Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (16 page)

Above all, more vivid to the eye than in the diagram and most vivid of all perhaps to the eye of the imagination, there is the red layer. Lying about thirteen feet below the surface and approximately sixteen inches deep, the red layer is the substratum of burned debris which serves as a perpetual reminder to the archaeologist of the severity of the Boudican attack. ‘Far below the modern streets of the City of London’, writes Peter Marsden, ‘the events of
AD
60 are indelibly scorched on the soil …’
¹⁹

The massacred inhabitants have left no equivalent red layer. As with Camulodunum, where, as has been seen, similar conditions of fire and slaughter prevailed, we can presume that the Romans returned to the smoking ruins – or perhaps long after they had grown cold, for the time scale of all these events remains mysterious – and gave the wretched victims a mass cremation.
There are no skeletons, skulls or mere bones which can be ascribed to the first-century sacking with the same conviction as can for example the Samian ware baked black or the hoard of burned bronze coins in the foundations of Lloyds Bank.

If there can be no certainty, there are nevertheless some grisly relics which have been interpreted as coming from the Boudican era, since their actual form – skulls of heads which had been hacked off the body – fits plausibly into the known pattern of Celtic tribal practice.
²⁰
Some of these decapitated skulls may have been discovered in the Walbrook stream as early as mediaeval times: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of the mass beheading of a legion on its banks at the orders of Allectus, who led a revolt at the end of the third century, was perhaps an imaginative response to their persistent appearance as wells were being dug. In recent years at least 140 skulls have been turned up on four sites around the crucial Walbrook area, with references to a possible further large number on a fifth site. In no case have skeletons or other bones been found adjacent to these skulls.

There are various possible explanations for such large-scale finds. Since the earliest cemeteries – those just outside the city limits – are not far from the Walbrook area, these vagabond skulls might in theory have somehow been swept by the stream from their original sites, although it has been pointed out that the Walbrook even in its prime was never particularly fast-flowing. Furthermore it seems a strange coincidence that only the skulls were displaced. The skulls certainly belong to the early Roman period, first or second centuries, with at least one of them embedded in a wall erected in 200. It is surely legitimate therefore to connect them, however tentatively, with the one large-scale massacre known to have taken place within Londinium at this time, one moreover conducted by tribes with an historically known taste for the ritual use of water, wells, groves and streams in worship, and the ritual involvement of the head – both in life and death.
²¹

Despite the absence of physical relics, Tacitus leaves us in no doubt that an immense number of people died at the hands of the
Boudican armies. It is true that his estimated figure of seventy thousand Roman and provincial dead, counting the sack of Verulamium yet to come, is once again likely to be an exaggeration. But actual figures in these matters, even if verifiable, have a way of being secondary to the impact of the event itself. (For instance, the Cromwellian massacre at Drogheda killed three thousand Irish according to the official verdict, four thousand at most: it is hardly necessary to emphasize the resonance of
that
event down the ages.)
²²
It is the overall picture of an ‘indescribable slaughter’ taking place, as perceived by the Romans, remembered by the surviving witnesses, which is both appalling and convincing.

Nor do Tacitus and Dio combined spare us concerning the atrocious manner in which many of these victims died. In the
Agricola
, Tacitus merely makes a general statement that ‘there was no form of savage cruelty that the angry victors refrained from’; in the
Annals
however he explains further that the Britons never thought it worthwhile to take prisoners in order to sell them (as was sometimes done at the time) or to exchange them for their own men. On the contrary: ‘They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn, and crucify …’ Dio’s account is even more specific and as a result even more dreadful.
²³

‘Those who were taken captive by the Britons were subjected to every known outrage’, he wrote. ‘The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.’ On one level, the symbolism of these skewers with which the formerly oppressed tortured and killed the womenfolk of the former oppressors is sufficiently obvious, if horribly so. But Dio makes the point that these obscene cruelties were also accompanied by ‘sacrifices, banquets’ and what he calls ‘wanton behaviour’ which took place in the Britons’ sacred places, and in particular in the grove of Andate, their goddess of Victory whom
they regarded with ‘most exceptional reverence’. Taking Boudica’s earlier invocation to the Iceni goddess Andraste (or Andaste) ‘as woman speaking to woman’ and putting it together with this mention of Andate and her sacred groves, it would seem that the general slaughter practised by the Britons had some distinctly religious or ritual element attached to it; as did the Iceni rising, with a Holy (Armed) Figurehead at its head.

The presence of a ritual element does not of course palliate the fact of the slaughter – or the atrocities which accompanied it; on the other hand it should not make them seem worse. It is natural of course for a later age, sharing neither the religious obsessions nor the oppression which had provoked the rebellion, to shrink back in horror from details such as Dio’s. Tacitus’ explanation for these cruelties is however a significant one: the Britons must have had a premonition of what was going to happen to them: they acted ‘as though avenging, in advance, the retribution that was on its way’. As will be seen, he relates the Romans’ own final full-scale slaughter of the Britons, including their women and their very baggage animals – ‘transfixed with weapons’ – without emotion; no need is felt here to explain let alone justify such ferocity. The Romans were the winners, and the implacable destruction of the losers was their right and even, it might be argued, their duty.

