CHAPTER SIX

The Red Layer

Far below the modern streets of the City of London the events of AD 60 are indelibly scorched on the soil as a red layer of burnt debris …

PETER MARSDEN, Roman London

One should be in no doubt about the dangerous nature of the situation then facing the Romans in Britain. And there was worse to come.

The Boudican revolt has been described as ‘the most serious rebellion against Roman rule in any province during the early Principate’ next to the great Batavian (Rhinelander) revolt under Julius Civilis ten years later;¹ Julius Civilis being another charismatic native leader of royal descent ill-treated by the Romans – he was sent in irons to Rome – before he rebelled. The Romans were experiencing for themselves the ugly truth, as expressed by Tacitus, that they had broken the Britons into obedience, ‘but not as yet to slavery’.² Now that the habit of obedience had been boldly flung off, the Britons were facing their oppressors with all the banked energies of the unfairly subjugated, not the lethargy which long generations of serfdom can breed. It was clear to the Romans themselves that such a British onslaught, in equal measure surprising and horrifying, must be checked and as soon as possible, lest the entire occupation of the island be imperilled.

With the Roman commander at distant Anglesey, the nearest available Roman force had to be flung into the fray, in order to stop the British triumph at source, following the sack of Camulodunum. That honour fell to the IX^th Legion Hispana – one of the legions which had taken part in the Claudian invasion, taking its name from the Spanish province where it had served with distinction.³ The commander of the IX^th Legion, Petilius Cerialis, set off for Camulodunum with the intention of rescuing his compatriots, or at least of inflicting a smashing defeat upon the rebels. He probably came from a camp at Longthorpe, near Peterborough, some eighty miles from Colchester, and despite Tacitus’ assertion, was not accompanied by a full legion, which would have comprised approximately five thousand men, but something under three thousand.⁴

If however the exact quantity of cohorts at Petilius’ command is in doubt, their fate at the Britons’ hands is not. Somewhere to the north of Camulodunum a British contingent was lying in wait: this would presumably have been a separate striking force from the army which had sacked the city and was probably detailed to cover just such a Roman advance. (We do not know precisely which tribes joined under Boudica, other than her own Iceni and the Trinovantes; some of the Coritani and the Cornovii from the Midlands were probably also there and maybe some disaffected Brigantes from further north; Dio’s figure of 230,000 for Boudica’s army at the final battle is obviously wildly exaggerated, but does at least convey the massive nature of the rising which Tacitus described as universal.)⁵ The ambush was as bloodily successful as the sack of the city had been. Petilius’ infantry was cut to pieces. He himself, according to Tacitus, escaped with his cavalry and took refuge back at the legionary camp.

Perhaps he had contributed to this defeat by acting rashly. Petilius’ later career, which brought him into contact with that other native rebel, the Batavian Julius Civilis, showed him to be a general of daring rather than cautious instincts;⁶ but at this point, while the Roman mentality still grappled bemusedly with the notion of British insurrection, caution would have been more desirable in a commander than daring. At least Petilius had survived to fight another day: and after his campaigns against Civilis he would end up as Governor of Britain. But for the present the Romans had now lost a further estimated 2,500 men, and were no nearer to stemming the British advance.

At this point, the Procurator Catus Decianus, he ‘whose rapacity had driven the province to war’ as Tacitus pointed out, exercised the traditional prerogative of the rat and fled the rapidly sinking ship. He took with him not only all his papers, but all his officers: Roman Britain was now without an administrative structure of any sort, and still the Governor Suetonius, hastening from Mona, had yet to arrive to save the situation – or so it was hoped.

Tacitus tells us that Suetonius was ‘undismayed’. That was just as well. He certainly made excellent speed in his 250-mile dash towards Londinium since he managed to reach it in advance of the British hordes from Camulodunum (a mere sixty-three miles away).⁷ Or perhaps the natural if damaging British concentration on plunder following the sack of the veterans’ wealthy city was already weakening their original determination to extirpate the Roman rule. It was the element of surprise which had enabled the British tribal forces to slaughter Petilius’ well-equipped and well-trained men of the IX^th Legion. Since the Governor of Britain could hardly be expected to linger in western Mona once the startling news of the fall of Camulodunum reached him, it might have been as well for the Britons to employ the element of surprise once again, either by ambushing Petilius, or by occupying Londinium itself. But this was not to be.

