Boudica - An Ancient History 101 Special Event (Part 2: Unfettered Fury)
with Lexi Diggins, Ben Paites and Kate Sumnall
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So and welcome back to part two of the Ancient History 101 series one finale. My three, count them three, special guests are back to talk about Boudica. At the end of part one last week, we left Boudica on the eve of the destruction of Colchester, London and St Albans. We learned about Iron Age Britain, the society that she lived in, their interactions with Rome, and the growing friction between these two groups of people. And we learned all about the multiple grievances that built up and up and up in Iron Age Britain until one day one woman, Boudica, snapped. So what can happen when an imperial power pushes a group of people to its limits? We are about to find out what happens when a woman with nothing left to lose decides that she's going to fight back. Once again, we have guests from Colchester, London and St Albans. And before we dig into it again, I'm just going to ask them to reintroduce themselves.
Yes. Hello, I am Ben Paites. I am Senior Collections and Learning Curator at Colchester Museums. And my background is in Roman archaeology specifically, but mainly objects and telling stories through objects.
Hello, I am Kate Sumnall. I am the curator of prehistory at London Museum. I frequently arm wrestle the Roman curator over that lovely bit of time where is it still prehistory? Is it not? I'm going to claim it. Similarly to Ben, I love artifacts and their power to really tell us about people's lives in the past.
Hi, I'm Lexi Diggins. I'm an archaeologist with experience in late Iron Age and early Roman sites. And I was also a guest curator at Verulamium Museum. Boudica was one of my focuses for that exhibition, which was all about stories of Iron Age and Roman women and artifacts that bring them to life.
So the first area that Boudica attacked was Colchester. Ben, can you tell us, did Rome just fly in and drop a Roman city in an empty field that had no one in it? What's Colchester like at this time?
So Colchester at this time, actually, let's go back a little bit before then. So Colchester as an area at the time of Boudica in the late Iron Age was a really significant, built-up, at least for the time, settlement. A regional hub is kind of a nice way to use it without using too much modern language like capital or city or all those kinds of things. But it was a really important settlement that was in this region. And I'm looking slightly at Lexi here, that flitted between the Cattavalloni and Trinavantis. And it seems like Velamion and Camulodunum had this sort of, these two settlements in the region were clearly really significant and swapped with conflict, swapped between who was controlling them. And so you have what is very, very important, both in terms of we start to see coinage coming out from Colchester as well as Velamion. You have these big industries along the east coast near where we are in Essex. So you have the salt mines in the Red Hills along the east coast. Really important. I mean, the Romans loved the salt, but clearly so did the Iron Age people. You have traces of industry and output. So Colchester was a producing center. It also was bringing in stuff. So they were one of those places who clearly had a lot of Roman influence well before the Romans officially arrived in, as we say often AD 43 with the Claudian invasion. You get burials with amphorae, you get objects.
I mean, the Lexden tumulus burial is one of the most incredible burials. It has these ghoulish, so kind of what is now modern France area, figurines from that area that have been produced in the Roman world. You have a medallion of Augustus found in that burial. Now, again, remembering this is before the official Roman period. So the person who was buried there, or at least the relatives and friends that buried them, clearly saw them as someone who loved Roman stuff, was influenced by Roman stuff, probably owned Roman stuff, drank Roman wine, imported Roman goods.
So Colchester as a place was very much becoming Roman long before the Romans were actually here. Now, that was the settlement that's out of Gosbeks, out of Stanway, that was the big port and kind of opera, the big town. When the Romans arrive, they establish a fort along the River Coln and that is not too far away. And that is as a means of kind of monitoring the people in the local area, having military presence in case there are any rebellions. But as often happens with the Roman way is that military presence brings family, it brings market traders, it brings other people who start to expand outwards.
And that fort becomes a colonia. It becomes a military settlement, but specifically a settlement that attracts retired veteran soldiers. So people who had spent their time in the army, when you finish your time in the army, you're kind of offered land, a place to go and spend the rest of your days. And there probably was some flexibility and choice over where you would have ended up. And some people clearly chose to end up in Colchester, in Camulodunum, in this Roman settlement. You start to see that it becomes not just a military town, but a town. You start to see theatres pop up. You start to see temples being built. You see all these things that are very quintessentially Roman start to appear in Colchester.
The fact that it has attracted veteran soldiers, however, is important, because that is the other way the Romans keep control, is by not just having active soldiers present, but by having their soldiers retire to the provinces. So that if a need ever did arise where people had to be reconscripted, or even if something happened spontaneously, having people who had been trained militarily, having been trained to defend and fight, is really useful to have in a town, because it means that you're not just relying on the butcher and the farmer to pick up their weapons and try and fend off tens of thousands of screaming Iron Age angry people. So it's a really, really important settlement. It's not the capital of the region or the country, necessarily. Again, it's just that we know it's a really important place. But yeah, it was kind of somewhere that had already started to become quite Roman long before the Romans officially arrived here.
So when Boudica rocks up, does it look like Mini Rome? Are the people that she's encountering all Italian?
Not Italian. I mean, the idea of Romans being Italian is a bit of a misconception as well anyway. A lot of them would have considered themselves Roman for sure. Some of them would have probably considered themselves Roman adjacent, because they were living there as Roman citizens. And even the indigenous people who had chosen to live their lives as Romans would have still had those ties back to their original culture. But again, just using Roman objects, adopting some Roman customs, we start to see baths appearing. Absolutely not saying the Iron Age people didn't wash themselves, but the concept of the baths somewhere, a structure of building you go to. And again, for the Romans, baths were more about social function than cleanliness because they're quite gross really. But these things were starting to develop. And like I say, the temples, and we do have in Colchester, as we do in lots of places, these syncretic gods that start to appear. So gods that are half Roman, half what would have been the religion of the people living here before then. And they get these double names. So we have Sylvanus is a Roman god, and you get kind of inscriptions to them. But you get these kind of blended deities. And you get, like I say, you get these Roman material culture, Roman objects and things alongside the Iron Age.
A good example of that is probably what's been referred to as the doctor's grave. So the doctor's grave may have been a doctor, but it's a burial that was found with what we refer to as a strainer bowl. So a bowl that was being used to put a concoction of herbs, spices and things in probably for medicinal purposes, alongside some divination rods. So these sticks that were believed to have been thrown down to predict the future and to tell what was going to happen. And alongside Roman amphorae and other things. And it's believed that this is a person who is from the Iron Age, who was adopting some of these Roman things in their practices. Which is why sometimes we're referred to as the druid's grave, rather than the doctor's grave, because the druids were the healers and the medical people and the magical people of the Iron Age. Whether it was a druid or not, we don't know. But it was someone who was clearly practicing these things. But taking in the Roman practices and Roman material culture as well as they did it. So yeah, it's a blending we have in Colchester of these different cultures.
Kate, what was London like at this time?
London is different to both Colchester and St Albans in that both of those were already very important places, which as Ben's just said, the Romans came in and asserted their power by choosing a center of power. And what looks like where Londinium was founded, that there isn't a great deal of Iron Age activity. We've got scattered activities that very much looks like farmsteads. So we've got odd roundhouses in the places and fields arrangements. And what it's looking like is, but it's still not an empty landscape. It was land that very much would have been under or associated with a group of people that the Romans very much just seized and said, we're having this. But it was a strategic place. It was a good place to ford the river and to cross it to be able to then link with the Kent ports, to be able to link with the two important centers at St Albans and also Colchester. And so having worked out that strategic importance to London, that was the start of the Roman occupation.
Now, modern London is obviously gigantic. I'm imagining that Roman London isn't quite so large. What area does it cover now?
It spans the river. So it is both the city of London as we understand it now, but also it's bits of Southwark as well. And Southwark at that time was islands. We've got a large North Island and a large South Island that's in the river. So it is marshy islands that the Romans sort of like settlement kind of span alongside. So 10 years after Boudica's rebellion, they've worked out that it may have spanned something like 70 hectares. So it is large. It is big, had a population of between 10,000 and 15,000. So it is significant. It's not tiny. And because of its strategic importance, there is the palace where the procurator was based and we think there's also a palace for the governor as well. So it is very much quite quickly being established as a centre that is under Roman control, being run to Roman rules with none of this pesky power struggles that you see in Colchester and St Albans where you have that really strong centre of power for Iron Age Britain. So if London, I think from what the evidence seems to see feels a bit more like, yeah, this is just Roman now.
Less of a blend?
Yeah, but you need to say that, but we do have roundhouses in the Roman city Londinium. We've got roundhouses north of the river by the Woolbrook where there seems to be glass working site going on. And there is an interpretation of that that says it may be British enslaved people that are living and working there. We also have Southwark, which seems to be predominantly occupied by migrant people, migrant populations, and also British people as well. And they don't seem entirely subjugated in that way because this is where the Harper Road woman burial is and she very much looks like a woman of power. Very interesting grave goods that's included with her. Oh, some of British origin and some of continental origin as well. So we've got Samian that comes from Gaul. We've got the rectangular mirror that comes from Italy. And it's a real blending between Roman culture and also British culture as well. So she seems to be someone that utterly straddles the two communities, but in a very Iron Age way. She remains an Iron Age British person. But her dates span 50 to 70. That's when we think she's dated to around, which is exactly the Boudica Rebellion. And we've got fire, that fire horizon on both sides of the river. So I am there thinking she's completely on Boudica's side. She's adding some sticks. She is also raising support on that side of the river as well.
