Three towns now lay in smouldering ruins: three towns, and according to Tacitus, some seventy thousand “citizens and allies” had been killed, plus the fifteen hundred or so crack troops of Cerealis. This level of devastation gave Suetonius Paulinus a problem: these were not the kind of numbers that he would want to be sending in his dispatches back to Rome. Even though the figures quoted by Tacitus are almost certainly exaggerated, there is no doubt that substantial proportions of Romans and Roman sympathisers had been wiped out by Boudica’s army. This not only physically loosened the Romans’ hold on the territory, it also weakened their intellectual capital in terms of “Romanising” those parts of Britain that the military could not reach. To lose a province would be unfortunate in the extreme; to lose it to a woman would just be sheer recklessness. While the later reports of the number of casualties enhanced the reputation and threat of the warrior queen – and in turn, the reputation of anyone who could defeat her – even half the reported seventy thousand dead would have represented a serious disaster in the eyes of the emperor and Nero was not a man that anyone in their right mind would want to upset.
The little that we know of Paulinus’s career suggests that he was reasonably experienced in dealing with revolts and uprisings: twenty years ealier he had been sent to Mauretania to quash the trouble there; and, according to Pliny the Elder, he had conquered the Atlas mountains of North Africa in just ten days, but even that feat must have seemed ancient history when faced with the challenge ahead of him in the form of Boudica and her victorious army.
After he had abandoned Londinium to the devastation of her forces, he and his men rode hard to get back along Watling Street to regroup his main forces. According to Dio’s account of the rebellion, Paulinus would have liked more time to delay the confrontation – possibly even until the following season – but his men were growing short of rations and he was forced to take some definitive action. As for Tacitus, he makes no mention of this and instead prefers to concentrate on the more constructive, positive tale of a governor he clearly respects.
For their part, the British were buoyed up by the successes of the last three battles. Having wiped out the three largest towns in Roman Britain, they had every right to feel elated by their achievements but this was no time to rest on their laurels. Boudica would have known that Paulinus was north-west of the smouldering remains of Verulamium; and she would know that he would know where she was now – and that she was coming after him. Traditionally, the British tribes had always had their greatest successes in the type of guerrilla warfare fought by leaders like Caratacus when they could catch the Romans off guard and unawares. Boudica had already witnessed the brutal success of her warriors cutting down the soldiers of Cerealis in this way. The problems came when the enemy had a chance to organise itself and set in motion the devastating killing machine that had made the Romans first masters of the Mediterranean and then masters of Europe. Pitched battles were not the Britons’ forte but perhaps – just perhaps – things were now beginning to change.
The gods had looked favourably upon her army in the last three battles where not even the pride of the Romans in their capital town could resist the bravery and sheer numbers of her warriors. She had honoured Andraste with the blood of her victims in the sacred groves and that would surely make them pleased with her actions. The only problem was now her army itself: it had grown so large with its success that her warriors were becoming impossible to co-ordinate; what’s more, the old habit of fighting each other rather than uniting against a common enemy was beginning to rear its ugly head. Boudica’s success now rested on keeping her army focused and being able to use the sheer numbers of warriors to overwhelm an entire Roman army if – and when – it came to battle.
Few details are known of the movements of both armies between the sacking of Verulamium and the final battle; even less is known about the location of where they met. Arguments about the actual site abound, from Surrey to Birmingham to Towcester but what is almost certain is that Paulinus would have tried to keep as many details as possible on his terms, not Boudica’s. And in many ways, he still had some advantages on his side. He would have known that her numbers totally outstripped his own but her army was untrained, so he had to use skill to outwit the greater army; he would also have realised that his strength lay in forcing the British into a pitched battle that was fought at a time and in a place and manner that he could control; he might also have guessed that his local knowledge could well have been better than hers, for the Iceni had generally stayed within their tribal lands over in the far east. He also had the benefit of having spent at least three seasons fighting in the hilly areas of western Britannia so his men not only had the experience, he knew how to pick an advantageous site for the battle.
