The Clash Between Boudicca and Rome

May I introduce to you, Queen Victoria of Icenia?
The matriarchal Britons called her buddug, Boudicca, VICTORY.
The patriarchal Romans called her mad.
‘She was huge of frame, terrifying of aspect, with piercing eyes and a harsh voice, a great mass of red hair hanging down to below her waist’ – this is the very picture of the Medusa head of state, the Cleopatra dysfunctional woman in power.

In AD 60, on the death of her husband, King Prasutagas, (lash) Boudicca is dispossessed, flogged, her nobles enslaved, her women sold, her daughters... plucked and plundered...by Procurator Decianus Catus.
Provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus – later recalled to Rome for excessive bloodlust – quite a feat on the front line of empire - is absent in North Wales, slaughtering druids and desecrating the Oak Groves of Mona. Doing his bit for the environment.

OOOO ….OOOO
when suddenly, out of the blue, the sky falls in
and the forests erupt again through the nice tiled floors of Colchester.
Boudicca and her hazel-wattled people are in revolt.
The Eastern half of Britain rises with her.
Kick over the wall cuz governors can fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour anger can be power
You know that you can use it

She ‘redeveloped’ the Rome Counties...
She burned down Colchester, a London left tactically undefended - on the Provincial Governor’s orders- and the old Catavellauni capital of St Albans. (spit)
Her army got larger with every victory.

Procurator Decianus Catus, flogging off the forests, garden-grabbing the graves, making a killing in the City (lash) finds himself staring at the end of civitas as he knew it. Norfolk, the guardsvan of Roman history, ploughing her fleet pony and wickerwork chariot through the heart of London.
There’s no future in your Roman dream
Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes
Your soapless baths and your manly steam
The Iceni queen bee is making free
With your city
He flees to Gaul, his smacked Roman backside smarting with the humiliation.

Now,
as a summer dawn paints the ripening Iceni corn a battle-blood red,
She turns her attention to Provincial Governor Suetonius Paulinus….
(drum)
This seasoned professional soldier, marching hotfoot from his rout of Welsh tribes in the West, concentrates his army at a place never really identified but possibly near Fenny Stratford on Watling Street.
Despite Boudicca’s eloquent passion for annihilating every last Roman in Britain,
some of the tribes she had united beneath her now went home with their war loot, thinking enough had been done.
Tacitus, reporting her in the Latin of her conquerors 100 years later, gives her this speech.

‘We British are used to women commanders in war.
I speak to you not as an aristocrat but as a woman of the people.
A woman of yourselves.
Think how many of you there are, and why we are fighting.
Then you will win the battle, or die.
That is what I, a woman, plan to do – let the men live in slavery if they want.’

Suetonius chose a position in a narrow defile, protected from behind by forest
Sure that there would be no cover for ambushes.
Yah!
(pointing stick)
‘The enemy are here, here, here, here and here.
Our chaps are here.
Pay no attention to the noise and empty threats these savages make.
There are more women than soldiers in their ranks.
They are not warlike and they are badly armed.
The 'battle dress' is a birthday suit to be ready for death
Their modesty covered only by woad.
The famous lime-bleached blood-streaked hair... the juice of rowan berries!.
When they see the weapons and courage of troops,
They will turn and run.
Keep the ranks. Throw your javelins. Strike with your shield bosses.
Then drive on.
After the second javelin,
Close ranks for the testudo.’
TESTUDO!
A giant... sword-jabbing... tortoise... formation,
A 6 deep, 4 square human armoured vehicle
Defensive and offensive,
Tightly shielded on all sides.
The nearest the Romans could get to a tank.
And your ‘tactics’?

Heads and dugs will rock and roll…and Roman dudes will bleed
Your 'warriors', the customary male hordes swollen with raging women
Swarmed into the vice of the defile
And up towards that butcher’s yard of javelin volleys,
Every volley adding dead or javelin-struck Britons
To the labours of the lines behind
Maybe after they’d slithered through the first half dozen
Dead and writhing the passion for vengeance faded?
Then that Roman tank rolled forward and tin opened
The whole helpless throng of you against the wagon line.
The kids stopped watching Mam and Dad win the final dream victory
And became the meat in the sandwich of the final bloody screaming defeat.
All you had room left to do was chariot charge your own people….

