GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Most of us were taught about Boadicea at school - and most of what we were taught was the stuff of storybooks, and based on the flimsiest of evidence. We now know she was called Boudicca, not Boadicea, and she certainly didn’t have knives on her chariot. But Roman cruelty to the Iceni - Boudicca’s tribe - did turn an uneasy truce into all out war, and Boudicca gathered her army and headed for nearby Colchester.

(In the vaults of Colchester Castle Museum)

The colonists at Colchester were so complacent that they hadn’t even bothered to build defences. And so for the veterans and their families it was the temple above me that became the site of their last stand. But by the time Boudicca and her hordes had finished the city had been razed to the ground, and as for the Roman colonists and their collaborators? Well, they’d been mutilated, tortured, massacred.

One of our best sources for the early years of Roman rule is an account by the Roman historian Tacitus: ‘Nec ullum in barbaris saevitiae genus omisit’ he tells us - ‘no sort of barbarian cruelty was overlooked in the hour of victory and vengeance’

Of course Tacitus gives us the Roman side of the story - the Celts simply didn’t keep written records: and he tells us how Boudicca went on to sack London and St Albans. The Roman army was over-stretched - many of them in Anglesey sorting out the troublesome Druids - and the Romans came within an inch of losing it all.

(On the banks of the River Thames in London)

So we know from Tacitus that Colchester, London and Saint Albans were all burnt to the ground by Boudicca and her hordes in the year 60. We also know from him that a Procurator called Classicianus was sent to Britain to help clear up the damage after the revolt.

And it’s here in London that we’ve got an extraordinary amount of archaeological evidence that backs up the historical evidence. We have Classicianus’ tombstone, it’s actually survived and on it it says that Classicianus was Procurator of the Province of Britain.

And all over London itself archaeologists have found burnt layers - burnt buildings, burnt pottery, burnt debris of things like human bones and animal bones that all mark the destruction of the extraordinary first great fire of London in the year 60. So we can imagine - just as Tacitus said - how the river here was running red with the blood of Boudicca’s victims.

The final showdown came somewhere to the North of St Albans; the Roman forces had re-grouped, and headed south down Watling Street right into the path of the advancing Britons.

The British were so confident that they even brought their wives and children to watch. But in a matter of hours it was all over: we’re told that 80,000 British warriors lay dead, and - according to Tacitus - only 400 Roman soldiers. That final crushing margin of victory concealed how close the Romans had come to disaster. But the revolt had taught them an important lesson, and out of the ashes a new Roman Britain would emerge..

(At the site of Roman St Albans)

After the revolt the Romans were left with burned and ravaged towns, so what did they do? They re-built them. Here at Roman Verulamium, now called St Albans, a huge government basilica was dedicated by the year 81 and all around me here, under the grass, are the remains of that thriving Roman town: houses,streets, and other buildings. In fact I’m actually on top of the main high street that ran from Roman Verulamium all the way through to Roman London. But with so little standing above ground it's almost impossible to imagine what this place would have looked like once. But there is a clue, up there on the hill, where the modern town of St Albans has grown up.

(At St Albans Cathedral)

The Church here was begun in the year 1077, that’s almost exactly a thousand years after the Roman Basilica of Verulamium was dedicated. And in fact this is where a lot of Roman Verulamium ended up. The builders weren't fools, so they used a lot of the high quality Roman brick that was lying around in the ruins of the old Roman town. And there are even monastic records that talk about the monks ransacking the remains for all this handy building material. That wasn’t all they took.

Those eleventh century cathedral builders also copied Roman designs. Now this isn’t Roman. Of course it's the Norman Cathedral nave, but it is the closest thing we’ve got to the Roman basilica, the government hall. Buildings as big this, and they looked very similar to this, went up in every major town in Roman Britain.

Just imagine what it must have been like for a British farmer to see something like this going up, and then have to come here and pay his taxes. It's sheer power, and only the most diehard tribal leader was going to be able to resist the benefits and the temptations of Rome. What would you have done?

At the time of the Boudiccan revolt, Britain was the northernmost province of what was by then an enormous empire - stretching as far south as the Sahara, and as far as Syria in the east.

The Romans simply didn’t have the military muscle or the resources to coerce so many millions of subjects. As a practical necessity they had to find another way to keep the natives under control. And what better way than to relax a little, to soften up and to win them over by letting them share in the benefits of this vast empire - the staggering feats of engineering, the exotic goods and the creature comforts which were beginning to filter through to the ordinary people in Britain, and exerting the same kind of pull that I think American culture has across the world today.

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