitus’s “Prasutagus”, but if it was someone completely different, then they were certainly active in producing coins from around the 30s AD to the end of the client kingdom and the revolt of Boudica.
On the reverse of one of the coins, the person who made it has left a note of his own name in the legend, “ESICO FECIT”, which translates as “Esico made me”. This boastfulness written in Latin makes a strong argument for the coins being made under the direction of the Romans in one of their client kingdoms. Shame, then, that poor old Esico left out the “R” of “PRASTO” and thereby made clear who had spelled the king’s name incorrectly.
Meanwhile, it is hardly surprising that no coins have turned up for Boudica: her rule as the de facto leader of the Iceni tribe was probably less than a year, and much of that would be spent far away from her homeland.
According to Tacitus, King Prasutagus was “famed for his long prosperity” but all that came to an end with his death in AD 60. His final wishes over what should happen next were by no means outrageous: according to Caesar’s observations on the Gaulish Celts, it was perfectly normal for a woman to inherit everything on the death of her spouse; however, on this occasion, Prasutagus decided to make his daughters his heirs in lieu of his wife. Perhaps they were still young enough to be under her guardianship or it could have been that by expressly dictating that they were his heirs, he shored up their rights to inherit and rule the kingdom on Boudica’s death; later, when Roman Britain was more established, we see plenty of evidence from tombstones of fathers making daughters their heirs. There is also the chance that the Icenian King preferred his daughters to his wife – or was even doubtful of her continued loyalty to their Roman masters. Whatever Prasutagus’s reasons, the fact remains that the will shows a certain degree of sexual equality in the indigenous culture.
However, the ways of the Britons were alien to Rome: to the emperor, governor and especially the procurator, Catus Decianus, it was entirely unacceptable of Prasutagus to assume that his estate was his to give away at all. As far as they were concerned, he was their client king – not a king in his own right; he ruled on behalf of Rome, was subordinate to it and had benefited handsomely because of this relationship. To their way of thinking, the relationship was with Prasutagus, not his royal line and certainly not his wife or daughters: once he was no longer king, the kingdom must pass back to the real power behind the throne where it would be completely absorbed into the Empire.
The “long prosperity” of Prasutagus was clearly too much for the Romans to resist: using the perceived sleight against Nero and the official inventory of the king’s estate as their excuse, the reaction was extreme and decisive:
“…his kingdom was looted by centurions, his house by slaves, as if they were the bounty of war…All the chief men of the Iceni, as if Rome had received the whole country as a gift, were stripped of their ancestral estates, and the king’s relatives were made slaves.”
TACITUS: ANNALS, XIV 31
To Tacitus, and to any Romans reading his account, the behaviour of his fellow countrymen was shockingly brutal: the two things that “civilised” Romans hated was any corruption of the ideals of Roman society – and that included slaves getting above themselves or when those in positions of power abused their privileges with profligacy. The Annals would certainly have made good drama; however, Tacitus was playing a double game, not only giving the raw details of what happened to Prasutagus’s kingdom but also doing so in a way that served to highlight the degenerate morality of the Empire under its hated emperor, Nero.
Another matter close to Roman hearts was sexual propriety – from both sides of the gender divide. While women were expected to behave demurely, men were also expected to behave with honour. And what was being meted out to the royal family in Nero’s name was enough to shock Tacitus’s audience to the core:
“his wife Boudica was flogged, and his daughters raped.”
TACITUS: ANNALS, XIV 31
In that one short line lies the seeds of hatred. Suddenly, the Romans had gone from attacking royal property to violating the King’s own kin – and the shame of this debasement would have been felt very, very deeply by Iceni and right-thinking Romans alike. The whole account is told with barely concealed bile towards his own countrymen who thereby heaped opprobrium on to the name of Rome. They had done more than “just” strip and then flog a wife and woman of the ruling nobility – and presumably by her rank of client queen she was also a Roman citizen; they had also gang-raped the two young princesses – who were probably both virgins. Such treatment of women was beyond belief: under Roman law, it was unlikely that any free women would ever be flogged even in punishment, while any man found guilty of rape would face execution; as a final insult to the Roman moral code, both the beating and the rape would have been regarded as particularly odious as they were perpetrated on members of the ruling class.
