Between two Warriors.

But the person who was chiefly instrumental in rousing the natives and persuading them to fight the Romans, the person who was thought worthy to be their leader and who directed the conduct of the entire war, was Buduica, a Briton woman of the royal family and possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women....In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. Cassius Dio
Britain in AD 60 was a Roman outpost. As such it should have been a another boring extension of the Roman Empire, given how the Romans imprinted their culture on every people they subjugated. Unfortunately for the Romans the British were ruled, not by their Ard~Ris but by the Druids who were both priests, bards & lawyers. They also seem to have had an innate ability for terrorism.

Culturally the British could not have been more different to their Roman rulers. For one thing, perhaps the most distinguishing thing, the Britons recognized women as equals, able to acquire property, bear arms, initiate divorce & they were educated equally with males. Amongst the British nobility most had some education at a Druidic college.

The heart of Druidism was Ynys Mon ~ Mona/Anglesey. To reach the pinnacle of Druidic training took 20 years. I know the bardic training involved a phenomenal amount of verse & grammar, all learnt by heart, so I imagine training in other areas was also rigorous. Let's face it, legally the druids recognized 9 types of marriage with duties & penalties attached. Start multiplying that & you are looking at a very involved & complicated legal system that attached an *honour price* to most crimes ensuring a victim was compensated. While I know far less about the Celtic legal system than the bardic I know enough to know a lot of the English *common law* is more derivative of this system than of its Roman counterpart.

The Romans, who built in squares & straight lines never understood the Celts who thought in circles & curves. It is this difference that is at the heart of Boudicca's uprising. My opinion, of course.

Boudicca. Like so many other Celtic figures she is half mythical. Even her name, which means victory, was less likely to have been her given name than her name as an aspect of the war goddess. Druid trained, she may have served her clan as a priestess as well as a queen, the Celts generally not making clear distinctions that way.

Boudicca was married to a man known as Prasatagus who amassed considerable wealth & was a client king of Rome. They ruled a tribe called the Iceni in what is now Norfolk & Suffolk. The background is important for a true understanding of what took place after Prasatagus died. Prasatagus had accrued a debt to Rome & when he died he left half his kingdom to Rome & the other half to his 2 daughters in an effort to both appease Rome & take care of his daughters. Under Roman law women could not own property so the Romans moved in. Now while the Roman law enabled there was a far more altruistic reason behind the rush to overpower *poor defenceless* women. Anne Rice covers this very nicely in her discussion Death of a Druid Prince.

The Iceni were at the receiving end of the trail of gold that began in Ireland, travelled through Wales & the Wicklow hills east to the North Sea & into Europe. I did mention the Iceni were wealthy & the Romans dearly loved gold.

At this juncture the Romans behaved stupidly & whatever their faults they were rarely stupid rulers. In their greed & arrogance they heaped insult upon insult on the Celtic peoples. The Iceni had already suffered the confiscation of their weapons. The Celts had an unusual relationship with their weapons. They often named them for one thing. They attributed magical powers & human emotions to them. They valued them as important heirlooms to be passed down through the generations or offered in religious devotion. The stores of weaponry to be found at the bottom of lakes in the Celtic territories testifies to this.

After Prasatagus' death the Iceni became a subject people, & lost their independence. They were heavily taxed & then Bouddicas' daughters were ritually raped by legionaries & she herself was whipped. If you've seen The Passion you will realise this was both messy & painful. The Iceni rose up rallying other tribes to their cause & rampaged through Britain. They targeted Camulodunum [Colchester] & razed it to the ground. There were no survivors. Anyone unlucky enough to escape the initial onslaught was sacrificed to the gods. The Celts had several nasty & painfully slow ways of doing this to those they particularly disliked. When Boudicca made the call to arms she probably did so as Priestess & queen. There is a whole complicated Celtic relationship to do with the land & kingship & women as aspects of *Mother Earth* & already sacred.

The Iceni then turned south & burnt Londinium to the ground. The layer of ash is so thick & extensive archaeologists recognize it as Boudicca's revenge. And she is not, as some suggest, buried under platform 9 at Central Station. No idea how that one started.

At this point things get rather vague. The legions, which had headed towards Mona to deal with the druids & effectively returned to do that later, headed back to deal with Boudicca first. No~one agrees where this took place but they do agree the Romans had wisely burnt their food stores & the Britons were marching on empty stomachs. They also agree the battle took place on a hill, the Romans holding the high ground, & that Boudicca's army was hampered by its own wagons & chariots [the chariots may have had scythed wheels & would have needed room to manoeuvre], its women & children. The Romans claimed a huge number of Celts fell in the battle. Boudicca reportedly took poison & ended her own life to avoid the humiliation of being paraded through Rome as a captive & Rome's stranglehold on Britain was secure for the next 400 years.

It's ironic really. Having fought to hold this most far flung of its territories Rome eventually discarded it in a last ailing attempt to defend itself from the marauding barbarians that sensed Rome was overextended, unwieldy & vulnerable. Abandoned by Rome another Celtic warrior emerged to rally the scattered tribes under one banner against a different foreign invader. His name was Arthur.