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
After 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.
At the same time Verulamium as a city was quite different in kind from both Camulodunum and Londinium. It was populated neither by Roman veterans and their families nor by Mediterranean businessmen but by Britons – albeit Britons friendly to the cause of Rome. Tacitus tells us categorically that Verulamium by this date had been granted municipium status, which ranked it below a veteran’s settlement (a colonia) but above an ordinary native tribal town (a civitas).
This privileged status must have had its roots in the events of the Claudian invasion in 43 when the Catuvellauni, in whose territory lay the town of Verulamium, had acted helpfully towards the Roman cause. Certainly Tacitus’ testimony is born out by archaeology. A Belgic stronghold called Verlamio had antedated Verulamium on the same site, but excavations (by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and later Sheppard Frere) have revealed that a carefully planned new British city was laid out from about AD 49 onwards. Furthermore, traces of a country house, a villa made of timber at Gorhambury, reveal that the loyal – to the Romans – Britons at Verulamium were beginning to live as did their new masters and allies.1
As Verulamium’s privileged status harked back to the events of 43, so the rivalries and hatreds of its inhabitants’ fellow Britons must also have played their part in the destruction which followed. A favourite notoriously has no friends. There was little sympathy and much jealousy to inspire the horde which now swooped down on its third municipal victim (Dio suggests that only two cities were laid waste but, since he does not name them, Tacitus’ testimony of three, bearing in mind his connection to the eyewitness, Agricola, is to be preferred). The fine Gorhambury villa was jealously destroyed by fire, as was much of the rest of the town.2
Once again excavations have provided evidence of a red layer of burned daub and ash far below modern St Albans: three shops disinterred from 1955 onwards give the same impression of normal busy life rudely interrupted, a first-century time warp, as has already been noted at Colchester and London. The modern focus of historical attention is however the later Christian town: the Roman city which was resurrected after the Boudican sack is now the site of a car park and an ornamental lake; the relics of the Roman theatre which can be inspected nearby are witness more to this placid prosperous centre than to the British municipium which the Queen of the Iceni and others in her army set on fire. Early British Verulamium has left little trace compared to these glamorous later developments.
But if there is evidence of fire, the same proportion of charred personal belongings has not survived. The fate of the residents of Camulodunum and Londinium served as an awful warning to the Britons of Verulamium; they had no wish to share it. These more fortunate citizens were able to make their getaway well in advance.
Once again Tacitus is clear on this point: ‘The natives enjoyed plundering and thought of nothing else. Bypassing forts and garrisons, they made for where the loot was richest and protection weakest.’ Even if one allows for Tacitus’ natural tendency to emphasize the superiority of the Romans, it must be admitted that Boudica – or whoever actually decided the direction of the British army under her titular command – had made a strategic mistake in ignoring for the second time the need to strike at Suetonius while he was at his most vulnerable.
For all Suetonius’ rapid and ruthless retreat from Londinium, he remained at risk until he had secured reinforcements for his own small force. This urgent need for reinforcements provides indeed the strongest argument for the theory that Suetonius must now have turned back to the Midlands and away from the London area. (The sources give us neither a specific geographical setting nor a time scale for the crucial events following the sack of Verulamium and leading up to the so-called ‘last battle’ between Romans and Britons.) The principal asset of the Boudican army was its size, enormous if now unquantifiable, but doubtless swollen with each successful foray, as the local tribes increasingly came to see the British side as the winning one. Then there was that famous Celtic courage, rashness if you like, which was particularly effective in surprise attacks and ambushes. Both these assets were liable to diminish as Suetonius caught up with his desired reinforcements, seasoned troops, and the British numerical superiority declined. And an element of surprise in the British attack could obviously not be long preserved, certainly not long enough for the Britons to gorge themselves in a further feast of municipal plunder along the way.
As it was, Suetonius had to face yet another reverse, this time one dealt out to him by his own side. Suetonius’ plans for bolstering up his own numbers from among the various legions scattered about the province included summoning the IInd Legion Augusta – so called because it had been raised by the Emperor – whose base was in the south-west at Exeter. The designated meeting place would have been modern Wroxeter (then known as Viroconium) or somewhere thereabouts in the West Midlands. Unfortunately Poenius Postumus, the Roman commander in charge of the IInd Legion – his actual title was praefectus castrorum, that is, camp commandant – failed to bring his men to the appointed rendezvous.