I discussed the significance of this sexual violence with Philip Crummy, a softly spoken Scottish archaeologist and the hugely respected director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust who has spent the last three decades scraping away two thousand years of earth to reveal the city’s ancient stories. “I think the whole episode of the rapes is really interesting: we know that raping could sometimes be a prelude to an execution as it was against Roman law to execute a juvenile virgin. So is this what the Romans had in mind? Were the rapes only part of the intended punishments for Boudica’s family? Of course, we just don’t know – but I think you have to look at the meaning behind the Romans’ actions to get to the truth of the matter.”
If Tacitus and his Roman readers found the whole episode of the rapes and beatings utterly distasteful, then it doesn’t require much imagination to work out the Icenian response. Virginity was highly respected throughout Iron Age cultures as it signified both purity and also powerful, latent sexual energy; to have it forcibly stolen was a double insult; the fact that it was the young princesses’ maidenheads that were stolen trebled the insult. To the ancient Britons, the Romans had not only abused their queen and her daughters: with Boudica being the earthly representative, priestess or perhaps even the embodiment of the goddess, Andraste, they had desecrated the gods as well. For a people who would barely leave home without gauging the will of the gods, the crimes were an assault on their whole system of beliefs and they would not – could not – be tolerated.
Surprisingly for a writer who tends towards the graphic, Dio Cassius makes no mention of the rapes or the beatings and instead puts his focus on a financial cause to the ensuing troubles. He describes a situation whereby Claudius had given money to the high-ranking Britons who had supported the Romans in their invasion – but then the procurator of the island, Catus Decianus, had insisted it was paid back immediately. This would have been troublesome enough in itself but was compounded when the statesman and philosopher, Seneca, who had lent the Britons forty million sesterces – worth about £50 million today – at a good rate of interest then demanded repayment in full and, if necessary, by force. The Britons, and especially the less-Romanised tribes, were not as familiar with money-culture as their invaders. Although coins had been in circulation for well over a century, theirs was a still largely a culture of barter and gift-giving, and you would never ask someone to give a gift back. The Romans’ demand for “repayment” of the loans would have left the Britons facing serious financial hardship and genuine confusion and anger, not least at the humiliation caused to such a proud people.
Wounded pride, shame and humiliation make uneasy bedfellows with peace. Even Tacitus is fairly unequivocal in placing much of the blame on the Romans but no one, probably not even Boudica herself, could have guessed what would happen next. What started as an upwelling of anger against the way the occupying army had treated the royal family grew into something that transcended any personal motive; the violation of their queen and her daughters was now just the touch-paper to a volatile situation that had been building in might ever since the Roman invasion. For seventeen years, the Iceni had suffered at the hands of their supposed allies: their people had been taxed to pay for the costs of being invaded, the young men had been taken to serve in the foreign army, their rulers had been emasculated and their warriors had even been deprived of their weapons by a people who were meant to be their allies. Any dissent had been put down with brutal force but while the Romans could beat the Britons in battle, they failed to win their wholehearted support – and the Romans knew this only too well:
“The Britons themselves submit to the levy, pay tribute and the other charges of government, provided that there is no abuse. That they bitterly resent: for they are broken in to obedience, not slavery.”
TACITUS: AGRICOLA, 13
The slow burn of resentment was now ignited by the ultimate insult to their royal family, their gods and status of the whole tribe. The Iceni had the cause; what they needed next was a leader. And into the limelight stepped their outraged queen who now stood before them as a living metaphor that the tribe could be badly bruised and abused but it still had its dignity – and that dignity was saying that it was time to fight back.