Now you've mentioned the river. How important was the River Thames to London? Is that why the Romans chose that site for this settlement?
Yeah, the Thames is a very wide river. It's also tidal, which means that it is entirely possible to afford it and also to build the bridge, which connects Southwark and the city. But it also connects the major roads. Which are connecting those centres of power as the towns. That's its practical side. That's its route as being a connector. You can sail the ships up it so they can be unloading. So rather than going to the Kent ports and then having to travel overland to get to where the goods need to go, they can just come straight into London and then hit the road system and then they can go out. So it saves time and effort. But the river's religious as well. The river is so important from a faith perspective. It is a living entity. As much the land is a living entity and it's connected with gods. And so we have got so many things that have been put into the river with intention, with beliefs that have been attached to it. And we've also got the dead that have been going into the river from the Iron Age perspective as well. So the river is sacred. The river is a connection between the living and the dead. The river is powerful. It can be unpredictable. It is so important and it's so much. I mean, the Romans believed rivers were sacred as well. So this is a thread that continues on. Sorry, I can talk too much about rivers!
Lexi, what about St Albans at this period? Is it similar to Colchester? Is it more like London or is it its own completely different thing?
So there are definitely similarities with both Colchester and London. And so one of the big similarities, I suppose, with London especially is the proximity of a tribal capital. What was your term then that you used? Regional hub. Yeah, I like that. Velamio or Valamian was the original Iron Age settlement of the Catuvellaunii tribe. The territory that they occupied was pretty vast going all the way up towards where modern day Essex is right down into the fringes of outer London. I'm thinking in terms of modern maps, just trying to describe it. And then quite a long way west as well. So they are one of the larger tribes. And so this settlement, it's thought that originally there may have been a tribal capital at another site in Hertfordshire at a place called Devil's Dyke, which is an enormous ditch, massive ditch, fortified area, just north of a village called Wheat Hampstead. So it's thought that it's possible that there was a very large oppidum there that was then moved by Tasciovanus, who was a tribal leader, moved possibly to Velamio to this site near the River Ver. And what's striking about these two sites is both of them are right next to rivers. So the Devil's Dyke site is next to the River Lee and Velamio, which derives its name from the River Ver or place above the marsh. I think that's one of the translations.
One of the reasons we know that it was an oppidum and then it was an important centre for Iron Age people is that we actually have coins evidencing that. We have coins of Tasciovanus, this leader or king, and also his son as well, Cunobelin. Apologies for my pronunciations. I have no idea how these names were pronounced. They were minted. We know they were minted at Velamio because it says on the coins, which is super helpful.
So there's the link with London, I suppose, and also with Colchester as the fact that they're both near rivers. And there is a spiritual significance to that that we've already discussed. Religious significance of life and death. And in fact, above the River Ver, the other side of where the initial Iron Age settlement was, are early Roman graves, Roman burials and even possibly mausoleum. The other thing about the oppidum at Velamio was that there is evidence of a very wealthy burial, Chieftain's grave at Folly Lane, just outside where the oppidum was, not far. And that was excavated in the 1990s. And the grave goods were incredibly rich. And the burial itself was marked by a very large ditch, an enclosure and a very large ditch. And it looked like there'd been some ritual burning going on.
So the objects have been dated to the Iron Age, but there is some evidence of Romanization. So there's that Roman influence, even before Britain has become a part of the Roman Empire. And then we also have evidence as a burial in Welwyn, Welwyn Garden City is a town, not far from St. Albans. And it's another very elite, high status, late Iron Age cremation burial. And what do you find with these cremation burials? Wine amphorae. So there is this strong connection that predates occupation with Roman culture, with some individuals, some wealthy individuals. So I think there are similarities between these centers, these Iron Age oppidum centers of contact with the Roman Empire, particularly the higher end of the Roman Empire and luxury goods, evidence of trade, evidence of wealth and cultural identity. Personally, I think the status, the Iron Age coins are some of the most beautiful objects I've ever seen. If you can have a look at an Iron Age stater online, the gold Iron Age status particularly, they're so beautiful. They're such beautiful objects, far more beautiful, I think, than the Roman coins. It's just yet another example of deep artistic ability and awareness in the Iron Age.
Okay, so we've got three settlements. All of them seem to have quite a high degree of cultural interaction happening. Three targets. Why is Colchester first, Ben? Why is that the first target?
So there's probably a couple of reasons. One is proximity. So we are the nearest to where Boudica and her armies started up in Norfolk where the Iceni tribe are. As I said, it's a hub. It's a really important center. It was in the Iron Age and had become an important Roman center. You start to see a lot of activity in this area that is showing not just the military, but it's showing that it's becoming very rapidly this key Roman city to the point where it becomes the capital. So this is where we can start saying the word capital. So capital for the Romans, at least. They considered Colchester as the capital, the main city in Britain. Now, of course, at this point, the whole of Britain hadn't been conquered. So it would only have been the capital of the Roman part of Britain. For the Romans, that's all they cared about. That was the important thing. It was the main city for their bit that they had. So that's why she headed here first. And as we've said, it's at this point where the armies aren't present, that the majority of the army isn't present. So it's a perfect opportunity to swoop in and do some damage without the risk of repercussion. As I said, there will be these veteran soldiers, so these retired soldiers living in the town and their families, women, children, and other people who would have been attracted to live in Britain as well at this point, as Rome was slowly Romanizing the country. So it was a perfect place to start because if you can get Colchester, then the other ones theoretically would easily follow. So that's why she headed here.
So what did the literary texts say that she did when she got to Colchester?
Well, so the texts give a lot of detail. Something I really find interesting is what happened before she got here. It's in the texts. So according to the story, and this again shows the exaggeration and dramatization of the Romans, this idea that there had been a statute of victory built in the town. So when Claudius invaded and conquered and they started to build the town, they set up a statue of victory. Before Boudica and her army arrived, supposedly the statue fell and the people living in the town, retrospectively, I guess, had seen that as victory, the goddess of victory, the Roman goddess of victory, turning her back on the city at that moment. So surrendering already before the Boudica's army had even arrived. And you also have accounts of, it's all in the few sources we have, of in the Thames, there were visions of a city falling and that city was supposedly Colchester and there were people, bodies supposedly seen in the river. And this idea, and the Romans loved this idea of divination. They love prophecy and soothsaying and being able to tell what's going to happen before it happened. Often written after the things have happened, but it seems in the Roman narrative and in the Roman idea that this is something that couldn't be stopped. And was something that the gods even were not on their sides at this point. The gods were saying no, Boudica is going to get you. She's on a rampage and there's no chance of any defense. So that's what happens beforehand and then she reaches Colchester. And so the accounts are fairly clear. I mean, the main story that we tell and the one that is quite obvious from the text is that eventually at some point, not all the people, but a lot of the people in the town ended up in the temple of Claudius. So we know that there was a temple dedicated to Claudius, the emperor who conquered Britain in Colchester. It is very strongly believed that that is the temple that sits underneath what is now Colchester Castle, one of the three museums I am senior curator for. I was asked a while back, I've been asked by a few people actually, but I was asked a while back by Professor Alice Roberts. Unexpectedly, how do we know it's the temple of Claudius? And that threw me because at that moment, I was talking about witches and I had no idea. I wasn't expecting to be talking about Roman stuff with her. So I was like, oh, actually, I don't know. Is it? Maybe it's not. I'm not sure. Am I wrong? So I did, I had to go off and do some of my, because again, it's one of those things where you get told and you just take it as fact. But what is interesting is that we do have, so we know that it's a very large Roman building, the foundation based on its construction and the features within it that we know that it was created in the early Roman period.
We know that it was a temple because if, and this has been done, if you were to excavate under the area that is now the jail cells and what we call the Lucas vault, so some of the front rooms, you can see the temple steps. They are still there. You can see a series of steps going down, which is what you would have in a temple. On other Roman buildings, you'd have this massive structure with these steps leading down. And they found what they think is the area of the altar that would have been at the bottom of those steps as well. So it's clearly a large temple, the largest of which at that time was the temple of Claudius. So that's how we know that that building was originally the temple of Claudius. So we have all these people who have been trapped essentially in this building and Boudica's army surrounded. And a matter of days, I think, is that they were supposedly trapped inside there, which isn't huge long time, but it's still long enough that you would be terrified that you wouldn't have any food or water. That alone wouldn't kill you for a couple of days, but you'd be weakened, you'd be tired, you'd be constantly living in fear. We know that she and her army had slaughtered countless people in the town already to get to the temple in the accounts of this screaming and this noise that starts to appear from the theatre. And people were thinking where is it coming from? And eventually everyone ends up in the temple. And we also, of course, have archaeological evidence that shows to us that people didn't survive this event because we have things like the Fenwick treasure, which is an incredible collection of objects that I will not do justice to by describing. So please go and look up photos because it's wonderful. But it was buried in Colchester at the time of the Boudican attack, seemingly in a pantry perhaps because there are a lot of burnt seeds and fruits and other things found around it and underneath a big block that could have been like a table or something that would have been in that room. And the fact that it was found tells us that the people weren't able to go back and recover it. And this is quite significant because if you look at the objects, it's gold jewellery, silver jewellery, it's coins, it's really important stuff. And if you had fled and were able to go back to Colchester, because we know the town flourished again afterwards, we know people did live in Colchester after this event, you could have gone back to look for your things. The owners of the Fenwick treasure were not able to. And there was also found close by, I can't remember what part of the anatomy, but human remains were found with evidence of violence against them. Now, whether these were the owners of that or someone else who happened to be in the household or happened to have been passing through. But because of this destruction horizon that we've talked about, this dark layer of earth, we know that all of this activity was happening at that time of that event.