Dio alleges that Boudica had an army of two hundred and thirty thousand people and even though this is probably grossly inflated, even half of this number would have looked invincible; Suetonius Paulinus had assembled around ten thousand men from parts of his Twentieth Legion, the Fourteenth Legion and various local auxiliaries. He had previously sent for the Second Legion Augusta, founded by the former Emperor Augustus, but its commander, Poenius Postumus, had failed to deliver the necessary men. It is highly unlikely that Postumus would have actively disobeyed a command from the governor himself; what is more likely is that he was genuinely unable to spare the men due to some trouble near his own base in Exeter, and there is some evidence of a rebellion in Somerset around this period. However impossible it might have seemed to respond at the time, it was a decision that would cost him his life.
It is unclear whether Paulinus ever received word from the Second Augusta that they were not going to arrive, but he was not able to wait much longer. Boudica’s forces were steadily advancing and gearing themselves up for more glorious battles that would rid their lands of the foreigners who dared to make them slaves. It is likely that the Britons would have followed Paulinus north-west along Watling Street. As for the location of where they finally met, all we have to go on is a brief description by Tacitus which, although it sounds vague, may well have drawn on the eyewitness account of his father-in-law, Agricola, who at that time was fighting under Paulinus as an officer in the Twentieth Legion:
“[Suetonius Paulinus] chose a position approached by a narrow defile, shut off at the rear by a forest, having first ensured that there were no enemy soldiers except at his front, where an open plain extended without any threat of ambush.”
TACITUS: ANNALS, XIV. 34
It is not hard to see why Paulinus chose this spot: the narrow defile or steep-side gorge would have shoehorned Boudica’s troops into a funnel so instead of the Romans having to face a giant bloc of marauding warriors, their flow would be regulated by the physical geography of the site, giving the Romans much more in the way of control. By choosing this site, Paulinus had also protected himself from being attacked from the rear as no chariot and few warriors could effectively fight from within a forest. And in front of the Romans was a plain – a wide open space where the Britons would not only be completely exposed but the manoeuvres of both sides would be clearly visible to the commander of the troops who would then be able to orchestrate the best tactics on the day.
But where exactly is this final, infamous battlefield? It’s a question that has kept both academics and pundits entertained for generations since the idea first arose of matching the classical texts with a host of British antiquarian “discoveries”. An early favourite from the eighteenth century was Primrose Hill in north London – largely because it was a “sacred” site for the recently re-formed Order of Druids so it accrued some mythical connections to the past. Another north London possibility has been mooted as Battlebridge Road – largely because of its name though there is no mention of a bridge in any of the classical accounts.
The trouble is that while Tacitus’s description may be tantalisingly detailed, it is almost meaningless in its lack of context and the changes wrought on the landscape of Britain over the last two thousand years. Not only do we not have the site itself, we don’t even know the Romans’ route from Anglesey to London and then westwards. But perhaps this misses the point: this lack of clarity is another key factor in keeping the appetite for the Boudica story whetted; in the absence of some definitive archaeological discovery, arguments will just keep on running.
The leading favourite of recent years has been Mancetter in Warwickshire in the West Midlands, north-west of Verulamium along Watling Street. Unlike some of the other more ludicrous suggestions, this had the ardent support of the late archaeologist and Boudica expert Graham Webster along with Dr Paul Sealey and Jenny Hall – and it makes logical sense in terms of Paulinus’s movements and Boudica’s likely response, although it does take both armies reasonably far north. Moreover, there are nice geographical features which seem to fit with Tacitus’s description of where the battle took place: bisecting Watling Street near Atherstone lies a ridge of old, hard rock running north-west to southeast that could fit with the description of the landscape. Was the “open plain” that this ridge overlooks really the flood plain of the modern-day River Anker? Topographically, the area seems to match quite well and although the ridge itself has been extensively quarried for gravel over the past few hundred years, it is still possible to see some narrow defiles along its length which equate to that described by the Roman historian. Other pieces of circumstantial evidence come from the archaeology itself: a series of infilled ditches have been excavated here since the 1950s, throwing up pottery from the reign of Nero, and the trench for a new drain at the local manor house revealed a small hoard of bronze and coppper Claudian military coins – likely to have been some small change buried by a soldier. A final discovery adds more weight to Webster’s choice of battlesite: whilst digging in his garden, a near-neighbour of the Manor House uncovered three complete amphorae on top of a clay floor. Further investigation revealed an entire military site lying deep under the village at Mancetter but until this is fully investigated, the likelihood that Mancetter is the battlefield remains open to question.