John Davies took me around his new Boudica Gallery at Norwich Castle Museum – an impressive space that tells the story of the Roman conquest, occupation and Boudica’s rebellion – in a touchingly human way. As chief curator for the museum, he selected the very best pieces to bring her story to life: on show are some of the artefacts from her day – humble brooches and pots from the common man and woman contrasting with some magnificent golden torcs. Roman and Briton, rich or poor, he has tried to capture the diversity of life in the first few decades following the Claudian invasion. “Boudica is such an important figure as well as being a world-famous name, so she has a central role in international history, too,” he said. “Think of the famous names from the Roman period and you’re likely to come up with Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ – and Boudica. Yet, like Jesus, she was only in her early thirties when she died. But despite that, it’s reassuring to think that some of this material might even have been seen by her. It’s that intimate connection with the past that has brought visitors here in their tens of thousands – sometimes from overseas or other parts of Britain but a lot of them from Norfolk itself. There’s still a lot to learn, though, and we’re continually having to update the gallery as new information comes in from archaeologists and metal-detectorists but it really is worthwhile: here in Norfolk she’s our personality – and we’re immensely proud of that.”
It’s typical of how the legend of Boudica has outstripped the facts that we cannot even be certain what the queen of the Iceni was really called. Boudica comes from the Celtic word bouda meaning victory, so she was either called the Iron Age equivalent of Victoria or that name was a title she assumed either when she first became queen or after the war against the Romans. In the absence of any definitive archaeological proof – her name on coins, a palace or relics that link her to the right time and place, all we have to go by are the words of Tacitus, who was writing between fifteen and sixty years after the event and then of Cassius Dio some hundred years after the revolt. One name she was never called was Boadicea which has been erroneously passed down to us after a medieval scribe made a copying error: he mistook the “u” for an “a” and the final “c” for an “e”, changing Tacitus’s “Boudicca” to “Boadicea” – and as this seemed to make sense and sounded suitably Roman, this was the version that eventually stuck.
Assuming that Tacitus was broadly telling the truth, Boudica not only existed, but she was the wife of the king. This would make her a consort rather than a queen by rights but here other documentary support comes into the realm: the experience of Cartimandua proves that it was not beyond the realms of the Iron Age imagination to have a woman serving as an independent ruler. And it seems from the classical writers and the Celtic legends that women could not only hold powerful positions within society, they could also transcend more modern gender roles in taking their people to war. Women had a close connection with warfare in a range of different guises as spectators at the edge of the battlefield, instructors for warriors, war-goddesses and even as warriors themselves. Romans and Celts feared and venerated the awesome power of the warrior queen: to both cultures she represented the human and the divine that connected heaven with earth; she symbolised the beginning and end of life and also the personification of fertility and death – and thus she assumed a potency unattainable by warrior men.
The goddess most closely associated with Boudica was Andraste who could well be the same goddess as the Gaulish Andarta, whose name translates as “unconquerable” – and there are certainly parallels between Andraste, Andarte and the earthly queen named Boudica or Victory. It further seems that Brigantia, the goddess of the Brigantes tribe that was ruled by Queen Cartimandua, was linked with Minerva, the Roman goddess of war. The connection between these warring goddesses and the two warring queens is highlighted by the relief found at the Chedworth Roman villa museum which depicts a goddess with a halo of hair above her head, carrying a spear in her hand, together with the legend, “Dea Regina” or “Queen Goddess”. This expression is almost tautologous: to the Ancient Britons, both words meant women who ruled with divine powers.
If the only surviving description of Boudica’s appearance is anything to go by, it was perfectly believable that Prasutagus’s queen could call on divine and well as earthly powers. Cassius Dio’s account is the stuff of legend and while it closely parallels the common themes from previous Greek and Roman writers, his is the only reference to Boudica’s infamous red hair that has defined her image for the last two thousand years. His classic lines go as follows:
“In build she was very tall, in her demeanour most terrifying, in the glint of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mound of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden torc; and she wore a tunic of many colours upon which a thick cloak was fastened with a brooch. This was her general attire.”