And of course, the destruction horizon itself tells us what she did to the town, she burnt it to the ground. Anything wooden, anything that could be burnt was burnt. And even stone and brick, we talk about Romans using other materials in their construction. With enough heat and pressure, even stone and ceramic building materials, to use the archaeological term, can collapse, can fall. The destruction was so all-encompassing that there would have been very little left of the town once Boudica and her army had finished with it, let alone the people who were living there.
So do the texts give any indication or the archaeological evidence for that matter about how many people were living in Colchester and how many people we may be talking about as casualties of this attack?
So from the kind of archaeological evidence, I guess is the best way of figuring it out because we kind of know roughly the size of the town. And a bit like how the city of London sort of still is within the Roman limitations of what was Roman London, Colchester is similar. Although the city has expanded, we do still have the kind of foundation parts of the Roman walls where you can see the limitations of what the town was at the time. I mean, it's always hard to guess numbers. Britain itself at that time would have been in the tens of thousands, probably people living here, maybe a hundred thousand or more in the Roman part of Britain at least. But Colchester being the capital would have had the highest population probably at that point. So although London and Verulamium were large towns or establishing to be large towns in London as well, Colchester likely as the capital would have had quite a large population here. And again, like we said though, a lot of that would have been military. So whether a lot of the soldiers had gone off to fight in this campaign in the northwest of Wales, so it would have been a much smaller population potentially. But yeah, it's going to be fairly large numbers and it's going to be noticeable. That's the thing. You've gone from a town that was thriving with activity and people in the markets in bars, temples, theatre, et cetera, to essentially nothing.
So Boudica has managed to strike her first blow. She's not finished yet. She moves on to London. Do we have any idea of time scale? Is this within a couple of days? Is this the next month? How long does it take her to start targeting London?
So we do know that she started in Colchester, and correct me if I've got this wrong, it was sort of spring time, sort of about March. It was after the campaign season had started, the Roman campaign season, which kind of ran spring through to autumn. But it was before the crops had begun to be sown. So if you're going to go burn a few cities, it's a quiet time. It's a good time to go with your box of matches, as metaphorically speaking. And then it seems that she gets to London about May sort of time. So there is a little bit of a gap, but at the same time, it is continuous momentum of what is going on. So whether she paused, regrouped, renewed relations, waited to see what the Romans would do, I don't know. Yeah, that seems to be the timeline. I mean, the accounts describe that the Boudican revolt spanned two years, 60/61, but we don't have precise start times, we don't have precise end times. But the evidence in London of that thick burnt layer we're all talking about in our cities, it very much dates to around those years.
So we've got that little bit of a gap. Is she able to expand her follower count in this gap? Is she continually saying to other tribes, look, we've done this to Colchester, join us. Let's do it at London as well, It's really fun!?
I think she would have recruited in Colchester or in the surrounding area as well. The other thing about timeframes that the accounts tell us is it seems like there was quite a lot of squabbling and back and forth around Roman officials. The Roman officials who were in the region at the time seemed to have been, I mean, there's a lot of blame, of course, in the text trying to find who was responsible for this. And of course, Agricola wouldn't be blamed because that was the father-in-law of the writer Tacitus. The other officials mentioned in the text, they're clearly going back and forth and different people were appointed in this time. That's the thing. It's not like if it was just one event, well, of course, you could appoint multiple people in a day. But there was clearly this thing where they could see this event was happening. Someone needed to take charge. The army was still up north. So even if they summoned the army immediately, it's going to be days to send people up there, more than days for them to come back down. And they kind of needed to finish their campaign before they could deal with what was potentially at that time seen as a little uprising happening down south. I think the Druids potentially were seen in the early stages as more of a threat still than Boudica. So the Roman army would have seen that as a priority to get that finished before they even thought about heading back south. But there's this period clearly before she reaches London where there's this bit of confusion. And there's, of course, time, as Kate said previously, for the people in London to flee. So there is definitely this slightly drawn out period of people being able to decide whether they think it's needed for people to flee some of the other big Roman towns or whether this is just a local thing and it might dispel itself or they can wait till the Roman army arrives back.
So Kate, can we say a bit more about this? Can we see that they are grabbing their possessions and fleeing London? Or can we see that they are digging their heels in and trying to defend it as best they can? What happens as you know that Boudica is on her way?
There is a degree of defense, but Ben's exactly right. We don't have the military force in the southeast at all. They're all away. They're busy. So yeah, there is some defense. But when it became apparent that they were not going to win against Boudica, then the procurator left and a whole load of other people, soldiers, merchants, the people who've been living in Londinium also left. Archaeologically, what culture has which we don't have within that burnt layer is a lot of personal possessions. They seem to be missing. And so that suggests that either they were retrieved from the burnt level salvaged or that they took them with them. We've got a couple of really interesting finds. We've got a pot with three intaglios within it. These are gemstones that would be set within finger rings and these are nice ones. But the symbols that have been carved into them are very much signifier symbols that are linked to the Roman Empire. So there is one pegasus as one of a discus thrower. And so the theory that's attached to these is that it marks you as being too Roman. So you didn't want to be found with those on you. You very much wanted to conceal them, but they were precious enough that you would want to go back and get them again afterwards. And that person didn't. So maybe they met their end or maybe they forgot about them. I don't know. Yeah, we've got only a few personal possessions still surviving at that time. The rest don't seem to be there in the same levels that they're there in Colchester.
So it sounds like London is being abandoned. Is that planned to be a permanent abandonment or are they planning to rebuild at one time? Are we seeing it as some kind of sacrificial lamb?
I think it was more strategy. I think it was purely a, we're not going to win against the force at this time. Best to fall back will come back stronger. And it is very interesting because there is that continuity of memory and plan because with the rebuilding of Londinium, it very much followed the same footprint, the same plan. There seems to be a, yeah, this was here, this was here. Put it back, rebuild, rebuild stronger with defenses this time. Rather than, huh, it's all burnt, it's all flat. It could be anything. Let's rebuild to a new pattern, a new plan.
So do the written texts tell us that Boudica walked into London, found it completely abandoned, wasn't anyone to kill. So she just set fire to it, but she really wanted to kill more civilians and just couldn't. What's happening?
The accounts do describe that there were people left behind and the written account is quite brutal of being those that are frail by age, sex or choosing to stay behind, unwilling to leave their homes. And yeah, they were massacred. They were burnt. Tacitus even describes them as being crucified as well, which surprised me because I thought that was a Roman punishment. So whether the Iron Age people were using a Roman punishment on the Romans, I don't know. I don't know if Lexi or Ben have got any more knowledge on that.
At Verulamium, there's very little evidence of actual killing in the archaeological layer of destruction. It's kind of a Marie Celeste situation in that there were things found that indicated people had to leave fairly quickly and had just left things. So there were burnt textiles found, sort of piled up burnt textiles. There were Samian ware stacked up that looked like it had been fired, ready to sell, but obviously had never been sold, but it was immaculate. And in fact, there was a whole row of shops that had just been razed to the ground, but there's virtually zero evidence of human remains. That doesn't mean that there weren't people who were killed. It just may be that if they were burnt, there's very little left. But probably people left because they knew what was coming. And they did know what was coming because they'd already seen and knew about Colchester and they knew about what had happened in London as well. What Tacitus says is that Verulamium is a municipium, which is the Roman description of a town, and it's the town of the Catevellaunii. And it's got these specific Roman rights and privileges. And it's been picked for destruction by Boudica because of that, because of the fact that it's adopted this Roman identity. And he talks about the fact that the rebels, Boudica's rebels, completely ignored forts and garrisons and went for civilian centers. And that's why they also picked Verulamium. He also talks about it being the richest material for the pillager. That's interesting. So I suspect that's also a reason why it was picked. Because it's a trading center. And that's what Verulamium is really known for. It's difficult to work out what happened to the civilians because there's very little in the archaeological record that backs up what Tacitus and what Cassius Dio say. It's this enormous death toll of, I think, about 70,000 Roman citizens and allies across all three centers that were killed. That doesn't mean to say that that didn't happen. But I don't know what the others think. I wonder if perhaps it wasn't that as much as they say and that perhaps people just fled. Because certainly at Verulamium within a year, roughly-ish, by October AD 62, Verulamium was a trading center again. And we know that because there was a tablet found at Verulamium discussing a trade between a London merchant and a merchant at Verulamium. And then there's also evidence to suggest that the town was rebuilt quite quickly afterwards.