A more recent suggestion for the battlefield is just north of Verulamium along Watling Street. The site around Cuttle Mill, near the Roman town of Towcester, has long been the origin of much local folklore about buried treasure and ancient battles. Its Northamptonshire location puts it potentially right on track for a meeting point between the advancing British army and the Legions heading back south from Anglesey, in what would be a twelve-day march. Like Mancetter, its geography seems to fit neatly with the description and logic of Tacitus: there is indeed an open plain near to the river that leads to a narrow valley that would have almost certainly been bounded by woods. So was this the site of the famous last battle? The British Museum’s Iron Age expert, J D Hill, thinks that it’s feasible: “I don’t think Boudica got as far as the Midlands as some people assume, so would lay my bet around the Chilterns to the northwest of St Albans, although if further north then not as far as the Fosse Way. The Romans would want to retreat to Gloucester or Exeter if they lost, which is why Towcester seems a good idea.”
Towcester would certainly have made a strategically sensible rallying point for the Roman troops that were meant to be coming from Exeter, Peterborough and Anglesey and would also have offered better protection from Boudica’s chariots due to the indented geography of the area. But, as with all enduring legends, the simple answer is that there is not enough detail to be sure.
For Philip Crummy, director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust that has done so much to transform our understanding of Boudica’s rebellion, one has to be pragmatic about the lack of a definite battle site: “My personal guess would be to place it somewhere in the Chilterns as the landscape feels right for the description but it really could be anywhere. Something might turn up someday but in the meantime, it’s a favourite hot potato for pundits – and it all keeps the interest in Boudica’s revolt against the Romans alive as a matter for debate amongst historians and archaeologists. Life would be a bit dull for us if we knew every detail about everything.”
Jenny Hall, Roman curator at the Museum of London, agrees: “It’s probably somewhere in the sweep up the road from St Albans around the Mancetter region but we just don’t know. Boudica’s army wasn’t organised and they certainly had nothing like a clearly laid-out strategy like the Romans did; they were just a rabble really – and in fact, that was their undoing in the end.”
Whatever the eventual meeting point, one can only imagine the cocktail of anticipation, fear and excitement that ran through both armies in intoxicating quantities. The Romans stood out in their silver and red blocks against the hillsides: dressed in their battle-gear with their helmets and armour gleaming in the strong, summer light, the glint from their weapons sent Morse flashes of warning to the enemy that needed no decoding. Both sides knew how Romans were armed – with javelins, daggers and the characteristic gladii, the short, double-edge sword that would stab, slice and twist in enemy flesh when used in close combat. Precision trained and experienced, they now stood rigid in their assigned positions, silent and motionless, watching the hordes of Britons jeering at them, waving their weapons in defiance. The Britons had armed themselves with anything they could lay their hands on: there were large numbers of hunting spears and knives and, for the privileged, swords and shields. They had waited seventeen long years to put right the defeat that had left them subjects of a foreign land; for their part, the Romans knew they had seventeen years of investment and their reputations on the line. Each soldier and warrior knew that this was effectively a fight to the death.
Paulinus had drawn up his men according to his battle plan: his cavalry at the flanks, his trusty legionaries in the centre and the light infantry and auxiliaries in between; facing them was the bulging wall of Britons who outnumbered the enemy by a ratio of around ten to one, grouped together in tribal bands by their leaders or chiefs who now raced up and down in their chariots relaying the orders of Boudica’s council of war; and behind the massing warriors sprawled a huge assemblage of wives, children, sisters and mothers, all gathered together with their possessions, their bounty and their loaded wagons to watch the spectacle for themselves.
