Boudica: Warrior Queen

Boudica was a queen of the Iceni who staged either a successful rebellion against the Romans or a massacre, depending on who's talking.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Willy, and today we're going to talk about
one of those subjects that he's been requested by so
many people we cannot name them all a billion times,

(00:23):
lots of times, and that is Boudica. Boudica was the
first century queen of the ic and I, which is
the tribe that lived in what's now East Anglia. She
either staged a successful rebellion against the Romans or a massacre,
depending on who's doing the talking, and now she's become
one of the most famous figures from that era of

(00:45):
British history. And it's not just because of this David
and Goliath esque nature of the whole story. There were
definitely other tribal leaders elsewhere in Britain whose fight against
the Romans was a lot more sustained and really more
effective when you like the long term consequences. But Buddhica
really gets tap billing because she was a woman, which,

(01:05):
in the eyes of the Romans, really made her something
to talk about. A lot of the surviving accounts of
Buddhica were written by Roman historians, after the fact. One
was Tacitus, who was writing within sixty years of her death,
and the other was Cassius Dio, who wrote about a
hundred years after the fact. The Britons themselves did not
leave a lot of written records, so pretty much all

(01:27):
of our written accounts of her are colored with the
Roman idea number one that women weren't fit togethern and
number two that the Britons were an unorganized horde of
filthy barbarians. But thanks to archaeological discoveries within the last century,
now we have a lot more complete picture of her
and of what happened than we ever did before. So
for background, Boudica is from the Celtic word Buddha, which

(01:50):
means victory. And we're not sure if that's a name
or a title, but it's definitely not bodicia, which you
might have learned in school if you were going at
s at times that Tracy and I were. Yeah, there
was a uh an error in in a recopying of
historical text lar and time ago that transformed it repopulated

(02:10):
itself through many many texts. Yes, so definitely bodicia. If
you've heard it said that way or written that way.
That's not the way. Here's a description of her by Dio.
In stature, she was very tall in appearance, most terrifying,
and the glance of her eye most fierce, and her
voice was harsh. A great mass of the tawniest hair

(02:31):
fell to her hips. Around her neck was a large
golden necklace, and she wore a tunic of diverse colors,
over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch.
This was her invariable attire, and this description is pretty
much in line with how she's often depicted, a powerful,
screaming warrior woman with long red hair who is really

(02:53):
bent on taking you down and ready to do it.
We don't, however, actually know what color her hair really was.
The red could have been an embellishment tied to all
of those prejudices about red haired people, and those have
been around since antiquity, and we don't have a ton
of evidence to suggest that she was particularly tall. That's
a description that went along with a lot of Britain's,

(03:14):
even though the skeletons that exist suggest otherwise. But it
may just be part of the myth of her being
this fierce, incredible creature. So Buddhico was queen of the
icn I, and as we said before, this was a
tribe that lived in what's now East Anglia. She was
born to a royal family around the year twenty five,

(03:36):
and she married a man named Prostatagas. He was definitely
from the icn I tribe, and it's not totally clear
whether she was as well, or whether she became part
of the tribe through her marriage to him. They had
two daughters and no sons. The icna I were subsistence farmers, potters,

(03:56):
and metal workers, and they also raised horses. They probably
lived in roundhouses with that's roofs, without a lot of fortification.
They were also one of the tribes that offered to
join an alliance with Caesar during his unsuccessful attempts to
invade invade Britannia in fifty five and fifty four b
c e. After Caesar left Britannia, there wasn't really a

(04:17):
lot of Roman or really any at all Roman activity
for almost a hundred years, but then Rome invaded Britain
again in the year forty three under Emperor Claudius. Unlike Caesar,
Claudius's army successfully fought off the guerilla resistance of the
tribes in the area, and they built fortresses and stationed
troops there. The Roman presence grew through much of eastern

(04:40):
Britannia after Claudius's invasion. The tribes were actually divided over
whether they were in favor of the Romans presence or
against it. There wasn't really one collective unified people known
as quote the Britons uh. They were scattered tribes with
their own leadership, and they had their own series of
struggles amongst themselves. The katu Velounie, for example, were nas

(05:03):
neighbors to the south, and they had an ongoing guerilla
campaign against the Romans expansion. The Iceni, though, made an
alliance with the Romans, but four years later the new
Roman governor, Astorius, who did not really trust the Britons,
passed a law that made it illegal for the tribes
to have weapons other than ones that they needed for hunting.