Poenius Postumus’ reasons for ignoring the summons are unknown: he may even have been pinned down by another tribe and had no choice in the matter. But his failure to arrive certainly increased. Suetonius’ problems. Lacking the men of the IInd Augusta, the latter was left to pull together the XIVth Legion and a detachment of the XXth (these had been with him on the Mona expedition) and the nearest auxiliaries available; out of all these Suetonius welded together a force of men variously estimated at between ten and fifteen thousand. Even if Dio’s estimated figure of 230,000 for the Boudican army is reduced to a hundred thousand or less, Suetonius’ troops must still have been heavily outnumbered. On the other hand these were hardened fighting men.3
Under the circumstances, Suetonius decided to attack the Britons without further delay. The bold decision that Boudica – or her deputies – should perhaps have taken themselves was in fact taken by the Roman Governor. This at any rate is Tacitus’ version of events, and it fits with what we already know of Suetonius’ character and his approach to strategy. He needed every advantage he could get against the numerically unequal odds; to choose the site of the battle himself and thus by implication its timing was to award himself two vital ones – as indeed it proved. It is true that Dio suggests to the contrary that the battle was imposed upon Suetonius against his better judgement as his legionaries grew short of food and the barbarians pressed him. But once again, Tacitus’ access to Agricola means that in a contradiction of this sort, especially over matters of military detail, his version takes priority. Furthermore Tacitus is convincingly explicit about the terrain chosen by Suetonius – without unfortunately naming it: ‘a position in a defile with a wood behind him’. This meant, as Suetonius realized, that he would only have to face an enemy at his front and here there was ‘open country without cover for ambushes’. These details smack of actual decisions taken and recollected in tranquillity long after.
Much ink has been spilt over the site of Boudica’s last battle, figuratively as well as actually, since it continues to be spilt in what might be described as the post-ink age. With D
io passing over the subject altogether – he tells us nothing at all about the actual site of the battle, not even the nature of its terrain – and Tacitus confining himself to the physical characteristics quoted above, an atmosphere had prevailed in which supposition, proposition and opposition have all been able to flourish happily. (In the 1980s two scholarly disputants concerning the location of the site did agree about one thing, that ‘the search for the pattern of the Boudica campaign is great fun’.)4 The key question must remain the view taken of Suetonius’ movements after his departure from Londinium, and during and after the sack of Verulamium.
It if is accepted that Suetonius went in search of reinforcements in those areas – basically to the west – where the scattered legionary fortresses and garrison could most easily succour his limited force, and then chose the position for the engagement for which he was now himself prepared, then a convincing argument can and has been put forward for a West Midlands site.5
In centuries gone by, however, a romantic attachment was felt to the notion of a last battle in London itself with special heed given to the area around King’s Cross station, built in 1852 and for which the name Boadicea’s Cross was at one point even proposed. The name Battle Bridge for an old crossing of the Fleet river near King’s Cross was held optimistically to offer encouragement. Thomas Nelson, author of The History of Islington, printed in 1811, was among antiquaries who were attracted by the idea of locating thereabouts ‘the operations of the Roman General in his arduous contest with that injured and unfortunate Princess’. In his long but spirited biography of 1937, Boadicea, Lewis Spence took much trouble, by the use of ancient contour maps, to point out the existence of some kind of defile around York Road and the Caledonian Road, between the ‘acclivity’ of Pentonville and the high ground near Gray’s Inn Land.6
Nor has London and its environs been allowed to dominate the field entirely: other suggested localities have included Wheat-hampstead, while Ambersbury Banks, a large earthwork in Epping Forest, is among local sites where the tradition of the last battle is cherished. Moreover in 1983 a revisionist argument for the Staines area was put forward by Nicholas Fuentes in the London Archaeologist; concentrating on the age-old valley between the well-wooded Shrubs Hill and the River Thames, and placing the ‘defile’ approximately where Virginia Water station is today. This argument however demands a radical reassessment of Suetonius’ campaign following Mona, including the theory that he actually brought his entire task force to Londinium, not merely his cavalry; it also proposed that Cogidubnus and the Atrebates of the Silchester area were somehow involved in the last battle; in the absence of firm new archaeological evidence, all this seems a revision too far.7
So for the time being at least the West Midlands region remains the most plausible locality, one supported by the known deployment of the Roman military forces around AD 60, the forces upon which Suetonius now drew, as Tacitus quite clearly tells us. Attention has been focused in particular on the Warwickshire area north-west of Nuneaton, near Atherstone; here, at Mancetter (Roman Manduessum), a steep escarpment can be seen rising from the plain. The discovery and exploration of a Roman camp here, which was the site of the XIVth Legion until it moved up to Wroxeter in about AD 55, has underlined its claims as a possible site of the last battle. Although the XIVth Legion would have departed by the time of the Boudican rebellion, auxiliary units – trained non-Roman troops – would presumably have still used the camp, and that would have made Manduessum, coupled with its terrain (still today conforming quite markedly to Tacitus’ description), an ideal focus for Suetonius’ strategic plan.f1 It would of course take the discovery of ‘some quite remarkable finds … such as a mass burial with closely identifiable weapons in association’ for the status of Mancetter/Manduessum to be finally verifiable.8 In the meantime no more plausible alternative has been put forward.