For the legions, the sight of the Britons’ families clustered around the edge of the battlefield would have been strange but not exceptional: they had witnessed the same scenes in their wars in Gaul – and while it struck them as somewhat gory if not a foolhardy thing to do in case the enemy needed a speedy retreat, that was the Britons’ choice. But for the Britons – like their comrades across the water – this was no pleasure trip for their wives and children: better to bring your family with you than leave them to the mercy of detachments of enemy soldiers who would rob, rape and murder anyone left at home. And what better way to propel a husband, brother or father to fight with true bravery than to have him watched by his own community? With everyone here at the same time, the women were protected and the men dared not shirk their duty on the battlefield. But on this occasion, the Britons’ strategy was about to backfire on them with an almost unimaginable horror.
With both armies poised, there was no longer any turning back for either Boudica or Suetonius Paulinus. As the din of British battlecries was hushed to a low but threatening rumble, it was now the turn of the commanders to rally their troops to the point of selfless bravery and try to focus their attention on the deadly task ahead. Boudica mounted her chariot, drove to the front line and surveyed her army – then spoke to her warriors for the very last time.
Her clarion call is lost to history; the stirring words recounted by Tacitus and Dio owe more to dramatic tension and historical tradition than they do to the actuality of what Boudica and Suetonius Paulinus would have said – but for all their often ham-fisted hyperbole, the monologues offer the student of language some interesting insights to the minds of the authors whose work the speeches almost certainly are. It is worth giving the two versions: first, Tacitus, in full:
“Boudica in her chariot with her daughters in front of her, rode up to tribe after tribe, arguing that it was perfectly normal for Britons to fight under women leaders. ‘But now it is not as a woman descended from illustrious ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging my lost freedom, my lashed body, the outraged honour of my daughters. Roman greed has developed to such an extent that not even our persons, nor even our age or our virginity are left unpolluted. But heaven is on the side of just vengeance: one legion which dared to fight has been destroyed; the rest are cowering in their camps or anxiously seeking a means of escape. They will not stand even din and shout of so many thousands, let alone our attack and our weapons. If you balance the strength of our armies and the reasons for this war, then you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s decision: as for men, they can live and become slaves.’”
TACITUS: ANNALS, XIV. 35
The speech, which finishes in the Latin with a series of spittingly alliterative v-sounds, is a clever piece of oratory which draws out the favourite Roman themes of the perversity of women rulers, freemen becoming slaves and the dangers of moral degeneration – all subjects which would have stirred the Roman audience’s heart. Interestingly, and at face value, Tacitus seems to de-feminise Boudica by saying that she does not speak “as a woman”: this has the no doubt intended effect of initially giving her more credibility amongst an audience where powerful women were distrusted. Likewise, he strips away her status, saying that she is acting not as someone “from illustrious ancestry” but “as one of the people” – a faux piece of humble camaraderie that is a thinly disguised reference back to the (perceived) halcyon democracy of the Roman republic. Yet here Tacitus is playing a clever game: by so blatantly saying that Boudica is not talking as a female and not as someone of high status, he protests too much: such a skilled orator would have known that the denials only served to emphasise that she was very much a woman and a queen, and it is precisely these facts which makes her so captivating a character for his history.
Other tricks of rhetoric – something any well-educated Roman man would have to have studied – include the use of “triplets” to add dramatic effect: expressions such as “lost freedom”, “lashed body” and “outraged honour” are followed by “our persons”, “our age or our virginity” and – in just one paragraph of Boudica’s speech – they are used no less than four times. Tacitus then makes the mood even more pointed as he slows down the rhythm for maximum effect: using the analogy of a set of weighing scales, the triplets become pairs of opposites (e.g., “conquer or die”) – with the very last pair flagging up once more the incongruous sexuality of the speaker that has previously been denied. The final phrase sums up Tacitus’s whole system of beliefs on the rightful structure of power: in the topsy-turvy world where women take control as the true moral leaders, even freemen will be treated like slaves.