So Suetonius reached Londinium unscathed, and reached it some short time ahead of the Britons; but it was an interval at least long enough for him to appraise the situation with his accustomed quick intelligence. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had pressed on towards Londinium with the original intention of using it as a military stronghold. But it is important to realize, as Suetonius soon discovered, that Londinium at this point was not actually a fortified city. Nor for that matter was it the capital city of Roman Britain, a fact which may be difficult for twentieth-century Britons to appreciate, trained by long historical usage to think of London as the centre of their world at least, and perhaps of other worlds as well.

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If not a military stronghold, what was the nature of the city to which Suetonius had hastened, and at which the marauding and triumphant Britons would soon arrive? Despite all the recent archaeological activity in this area, the exact origin of Londinium has not yet been established beyond all possibility of doubt.⁸ Caesar does not mention Londinium at all in his account of the second (54 BC) campaign in the course of which he crossed the Thames; while it was the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth who was responsible for spreading the enduring legend of a pre-Roman city, something for which there is no support from archaeology. Since the name Londinium itself does derive from something pre-Roman, it was perhaps some obscure farm on a bend of the river which gave its name forever to the future mighty conurbation.⁹

Be that as it may, the archaeological evidence indicates that Londinium as known in the first century owed its foundation to the Romans. There are two main theories: the first suggests that Londinium was founded as a military base at the time of the Claudian invasion of 43. The second envisages it as ‘a carefully planned civil trading settlement of Roman merchants’. It is the lack of military equipment among the discoveries unearthed which argues against the theory of the military base: unlike Colchester, for example, which is known to have been established in the first place as a fortification before being transformed into a colonia, and where a plethora of military remains have been turned up. The military argument cannot however be conclusively demolished. For one thing, the new settlement undeniably occupied a situation of strategic importance: it would make sense if its earliest Roman use was in fact as a place of river crossing, and that would suppose some form of military presence.¹⁰

The dating of the coins however suggests a town which began to flourish from about AD 50 onwards. Recent archaeological work has indeed tended to reinforce the notion of a town planned from the first and rapidly expanding. Traces of a major north-east–south-west Roman road have been revealed in Southwark, crossing the Thames just below the modern London Bridge (and above the mediaeval one). This is in addition to the long-known major east–west road, nine metres wide, which has been replaced by the modern Cheapside, but parts of which have been integrated into Lombard Street and Fenchurch Street. Traces of this north–south road, on the north bank of the Thames, were found in the winter of 1984/5 in King Street, between the Guildhall and St Paul’s; already in the AD 50s it was attended by thriving shops.

There are also traces of a central square, probably a market square, under Gracechurch Street, as well as these broad roads, and although the Boudican destruction followed by Roman reconstruction makes it impossible to be certain, there may well have been an early temple; if so, it would notionally lie beneath the site of that temple, recently rediscovered, which is dated about AD 70. We know that there was at least one large building, a Roman version of a modern shopping mall; this had a deep verandah or portico running along in front of it, obviously intended for a series of different shops, which indicates that the Roman version of the developers were also present.

‘Boudican’ Londinium spread over thirty acres at least and may have had as many as thirty thousand inhabitants.¹¹ The limits of the city are indicated by various factors including, of course, those fire deposits which provide brutal evidence of how soon all this development was to be suddenly and violently shattered. The siting of the Roman cemeteries of this period is also important, since they had by law to lie outside the bounds of the city. Londinium in these early days would have centred round modern Lombard Street where it is bisected by Gracechurch Street, and continues into Fenchurch Street, with the findspots of shards and so forth heavily grouped near Leadenhall Market. A stream, later named the Walbrook, flowed through it, (its course lying beneath the modern Bank of England and Mansion House). The eastern limits of Londinium would have been not much further than Mincing Lane; the Fleet from which modern Fleet Street takes its name, then a navigable river, must have acted as a virtual boundary in the west.

