Authors: Charlotte Higgins
Claudius was convinced by this shrewd appeal to his reputation, and pardoned the Briton and his family: nothing is heard of them again, though there was some (rather wishful) speculation in the nineteenth century that a woman whom the poet Martial mentioned some forty years later – Claudia Rufens, ‘
caeruleis … Britannis edita
’, ‘sprung from the woad-painted Britons’ – might be a descendant, suitably named after the merciful emperor. At any rate, Tacitus’s description of these events is remarkable: the historian has the Briton employing the quintessentially Roman skill of rhetoric and using it to best the emperor himself. Not for the first or last time, a Roman writer was using the figure of a defeated enemy – one who is shown to possess true Roman virtues – to launch a bitter attack on the imperial project. It is precisely this treatment of Caratacus that allowed the character to be created, by later British readers, as a heroic figure. The carefully described moment of the Briton standing before Claudius lent itself to artistic depiction: George Frederick Watts, for example, submitted a painting of the scene for a competition held in 1843 to
select artists to decorate the new Palace of Westminster. But Caratacus seems now to have drifted out of fashion and out of memory. There is no place for him in Colchester’s annual carnival, though you might argue that he has a better claim to inclusion than Boudica. It is probable that more modern Britons have, thanks to the
Asterix
comics, heard of Vercingetorix, the Gaul who rebelled against Julius Caesar, than Caratacus.
In any case, it was Boudica whom I was now seeking: the other great British rebel leader, who, in
AD
60 or 61, a decade after Caratacus’s capture, rose up against the young Roman administration. Under the rule of her husband Prasutagus, the Iceni had been a Roman ally. But when he died, leaving his kingdom and property equally divided between the emperor Nero and his own daughters, things went badly wrong. The Roman military, according to Tacitus, seized Iceni property, flogged the queen, raped her daughters. The flagrant abuses and grotesque humiliations were too much. With the brunt of the Roman forces far away, tackling a Druid stronghold on Anglesey, Boudica and the Iceni seized their chance. They rampaged through the south-east, and took on Camulodunum, where the behaviour of the Roman colonists – driving Britons from their land, treating them like slaves – had sparked outrage. Terrifying portents were witnessed by the Romans: in the town, the sculpture of Victory spontaneously toppled and the theatre rang with the sound of hideous supernatural shrieks; in the Thames estuary, the sea took on the appearance of blood, and people saw an image of the colony overthrown. Those who could took refuge in the temple of the deified Claudius, which itself had become a hated symbol of foreign rule. The Romans sent to London for help, but the procurator (or chief financial officer) sent only 200 ill-equipped troops. Camulodunum was otherwise entirely undefended. The temple held out for just two days before the town was captured and burnt, the inhabitants massacred. Finally, the 9th Legion arrived, but the rebels defeated it, slaughtering its entire infantry and forcing its commander, Petilius Cerealis, and the cavalry to ignominious flight. The procurator, or chief financial officer, fled to Gaul from his base in London. Finally, the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus marched back to the south-east from Anglesey and, despite the appeals of the inhabitants, decided to sacrifice London for the sake of the province as a whole. Everyone from the city who could
not follow in his baggage train – the old, the sick, children – were left to be slaughtered by the Iceni and their allies. Verulamium, the Roman town beside modern St Albans, met the same fate. Finally Suetonius Paulinus engaged the rebels on a battlefield of his own choosing, somewhere near London. His victory was total. Fleeing Britons were trapped by their wagons, which ringed the battlefield. Women were not spared. Dead pack animals bristled with spears. Eighty thousand Britons (or so wrote Tacitus) were slaughtered; 10,000 more than had been killed by the rebels. Boudica took poison and killed herself.
Matthew and I were heading to the Iceni heartlands of Norfolk. As we trickled south from Yorkshire, the camper van’s engine, instead of emitting its usual musical gurgle, began to roar and cough. Finally, with an unpleasantly acrid stench, it gave out, and we were obliged to continue by the less romantic means of a hire car. It was a relief, at least, to be in a vehicle that could comfortably travel at more than fifty miles an hour. The road into Norfolk, sweeping us east into England’s rump, was not designed for gentle puttering, but was a great trunk route, with lorries hurtling through the flat agricultural heartlands. Finally, in the market town of Swaffham, we ate a picnic in the graveyard – then ran for cover inside the church as a sudden downpour came. Its medieval ceiling was carved with phalanxes of angels, wings outspread. I lay on a pew and gazed upwards, soaring with them.
