Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (6 page)

As for Britain, she buried the memories of her rebellious warrior queen for many centuries and became a quiet and peaceful part of the Roman Empire.

While about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries

Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess,

Far in the East Boadicea, standing loftily charioted,

Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility,

Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune,

Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters o’er a wild confederacy.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ancient Roman London as Destroyed by Boadicea, Britain’s Warrior Queen

by Teresa Thoma
s Bohannon

A
learned antiquary, Thomas Lewin, Esq., has proved, as nearly as such things can be proved, that Julius Cæsar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o’clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Cæsar’s Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians.

Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants, the desirability of such a depot as London with its great and always navigable river could not have been long overlooked.

In Cæsar’s second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than a modern English town) perhaps already called London—Llyn-don, the “town on the lake.”

After a battle at Challock Wood, Cæsar and his men crossed the Thames, as is supposed, at Coway Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton and below Weybridge.

Cassivellaunus, King of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Mandubert’s subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and the Catyeuchlani.

Straight as the flight of an arrow was Cæsar’s march upon the capital of Cassivellaunus, a city the barbaric name of which he ei
ther forgot or disregarded, but which he merely says was “protected by woods and marshes.”

This place north of the Thames has usually been thought to be Verulamium (St. Alban’s); but it was far more likely London, as the Cassi, whose capital Verulamium was, were among the traitorous tribes who joined Cæsar against their oppressor Cassivellaunus. Moreover, Cæsar’s brief description of the spot perfectly applies to Roman London, for ages protected on the north by a vast forest, full of deer and wild boars, and which, even as late as the reign of Henry II, covered a great region, and has now shrunk into the not very wild districts of St. John’s Wood and Caen Wood.

On the north the town found a natural moat in the broad fens of Moorfields, Finsbury, and Houndsditch, while on the south ran the Fleet and the Old Bourne. Indeed, according to Stukeley, Cæsar, marching from Staines to London, encamped on the site of Old St. Pancras Church, round which edifice Stukeley found evident traces of a great Prætorian camp.

However, whether Cassivellaunus, the King of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had his capital at London or St. Alban’s, this much at least is certain, that the legionaries carried their eagles swiftly over his stockades of earth and fall
en trees, drove off the blue-stained warriors, and swept off the half-wild cattle kept by the Britons.

Shortly after, Cæsar returned to Gaul, having heard while in Britain of the death of his favourite daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, his great rival. His camp at Richborough or Sandwich was far distant, the dreaded equinoctial gales were at hand, and Gaul, he knew, might at any moment of his absence start into a flame. His inglorious campaign had lasted just four and a half months—his first had been far shorter.

As Cæsar himself wrote to Cicero, our rude island was defended by stupendous rocks, there was not a scrap of the gold that had been reported, and the only prospect of booty was in slaves, from whom there could be expected neither
“skill in letters nor in music.”

In sober truth, all Cæsar had won from the people of Kent and Hertfordshire had been blows and buffets, for there were
men
in Britain even then. The prowess of the British charioteers became a standing joke in Rome against the soldiers of Cæsar. Horace and Tibullus both speak of the Briton as unconquered. The steel bow the strong Roman hand had for a moment bent, quickly relapsed to its old shape the moment Cæsar, mounting his tall galley, turned his eyes towards Gaul.

The M
andubert who sought Cæsar’s help is thought by some to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King
Brown
), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brut of Troy.

The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban’s; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline)—a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it—had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.

Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to whic
h Llyn-don would never have assimilated.

The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river which it controlled, on the north by fens, and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depot and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.

Hitherto, the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city.

The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigor and so sharp in outline that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though
not, indeed, dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic.

In the year 62, London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban’s).

When the Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back still
“bleeding from the Roman rods,”
she slew in London and Verulamium alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome, impaling many beautiful and well-born women, amid reveling sacrifices in the grove of Andate, the British Goddess of Victory.

It is supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice lying scattered like flower leaves, and above that a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the
débris
of charred wooden buildings.

This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King’s Cross (otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage and despair, took poison and perished.

London probably soon sprang, phœnix-like, from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years.

FenMaric, one of the main characters in my historic fantasy novel,
Shadows in a Timeless Myth
, was a member of the Ninth Legion who fought and died attempting to stop Boadicea. He still exists to appear in
Shadows
because he was battle-cursed by a Druid Priest to the same fate that the Druid Priests believed themselves fated for, soul transmigration...but with a vengefully punishing twist!

