Great Trees of Wales #2: Nevern's Bleeding Yew

Does a bleeding yew tree mark the grave of an ancient High King in a small Welsh churchyard?

Bleeding yew trees are actually common enough to be a readers problem on Gardner's World, but this one is the famous Bleeding Yew. It's a pity then that there isn't a better story about why blood red sap seeps from this 700 year old tree at certain times of the year, but maybe I can do something about that.

The main story is that a monk was hanged here for a crime he didn't commit, but there are also versions where it is empathy for Jesus or that it is waiting for an independent Wales or world peace, or something.

However the yew though is just the hook to lure you into the churchyard of this fascinating little hamlet.

Nevern is in an interesting part of the world. A few miles away is Castell Henllys, a reconstruction Iron Age village on the site of a genuine Iron Age village. The discovery of the post holes of the original huts in 1980 saved the place from becoming an Asterix theme park, and instead there are authentic Celtic roundhouses here, a reminder of a time when there were no Welsh or English, just Britons.

Also nearby is Pendre Ifan, possibly the finest dolmen in Wales.

The Church of St Brynach though is in its own way just as fascinating.

First of all there's St Brynach himself, who according to his chronicler was a bit of a lad until he converted to Christianity and cleaned up his act. At least one woman was apparently unimpressed with his new found chastity and attacked him with a spear when he wouldn't do the business with her.

The current church is a Norman one built on the site of St Brynach's original "clas". Apparently this was his third attempt at church building. The first failed when he was chased away by demons and the second when the locals stole his wood. (You know, I'm starting to think this chronicler was taking the piss.....).

What does remain though are some very curious stones. One is now the outside sill of a window and is inscribed with the seemingly random letters. Another is inside and has a rather stylised cross on it, but the most interesting has some curious upside down Ogham writing on it. It just says 'Maglocunos son of Clutarius' (was here?), but because it says it in Latin as well it helped scholars to decipher this ancient script.

Outside is a wonderful 10th century Celtic high cross, but the highlight of the churchyard is the enigmatic Vitalianus Stone. This dates from about 500AD and is also inscribed in Ogham and Latin. Possibly this was here even before Brynach.

Now 500AD is right in the middle of the Age of Arthur. This is the year usually given for the Battle of Badon Hill, which is mentioned enough times in different sources to probably be a real defeat for the Anglo-Saxons, although it's far from clear if anyone called Arthur was ever involved in it.

Now Vitalani could just be some otherwise anonymous Roman who just happens to be buried in what subsequently became the home of a Celtic Saint, but he could also be someone much more interesting. The Latin inscription actually says "Vitalani Emerato" which is cod Latin, the second word should probably be Emeritus, meaning "of merit". This may be a spelling mistake, or it could be a local Celtic dialect.

But if the second word is wrong, what if the first word is too? Vitalani or Vitalinus is not a common Latin name. However the chronicler Nennius, who cobbled together a work called Historia Brittonum in the ninth century does have someone whose father and grandfather both have that name. After the brief mention of Arthur in the poem Y Goddodin, Nennius is our oldest primary source for the legendary chap, although Nennius actually calls him dux bellorum meaning Great Leader, not king. It is from Nennius that we get the famous list of Arthur's twelve battles.

Nennius also gives us the tale of Vortigern, who invited the Saxons over as mercenaries only to have them betray him. The story most people know about Vortigern is how his castle kept falling down until Merlin told him about the two dragons under the foundations. Merlin was added to this story in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in Nennius the boy who narrowly avoids becoming part of the castle is Ambosius Aurelianus, who is well attested enough to probably be real as well.

Meeting of Vortigern and Rowena by William Hamilton

What interesting though is that Nennius tells us
Vortigern's dad and granddad were both called Vitalinus. Now in Old Welsh Vortigern actually means Great King, so it could be a title rather than a name. In which case, what was he actually called? Well, the obvious answer is Vitalinus, the family name.

In which case do we have an ancient High King of Britain buried here?

We can't be sure, but both the Historia Brittonum and the Black Book of Carmarthen have Vortigern fleeing into the west from the victorious Saxons. With a church dedicated to a barely believable Celtic Saint along with some Ogham and bad Latin this is certainly the sort of place you'd expect to find someone like him.