(05:25):
This did not go over well, and the I c
n I staged a rebellion. Astorius put down the rebellion
and removed their leader and Tedios from power and made
Buddhica's husband prost Otagous a client king. And as a
client king, he got to keep control of his tribe,
and the tribe got to keep some level of autonomy
in managing its own affairs, but they had to stay

(05:48):
loyal to Rome and pay taxes. In this arrangement, the
icen I got protection both from Rome and from the
other tribes as part of the deal, but it came
with a cost to The taxation was pretty huge. As
time went on, the tax costs to the icna I
got higher and higher. The Romans would also collect part

(06:09):
of the harvest and store elsewhere and then sell it
back to the ic and I, who had to both
pay for the goods and for their transport back to them.
So tensions started to grow a bit as things got
financially harder and harder. Yeah, not such a good deal
after all. Well, maybe you're not having to fight off
your neighbor's constant, that's true. Emperor Claudius, of course, was

(06:30):
poisoned in the year fifty four and Nero rose to power.
Uh Nero ordered a temple to Claudius to be built
in Camulo Dunham, which was the Roman capital in Britain.
There the British chiefs would be required to worship once
a year, and they had to pay for the temple
as well. This says you can imagine, was not a
popular move. Prositagus's client king relationship with Rome made things tricky.

(06:54):
After he died in the year sixty he was considered
to be a Roman citizen and he had taken the
step of selecting airs for his kingdom, which was a
pretty Roman idea. He bequeathed half of his kingdom to
Nero and the rest of his wife and daughters. This
was a completely unprecedented arrangement, both in British custom and

(07:15):
in Roman law. Among the Britons, women had a higher
social standing than they did in Rome. It really wasn't
unheard of for women to would hear it property or
to be next in a line of succession. But because
of his client kings status, the Icna kingdom really belonged
to Rome and not to Prostagas in Rome's eyes, this

(07:35):
this land and kingdom that he had bequeathed was not
actually his to give away. It would really belong to
Rome until Rome selected a new client king to take
his place. So, because they held this belief, Rome took
possession of his entire kingdom. A Roman official arrived and
took inventory of Buddica's estate because it was now considered

(07:57):
Roman property after her husband death. The Romans also shamed
Boudica and her family. The exact method kind of varies
in the telling. Tacitus writes that Boudica was flogged and
her daughters were raped, but Dioh writes that it was
about money. Roman leaders had loaned her husband money, whether
he really wanted to borrow money or not, and then

(08:20):
showed up at her home demanding that she immediately repay
it with interest. At about this time, the Roman governor
Gaius Swotonis Pollinus was away in Mona, which is now
considered Anglesey, which is a Druid island off the coast
of Wales. His goal was to eliminate the Druid religion,
and this was accomplished or um pursued, among other ways,

(08:43):
by cutting down the Druid grove, slaughtering druids, and placing
a garrison on the island. The icin I and other
tribes heard about this and were outraged, and Boudica was,
thanks to the Romans treatment of her husband's estate and
of her family, pretty much primed to fight back against them.
So really, considering all the other stuff, that had gone before.

(09:06):
The Romans actions at Mona were the last straw for
both Boudica and the I C N I, so she
amassed an army, which reportedly started with about twenty thousand Britons.
There's twenty thousand included children and elderly people. It was
basically all people, come on, let's fight the Romans. Boudica
and her army laid waste to the Roman capital of Britain,

(09:28):
Camulo Dunham, which is now Cultister, and destroyed parts of
Londonium which is now London and very Lammium, which is
now St. Alban's. They started in Camula Dunham, which was
an existing town that had become heavily Romanized. It had
gone from being a collection of thatched roofed cottages to
having a marketplace, a three thousand seat theater, and the

(09:50):
Temple to Claudius that we mentioned earlier, which was in
the process of being built. Both Tacitus and Dio write
about strange happenings leading up to Boudica's attack on Camulo Dunham,
including a statue falling over and women making frantic prophecies
of impending doom. It's possible that this was a deliberate
effort on the part of Boudica's army to so fear

(10:12):
and superstition in advance of their attack. Although it had
been built up really significantly under Roman influence, Camuel Dunham
didn't really have any defenses. The town sent to lundonni
Um for assistance. Laundunium only sent two hundred men as reinforcements,
either because they didn't take this army of Britain seriously

(10:32):
or because they didn't really have men to spare. Budhica's
army went house to house for about two days, smashing,
looting and killing. Survivors took refuge in the Temple in Progress,
which the forces surrounded and demolished and killed everyone inside.
In the end, Camuel Dunham was entirely destroyed. Boudica's forces

(10:52):
burned it to the ground, and the fire was so
hot that some of the clay walls in the archaeological
record looked like they've been fired to kilm like pottery.
I mean, there are pottery shards as well, but these
clay walls had also been fired by the heat became pottery.
According to written accounts, the death toll there was approximately
ten thousand people, but the archaeological record is less clear