'It was a glorious victory
Like those of the good old days.
Some estimate as many as 80,000 British dead.
There were four hundred Romans killed
And scarcely more wounded.'

Britannia 1 Roma 80.
But we only have the Roman match report.

She is history, not myth, but remember
History is written by the victor
And she neither wrote nor won
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Rome had to win or risk the Empire,
Britain had to win or simply expire,
And with it the Western horizon,
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Procurator Decianus Catus
Spoke down his nose, spoke down his anus,
"The Emperor claims the dead king's kingdom"
No freedom, no future, no fun.

"Our Roman matrons have a place too
In a civilised home: I could offer you
A place in mine: dresses, baths, decorum."
No freedom, no future, no fun.

She danced to the wardrums, warhooves, hornwhine,
Exhorting, as Romans were drilled into line,
Her race to fling back the squares of London
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Now her rebels hole up, where home is none,
On roots thin as hope and a dream of Britain
Hunted through nettles and thorns, their soles stung:
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Her hard core Iceni's last stand and fall
Is the longest, fiercest, stubbornest of all
But is crushed - like flint - in The Battle of Thornham.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Death-and-glory queens, country dragons:
(Become) Whores of fashion in Camolodunum,
In Roman roses our own scent gone.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

‘My salts that I sowed in the Squareheads' wounds
Return in a wash that will sour our lands.
I loosen my tongue on its poison:
I loosen my tongue on its freedom’

Because they could not find her, bury her, kill her
chain her to their story
And drag her defeat through the streets of Rome.

That is why she can be our white goddess walking between Celtic daughters in Cardiff,

That is she can ride that moving, oak-gracious
There-and-not-there at the heart of Government,
Iron coach to nowhere the Victorians invented for her in Whitehall, getting every single detail wrong and the spirit absolutely right
The mother of Britain giving the mother of battles
to the frontier cowboys of Nero.

That is why, as well as a statue in Wales, which she probably never visited
And a statue in London, a city she burned down,
she must have a statue here
in the heart of Icenia

The maddened mother making a chariot stand
on the stolen innocence of her children,
The matriarch martyr dying for her people,
The great British rebel with a cause,
A Norfolk hero-tale, a wild, turning North Sea tide,

A woman
who
would
not
lie
down.


The Anarchy Tour

('And there's no future in England's dreaming....')

We’d gone down an absolute storm at Camolodunum
They were calling it Dun Camulus - the old British name - in her honour:

Never mind the Romans:
Here Comes Boudicca and the Banshees
Here Come the Stranglers. Here Come the Damned.
To town near you. Now.
And what a town!
Proto-Essex Man Colchester!
The model Roman Urb, the colony Camolodunum,
The sound of the suburbs
Rocked to its foundations, show homes stomped to a cinder,
Whooshed in the fire that flamed from her loins.
And there were some neat little gigs to come.
In no particular order...
The big farewell at the St Alban’s Empire.
And then – goodnight Verulamium.
Right now. Ha ha ha.
There’s no future in your Roman dream.
Your traffic lanes and your shopping scheme.
Your sopaless baths and your manly steam.
The I – ceni queen bee
Is making free.
With your city.
It’s the only way to be.
Some out of town ‘fortresses’ to ‘raise the roofs’ at.
Boudicca Boudicca Boudicca Boudicca
There is no safe European home,
This is no vestal vallium Rome.
Boudicca Boudicca Boudicca Boudicca
Knocking the Ninth Legion dead near Lincoln,
Heads and dugs will rock and roll …
And Roman dudes will bleed.
All of them
Except that plodding heavy metal joke they call a cavalry - the alae-
Who scarpered. ...

Now we're on the road again - the Roman road, straight as a sword
To little old Londinos on the Father of Rivers,
Londinos, the ancient British god of harvest and light,
Londinos, the Britain the Britons have lost
In monumental vitae imperium
Nil futurus Nil liberatus tedius librium Londinium.
Never Mind the Pansy's People and Pseudo-Greeko dreaming
Disguising the Roman bankers and the new-rich salemen scheming,
Never mind the fat cats in their new-rich concrete flats
Never mind the Roman tick-accountants and marts
Never mind the admin blocks with power-skirted guards
Never mind the humdrumming Boredom Now
Here Comes The Pogo with Death and Co.
Here Comes Blood Spitting Anger Joe
HERE COMES BOUDICCA!

