Boudican revolt

The Boudican revolt was an armed uprising by native Celtic Britons against the Roman Empire during the Roman conquest of Britain. It took place circa AD 60–61 in the Roman province of Britain, and it was led by Boudica, the Queen of the Iceni tribe. The uprising was motivated by the Romans' failure to honour an agreement they had made with Boudica's husband, Prasutagus, regarding the succession of his kingdom upon his death, and by the brutal mistreatment of Boudica and her daughters by the occupying Romans.

Although heavily outnumbered, the Roman army led by Gaius Suetonius Paulinus decisively defeated the allied tribes in a final battle which inflicted heavy losses on the Britons. The location of this battle is not known. It marked the end of resistance to Roman rule in most of the southern half of Great Britain, a period that lasted until AD 410. Modern historians are dependent for information about the uprising and the defeat of Boudica on the narratives written by the Roman historians Tacitus and Dio Cassius, which are the only surviving accounts of the battle known to exist.

In AD 43 Rome invaded south-eastern Britain. The conquest was gradual, and while some native kingdoms were defeated in battle and occupied, others remained nominally independent as allies of the Roman empire.

One such tribe was the Iceni in what is now Norfolk. Their king, Prasutagus, thought he had secured his independence by leaving his lands jointly to his daughters and to the Roman emperor, Nero, in his will. However, when he died, in 61 or shortly before, his will was ignored. Tacitus describes the Romans as seizing lands, enslaving Iceni, and violently humiliating the royal family; his widow, Boudica, was flogged and her daughters raped. According to Dio, Roman financiers called in their loans.

In AD 60 or 61, while the Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was leading a campaign against the island of Mona (modern Anglesey) off the northwest coast of Wales, a refuge for British rebels and a stronghold of the druids, the Iceni conspired with their neighbours the Trinovantes, amongst others, to rise in revolt.

Boudica was their leader. According to Tacitus, the rebels drew inspiration from the example of Arminius, the prince of the Cherusci who had driven the Romans out of Germany in AD 9, and their own ancestors who had driven Julius Caesar from Britain. Cassius Dio says that at the outset Boudica employed a form of divination, releasing a hare from the folds of her dress and interpreting the direction in which it ran, and invoked Andraste, a British goddess of victory.

In an imaginary speech, the Roman historian Tacitus has Boudica addressing her army with these words: "It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters," and concludes, "This is a woman's resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves." Tacitus depicts Boudica as a victim of Roman slavery and licentiousness, her fight against which made her a champion of both barbarian and British liberty; and he portrays Boudica's actions as an example of the bravery of a free woman, rather than of a queen, sparing her the negative connotations associated with queenship in the ancient world.

The first target of the rebels was the former capital of the Trinovantes, Camulodunum (Colchester), which had been made into a colonia for Roman military veterans. These veterans had been accused of mistreating the locals. A huge temple to the former emperor Claudius had also been erected in the city at great expense to the local population, causing much resentment. The future governor Quintus Petillius Cerialis, then commanding the Legio IX Hispana, attempted to relieve the city, but suffered an overwhelming defeat. The infantry with him were all killed and only the commander and some of his cavalry escaped. The location of this battle is unknown.