Rutger Hauer as Vortigern in Merlin (1998)

So maybe what the yew is bleeding for is the last superbus tyrannus, the Romano-British ruler of old Roman Province of Britannia, who tried to hold together a Latin speaking Celtic kingdom to the very end, and who, before he died, saw his kingdom fracture into feuding tribal groups. Perhaps it bleeds because the process of putting it back together again is not yet complete? 

More on the possible Vortigern/Vitaninus link.

Five Ways To Get Out Of Debt: Lessons From The Ancient World

The world has a debt problem.

Let’s put this in perspective. Our little blue planet has a Gross Domestic Product of about seventy trillion dollars. That’s a seven with thirteen noughts after it.

The world’s debt meanwhile is at least three times that, an estimated $223 trillion.

‘At least’ being a very guarded phrase as estimates of the total exposure of derivatives, those infamous financial ‘weapons of mass destruction', runs to two or three times that level.

The bank JP Morgan alone has derivative liabilities of $90 trillion, or more than the world's GNP. Given that they effectively hold the world to ransom you may or may not be relived to know that they have one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair working for them and that they were recently fined nearly a billion dollars for illegal trading.

It seems we bailed out the banks, but totally failed to reform the system.

We have however been here before. Debt has been with us one way or another for 5000 years or more, and in that time different ways have been found to deal with it.

So here we are, the ancient world's solution to the debt crisis.

1) More debt

The hair of the dog approach, which has never worked for my hangovers. This tactic probably goes back a long way, probably to the day when Paul was repaid at the expense of Peter.

It was the ancient Sumerians who wrote the book on debt.

Hammurabi is a name I actually remember from school history. Under his reign the first recorded laws were inscribed in stone. They covered all aspects of life from getting married to buying a house to having children to committing adultery and finally getting divorced.

There were also rules for dealing with cowboy builders (by killing them), and an awful lot about debt.

One Babylonian solution to debt is to sell someone else into slavery to pay it off. If you want to know how that feels, ask a modern Greek.

Debt though kept the wheels or the Babylonian economy turning, and turn pretty rapidly they did too.

However it couldn't last forever, and it didn't.

2) Growth

Like sex when you're sixteen, growth today is that mysterious something that everyone talks about but nobody seems to know how to get.

For the Neoliberals it will come back once we cut taxes and public spending. For the Keynesians it will return if we increase debt and don't cut public spending. Standing the sidelines, shaking their heads and muttering about Peak Oil, are the environmentalists.

Not that there were too many of them 5000 years ago when credit fuelled growth made the Fertile Crescent the economic powerhouse of the Known World. But it didn't last. The clue to what went wrong is in the name. Seen any pictures of Iraq recently? Doesn't look very fertile, does it?

The Tigris and Euphrates delta may have been the birthplace of Western Civilisation, and for a while home to a very advanced system of agriculture, but it was also a very fragile eco-system.

Deforestation led to soil erosion and irrigation led to salinisation. Eventually the land that had fed the armies of Hammurabi and Darius the Great was mostly barren salt flats. Their economy weakened and in 330BC the Barbarians overran the frontiers in the form of Alexander the Great.

The problem is, whilst there is no practical limit to how much debt you can create, an economy is firmly based in the real world which has definite limits. As the economist, and peace activist, Kenneth Boulding said "anyone who believes you can have infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist". 

It is now more than 40 years since the book Limits to Growth started to map out the ecological limitations of our economy. Since then conventional oil has peaked and just about every other measure of economic activity has declined too. Those early computer models have been widely derided ever since, but the scenario of ecological overshoot and economic collapse in the second half of this century looks rather more convincing today.

3) Inflation

So if you can't grow your economy, why not just grow your money?

It seems rather obvious really. If you lower the interest rates people are more likely to spend than save, so if you could reduce the interest rate to effectively less than zero people would have no motivation at all to keep their money in the bank so they go out an spend it.

There are a few tiny, weeny problems. We sort of got away with this in the seventies as, with full employment and strong Trade Unions, wages more or less kept pace. Today it's more likely that prices would shoot up whilst your pay cheque stays grounded. Economist Max Keiser thinks this will be the next trick our leaders pull, but then he is barking mad.

Inflation first became an economic problem in the fourth century BC. Then, as now, we can blame the Greeks.