Lincoln's burning! St Albans is burning!
LONDON'S BURNING!!!!!

Fenny Stratford isn't burning.

Britain's Dreaming

Crowded House are singing
"Julius Caesar
and the Roman Empire
couldn't conquer
the blue sky"
and I think of you, Boudicca,
with that same sense
of singing triumph
even though your glory days
were under grey skies
and short-lived
and weren't innocent
or cornflower-pretty
as some Celtic blue summer
and had more to do
with this Norfolk flint
and stubborn soil
than an air of heaven
and even though
Suetonius Paulinus
and the Roman Empire
seized the sunrise
of your three easy wins
as if seizing the flames
of your famous red hair,
and even though
Suetonius Paulinus
and the Roman Empire
crushed your country
if not your body
in his square Roman fist
sowed harvests of hunger
rubbed decades of salt
in your people's wounds

the old word
buddug
still sings in my Welsh blood,
in the Norfolk winds
off this unresting sea

buddug:
buddig:

victory



Anarchy


I want to sing about Boudicca because
I love her woad-caked brythonic majesty.
(Strict stuffy Latin master Julius Caesar
Named the Britons thus: Pretanni: Painted folk
While Boudicca played truant in the art room
With blue clays and her bra off. Who
Would you rather spend the afternoon with?)
I love her fecundity, (The fact
That she wouldn't hide the power
Of earth-words in a Latin fudge like "fecundity").
I love her ferocity. Hell had no fury
Like a matriarch scorned and three
Roman colonies caught it, the barracks
Of those ramrod rapists burning down
Over their heads, a riot of hooves
IN THE CITIES OF THE DEAD.... - I love that
Because it's what ought to happen
When any mother's back is flogged by a prick
Like Decianus Catus, any mother's daughter
Plucked and plundered: She ought to be a revenge
Archetype, a maternity myth:
Perhaps she was once. Now she doesn't fit.
She's the round Earth goddess the Romans buried
Under straight roads and patriarchal order,
The fascist composure of the fasces, the drilled
Decimation, the retarded skeletons
In Iceni burial grounds....
She lacked these civilised virtues.
But I still feel the hysteria rising
In her veins, the menstrual flow that crashed
Like the North sea, that stormed her victory
Against the ironskirts, still feel it freeze,
Her chief bard wince, as they flayed her back,
Forced garrison lust on her daughters
Still see that bloody mane came up
In dark knowledge, "They shouldn't have done that."
Then fly for the throat - like a wild voodoo warsong
Strung on a bard's harp -
And tear it to shreds. Right
Now .....
Ha ha ha ha ha.... I love
The fact that she went all the way.]

Elegy for the Iceni

"The retarded development and modest character of Romano-British remains in Norfolk suggest the severity with which the Iceni were crushed' (Encyclopaedia Britannica)


We're the restless ghosts in the winds and rains,
Funneling the valleys, sweeping the plains,
Inlets and warrens that run underground,
Unbridled pathways, unquiet streams,
Haunted hidden corners of rootless sound,
Hives of Iceni, dead and unqueened,
By bronzebreasted redcrests violently weaned
We're the baby who wails for her dead mother's breast.

We are dead keening women, whispering grass,
The breath in the lilac and bluebells, the blast
Through the pale yellow oak leaves, hawthorns
And nettles. And that shout, queen of warriors,
From your victory chariot with your triumphant
Horsemen around you! And that salt chill of a winter's
Reprisals that blighted twice twenty summers.
We're the mother who wails for her new baby's death.

We are the cries in the corn, the harrowings hooted
Under moons of hunger, in the squeals of the hunted,
The creaking of geese through night-forest fears,
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The unresting dunes and the moaning wave-break,
We're the memory that's cankered two thousand years
Of Celtic blood with an unhealing ache,
We're the oracles lost in the noise diggers make.
We're the dead daughters wailing for the end of the world.

