A History of Ancient Britain (55 page)

While the native Britons had used lead as a constituent of bronze and pewter, the Romans had many more applications for the stuff. The Latin word for lead is
plumbum
, and the Romans
certainly employed the metal in their plumbing – in pipes for their homes and bathhouses as well as for their grand viaducts. Lead is toxic – a fact that may or may not have been known
in ancient times – but nonetheless it was used by the Romans to line their cooking pots and even as an ingredient in some of their cooking.

Ingots of lead, some weighing as much as 15 or 16 stones – as much as a grown man – were produced in the Mendips and transported all the way back to Rome. Some were stamped as the
property of the Emperor himself – and not because he coveted the lead itself necessarily, but another metal contained within. Lead contains silver, crucial for Roman coins, and with this in
mind the metal was processed within heavily defended forts. Like gold, lead is so heavy it provides its own security – you would be hard pushed to make off with 16-stone ingot of the stuff
– but it was the prospect of silver that explains the scarred landscape of the Mendips.

The promise of gold drew the Roman miners and engineers towards known reserves in Devon, Scotland and Wales. But the biggest prize lay further west. Around 30 years after they arrived in Britain
they had brought the Welsh to heel. Right away they set about extracting gold on a huge scale at Dolaucothi, in Carmarthenshire in south Wales.

Gold was being collected from the rivers and streams by the locals
there as early as the Bronze Age, but the Romans brought truly industrial techniques into play. Having
surveyed the terrain, they understood the gold ran in veins through quartzite rock. The problem was how to get at the quartzite without expending thousands of man-hours stripping the trees, turf
and soil that cloaked the hillsides.

Their solution was to divert the natural streams and rivers along specially built aqueducts and leats, some of them as much as seven miles long, and into huge clay-lined earthen tanks dug into
the hillsides. By opening sluice gates, millions of gallons of collected water could be directed downhill in thundering torrents, completing the task of exposing the bedrock in seconds. Known today
as hydraulic mining – or hushing – the technique was in use in Britain from time to time until the nineteenth century, and in parts of Africa until the twentieth.

The exposed veins were then exploited by hand, by miners. No doubt much of the manpower was slave labour – local populations pressed into servitude underground. The area was exploited
again by the Victorians and remained open until 1938. It was while digging their own tunnels and galleries that modern miners broke through into spaces excavated nearly 2,000 years before. The
walls and roofs were pitted throughout with the scars left by ancient iron picks. As well as forcing the locals underground, the Romans routinely sentenced their convicts to lifetimes in the mines,
so that the fortunes in British gold that went into the Roman exchequer were soaked in sweat, blood and tears.

As the Roman machine spread out across Britain, more and more of the native population was faced with choices – and dilemmas. There was an obvious and understandable temptation to get into
gear with the machine, to seek to profit from it. Back in Dorset in the former lands of the Durotriges – some of whom would await the Roman advance from within their capital at Hod hill fort
– archaeologists have found evidence that not everyone there lived in fear of Rome.

At a place called North Down, deep in the Dorset countryside, a team from Bournemouth University has been excavating one of a class of settlements known as banjo enclosures. Viewed from the air
such sites bear a superficial resemblance to a banjo, with a circular ditch enclosing the shape of the body, connected to a long narrow neck that provides the entrance. Banjo enclosures might look
defensive but in fact they are anything but – in truth just undefended farming settlements providing homes for extended families.

As well as mineral wealth and slaves, the Romans wanted to take advantage of southern Britain’s rich farmland. In later centuries Dorset would be known as the
‘breadbasket’ of England and the Romans viewed the place in much the same way. Dorset grain would be exported by the Romans as far as Hadrian’s Wall and the Rhine Valley. But at
North Down the picture being built up by the archaeologists is of Iron Age Britons living peaceably through the transition from independence to domination by Rome.

