Dreaming the Eagle

"Manda Scott wrote several novels about Boudica, following her life story. We tend to over-rationalise the events of the distant past. Manda Scott very much thinks about Boudica as somebody who’s deeply influenced by her beliefs in the spirits of the landscape. What I particularly liked about Manda Scott’s novels is the way she brings these mythical, spiritual things to the story. I think it’s very difficult for archaeologists to understand how Iron Age people saw the world. What we have is some odd comments made by classical authors about how Iron Age people worshipped spirits and gods, and archaeological discoveries. But we do know that the attitudes of people in the Iron Age were deeply imbued with thoughts about the nature of the landscape. When Boudica was rising up against Rome and fighting Rome, she would have been deeply influenced by her own spiritual or mystical beliefs. I like the way Manda Scott wrote those ideas into her fiction. I couldn’t do that if I was writing another academic book on Boudica because, as a work of archaeology or history, we can’t interpret those things. They’re too complex and too obscure to us. But I think art is a way of looking at issues like that. Writing a novel is a way of thinking about issues that we can’t understand from a historical point of view. We can’t find any direct evidence for Boudica in the archaeological record. Late Iron Age rulers did produce coins, which quite often had an abbreviated version of their names. By the late Iron Age, we’re getting gold, silver, and copper alloy coins being made in Britain. There’s a famous Iron Age ruler in the southeast, called Cunobelin, for instance, and we can identify the abbreviation of his name on the coins. He was a major late Iron Age ruler in the early first century AD in the southeast of Britain. We can’t identify Boudica. She probably wouldn’t produce coins in her own name because she wasn’t actually the ruler. We’ve only got the name of Prasutagus written down once. In all the classical texts, there’s one reference to him. There are some coins that have a name that is a bit similar to Prasutagus, which are found in East Anglia. So perhaps that is Prasutagus; there’s quite a debate about that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We might be able to find where Boudica and Prasutagus lived because they ought to have had quite a privileged lifestyle. But, so far, there’s nowhere in East Anglia that would be obviously high status enough. We haven’t found an early Roman villa or even a high status settlement that might be the home that might turn up one day. We might expect to find a burial for Boudica. It’s debatable because Tacitus and Dio are so different about what happened to her when she died after the final battle. In the late Iron Age, some rulers were buried with quite a lot of wealth. We think probably the Romans might have interfered with any celebrations, once Boudica was killed, because they just defeated her. In battle, but we don’t know where. The last place to be burned was St Albans [Verulamium], we don’t know how long it took the Romans to defeat her after she burnt Verulamium. It could have been weeks or it could have been months. There’s lots of uncertainty. She might have moved further north. She might have moved further east back towards where she came from in East Anglia. We absolutely don’t know and there’s no convincing battle site that’s been located. We’ve got good evidence of the burning of Colchester and London, because we find a very thick burnt layer in the early urban layers of those towns, and actually, quite recently, a hoard of metal objects was found in Colchester, buried in a pit under a house. It’s called the Fenwick Hoard and it’s a collection of military metal items and jewellery. The jewellery will have belonged to quite a wealthy woman. The military items must have belonged to one of the settlers of Colchester, who had been a military officer, and who was quite well off. Perhaps when they knew there was going to be trouble, they buried some of their wealth in the pit in their house. They were probably killed, unfortunately. But that is one example of the very little direct evidence for Boudica’s rebellion. “She’s a powerful figure of resistance” It doesn’t really provide much information directly of Boudica herself, but what archaeology really does is it gives us a very good perception of the nature of the society in which Boudica lived. Our knowledge of what the Iron Age people were like has been transformed over the last 60 years. The classical texts tend to write about Iron Age people as barbarians and primitives. As a result of archaeology, we know they’d been cultivating crops and domesticating animals for millennia by the time the Romans came to Britain. They built elaborate timber houses, and they lived in settlements that were well supplied with food. They had their own settled society. Boudica was a member of the elite of her people, she would have been a wealthy woman. I tend to think from what we know of the archaeology that she and Prasatagus will have been Roman citizens, they might have been literate in Latin. But if we do one day find the place they lived, we might well find out a lot more about them. So the archaeology gives us a real increase in knowledge about the society, but it doesn’t necessarily provide very much direct information about exactly what Boudica was up to. The chronology is a really difficult issue. The uprising might have lasted for more than a year, which is why I’m being careful about saying where and when she was defeated."