Past Swaffham, we came upon a sign inviting us to visit something called the ‘Iceni Village’. Since it was Iceni country we had come to see, and the Iceni Village promised us a reconstruction of an Iron Age British settlement, we each handed over our £6. We crossed over a wickerwork drawbridge stuck with plasticky heads on poles. Inside the enclosure was a clump of sketchily made roundhouses. Within, they were dripping from the rain. A few garden-centre ceramic pots were scattered around. Sinister-looking shop mannequins, with blue-stained faces, bad wigs and some distant approximation of Iron Age dress, leered at drunken angles through the gloom. They reminded me of the Ugly-Wuglies, the creatures made of pillows and old suits that come alive in E. Nesbit’s story
The Enchanted Castle
. Wherever Boudica was, she was certainly not here.
We retreated, out of sorts, to the village of Castle Acre, through which runs the Roman road known as the Peddars Way – now a
footpath that can be followed from the north Norfolk coast to Suffolk. Grateful for something solid and true instead of the Iceni Village fakery, we wandered through the ruins of the village’s Cluniac priory: the chevrons and diapers carved into the Norman arches were so crisp they looked as if they had been cut from paper. As the June evening elongated into dusk, we meandered along the river Nar, past fields drenched blue by oceans of prickle-stemmed viper’s bugloss. As we rounded a corner of a tree-arched lane, we saw a barn owl bowling along towards us, low to the ground through the dark-green tunnel. Its impossibly wide wings shone white in the gloaming. It was perfectly silent, and perfectly uncanny, like a bird in a dream.
The following day we went east again, and drove to the village of Caistor St Edmund, a couple of miles outside Norwich. In a field on its outskirts lie the remains of a Roman town. Some 400 years before, the scholar William Camden had come here too, researching his magisterial work,
Britannia
, a county-by-county description of Britain that drew on his acute topographical and antiquarian observation as well as his learned knowledge of the classical texts that, thanks to the printing press and the great surge of humanist learning on the Continent, were now in circulation. First published in Latin in 1586, it had already run to multiple editions by the time it was translated into English by Philemon Howard in 1607. By way of its learned and beautifully written descriptions of Britain’s towns, cities and antique remains, it was the work that, more than any other, began to wrest British historiography out of the grasp of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythography. Camden’s aim was, he wrote, to ‘restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britaine to his antiquity’.
Camden thought the ruins at Caistor were those of the Roman town Venta Icenorum (meaning ‘the marketplace of the Iceni’) mentioned by the second-century Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy. Most people since have agreed, not because there is any firm evidence that this was its name – no Roman inscription has been found on the site that definitively identifies it – but rather because there is no other settlement discovered in Iceni territory that has such a good claim to be ‘the marketplace of the Iceni’, the region’s administrative or ‘
civitas
’ capital. Now only the town’s walls can be seen above ground: where it once stood is sheep-grazed pasture. As Camden
wrote, ‘It hath quite lost it selfe. For beside the ruines of the walles, which containe within a square plot or quadrant about thirty acres, and tokens appearing upon the ground where sometimes houses stood, and some fewe peeces of Romane money which are now and then there digged up, there is nothing at all remaining.’
We walked around the walls, taking in the scale of the place: assuming it really were Venta, it would be the smallest known
civitas
capital in Britain, a backwater. Not far to the west, trains streaked past en route to Norwich, and the main road thrummed away, a bass line to the cawing of irritable rooks. The south-facing wall was covered in plants: the alkaline Roman mortar, which bonded together the flints when it was built in around
AD
200, had created a narrow strip of chalky habitat, an anomalous island amid the plain green pasture for lime-loving flowering plants. And so the ancient wall was covered with blooms: gentle mulleins, with their silvery furred leaves and tall spikes of yellow; buttery ladies’ bedstraw; delicate pink convolvulus creeping low along the turf; lipstick-red field poppies. We wandered down to the river Tas, now a gentle stream ambling through cattle fields; once, it is supposed, a busy artery to the North Sea, with goods loaded and offloaded at Caistor’s wooden quay. In the dry summer of 1928, aerial photography – then a brand-new archaeological technique – showed the complete plan of a Roman town marked out in neat lines of parched grass where the foundations of buildings were buried shallowly under the soil. Excavation then brought to light traces of a basilica, baths, a forum and two temples. But even a recent dig has discovered no evidence of an older, Iron Age settlement that might have been Boudica’s, despite the fact that Roman towns in Britain were often built over, or near, their native predecessors. Boudica had slipped away again.