Unlike hapless Camulodunum, the first British colonia, and the municipium of Verulamium to which Boudica’s army would shortly turn its attentions, Londinium had as yet no official status. This is the description given to us by Tacitus: Londinium ‘did not rank as a Roman settlement, but was an important centre for businessmen and merchandise’. The word which Tacitus uses for businessmen, negotiatores – bankers or those engaged in financial transactions as opposed to mercatores, merchants – suggests incidentally that Londinium in its occupational use in AD 60 was not so far from that of the City of London, which now occupies more or less the same area.¹²

Although lacking a charter, the city may have enjoyed some kind of self-government under military control.¹³ For whatever the origins of the site, it is clear that by AD 60 a teeming energetic cosmopolitan city, connected with Europe and beyond, full of confidence in its commercial future, occupied it. Londinium at this point should not be regarded as a ‘British’ city. It may have been temporarily swollen with British refugees, given the impending arrival of the Boudican army, already laying waste the countryside of the Thames between Camulodunum and their new target. But the city was not a natural focus for any particular British tribe, as the fact that it had taken a Roman foundation to conjure it into existence bears witness.¹⁴

The cosmopolitan nature of this busy community is on the contrary well illustrated by the kind of belongings and household objects it left behind, many of them luxuries which had to be imported from some far-flung town or country. Objects have been found as geographically diverse as red-pottery tableware from southern Italy, still showing traces of Vesuvian ash, amphorae, probably containing olive oil, from the Seville region of southern Spain, smaller amphorae for wine from Rhodes, and glassware from Syria. Here were wealthy merchants, already beginning to live in the kind of comfortable lifestyle they had enjoyed at home, not necessarily Roman, but from the easeful Mediterranean. As with Camulodunum, a growing body of expatriates had come to profit from the opportunities presented by the new Roman province, serenely confident that the graph of their prosperity must inevitably soar with the passage of time.

Then Suetonius arrived from Mona, took one look at Londinium and decided to abandon it to the enemy. The town, he believed, could not be defended and the horrifying recent experience of Petilius left him disinclined to emulate that commander’s rashness; he was well aware of the inferior numbers of his own men compared to those of the Britons. It was better to live to fight another day. As Tacitus coolly and succinctly expressed it: ‘He decided to save the whole situation by the sacrifice of a single city.’ It was a radical and unsentimental solution.

In vain those about to be sacrificed – civilians all – prayed and wept not to be left to their fate. Suetonius gave the signal for departure. The brave Roman cavalry clattered away. The legionaries, those that there were, marched off. The able-bodied must have tried, many of them, to leave with him. At any rate, ‘those who could keep up with him’ were given a place. Others would have escaped up the waterway of the Thames to the safer territories of the Atrebates, with their capital at Silchester and their king Cogidubnus, like Cartimandua of the Brigantes, friendly to the Roman interests.¹⁵ But there remained behind in Londinium, according to Tacitus, all those who could not travel, either because of their sex, or because they were too old (or, as he might have added, too young). And there was a third category, equally poignant from the point of view of the historian, of those who remained behind voluntarily because they were ‘attached to the place’. Already it seems the city had its inveterate inhabitants, who if not native Britons, were in another sense already Londoners: these too stayed behind as centuries later Londoners would refuse to leave their homes during the Great Plague, the Great Fire and the Blitz.

‘Never before or since has Britain ever been in a more disturbed and perilous state’: records Tacitus, later, on the state of the Roman province at this time, and it is worth recalling that Tacitus had a first-hand witness to the events and emotions of that terrible period in his father-in-law, then a young man and a member of Suetonius’ staff. With the veterans and their families massacred, a colonia burned to the ground, at least part of a Roman legion wiped out – a minimum of two thousand men – and now a populous merchant city abandoned, it is difficult to see that Tacitus was exaggerating.

