CHAPTER 16

UP FROM THE ASHES …

Roman Britain after AD 60/61

“Her death it brought us bitter woe

Yes, to the heart it wrung us,

And all because she didn’t know

A mushroom from a fungus.”

ELIZABETH NEWBERY: THE LOOKOUT GUIDE TO THE QUARRELLING CELTS

“No one can deny that she had a huge impact long after her day,” muses archaeologist Philip Crummy in an office groaning under the weight of work in progress. We were discussing the legacy of Boudica and her revolt for the Roman Empire. “After all, when the Romans rebuilt Camulodunum, they added a city wall and a large defensive ditch – what’s now called Gryme’s Dyke – as they weren’t going to be caught out in the same way twice. But much more than that, it became increasingly common for them to build defensive earth ditches at a whole range of new settlements that were springing up after the revolt. I think the lack of defences at Camulodunum in AD 60 must have been viewed as less of an oversight and more of an outright scandal.”

It seems the Boudica effect was felt not just in the burned red layer of soil: her revolt had changed not only the landscape but the psyche of the Romans from an almost arrogant confidence to an anxious paranoia. Clearly, Tacitus and Dio were not exaggerating the significance of her story: Britannia was now transformed into a new mental and physical space – and the story of the next four hundred years of Roman occupation bears all the hallmarks of a warrior queen’s fiery fingerprint.

It was as if the province was holding its breath: an anxious peace now settled over the province of Britannia under the rule of its new governor, Petronius Turpilianus. Boudica might have been dead, along with her cause, but the debris of her uprising festered in every strategic decision the Romans now made. The drubbing she had given to military rule in Britain – and just as importantly to imperial confidence – reverberated in provincial policy for at least the next decade. The Romans stopped trying to expand their British frontiers and just concentrated on consolidating what they had already got. Financially, militarily and politically, they could not afford to have another rebellion in the province.

Turpilianus knew his job was now one of reconciliation and relationship-building with the Britons; there were to be no new military operations under his command, and the same would be true for his successor, Marcus Trebellius Maximus, who ruled Britannia from AD 63 to AD 69. It was only with the appointment of Petillius Cerealis in AD 71 that the old days of conquest and frontier-chasing came back into vogue – an attempt for total domination of the island that would eventually see the Romans being driven back by the Caledonian tribes in AD 117 to the eventual northern border of Hadrian’s Wall, near to the modern border between England and Scotland. However, all that was half a century ahead; for now, Cerealis had his own reasons for reasserting Roman dominance over the Britons: he had been the commander of the detachment of soldiers marching down from Peterborough who had been so severely routed by Boudica’s army. His new appointment as governor of the province was the perfect opportunity to exact some personal revenge for his dented pride – and for his thousand men who had been cut to pieces.

But if the mood was tense in Britain in the post-Boudican era, it was even worse in Rome. Since his murder of his mother in AD 58 and then of his wife, Octavia, in AD 62, the Emperor Nero was realising that he could behave exactly how he liked without fear of public or even private censure. While Paulinus and his army in the province were trying to defeat Boudica’s warring rebels, the emperor was giving performances of his lyre-playing and when this didn’t satisfy his artistic pretensions, he took to the stage as well – little realising how embarrassing he was to himself and those who were forced to watch. By AD 63, his grip on reality was becoming ever more tenuous as he signed his heart over to new religious cults in a bid to find some meaning to his life or, perhaps, just more power. Unfortunately for the Christians, their fledgling religion wasn’t one of his chosen few and following the great fire of Rome in AD 64, Nero placed the blame for the inferno squarely on their shoulders. While he set about rebuilding the city in the imposing style of the Greeks, he continued to kindle a Roman hatred of the faith that would last for three hundred years until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD. By then, not even a new faith would be enough to save the unwieldy Roman megastate from its inevitable implosion. By AD 410, time achieved what Boudica never could: the end of Roman rule in Britain.

Meantime, in the absence of strong political leadership from Rome, the whole of the empire was growing uneasy. It wasn’t just Britain that was rocked by civil unrest; trouble was brewing in both Gaul and Spain, which had the potential to jeopardise the entire Empire. On the June 9, AD 68, after singing, playing and murdering his way into a corner, Nero finally ended the misrule of Rome by committing suicide by putting a dagger to his throat. He knew that he had squandered a fortune, alienated his people and, critically, lost the support of the army – but now it was too late. His death was not the focus for much genuine grief and misery, though Nero had the last laugh: with no clear successor, the empire was plunged even further into despair and civil war.