When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, he found truly staggering quantities of gold and silver stored under the mattress. To put some numbers on this, a rich Greek city like Athens might take in about 400 talents of silver a year in tax, which is about 10 tons. In the vaults of Persepolis the Macedonians found over 3000 tons of the shiny stuff.

And then they started to spend it. The resulting price hikes effectively halved the value of the shekel in the pocket of the ordinary Babylonian. Add to that the market uncertainty caused by Alexander's death and you had a Classical Credit Crunch.

4) Wipe the slate clean

But it wasn't the first one.

Life in indebted Babylon could be hard if you were at the bottom of the social ladder. As no ancient civilisation could survive without peasants or infantry it was important to make sure debt didn't completely destroy the social fabric of the nation.

Every few decades, it seems, they hit the reset button and 'wiped the slate clean', a phrase that has passed into the world’s vernacular. Between 2400BCE and 1400BCE some thirty odd instances of debt cancellations have been found in Mesopotamia.

The idea seems to have been picked up by the Israelites, who had a sojourn in Babylon in the sixth century, and the Old Testament tells how the ancient Israelites held land in common and had a Jubilee Year every half century in which debts were cancelled and slaves freed.

Today, only Iceland has tried such a tactic, and so far things are looking good for the Vikings – if not for their banks. What would happen if one of Europe’s debtor nations tried this could be interesting. Probably bad news for the banks, and anyone with savings, but potentially good news for the real economy. 

5) Do nothing

So what happened to Babylon after 1400BC when they stopped cancelling the debts?

Inequality increased, more and more peasants were sold into debt slavery, economic migrants fled and caused a nuisance as far afield as Egypt and Mesopotamia entered a period known as the "Dark Ages".

I wonder if we might be following suit?


Bibliography
Lost Traditions of Biblical Debt Cancellations by Michael Hudson 
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

Privatised War: Greek Style

copywrite Karl Kopinski

So Greece took the blue pill, accepted the bailout and has embarked on a wholesale privatisation of its state sector. Ah well, such is the way of the world now.

Not that everything's going to be sold. The military, for instance, will still control its own tanks. For anyone who remembers 1967 this might be a bit ominous.

War is certainly privatised these days in other ways. The second largest contingent in the Iraq War, after the US Army, was the foreign mercenaries, but at least they came a long way second behind the state funded Grunts. 

Surely nobody would be daft enough to let the sell off the whole of their armed forces?

Well, yes. The ancient Greeks did.

What's a Greek Earn?

The Greek hoplite was the Main Battle Tank of the Classical Era. Heavily armed infantry in armour with big shields, their drill and discipline made them invincible in a frontal attack on level ground. Unlike the pouting hunks of the film 300, they fought with the spear rather than the sword and were probably a bit chubby, as a fat cushion helps with wounds.

The hoplite had to buy his own armour and equipment, but was then paid for the time he served defending his city. They were given a food allowance and wage on top of this. By the fourth century BCE this worked out at about 130 grams of silver a month, which in modern money would be about fifty quid. It was worth a bit more than that then, but a glut of trained soldiers after the Peloponnesian war meant mercenary pay was no more than that of a typical skilled worker.

This made the hoplites solidly Middle Class. The aristocratic cavalry of the Upper Class had trembled before its spear points whilst the humble slinger and javelin men of the Working Class had had to accept supporting roles and a third of the salary. Only in Athens, where the plebeian oarsmen of the navy held the balance of power, was the Middle Class hoplite not supreme.

The fought off the Persians, then they fought each other.

Finally, with not a lot else to do, they fought

for the highest bidder. By fourth century BCE there were probably fifty thousand mercenary hoplites knocking about. For comparison Athens, past its prime but still the leading city state, could just about muster ten thousand citizen hoplites and Sparta, the top land power, no more six thousand spearmen, although they these were hard as nails.

There was even a place you went to to buy mercenaries all to sell your services. This was Cape Matapan, at the bottom of the Peloponnese. A nearby cave was reputed to be the entrance to Hades. There, presumably, men in togas and red braces bought and sold hoplite futures which, if you were unlucky, could be a trip down the cave.

If you had the money you could head south and raise an army that would make the greatest cities in Greece quail. The Persians had the dosh, but they seemed to have given up on the quarrelsome Greeks and preferred to spend their time freeing their slaves, developing the Arts and the postal service and spreading peace and good government across the Known World. For some reason history has written them as the Bad Guys in this story.

copywrite roman-empire.net

An example of the sort of military might money could buy occurred in 401BCE. A force of 10,400 mercenary Greeks was employed by the Persian usurper Cyrus the Younger. His private army did the job and soundly thrashed his brother's royal troops, but unfortunately Cyrus lost his head during the battle. Literally.