(11:16):
on this account. There is plenty of charred earth, and
there are, as we mentioned, shards of pottery, but there
really aren't that many bones, suggesting that many actually managed
to flee before Budhica's army got there. Quintus Petilius Serre
Alice Caesus Rufus, who was the commander of the ninth Legion,
heard about what was going on and headed for Camuel

(11:37):
and Dunham with two thousand legionaries and five hundred cavalry. Boudica,
whose army just kept growing and gaining new members as
she moved across the countryside, ambushed the infantry and wiped
them out. The cavalry survived and retreated. Then Governor Swetonas
heard of the rebellion and came back from Mona. He

(11:57):
wrote ahead of his men and got to Londinium before
Budhica's army did. He decided that it would be impossible
to defend, especially since Boudhica was going to get there
before the rest of his men could. The city was
unwalled and had few defensive vantage points, so he ordered
for the city to be completely evacuated. When Boudica arrived,
she and her force slaughtered everyone who remained. Some of

(12:20):
the writings about this particular slaughter are really glory and
they involved sexual mutilation of the bodies. But like we
saw in Camula Dunham, we don't have a lot of
bodies or bones in the archaeological evidence here, just a
really thick layer of char. The layer in the archaeological
record is full of burned daub from buildings and remnants

(12:42):
of molten glass. It's not as citywide as the Camula
Dunham burn, and there aren't many objects other than building debris,
so people probably picked up as much as they could
carry when they evacuated, or they somehow survived and returned
and cleaned up. Boudica and her army then turned northwes
Us two very Lamnium, which, hearing of their approach, did

(13:03):
a pretty smart job of emptying. The evacuation was pretty thorough,
so by the time Boudica's force got there to sack
and burn, most of it was abandoned, so they sacked
it and burned it, but didn't do a lot of
murdering that time around. There aren't lots of stories of gore.
No that was a lot more just burning things down.
And meanwhile, Swetonius gathered an army of about ten thousand men,

(13:26):
including some of the force he had used it Mona
and some reinforcements from other outposts. It's not entirely clear
where they fought or how big Boudica's army was at
this point, but according to Dio, she had more than
two hundred thousand fighters, including the elderly people and children still,
but modern historians agree that that number is probably pretty inflated.

(13:48):
In all likelihood, her force did outnumber the Romans considerably,
but they also weren't a trained army, so what they
had in numbers, they probably lacked in skill. So exactly
where this last battle took aces the subject of a
lot of debate, as one of those things where they
compare the written descriptions to the landscape and where they
would have been moving. Um, the Romans chose to a

(14:10):
spot to fight that gave them huge advantages. The Britons
were going to have to move through a large field
where they would be completely exposed, and then into a
gorge where they basically hit a bottleneck. But so far,
while trying to match this description to the local area,
they have not found a definite X marks the spot

(14:31):
kind of certainty, like the descriptions don't match up with
the topography of anywhere yet. Yeah, there there's There are
several contenders, and none of them is in the definite forefront. Allegedly, though,
Boudica arrived at the battlefield with her daughters in a chariot,
and Romans wives came out to watch the fighting. Tacitus
and Dio both record speeches she allegedly delivered, and those

(14:54):
speeches don't particularly agree with each other, uh, and they're
pretty heavily Roman in their sensibility. There there's a lot
of I'm just a woman, and I know that you're
not used to fighting for a woman, but I'm a
woman and you're gonna fight for me and it, which
might not have really been her mindsets right the If
you read these and you can find them easily online,
if you read them, it does definitely sound like someone

(15:17):
describing something for readers of their own culture about a
different culture that is not theirs. Um. So probably she
did say something, but not the things that are written down.
This battle went overwhelmingly in the romans favor. According to Tacitus,
the Romans killed about eighty thousand Britons while suffering only

(15:40):
four hundred or so casualties. Then, when the Britons tried
to retreat, they found their way blocked by the chariots
that had brought out the Romans wives, which drove up
the death toll. Budica herself escaped, but she died shortly thereafter,
and her cause of death remains unclear. It may have
been suicide by poison, which is how Tacitus tells the story,

(16:03):
or it may also have been shocked from an injury
in the battle. Dio says that she actually fell ill. Many,
but not most, of the Roman deaths during Boudica's uprising
were civilians. According to Tacitus, seventy thousand civilians died. The
small remaining community of Ice and I were absorbed under
Roman control, and Rome said about rebuilding and also quelling