CASSIUS DIO: ROMAN HISTORY, BOOK 62
The idea of the ancient Britons as tall is rarely borne out by examination of the few available skeletons from the period but there is much documentary evidence from classical scholars that the whole panoply of Celtic-speaking peoples in Europe were perceived as of unusually great height. As for being “terrifying”, it was commonplace for warriors to paint or decorate their bodies with blue pigment in what seems to have been some semi-religious pre-battle rite but the effect would also have been dramatic on the enemy. To see not only a blue-painted warrior but a naked blue warrior would have been quite startling. However, in this case the indication is that she remained fully clothed and it was more her demeanour that struck fear into the beholder.
One of the finest examples of a torc found in the UK. Made in the 1st century BC and worn by the highest status members of society. Could this have been worn by Boudica? Discovered in SW Norfolk in 2003 and now on display in Norwich Castle Museum
The harshness of her voice as described by Dio probably had more to do with painting her as unfeminine than any real vocal characteristic. There is certainly no suggestion that the Celtic language sounded hard upon the ear but with Dio being the only commentator to mention her appearance, this assertion is impossible to confirm or deny.
Along with body paints, another tactic used by the image-conscious ancient Celts was to coat their hair in lime to stiffen it. This would have the effect of lightening it in colour and also making the warrior look even more terrifying in appearance – but again, there is no suggestion that Boudica followed this trend as her hair “fell to her hips” in a manner equally fashionable amongst Celtic people. However, as already discussed, the symbolic power of the redhead was apparent even from early classical times: as well as being visibly different and therefore “strange” or “other”, there is a suggestion that red hair signified high status in Mediterranean and North African societies, presumably because it would take both time and money to achieve this effect in naturally dark hair. Furthermore, the royal line of the Egyptians stemmed from Macedonia, where natural red hair was not uncommon, and this would also confirm the status of the bearer. Luckily for Boudica, Christianity had yet to penetrate British and even mainstream Roman attitudes at this point, for Judas was said to have had red hair and thus the rise of Christianity is mirrored by a decline in both the status and appeal of the redhead, so that by the middle ages, a redheaded female was in danger of being heralded a witch.
There is good archaeological evidence to back up Dio’s assertion that Boudica wore a golden necklace: torcs have been found in buried hoards including the remarkable Snettisham hoards which contained a variety of styles, sizes and dates of deposit, from the mid-first century BC to the first century AD. These magnificent pieces of jewellery have been found in iron, bronze or gold and can be seriously impressive; they were worn by high-status individuals such as kings, queens, battle champions or nobility, and even though the larger ones were often hollow they still would have been far too heavy for general wear, leaving their use for display, ritual or religious ceremony.
As for Boudica’s dress, we know from the classical texts as well as archaeological discoveries that the ancient Celts certainly had a love of brightly coloured clothing. Bodies found in the boglands of Denmark show the remains of a woven fabric similar to modern Scottish tartan in its use of different colours on the warp and weft to make a chequered design. The heavy woollen cloaks made by the Gauls were famous in Rome in much the same way as Indian pashminas are nowadays; with different weights of fabric to match the requirements of the seasons, they were high-value objects of status for the wearer as well as being remarkably warm, durable and weatherproof with all the natural lanolin contained in the wools. The tunic would have been a standard item of clothing, secured at the shoulders with a number of straps that might have varied according to whether the woman was married or not; certainly, the style of clothing with its fastenings at the shoulder would have enabled ease of access to breastfeeding mothers who would have represented a significant proportion of female society.
The final piece of Dio’s description focuses on Boudica’s brooch. The Britons were renowned for their love of decoration and while the popularity of brooches was partly functional as they held together two ends of a cloak, they also gave the opportunity to display both wealth and status. The standard design had a pin at the back which functioned a little like a modern kilt or safety-pin, though there were variations using safety-chains as well. Brooches would have been worn by both men and women and were frequently made of iron and highly decorated with inlaid enamel, precious stones or intricate metalwork designs.