Scattered across the site are as many as 30 large, deep pits, dug straight down into the chalk. Their primary function was the storage of grain like oats and barley, but it seems the farmers
also used them as a means of entering into some kind of transaction with the gods, or with nature herself. Having emptied a pit of grain, the farmers then made offerings of pieces of pottery and
other valuables, including pieces of Roman amphorae. Sometimes they placed cuts of meat or even their own dead into the spaces left by the food. It seems they felt an obligation to give something
back into the earth in return for that which had been gained.

As well as native grains and animals, the pits occasionally offer up exotic imports like chicken. Such birds are commonplace on our own tables but in Iron Age Britain they were a luxury that
could only be obtained through people with connections to Europe and the Mediterranean.

Since so much of the old way of life, the Celtic way of life, continued unmolested and unabated, it is tempting to imagine some people there living prosperously, making themselves rich by
selling their grain to feed the hungry armies of Rome. All the while they mixed with the foreigners they picked and chose from those aspects of the new life that attracted them – new styles
of clothes and jewellery perhaps, new foodstuffs – but they continued to inhabit the same sorts of settlements they always had, and to practise their own rituals and religions. At North Down
at least, the indications are that the Romans left them to it.

Rather than an unbroken wave of conquest, then, the coming of Rome was a process. The armies meted out violence – that much is certain; but it was hardly a time of endless battles. By
AD
60, having spent nearly two decades in Britannia, the Romans were even lulled and lured into dropping their guard from time to time. Given the scale of the new province,
they could hardly defend every town, every city – and surely they deemed that unnecessary anyway. In the south-east, after all, the Roman presence was so well established it had engendered
among its Roman, or Romanised, inhabitants a fair degree of complacency.

Camulodunum had been established first of all as a colony for retired soldiers. Despite the military background of its original inhabitants, it was undefended for the
first 11 years of its existence. It was also quite unique in Britain in that it was independent, self-governing and semi-autonomous. Completion of military service was rewarded with Roman
citizenship and in the first century it was a prosperous, cosmopolitan place with a population made up of people drawn from all over the Empire. Nearing completion in
AD
60
was an enormous temple, the biggest in Britain, dedicated to Claudius. Camulodunum was, by any measure, a town on the up.

But if all was well in the busy streets, shops and comfortable homes of the oldest Roman town in Britannia, something was rotten in the way at least one of the nearby tribes was being treated.
The Iceni, occupying a territory roughly the same as modern Norfolk, had long been friends of Rome. Their king, Prasutagus, had grown wealthy by association. He may have been one of those who bowed
down before Claudius alongside the King of Orkney, but his loyalty had served him well in any case.

Wily politician that he was, he drew up a will stating that in the event of his death his estate was to be split – half for his two daughters and half for Emperor Nero himself. He was not
the first native king to attempt the ploy: such tactics had become relatively commonplace as local leaders walked the tightrope between their people and their masters. The Romans, as it turned out,
were having none of it. Despite all of Prasutagus’s efforts to ensure a future of peace and prosperity for his family and for his people, when he died the local officials helped themselves to
everything he left behind.

Prasutagus’s widow was named Boudicca. History paints her as the British pride incarnate, but she was a woman who had played the game and married well. She was as much a part of the
establishment as an opponent of it. Whatever the truth of her motivations, she apparently complained bitterly about the treatment meted out to her family, the disrespect being shown to her dead
husband.

According to the ubiquitous Tacitus, Boudicca was publicly thrashed, ‘disgraced with cruel stripes’. Worse still her daughters were raped by Roman soldiers while she was made to
watch. More worrying for the mass of the Iceni, however, was a demand that they surrender their swords and other weapons. This was part of the so-called Pax Romana – Roman Peace –
whereby the inhabitants of Roman provinces all across the Empire were forbidden to bear arms. While an apparently reasonable suggestion in
principle, for Celtic warriors
raised over countless generations to see their weapons as visible manifestations of their independence, the surrender of their swords was unthinkable, an intrusion bordering on a personal
slight.

If the Roman authorities thought they had dealt with matters by doling out rough justice, they were mistaken. In the words of Tacitus: ‘Exasperated by their acts of violence, and dreading
worse calamities, the Iceni had recourse to arms. The Trinovantes joined in the revolt. The neighbouring states, not as yet taught to crouch in bondage, pledged themselves, in secret councils, to
stand forth in the cause of liberty.’

