The Warrior Queens Read online

  The plain fact was that the Romans simply could not conceive that the Britons could do this to them: rise up, sack a city and massacre its inhabitants. History after all provides plenty of examples of this kind of tragic error. It is a common mistake on the part of the conquering power to consider a rebellion of the conquered to be impossible, because they find it unbelievable. The Romans of Camulodunum merely joined in this error and suffered for it.

  Nor was disbelief confined to Camulodunum itself. Once the situation was accepted within the colonia for what it was – serious but not yet desperate – there was still time for the veteran settlers to send for reinforcements from London to the few men still under arms at Camulodunum. Here, however, the Procurator Catus Decianus, showing himself to be complacent as well as rapacious, thought it sufficient to despatch a mere two hundred men (who would perish with their former comrades). Around the wall-less town itself not even a rampart or a palisade was erected, for which there must have been time if reinforcements could still be summoned from afar.33 Most tragic of all, the women, the children and the old people were not sent away.

  The town was overrun without difficulty. Archaeological evidence not only confirms that there were no walls – as Tacitus stated – but that the original defences erected by the legionaries had actually been levelled down. Over them were built a series of houses made of wattle-and-stake, and filled in and covered with daub. These houses were separated by narrow gravelled alleys. All of this would be easy to destroy by fire – and it was. So fierce was the fire that whole buildings became baked into a kind of clay: a section of one such house (discovered in 1972 in the Lion Walk near the site of the temple) can still be seen preserved in the Colchester Castle Museum. The carbonized remains of twill mattresses were found, and other domestic objects such as Samian ware, burned black, as well as food: the charred remains of imported fruits, including dates, plums and figs.34

  Even today, in modern Colchester, traces can be seen of a way of life which came to a halt abruptly nearly two thousand years ago. (Modern Colchester has incidentally considerable archaeological value as a site since it had to be totally rebuilt by the Romans following the holocaust of AD 60, allowing precise dating for certain discoveries.) The excavated site of a centurion’s camp gives the visitor a strange Pompeian feeling of the past arrested. This camp, founded about twelve years before, would have been part of the sketchy defences of the town. A Roman grid cooking-iron has been discovered (such grids, by being pressed flat into the earth, have a good chance of survival). One may reflect that the last meal cooked on that iron was cooked in AD 60.35

  Moreover there have been plenty of new opportunities for excavation, due to the levelling of one lot of buildings and the erection of another as the town has been rebuilt by stages during the twentieth century. In that brief interval allowed by the grace of the developer can be seen once again the blackened Samian ware and the scorched earth – literally – of the Boudican sack: an extraordinary orange-red huef2. However, curiously enough, of actual skeletons there are very few traces. It is to be assumed that sometime later the Romans came back and cremated the remains of their slaughtered comrades.

  Three surviving artefacts, two of them of stone and one of bronze, also bear witness to the savagery of the British attack – as also to the motives which inspired it. At some point the British tribes swooped down upon the Roman cemetery to the west of the town where the old soldiers had been interred, as it was hoped, for an eternal rest after their long and honourable labours. The tombstone of one Marcus Favonius Facilis of the XXth Legion shows him standing confidently in full military panoply, including his vituus or vinestick (the modern swagger stick) in his right hand and his sword in his left. But the tombstone (discovered in 1868) has been broken into two pieces; more significantly still, the face has been hacked away.

  In 1928 another tombstone was discovered, that of a man who died at the age of forty belonging to the first Ala (auxiliary cavalry unit) of the Thracians. Named as Longinus Sdapezematygus, his adoption of a Roman name in addition to his Thracian one was a characteristic practice. Unfortunately for his survival, Longinus was depicted as mounted upon an enormous rampant horse while below him crouched some troglodyte figure of a man, who probably symbolized death, but could well have had to the British attackers a more unpleasant symbolism of subjugation. At all events the tombstone of Longinus Sdapezematygus has been set about with a will, the face of Longinus himself and the nose of his horse violently obliterated.

  Lastly, a bronze head of the Emperor Claudius was fished out of the River Alde, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, in 1907 by an astonished boy who had gone swimming. This head too has been subjected to violet treatment, as can be seen from the jagged edges at the neck where it has been hacked away from the body. Once thought to be the head of the great equestrian statue of the Emperor which would have fronted the temple erected to his memory, its comparatively moderate size and provincial technique are now considered to rule out that possibility. It must have belonged to some lesser statue erected in the body of the town. From the point of view of the sack of Camulodunum, it is of course more evocative to regard this head as one which might have been once carried on a pole through the burning streets of the colonia – if not the live head of the Emperor, at least the symbolic head of the enemy.f3 Since the Alde findspot is in Iceni territory, one imagines that the head, a peculiarly incriminating piece of evidence, was finally flung away there, after the defeat of the tribe.36

  The temple itself held out for two more days following the sack of the town. The old soldiers congregated there as in a redoubt for one last desperate effort to survive until reinforcements came. Weapons and armour, rusty with disuse, have been discovered, which the veterans must have hastily routed out and donned.37 The picture of these old warhorses, once the masters of Europe, now destined to die, antiquated weapons to hand, at the hands of the despised barbarians outside the limits of the known world (as they had once complained to Claudius) has its own poignancy. For unlike Lucknow and Mafeking, there was to be no relief for this particular garrison. The gaudy temple was battered down and fired, the veterans, like their families, put to the sword.

  The Britons under Boudica surveyed the smoking town and turned their faces towards London. For the Romans, when news of the holocaust reached them, there was an additional humiliation to be faced. ‘Moreover,’ wrote Dio Cassius, ‘all this ruin was brought upon [them] by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.’

  1 A reconstruction at the Castle Museum, Colchester, shows a building of gleaming white, with ostentatious red, blue and golden ornamentation; Roman eagles and a triumphant statue of the Emperor Claudius at the front steps make it easy to understand Tacitus’ reference to a blatant stronghold.

  2 As for example at a site in Culver Street, Colchester, destined eventually to be a car park, visited by the author in the summer of 1985 when it was worked by the Colchester Archaeological Unit.

  3 It is now in the British Museum. Both the military tombstones can be seen in the Castle Museum, Colchester.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Red Layer

  Far below the modern streets of the City of London the events of AD 60 are indelibly scorched on the soil as a red layer of burnt debris …

  PETER MARSDEN, Roman London

  One should be in no doubt about the dangerous nature of the situation then facing the Romans in Britain. And there was worse to come.

  The Boudican revolt has been described as ‘the most serious rebellion against Roman rule in any province during the early Principate’ next to the great Batavian (Rhinelander) revolt under Julius Civilis ten years later;1 Julius Civilis being another charismatic native leader of royal descent ill-treated by the Romans – he was sent in irons to Rome – before he rebelled. The Romans were experiencing for themselves the ugly truth, as expressed by Tacitus, that they had broken the Britons into obedience, ‘but not as yet to slavery’.2 Now that the habit of obedience had
been boldly flung off, the Britons were facing their oppressors with all the banked energies of the unfairly subjugated, not the lethargy which long generations of serfdom can breed. It was clear to the Romans themselves that such a British onslaught, in equal measure surprising and horrifying, must be checked and as soon as possible, lest the entire occupation of the island be imperilled.

  With the Roman commander at distant Anglesey, the nearest available Roman force had to be flung into the fray, in order to stop the British triumph at source, following the sack of Camulodunum. That honour fell to the IXth Legion Hispana – one of the legions which had taken part in the Claudian invasion, taking its name from the Spanish province where it had served with distinction.3 The commander of the IXth Legion, Petilius Cerialis, set off for Camulodunum with the intention of rescuing his compatriots, or at least of inflicting a smashing defeat upon the rebels. He probably came from a camp at Longthorpe, near Peterborough, some eighty miles from Colchester, and despite Tacitus’ assertion, was not accompanied by a full legion, which would have comprised approximately five thousand men, but something under three thousand.4

  If however the exact quantity of cohorts at Petilius’ command is in doubt, their fate at the Britons’ hands is not. Somewhere to the north of Camulodunum a British contingent was lying in wait: this would presumably have been a separate striking force from the army which had sacked the city and was probably detailed to cover just such a Roman advance. (We do not know precisely which tribes joined under Boudica, other than her own Iceni and the Trinovantes; some of the Coritani and the Cornovii from the Midlands were probably also there and maybe some disaffected Brigantes from further north; Dio’s figure of 230,000 for Boudica’s army at the final battle is obviously wildly exaggerated, but does at least convey the massive nature of the rising which Tacitus described as universal.)5 The ambush was as bloodily successful as the sack of the city had been. Petilius’ infantry was cut to pieces. He himself, according to Tacitus, escaped with his cavalry and took refuge back at the legionary camp.

  Perhaps he had contributed to this defeat by acting rashly. Petilius’ later career, which brought him into contact with that other native rebel, the Batavian Julius Civilis, showed him to be a general of daring rather than cautious instincts;6 but at this point, while the Roman mentality still grappled bemusedly with the notion of British insurrection, caution would have been more desirable in a commander than daring. At least Petilius had survived to fight another day: and after his campaigns against Civilis he would end up as Governor of Britain. But for the present the Romans had now lost a further estimated 2,500 men, and were no nearer to stemming the British advance.

  At this point, the Procurator Catus Decianus, he ‘whose rapacity had driven the province to war’ as Tacitus pointed out, exercised the traditional prerogative of the rat and fled the rapidly sinking ship. He took with him not only all his papers, but all his officers: Roman Britain was now without an administrative structure of any sort, and still the Governor Suetonius, hastening from Mona, had yet to arrive to save the situation – or so it was hoped.

  Tacitus tells us that Suetonius was ‘undismayed’. That was just as well. He certainly made excellent speed in his 250-mile dash towards Londinium since he managed to reach it in advance of the British hordes from Camulodunum (a mere sixty-three miles away).7 Or perhaps the natural if damaging British concentration on plunder following the sack of the veterans’ wealthy city was already weakening their original determination to extirpate the Roman rule. It was the element of surprise which had enabled the British tribal forces to slaughter Petilius’ well-equipped and well-trained men of the IXth Legion. Since the Governor of Britain could hardly be expected to linger in western Mona once the startling news of the fall of Camulodunum reached him, it might have been as well for the Britons to employ the element of surprise once again, either by ambushing Petilius, or by occupying Londinium itself. But this was not to be.

  So Suetonius reached Londinium unscathed, and reached it some short time ahead of the Britons; but it was an interval at least long enough for him to appraise the situation with his accustomed quick intelligence. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had pressed on towards Londinium with the original intention of using it as a military stronghold. But it is important to realize, as Suetonius soon discovered, that Londinium at this point was not actually a fortified city. Nor for that matter was it the capital city of Roman Britain, a fact which may be difficult for twentieth-century Britons to appreciate, trained by long historical usage to think of London as the centre of their world at least, and perhaps of other worlds as well.

  *

  If not a military stronghold, what was the nature of the city to which Suetonius had hastened, and at which the marauding and triumphant Britons would soon arrive? Despite all the recent archaeological activity in this area, the exact origin of Londinium has not yet been established beyond all possibility of doubt.8 Caesar does not mention Londinium at all in his account of the second (54 BC) campaign in the course of which he crossed the Thames; while it was the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth who was responsible for spreading the enduring legend of a pre-Roman city, something for which there is no support from archaeology. Since the name Londinium itself does derive from something pre-Roman, it was perhaps some obscure farm on a bend of the river which gave its name forever to the future mighty conurbation.9

  Be that as it may, the archaeological evidence indicates that Londinium as known in the first century owed its foundation to the Romans. There are two main theories: the first suggests that Londinium was founded as a military base at the time of the Claudian invasion of 43. The second envisages it as ‘a carefully planned civil trading settlement of Roman merchants’. It is the lack of military equipment among the discoveries unearthed which argues against the theory of the military base: unlike Colchester, for example, which is known to have been established in the first place as a fortification before being transformed into a colonia, and where a plethora of military remains have been turned up. The military argument cannot however be conclusively demolished. For one thing, the new settlement undeniably occupied a situation of strategic importance: it would make sense if its earliest Roman use was in fact as a place of river crossing, and that would suppose some form of military presence.10

  The dating of the coins however suggests a town which began to flourish from about AD 50 onwards. Recent archaeological work has indeed tended to reinforce the notion of a town planned from the first and rapidly expanding. Traces of a major north-east–south-west Roman road have been revealed in Southwark, crossing the Thames just below the modern London Bridge (and above the mediaeval one). This is in addition to the long-known major east–west road, nine metres wide, which has been replaced by the modern Cheapside, but parts of which have been integrated into Lombard Street and Fenchurch Street. Traces of this north–south road, on the north bank of the Thames, were found in the winter of 1984/5 in King Street, between the Guildhall and St Paul’s; already in the AD 50s it was attended by thriving shops.

  There are also traces of a central square, probably a market square, under Gracechurch Street, as well as these broad roads, and although the Boudican destruction followed by Roman reconstruction makes it impossible to be certain, there may well have been an early temple; if so, it would notionally lie beneath the site of that temple, recently rediscovered, which is dated about AD 70. We know that there was at least one large building, a Roman version of a modern shopping mall; this had a deep verandah or portico running along in front of it, obviously intended for a series of different shops, which indicates that the Roman version of the developers were also present.

  ‘Boudican’ Londinium spread over thirty acres at least and may have had as many as thirty thousand inhabitants.11 The limits of the city are indicated by various factors including, of course, those fire deposits which provide brutal evidence of how soon all this development was to be suddenly and violently shattered. The siting of the Roman cem
eteries of this period is also important, since they had by law to lie outside the bounds of the city. Londinium in these early days would have centred round modern Lombard Street where it is bisected by Gracechurch Street, and continues into Fenchurch Street, with the findspots of shards and so forth heavily grouped near Leadenhall Market. A stream, later named the Walbrook, flowed through it, (its course lying beneath the modern Bank of England and Mansion House). The eastern limits of Londinium would have been not much further than Mincing Lane; the Fleet from which modern Fleet Street takes its name, then a navigable river, must have acted as a virtual boundary in the west.

  Unlike hapless Camulodunum, the first British colonia, and the municipium of Verulamium to which Boudica’s army would shortly turn its attentions, Londinium had as yet no official status. This is the description given to us by Tacitus: Londinium ‘did not rank as a Roman settlement, but was an important centre for businessmen and merchandise’. The word which Tacitus uses for businessmen, negotiatores – bankers or those engaged in financial transactions as opposed to mercatores, merchants – suggests incidentally that Londinium in its occupational use in AD 60 was not so far from that of the City of London, which now occupies more or less the same area.12