Against this background, it is small wonder that after Boudica’s uprising the policy in Britain was strictly one of trying to repair and maintain the status quo. With the rest of the empire suffering uncertainty and strife, the dwindling revenues from taxation in the provinces were becoming a growing cause for alarm, particularly when Nero had been squandering his way through the coffers in Rome. At last, after what has been known as the “year of the four Emperors” in AD 68-9, Caesar Vespasianus Augustus finally took the throne and brought about the first period of stability for almost a generation. Vespasian’s background was suitably impressive and not without some personal colour: he had already won notoriety for allegedly being pelted with turnips during his pro-consulship of Africa and then – more dangerously though not unsurprisingly – for falling asleep during one of Nero’s artistic performances. The ten-year reign of this experienced and able politician was marked by a restoration in the fortunes of the empire and a renewal of the expansionist policies in the province of Britannia.

Immediately after the revolt, the Romans had set about rebuilding their prized capital at Camulodunum, with renovation works also taking place shortly afterwards in both Londinium and Verulamium. The need to rebuild was emotional as well as administrative – the province could not be without its colonia and its increasingly urban population could not live without their towns. This is clearly borne out by the archaeology in Colchester which shows that there was barely enough time for the top layer of the Boudican destruction horizon to have weathered before reconstruction began again, while the pottery record shows barely a break in its two-thousand-year continuity. Although Camulodunum had been the worst affected of the three sacked towns, this was the settlement that now had to be raised back up as quickly as possible and although the new town was on a smaller scale, there seem to have been enough survivors to effect some kind of “business as normal” policy once the debris had been cleared away. Within a few years, a new Colonia Victricensis had risen from the ashes to parade its renewed glory – only this time with the addition of a substantial defensive wall to protect it from any future attacks. That the protective wall largely achieved its goal is beyond any argument: about half the original structure can still be seen today.

As for the second target of Boudica’s wrath, Londinium was already a de facto place of provincial administration at the time of the revolt and its influence grew even stronger in the years after the uprising and attack. Jenny Hall, Roman curator at the Museum of London, picks up the story: “There is little doubt that the new procurator, Classicianus, based himself here in the early AD Sixties and although there are hints from the archaeological record that it took some time for the pace and volume of trade to fully recover, we can see from the pottery record – and the development of the quayside – that just like Camulodunum, the settlement quickly got back onto its feet. I think it had probably had the biggest buzz of any of the early Roman settlements so it’s hardly surprising that it took over the role as the major town in Britain.”

For London, the major phase of re-birth was under Vespasian. During this time, the town became a key supply base for the growing demands of the military and also – now that they knew the army wouldn’t be withdrawing from the province – for the increasingly Romanised population who decided that the Romans were here to stay. The superior port facilities over its rival settlement at Colchester meant that the town became even more strategically important, with larger ships able to sail from Europe right up the Thames to the heart of the developing city. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, the facilities were improved even further by the construction of a substantial new quay, some six hundred and twenty metres long. This was lined with wood specially selected for the purpose in a major construction project with wharves, warehouses and jetties that made the docks the envy of the entire province and laid the foundations for its evolution into a world city over the next two thousand years.

Leather briefs found in Queen Street, London,
possibly belonging to female acrobat or performer

From merely “scraping by”, Londinium now grew into a self-confident and sophisticated settlement with all the accoutrements of Roman life, including a timber amphitheatre for gladiatorial games which was built around AD 70 at Guildhall, a vast new forum replete with outbuildings for provincial officers and staff and – the pièce de résistance of any Roman town – the public baths, built around AD 80 at Huggin Hill. The wonderful discovery of some skimpy leather women’s knickers at Queen Street in London caused much speculation: normally, Roman women would wear a strip of cloth to support the breasts and another piece of cloth, like a loin cloth, called a subligar or subligaculum, meaning “little binding underneath” on their lower halves. However, these tiny leather briefs were well made with hemming all the way around the hourglass shape and there were laces at the sides for fasting the underwear to a snug fit. But what on earth were women doing in the years following the Boudica revolt that required leather underwear? Jenny Hall looks after the discovery: “Suggestions have included their use by women who were menstruating but the most likely answer is that they were worn as part of the costume of female acrobats or performers where they would be neat-fitting with a bit of ‘give’. And from the pictorial evidence that we have from elsewhere in the empire, that would have been just about all that they were wearing, except for kneepads.” Whatever their use, well-worn and with a hip measurement of just thirty-one inches, their owner was certainly someone in good physical shape.