Tacitus levelled much of the blame for the uprising that followed on the conduct of the veteran soldiers settled in Camulodunum. ‘These men treated the Britons with cruelty and oppression;
they drove the natives from their habitations, and, calling them by the names of slaves and captives, added insult to their tyranny,’ he wrote. ‘In these acts of oppression, the
veterans were supported by the common soldiers; a set of men, by their habits of life, trained to licentiousness, and, in their turn, expecting to reap the same advantages.’

Gaius Cornelius Tacitus is every bit as fascinating as the times and characters he wrote about. A senator and historian, he was almost a manifestation of Rome’s conscience as well. Born
more than a decade after the Claudian invasion of Britain, he lived until
AD
117. It was not until
AD
98 that his written works began to circulate
but from then until the end of his life he kept the revealing light of his intelligence trained on the triumphs and disasters of the Empire.

Tacitus – a name that, ironically, means silent – was especially exercised about the often-corrupting nature of power. He saw the citizens of Rome getting rich on the proceeds of
tyranny and apathetic about the moral cost of so much easy wealth. More than anything else it seemed he feared an unchecked, unaccountable Empire would become a monster.

Time and again he watched Romans sowing a bitter crop in the soil of those they have chosen to abuse. ‘While the Britons were preparing to throw off the yoke, the statue of Victory,
erected at Camulodunum, fell from its base, without any apparent cause, and lay extended on the ground with its face averted, as if the goddess yielded to the enemies of Rome,’ he wrote.

Having raised an army tens of thousands strong, Boudicca quickly turned her attention towards the nearest symbol of Roman oppression. With its giant temple to Claudius, Camulodunum fitted the
bill perfectly. The
timing was ideal as well: the Roman Governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was on campaign in Wales with most of the army, fighting druids on the
island of Anglesey.

Within Camulodunum there was an atmosphere of rising panic. There were a handful of serving soldiers in the town but nothing capable of mounting any kind of realistic stand against thousands of
Britons. Such was the complacency of the inhabitants of the town, they had built the place without any practical defences: ‘No fosse was made; no palisade thrown up; nor were the women, and
such as were disabled by age or infirmity, sent out of the garrison,’ wrote Tacitus.

Boudicca and her rebels laid waste. Those sheltering at home, in mostly timber buildings, were quickly dispatched. The temple was the only structure erected of stone and it was a massive edifice
– taller in its day than the Norman castle that occupies the site now. It was windowless, the only way in or out being through massive bronze doors that could be barricaded from the inside.
It was behind those walls that perhaps thousands of men, women and children took refuge, holding out for two days.

Finally the rebels managed to break in. None was spared and later the whole town was set ablaze. Only the stone walls of the temple survived the inferno. Fragments of burnt human bone, along
with piles of charred Roman Samian Ware pottery, are still being excavated from the foundations of Colchester – testament to an atrocity committed nearly 2,000 years ago. Evidence of the
burning of Camulodunum can still be seen. All across modern Colchester, when holes are dug down through the Roman deposits, a black layer of ash a foot and a half thick is clearly visible.

The razing of Camulodunum was not enough to satisfy Boudicca. Word of the horror had been sent to Paulinus but before the Roman army could double-time it back from Wales the bellicose queen led
her warriors on a campaign of murder and destruction. Londinium – as the Romans called their new town – was wiped out, along with Verulamium, the town known today as St Albans.

It is estimated that something like 70,000 people died at the hands of Boudicca’s warriors in Camulodunum alone. Noblewomen were apparently singled out for special treatment. In line with
Celtic tradition, inspired by the druids, female captives were taken to sacred groves of trees and put to death. Their breasts were then cut from their bodies and sewn over their mouths before
their corpses were impaled on long spikes driven into the ground. Whether this actually happened – or if it was an invention on the
part of Roman writers seeking
justification for wiping out the druids – is anyone’s guess.