This theme of slavery and men allowing themselves the humiliation of being ruled by women is picked up and echoed by Dio. Although he positions his great Boudica speech before the sacking of the cities, its tenor uses the same rhetoric and ideas as Tacitus’s pre-battle speech – once more put into the mouth of Boudica as she raises a spear in her hand and addresses the masses:
“You have realised through experience how different liberty is from slavery; therefore, while some of you may have believed the enticing promises of the Romans through sheer ignorance, now that you’ve tasted both you’ll understand how wrong you were in choosing foreign oppression to your ancient way of life – and you’ll have come to learn that it is better to have poverty with freedom than wealth with servitude. For what can be worse than the treatment we have suffered since these men came over to Britain?”
CASSIUS DIO: HISTORIES, BOOK 62
Boudica-cum-Dio then continues for a while with a tirade on the injustices of the Romans’ taxation policy towards the Britons before berating her people by saying it is actually all their own fault: they allowed the Romans to successfully invade in the first place. With enough over-egging to make the speech a verbal soufflé, Boudica then goes on to philosophise about Britain’s place in the world and the Roman perception that Britons dwelt on a “different earth and under a different sky”. While this is true, its purpose here is more to reiterate to Dio’s audience that we are dealing with exotic creatures – like the strange beasts and ethereal land in the travellers’ tales of Germanicus’s fleet when they were stranded in Britain just half a century before. Complaining that Britons are misunderstood, Boudica then tries to unite the disparate tribes in her ranks by referring to their home “on one island” and their “one common name” despite the fact that there is no evidence that the Britons of the period ever fought with a common “British” consciousness.
The next section of Boudica’s protracted monologue deals with the differences in bravery between the Romans who arm themselves to the hilt and hide out in forts and the Britons who fight with just a shield for protection and then blend seamlessly back into the landscape for protection. Once more, Dio portrays the Britons as almost romantic and magical creatures of nature; just like the noble savage, they are uncorrupted by the artifices of civilisation, and instead slink around in the shadows until bursting forth like barbaric woodland elves or nymphs:
“We have such an excess of bravery that we consider our tents to be safer than their walls and our shields better at protecting us than their whole suits of armour. Because of this, when we win we capture them and should they overpower us we can still escape – and if we decide to retreat somewhere, we can melt away into swamps and mountains so that they can never find us…unlike us, they fall prey to hunger, thirst, cold or heat; they need shade and shelter, they need leaven bread, wine and oil – and without these they die, whereas we have grasses and roots for bread, the sap of any plant for oil, water for wine and trees as houses. What’s more, we know this landscape as a friend but to them it is strange and dangerous. As for the rivers, we can cross them naked whereas they find them hard to cross even in boats. So – let us prove to them that they are hares and foxes trying to rule over dogs and wolves.”
CASSIUS DIO: HISTORIES, BOOK 62
When she finishes this part of epic monologue, Dio further reinforces the magical nature of the Britons by the description of Boudica releasing a hare “from the fold of her dress” (as opposed to plucking a rabbit from out of her sleeve) to divine the will of the gods. According to Dio, the hare ran in an auspicious direction and the crowds went wild with delight at the support of the heavens for their cause.
Someone as educated and erudite as Dio would have been well aware of the symbolism of the hare to the Britons, as it was an established part of the classical writings on Britain. In his Gallic War, Julius Caesar commented that hares, along with the cockerel and the goose, were never eaten, while Boudica’s reference to the hare in her speech – and then one’s use in divination – seems to fit with what we know about the animals from British and European archaeology. Hares stood out as strange and unpredictable beings, much like the gods themselves; their habit of darting around as ghostly figures of the night – precisely the time when the spirit world would be most feared – merely added to their mystery while their violent “boxing” each spring earned them a special resonance in the warrior culture of Britain. Their spiritual significance is clear from the remains that have been found layered in ritual burial pits in Ewell in Surrey, Jordan Hill in Weymouth and even in the Icenian territory itself at Ipswich. They have also been represented in Romano–British art and sculpture, particularly in relation to the hunter-gods of Britain and Gaul, where they were frequently depicted as quarry.