Of all types of jewellery that survive today, brooches are among the most numerous as they had to endure the rough and tumble of everyday life and so were in constant danger of falling off and being lost. It is no surprise that forty-seven brooches are amongst the finds discovered at the religious Icenian site at Thetford where hundreds if not thousands of people would have jostled together in the arena: these are precisely the moments when precious jewellery is lost.
But if Boudica’s clothes were standard dress among the ancient Britons, there was something else about her that set her apart. According to Dio, Boudica was also “possessed of greater intelligence than often is found in women”; while this might have well been the case, it was no doubt too unsettling to Dio and his Roman audience to contemplate the fact that Boudica was in any way ordinary; she had to be viewed as abnormal as she had taken it upon herself to defy Rome. To even entertain the thought that she was nothing special and that other women could do the same would have been too unnerving, too threatening for the mindset of the great invincible Empire.
Despite being told so much of her appearance, it is hard not to yearn for real depth in the classical texts to help Boudica appear as a fully rounded person and not just a character in history. Particularly frustrating is that neither of the classical commentators gives us an intimate window into Boudica’s home – the alleged scene of the Romans’ brutal domestic violence. Even archaeology, which can normally provide the touching details of human life, has only provided us with four possible options for this seat of royal power. The Iceni sites notable for having a mint are Saham Toney, West Stow, Needham and Thetford – but these options are important in their own right: this is the largest number of sites of any contemporary tribe and makes the Iceni unique in Britain; it also adds weight to the idea that power within the tribe might well have been decentralised amongst a number of factions.
Around AD 50, a vast rectangular structure some thirty-two thousand square metres was rebuilt at Thetford and, in its heyday, it would have been an impressive sight: the size of five football pitches, the whole area was bounded by two ditches separated by nine fences laid out in a series of concentric boundaries around the perimeter but its purpose seems to have been as a key religious or ceremonial site as there is little in the way of domestic or defensive archaeology. There was only one entrance into the inner enclosure and that was through a corridor of large posts on the eastern side of the structure that led to a great timber gateway; once inside, there was a wide open area a little larger than a football pitch that would have been perfect for public gatherings, overlooked by a two-storey wooden building left over from the site’s previous incarnation.
Norfolk Museum archaeologist, the late Tony Gregory, suggested that the site was in fact the royal palace of Boudica but there is no supporting evidence for this, although she might well have used the site. However, additional evidence that this was a meeting place comes from the discovery of those forty-seven brooches that could easily have fallen off the owners’ clothing as people jostled together in a crowd. Was this perhaps the site where the Iceni people massed when they decided to wreak their revenge on the occupying Roman forces? Does the evidence on the ground point to this being the rallying site for the new Iceni army? The evidence is circumstantial but the timing makes it likely that it bore witness to some part of the revolt.
As the news spread of Boudica’s flogging and the princesses’ rape, the Iceni tribespeople left their fields and homesteads and began to gather en masse near to the royal residence. Showing their support for their queen and their hatred of the Romans, the disorganised rabble quickly started to gain a focus and gather a momentum that had been suppressed since the revolt of AD 47. The crushing of that Iceni revolt was followed by thirteen years of relative peace when any background resentment towards the occupying force had been capped by King Prasutagus’s pro-Roman stance. But no longer. Like a bottle of slowly fermenting beer, the pressure had been building up and was now ready to explode. The Iceni had good grievance to go to war once more – and this time nothing and no one stood in their way.
More surprising was that the Iceni were now joined by their southern neighbours, the Trinovantes, who were also close to bursting with their own unvented anger against the occupying army. They had been the first native Britons to sign up to a treaty with the Romans way back in 54 BC when Julius Caesar had made his second attempt at invading the island. But a century of supposed friendship with the occupying army was about to come to an end.
For the Trinovantes, the cause was one of almost total emasculation: in AD 49, land in the former Trinovantian capital of Camulodunum had been taken by the Romans to make a new colonia – somewhere retired soldiers could live. Then the Trinovantes nobles were hit with all manner of taxes and ex gratia payments to pay for the construction and running costs of a gigantic new temple to honour the dead but deified emperor, Claudius. The Britons were even expected to work at the temple, taking them from their usual labours and forcing them to pay homage to a foreign god and the very man who brought them into servitude.