So to the point that you made about it being a tactical retreat, I think that's probably quite true. And it's almost like, well, we know what's coming and we can't do much about it because the army aren't here. We're going to have to just go somewhere else. It's interesting to think about where they might all have gone, actually. And then we're going to have to wait it out and come back when she's defeated them. The rebels are defeated. And that looks exactly like what happened. It looks like people came back quite quickly. And certainly at Verulamium, they rebuilt that town and they built it better and bigger afterwards.
The Boudican revolt is not unusual in Britain that we've been talking about that. But also when you've got an empire the size of the Roman Empire with the constant expansion into new lands, new populations, of this is how it goes. Sometimes you're gaining ground. Sometimes you're losing a bit of ground. And there must have been strategy. There must have been techniques of, okay, we pull back. We go to here. We then go back fast. We rebuild as was. It's not anything that surprising or new. I also don't think that Boudica was just a mother and a queen who became a warrior because of the circumstances. I think she was a warrior before this. You can't just rouse troops and create a revolt like that. She had strategies. She was a clever woman. She knew what she was doing. The type of warfare that she was in charge of was working very much to British strengths, working with the landscape trees. They weren't meeting. There were Roman soldiers on a flat open field of they were picking their moment and causing devastating damage. And so the Romans were kind of also refusing to meet on those sorts of grounds because the Iron Age people, they had the upper hand there. And so I think there was, again, it's part of those tactics of, right, no, if we're going to win this, we will do in a time and a place at our choosing where we will have the upper hand.
And to your point about Boudica having been someone who was quite strategic and knowledgeable before her husband dies, there's also this wider culture of the power that women held in the Iron Age. In the archaeological record, there is evidence that inheritances and land did pass in a matrilineal way. Thinking specifically of Dorset and the archaeological site there where there's evidence of kinship, of women staying in place and men coming in and having families with those women. And then there's also the high status burials that we talked about before where women are buried with chariots and even buried with weapons and buried with high status objects. And that's the case at Verulamium. There's a really large cemetery that's found at King Harry Lane just on the outskirts of what was the Roman town. The burials there are Iron Age burials and there's really significant objects found with the women. So I think your point, Kate, about Boudica not suddenly just having to become this warrior, but possibly that's ingrained already in the culture. I think that's a really good point.
Why don't we go back to look at archaeological evidence? All three of you have described this destruction layer. So if I travel to any one of these three cities with my shovel, how far am I digging down? What am I going to find? What does it look like? Where is it?
Well, in London, you're digging down about six, seven meters to hit Roman layers. London is famous for having been burnt a good few times. Right, wrong history. And there's also a Roman fire during the Hadrianic period as well. But there is very much a thick layer across that seems to be contemporary with the 60/61 date. We have it in the city of London, we have it in Southwark. But we can also trace it out further in Putney, Brentford, Staines. So it seems that Boudica's army, Boudica's troops seem to be moving out west heading towards Silchester. Didn't get Silchester, but seem to be coming out that way. So I think the archaeological evidence is there. We've got a thick layer of black charring and then we've got the red clay underneath it. And yeah, we've got the burnt artifacts. We've got burnt timbers. Similarly to St Albans, we've got a pottery shop of Samian also burnt as well. That didn't seem to have been looted. Don't want your fancy Roman nonsense. Brentford ware's plenty good enough. Thank you very much. We'll leave that there and burn it. But it is very interesting to dig down and it's really emotive that when you see just this thick layer that is very obviously burnt and you can attribute it to such an iconic figure of Boudica and such a tumultuous time as well. It's powerful stuff.
Is that true of Colchester as well?
Yeah, and this is the thing I think so often when we're talking about archaeology, we're talking about the long history. In Roman times, we're talking about generally throughout this period, this is what happened in a lot of the time in the archaeology. That is what it tells us is because it's kind of refuse tips. It's the, as people always say, archaeology is rubbish. It is. It's the stuff that people threw away and didn't want to go back for. So it's telling these quite broad narratives. But here we have a snapshot. Here we have a moment in history where multiple people were affected. And unlike burials, human graves, they are a snapshot as well, but they are very much formed by society and family and friends and curated, to use a kind of modern term. This is a moment that happened a bit like Pompeii and the destruction of Mount Vesuvius where something unexpected happens and everything is frozen in time for a moment. And that's what makes it so exciting. In Colchester, because of the kind of variability of the land, we are on top of a hill in Colchester. Again, quite flat, but we are up and the elevation of the town has changed a little bit over the years. But what I can tell you is you're not allowed to do this, sadly, but if you were to go into the basement of Robert Dias or the George Hotel, there are parts of the destruction layer visible in the walls that have been preserved because you can see them there. So it's not far down at all in Colchester. I think for Colchester, it's partly because this part of the country is so building material resource poor. We are a town that has been recycled throughout centuries. Like I said, the base of Colchester Castle, which is a Norman castle, is on top of the foundations of the Temple of Claudius because rather than building new foundations, which we don't have the resources for, let's just use what's already there. And it's very sad, but you go to excavations and you find these beautiful Roman mosaics with huge trenches through the middle of them where medieval builders have had to try and get resources to build their own houses and buildings and things. So the elevation of the town hasn't changed much over the years, whereas with some places you might knock houses down, build soil over the top, and it kind of raises a little bit as time goes on. It's not quite that story in Colchester, at least where the limits of the Roman city are, right at the top of the city center. But yeah, you do see it not too far down, you don't have to dig too far.
If I went to St Albans, what would I find?
It's a little bit different. We're on a gentle slope. We're in a river valley, the Ver River Valley. The town at the time of Boudica's destruction, the Roman town's size was about 20 acres. Of that 20 acres, less than 50% was burnt. But it looks very tactical in terms of the burning. The burnt layer, or it's known as the destruction layer, is up to half a meter thick in places, and testing that was done on it showed that the temperature levels were really, really high. It was incinerated a lot of the buildings, and there's evidence of stone being burnt and clay tiles being burnt. There's pottery and coin evidence found within the burnt level, which confirmed the date of destruction to be around AD 60 to 61. So we know that that is absolutely caused by the destruction of Boudica and her forces. And that burnt layer was discovered by an archaeologist called Shepard Frere, who excavated between 1955 and 1961. The layer that was found was very, very widespread. He called it the destruction horizon. I was very lucky to be able to handle some of this destruction for part of an exhibition that I guess curated. Down in the basement of the Verulamium Museum, they have boxes of burnt wattle and daub, fragments of just absolutely burnt wattle and daub. They're very fragile. We were allowed to use some of the burnt wattle and daub in the exhibition, so we had our version of Boudica and some lovely objects loaned from Colchester, thanks to Ben and his team. So we had our Boudica right next to what she had destroyed, which was quite interesting. In terms of how far you would have to dig down to find that layer, because we are on a bit of a hill there as well, it depends where you dig. I was digging there recently. Only a few weeks ago, I was on a dig called the Rose and Crown Dig, so you can Google it and have a look. It's organized jointly by the museum and by the council and county and commercial archaeologists. It's a big partnership. And we were digging, we think, just within the walls of the later Roman town. We dug down. You're given a depth that you can dig to, and you can't go any further than that. At the deepest level, we were probably at about two and a half meters, and we had not reached the early Roman layer. And we kept getting very excited. We did find a lot of burning events, and we kept thinking, have we found the destruction there? But they were little isolated burning events that were caused by industrial practices and little fires, but they weren't the destruction there. So we would have had to probably go down by at least another meter and a half, maybe. So quite deep to get down to the original Roman settlement and burn there. But what we did find, which is really exciting, we found some Samian with three gladiators on it.
This gladiator expert is very happy about it. So you've mentioned Samian ware and wattle and daub, I would have thought, would just be ash by then.
Yeah. So the other thing about the attack on Verulamium, and it's interesting, is that the Roman bath survived, but the shops that were selling Roman products did not. That might be accidental. Who knows? It could be that stone survives, more than wooden buildings probably, is more really what happened. I think that when you pair that with the sources, talking about pillaging as well, it's interesting, isn't it? You think, it probably was a mixture of we're going to set fire to anything that represents Rome, but then you think, well, if you're presented with a stone, mostly stone construction bath house, where are you going to, it's quite hard to set fire to. This destruction horizon, we're talking massively high temperatures.
It sounds like Boudica's rage is literally white hot. Is there anything, because all of you have handled these objects, discussed these objects at length, is there anything that has been preserved by this fire or perhaps maybe that you were surprised to still find it and be able to identify anything that might surprise me?
I don't know if it would surprise you, but the thing that I think surprises some people and is incredibly important for our understanding of life at that time are the seeds and fruits and foods that are preserved accidentally because of this, because they're not going around burning food and fruits, because what's the point? You might as well take some and eat it or just leave it, because it's not really Roman. Although some of them are very Roman. You get dates and you get things that are clearly recently imported to Britain that are being found. Olives are being found in the destruction layers. We know they were bringing olive oil over long before Roman official occupation, but olives as food and all of these other things have been preserved through the burning, through the fire. That means that we can now know what people were eating at that time. I was listening to another podcast in preparation for this a little while back and it was talking about their last meals. I don't think these were their last meals, because we know where, like I said, where the fennel treasure was. These were found in such quantities and in such a way that it seems like it was a pantry or a larder rather than the people were snacking on dates and then, oh, food is coming, quick run. But nonetheless, it still tells us a lot about the diet at the time and what people were able to have access to as well, because this is the thing. Dates weren't growing here in Britain. It's showing what the Roman influence in terms of food was starting to show at that time as well.