The Ten Thousand then found themselves unemployed and a long way from home. The Persians managed to separate the officers from the men and then bump them off, but the democratic Greeks just elected some more. They then spent the next two years fighting their way home again.

The story has been read by generations of British Public School boys as a tale of daring-do under difficult circumstances. What has not been recorded is the Persian's opinion of what was effectively a rogue armoured division pillaging its territory for a couple of years, upsetting the freed slaves and no doubt messing up the postal service.

So with so much fighting power available for those able to pay, where could the cash come from? The city states could only just afford to pay their own citizen soldiers. In Athens at this time economic reform had made the rich richer but everyone else poorer. (Plus ça change, but lets move on.)

Phocians Rock

Where there was money was though was at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here an elderly peasant

woman sat on tripod breathing in hallucinogenic gases. Her ranting were then turned into cryptic advice by the resident priests to be given out to anyone who paid enough tribute. Allegedly the priests were also open to a little persuasion from other interested sources if they could match said tribute. The priests were therefore sitting on a pretty packet.

Unfortunately for them Delphi was located in Phocis, a rural backwater of a place that was in 356BCE being threatened by neighbouring Thebes with dire consequences if it didn't make amends for numerous alleged religious offences. Delphi was one of the holiest sites in Greece, but, alas, temptation got the better of the Phocians and they nicked Apollo's gold and went shopping at Cape Matapan.

Using money looted from the gods caused some problems. The Phocian had to pay their men time-and-a-half and ended up with "the worst naves, and those who despised the gods". However they assembled 20,000 of these desperados and soon started kicking ass.

Epaminondas

Thebes had one of the most formidable armies in Greece at this time thanks to the reforms of a rather dislikable character called Epaminondas. The elite of the army was apparently made up of 150 gay couples. They did wear skirts, but whether or not they liked quiche is not recorded. When they eventually died to the last defending Thebes from Alexander the Great's dad, the victorious and somewhat homophobic Macedonian was both impressed and a little grossed out. He ordered the official scribes not to record any allegations of "unseemly" acts by the dead soldiers. As Epaminondas didn't marry or have children you wonder how common such "unseemly" behaviour was in Thebes.

Epaminondas had been dead for six years in 356BCE and so it was someone else who had to take field against Phocis. As the city could only muster 12,000 citizen hoplites of its own they were hard pressed from the start, and it soon got worse as Sparta and Athens soon decided that they disliked the warlike, arts-hating Thebans more than they hated each other and threw in their lot with the temple robbers.

A very messy war then engulfed the region for a decade before the money ran out and the Macedonians stepped in. It was estimated that Phocis had got through 10,000 talents of silver in the course of the war. A talent is 26 kilograms so that's a mountain of silver. To put this into some sort of perspective Athens was taking in no more than 400 talents a year in taxes. The Phocians were made to pay the money back, but being piss poor to start with and devastated by war they were eventually saddled with a thousand years of debt (once again, lets just move on...).

It had all been spectacularly pointless, but that wasn't the end of the Greek Mercenary by any means.

When Philip's son, Alexander the Great, invaded the Persian Empire in 334BCE he found the Persians had bolstered their own cavalry with no less that 48,000 hoplite mercenaries. That meant that Darius actually had seven times as many true Greeks fighting on his side as Alexander did, even though he was supposedly leading a Pan-Hellenic army out to get their own back for the Persian Wars. It seems the Greeks preferred regular pay (and post) to revenge.

They've Got A Lot Of Gaul(s)

All this should have been a dire warning on the perils of privatising war, but it gets worse.

In the northwestern Greece is the city of Phoeniki in Epirus, whose most famous General was Pyrros of the infamous victories. Shortly after he died in a siege, knocked out by a woman armed with roofing slate after an elephant got stuck in a doorway, the citizens decided to save themselves the bother of guarding their own city walls by recruiting a gang of wandering Gauls to do the job instead. It seems they didn't ask for any references.

These Gauls had been serving with Carthage in the Punic Wars but they had pillaged a city they were supposed to be guarding, tried to betray another, gone over to the Romans and sacking a Roman temple before being expelled from Italy.