Indeed, if the Boudican revolt was the second most serious provincial rising in this century, for a parallel to the Roman situation on the abandonment of Londinium it is suggested that one should go back a hundred years to Gaul.¹⁶ Here the young champion of the Arverni, Vercingetorix, defeated Caesar at Gergovia in 52 BC, and at the head of a general army of the Gauls very nearly succeeded in throwing the Roman yoke off altogether.

The lamentations of the helpless inhabitants of Londinium had not been misplaced. Their city was to be destroyed and they themselves were to be sacrificed, in certain cases quite literally so. From the very first, serious excavations of the city of London – beginning in 1915 but with a rapid increase after the First World War – have indeed provided startling evidence of the violent demolition of an earlier foundation in the middle of the first century AD.¹⁷

The process of discovery, in connection with the building and rebuilding in this area, has continued in various phases ever since, with the depredations of the Blitz during the Second World War providing of course ripe opportunities. If not all of these were taken in the past – where archaeological discovery is concerned one might well adapt the words of Thomas Hood concerning a noted sportsman: ‘What he hit is history; what he missed is mystery’ – fortunately the present climate is increasingly favourable to co-operative ventures between archaeologist and developer.^f1

In this way fragments of burned roofing tiles, wood ash conveniently accompanied by burned coins of the reign of Claudius – seventeen such bronze coins were discovered at a depth of seventeen feet when Lloyds Bank was built – burned grain from a merchant’s stock he could not carry away, burned Samian ware, all these have provided mute testimony of the great fire which finally completed the holocaust of London. The civilized homes of the wealthy businessmen, made of timber and some clay, with their white plaster work, some of it decorated with colours, with their thatched roofs and their wooden floorboards, burned merrily. The elegant pots, the amphorae for the Greek wine and the Spanish oil, the decorated pottery lamps imported from the Mediterranean, all these witnesses to the sophisticated tastes of the first Londoners were first smashed by desecrating hands then baked in a furnace of destruction. The fact that some of these houses even had running water by this date would have been of little significance in view of the fiery furnace which now engulfed the centre of the city: it has been estimated from tests on burned Samian ware that the heat must have been in excess of 1,000°C (to be compared with the similarly estimated heat in the firestorms in Hamburg during the 1943 bombings, with all the additional aid of high explosives).¹⁸

Above all, more vivid to the eye than in the diagram and most vivid of all perhaps to the eye of the imagination, there is the red layer. Lying about thirteen feet below the surface and approximately sixteen inches deep, the red layer is the substratum of burned debris which serves as a perpetual reminder to the archaeologist of the severity of the Boudican attack. ‘Far below the modern streets of the City of London’, writes Peter Marsden, ‘the events of AD 60 are indelibly scorched on the soil …’¹⁹

The massacred inhabitants have left no equivalent red layer. As with Camulodunum, where, as has been seen, similar conditions of fire and slaughter prevailed, we can presume that the Romans returned to the smoking ruins – or perhaps long after they had grown cold, for the time scale of all these events remains mysterious – and gave the wretched victims a mass cremation. There are no skeletons, skulls or mere bones which can be ascribed to the first-century sacking with the same conviction as can for example the Samian ware baked black or the hoard of burned bronze coins in the foundations of Lloyds Bank.

If there can be no certainty, there are nevertheless some grisly relics which have been interpreted as coming from the Boudican era, since their actual form – skulls of heads which had been hacked off the body – fits plausibly into the known pattern of Celtic tribal practice.²⁰ Some of these decapitated skulls may have been discovered in the Walbrook stream as early as mediaeval times: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of the mass beheading of a legion on its banks at the orders of Allectus, who led a revolt at the end of the third century, was perhaps an imaginative response to their persistent appearance as wells were being dug. In recent years at least 140 skulls have been turned up on four sites around the crucial Walbrook area, with references to a possible further large number on a fifth site. In no case have skeletons or other bones been found adjacent to these skulls.

