Great Tales From English History (4 page)

A
NY BRITISH ‘KING’ WHO LIVED UNDER THE
Romans had to pay a price for his protection. So when Prasutagus, the leader of the Iceni people, died in ad 60 he prudently left half his wealth and territories to the emperor Nero as a form of ‘death duty’. The Iceni occupied the flat fenlands that stretched down from the Wash across modern Norfolk and Suffolk and, like other Celtic peoples, they accepted the authority of female leaders. Dying without a son, Prasutagus had left his people in the care of his widow, Boadicea (or Boudicca), until their two daughters came of age.

But women had few rights under Roman law, and Nero’s local officials treated Boadicea’s succession with contempt.

‘Kingdom and household alike,’ wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, author of the first history of Britain, ‘were plundered like prizes of war.’

The lands of the Iceni nobles were confiscated and Boadicea was publicly beaten. Worst of all, her two daughters were raped. Outraged, in ad 61 the Iceni rose in rebellion, and it was Boadicea who led them into battle.

‘In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying,’ wrote a later Roman historian, Dio Cassius. ‘Her glance was fierce, her voice harsh, a great mass of the most tawny hair cascaded to her hips.’

Joined by other Britons, Boadicea with her rebel Iceni fell on Colchester in fury, slaughtering the inhabitants and smashing the white-pillared temple and other symbols of Roman oppression. Over eighteen hundred years later, in 1907, a boy swimming in the River Alde in Suffolk, deep in what had been Iceni territory, was astonished to discover the submerged bronze head of the emperor Claudius. Looking at the jagged edges of the severed neck today, one can almost hear the shouts of anger that have attended the satisfying ritual of statue toppling over the centuries.

The rebels now turned towards Londinium, the trading settlement that was just growing up around the recently built bridge over the Thames. The vengeance they wreaked here was equally bitter. Today, four metres below the busy streets of the modern capital, near the Bank of England, lies a thick red band of fired clay and debris which archaeologists know as ‘Boadicea’s Layer’. The city to which the Iceni set the torch burned as intensely as it would in World War II during the firebomb raids of the Germans. Temperatures rose as high as 1000 degrees Celsius - and, not far away, in the Walbrook Stream that runs down to the Thames, has been found a grisly collection of skulls, violently hacked from their bodies.

Boadicea’s forces had wiped out part of a Roman legion that had marched to the rescue of Colchester. But the bulk of the Roman troops had been on a mission in the north-west to hunt down the Druids and destroy their groves on the island of Anglesey, and it was a measure of Boadicea’s self-assurance that she now headed her army in that north-westerly direction. Her spectacular victories had swollen her ranks, not only with warriors but with their families too, in a vast wagon train of women and children. She laid waste to the Roman settlement of Verulamium, modern St Albans, then moved confidently onwards.

Meanwhile the Romans had been gathering reinforcements and the two forces are thought to have met somewhere in the Midlands, probably near the village of Mancetter, just north of Coventry.

‘I am fighting for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters!’ cried Boadicea, as she rode in her chariot in front of her troops. ‘Consider how many of you are fighting and why - then you will win this battle, or perish! That is what I, a woman, plan to do! Let the men live in slavery if they want to.’

These fighting words come from the pen of Tacitus, who describes the fierce showdown in which the much smaller, but impeccably armed and drilled Roman army wore down the hordes of Boadicea. At the crux of the battle, it was the wagon train of British women and children that proved their menfolk’s undoing. The camp followers had fanned out in a semicircle to watch the battle, fully expecting another victory. But as the Britons were driven back, they found themselves hemmed in by their own wagons, and the slaughter was terrible - eighty thousand Britons killed, according to one report, and just four hundred Romans. Boadicea took poison rather than fall into the hands of the Romans, and, legend has it, gave poison to her daughters for the same reason.

It was only when some of Tacitus’ writings, lost for many centuries, were rediscovered five hundred and fifty years ago that Britain found out that its history had featured this inspiring and epic warrior queen. Plays and poems were written to celebrate Boadicea’s battle for her people’s rights and liberties, and in 1902 a stirring statue in her honour was raised in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. There on the banks of the Thames you can see Boadicea thrusting her spear defiantly into the air, while her daughters shelter in the chariot beside her.

But the menacing curved blades on Boadicea’s chariot wheels are, sadly, the invention of a later time. Remains of the Britons’ light bentwood chariots show no scythes on the wheels. Nor is there evidence of another great myth, that Boadicea fought her last battle near London and that her body lies where she fell - in the ground on which King’s Cross Station was built many years later. Her supposed grave beneath platform ten at King’s Cross is the reason why Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express leaves, magically, from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

In fact, the bones of the great queen probably do lie near a railway line - albeit more than a hundred miles north of King’s Cross, near Mancetter in modern Warwickshire. The trains on the Euston line between London and the north- west rumble through the battlefield where, historians calculate, Boadicea fought her last battle.

AD 122

T
HE ROMANS EXACTED FIERCE REVENGE FOR
Boadicea’s revolt. Reinforcements were sent over from Germany and, as Tacitus put it, ‘hostile or wavering peoples were ravaged with fire and sword’.