The First Word in English

by Richard Denning

I
n 1929 an RAF crew took aerial shots of the site of the old
Roman town of Venta Icenorum around the church of Caistor St. Edmund near Norwich. The photographs revealed an extensive road network and soon the archaeologists moved in. During their excavations they came across a large early Anglo-Saxon cemetery with burials dating from the 5th century.

In the cemetery, they found some cremation urns as well as pots with possessions inside. One of these was full of bones—but they were not human remains. Most were sheep knuckle bones and probably dice or other game pieces. But amongst them was a bone that was and still is of historical importance.

It was a bone from a Roe deer and upon it there were runic inscriptions. The runes were Old German/Old English runes and spelt this word: RHIHFt

Which means
Raihan
.

What is Raihan? Well the “an” in old German meant “belonging to or from,” and the “Raih” is believed to be a very early version of the word “roe”. So this inscription which has been dated to circa 420 A.D. means “from a roe”.

It is not uncommon in the Saxon period to find similar bones from other animals with writing telling us which beast it is from.

So what we have here are the possessions of a man or woman from the very first years of Anglo-Saxon settlement of East Anglia buried in a cemetery that would have been very new, within or close to a decaying Roman town. What we also have is the very first word written in the country that would one day become England in the language which would one day be called English.

What we see here are the scrapings of one of the first of the mercenaries who crossed the North Sea on hearing the call from the Britons for fighters to help protect Britannia from the Picts and Irish. He and thousands like him stayed on to carve out a nation.

There is more on this word and 99 other ones that form part of our history in
The Story of English in 100 Words
by David Crystal. It’s a fascinating book and I very much recommend it.

I find this evidence of the first written word in English fascinating and quite romantic really. I write novels about the early Anglo-Saxon period, always striving to bring back to life people who died fourteen centuries ago. This to me is a tangible relic of one of those people.

Degsastan: A Lost Battlefield

by Richard Denning

Ethelfrid, king of the Northumbrians, having vanquished
the nations of the Scots, expels them from the territories of the English, [a.d. 603.] At this time, Ethelfrid, a most worthy king, with ambitions of glory, governed the kingdom of the Northumbrians, and ravaged the Britons more than all the great men of the English...whereupon, Aedan, king of the Scots that inhabit Britain, being concerned at his success, came against him with an immense and mighty army, but was beaten by an inferior force, and put to flight; for almost all his army was slain at a famous place, called Degsastan. In which battle also Theodbald, brother to Ethelfrid, was killed, with almost all the forces he commanded.... From that time, no king of the Scots durst come into Britain to make war on the English to this day.

—from the chronicler Bede

I
n the year 603 an important battle was fought somewhere in the Scottish borders. It probably brought together several nations and races—Scots, Picts, Romano-British and English—in a showdown that determined the future of the region for a hundred years and propelled the Northumbrian Kingdom into a dominance that led to its golden age as recorded by Bede in the 8th century.

It was so well known a location that Bede even says it was
“a famous place, called Degsastan.”
Yet today we do not know with any certainty where it may lie. So what do we really know?

The nations of Deira, Bernicia, Rheged, Strathclyde, Manau Godddin, Dál-Riata, Mercia, and the lands of the Picts are the players in this drama and frequently entered into conflicts and alliances with each other.

Coming from the east, the tribes of Anglo-Saxons were expanding their holdings in Northumbria and moving west. They came into conflict first with the Romano-British or Welsh. The Battle of Catraeth—fought around 597 A.D. between the fledgling English Kingdoms and the Romano-British natives of Rheged (Cumbria), Strathclyde (Dumbarton area) and Manau Goddodin (around Edinburgh)—weakened the British to the extent that Aethelfrith’s Bernicians were able to move on into the lands “between the walls,” that is, to threaten that area between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.

This seems to have provoked the Scots under Aedann Mac Gabrhrain into becoming interested in Bernicia. The Scots were actually an Irish tribe from Ulster who in about 500 to 600 settled the west coast of Scotland. They came into conflict with the Picts and the British too. But in c. A.D. 601 a diplomatic mission from the Scots to the Angles appears to have occurred.

All we know is that the Scots princes Bran and Domanghast died at that meeting, or shortly afterwards, and that Aethelfrith was held to blame. The Scots’ response was not immediate however—not, in fact, for two years. There are references to a plague in the
Annals Cambriae
about the same time which might explain why the Scots took two years to respond to the loss of two princes. Eventually, they gathered an alliance and marched under King Aedann to Degsastan where, as Bede describes, the Scots were beaten by the much smaller forces of Aethelfrith and his brother Theobald, the one who perished in the battle.