For Roman civilization itself was far from lacking the concept of revenge. The most celebrated temple in all Rome was that dedicated at the turn of the last century
BC
to the god of vengeance, Mars Ultor. (While in Mars’ wife Bellona the Romans had their own ferocious chariot-driving spear-waving goddess of war, to whom future Warrior Queens would sometimes be compared, or compare themselves.)
²⁴
This temple was dedicated by Augustus after the battle of Philippi when he considered that he had avenged the murder of Caesar: here magpies and vultures and larger victims, horses and wolves, were sacrificed on the bloodstained altars. If it is argued – inverting Tacitus as it were – that the Romans in Britain after Boudica’s defeat were merely avenging what had gone before, then it must be pointed out that
Roman history was certainly not deficient in instances when hapless civilians had been massacred. Returning once again to the comparison with Vercingetorix, Caesar, for example, put all the innocent inhabitants of Avaricum (Bourges) to the sword during the period of his wars against the Gallic leader.

It has been remarked more than once that at the hands of the Romans the weak had no rights.
²⁵
Momentarily under Boudica, the Britons – like the Indians at the time of the Mutiny in 1857, to which we will return – had ceased to be the weak. Zestfully, they did not hesitate to take full advantage of their new strength. Where historical massacres are concerned, twinkling as they do like innumerable black stars in the moral galaxy of history, it seems fairest to divide them into two categories: those where the oppressed rise up and strike down their oppressors, exacting vengeance in the process, and those where the rulers or invaders exact their own vengeance on a particular section of the population, for their own reasons. The Boudican vengeance fell into the former category, which has at least the merit of being the more comprehensible of the two.

Curiously enough, Boudica’s own reputation as the leader who headed this avenging force has remained remarkably free of the taint of atrocity. Boadicea, as she must now become in reference to her later reputation, is frequently seen as a partisan queen of considerable nobility. Her lethal scythe-wheeled chariot also features more often than not – the chariot that never was – but somehow Boadicea herself never seems to leap down from it to take part in the bloodstained termination of a Roman civilian life. This may well be accurate, and again it may not. The highly limited sources available neither implicate Boudica personally in the bloodshed nor defend her from it. History – legend – has however by implication defended her from the charge of atrocity by glossing over it where she herself is concerned.

Beneath this lies the incontrovertible fact of Boadicea’s feminine gender. It is as though a woman leader can mount a ritual chariot, wave a metaphorical banner in the air, invoke the
spirits of revenge in return for intolerable wrongs done to her, but she must not actually be involved in the killing itself. After all, if there is no direct evidence that she was so involved, there is also no evidence against it. Boudica at all points cheered on the Britons and urged them to defeat the Romans. So the well-attested massacres – as well attested as any other part of the story of Boudica, since both Tacitus and Dio report them – vanish in favour of the patriotic female leader on high in her chariot: high that is, morally as well as physically, above the inevitable consequences of her oratory.

There is an appropriateness about this, which does not necessarily relate to historical truth. Boudica’s sex and that of her children made them peculiarly vulnerable targets to the Romans, intent on making a series of symbolically brutal gestures to indicate the uselessness of British resistance. So Boadicea’s sex has subsequently saved her legend from the tarnish of Dio’s revelations, for which in fact as the effective leader of the Britons she must have been morally if not physically responsible.

Meanwhile the red layer beneath the City of London serves as a different kind of
memento mori
of the Boudican sacking and perhaps a more pertinent one. Its existence is a perpetual reminder that even the most thriving commercial city can be laid low, and that by a people generally despised as slaves, and that all in an instant of time: the destruction of everything made of clay, timber, thatch – or even other, far more durable modern materials – is guaranteed.

For afterwards, after Boudica and her troops had streamed on to enjoy one further fevered hour of triumph before tuning towards oblivion – as it seemed – Londinium too fell into a state of decay and became a kind of ghost town. (Even the great new roads north of the river were abandoned: those newly excavated in the King Street site show a period of about twenty years’ disuse.)
²⁶
In the nineteenth century Macaulay imagined a situation in which some kind of ‘malady’ would be engendered within ‘the bosom of civilization itself’ to bring about the collapse of the then flourishing city of London: ‘is it possible that, in two
or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide the ruins … with owls and foxes, may wash their nets amid the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?’
²⁷

But in the middle of the first century
AD
it had already happened.

¹
Excavations of a site off Leadenhall Street during 1985–6 took place during a pause granted by the developer Legal & General before the erection of Leadenhall Court, a new centre of shops and offices; they were jointly supported by the Museum of London, English Heritage and the developer, who together formed the Roman Civic Centre Project.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eighty Thousand Dead

It was a glorious victory, comparable with bygone triumphs. According to one report, almost eighty thousand Britons fell.

TACITUS
, Annals

A
fter the fall of Londinium, there was still a third city to be sacrificed. Not yet gorged with slaughter or, more to the point, plunder, the Britons under Boudica swept on to Verulamium (St Albans). The city was not defended. Suetonius, the Roman commander who had coolly appraised the necessity of deserting an entire expatriate community, was not likely to hesitate over the fate of Verulamium. This was primarily because Suetonius’ attention remained focused on those measures likely to stave off Roman defeat in the first place, and then turn the whole pulsating British advance to the Roman advantage: it was after all for the long-term victory, or at least the saving of the province, that he had taken the decision to abandon Londinium.