But tempers cooled, and in ad 77 a new governor arrived in Britain, Gnaeus Julius Agricola. His daughter was married to the historian Tacitus and it seems likely that Tacitus himself came with his father-in-law and served on his staff for a while. So it was from first-hand observation that he described how Agricola, to promote peace, ‘encouraged individuals and helped communities to build temples, market-places and houses. Further, he trained the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts and expressed a preference for British natural ability.’

As a result, wrote the reporter-historian, ‘the people, who used to reject the Latin language, began to aspire to being eloquent in it. Even the wearing of our Roman robes and togas came to be esteemed. And so, little by little, the Britons were seduced into alluring vices - colonnades, baths and elegant banquets.’

Then, as now, the well-to-do locals showed themselves suckers for Italian trendiness. Beautiful mosaics, underfloor heating, villas, law courts, council chambers, sports stadiums, bath-houses, amphitheatres, roads - handsome stone structures of all kinds sprang up in the main Roman settlements, especially in the south of the island. But the most massive construction project of all was the Empire’s huge northern frontier wall, started in ad 122 and some six years in the building.

The great wall was the work of the emperor Hadrian, a patient and thorough man who spent half of his twenty-one-year reign systematically travelling the boundaries of his vast Empire, sorting out problems. In Britain, Rome’s problem was the warlike peoples in the north of the island - the Picts and the Caledonians - whom the legions had found it impossible to subdue.

Running seventy-three miles from the River Tyne on the east coast to the Solway Firth on the west, Hadrian’s Wall was 3 metres thick and 5 metres high, a huge stone-faced rampart with a succession of full-scale frontier forts along its length. In 143, Hadrian’s successor Antoninus built another row of ditches and turf defences a hundred miles further north, and for as long as this, the Antonine Wall, held, it created a broad northern band of Roman-dominated territory.

Excavations show that Hadrian’s Wall was a centre of bustling colonial life where soldiers and their families lived, traded and, to judge from the scraps of letters that survive, invited each other to dinner parties. To the rolling windswept hills of northern Britain the Romans brought
garum
, the dark, salty fish sauce that was the ketchup of the Roman legionary, poured over everything. For the sweet tooth there was
defrutum
- concentrated grape syrup that tasted like fruit squash. Another scrap of letter refers to the thermal socks and underwear that a Roman soldier needed to keep himself warm on the northern border.

It is not likely that many of Britain’s border farmers wore togas or conversed in Latin. But they must have learned a few words as they haggled over the price of grain with the Roman quartermaster or bit on the coins that bore the current emperor’s head. It was during Britain’s Roman centuries that cabbages, peas, parsnips and turnips came to be cultivated in the British Isles. The Romans brought north bulkier, more meat-bearing strains of cattle, as well as apples, cherries, plums and walnuts for British orchards - plus lilies, roses, pansies and poppies to provide scent and colour for the island’s early gardens. The British were famous for their trained hunting dogs, which they bred, trained and sold to Europe. But it was probably thanks to the Romans that now appeared, curled up by the second-century fireside, the domestic cat.

The Romans were proud of what they called
Pax Romana
, ‘the Roman peace’. They cultivated the life of the city -
civitas
in Latin - the root of our word civilisation, connecting city to city with their superb, straight, stone and gravel roads. Some Britons joined the Roman army and were sent off to live in other parts of the Empire. Soldiers from the Balkans and southern Europe came to Britain, married local girls and helped create a mingled, cosmopolitan way of life. In ad 212 the emperor Caracalla granted full citizenship to all free men in the Empire, wherever they might live.

But the comforts of Roman civilisation depended on the protection of the tough, battle-ready legions that had built the Empire and now guarded its frontiers. Organised in units of a hundred (hence the title of their commanding officer, the centurion), Roman legionaries drilled every day - ‘cutting down trees, carrying burdens, jumping over ditches, swimming in sea or river water, going on route marches at full pace, or even running fully armed and with packs,’ as one fourth-century reporter described them. Could a modern SAS man emulate the crack Roman cavalrymen who had mastered the art of vaulting on to their horses’ backs in full armour?

Those who remained outside the Empire were warriors too - and of them there were many more. The Romans called them
barbari
, from a Greek word that originally meant ‘outsiders’ but which came to be tinged with notions of savagery and fear. In ad 197, less than seventy years after its massive fortifications were completed, Hadrian’s Wall was overrun by the Picts, the warlike barbarians of the north. Many of its forts had to be reconstructed.

A hundred years later southern Britain faced another threat. Sailing across from the low coastal islands of northern Germany came the Angles and Saxons - pirates who preyed on the prosperous farms and villas of the south-east in lightning hit-and-run-and-row raids. In 285 the Romans started fortifying a line of defences and watchtowers to keep them at bay. Eventually the fortifications stretched all the way from Norfolk down to the mouth of the Thames and round the south coast to the Isle of Wight. The Romans called it the Saxon Shore.

But there was only so much that forts and soldiers could achieve. The pressures of peoples are hard to resist. The Angles, Saxons and other raiders from across the sea were part of the great swirlings of populations that were bringing change to every part of Europe. These barbarians - most of them Germanic peoples - penetrated the Empire willy-nilly, and by the early years of the fifth century they were sweeping southwards, threatening the survival of Rome itself. The legions were called home. In ad 410 the British asked the emperor Honorius for help against the continuing inroads of the seaborne raiders. But the bleak answer came back that from now on the inhabitants of Britannia must fend for themselves.

AD 410-c.600