BOUDICA

Sometime in the early 3rd century, the Roman historian Cassius Dio reflected on the mental state of Emperor Nero in the year 60 CE. The notorious Nero, who had already ordered the murder of his mother, was now trying to present himself as a musical genius. His public performances were reputedly so bad that audiences openly laughed at him, but he had thousands of soldiers to lead rounds of applause. All this was reportedly done to “celebrate the shaving of his beard; and in behalf of his preservation and the continuance of his power”.

This dangerously unstable ruler may have been mad but he held sway over the huge Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Dio recorded that this deranged imperial hubris received a severe shock from the west on the far edges of Nero’s domains: “While this sort of child’s play was going on in Rome, a terrible disaster occurred in Britain. Two cities were sacked, eighty thousand of the Romans and of their allies perished, and the island was lost to Rome. Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.”

The woman who caused the Romans “the greatest shame” was Boudica, Queen of the Iceni. Although she was not Britain’s first warrior queen, Boudica was the first British female ruler to be historically recorded in any detail – and her story was dramatic in the extreme. An epic tale of vengeance, destruction and bloodshed, Boudica almost ejected Roman forces from Britain in a great uprising during c.60-61 CE. Dio was wrong to state that Rome temporarily lost Britain to the rebellious Britons and their warrior queen but she definitely came closer than most. The question is: how close?

Claudian conquest

In 60 CE, Britain had