These moves were almost guaranteed to rub dirt in the faces of the conquered Britons and at the first sign of uniting behind a strong leader, the Trinovantes put aside any petty tribal jealousies and flocked to join Boudica’s army.
For the watching queen, seeing the crowds building up before her eyes, it would have been like seeing her future roll out in front of her: there was only one response, only one plan of action – and that was to wipe out all trace of the Romans’ polluting culture and their gross abuse of every man, woman and child in the conquered territories. Since the arrival of the Trinovantes, this was no longer simply a tribal matter: this was serious; this was all-out war.
“I definitely think there was someone out there called Boudica,” mused Philip Crummy in one of our long phone conversations, “though it’s hazy as to what she was actually doing. There really is the tiniest, tiniest amount of evidence but I still believe she existed.” So how did he envisage this woman? “Well…” He let out the word as if he were exhaling thoughts. “I see her as head of the army but the rebellion was a much bigger thing that spread across the whole province. To my mind, she was more a figurehead rather than a heroic or a Winston Churchill war leader. I suspect that she was actually part of a big group of leaders but the other names haven’t survived – probably because the Romans over-focused on the fact that she was a woman, which all added to the disgrace of her rebellion. As for the Britons, I would imagine the individual tribes would have their own leaders so it would be more a confederate army – after all, the British were not exactly known for working together. But I really don’t think that she could have been acting on her own: the revolt was too big, too widespread to be managed by one person. The warriors would not have been acting as one single army but as a collection of loose tribal groups under a party of war-leaders in which Boudica was key – but, no, she couldn’t have been alone.”
Farmers told their neighbours, who told their kinsmen who told their neighbours: the tribes were rising up against the invaders and the locals hurried to leave their farmsteads and get ready for battle. In a mounting flurry of industry, new weapons were smelted – particularly the spears favoured by the native fighters – and old ones taken out of hiding and cleaned, the horses were made ready with all their finery and the fields prepared for their departure. The East Anglian countryside began to empty and spill out on to the roads and tracks heading south toward Camulodunum.
The timing of the revolt could not have been better, at least for the British: the campaigning season of AD 60 saw the main Roman forces busy with their efforts to wipe out the Druids’ cauldron of political mischief in Anglesey over in the far west of Britain – just about as far away as they could be from the Britons who were now massing under Boudica in the east. Whether or not the Druids had sent word of their impending fate to stir up revolt as a distraction in the east – or whether the Britons just seized the best opportunity to wrong-foot the enemy – can’t ever be proven but by the time the Romans got to hear of Boudica’s revolt, they were up to their eyes in the ethnic cleansing of Anglesey: the Druids were being slaughtered and their religious sites desecrated beyond repair. But while the threat from the so-called Isle of Mona might have been neutralised, it left the bulk of the Roman forces hundreds of miles away from the new threat that had risen in the east.
Tacitus calls the British uprising a “sudden revolt”, suggesting that it caught the Romans unawares. And so it might: the Iceni had been allies of Rome for the past seventeen years while the relationship between Rome and the Trinovantes went back even further, to the time of Julius Caesar. Roman military action might have been almost invincible but their intelligence had failed badly – Suetonius Paulinus had been too tied up with the warring factions in Wales and the despised Roman procurator, Catus Decianus, had been concentrating too hard on how much he could screw out of Prasutagus’s kingdom to consider the political ramifications of his actions. In a bid to assess the damage and come up with a rapid plan, Paulinus grabbed a small contingent of men and made an immediate move back east; Catus Decianus just panicked. Though the citizens of Camulodunum pleaded with him for support in the knowledge that they would be Boudica’s number one target for attack, he barely managed to scrabble together a couple of hundred poorly armed troops to help defend them. He now knew that both sides would want his neck on the block and he ungallantly abandoned the sinking ship and fled in fear to Gaul. While he had escaped with his life, his fellow Romans would not be so lucky.