(16:27):
any further unrest. The rebuilt Camulo Dunham was much more defensible,
as were the new Roman settlements elsewhere. Len Dunniam was
rebuilt as well, and eventually, of course, became a much
bigger and more important city as we know it today.
Very Lamium was much lower to rebuild, but once rebuilding started,
it was definitely in the Roman fashion and not in

(16:49):
the style of the Britons, and Rome gradually moved into
more and more of Britain and continued to do so
right up until the time when the empire fell. This
is one of those cases where they learned from the
experience of having been essentially routed by an army of
various assorted people from around the countryside, and then the

(17:10):
rebuilding took many steps to make sure that things would
be better yes in the future. So yes, that is
the story of Boudica. I actually did find one book
that had some discussion in it about whether she was
a real person at all or whether this is sort
of a story that conveniently has a person that we

(17:32):
don't really know existed. And the general consensus was, yeah,
we think she's a real person. I don't know if
her name was really Boudica or not. That's sort of
a title maybe, sort of like calling someone Victoria who
was not actually named Victoria. Um, but yeah, that not
a lot of definite. There's it's nebulous. Still, Yeah, it's nebulous.

(17:55):
Some of the particulars of this, they're very nebulous, Like, uh,
did lots of people Sir five or where they may
be buried elsewhere. Then people come back and get all
their stuff or had they taken it all away before
the looting and sacking happened. So the records we have
still leave a lot of questions and answered yes, and
considering how long ago this happened, that's not super surprising.

(18:19):
And considering how there was not a lot of written
record from like from the Britton's um pretty much the
people who were literate in that culture at the time
where the druids and that was not really focused on
like keeping daily history of what was going on. We
definitely have a way more one sided account. Do you

(18:41):
also have a spot of listener mail us? I knew
and I have two different pieces of listener mail spots plural. Yes.
They are both about our episodes on the Irish Potato
Maamin and they have some similar themes. I want to
read both of them. The first came to our inbox
from Shannon. Shannon says, thank you so much for your
podcasts on the Irish potato Famine. Was one of the

(19:02):
few times I've heard the story in such depth outside
of Erin. A few things I'd like to share with
you one. In Dublin, you can hear stories of how
women would fake being prostitutes to be arrested and sent
to jail to get food. There is a prison that's
now a museum, and the tour guide I had was
of the opinion that it was an economic genocide since

(19:23):
there was double the amount of food being grown in
Ireland that was needed to defeat everyone, but it was
still being taxed out of the country. Two. My great
grandmother was a child of Irish immigrants who went to Liverpool.
My grandmother would always say, and she says, this is
Irish and I'm not let's try. I'm afraid I would neglet.
She had a phrase she would say when she ran errands,

(19:44):
which means off to sell a share, which was how
they would pay for food. By the way, they came
over due to the rebellion. Would love this as a podcast.
Many Irish names were americanized a point three. My great grandfather,
when arriving in Boston, changed his last name from Oli
to Leary, thinking it would help him get a job.
When it didn't, he just never changed it back. And

(20:05):
my grandfather didn't know that his last name wasn't Larry
until he was drafted into the army and number four.
The workhouses continued. Many became quote Magdalene laundries and are
a massive black mark on the Irish government for not
stopping them after becoming independent. Also a great podcast topic.
So that was from Shannon. Our other note is from

(20:26):
also someone named Shannon, but it's from Facebook. This Shannon says,
just finished listening to your Irish Famine episode. I am
an American expat now living in Dublin, Ireland, with a
master's degree in Irish history. I'm very familiar with the famine.
I want to congratulate on a very good podcast about
a very complicated issue. One interesting story concerning the famine.

(20:48):
In the latter years of the famine, the jails throughout
Ireland were extremely overcrowded. There were two very good reasons
for this. First, a vagrancy law was passed so people
who begged could be put in jail. Second, people were
so desperate for food that they would purposefully commit crimes
to be put in jail because once there they would
get two meals a day. For example, kill Mayhem Jail

(21:10):
in Dublin had over nine thousand prisoners during eighteen fifty
and a jail that had less than two dred cells. Yeah,
disease was rampant in the jail, but it was better
than being on the outside. Thanks again for the podcast.
I hope to hear more about Irish Street in the future,
So thank you Shannon and Shannon. We really did not

(21:30):
get into. That's what it was. One of those stories
that just kept getting more and more awful. Well, and
there are a lot of layers to it, many many
awful layers. And one of the layers that we did
not get into was the layer of people deliberately committing
crimes just in order to get a meal, or pretending
to commit crimes in order to get a meal. There
was a lot of people went to great links just

(21:52):
to try to get footed because there was not really
another option. We're getting desperate times, desperate measures extremely so
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(22:14):
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(22:37):
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