We drove on to Norwich. The website for the Castle Museum talks of ‘East Anglia’s very own Queen Boudica’. The stars of the show were the Iceni torcs: fat arcs of gold, formed of twisted wires and with intricately decorated ends, the products of infinitely patient craftsmanship and vast wealth. They are part of the hoard of gold, silver and bronze late Iron Age objects found between 1948 and 1990 at Snettisham, near King’s Lynn. There are so many of these shining items that even with the finds split between Norwich and the British Museum, each display looks lavish. Nearby, children could take a ride in a simulated Iceni chariot. I saw an Iron Age sword, its hilt in the
form of a human figure, and some brightly enamelled metal fixing for horses’ harnesses: perhaps it was battle gear like this that the Iceni took up when they defied the Romans. A film showed a group of small children, dressed in putative Iron Age costume, being told the story of the rebellion by an actor playing their grandmother, who explained that the rebellion was brought down by the Romans’ superior technology (‘a solid line of shields like a living wall’). The story of Roman Britain told in this museum is the story of the heroic failure of the Iceni. There was little doubt whose side we were meant to be on. For someone who was so elusive, Boudica seemed to have been very thoroughly claimed.
As with Caratacus, everything that we know about Boudica and her heroism is begun by Tacitus. As with Caratacus, he puts into her mouth an extraordinary speech, delivered to her troops before the final, fatal battle. Speeches by great statesmen or leaders, set down in their entirety, are alien to history writing of the modern age: and since there can have been relatively few occasions in antiquity when it would have been possible to record speeches verbatim, their status as straightforward historical evidence of what was said is frequently fragile. And yet they are a constant of ancient historiography, from Herodotus onwards, reflecting a centrality to intellectual life in classical antiquity of rhetoric, of face-to-face spoken-word argument, of the dialogic batting back and forth of ideas. There is virtually no chance that Tacitus was drawing on knowledge of what Boudica said to her troops, if anything at all. (Nor would she, it hardly needs saying, have used Latin.) Boudica’s speech, and the oration that Tacitus carefully sets up to balance it, given by Suetonius Paulinus to the Roman soldiers, are opportunities for the reader to step back from the forward motion of the narrative and to examine the moral meaning of events. They are opportunities for the author to create character, and bring us vividly into the midst of a dramatic episode. For Tacitus, above all, Boudica’s speech is about vocalising the enemy. An enemy who speaks is already, in some ways, your equal. When an enemy speaks as well as Tacitus has Boudica speak, there is a danger she may be your superior. When your enemy is a woman there is, on top of all of this, something shiveringly unnatural afoot – but perhaps also something horribly fascinating and terribly impressive. Could a barbarian woman really have brought the virile Roman troops so low?
Boudica addresses her comrades from her battle chariot. Like Suetonius Paulinus’s exhortation that follows, it is not rendered as direct, but rather reported, speech. She is not, she says, speaking as the scion of a great royal house, but as an ordinary woman avenging her lost freedom and her violated daughters. They had already destroyed a legion, and they could do it again – or die trying. Such was her resolve as a woman: as far as she was concerned, the men could live on and become, in a ringingly assonant phrase, slaves – ‘
viverent viri et servirent
’. (The phrase is cruelly and cleverly punning: she seems to be hinting that the word for men, ‘
viri
’, is related to the word for ‘become slaves’, ‘
servirent
’.) Suetonius Paulinus’s speech is not obviously given any stronger a claim to the reader’s sympathy than the Briton’s, except perhaps by way of an appeal to the military discipline of his army as against Boudica’s ragtag assemblage of barely armed troops, more women in the ranks than men. (Though that itself seems ambiguous – an army of women may not be quite a worthy enemy.) Whose side are we supposed to be on at this moment? Ultimately, for certain, the Romans’. But in the thick of the moment – as Boudica cries revenge for her raped girls and death or glory for her troops – it is hard to to tell.