If the site of the last battle is finally unknown and perhaps unknowable, the course of the battle presents a different problem. One travels back in time from the suppositions of the twentieth-century archaeologists – agreeing only on the lack of certainty possible and the ‘fun’ involved in the discussion – to the ancient historians, who express their respective certainties by once again contradicting each other, as they do over Suetonius’ role in its inception. Once again, and for the same reason, Tacitus’ is the preferred account.
There was one matter on which the two ancient historians did agree – that the battle itself was preceded by a series of set speeches. But as with Dio’s earlier Boudican speech, recounted in Chapter Five, this was more a question of contemporary protocol than historical accuracy. In this case Tacitus and Dio give us a total of three speeches: one apiece for Boudica and Suetonius from Tacitus; Dio, having already given the Queen her say, contents himself with awarding Suetonius a tripartite speech, delivered in turn to his three divisions. It is Tacitus’ portrait of the Queen on this occasion, driving round and round the assembled tribes in her chariot, with her daughters in front of her, which has made an indelible impression. It has become joined to that physical description given by Dio on the earlier occasion of the tall, splendid and ferocious red-haired Celt in her war panoply; together they form the popular image of Boadicea.
‘We British are used to women commanders in war’ the Queen cries, before adding, with that neat lack of logic many other Warrior Queens will be found to echo: ‘I am descended from mighty men!’ Otherwise Tacitus’ Boudica emphasizes her ghastly treatment at the hands of the Romans – ‘I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters’ – and dwells further on other Roman atrocities, as well as denigrating the Roman courage. She ends with this clarion call to invoke – like so many Warrior Queens – a sense of masculine shame: ‘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 will.’
Suetonius, according to Tacitus, also stressed the feminine presence in the British ranks, but in this case he did so only in order to hold it to scorn: ‘In their ranks there are more women than fighting men.’ Dio’s Suetonius equally took the opportunity to sneer at the natives: ‘Fear not, then, their numbers or their spirit of rebellion; for their boldness rests on nothing more than headlong rashness unaided by arms or training!’ The Britons’ achievement in capturing the two cities of Camulodunum and Londinium is dismissed as being due to betrayal in one case and abandonment in the other. With the confidence of a member of the master race, Dio’s Suetonius declares: ‘let them learn by actual experience the difference between us, whom they have wronged, and themselves’.
The rightness of the Roman cause is indeed one of the major themes of Dio’s Suetonius: ‘the gods are our allies’, he goes on to say to this third division, ‘for they almost always side with those who have been wronged’. His other theme is the natural superiority of their heritage: ‘we are Romans and have triumphed over all mankind by our valour’. Lastly Dio’s Suetonius does at least envisage the possibility of defeat, if only to allow the author to dwell once again on those British atrocities which he had already described so vividly apropos the women sacrificed to Andate. If the Romans did not triumph and were captured, they could expect to be impaled, to look upon their own entrails cut from their bodies, to be spitted on red-hot skewers, to be melted in boiling water … In a word, ‘to suffer as though … thrown to lawless and impious beasts’.
In the event Suetonius’ confidence was justified: except that the courage was found equally on both sides, the skill and experience solely on that of the Romans. Even before battle was joined, the two armies drawn up for battle would have presented an extraordinary contrast in their equipment and the manner of their array, a contrast which only became more intense as the conflict proceeded.
Here were the Britons, a vast concourse of them it is true, but in no sense a standing army: the fact that they were farmers, that they had literally come off the land, wou
ld be cruelly emphasized in the aftermath to the battle. The Celtic sword was the traditional weapon of such people, a sword with a long history, a sword such as the sword with which ‘the wild deer’, Cúchulainn, had been able to despatch all fourteen soldiers sent after him by the wicked Queen Medb. They wore no body armour of any sort, except perhaps a pair of loose trousers (if we judge by the Gauls depicted on the Roman sculptural reliefs). The fine helmets and decorated shields which this civilization has left behind were for the aristocrat–warriors among them: these too would have been mounted on the light wickerwork chariots, like to their queen’s, from which they habitually dismounted to fight. (The chariot was however already slightly old-fashioned and had vanished altogether from the British/Celtic host by the second century AD.)9
We may believe that this concourse had the noisy, shambling quality of the Celtic array, with its music and its shouting and some hoarse amalgamation of the two. Perhaps the most significant difference of all between the British army and the one which faced it within the defile was that the Britons had brought along their families to see the fun. There they were, women and children, in a series of wagons stationed at the edge of the battlefield – which meant, given the lie of the land, at the back of it. One imagines a certain boastfulness in the mounted warriors of the Britons, and in their foot followers too, as beneath the eyes of their dependants they ‘seethed over a wide area in unprecedented numbers’. The presence of these innocent camp followers, in a position which might well and in fact did prove extraordinarily dangerous, illustrates perfectly how war for the Britons, with its joy of fighting, its hope of plunder, was a serious but also a tribal business.