The Ballad of Boudicca

She is history, not myth, but remember
History is written by the victor
And she neither wrote nor won.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

She is history, not myth, but remember
History is written by the vicar
To whom alma mater means nun.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Rome had to win or lose an Empire,
Britain had to win or simply expire,
And with it the Western horizon,
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Procurator Decianus Catus
Spoke down his nose, spoke down his anus,
"The Emperor claims the dead king's kingdom"
No freedom, no future, no fun.

"Our Roman matrons have a place too
In a civilised home: I could offer you
A place in mine: dresses, baths, decorum."
No freedom, no future, no fun.

The Mother of Britain in Whitehall stands
On the stolen innocence of her children
Chariot-riding a North sea tide,
The Woman Who Would Not Lie Down...

She danced to the wardrums, warhooves, hornwhine
Exhorting, as Romans were drilled into line,
Her race to fling back the squares of London
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Now her rebels hole up, where home is none,
On roots thin as hope and a dream of Britain
Hunted through nettles and thorns, their soles stung:
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Her hard core Iceni's last stand and fall
Is the longest, fiercest, stubbornest of all
But is crushed - like flint - in The Battle of Thornham.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Death-and-glory queens, country dragons:
Whores of fashion in Camolodunum,
In Roman roses their own scent gone.
No freedom, no future, no fun.

Her salts that she sowed in the Squareheads' wounds
Return in a wash that will poison our lands.
But she loosens her tongue on a freedom
Undragged through the streets of Rome

The Mother of Britain in Whitehall stands
On the stolen innocence of her children
Chariot-riding a North sea tide,
The Woman Who Would Not Lie Down.

Cover feature Saturday Dec 7, 2013.

The EDP doesn't put its features online, so with permission I reprint it below.