If I had all the money in the world, one of the projects I would take on is to go through all of the preserved seeds and feedstuffs from the destruction there at Verulamium, because I don't think they've been looked at. Some of them were sent away, but some of them quite lost them out and they're just in the drawers still. And it would be amazing to go through and analyse what was being grown locally, what was imported. Any of you remember the burnt biscuit? That's from cultures there, isn't it? The burnt biscuit.
The roll, yes, the bread. Like you say, we had multiple burning events as well in Colchester. But from the Boudican destruction, you do get quite a few other foodstuffs. It's not just the seeds and the fruit. In fact, the other thing about cooking and eating, we have a whole iron griddle that was from a Boudican destruction layer. It was badly burnt and unusable afterwards because of the heat of the fire, but still kept its shape roughly. And that is on display in Colchester Castle. It's more like a kind of portable griddle. So maybe it was a soldier's griddle that they took on campaign or something like that. But it was not only the foods they ate, but how they cooked. It struck me as another reason to burn these three places. All three are central trading posts, but it's where the food is stored. So by burning them, you're taking out all of those supplies, which yes, they're going to come back and rebuild, but it's going to slow them down. It's going to distract them. And so it's part of the tactic. So not only is it spectacular, and it is an expression of rage, but it's also there is calculation within it as well, I think.
Okay, so three cities burn. We've mentioned that she may have been on the way to Silchester, which is another great site to visit, by the way, for any listeners who haven't yet. Why does she stop burning cities? What happens? Is she prevented or does she just give up burning at this point?
It's unlikely that she would have stopped with that going on. So talking of Silchester, so there is evidence of a burning event at Silchester around the same time. Whether this was Boudica's army, probably not, or whether this was people hearing what Boudica was up to and thinking, yeah, you know what? The Romans are pretty rubbish, actually. Let's kick them out, because Silchester was a really important Iron Age site for the Atrobatis, another tribe, before the Romans arrived. So very similar to Colchester and Verulamium. But as we say, whether that was actually kind of a direct response to what Boudica was doing or a subsidiary thing that happened about the same time, perhaps, we're not really sure. But what seems to be what happened from the literary resources, anyway, is that she was continuing. She'd left St Albans and she was going somewhere, perhaps, to another town. And it was at this point where the Roman army finally made their way back down south and intercepted Boudica's army.
So we've got an army on the move on its way back from Wales and they're planning on facing these rebels. If I'm a Roman armed to the teeth, and we all know what Romans look like because we've got so many images of them, when I look at one of the rebels, are they armed the same way as me? Have they got the same kind of weapons as me? What should I be looking out for if I'm a Roman trying to defend myself from a rebel?
Different weaponry. Not standardized in the same way with the Roman soldiers, with their legions and the cavalry and all of that. You think of the Iron Age communities and horses and chariots are incredibly a strong visual image. We know based on the weaponry that we've got from graves and also from the Thames. We've got spears, we've got shields. We've got also willow bark shield as well. That one's from Leicestershire that I'm thinking of. So spears, swords, daggers, short swords. Yeah, there was no absence of weaponry and coming back to that art question of the weaponry is also stunningly beautiful. It's decorated, it's symbolic, it's powerful things that probably were imbued with identity and tied up with the identity of the owner as well. So not standardized, not plain like the Romans, but very well made, very beautiful and I think they had magic on their side as well.
I think it's armor that is the real distinguishing difference between the Roman armies and the Iron Age people. So they had shields as Kate said and we have traces of shields here in Colchester. We have a beautiful kind of metal binding for what would have been a shield. But in terms of the Roman, like you say, that iconic image of a Roman soldier, the plate armor, the greaves, the arm guards, fully protected helmets. Now Iron Age people did have helmets. There is evidence of Iron Age helmets but whether Boudica's army had that and kind of as Kate says, often they were beautifully decorated and really fancy elaborate ones. So I think probably a big part of the army as well would have had some of those more bog standard, maybe even grabbing whatever they could find around them to use as a weapon. So they wouldn't have had armor because they wouldn't have had that lying around. Remembering as well the Roman army, the soldiers, the armor wasn't really theirs. It was given to them by the state to wear, to use in battle. So that was kind of a big key thing and has for a long time been seen as the key thing and the reason why eventually the army of Boudica was defeated is because they didn't have that same level of protection. I'm sure they were perfectly skilled fighters and very capable of defending themselves but when you're outnumbered the way they were, you also need that physical defense to be able to protect yourself.
They also had slingshots and they were incredibly adept with those slingshots. So these are small, clay, hard-fired pellets that are just slightly smaller than a chicken's egg that fired from a leather sling and they can travel hundreds of meters and the force with which they are moving is enough to punch through and kill. So if you also consider the methods of fighting of yet they didn't have that sort of armor but neither were they planning on meeting the Romans on an open battlefield. Yeah, they were playing with strategy. They were hiding in trees. They were bombarding. They were picking people off as they go. In the middle of the night, they'd work with the weather, they'd work with the train and they would have the element of surprise. I think they'd also play to the element of theater as well of to be loud, to be in your face and all the tension over here. Meanwhile, coming up behind you, you've got something else going on. So I think it's some different techniques and different strategies.
Carnyx!
Yeah, so just explain to me what a carnyx is for the uninitiated.
It's an Iron Age instrument, often but not always, with an animal head at the very top. It's large. It's almost as big as a person and some of them have a, they even have the tongue of the animal which when blown, moves and creates a different sound. There's one that's found quite recently, I think it was found in Norfolk. Yeah. Yeah, so there's great excitement that it might actually be linked to Boudica because it's found in the territories of the Iceni. They were documented as, by sources at the time, by Roman sources, as being very terrifying and used to terrify the Roman armies. I am friends with someone who's been working at reproducing these from original artifacts that have been found on digs and he played one, he played the reproduction of one of them and we used it in the museum. They are eerie. They have the most strange sound, quite low to start with and then you can build up to this quite shrieking sound. It must have been quite terrifying if you'd never heard anything like that before.
So the sources tell us that by the time Boudica met a real Roman army, that she had 120,000 warriors behind her. Knowing what we know archaeologically about the population of this area at the time, is that a plausible number or is that the Romans inflating numbers to make their victory seem more impressive?
I think there's a bit of inflation. I think they definitely exaggerated to make it seem that the Roman army defeating them was even more impressive. Also, this idea that the people alongside Boudica weren't necessarily all fighters. I mean, you do also have in the accounts that there were people sitting on the sides, essentially watching the battle who had come with Boudica's retinue. So this isn't a large group of warriors necessarily moving along with her army. This is a mixture of people, which does make you wonder kind of what was their intention if they're bringing others along with them. The Roman army does when it travels. You get a hangers-on of girlfriends, traders, other people to support the army as it travels. But yeah, I think that number is certainly exaggerated. But I don't doubt that it was large. I don't doubt that as she'd been traveling through Britain, she'd been gathering troops as she went.
Between the burning of St Albans and this final battle, is there anything else significant happening that the historians are just, you know, we need to get to the end of this. We need to write our conclusion. Or is it three cities burned, final battle straight afterwards?
Depends who you read.
Right, okay.
The section in the Agricola from Tacitus is quite short. It's more of a summative kind of thing of what happens. And then in the Annals, which is Tacitus' more prosaic, longer historical account of what's been happening, it kind of goes into a bit more detail about all the stages. All of these phases. That's where you get the vision in the Thames and all that kind of stuff. All of those things is clearly adding to the story that had already been established. As we've said before, all of these events are clearly happening over quite a large period of time. So there is going to be a gap between each event. So especially between Verulamium and that final battle. As to what goes on in that time, we can speculate. We don't really know. Boudica undoubtedly was gathering more troops. That was kind of the intention throughout this whole campaign is to rally and get more people alongside her. The Romans, of course, the army is making its way down. That is a journey in itself from northwest Wales down to wherever the site may have been. Because they're clearly heading towards a city and they just happen to intercept or they're aiming to intercept the army before they get to somewhere else. That's clearly what's going on.
Question. What is Watling Street?
It's a road. A Roman road. Probably one of the more famous ones, I think, actually. I always struggle to know when it comes to Roman stuff, what's famous and what's not. Just because I know it doesn't mean everyone else does. But yeah, so the Romans, I mean, they're famous for their straight roads, aren't they? When creating roads, they kind of pick two points and build directly between them.
It's described by people as like the main Roman artery. It runs roughly kind of northwest from the Kent port to the West Midlands. The total length is about 200 miles. It basically linked the landing site at Richborough and Kent, which is Dover, to London. And then it crosses the country to the military hub at Wroxeter. There is evidence that actually there was already a route there, an Iron Age route. I think sometimes if people don't maybe know much about Roman roads and Iron Age roads, they might assume that Romans came and just built these straight roads and there was nothing there at all before it was just paths. But actually that's not true. There were established Iron Age routes already in Britain. Of course there were because they had chariots and they had horses and they had carts and they had trade. So of course there were already established Iron Age roads. But I guess what the Romans do is they change the nature of these roads and the way that they're built and the materials they use. And they make them wider and straighter and they're able to take on heavier weights and soldiers. And Watling Street is important because it connects so many of these hubs that we've been talking about like Verulamium and Camulodonum, Colchester and London. And so it's an artery route. It's a main route for the military and also for trading.
