Known as the warrior queen of the Iceni people, Boudica famously led troops in a rebellion against Roman rule in Britain.
Discover how and why ‘the Victorious Woman’ has gone down in history.
Who was Boudica?
Boudica or Boudicca, also known in Roman sources as Boadicea, was the woman leader of the Iceni tribe of Britons from what is now Norfolk and parts of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
She lived in the early to mid-1st century AD. Her name means “Victorious Woman” in the language of the British Celts. She was the wife of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, and had 2 daughters with him.
We do not know for sure, but Boudica may have been born around AD 25 to 30 into the Iceni tribe or another such as the Trinovantes (from what is now Essex or Hertfordshire).
A later Roman historian describes the adult Boudica as being a striking presence: very tall with long red hair falling to her hips, usually wearing a many-coloured tunic and a gold torque around her neck.
He may be adding colour to his narrative; we don’t know if this is based on any eye-witness reports. Whether or not the description is accurate, it has undoubtedly influenced modern perceptions of her.
Life in Britain before the Romans
Around the time of the Roman invasion of AD 43, the Iron Age people lived mainly rural lives in tribal groups, but larger, more complex settlements can be seen in the archaeological record.
Though perhaps not recognisable as towns as we (or the Romans) would expect them to look, these centres could be protected by extensive earthworks such as at Lexden near Colchester in Essex. The Iceni may have had a smaller centre at Caistor St Edmunds in Norfolk.
Leaders also minted their own coins, and their people produced impressive metalwork.
The Roman invasion of Britain
In AD 43, the new Roman emperor Claudius was looking to score a military triumph to shore up his regime, and his forces invaded Britain.
The Romans had the advantage of a heavily armed, trained professional army with a strong sense of discipline. They overcame or manipulated the tribes of southern Britain into becoming ‘allied’ client kingdoms, where their rulers could stay on for their lifetimes.
One such agreement was with Boudica’s Prasutagus of the Iceni, who made the emperor his co-heir along with his 2 daughters.
The usual practice was for the Romans to inherit everything after the death of a client ruler.
The Romans established garrison forts and towns to hold down and Romanise the south and then began to push into other areas of Britain. The main towns included the capital at Colonia Victrensis or Camulodunum (Colchester) and the then slightly less important centres of Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (London).
Despite being involved in an abortive revolt in AD 47, the Iceni held on to their semi-independence until Prasutagus died in about AD 60.
How do we know what happened next?
We have the accounts of 2 Roman historians: Tacitus and Cassius Dio. However, both had their biases as Romans (and given that Boudica was a woman, particularly as Roman men).
Neither was an eyewitness to the events. Tacitus lived at the time, but Dio was born roughly a century afterwards.
We also have archaeological evidence to draw on, such as destruction and fire damage layers.
The Iceni mistreated
After the death of Presutagus, the provincial procurator Decanius Catus disregarded the treaty, treated the Iceni as a subject people, and began to take their land and tax them heavily.
We are told that the Romans enslaved some of the late king’s relatives. The final outrage came in about AD 60 when they flogged Boudica and raped her daughters.
Boudica’s answer to these events was to raise an army from among the Iceni and the Trinovantes and march against the Romans. The Roman sources and some early modern interpretations make much of Boudica’s “emotional” response, playing on perceived gender stereotypes of women.
In reality, Boudica must have had leadership qualities and organisational ability to raise, command (however loosely) and maintain a huge army against the Romans. Dio says that this force was 120,000 strong.
Given what we know about population sizes at the time, this is likely an exaggeration, but it probably numbered in the many 10s of 1000s.
The later Roman writer Dio says that Boudica, armed with a spear, addressed the assembled warriors with an inspirational speech covering wrongs the Britons had suffered and underlining the innate toughness of the Britons versus the alleged “softness” of the Romans.
He also claims she performed some sort of divination ceremony to win divine favour before the army marched off.
The Victorious Woman versus the City of Victory
For Boudica, ‘the Victorious Woman’, the first goal was to wipe out the major Roman centre in her immediate area: Colonia Victrensis, ‘The City of Victory’, now Colchester.
Her task at this particular time was made easier by several factors. Most of the Roman forces under Suetonius Paullinus were off campaigning in Wales, and her first target at Colchester no longer had strong defences.
The walls had been removed when the original Roman legionary fort had been expanded into a proper town and colony for retired veterans.
The garrison of about 700 men and the 2,000 or so retired veterans could not repel the attack by Boudica’s much larger force.
Those soldiers and panic-stricken civilians who survived the initial onslaught barricaded themselves into the Temple of Claudius (now the site of Colchester Castle, which is a scheduled monument), we are told, held out for 2 days before being overwhelmed.
The victorious Britons burned the city, leaving a destruction layer of burnt material and collapsed buildings up to half a metre thick in places, along with toppled military tombstones and traces of smashed military equipment to be discovered by archaeologists 2,000 years later.
There is also evidence of hastily buried possessions that their owners never recovered
The revolt spreads
Elements of the 9th Legion attempted to reach the town but were crushed, with only some of their accompanying cavalry detachment surviving.
The hated Procurator fled from Londonium to Gaul (France). Paulinus returned from Wales but was not in a strong enough position to take on Boudicca’s army. The Britons then sacked Londinium and Verlamium, neither of which had strong defences at that time.
Paulinus eventually regrouped, possibly at Letocetum (Wall near Lichfield in Staffordshire). Tacitus tells us that his expected reinforcements from the 2nd Augustan Legion with its attached auxiliary troops did not show up (and that its commander later committed suicide).