Boudica’s reference to the Britons as dogs and wolves played on a preeminence of these creatures in the Celtic cultures of Europe which is well recorded in both classical writings and the archaeology from the ground. Dogs had a duality that made them intriguing: regarded as hunters – literally dogs of war – they were also loyal guardians or protectors. Having both these attributes, they could represent the spirit world as well as the physical world itself. This is shown in both art and actuality, with the remains of dogs in numerous burial pits and wells around Britain. Dogs were such a central part of Celtic life that the name “dog” or “hound” itself was transferred to a wide range of great war-heroes, including the Irish Cú Chulainn, the sorcerer Cú Roi mac Dairi and even the powerful Catuvellauni King Cunobelin. Interestingly, though, the idea of a “hare” trying to rule over a “dog” is nothing more than a zoomorphism of the old Roman theme of slaves upsetting the natural order of life by trying to rule their masters.
The final piece of rhetoric put into Boudica’s mouth by Dio demonstrates the writer at his least subtle. Whereas until now it has been just about possible to suspend disbelief and imagine the warrior queen using Dio’s words to address her army, he now indulges in a rant against Nero that is blatantly Roman in origin, rampantly sexist in its tenor and overtly biased in its politics:
“Raising her hand up to heaven, Boudica cried: ‘I thank you, Andraste, and talk to you woman to woman, for I don’t rule over any burden-bearing Egyptians like Nicrotis did, nor over the trading Assyrians like Semiramis (we have learned something from the Romans), and we certainly don’t rule over the Romans themselves as Messalina used to do, then Agrippina and now Nero. He may call himself a man but in reality he’s a woman, playing his lyre, singing and trying to make himself look beautiful. No – I rule over Britons: men who might not know how to work the soil or have a trade but who excel in the art of war and share everything, including their children and wives, so that the latter are as brave as their men. Therefore, as the queen of such men and women, I humbly pray for victory, that we should live and have our freedom against these people who have warm baths, eat fussy foods, drink unmixed wine, anoint themselves with myrrh, sleep on soft chairs with withered boys, and who are slaves to a musician – and a bad one at that! Don’t allow this Mistress Domita-Nero to lord it over me or you men: let her sing and lord it over the Romans for they are the ones who deserve to be her slaves, having given in to her for so long. But you, Mistress, you alone will always be our ruler.’ Having concluded her address to her people in such a manner, Boudica led her army against the Romans.”
CASSIUS DIO: HISTORIES, BOOK 62
Like a student cramming every example into the last few minutes of an exam paper, Dio goes completely overboard in dredging up every single example of powerful, evil or misguided women rulers that he can think of and turned it into a speech. It was almost as if he had lifted the list of dangerous women from Propertius’s Elegy on the enslaving power of love and placed it in the mouth of the Iron Age queen. Nitocris was the first queen to exercise political power over Egypt but had the cunning to allegedly trick one of her successors into revealing his greed; Semiramis was rumoured to have had an insatiable sexual appetite whereby she seduced the most handsome of her soldiers and then would have them killed in the most ruthless abuse of sexual power; Messalina may not have been a queen in her own right, but she used the power behind the imperial throne to murder anyone who stood against her or tried to diminish her influence. As for Agrippina, her reign of terror even caught her own son, the Emperor Nero, in its violent grasp until he finally managed to summon up the courage to have her murdered. Although at face value, Boudica is raised up to the pantheon of the known-world’s hall of fame for queens, the list of women rulers would do little to enhance her reputation; to Dio’s educated Roman audience, she would be damned by association.