We talk about Roman roads lasting quite a long time. What about Watling Street? Can we still see that being used in any way?
Yeah, so it's still used. I mean, it's an artery road that's still used.
So Watling Street runs between Dover and Wroxeter, which means it's long for anyone who isn't familiar with English geography. It's quite a long road. And we know that the final battle is known as the Battle of Watling Street. So do we have any idea where along this massively long road this battle is supposed to have happened?
The most that seems to be said is it's somewhere in the Midlands.
In the Midlands, okay. Is that the Midlands as we know the Midlands or the Midlands of what was Roman Britain at the time?
I think it's Midlands as we understand them.
The thing that we do know, which hasn't helped in the 2000 years since this event, we do know a little bit about the geography of the site where the battle took place. Now we know that it supposedly happened in a sort of valley type area with a sort of bottleneck. The idea was that this was done by the Roman army because they knew the army was so vast that they needed to find a geographical feature to help them to prevent massive onslaught. Because they would have just surrounded them. If the numbers were correct and it was 170,000 fine aged British troops, they would have surrounded that Roman army quite easily and obliterated them. But the Romans were tactical and they always thought about their environment and they thought about where they could position themselves and wait if they had to for the army to come to them to then put themselves in the best position to ensure victory. That's what we do know about this site is that clearly the features within the landscape were such that they were able to position themselves in this neck of this valley so that when the army in front of them came forward it was still one on one soldier rather than one on 50 or whatever it might have been if it had been an open field say. That should help us figure out where this battle has taken place. It hasn't. There have been a few sites suggested but none of them have that archaeological evidence to prove it for certain that yeah we've got ballista bolts or we've got you know spears and swords and evidence of conflict happening in these areas. It's a tricky one to know for certain.
If you think about what would have got left behind people would have just recycled a lot of those materials. The organic matter would have disappeared quite quickly you know the clothes and things like that. Unfortunately people would have also robbed these sites you know if there was a lot of death.
It also depends whose burial practices are being followed for disposal of the dead because the one thing that we do know about Iron Age mortuary practices is that they are incredibly varied and the number of extant remains that we have do not in any way match the Iron Age population that was living here. So there are so many different ways of dealing with the dead that the Iron Age people used that don't leave that much of a trace. They did bury some. Yes they cremated some. They also did excarnation of putting people on platforms. They did bone gathering. They did mummification. There is so much. So if it was the Iron Age population that came to gather their dead and treat their dead in an appropriate way yeah that just becomes part of the invisible Iron Age mortuary record. There's not enough evidence there for everyone that's had and if it is the Romans that are dealing with the dead well then that's going to be something that's going to be very practical and probably doesn't leave a great deal of trace and yes with very little respect.
So for those of us listening who are thinking about getting our boots on and a trowel out of the shed to go and find the battlefield of Watling Street it sounds like there isn't going to be one smoking gun piece of evidence that's going to tell us this is where it is. Do you think we're ever going to find it and be able to identify it?
I will pose another question. Do you think we need to? Because we have a lot of the sources have told us a lot and we know how the Roman military worked and we know how to some extent the Iron Age forces operated again both from textual sources and from what archaeological objects we have from that period. I don't know what more that site would tell us and what would likely happen is plaque goes up. Thousands of tourists might visit that site for a few years. I don't know what more it could actually necessarily tell us about the battlefield itself.
I think what would be more interesting is looking more into Iron Age women and burial practices, how they lived and I think that there are digs that are happening right now in Britain which when they do get written up might tell us more about the women of the Iron Age whether Boudica and Cartimandua were outliers or whether actually women played quite a significant role in every aspect of Iron Age life. I think that could be more interesting. I don't think it's necessarily that helpful to just be pursuing this idea of we need to find out where this last battle was and where Boudica died and I agree with Ben. I don't think that's really the real story.
Right, we're going to go to the Romans just for a quick session because we've got to finish the battle of Watling Street which, spoiler alert, the Romans hung around in Britain for another couple of centuries, didn't they? So I think we know how the battle ended. Can we tell from the sources how this battle went from beginning to end? Do they tell us exactly how it happened?
Not really, no. I mean and also it's written from the perspective of the victors. So yeah, it was quite a rousing defeat I think. Yeah, it's very hard to reconstruct the battle with any degree of accuracy I think with that span of time even in the length of time between the revolt and the accounts and then with the translations and everything.
So we've got a difficult battle that we can't really tell what's going on. One of the difficulties we have is that the sources tell us that Boudica doesn't survive. They don't really give an accurate portrayal. What do the sources say about her death because it's two different writers. Are they saying the same thing so that we can believe what we're told?
No, they're not. Cassius Dio says that Boudica falls sick and dies and that the Britons mourned her and gave her this costly burial and then they just scattered and went home. That's why we can't find the battle site. They all just scattered and went home.
Of course.
They packed up their picnics and off they went. Didn't leave any lunch.
So Cassius Dio, he's writing a little bit later. He doesn't know anyone who was involved. Tacitus is writing earlier. He does know people who were involved but he's writing the account with the less detail.
About the battle, at least. He says that she took poison and died. Now, if you took poison, you would also fall ill. So whether Cassius Dio had taken that account and it's kind of been extrapolated into that, again, a century later, we don't know. But also there's this idea, I guess, that suicide within the Roman world is something reserved for, or not reserved for, something that is particularly associated with the elite. And there are many emperors who took their own lives as a way of avoiding the injustice and the being murdered by a... I mean, there are plenty who were murdered as well but avoiding that, because so many emperors were murdered, it was kind of seen as a way where you take your own life because then that avoids any humiliation through being killed by someone else. I've always wondered whether the Romans have just put that onto Boudica. Seeing her as the leader of the opposition, essentially, and they say, well, she's a Roman noble. She would have been perfectly capable to die in battle and I'm certain she would have fought as strongly and fiercely to the end, given what else we know about her and Iron Age women. But maybe it was the Romans who were saying, well, you know, from what we understand of nobility, this is what a person would do. And so this is what we've written in the accounts.
And then I also don't think that she would have wanted to be captured. So whether she would have made that insurance measure because she knew there would be torture, there would be humiliation, probably sexual attacks should be paraded through Rome, broken. With capture, it's worse than death on her terms. Once it becomes inevitable that she is not getting out of this.
Do you think it's necessary for the Roman narrative that she has to die? Because I've heard a few theories of she managed to escape and lived out her life somewhere else.
She would have needed to utterly escape all the Roman attention. And if she was as she's described, she was a distinctive figure. So she would have had to have left her ancestral home. She would have had to travel to a new place where she could be confident that the Romans would not turn up.
And Kate, this question is for you. Is she buried underneath a London train station?
Of course she's at King's Cross! Queen's Cross. No, there is no evidence beyond popular myth that that is her final resting place. I think she's got a few reported final resting places. I think there are reports of her being, you know, her grave at Camberwell in South London. I think, isn't she reportedly in Colchester as well?
I think people think Colchester just because of the association with that was the first kind of town she destroyed. There was also the tombstone found at Corinium, Cirencester that had Boadica or something very similar as the name on it. And there was a big flurry of excitement mostly by the general public, not archaeologists, that this was Boudica's grave that had been found. But kind of as we know that that was a name that was sort of, it is seen elsewhere at that time. It's not an exclusively one person called Boudica. That name or variants of were seen across the Iron Age world. So, and I think from the timings, I don't know whether they were grave goods, but something about the dating of it as well wasn't right anyway. So it's not her, but people have said maybe there was a moment where people were thought, oh, maybe this is Boudica's grave that we found. But it was a very Roman tombstone as well. So they wouldn't have buried her with a Roman tombstone either.
So if we assume that Boudica is dead during or shortly after the battle, along with tens of thousands of her followers, what is the Roman response to this rebellion now that it's over? What are the consequences for anyone who's survived that battle?
The result of all of this is actually things go to the extreme of what she was fighting against from this point. The Roman presence increases, the Roman control increases, and that's both in terms of kind of the political system and political control, but also starting to put in kind of those Roman features that we talked about, the theatres, the temples, those symbols of Roman-ness expanded drastically after this point. And you see, archaeologically, you see these buildings start to spring up massively towards the end of the first century AD after all this happens. And a bit further down as well, you start to get town walls. You start to see these defensive structures built to defend those Roman towns in case there are large-scale rebellions that happen in the future. And they do, and there are more throughout the whole Roman occupation. There are rebellions and there are uprisings. So they are needed for the Romans. They do need those defensive features.
That's what you see is, in fact, what Boudica'd hoped to achieve, the liberation from the Romans. The outcome was that it was worse in the sense that it was stronger Roman control at that time. Verulamium becomes a walled city, built more in stone, less in wood afterwards. Becomes bigger, becomes more luxurious, just becomes more Roman. Actually, in Tacitus' description of what happens afterwards, he talks about the tribes being harried with fire and sword. So I think, unfortunately, they really are punished for rising up. More troops are introduced as well into Britain. Funnily enough, though, there's never been a military fort found near to Verulamium. So there's no evidence that there was suddenly a stronger military presence at Verulamium. But it becomes very quickly a bustling trading center again, and quite prosperous. There's evidence that there were Roman soldiers stationed at the gates of each of the gates in the city walls, but not that there was a fort there.