True to form, their love of money won out over their dedication to the job. A fleet of Ilyrian pirates sailed past and the Gauls discovered they could make more money for less work by selling the citizens into slavery.

From the Black Death to Blackwater.

And that really should have been that for the mercenary army.

copywrite Graham Turner

But after the Black Death called half time on the Hundred Years War, several English armies went rogue, including one that kidnapped the Pope. He offered them a choice of a 5000 crown ransom and his blessing or 10,000 crowns and a solemn curse with bell, book and candle and, just like the hoplites who thumbed their noses at the gods to fight for Phocia, the English opted for the cash and the curse.

The Renaissance perhaps marked the high point of mercenaries in Europe as the Swiss banks were more than prepared to lend wannabe monarchs a sack load of gold to raise an army. The Swiss had also cornered the market in soldiers for hire, so it was really a win-win situation for them. However, as Machiavelli and other noted, that this meant battles were usually fought to the last crown rather than the last man.

March or Die, Columbia Pictures, 1977

Although armies of the Age of Reason often employed non-native soldiers, such as the legions of wandering Scots and Irish, the days of the true mercenary were drawing to an end. After the French Revolution nationalistic fervour became as essential to victory on the battlefield as the musket, and so mercenaries were generally banished from European battlefields and sent to garrison Europe's overseas empires instead.

The wars of the twentieth century saw entire nations in arms, but with the ending of the Cold War the massed conscript armies were replaced by fully professional forces. Perhaps therefore it's inevitable that the mercenary should have returned. Is an American who enlists with Blackwater to defend an Iraqi oil refinery really that much more of a mercenary than a British soldier sent abroad to fight for a cause most of his nation couldn't give a toss for?

However if this the direction of travel in warfare we should perhaps heed the warning words of the ancient historian Polybius "My object, in commenting on the blind folly of the Epirotes, is to point out that it is never wise to introduce a foreign garrison, especially of barbarians, which is too strong to be controlled."

In 2008 69% of the US military in Afghanistan were private contractors.

Bibliography

Armies of the Macedonian and Punic Wars by Duncan Head
Alexander the Great's Campaigns by Phil Barker

Transition Towns

The Power of Community

200AD and the Roman Empire was a single pagan civilisation stretching from the borders of modern Scotland to what is now Iran. But the Empire was changing. The frontiers were now fixed and the army that defended them paid by taxes and not plunder. 

Ostrogoths attack Rome 541CE (Angus MacBride)

Then the crisis came. Barbarians overran the frontiers and the system of free trade that had made the empire rich collapsed. Order was restored, but at a cost of years of austerity and high taxes.

Those taxes were in turn levied increasingly on the poor whilst the rich not only got richer, they retreated from public life and spent their wealth on themselves and their country houses rather than in the cities and on public buildings. Ordinary citizens felt increasingly abandoned by their superiors, left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dangerous world.

During this century of chaos one group of citizens stuck together. An unusual sect, they were egalitarian enough to allow women to rise to senior positions, something unheard of in the Roman world. When disaster struck and the rich ran for the hills, their leaders stayed to help. If members of the community were enslaved by barbarians they pooled their resources to buy them back.

Although their ideology was considered somewhat weird by most citizens, their undoubted sense of community drew them an increasing number of supporters. In due course the Emperor himself was to join them. 

Ninety years later the western half of the empire, militarily strong but economically weak, collapsed. Economic power moved east and the Germans took over the running of Europe. However this sect, now much changed and not always for the better, survived and is with us still.

They are of course, the Christians.

A History of Oil

Oil is the problem. 

Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia

In 1912 we entered the oil age when Winston Churchill made the decision to switch the Royal Navy from using British coal to foreign oil. The first oil war began two years later when British and Indian forces invaded Iraq to protect the Navy’s Iranian oil fields. We invaded again in 1941, 1991 and 2003. In fact in the 100 years of the oil age, the British Army has been in Iraq for 41 of them, whilst next-door-neighbour Iran saw British backed regime changes in 1941 and 1953. 

But foreign wars weren’t the only problem with oil. 

Between our second and third invasions of Iraq scientists had been warning with increasing frequency about the dangers of climate change. As oil replaced coal the rate of increase in Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerated, and this was a problem that couldn’t be solved with tanks.

