Appendix One Shadow of a Warrior Queen

Appendix One Shadow of a Warrior Queen BOUDICCA AND THE DESTRUCTION OF LONDON: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS We know very little about Boudicca and even less about her anony- mous daughters, her husband the shadowy Prasutagus, their household and retainers, where they may have lived, fought, died or been buried. We have no strong grasp of who or how many were the Iceni, or what their daily conversation was or their immediate hopes and fears. Our words for Iceni society are already packed with duplicity: tribe, warrior, priest, native, barbarian, king. Many of these defini- tions come directly from Roman historians trying to make sense of a closely knit agricultural society based upon ties of kinship and alle- giance. Even the ‘tribal’ names (which changed for unknown rea- sons between the Caesarian and Claudian invasions) tell us almost nothing and may be little more than dynastic titles for groups of people joined under a certain ruler. For a Roman, all non-Romans were essentially barbarians – fascinating, exotic, very dangerous and, at least on first contact, utterly alien and ‘other’ (hence the terror engendered in the legions every time they came into contact with an army of indigenous warriors). Tacitus remarks, ‘remember we are dealing with barbarians’ – who, however familiar by looks, were simply unknowable. It is of course, a truism that the Romans were not racially biased. There is little evidence that the Romans had any general racial prejudice in the modern sense. Hence they assumed anyone, or almost anyone, could absorb Roman culture and manners, even as they themselves (despite the protests of moralists and conserva- tives) borrowed extensively from other cultures, especially in the fields of art and religion.1 Yet this disguises the fact that Romans demanded conformism. Absorption equalled assimilation into the civil, legal and religious structure of being governed as Roman. Refusal meant persecution or extermination (policies adopted towards both religious dissent- ers such as the early Christians and tribal opponents). For the rulers of an ethnically diverse, multilingual empire, the Romans were ever conservative and conformist. Otherness came from a wilful refusal to become Roman and learn Latin. The determining quality of Roman 519 520 Violent London civilization was similarity in terms of recognition of the cultural rules. The Romans simply could not understand the stubbornness of other highly civilized metropolitan peoples (in the Middle East) or the supposed haphazardness of agrarian tribespeople. The war of AD 60 itself is recorded in full by only two Roman historians, from whom the name Boudicca has come down through history. The evidence of destruction exists as a layer of blackened earth in Colchester, St Albans and London. The Roman texts are therefore supported only by the circumstantial evidence of city fires (a frequent occurrence in wooden towns). There is almost no direct evidence of violent destruction through deliberate human intervention, although skulls purportedly from the period were found in excavations around the Walbrook in London. The archaeology has therefore always been used to support the Roman texts (like biblical archaeology support- ing the Gospels), for no independent voice records the narrative of events and no oral tradition remains. Indeed even the name Boudicca is complicated by the fact that it translates as ‘Victory’, a rather con- venient name for a warrior queen and one she may have adopted or been given at a symbolic or ritual event. She may have been therefore Boudicca or another Celtic variant, Buddia, or neither to her follow- ers. She does not name herself in Tacitus’s narrative. The first written record of the war occurs in the work of P. Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman administrator and historian who was the son-in-law of Britain’s most famous governor, Agricola, a participant in the war himself. Born around AD 55, Tacitus had a personal interest in Britain through his marriage and was sufficiently close in time to be able to write from contemporary evidence, Roman records and the oral tradi- tions of legionary families. He did not visit Britain, however, and was only too well aware of the generic requirements of history, the sty- listic shape and tone needed for a retelling. Boudicca fascinated him, not merely as a person in her own right but because she represented a power against which Roman honour and virtue could be tested. For Tacitus it was Roman incompetence that allowed Boudicca to cause trouble but it was equally important that Boudicca and her follow- ers were not represented as mindless savages, for then Roman virtue would have no worthy opponent. Read this way, Tacitus’s account is determined by a Roman readership for whom history is a way of recalling a republican ideal in a world fallen into decadence and led by greed and political intrigue. The nobility of the Roman generals is contrasted with the barbarian warrior leaders. However noble, brave and honourable