I’ve done a lot of Boudicca storytelling around Norfolk and beyond since I wrote my verse tragedy ‘Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming’ in 1996. (The nod to punk dissidence continues in the 2013 version, called The Clash Between Boudicca and Rome.) There is a lot of interest in Norfolk’s ancient queen out there, and it’s growing, though basic knowledge, even on her home-ground, is patchy.
That’s not surprising. She is not a required part of the school history curriculum, not even in Norfolk. Eminent archaeologists will tell you ‘we know so little about her.’ Historians that ‘history is written by the victor and Boudicca neither wrote nor won.’
Historiographers - and critics of her magnificent but ahistorical statues in London and Cardiff - say she has become ‘a figure of myth’ and romance, her real story and personality ‘lost in the method of her portrayal, associated with folklore and legends.’
All true. But even legends have to start somewhere. And unlike that Celtic-Norman/pagan-Christian myth ‘King’ Arthur or even his downmarket rival as national hero – the relatively historicised thirteenth century-ish anti-Norman post-Saxon outlaw Robin Hood – there is a real time, place and date for Boudicca. Iron Age Icenia (modern Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Cambridgeshire) AD 60-61.
And a narrative. The Roman incorporation of the wealthy client kingdom of Icenia into the Roman province of Britain in AD 60; the queen’s flogging; the rape of her daughters; the enslaving of her nobles; the theft of her cattle; the putting of matriarchal women in their place.
Boudicca’s subsequent rebellion united the tribes of Eastern Britain seething under this sort of thing and came close to driving the Romans out. It shook the Empire.
Yes, the narrative is based mostly in secondary sources – the Roman accounts of the sympathetic Tacitus and the lurid Dio, imbibed ever since as part of our 2000 year Roman heritage.
But this has been increasingly seasoned with the story written in the earth itself. The evidence of slaughtered Britons with ballista bolts in their backs; of punitive salt sowed into rich Iceni lands, the marks left by distinctly unsavoury Procurator Decianus Catus acting for Emperor Nero - and of Suetonius Paulinus, a Provincial General recalled and reprimanded ‘for excessive bloodlust’ (quite a feat on the front line of Empire.)
And for the Iceni the brutality continued. As Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it ‘the retarded development and modest character of Romano-British remains in Norfolk suggest the severity with the Iceni were crushed.’
Telling this story in drama and poetry against the grain of our still very Roman civilisation can be like banging your head against Hadrian’s Wall.
All through the Middle Ages, Latin cautionary tales warning against ‘hysterical’ women as heads of State persisted in monks’ Latin tales and patriarchal Christianity.
The fact that the name ‘Boadicea’ (and all the corruptions of this that followed – Voada, Voadicia, Bonduca, Bunduca, Bonduica, Boadicia) entered the monastery annals in the twelfth century and that this monk’s spelling mistake was still being taught in the 1960s suggests a lack for reverence for a figure who united the British in arms for the first time and who, but for the enduring propaganda of the victors, might have been called the mother of a nation.
What’s in a name? ‘Boadicea’ has a romantic sound perfect for the Thornyecroft statue in Whitehall, if not in proper history, and my audiences often cling to it. But it’s wrong.
Perhaps it’s easier to get it right in Wales. The ancient British word ‘Buddug’ preserved in modern Welsh, the name engraved on her statue in Cardiff town hall, means ‘Victory.’ It’s intriguing that our Norfolk ‘Victoria’s fame grew and her statue appeared in London during the reign of that other Queen Victoria, and became a symbol of ‘British courage in adversity’ and of the ‘mother of a nation.’ Until then Boudicca had been a footnote in Roman history or at best a walk-on part in her own drama.
But why does Boudicca the ancient queen of Norfolk have a statue in Whitehall, at the heart of government, in a London she razed to the ground and another in a Wales she probably never visited - but nothing in Norwich?
That’s a rhetorical question. But it gets answered. 1. History is written by the victor. Unlike Nelson and Churchill, she lost.
But what is history but the telling of stories that embody what we believe?
2. She is a Celt, venerated in a museum of Welsh heroes in Cardiff.
But so was King Arthur. And this Celt was as Norfolk as the centuries of Iceni buried in our soil.
3. She is a woman. And unlike the ancient Celts, we are unused to women commanders in war and more forgiving of righteous violence committed by male heroes.
But any mother will understand her outrage.
Norwich museum has a Roman exhibition coming soon and is rightly proud to be getting it. Rome remains one of the pillars of Western civilisation, the guardian of Greek classicism and (after a grim start persecuting it) of Christianity and certainly of law and order. Its feats of engineering and building were advanced beyond the native British imagination, arguably until the Industrial revolution. Its literature and art remain beacons. It has lasted beyond its own millennium.
But the squaddies and robber-bankers of its wild west frontier in AD 60 in Icenia were a disgrace, both to the later Rome and to humanity at any time. To spare the feelings of our listeners, the fact that Boudicca’s violated daughters were children is glossed over, though this of course then skews our understanding of the reprisals, and slants the story implacably in favour of the Romans.
These were Romans worthy of Nero. Beasts disguised by Roman culture, not representative of it. And a British queen challenged them.
She was ultimately outwitted by a futuristic military machine beyond her and her people, yes, but she achieved glorious successes against them on behalf of a very British spirit of defiance against the odds. Her war-painted amateur warriors – fighting for their lives and way of life, death-day naked except for woad and hair dyed with rowan berries – the men’s hair bleached with lime - defeated a fearsomely armed, professional Roman legion outside Lincoln, out-horsing the Roman cavalry with native horsemanship. And while the bladed wheels are a myth, the light holly-wood chariots are as exciting now as they were to my ten year old self.
Norfolk is certainly Nelson’s county and I love seeing that on the county signs as I come home. But let me try this on you: Icenia– Boudicca’s region. Let’s have that on the region’s signs. A reminder of that irrepressible moment when Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Cambridgeshire ‘did different’ for all the right reasons.
And let’s have a statue to her in Norwich rooted in her real history and her own soil, a statue that ‘does different.’ With ‘Boudicca’ engraved on its plinth.
If my audiences are anything to go by – especially women and those of a ‘folk’ persuasion (and the Bank Holiday drinker at Flitcham last May demanding a march on County Hall for a Boudicca statue now) it’s time. Meanwhile I’ll keep staging my tale with the help of my woad-faced, spikily red-haired, corn/pony-tailed Boudicca created for me by a Norfolk art teacher nearly 20 years ago.

Further reading? Check out 'Boudica: Her Life, Times and Legacy' by Dr John Davies and Bruce Robinson (Poppyland £9.95) and - more generally -'The Land of Boudica' Dr John Davies Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service.
My book of poems 'Britain's Dreaming' (Frontier publishing, 1998) devotes one of its three sections to Boudicca.