Give Me A P Please Bob

As fans of Geoffrey of Monmouth know, Totnes was where Brutus the Trojan landed on these isles to found Britannia. It was also where, in 2005, Robert Hopkins and friends started the Transition Town movement.

Transition Towns are the big idea of the moment in sustainability circles. They are a more optimistic reaction to the end of the age of oil than the Dark Mountain lot.

Transition movement revolves around three Ps.

Peak Oil is the moment when we have used up half the world’s oil. We can search the deep ocean floor for new fields, extract more from existing wells with new technology and move to unconventional sources, but this all costs more. 

The modern world eats oil, runs on oil and is mostly made out of oil, but with China, India and Brazil all wanting more of the black stuff, it will soon cost a lot more. The Chancellor can knock a penny or two off fuel duty to keep motorists happy, but he can’t reduce the cost of artificial pesticide, aircraft fuel or plastic. 

Permaculture though is part of the solution. 

It is the practise of feeding ourselves, wherever we live, in a way that doesn’t mortgage the future. Small scale, low impact, diverse and imaginative projects allow people to grow food almost anywhere. An increasingly popular sub-branch is guerrilla gardening, the planting of any disused area of land with fruit and vegetables for general consumption. If the kids nick all the strawberries, that’s just great.

The final P is People.

As is becoming increasingly obvious as one scandal after another breaks, our society is not about to reform itself anytime soon. Politicians have been caught fiddling their expenses, the media is out of control, the bankers have been quietly profiting out of the Credit Crunch but this unhallowed triumvirate is still running the country. 

Transition in Your Street

But you know what? We don’t need them.

As the people of Ancient Rome realised, when the going gets tough the last people you’re going to find hanging around to help out are politicians, media moguls and bankers. Just as it was left to the likes of Charmaine Neville, a singer in a jazz band, to borrow a school bus and rescue the sick and elderly from flooded New Orleans when hurricane Katrina struck, the people who will help you survive Peak Oil probably don’t live in a tax haven.

Whether or not there was a Charmaine Neville to borrow a chariot and rescue her neighbours when the barbarians overran the Roman Empire is not known. What we do know though is that whilst the Christian Bishops were becoming the new administration on the continent, most of Britain returned to paganism, but not the Roman sort. Something kept society going in the changed world of the fifth century, but it wasn’t the Christian Church.

And that is where I think Pagans can help the Transition movement. 

The hardest transition of all to make is the one inside, the transition from seeing the natural world as a resource to be fought for and exploited to one which should be shared and venerated, but I would hope this is a transition most of us are at least part way towards making.

So why not join the Transition movement and help future-proof your community, because at the end of the day your community are the people who’ll be there in a crisis.

If your town isn’t on the list yet, round up some friends and make it so. We put my home town of Glossop on the list, and it wasn’t that hard.

The society that oil built is coming to an end. Help to become part of what comes next.

(This article first appeared in the Lammas 2012 issue of Pentacle magazine)

Boudica Questions

If you like your babes ginger and armed to the teeth then there's no doubt Boudica, the woad-wearing warrior widow from Norfolk, is your lady.

The expected Hollywood movies never materialised and so her only screen appearance this century has been in a 2003 TV production staring Riversong, a mixture of "Braveheart, I Claudius and Carry On Somebody" according to the guy who wrote it.

However she still seems fairly popular and has displays dedicated to her in the museums of Norwich, Colchester and London. Seeing as how she burned the last two to the ground that's a bit bizarre, a bit like having a Herman Goring museum in Coventry.

But how much do we really know about her?

1. Did she really exist?

Neo-classical Boudica by John Opie

A bit of a crucial question really, and a very hard one to answer. There certainly was a revolt, but who actually led it?

We know the story of Boudica mainly from two Roman historians; Tacitus and Dio Cassius. As the enemy you would have to wonder exactly how much they would know. Do we know who leads the insurgency in Afghanistan, for example, or who led it in Iraq? Not really.

Neither historian was around at the time either, although as Tactitus's father-in-law was later a Governor of Britannia he had a more direct connection with events.

However the main point of suspicion is her name, which translates as 'Victory' in ancient Celtic. A tad convenient really, a bit like a Bishop being called Cardinal Sin - who is a late Archbishop of Manila actually.

Another  possibility is that she did exist but the Romans got her name wrong, rather like the mountains and rivers around the world that appear on European maps with names that translate as 'mountain' or 'river' in the local lingo.

Maybe someone asked "Who won that victory over the Romans in 60CE" and the oppressed peasant, looking at the devastation and contemplating the Roman yoke now back upon his shoulders replied in Celtic, "Victory?"

2. Why do we still remember her?

Realistic Boudica, Norwich Museum

Obviously this is mainly because it's a cracking story, but for an English audience she is an unusual historical heroine.

Firstly she is a Briton, a Celt, and English historians have a long and ignoble history of doing down the Celts. Owain Glendower is only remembered in England as a superstitious windbag in Henry IV Part One, and until Mel Gibson donned a skirt nobody south of the border had heard of William Wallace.

Secondly she fought against the Romans. In England we loved Rome so much we built an Empire in her image, and well educated young men went out to govern large chunks of Africa knowing more about Caesar's Gallic wars than the north of England.

She became famous, it seems, simply by the luck that modern historians rediscovered her about the time of the Armada, when the idea of a plucky Queen standing up a foreign invader seemed very prescient. Two and a half centuries later the story of an indigenous freedom fighter battling the world's greatest empire my have been a bit less welcome, but fortunately the then monarch shared a name with her and so the Victorians too learned to love Boudica.

3. Was she a Queen?  

Male fantasy Boudica (Rhaegar Targaryen)

Assuming she existed, was she really a Queen? Maybe not.

The Roman historians agree she was royal, but fail to explain why she did not become leader of the tribe when her husband, King Prasutagos, died. Maybe this was a Iceni tradition, maybe it was Roman sexism, or maybe she was disinherited as her anti-Roman feelings were already well know. We don't know.

However, it is very likely that as the wife of a client king she would have been a Roman Citizen, which may well be the point of Tacitus telling us the story of her flogging by the Roman Governor Suetonius's men.

Roman readers would expect a bit of brutality towards painted Brittunculi, but Roman Citizens were expect to be treated with a bit of respect. 


4. Did she ride a chariot in battle?

Victorian Boudica

Tacitus has her in a chariot, but the archaeologists aren't so certain.

Certainly there were war chariots in earlier times, and Caesar reports meeting then in battle in 55BCE. Definitely the Iceni were into their horses, and we have coins and other evidence of plenty of horsiculture, but nothing suggesting chariots.

By the first century CE chariots had disappeared from the battlefield and been replaced by cavalry. True, Tacitus described his father-in-law meeting some in Scotland a couple of decades later, but this story appears to have been nicked from Caesar.

They were still used as executive limos and racing machines, but to depict Boudica leading her warriors into battle in one in 60CE would be a bit like showing General Slim fighting the Japanese in Burma in 1945 astride an elephant, although to confuse matters Slim did have elephants in his army, but he only used them to carry his supplies.

If she did ride a chariot though it certainly didn't have scythes on the wheels. Scythed chariots were an unsuccessful attempt to invent the unguided missile from the time of Alexander the Great and had been given up as a dead loss centuries before the Romans invaded Britain.

5. Was there a Druid conspiracy?

Essex girl Boudicca, Colchester Town Hall

The Iceni chose their moment to rise as the bulk of the Roman army was out in Wales trashing Angelsey.

Indeed, the famous passage about the Druids "pouring forth dreadful imprecations" at the attacking Romans is on the page of Tacitus right before he describes the revolt of the Iceni.

So was this just opportunism, or were the Druids involved in fermenting the uprising?

A previous attempt to invade Angelsey had had to be called off after the Brigantes revolted, so there was a bit of a pattern here. Maybe what inspired the Iceni to revolt was not the maltreatment of their queen, but the murder of their priests?

However it could equally be a case of an opportunity too good to miss. The Easter Uprising in Ireland didn't take place because the Irish supported a unification of Europe under Germany in 1916 (although they appear to have changed their minds on that now) but simply because the British Army was bogged down on the Somme. However just to confuse things the Germans did send the Irish weapons.

If the plan was for a distraction to save Mona it may have succeeded. Although Tacitus has Suetonius demolishing the Druid's groves before marching back to deal with Boudica, he also tells us that in 77CE the Romans had to invade again to finish them off. So maybe she was not such a failure after all.