Kate, what was London like after 62?
In a way, it was almost like it didn't happen in a way, just because the rebuild was so fast, and it followed the similar sort of pattern to what was there before. It did have an impact if there were defensive ditches that were built, and it was laid out more as a fortified settlement. Our wall came later. But yeah, we see a similar sort of pattern. It becomes even more Roman, even bigger, and it's that lasting sort of impact. I think, Lexi, you referenced if we've got one of the writing tablets that was found at the Bloomberg site, which is a contract setting provisions for the rebuilding of Verulamium, and that dates to 61. So it's so lovely to have the written records as well, where you can sort of see the sending of resources, the sending of building materials as well, in order to do all of this. So they didn't waste any time at all.
We talked about Tacitus and Cassius Deo. When they are describing Bousica and her rebels, we've discussed that they seem quite misogynistic, quite xenophobic. Who was their audience? Who was reading these? Did the average Roman across the empire know that this rebellion existed, or is there someone who's perhaps just sitting in a library, reading something that's not exactly the best-selling text in the empire?
The story almost becomes mythological. It's a history, but it's entertainment as well. Boudica represents a sort of worthy opponent of the Roman might, but Rome triumphed. Rome overcame. It was also part of the story of she had to be defeated. Couldn't possibly have a woman disrupt the world order, according to the Romans, not to that extent. So it was entertainment, but it was also a salutary lesson of know your place.
You do also have a trend in the late first century BC into AD of exotic female leaders killing themselves, having tried to subvert the Roman way of life. So you have Cleopatra, of course, and her story is certainly mythologised, and we know she was a real historical figure, but definitely the written accounts make her seem like this magically enticing, seductive figure who usurped Roman power and was responsible for orchestrating both Caesar and Mark Antony and all of that kind of stuff. I'm not sure how much we can self-reference, but listening to your recent podcast on the Aeneid as well, the Aeneid written obviously was a story that existed long before, but the story of that, and Dido is this figure of this exotic female ruler who tried to almost prevent Roman establishment in the Mediterranean and through her own ways, not through war, but through, again, seduction and kind of stuff. But Boudica is only different in the way that she isn't trying to seduce the Romans to maintain power. She is fully destructive and fully trying to burn everything down. All three are mythologised and exaggerated, and again, I think it's because the Romans see women as inferior, and well, the Roman men see women as inferior, and are trying to reinforce that narrative through historic events to convince the Roman people that women shouldn't be in power, and that's what all these stories are doing.
Yeah, and then there's Cartimandua as well, is all part of that same thing, I think. I was thinking about the Bronze Age as well, and there's evidence that women in some cultures had more power in the Bronze Age, and there's definitely periods of history where women seem to have more power, and then it goes backwards again. In certain parts of the world, there are women who are powerful leaders, and it's just these patriarchal societies that change things and reframe things.
Yeah, that's a good point, because I also knew Caratacus in the north held off defeated more Roman legions than the Boudican revolt, caused more damage, held on for longer, but in no way made the history books in the same way as Boudica.
We expect him to do that, he's a man.
So her gender is central to her myth, and I think that Roman kind of misogynistic patriarchal idea of what a woman should and should not be doing, that didn't exactly leave Britain when the Romans left, that's carried on quite a long time. So can we see subsequent historians in Britain approaching the story of Boudica much in the same way that the Romans did, that she was stepping out of those gender roles and that she wasn't exactly a good guy?
It's interesting because the histories of Boudica, there's a written history that dates to the 16th century. Again, the story is very much picked up during the reign of Victoria as well, which is when the statue was erected of her and her daughter's inner-sized chariot near Westminster Bridge, of actually it's when we've got a female monarch on the throne, again, that we seem to return to the story of Boudica. And something that Victoria shared with Boudica is that link to victory being part of their name as well. So it's these strong female ways. A Boudica also stands for patriotism, for the underdog in the country, standing up against an external threat. It's a story that has different resonances for different periods of time. She gets co-opted, I think, by different individuals, different groups of people who want to use her for their own political or social or cultural ideologies, essentially. And again, with Elizabeth I and Victoria, not only are these both female rulers mirroring Boudica in many ways, but of course we do have female rulers at other points in history. But the reason I think there's so much interest in Boudica at those points is there's also this movement in both periods of Britishness and British expansionism, colonialism, all of that starting out under Elizabeth I, the exploration of the Americas and this idea of, okay, well, we've got a queen. How do we legitimize her as the person to be leading us at this time? Oh, we had a queen a thousand years ago or a thousand and a half years ago. She did a great job. She was defeated, but she was wonderful. And then the same with Victoria, when the British Empire was being even more established and Africa was being butchered into multiple pieces and distributed across Europe. Same thing happens again. Suddenly Boudica is seen as this wonderful figurehead of British history and Britishness. Again, I think it's those wider political things happening at the same time. As a way, like you say, Lexi, is kind of to justify, to kind of use her to kind of as a figurehead to justify the actions that were going on more broadly. She gets used as a reason to be able to justify colonization when in fact, that's what she was fighting.
She was fighting colonization.
Exactly.
Of course, that's the irony.
Now, I want to talk about what we can see now and all three of you are attached in some way or another to museums. So let's talk about this. Bend first, because Colchester got bent first. If I was to visit Colchester Castle, what can I see in the collection, in the exhibition that I can say, yes, that is from Boudica's rebellion?
So we very helpfully have a whole Boudica section. It's very clearly demarcated. This is the Boudica area. So we'll start with that. So we have a selection of burnt objects from that destruction horizon, the seeds and fruits and things that I mentioned, the griddle. There is a bit of wall, a section of a wall with plaster that had melted and burnt during the attack. Same in wear again, but no one took it. They just left it to burn. Glass, molten glass. Colchester had a very wonderful glass production industry. We've got some incredible glassware in a different section of the museum, but we've got some wonderful glassware, Roman glass, but some of it was destroyed. And then next to that, we have a case entirely dedicated to the Fenwick treasure. So this is an assemblage of jewelry, gold and silver, probably a man and a woman, it seems, based on the types of jewelry we find. The woman was clearly at the height of all the fashion trends at the time. So there's a pair of kind of spherical hollow, spherical earrings that I have seen examples of in Pompeii and Herculaneum, in the Cyclades and the Greek islands. You find them National Museum in Athens has lots of examples of them from various places. In Egypt, there's a mummy portrait with a woman wearing exactly the same style of earrings. So these were international fashion people. And the man has a silver armband, which is called an armilla. So it's a military award that was given to men, soldiers usually after they've retired. So this was kind of an established, I say family because there's also a ring in there that's so small it may have belonged to a child, we think.
This assemblage was found in a lift shaft during an excavation to build a lift shaft at the Fenwick department store in Colchester. And it's that classic story. It was the last day of the excavation. They were about to pack up and the archaeologist, Adam, was digging and saw a bit of gold and he was like, oh, it's a bit of gold. Maybe there's something under here. So they had to block lift everything because they couldn't micro-excavate. And then our conservator at the time took it in and excavated everything and all of this stuff started to come out. And it's really incredible. And it shows us how Roman Colchester at the time of the Boudican attack was clearly a place that was attracting wealthy former soldier families who were looking to set up a life. That was the thing. They were looking to settle down and live here, spend their final years here. So that's what we have in that section. But of course, you can go down to the foundations underneath the temple where we've got some wonderful reconstructions of what the temple would have looked like. And it shows the architecture of the building and how it might have been. You can go on a tour around the bottom and learn a bit about the construction and what happened in the town.
If you're not worried about the ghosts of Burnt Romans.
So the important thing with the vaults, because we also get a lot of ghost hunters that come to us looking to do it. Because I mean, a 2,000 year old building with very dark history because it was a jail for much of its history as a castle. I always say, though, that obviously the vaults underneath, they were filled with sand. They were structural. They weren't anywhere that people went other than when they were being built. So if you did see a ghost of a Roman down there, be a builder. On the physics of ghosts, if such a thing exists, that wouldn't really make sense. You wouldn't really expect to see any trace of people down there because it was hardly ever been into.
There you go, ghost hunters. You can put your little machines away. Now, Kate, it's a bit more difficult with London, isn't it? Because the Museum of London is temporarily closed as you are getting ready for your brand new location. Can you tell us a bit more about when the museum is going to reopen and is it going to have a section dedicated to Boudica?
So yeah, we're going to move from our current site at London Wall, sort of on the Barbican side, and we're moving to the Victorian Market Buildings at West Smithfield, which has got fabulous history attached to it. We are going to open later this year and at the moment, what's going on displays very much under our hats of keeping quiet about what it is until we're given the green light that we can talk about what will be included and what will be on display. So I'm sorry, I can't really say very much.
Okay, we're going to have to visit. I'm going to be the first in the queue. I can't wait to see that museum reopened. And Lexi, what about St Albans? Is there anything on display that we can say, yes, that's related to Boudica?