As well as entertainment, it seems that tourism, or at least travel, was also on the rise. On the south bank of the Thames, the destroyed suburb at Southwark was experiencing its own reincarnation with the construction of a large stone building in the early AD Seventies which appears to have been some kind of hotel for all the provincial bureaucrats that were now employed in keeping the country running.

At some point during the reconstruction of Londinium and the growing confidence across the entire province, it must have been realised that the former trading settlement was beginning to overshadow the political centre of Roman power at Camulodunum. From the scale of investment in the rebuilding, it seems most unlikely that the town’s renaissance could have been achieved by private money alone. It is unclear precisely when, but at some point around this time, the provincial administrators made London the new capital of Britain.

Meanwhile, thirty miles north-west in the sacked town of Verulamium, it was an altogether very different story. Unlike in Colchester and London, this time there was no phoenix rising rapidly from the ashes of Boudica’s destruction and no surge of renewed confidence from the population that they could rebuild their homes and businesses even better than before. For the Britons who had made Verulamium their home, there was no great tradition of urbanity and its fragile hold had been shattered by the events of AD 60/61. From the archaeological record, it appears that the thick layer of burned material was barely touched in the years following the uprising; in fact, it would take almost two decades for the town to get back on its feet and raise itself up to some of its former glory. If the original Roman town was incomplete at the time of the uprising, it remained so for a long while after Boudica had left the town. The forum and basilica were only finally completed around AD 79 and progress appears to have been slow, either through lack of funds, lack of manpower or lack of motivation. Rosalind Niblett is unequivocal: “I think that Boudica really did devastate the population. Verulamium was just on the cusp of becoming a sort of ‘show town’ when she and her army tore through it. For the ten or fifteen years after her uprising, the wealthy Catuvellaunian elite clearly decided it was safer to hoard their money rather than invest it in ostentatious buildings that could be burned down – we know they had the money as it’s turned up in the form of buried gold and silver coins; they just chose to keep it for themselves or their gods.”

There is, however, evidence from the writings of Tacitus that the Romans actively encouraged the rebuilding of their cultural centres after the uprising. In his biography of his father-in-law, the celebrated Roman general Agricola, Tacitus makes reference to the fact that during the winter of AD 79-80, a few years after his appointment as the new British governor, Agricola poured himself into the drive to make Britons more “Roman” by adopting urban lifestyles centred around all the trappings of cosmopolitan life. It was seen as a mark of status and largesse to fund the building of iconic buildings, such as a forum or temple, and the state was not beyond giving whole communities a helping hand towards both self and civic improvement if it served the purpose of spreading Roman civilisation to the masses. After all, the more Roman the population, the less likely it was that another Boudica would rise up from the ashes and again destroy their hard work.

The renaissance of Verulamium was aided by its proximity to the by-now flourishing Londinium – another indirect impact of how the Iceni queen forever changed the geography of Britain. Whereas in pre-Roman times, and to some extent even up to the revolt itself, Verulamium was marginal to the main trading centres, the massive growth of London now had a profound effect on its smaller partner. Just a day’s march away for the army, or a day’s ride for a cartload of goods, Verulamium was now within striking distance of the new capital’s “suburban effect” and its location on Watling Steet, the main route out to the north-west and Chester, assured that it could get a free ride on London’s coattails. And the rapidly developing town made good use of it: by AD 100, Verulamium had an extensive Roman grid system of metalled and stony streets with their attendant shops, workshops and houses, along with a forum/basilica and all the paraphernalia of cosmopolitan life. At the heart of the new town was a strong commercial and administrative area, and at its centre was the large forum complex covering an area of more than two thousand square metres with some often magnificently carved Purbeck marble stonework. The forum would have had the traditional large, colonnaded courtyard and an outlying piazza, and its stature would have continued to grow with the whole area being improved right through to the late second century.

The feel of the new town would have been unashamedly Roman, with impressive stone buildings, Mediterranean-style shops and houses, and wide, cambered streets. Temples grew up to support the new faiths and beliefs of the population that were melding with the long-held traditional ideas about the spirit world. As well as the physical infrastructure, there were all the services of urban Roman life such as water channelled right across the town and probably even fountains as well. And for relaxation, there was of course the grandiose baths complex, with its warming hot air piped from the central heating system. By the end of the first century, the urban landscape of Verulamium was exotic, imperial and decadent; Boudica’s army would have spun in their graves to see all their hard work of destruction obliterated by the shiny, new settlement that announced in a clear voice that Britain was now, truly, a Roman province.

As for the Britons in the re-invigorated province, the uprising had removed whole swathes of the active labour force from the areas of the Iceni and its fellow tribes and this undoubtedly had a serious effect on the landscape of eastern Britain after the revolt. Along with the swingeing reprisals came widespread famine that would have done much to reduce not only the numbers in the rural population but also their anti-Roman spirit. To the north, in the lands of the Brigantes, the bellicose Britons still had some stomach for revolt and demonstrated this during the final years of Queen Cartimandua’s rule and beyond, but south of their lands, the Iceni and the Trinovantes were crushed into submission.

There is one final irony in the landscape of Roman Britain in the years after Boudica’s uprising: the scorched earth policy of Suetonius Paulinus had left a blank canvas in the tribal lands of the Iceni which the Romans were now determined to fill with their own designs. With the vast bulk of the troublemakers killed and their kinsmen enslaved or forced to migrate, the provincial administration could unleash their long revenge. This came in the form of a new Roman town called Venta Icenorum – laid out in all its organised glory near an old military fort by modern Caistor St Edmund. The relics of the town can still be seen today, from the large amphitheatre to the grid-like streets which show clearly on aerial photographs. Built around AD 70, Venta Icenorum, or “market place of the Iceni”, was the administrative seat for the region – and the beating heart of Romanisation that would feed the surrounding areas with the gospel of true civilisation. From its humble beginnings in wattle and daub and wood, the town developed into a full-scale Roman town with stone temples, vaulted baths with central heating and a piped water supply.

For a people who had lost their soul, compensation could be found in the baths, forum, shops and theatres of the smart new town; certainly the bulk of the town’s population appear to have been native Britons who gradually came to join the urban lifestyle of their new overlords. In its heyday, Venta probably had somewhere in the region of three to five thousand people living in its Mediterranean-style houses; gone were the thatched roofs and circular layouts of their previous homes. The town had a sewerage system to keep the smell down during the hot summer months, and it was now possible to pop out to the shops to buy their daily bread.

But it seems that for all its magnificence and urban sophistication, the descendents of Boudica’s warriors never really felt at home here. The population actually seems to have declined as the town became more established, and after the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the Saxons, the people of Venta abandoned this landscape of Roman artifice and melted back into the flat plains of the Norfolk landscape. For almost fifteen hundred years, the ruins of the town lay largely forgotten under fields until an RAF flight in 1928 took the remarkable photographs that brought it back to the fore. An archaeological dig followed and the layers of neglect were peeled back from the town to reveal the neat and ordered settlement that tried, and in the long run failed, to convert the Iceni from the proud rural warriors of Boudica into true Roman citizens, in heart, mind and soul.

However, against the backdrop of the continually changing tribal fortunes in the pre-conquest era, the period after Boudica’s rebellion had become a time of relative peace for the majority of Britons. Within a decade, martial law had softened into civil administration: politically, the ground rules of governance had been set – and they would stay that way for most of England for the next three hundred years until the decline of the Roman empire. By AD 78, the fierce guerrilla resistance by the Welsh would finally be subdued while the rebellious Brigantes were being controlled by the networks of Roman forts and military bases. The growing political strength in the province meant that the Roman army could now re-distribute itself to start expanding the frontiers even further to the north, leaving the lands of the south to be controlled by civilian administrators in the new civitates across the country. No new Boudicas emerged to trouble the Roman mind: Britannia and the Britons now effectively belonged to them. Confident that their rear was free from the threat of uprising, the Romans started their push north into Scotland where they reached as far as the Highlands with their glorious victory against the Picts at Mons Graupius in c.AD 84 before lack of manpower forced their reluctant retreat back to the permanent boundary at Hadrian’s Wall in the first half of the second century.

Nevertheless, the mere fact that the governor, Agricola, would even contemplate his push north into Scotland is testament to the belief that the province of Britannia was now safely Romanised with enough people buying into the new culture to guarantee its maintenance even without the bulk of the army or the direct presence of the governor. The threat of uprising had been extinguished, its tribal aristocracy transformed from warriors to civilians. Status was no longer achieved by fighting and feasting, it was down to money and influence – much as it is two thousand years on, in a modern Britain that still bears witness in both landscape and culture to almost five hundred years of Roman imperial rule.