There are various possible explanations for such large-scale finds. Since the earliest cemeteries – those just outside the city limits – are not far from the Walbrook area, these vagabond skulls might in theory have somehow been swept by the stream from their original sites, although it has been pointed out that the Walbrook even in its prime was never particularly fast-flowing. Furthermore it seems a strange coincidence that only the skulls were displaced. The skulls certainly belong to the early Roman period, first or second centuries, with at least one of them embedded in a wall erected in 200. It is surely legitimate therefore to connect them, however tentatively, with the one large-scale massacre known to have taken place within Londinium at this time, one moreover conducted by tribes with an historically known taste for the ritual use of water, wells, groves and streams in worship, and the ritual involvement of the head – both in life and death.²¹

Despite the absence of physical relics, Tacitus leaves us in no doubt that an immense number of people died at the hands of the Boudican armies. It is true that his estimated figure of seventy thousand Roman and provincial dead, counting the sack of Verulamium yet to come, is once again likely to be an exaggeration. But actual figures in these matters, even if verifiable, have a way of being secondary to the impact of the event itself. (For instance, the Cromwellian massacre at Drogheda killed three thousand Irish according to the official verdict, four thousand at most: it is hardly necessary to emphasize the resonance of that event down the ages.)²² It is the overall picture of an ‘indescribable slaughter’ taking place, as perceived by the Romans, remembered by the surviving witnesses, which is both appalling and convincing.

Nor do Tacitus and Dio combined spare us concerning the atrocious manner in which many of these victims died. In the Agricola, Tacitus merely makes a general statement that ‘there was no form of savage cruelty that the angry victors refrained from’; in the Annals however he explains further that the Britons never thought it worthwhile to take prisoners in order to sell them (as was sometimes done at the time) or to exchange them for their own men. On the contrary: ‘They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn, and crucify …’ Dio’s account is even more specific and as a result even more dreadful.²³

‘Those who were taken captive by the Britons were subjected to every known outrage’, he wrote. ‘The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.’ On one level, the symbolism of these skewers with which the formerly oppressed tortured and killed the womenfolk of the former oppressors is sufficiently obvious, if horribly so. But Dio makes the point that these obscene cruelties were also accompanied by ‘sacrifices, banquets’ and what he calls ‘wanton behaviour’ which took place in the Britons’ sacred places, and in particular in the grove of Andate, their goddess of Victory whom they regarded with ‘most exceptional reverence’. Taking Boudica’s earlier invocation to the Iceni goddess Andraste (or Andaste) ‘as woman speaking to woman’ and putting it together with this mention of Andate and her sacred groves, it would seem that the general slaughter practised by the Britons had some distinctly religious or ritual element attached to it; as did the Iceni rising, with a Holy (Armed) Figurehead at its head.

The presence of a ritual element does not of course palliate the fact of the slaughter – or the atrocities which accompanied it; on the other hand it should not make them seem worse. It is natural of course for a later age, sharing neither the religious obsessions nor the oppression which had provoked the rebellion, to shrink back in horror from details such as Dio’s. Tacitus’ explanation for these cruelties is however a significant one: the Britons must have had a premonition of what was going to happen to them: they acted ‘as though avenging, in advance, the retribution that was on its way’. As will be seen, he relates the Romans’ own final full-scale slaughter of the Britons, including their women and their very baggage animals – ‘transfixed with weapons’ – without emotion; no need is felt here to explain let alone justify such ferocity. The Romans were the winners, and the implacable destruction of the losers was their right and even, it might be argued, their duty.

For Roman civilization itself was far from lacking the concept of revenge. The most celebrated temple in all Rome was that dedicated at the turn of the last century BC to the god of vengeance, Mars Ultor. (While in Mars’ wife Bellona the Romans had their own ferocious chariot-driving spear-waving goddess of war, to whom future Warrior Queens would sometimes be compared, or compare themselves.)²⁴ This temple was dedicated by Augustus after the battle of Philippi when he considered that he had avenged the murder of Caesar: here magpies and vultures and larger victims, horses and wolves, were sacrificed on the bloodstained altars. If it is argued – inverting Tacitus as it were – that the Romans in Britain after Boudica’s defeat were merely avenging what had gone before, then it must be pointed out that Roman history was certainly not deficient in instances when hapless civilians had been massacred. Returning once again to the comparison with Vercingetorix, Caesar, for example, put all the innocent inhabitants of Avaricum (Bourges) to the sword during the period of his wars against the Gallic leader.