Whereas Tacitus gives Boudica a powerfully emotive monologue, his pre-battle speech from Suetonius Paulinus is almost perfunctory in its commands as he reminds his soldiers that they are highly trained and disciplined professionals:
“‘Before you,’ he said, ‘you can see more women than warriors. Cowardly, unarmed, they will give up the moment they see the weapons and bravery of their conquerors who have given them such a drubbing so many times before. Despite your many legions, it will be the few who decide the true outcome of the battle, and it will add to their glory that so small a force have won the respect of a whole army. Keep your ranks tight, and once you’ve discharged your javelins, then continue the slaughter and devastation with shields and swords, never stopping to think about plunder: when you’ve won yourselves a victory, you can have it all.’”
TACITUS: ANNALS, XIV. 36
Typically, Dio’s version of Paulinus’s speech is considerably more florid, referring to the threats of “entrails sliced from our bodies” or being “spitted on red-hot skewers” and other gruesome fates that would be suffered should they lose to the Britons. Addressing each of his three divisions in turn, his words are less convincing as those of such a seasoned military man as he tees up the drama and jeopardy the soldiers now face:
“Choose, therefore, whether you would prefer to get the same treatment as some of our comrades and be driven out of Britain altogether, or by winning, to gain revenge for your friends who have fallen – and at the same time give humanity an example not just of benevolent clemency towards the loyal but inevitable severity towards the rebellious.”
He finishes with a theme that resonates with Tacitus’s speech for Boudica:
For the women and children craning their necks at the edge of the battlefield, half excited, half terrified, this was probably the largest crowd of people they had ever seen; in fact, it was probably the largest number of people ever to have gathered in one place in the whole history of ancient Britain. Yet despite the masses, one can picture the families desperately searching for the faces of their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers and perhaps even mothers and sisters in the hordes of warriors in front of them. But the amorphous crowds would have blotted out their view like the rising sea as it builds to the crescendo of a wave: now everyone was poised; everyone was ready.
In the last few moments before war commenced, chariots raced along the British lines, whipping their warriors into an ecstasy of hatred that had already been fuelled by large quantities of ale; the Romans, meanwhile, stood square in their clean, shining lines showing little of the terror they must have been feeling. Then, at Boudica’s command the battle horns sounded and the warriors unleashed their fury; one can barely imagine the cacophony that exploded from the Britons as they roared towards the Roman front line with a seismic wave of thundering energy. This was the moment that both sides had feared and lusted after – raw and naked passion against cold, military steel.
In the ordered rows of Romans, every sinew would have strained to hold their position against the basic human instinct for fight or flight. But they had their orders – no man was to discharge his javelin until Paulinus gave his signal. Five hundred yards, four hundred yards, three hundred yards and closing; the Britons charged across the open plain, into the jaws of the funnel-shaped defile that led to the waiting legions; two hundred yards, one hundred yards – then as the Britons made their final race towards the disciplined blocks of Romans, Paulinus gave his command: the air screamed with flying javelins followed by the muffled thuds of around seven thousand long, barbed tips connecting with the dull resistance of earth, shield – and human tissue. But still the Britons kept on coming. Like the heads of Hydra, as soon as one warrior fell, another would rise up in his place in a nightmare of mythical proportions. A second deluge of javelins rained down on Boudica’s army and as they struck home on the unprotected flesh, a defensive rampart of thousands of bodies began to block the warriors’ path.
Once their missiles were all discharged, it was time for stage two: a lightning flash of steel announced that the Roman legionaries had drawn their short swords from their scabbards as they now raced down the slope in their deadly wedge-shaped formation towards the enemy. The clash, when it came, was electric – a fusion of light, sound and white hot energy as the leading soldiers cut a gash through the mass of British warriors, dividing them, annihilating them with the cold, relentless butchery of a professional strategy of death. The blunt shunt of the shield partnered the swift, stabbing twist of the sword; and still the Britons kept on coming. But like a tug of war in reverse, the Romans now pushed forwards, cutting down all who fought before them. The Britons would not even have had the room to raise their swords as they were shoehorned together by the sides of the valley, the wedge-formation of Roman soldiers and the crowds of their own warriors racing up behind them. Crushed together, their strength in numbers now became a weakness in contrast with the organised blocks of well-spaced Romans.
Amidst the bloody chaos, little by little, both sides would have sensed that the advantage was turning. In the mêlée of the hand-to-hand combat where you were close enough to feel the gush of your enemy’s breath as you stabbed the life from him, the Romans would have realised that the war cries of the Britons were slurring into the agonised screams of the dying. And yet Boudica’s army fought on with the knowledge that the die had been cast and until it stopped rolling, so would they keep on moving forward until faced with their destiny.
From his position on the slope overlooking the battlefield, Suetonius Paulinus would have seen the subtle but growing signs of a glorious victory playing out on the field before him. As his cavalry swept down in a steady pincer movement that trapped all before it in a giant claw of death, the tumult of Britons began to lose its fervour: it was now battling for survival in a writhing sea of blood and body-parts where it was hard to tell the living from the dead. And then the flood of warriors slowed, halted and reversed. In a tangle of desperation, anger and fear, the Britons now began to flee, pursued by the cavalry and the flanks of roaring, bloodied legionaries but the warriors were trapped by their own wagons that sealed the edge of the battlefield. Women, children, animals and carts piled high with the trophies of a war: nothing was spared the wrath of the Romans who carried their orders through to the end.
And then it was over. As the light faded and the soldiers sifted through the piles of steaming corpses searching for fallen comrades, possible bounty or any as yet un-dead enemies, their officers counted the grim tally. Tacitus reports the numbers of dead as eighty thousand Britons and just four hundred Romans – a sum that would put it in the record books for the number killed in just one day until the advent of World War One; Dio says only that “many” were slain. Allowing for the usual levels of exaggeration, the truth has been estimated at closer to forty thousand Britons and around a thousand Romans but to put this into context, a death toll of fifty thousand is equivalent to the number of people killed when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
As for Boudica, we have no record of when she knew she had lost the battle for Britain, or even if she survived to see the tide turning. There are two versions of her death: Tacitus says she ended her own life with poison; Dio that she fell ill and died. Both amount to the same effect – that in losing the battle, she surrendered her life. It would certainly not have been regarded as “womanly” by the Romans to die on the battlefield or by her own sword; poison was regarded as a particularly female way to commit suicide and would have been well-known to classical audiences as the way the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, chose to escape the humiliation of defeat. However, Boudica did not play by Roman rules: as a British warrior queen she may well have chosen to die by the sword. The fate of Boudica’s two daughters is not mentioned by either writer and nor is there a clue in any material remains: they disappear from the record along with all reference to the actual site of the battle, two more nameless victims of the Roman conquest of Britain.
The death of Boudica was also the death knell for her rebellion. Dio claims that following their defeat, the Britons had tried to keep up the resistance but without her, it too faded away and died. Tacitus merely tells us that the Roman army had to spend the winter “under leather” – camping in leather tents that would have provided scant comfort for the victorious soldiers and little shelter from the cold, hard rain and snow. Small wonder, then, that their reprisals against the natives were so vicious.
There were other casualties – and not all in terms of revenge. When he heard word of the resounding victory of his comrades, Poenius Postumus, the camp prefect of the Second Legion who had failed to send his troops to aid the Governor, fell on his sword with the shame of depriving his men of their part in the glory. His was a personal tragedy, played out in all its agonising regret, hundreds of miles from the killing-fields that put an end to British hopes of freedom from Rome for the next three hundred and fifty years.
Boudica may have died and, with her, any hope of freedom from the iron yoke of Rome but what she had achieved in the battles and the purging fires ensured that she would reside in the memories of both the Romans and the Britons for at least the next fifty years. And then, just as the last embers of resistance were starting to fade, she rose from the ashes like the phoenix of mythology in the writings of Tacitus and, later, of Dio. The first stage of her life may have been over – but the larger part of her story had only just begun.