Boudicca’s speeches, they are predicated upon a back- ground of wanton terror and atrocity, which can never be forgotten. Natives always reverted to type. Roman generals, however, trusted their troops and the discipline of the legions; they were capable of following the path of virtue and many did so even when prosecuting Appendix One 521 a punitive campaign. Only when campaigners went too far, as with Paulinus’s revenge ride into East Anglia, or legionaries got out of hand, does Tacitus condemn them, for discipline and virtue (truth to an unspoken Roman personal code of honour) had broken down and on these two alone Roman power allegedly rested. It was the ability of the legions to recover from disaster and disadvantage that marked their superiority over undisciplined natives and barbarian hordes. Tacitus’s account gives only glimpses of the political state of Britain during the war of AD 60. The independence that Prasutagus thought that he had won by making the emperor co-heir was cruelly stolen away when Roman troops arrived to protect Roman administrators and their slaves who were intent on occupying the Icenian territories just as they had occupied the area in Essex and Suffolk of their neighbours the Trinobantes. It is unclear what this ‘occupation’ meant for Boudicca (or her representatives) as they had obviously not expected an attack and had prepared no forces. The Romans may therefore have arrived uninvited from nearby Colchester or, more likely, marched from London on the orders of the imperial agent Catus Decianus. The Iceni may have believed this to be a diplomatic mission to renegoti- ate terms. Either way, it is clear that the Iceni felt themselves to be outside Roman rule and independent of Roman taxation or law. They were willing to pay tribute, the naming of the emperor as co-heir clearly a symbolic gesture verifying neighbours (British and Roman) in kinship. No one expected an occupying force nor one intent on such violence. The Romans clearly intended to cash in their cheque and turn Iceni lands into part of the military province. Things then turn very ugly. Boudicca is seized and flogged. We do not know why, but this and the rape of her children is clearly a symptom rather than a cause of the war. The daughters may have been raped by Roman ‘slaves’, something that would have been deeply humiliating to the royal household. Yet these slaves were not mere menials but clearly the civil servants and administrators of the Roman authorities. Slaves such as Narcissus and Polyclitus could rise to become the most important men in the empire below the Emperor, so the term is very wide and impossible to interpret. Why then were Icenian lands occupied, the royal household humiliated and the nobility deprived of its estates? Because the Romans knew they were plotting a war. It seems clear that the Iceni and Trinobantes were possibly conspiring before the occupation, which itself was a punitive raid to show once and for all who was in charge. Tacitus tells us that the Trinobantes were already plotting to regain their ancestral capital (Colchester) for ‘they had secretly plot- ted together to become free again’. Insulted by the ex-legionaries who had made Camulodunum their home and expelled the aborigi- nal inhabitants, the Trinobantes were witness to the building of the 522 Violent London largest structure yet seen in the British Isles, ‘a blatant stronghold of alien rule’. This itself was an insult but even more insulting was the fact that the priests of the emperor cult were of Trinobantian origin and so the Romans were using Trinobantian administrators to tax their own ‘tribe’ for constant tribute for the temple. This was extor- tion in which the Trinobantes had become unwilling partners. Even more dreadful was the fact that the retired legionaries seemed to be under no legal or disciplinary restraints. For all intents and purposes the north-east corner of modern Essex and the southern part of Suffolk were under permanent martial law designed to uphold an arbitrary system of legalized banditry. Nevertheless, Tacitus tells us ‘servitude had not broken them’. The bonds of household and kinship still held amongst these Britons as it did still with those non-provincial Britons north of the Thames and west of the Sussex Weald. Some modern historians have suggested that ‘the rebellion of Boudicca’ was a consequence of the ‘new’ status of tribal life in Norfolk, hence ‘By AD 60 we may expect a number of the British tribes to have been formally recognized as civitates, or non-citizen but regular local authorities on the Roman pattern, to whom various functions were delegated, and it is likely that the kingdoms of Prasutagus of the Iceni and of Cogidubnus and perhaps others were similarly regulated.’2 Not only is there scant evidence for such an assertion, but the ‘status’ that came from recognition as civitates for a Roman must surely in East Anglia have been a scandalous humiliation and degradation (although not perhaps on the south coast of the province of Britain proper).

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