So the Roman Museum at Verulamium, or it's called Verulamium Museum, it's actually a museum that's dedicated to the everyday lives of Romanised British people. So it's kind of themed more around things like trade, religion, luxury, that sort of thing. There is a section though that looks at Iron Age objects that were found in different excavations, including that amazing chieftain burial that I mentioned at Folly Lane. And it also has objects like the lead slingshots that may be linked to Boudica. And it has things like an enameled pendant from the trappings of a horse. And it really demonstrates the skill of the Iron Age blacksmiths. And then we also have the bronze tubes from mechanics that have broken up into pieces. But they also obviously link to the battle sounds and maybe ritual sounds of Iron Age landscapes. So whilst there isn't a separate section dedicated to Boudica, there is plenty of archaeological evidence at the museum for Iron Age culture, I would say. And the fact that there was an Iron Age settlement that predates Verulamium.
Okay, so we're on to our final question. And it's got to do with something in Colchester Castle, I have to admit then, because when I was there last, at the end of the Boudica section, there was a little game. Two buttons. Do you, as a visitor, now that you've seen everything and you've heard the story, press yes for if you think Boudica was justified to burn down the cities and go on a rampage, or no if she was the villain of the piece? First of all, I'm really curious to know. Do you get a 50-50, or do people go, yes, you absolutely won, and no one presses the other?
What has been really fascinating. So I've been working in Colchester Museums for over a decade now. I've had a couple of different roles in that time, but it's been about 10 years. So I've seen that game regularly, have a look at it, just to see what score we're at, just out of interest. For most of my time here, yes, it has been about 50-50. In the last few years, there is a noticeable increase to people saying that, yes, Boudica was justified in destroying or fighting against the Romans, however it's worded, to the point where it's something like 70% of people saying yes. Now, I wonder if there are kind of certain things around, I mean, obviously, this is entirely dependent on our visitors, who our visitors are and what their thoughts, feelings and things are. And again, like we said, her symbolism is a British symbol, and there is a trend in society today, sadly, of pro-Britishness and anti-other, and I don't know whether people are feeling like this is an outlet for them to share their thoughts on that rather than talking about a woman who died 2,000 years ago and resisted Roman rule. I did wonder that, just because it seems to have been that I've also seen kids running up and smashing the buttons and running away, not really knowing what they're doing. But that would have been happening in all those years before too. So, you know, that could be a factor, but also I do try and check it every so often. I've noticed there has been a slight swaying towards that she was justified in recent years. So, yeah.
I seem to remember my small daughter pressed, no, she wasn't justified a couple of years ago. And when I told her about this podcast being recorded and reminded her of this, she went, no, surely I didn't. She was absolutely justified that Romans are evil. So, it's quite clear that people can change their minds. Now, I'm not going to ask each of you whether or not you think she's a hero or a villain. I'm going to ask each of you, do you think there's some level of justification in her actions? Because that's a slightly different thing. Ben, would you like to go first?
I mean, she's entirely justified. And like it's completely understandable how she reacted the way she did. And like we kind of came to the conclusion of whether it's taxes or whatever, I think 100% this is down to the fact that her daughters were raped and she was beaten. And it was the Romans that did that. There is no doubt that someone who had been through what she had been through would want revenge and probably deserved some sort of revenge. The scale of which she rebelled and of course ended up killing lots of innocent people, civilians, people who weren't associated with the injustices that she had faced. That is something else. But I think definitely she was justified and it is understandable why she reacted the way she did.
Kate, do you want to add anything to that?
I think Ben has it of you can very much imagine the position that she was in and how few options she would have felt that she had available to her. It just struck me something that I read recently about how looking at anthropological and ethnographic evidence from communities that have been more recently coming into contact with colonizers, how often it's women who are the intermediaries for many, many different reasons. But yes, it is women that stand at that point and so it is interesting to then come to compare that with Boudica's situation and again, it was a woman that was standing between colonizers and a population that was here beforehand. So it's an interesting one. I don't think there is a clear right and wrong which is why you didn't ask that question. But yeah, it's an interesting situation.
What about you, Lexi? Have you got any thoughts on it?
Just trying to put myself in her shoes which is very difficult for many reasons. I understand the feeling of just absolute horror grief actually that she must have felt. If what we read in the sources is true about what happened to her and her family and let's not forget this hasn't just happened. This sort of thing has been happening with the Romans, in Britain, in other parts of Britain as well. We know how people were treated from things that we found that have happened to people, really unpleasant things. The fact that innocent civilians were killed is not great. I'm quite pleased that in the archaeological record it looks like people may have had time to get out. So that makes me feel better. But yeah, I think I agree. I think it was Kate that said, you know, she would have had limited options. I think it was Ben that said earlier about the fact that when you've got nothing left to lose you turn around, don't you? And pick up a sword or whatever. You turn around and fight. And I think it feels like that was what happened. She just had nothing left to lose and wants to try and stop this colonization. So I may not agree with everything that happens but I understand why.
Okay, I'm going to get political for this final part of the final question. And I'm not necessarily going to ask you all to go full political. Personally, I think politics is a huge reason to talk about the past in the first place. We live in a time where all of those things that you've just mentioned are on the news every day. Imperialism, colonization, oppression, subjugation, mass murder and people are hotly debating if uprisings against these horrors are ever okay and discussing if people should just put up with bad treatment. Usually the argument seems to be that uprisings and rebellions are fine depending on which group of people are the ones oppressing and the ones being oppressed. And that's not even going into the modern surge of homophobia, racism, misogyny. They're all coming back in a big way. So I think there's probably thousands of women today across the world, people today who are just as aggrieved and as desperate as Boudica. They also have nothing left to lose. And don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to give them tips on how to burn modern cities to the ground or anything. And I'm not going to ask you if insurrection is only acceptable if it takes a format that makes the oppressor comfortable. Clearly I have a lot of thoughts on that debate, but that's a whole other episode. So instead I think that rather from talking about Boudica's perspective, maybe we can flip it around, talk about the Roman perspective almost, because as we say, there are groups treating people now, pushing them to their limits just as the Romans used to do across the empire. So for people today who say might makes right, the weak must suffer what they must or that violence is justified because that's just what humans have always done. Could those people learn anything from this story, even if it's just as a cautionary tale? And is it possible for a story that's 2000 plus years old to provide us with a learning opportunity?
People are essentially what they've experienced, aren't they? I think colonization and just dehumanization, subjugation. For me, just the lesson should be more about the great diversity of people that we've had in this country for thousands of years. People coming in and out for all sorts of reasons is more the story that I would rather tell. Standing up to colonization is more the story that I want to talk about, I suppose.
I think it is deeply depressing how in 2000 years we seem to have learned very little on a global scale about violence is not the answer. But at an individual level of I think like you're exactly right when you say everyone is a product of their lives, of their trauma, you never quite know what any person might be capable of in the best sort of way as well as the worst possible way. You put them in that sort of situation inner strength, inner resilience.
I think in terms of what we can learn, I think humanity has proven that we can't really learn as a group. We can't learn from the mistakes of the past. We haven't learned mistakes of the last century, let alone the mistakes of the last two millennia. But I think a positive may be that we can and hopefully we've done in these conversations is you can take this story of Boudica, of a woman, of power and influence and strength and use it to counteract perceptions of the Iron Age, perceptions of women, perceptions of the past as well because it shows us that actually this kind of time period and period just before the Romans arrived in Britain was much more interesting than a lot of people might seem to think. It wasn't people in mud huts fighting each other constantly. There was fighting, but it was a time of beauty, a time of self-reflection. Again, those mirrors show that people were clearly interested in how they presented themselves to others. It's the archaeology and the literary sources and the literary resources are the issue mainly because that's why pre-history has been seen as this dark period with nothing because we don't have people explaining what was happening at that time. But more and more we're finding out actually it was incredibly diverse, whatever way we look at that. There were people here from all over Europe, North Africa, probably from the Iron Age into the Roman period. And that is something that often gets overlooked in the kind of nationalistic stories that get put out about Boudica and Britishness. It's this idea well actually she was part of this much wider system of multiple different people, different genders, different sexualities, different ethnicities, different, you know. And we're still like that today. We're still a diverse nation. We're still a diverse place. But why haven't we been able to become more accepting?
Yeah, acceptance. The way that we treat each other even when we're different I couldn't think of a better place to end this conversation. So let's wrap this up. I want to sincerely thank Ben, Kate and Lexi for lending us their expertise on this very ambitious special double episode, one that admittedly tested my very basic tech setup to its limits. Sometimes I am so jealous of those history podcasters with rich benefactors and a state-of-the-art studio with their own team of tech boffins. But I digress. Pushing my laptop to its limits was absolutely worth it. So thank you so much. This has been so rewarding. For listeners, don't forget if you want to see some of the sites and objects that we've mentioned for yourselves. If you're in or you're going to be visiting the UK, you can travel to Colchester and see exhibitions there in the museum that's in the castle as well as the foundations of the Temple of Claudius, which is exciting. You can visit St Albans where there are visible traces of Roman structures dotted around the town as well as the wonderful Verulamium Museum and reopening soon in its new location where I will be waiting for those doors to be opening, London Museum, which promises to be even more absolutely incredible after its makeover. And though we didn't mention it in the episode, you can also learn more about Iron Age life in places such as Andover, the Museum of the Iron Age, any of the hillforts dotted around the UK. I personally love Maiden Castle. Go and say hello to the sheep there for me. Or living history museums that recreate Iron Age buildings and crafts. My favourite is Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire.