Dan Snow's History Hit - Boudica, Britain's Warrior Queen

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

In 61 CE, Boudica of the Iceni led a bloody revolt to end Roman rule in Britain. Roman historians tell us with great drama and flair that the grand finale is a huge battle between Boudica and the Roman governor, Suetonius. Tens of thousands of Celtic warriors went head-to-head with a small force of veteran legionaries to decide the fate of Roman Britain.Today we're joined by Caitlin Gillespie, a historian and author of Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain. She tells us the story of this revolt, the famed warrior queen who led it, and how it all ended.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

If you dig a hole anywhere in the area that was once inhabited by the Roman city of London, you dig down, you go through the 20th century and all the building of the 19th, you plow through the early modern, the medieval and the Anglo-Saxon and you end up at the Roman. And beneath the Roman, you have what some archaeologists call a destruction horizon, a layer of red clay. That is what remains of the first London, the first Roman London. remains of the first London, the first Roman London. Because all of it was destroyed in a frenzy, an orgy of violence and pillaging and destruction and burning, that 2000 years later still leaves its remain in the stratigraphy of the soil. That burn layer, that red layer of superheated clay,

is the destruction wrought on London by Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni. This is Dan Snow's History. In this podcast, I'm going to go back to 60 or 61 AD, when Roman-occupied Britain and a charismatic warrior queen is going to lead the Britons in a mighty, massive uprising against Roman rule that threatens to drive the Roman eagles out of Britain, as surely as Arminius drove them out of parts of Germany. This is the great crisis of Roman Britain, and Boudicca is at its heart. After the Romans pillaged her property, after they

terribly abused her family, beat her, she leads an army of furious Britons, first to Camulodunum, the capital of Roman Britain, where she smashes that Roman colony. You can still go and visit. Under Colchester Castle today, there are some vaults that were excavated in the 17th century, and the roof of those vaults is the Roman base, the Roman platform on which their Temple of Claudius was built. That was in the process of being built when Boudicca and army swept into Camulodunum. The stonework, which you can still touch today, witnessed such horrors, such horrors when Boudicca sacked Camulodunum, that Roman historians used them to shock their audiences for generations to come. Next, they set their sights on Londinium, and the governor of the

province had to abandon London. As it was said by a Roman historian, he abandoned the city to save the province. He retreated up to the Midlands, where that governor, Suetonius Paulinus, fought one last decisive battle against Boudicca and her army. We don't know where that battle was fought. I made a programme years ago in which we speculated it was one particular valley on the A5, on that Roman road between London and Chester. Who knows, one day the archaeology may prove us right. In the meantime all we have are the words of the Roman historians and they paint a terrible picture of that bloody day. Tens

of thousands of Britons cut down, annihilated by the superior tactics, training and weapons of their outnumbered Roman enemy. This is one of the greatest stories in Roman and British history. The story of Boudicca is probably the one we can be least certain of. It's only recounted in really two Roman historians, one of those is pretty unreliable, Cassius Dio. So Tastus is much the only source we've got for this. Heavily biased, he's putting speeches in people's mouths, he's got an agenda, but my goodness, it's a remarkable story. And we do, of course, have the archaeological finds. We do know that Camulodunum, Landinium, and Verulamium, now St. Albans, were laid waste, utterly baked, put to the sword and the flame

in the middle of the first century AD. So we've got no reason to doubt particularly that Boudicca existed. She was on the losing side. Indeed, her story was forgotten for centuries and only rediscovered as people started reading and finding these lost books of Tacitus in the early modern period. Now though, she's one of the most famous of the British monarchs. She adorns every child's history book in my kid's library. And her story, her tenacity, her charisma, her desire to fight against an imperial overlord, well that's proved enormously powerful to modern audiences. It is a shocking, dramatic episode in British history. And on this podcast, I'm going to tell you all about it.

Joining me today is Katlin Gillespie, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on women in the Roman Empire, and she is the author of Boudicca, Warrior Woman of Roman Britain. This is the beginning of a special series of kings and queens that I've found particularly fascinating, remarkable, terrible, ones with an important legacy or just ones with a remarkable story. We're going to be looking at several of them,

so we've got to start, obviously, with Boudicca. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Katlin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, so Katlin, the Romans have conquered much of southern Britain by the 50s AD. They've been

around for 15 years or so since the Claudian invasion. But what's that conquest look like? Are there sort of Roman troops in every village and town? Or is there a kind of patchwork of control? That's a great question. And one of the things I want to start by establishing is, as you just said, Southeastern Britain is really a recent acquisition of the Roman Empire, right? So they really haven't been there that long. There are troops around, but they're really concentrated in certain areas. And the place where you have the biggest military presence is in Camulodunum or modern Colchester. That is where Emperor Claudius had entered with his chariot and his elephants

and all of that. That's where you have a temple being built to the divine Claudius after his death. This is what is the provincial capital of that conquest, of that new area of the empire. And so most of the people are there. But what you have in the time that we're going to be looking at is a desire to go further. So you have people in Camulodunum, and then you have the growth, really, of Londinium or London, which will be the center of government. And that growth is happening. And it's unclear exactly when a kind of government palace gets established in that city. We're concentrated in the southeastern area and looking to expand.

And we're told, aren't we, that Boudicca and her husband, Prasutagus, they're kind of left in a position of power by the Romans. What does that mean? Yeah, so Prasutagus got an offer he almost couldn't refuse to become a client king under the Emperor Nero. So when you have an association of client kingship, and we're going to meet a woman called Cartamandua, who has a similar relationship, she's a client queen, the Romans expect something from you. You're being taxed. Some of your young men are being conscripted into the Roman army. You have these sorts of things, but you also have a level of municipal government that you are in charge of as well. So you get your own king who is a local, who's not a Roman in magistracy within your own towns or centers of civilization. And

you can also call upon the Romans for help. So if, as becomes the case with Cardamandua of the Brigantes, she faces a rebellion by her ex-husband, she calls upon the Romans, the Romans have to provide their army to put down that rebellion. So there are some pluses and minuses in that you owe the Romans a lot, but you can also call on them for help. So is this a slightly cheaper way of imposing imperial control? There's areas where you're making the world Rome, you're building Camnodunum, you're building temples, it's full of Roman settlers. And then are there kind of newer territories where you're going into making these deals with the elites,

with the local monarchs, and sort of maintaining the status quo whilst establishing Roman overlordship? That's a great way of putting it. I would say you have this place in Camulodunum where you have a veteran colony. So once you are retired from the Roman army, you get your citizenship, you get a place to live, you get land, but you can't really choose where that is. And so some of the Roman army, after they get discharged, they're in Camulodunum. They don't necessarily want to be put into the

countryside where the Romans haven't really had as strong of an incursion. So yeah, you have these areas, especially where Boudicca is in East Anglia, where there isn't as much of a Roman presence. So it's really powerful to be able to offer client kingship to someone there like Prosutagus, and for him to be able to take advantage of the backing of Rome while the Romans take advantage of him by not having to pay one of their own to really control that area. Yeah, he's keeping the peace. They're keeping the peace for the Romans. Okay, so, Catlin, how has the British experiment been? It's a long way from Rome. It's over the sea. It's a difficult geographical and climate place to conquer. What is the state of play in around 60 AD, just before Boudicca kicks off?

Has Britain been a difficult place to conquer and subdue? Britain has been a difficult place to conquer and subdue since the time Julius Caesar really tried to establish a foothold in 55-54 BCE. I mean, there are reasons why after Caesar it took until Claudius and Alice Plautius in 43 or so to establish a real Roman presence. And immediately after that, it's not as if the Britons suddenly said, oh, well, now we're a Roman colony, no problem. We'll go with all of that Romanization or what have you. They are continuously revolting from that time. And I think the Aseni, the people of which Boudicca is a member, they had revolted unsuccessfully. The strongest revolt was led by a guy called Caraticus. He was a leader in the Catovalloni.

He revolted for almost a decade before he was captured in 54. He was betrayed by another Briton. And so there are continuous uprisings. And one of the most difficult bits, I think, is that there is no idea of the Britons. There are all these individual peoples. And if you have subdued, say, the Catovalauni, it doesn't mean that now the Trinovantes to the north are going to say, oh, I guess we're all under Roman rule. All of these peoples had been operating very separately, and it took until Boudicca for them to unify in any sort of way. Let's get onto Boudicca then. Why does this tribe, the Iceni or the Iceni, they're in what is today Norfolk. They had been seemingly living, as you say, in a kind of client

relationship with the Romans. There was trouble elsewhere, but they seemed to be pretty calm. Why does a whirlwind suddenly erupt out of that part of Britain and threaten and, well, shake Rome's hold on the entire archipelago? I love the metaphor of an eruption that occurs because it is so sudden that Prosuticus, who had been the nominal political and religious leader of that space and the client king with Rome under the leadership of Nero, he dies. leader dies, is that client kingship status doesn't go immediately to his successor. It's not something that is bequeathed in your will. Every individual client king had to establish that relationship with the emperor. And so when he dies, the Romans decide to regard his will as null and void. He divided his holdings between his two daughters and Nero as a good client king should, so fine. But those in the area said, no, we're not going to pay any attention to that. Instead, we're going to treat this area as if it was unconquered and

ready for exploitation. And so they attack his home. They assault his two daughters. They beat up his wife, this woman, Boudicca. They enslave all of his family members. They take his land as their own. They take over as if there was no relationship with Rome to begin with, There was no relationship with Rome to begin with, and this is an area ripe for plunder. Boudicca takes this poorly, as you might imagine, and she takes it not only as a personal insult to herself and especially her two horribly abused daughters, but as an insult to her entire people. And all that goodwill that they had set up with the emperor is now lost. And so the Aseniori Keni gather together and they bring in other tribes or peoples from the

surrounding areas, like the Trinovantes, and they unify in a way that they had never been able to before. Is that something about the general discontent at the time? Are you able to identify some personal charisma or political genius on the part of Boudicca? Well, I think in at least the way she's been received, that part of it was the charisma, was the force, was the nature of Boudicca as an individual around whom everyone seemed to gather. It was like all those peoples in the area were waiting for a leader. They needed someone to serve as a figurehead. And Boudicca, whose name means victory, whether or not that was her actual name or not, right? We get this idea that

she's a symbol as well as an individual. They make her into that symbol of we have been oppressed. Here is the personification of that oppression, of that overtaxation, of that treatment of individuals as if they are enslaved peoples, even if they had a relationship with Rome. Here is all of that buildup, right? Picture that volcano that has been bubbling, that has been the discontent that has been just under the surface finally erupts. But they just needed someone to help with that unification, I think. And because it is a family issue, she makes it an issue of herself as the every woman or the every mother. It becomes easy or easier to follow her vision and her personal insult as a microcosm of a macrocosmic insult that the Romans were

perpetrating against the Britons. Nice, that's a good way of putting it. But the timing is also suspicious, isn't it, Catelyn? Because the Roman governor is in one of the most far-flung corners of what is now England and Wales. It's the island of, we now call it Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales. You couldn't be in a worse place if you're in charge of a province or certainly in charge of military discipline and stability in a province than in Anglesey. So is this just bad luck or is it cunning timing? It's a little bit of both, I would say. You know, after Caradacus' revolt, a lot of those who survived had perhaps gone to Anglesey. There was a Druid center of worship. And so it becomes kind of almost a center of refugees.

Suetonius Paulinus, who is that governor, he's on a mission to conquer and to establish a Roman presence on Anglesey. And it honestly is a mistake of timing. He has a whole thing where he wants to prove himself to be the most successful current governor slash military leader in Rome. And so he's almost looking for something to conquer. And so part of it is, I would argue, an ego trip that goes terribly wrong on his part because he needs to prove himself. It just happens that it was in the same year or in the same time that Boudicca's husband died and that everyone had taken advantage of her family. Now, part of that timing is a little squidgy in Roman history, and that's a very technical term, that we don't exactly know the timing between when Prasutagus died and when Boudicca was able to gather an army. But she was able to gather enough, and maybe they were just in the wings kind of waiting for that timing to work out.

But Suetonius Paulinus, as you say, was truly as far away as you could be. And so she is able to bring her tens of thousands to Colchester. So tell me, they march out of the other side of Britain. So they're in Norfolk on the east coast. What is the first military action she takes? Did she ambush a legion or does she assault what is now Colchester straightaway? She aims for Colchester straightaway as the center of the kind of Roman, both religious and political presence. That's where they want to go.

That's where they want to center their first attack. And it is with enough speed and a sense of surprise that there are a lot of citizens still in that city, right? It's not as if all of the families had enough warning time to escape. Some did, but many were stuck in the city when she and her army attack and are eventually able to penetrate that city, which did not have proper walls at the time, right? It did not have a proper defense system as it would in the following decades. And they are able to essentially burn it to the ground. Anyone who had survived was gathered in the Temple of Claudius, and they are essentially incinerated. You're listening to Dan Snow's History.

We're talking about Boudicca's Revolt. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And we hear, don't we, that they took the veteran troops, the settlers made a final, a last stand inside the Temple of Divine Clues, which then became the base of the Norman castle that's still there today. And so you can still go down to the crypt where I've been and you can, that's the original Roman foundation of the building, extraordinary. And they were killed

to a man and a woman and a child, I guess, right? So this is the problem with Boudicca. I guess we need to be careful kind of glorifying it and looking for heroes here because this was unbearably savage revenge that she was taking. It absolutely was. We get in our ancient accounts that they took their vengeance as if they knew that it would be short-lived. So they're not taking prisoners. They're not taking hostages. They're not even plundering or taking kind of war booty. They are destroying. And it is at the same time horrifying and invigorating, at least for her and her army, that they are able to work with such speed and such calculation, such that when you go to Colchester today, you can see evidence of people trying to escape with speed. So they're burying

their money in a little hole, hoping that they can come back someday and collect their belongings. You get food items that get buried along with that level. So if you go in the remains of what was that divine temple, you can find oyster shells from their dinners or from what the Roman army was eating at the time that they are essentially destroyed, at least those who remained, right? Because Suetonius Paulinus has most of the army with him. He has his legions. It's those veterans and the older men, the wives, the children, they're the ones who try and make that last stand and pay for it with their lives. They're butchered and the city is raised to the ground.

That symbol of imperial Rome raised to the ground. And then they head to London, down the Thames Estuary, down along the line of the Thames and get to this new vast commercial and increasingly important city and do the same. And they do the same. And the thing is that the veterans at Camulodunum had called for help, right? And there was another Roman general who was on the way. And Boudicca's army, as they're going towards London, they destroy them and make them turn in an immediate retreat so that the Romans are running away.

And they don't even make it to London. And again, those who are at London or in London, those who are able escape, but they leave behind the elderly and the women and those who are most vulnerable. And that's one of the parts of this story that is so hard to hear, because then Boudicca's army takes out just horrific vengeance and violence and outrage, especially against any of the captives. And they kind of target the Roman women and sacrifice them to a goddess of victory, at least in one of our accounts. And it is, it's hard to read. It's hard to read. There is some, people can go and look at the testers. Although the Cassius Diary contains even more perhaps dramatic accounts of the violence that was inflicted on the people of London. Now, what is the governor of the Roman province doing with his legions at this

point? What's his plan? Well, he's heard about what happened at Camulodunum, and he has been successful in Mona or Anglesey. He has been very successful after an initial attack. There was a moment where it looked like the Britons would retain their foothold at that Druid center, but they were largely unarmed. There is a frenzied group of women, say, who are at the seashore waving about torches, kind of like Bacchic worshipers, and the Romans just mow them down. And they establish a very swift foothold. And then as soon as they do that, Suetonius Paulinus takes the remainder, the majority of his army, and he heads down Watling Street, or what is now Watling Street, and is prepared to meet Boudicca as soon as possible.

So Boudicca moves north from London. Suetonius Paulinus is moving down towards her from the north, from the northwest of the Midlands. I always like the story, a little side story, of there's another Roman legion in the west country, in what is now Exeter, and their commander just panics and just stays exactly where he is. And perhaps there was trouble locally and stuff and does not obey his boss's command to meet up with him so he can concentrate their forces. So the Romans are a bit divided and the Romans

don't have all their legionaries together for this final clash. Boudicca on the way famously destroys one more big Roman settlement, doesn't she? She does. Fortuitous isn't the right way to put it, but it's almost like on the way. On the way to meet Suetonius Paulinus, they happen to destroy Verulamium, which is just outside St. Albans. And there are some sources that say maybe they destroyed the whole city and others that say it was more kind of concentrated, but it was less of a planned attack. So it has the sense of, well, the main targets had to be Cumulidinum and Londinium. And then as we're on the way, we might as well destroy other things that happened to be Roman allied places. So Verulamium was Amunikipium, which is kind of an interstitial status. It's not quite a Roman colony and it's not quite where you would have

a client king. It's somewhere in the middle. And so because it has a Roman presence, it is open for Boudicca's army to take advantage. So that is the final city obliterated. We should say actually, particularly in London, you can still see in the archaeology, there is still the burn layer of Boudicca's revolt, 60 or 61 AD. It's like the effect of extreme heat on mud brick, on the various kind of buildings at the time, and they've all been incinerated and melted. Now there's this layer wherever you dig in London, as I understand, archaeologists have also found that in Verulamian in St. Albans as well. Yeah, they haven't. The Boudicca destruction layer is so clear. So if you go into the museum

in Colchester, you can see it's almost as if you have a burnt piece of toast and then you put another piece of bread on top. So you can see that burn layer where it's as if you just sliced it right across. It's truly incredible that like here is a slice of time that is perfectly preserved. It's almost like Pompeii, right? Where you have, here is the exact moment that this happened. There was the before and there was the after. And here is that crust. The stratigraphy is pretty unambiguous. Okay, so they're marching north.

They're on what we'd now call the A5, but it's Swatling Street. And they meet, we don't know where, one of the great battles of British history takes place. We think that Suetonius had something like 10,000 men. Boudicca's army is credited by the Roman historians as being absolutely ginormous, 100,000 people. What is your sense of the balance of power here? Well, I'll speak for two seconds

on behalf of our leader at Exeter. He didn't come up because of this, perhaps enormous discrepancy in troops. I mean, even if Suetonius Paulides has 10,000 Romans plus, say, a few thousand auxiliaries and cavalry, he has at most 13,000 men. Boudicca, if you pay attention to Tacitus, it's somewhere around 100,000. If you want to trust Cassius Dio, he suggests her army has swelled up to 230,000 men at this point. Now, that is a huge exaggeration, but give or take, she has 10 times more people fighting for her than Suetonius Paulinus. So he has to be incredibly

decisive and strategic. And for whatever reason, and it is hard to figure out why, he is the one who controls the space of engagement. He places that battle where it is going to be most helpful for the Romans given their discrepancy in numbers. So they fight in this incredibly narrow defile that has a kind of a wooded area at the back. So you have a situation where he has his Roman army and the auxiliaries and the cavalry, and Boudicca can't take advantage of her insanely superior numbers because of the narrowness of the space. Now, her army also doesn't have that consolidated, unified Roman military training. They don't have the tactics that the Roman military has. They are disorganized. There is a wonderful idea of unity that all of these peoples have come together, but there is a disunity in that they have no idea how to fight together. And so he's the one who really becomes in control of

that final battle. And when Boudicca prepares her army, she gives a wonderful speech. She is ready. a wonderful speech. She is ready. It is one of those military speeches where you represent this as the moment. We are going to have victory. We are going to win freedom, or we are going to die trying. There is no middle ground. And she speaks in front of all of these people. She's riding in a chariot with her daughters as kind of symbols of what they are fighting for. In another account in Cassius Dio, she's standing on almost a Roman style platform, right? So they've set her up, her red hair, kind of the color of a lion's mane is streaming behind her. She's got her multicolored cloak. She's got that huge torque, a golden sort of neck piece that symbolizes her queenship or her leadership capabilities. She is ready to fight. And as if that wasn't enough,

she also gives a religious sign. So she releases a hair and the hair runs in the right direction. And that seems to say that the gods are behind us. So we have the gods on our side. We have numbers on our side. We have the cause of freedom and justice on our side. It's almost impossible to lose. And yet lose they do. Oh, Katlin, I was there for a minute.

I'd suspended my previous knowledge and I was with you. I thought we're going to storm to a great victory here, but okay, tell me how they lose. They lose because they don't have the organization and they can't take advantage of their numbers. So if you have all of these troops and they are kind of squishing together to try and get to the front lines and the Romans have all of their training come into play. And they are able to cut down the Britons. And what is even more tragic, at least to me, is that the Britons have been so confident that they made this almost like an amphitheater of war. They set up all the wives are kind of watching from the sidelines behind them, behind that theater of war. They're on the edges

of the battlefield looking out for their men in their little wagons, and the Romans just plow through. And they are so strategic that they are destroying Britons without any real pushback so that when you get to the end of the battle, they also destroy those wives who have been watching. They are indiscriminate in their slaughter. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So much so that Tas says the romans might have lost a few hundred men but the britains lost tens of thousands buddhica in true almost roman fashion if you are a Roman general, what is more noble or what is more powerful is to die

on the battlefield. And we don't know if she actually fought. Like, let's be very clear. I have no idea if she was actually in the battle, but she is this figurehead. And at the end, when she realizes that they have been defeated, she takes poison and she dies by suicide, almost in the manner of a Cleopatra. I don't think she had, you know, serpents on hand, but she had some other kind of poison where she dies rather than be captured by the Romans and paraded in Rome as a emblem of their own victory. She is given a huge funeral, right? She's given a huge send-off by the Britons, but everyone knows that with her death, the rebellion is over.

The Romans take terrible revenge in the immediate aftermath, but strategically, if you look at it with a longer view, is this the last best challenge in southern Britain to Roman rule? Will there be other rebellions subsequently that come anywhere close to this kind of impact on Rome? In the immediate aftermath, there is a sense that the Britons have been defeated. Suetonius Paulinus is so vengeful against those who have survived that he is soon replaced by a somewhat more gentle governor. Wow. Too violent for the Romans. Jeez. Too violent for the Romans is hard.

That's hard. It's hard to do. And immediately, they have a larger Roman presence of the army. The Roman army remains in the field. They are bolstered by additional troops. Camulodunum gets rebuilt with a larger defensive ditch and a larger wall and a bigger and better temple to Claudius. But they also move the capital to the more strategically positioned space of London. So you have kind of a separation between the religious center at Camulodunum and then the government at Londinium. But there is one more revolt, and it's not exactly in the same area. But in the decades that follow, in the early 80s, there is the revolt of the Caledonians

under the leadership of Calgacus. Now we're moving north, but that revolt of Calgacus is put down by the governor Agricola, who happens to be Tacitus' father-in-law. And that's really the moment when the Britons, at least on that part of the island, are defeated. And then you get Hadrian's Wall, of course, in the second century, and we really separate the Roman side from everyone else to the north. Well, we should say, like,

Boudicca almost disappears from the historiography, right? Elizabeth I hadn't heard of Boudicca. Was this a piece of Tastus or Cassius Dio that was found more recently, rediscovered? She shows up in Gildas in the 6th century. She shows up in various authors, but she's not the focus in the way that she would be from the time of Elizabeth I and especially Victoria onwards and into especially the 20th century. So there's almost a revivification of Boudicca once Queen Victoria gets a hold of the fact that her name means victory. And she really gloms onto this idea

of a figurehead for freedom and victory and nationalism and independence and everything else that Boudicca has come to mean. And it's so interesting that the British Empire, Victoria, the British Empire at its apogee, whilst also deeply influenced and in many ways trying to emulate the Roman Empire, also decides to take on this great anti-Roman as a mascot. Absolutely. So Boudicca's whole center of her identity

is that she is anti-Roman. But it also means that she is very pro-Britain. And she is accepting of things like, sure, we have trade with the continent, but we are never going to be under their rule. And she has no interest in expansion. And she has no interest in expansion, right? What confuses me in some ways when people compare other empires or the interest in empire to Boudicca and nationalism is that she had no interest in expanding. She had an interest in getting rid of the Romans and remaining or kind of going back to a late Iron Age period of individualism within her East Anglian hometown. And Boudicca continues to fascinate us and she

continues to be this figure that I think we draw upon, whether it is for current political memes or heavy metal bands or, you know, there's even a beer named after her if you go into East Anglia. So there is every sort of idea of reception of this woman and what she symbolized that we can continue to draw upon today. For sure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling me all about it. And while you're here, Katlin, tell everyone what your book is called. So I wrote a book called Boudicca, Warrior Woman of Roman Britain.

Listen, that does what it says on the tin. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to this podcast about Boudicca's revolt. If you are interested and you want to learn more about this, we have got documentaries on History Hit, the TV channel. As you know, when you get a subscription to History Hit, you get access to our wonderful TV channel. I've been to Colchester Castle.

I've seen some extraordinary artifacts that may date to the revolt or certainly the aftermath of the revolt very very special place indeed we've got tristan hughes as ever the history historian he's been all over the country on the trail of buddhica as well so make sure you go and do that next time speaking of occupying powers imperial powers we've got robert the bruce on the podcast to finally achieve his dream of sitting on the throne of an independent scot, he had to show a tenacity, a bravery over decades of unequal struggle. Watch out for it on your feed, wherever you get your parts. you