6. Did the Britons commit atrocities?

Boudica by Chris Rawlins

Well I'm sure it wasn't pretty, the Britons being full of Woad rage, but whether or not the Britons carried out some of the most lurid atrocities described by Dio Cassius is open to question.

Dio (the historian, not the late Rock God) was a classical Greek who regarded everyone north of the Rhine as a bit suspect and also a misogynist who regarded a women ruler as an offence against nature, so account has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The archaeology shows Colchester was thoroughly looted before being burnt to the ground. Very few bodies have been found, but then the main place to look for them, the Temple of Claudius where the citizens made a last stand, was cleared in Medieval times when the Castle was built, so maybe we'll never know.

On the other hand it should be noted that there is evidence of a Roman scorched earth policy in retaliation, with the major settlement of Thetford being erased from the map. 

7. Did she burn St Albans?

Avenging Boudica by Peter Frost

Tacitus says Boudica burnt London, Colchester and St Albans, the three biggest towns in Britannia in his day. The archaeology supports the destruction of London and Colchester, but apart from a fire in the theatre St Albans doesn't appear to have been touched. What's more, if you plot the evidence of destruction on a map it appears to point southeast from London towards Silchester, and not north to St Albans.

Excavations at Silchester are not complete, but there is starting to emerge evidence of possible Boudica-era fire. It could be then that Tacitus made a mistake. Having been told that Boudica trashed the three largest town in the country, he may have failed to account for St Albans overtaking Silchester in size in the intervening years.

8. Why did the II Legion not march? 

Boudica by Gordon Napier

Facing the biggest revolt in a Roman province yet the Governor Suetonius ordered all available men to march to Norfolk. The Legio IX Hispana answered the call and was wiped out for its trouble. Meanwhile down in Exeter the Legio II Augusta did nothing. Why?

It is recorded that the legion was then under the command Poenius Postumus, the praefectus castrorum and for his 'cowardice' he committed suicide and Poenius became postumous.

Praefectus castrorum translates as 'camp commandant' and he would usually have been third in command. Where his superior officers were we don't know, but possibly they were on Suetonius's staff up in Anglesey.

The praefectus castrorum was different to the Legates who commanded the legions as he would be a soldier who had risen from the ranks and not an aristocrat. As the senior non-commissioned officer in the Legion, the praefectus castrorum would be the equivalent of a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army.

Now anyone who has met one of these characters in real life - and one used to run a pub near me - will know that they are usually a lot of things, but not scared of a fight. It's possible to imagine a bluff praefectus castrorum failing to grasp the bigger picture, but not really of shunning battle because he'd filled his pants.

Might there have been something else going on in the south-west that stopped the legion marching?

History can't help, but archaeology may give a clue in the form of a pile of bodies by the gate of  Cadbury Castle in Somerset. Dated to the first century CE, could they be the result of an uprising coinciding with Boudica's, one which stopped the Legio II marching east?

Boudica Warrior Princess

9. Where was her last battle?

Somewhere on A5 between Wales and London is the answer. Tacitus gives us some geographic clues, but when they were fed into a computer it gave 263 possible locations. Maybe one day someone with a metal detector will get lucky and find it, in the same way the site of the Battle of  the Teutoberg Forest was found in the 1980s, but until then we're just guessing.

10. Did she survive her last battle?

Tacitus tells us that, defeated in battle, Boudica commits suicide, thus giving a neat ending to his story. Cassius Dio meanwhile has Boudica survive only to expire from illness whilst planning further resistance. Tacitus is usually considered the more reliable source, but the archaeology seems to support Dio.

Maturnal Boudica, Cardiff City Hall

After the Battle of Watling Street forts were built in Iceni territory and Londinium, although not rebuilt for civilian use for some time, became the site of an Auxiliary Fort. All this is evidence for continued counter-insurgency operations by the Romans.

Were the Britons still led by Boudica though? Again, you'd have to ask how would the Romans know. A thousand years later Harold II died at Hastings and we're still not sure exactly how, so it's possible both Tacitus and Dio are wrong.

Whoever was leading the Brits though, they appear to have continued to put up a struggle and apparently Nero considered abandoning the province altogether.

The moral of the story then is - don't mess with a Norfolk broad.

Sources;
Professor Miranda Aldhouse-Green Boudicca Britannia
Dr Birgitta Hoffman (Lecture to Glossop Guild)