It has been remarked more than once that at the hands of the Romans the weak had no rights.²⁵ Momentarily under Boudica, the Britons – like the Indians at the time of the Mutiny in 1857, to which we will return – had ceased to be the weak. Zestfully, they did not hesitate to take full advantage of their new strength. Where historical massacres are concerned, twinkling as they do like innumerable black stars in the moral galaxy of history, it seems fairest to divide them into two categories: those where the oppressed rise up and strike down their oppressors, exacting vengeance in the process, and those where the rulers or invaders exact their own vengeance on a particular section of the population, for their own reasons. The Boudican vengeance fell into the former category, which has at least the merit of being the more comprehensible of the two.

Curiously enough, Boudica’s own reputation as the leader who headed this avenging force has remained remarkably free of the taint of atrocity. Boadicea, as she must now become in reference to her later reputation, is frequently seen as a partisan queen of considerable nobility. Her lethal scythe-wheeled chariot also features more often than not – the chariot that never was – but somehow Boadicea herself never seems to leap down from it to take part in the bloodstained termination of a Roman civilian life. This may well be accurate, and again it may not. The highly limited sources available neither implicate Boudica personally in the bloodshed nor defend her from it. History – legend – has however by implication defended her from the charge of atrocity by glossing over it where she herself is concerned.

Beneath this lies the incontrovertible fact of Boadicea’s feminine gender. It is as though a woman leader can mount a ritual chariot, wave a metaphorical banner in the air, invoke the spirits of revenge in return for intolerable wrongs done to her, but she must not actually be involved in the killing itself. After all, if there is no direct evidence that she was so involved, there is also no evidence against it. Boudica at all points cheered on the Britons and urged them to defeat the Romans. So the well-attested massacres – as well attested as any other part of the story of Boudica, since both Tacitus and Dio report them – vanish in favour of the patriotic female leader on high in her chariot: high that is, morally as well as physically, above the inevitable consequences of her oratory.

There is an appropriateness about this, which does not necessarily relate to historical truth. Boudica’s sex and that of her children made them peculiarly vulnerable targets to the Romans, intent on making a series of symbolically brutal gestures to indicate the uselessness of British resistance. So Boadicea’s sex has subsequently saved her legend from the tarnish of Dio’s revelations, for which in fact as the effective leader of the Britons she must have been morally if not physically responsible.

Meanwhile the red layer beneath the City of London serves as a different kind of memento mori of the Boudican sacking and perhaps a more pertinent one. Its existence is a perpetual reminder that even the most thriving commercial city can be laid low, and that by a people generally despised as slaves, and that all in an instant of time: the destruction of everything made of clay, timber, thatch – or even other, far more durable modern materials – is guaranteed.

For afterwards, after Boudica and her troops had streamed on to enjoy one further fevered hour of triumph before tuning towards oblivion – as it seemed – Londinium too fell into a state of decay and became a kind of ghost town. (Even the great new roads north of the river were abandoned: those newly excavated in the King Street site show a period of about twenty years’ disuse.)²⁶ In the nineteenth century Macaulay imagined a situation in which some kind of ‘malady’ would be engendered within ‘the bosom of civilization itself’ to bring about the collapse of the then flourishing city of London: ‘is it possible that, in two or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide the ruins … with owls and foxes, may wash their nets amid the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?’²⁷

But in the middle of the first century AD it had already happened.

¹ Excavations of a site off Leadenhall Street during 1985–6 took place during a pause granted by the developer Legal & General before the erection of Leadenhall Court, a new centre of shops and offices; they were jointly supported by the Museum of London, English Heritage and the developer, who together formed the Roman Civic Centre Project.