Boudican revolt

Around 60 or 61 CE, less than twenty years after the Roman invasion of Britain, the Iceni of East Anglia and their neighbours rose against Roman rule under the leadership of their queen, Boudica. The rebels destroyed the three main Roman towns of the province, Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans), before being crushed by the governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus in a battle whose site remains unknown. The revolt nearly cost Rome the province, but its defeat secured Roman control over most of southern Britain.

The Roman conquest of Britain began in 43 CE and advanced gradually. Some tribes were defeated and occupied; others, like the Iceni in what is now Norfolk, were left as nominally independent allies. The Iceni king Prasutagus tried to protect his kingdom by leaving it jointly to his daughters and the emperor. When he died, the will was ignored. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Roman officials seized land and enslaved Iceni; Boudica was flogged and her daughters raped. The later historian Cassius Dio adds that Roman lenders suddenly called in their loans.

The moment came while Suetonius was campaigning far to the west against the island of Mona (Anglesey), a refuge for British fugitives and a centre of the druids. The Iceni and the neighbouring Trinovantes rose together. Their first target was Camulodunum, a colony of retired Roman soldiers who had mistreated the local people, dominated by a costly temple to the emperor Claudius. The procurator Catus Decianus sent only 200 auxiliaries. The town was overrun, its last defenders held out in the temple for two days, and archaeology shows it was systematically demolished. A relief force from the Ninth Legion under Quintus Petillius Cerialis was routed, with its infantry wiped out. Catus fled to Gaul.

Suetonius rode ahead to Londinium, by then a busy trading town, but judged he had too few men to hold it. He withdrew, taking with him those who could leave. The rebels burned the town and killed those who remained; a thick red burnt layer from this time is still found beneath the City of London. Verulamium was also destroyed, though evidence there is more limited. Ancient sources claim 70,000 to 80,000 people died in the three towns, and both Tacitus and Dio describe extreme cruelty towards the inhabitants.

Suetonius gathered the Fourteenth Legion, detachments of the Twentieth and local auxiliaries, almost 10,000 men in all; the commander of the Second Legion refused to march. He chose a narrow position with woods behind and an open plain in front, so the much larger British host could only attack head-on. Ancient writers put Boudica's army at 230,000 or more, a figure modern historians treat with scepticism. The Britons placed their wagons, with their families aboard, at the rear.

According to Tacitus, the legionaries held their ground, threw their javelins, then advanced in wedge formation, supported by auxiliaries and cavalry. The fleeing Britons were trapped against their own wagons. Tacitus claims nearly 80,000 Britons died against 400 Romans, figures modern scholars regard as greatly exaggerated. Tacitus says Boudica took poison; Dio says she fell ill and died. Most historians place the battle somewhere in the Midlands, perhaps along the later Watling Street, but no site is proven.

According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, the crisis nearly persuaded the emperor Nero to give up Britain. Instead, after the governor's harsh reprisals drew criticism, Nero replaced him with a more conciliatory successor. In Colchester, London and St Albans the revolt left a layer of burnt material that archaeologists call the Boudican destruction horizon, and in Colchester a hoard of jewellery found in 2014, the Fenwick Treasure, was probably buried by a Roman couple who never came back for it. Unrest continued in the north of what is now the United Kingdom, but the south remained under Roman rule until the early fifth century.

Our 100 CE map shows southern Britain firmly within the Roman Empire a generation after the revolt.