The Battle of Watling Street
As he was now several thousand soldiers short of what he had hoped for, General Paulinus knew that he couldn’t defeat Boudica’s much larger army with his modest force unless he picked his ground very carefully to try to neutralise their numbers and waited for the rebels to come to him.
With his army of about 12,000 to 15,000, Paulinus chose his defensive position in a narrow defile with a thick wood to his rear, making it unlikely that he could be surrounded or even outflanked.
We don’t know for sure where the resulting ‘showdown’ that modern historians call the ‘Battle of Watling Street’ happened. One of the leading candidates is Mancetter in Warwickshire, whose Roman period name ‘Manduessedum’ means ‘place of chariots’ and has a similar topography to Tacitus’s description.
Boudica’s army had swollen in numbers, including the warriors’ families, who looked on from a semicircle of wagons to its rear. Its very size would have probably made it difficult to command.
We cannot say for sure how much Boudica could command directly, though Dio says, “she assigned the others to their several positions” at the start of the battle.
The Roman historians describe Boudica riding along the ranks of her army in her chariot to deliver inspiring speeches to the warriors. Boudica’s role as an assertive woman would have shocked Roman readers.
The speech that Tacitus puts in Boudica’s mouth stresses that it wasn’t unusual for Britons to fight under a female leader and that she appealed to the sense of liberty, justice and manhood among ordinary warriors:
It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters…
Boudica
But heaven is on the side of the righteous, a legion which dared to fight has perished; the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are thinking anxiously of flight. They will not sustain even the din and the shout of so many thousands, much less our charge and our blows. If you weigh well the strength of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you must conquer or die.
This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.
Tacitus alleges that many women fought in the rebel army. He tells us that if they had actually met in an open field, even if the Romans were only 1 man deep, they could not have stretched to cover the whole front of the rebel force.
They charged with chariots and other troops, but their attacks were disrupted by the javelins of the Roman soldiers and by auxiliary archers shooting arrows.
When he judged the assault had been sufficiently blunted, Paulinus ordered his men to advance in a compact wedge formation. They broke out of the defile, defeating the main warrior force and then massacring the watching rebel civilians. Supposedly, the Romans even slaughtered baggage animals as their pent-up aggression exploded.
While sparse, Roman accounts of the battle stress superior Roman training, discipline and equipment against what they saw as “barbarian” ferocity and noise. All are standard Roman tropes.
How did Boudica die?
The Roman historians disagree on what happened to Boudica after the failure of the rebellion. Tacitus says that she took poison rather than be captured or further dishonoured, while Dio tells us that she fell ill and died while regrouping to continue the fight.
The former might be more of what a defeated Roman commander expected and could be a literary trope. Boudica could have equally been killed during the battle or died of wounds afterwards.
Despite a much earlier Bronze Age burial mound in London being associated in folklore as her grave, we don’t know where her burial place was.
After the defeat, Paulinus crushed the remaining resistance in the province. He may have brought the remaining rebels to heel by burning their crops and creating an artificial famine.
Once he had done the dirty work of re-imposing order, Paulinus was replaced as governor.
Boudica’s legacy
Since early modern times, particularly from the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Boudica or Boadicea has become a symbol of defiant Britishness, female strength and determination.
In the 1850s, the sculptor Thomas Thornycroft created a group of bronze statues of Boudica and her 2 daughters mounted in a scythed chariot. In 1902, this was unveiled as a monument on a granite plinth designed by TG Jackson at Victoria Embankment near Westminster Bridge in London.
The inscription on the plinth includes the line “regions Ceasar never knew thy posterity shall sway”, meaning that the former province of Britain personified here by Boudica had eclipsed Roman in imperial might by ruling over an even more far-flung empire.
We will, of course, never know what the ancient insurgent leader fighting for her indigenous people against an overbearing imperial power would have made of that.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the suffragettes also used her as a symbol in their campaigns of getting women the vote. As a combination of woman, mother and ruler, Boudica was invoked in pamphlets and on banners.
Boudica became a popular costume choice for pageants and other events.
She has also featured in numerous plays and later films or television programmes, most recently portrayed by Olga Kurylenko in the 2023 film ‘Boudica: Queen of War’.
The role of Historic England
Some of the important sites mentioned are protected by being ‘scheduled’ or ‘listed’. You can find out more about these and other sites online at the National Heritage List for England.
Further reading
The use of the word England is misleading, maybe if you want to say England you could say that part of Britain that “would become England” would be better
The Roman Description of Queen Bod-Dig is as follows. She had red hair hanging to her knees. She wore a coat of many colours (Tartan) she carried a heavy war spear. Queen Bod-Dig had a stable of black Arab horses. These horses can outpace
any thorough bred. How do you tell if a horse is an Arab. It holds it’s tail up.
Clive Hughes cthclive@gmail.com
Why did you feel it necessary to insert gratuitous criticism of the British Empire?
England didn’t exist at that time why don’t you state that the islands were Celtic and not anglo saxon
Thanks for your comment! You are correct to say that the word ‘England’ would not have been contemporary with the events of the revolt. We have changed the name ‘England’ to ‘Britain’. We initially use England because of our national remit in that nation and most of the events of the revolt happened in what we now consider as ‘England’ in modern terms. While a lot of people are now familiar with the term ‘Celts’/’Celtic’, there is a debate among historians if that was really a common contemporary identity for various Iron Age peoples living in Britain or Europe. It was a label the Greeks and Romans used in some circumstances of those peoples.