Back inside the walls of Colchester, I wandered down Maidenburgh Street in the Dutch quarter – where Flemish weavers settled in the sixteenth century – and peered through a window in one of the buildings partway down the street. Here were low walls, carefully preserved for public view, that described a gentle curve: the foundations of a Roman theatre. Further down the lane was a little Saxon chapel built on the line of the theatre wall; indeed, built out of its very bricks and masonry. I pushed open the door and found myself in an anteroom full of flower-arranging impedimenta. Opening a second door, I was suddenly drenched in incense-laden air, facing an iconostasis. This Saxon chapel, with its Roman foundations and its Roman bricks, which had been restored by the Normans, and later by the Victorian Gothic architect William Butterfield, is now a Greek Orthodox church. It is dedicated to St Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great. In local folklore, Helen was the daughter of King Coel, whose stronghold was Colchester Castle. The story is told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century work A History of the Kings of Britain: Coel, who rules from Colchester, sues for peace when the great Roman senator Constantius arrives on British shores. After Coel dies, Constantius marries his daughter and seizes the throne, later becoming the ruler of all Rome.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work, though regarded as authoritative until well into the Renaissance, is a repository of myth rather than fact. His version of Britain’s early history – the source for which he vaguely and dubiously claimed was a nameless ‘very old book’ – provides some compelling narratives, stitched through with the threads of legends, many from his native Wales. He tells the tale of the giants Gog and Magog who once roamed the land; the fate of King Arthur; the story of Lear. He claimed that Britain was named after a man named Brutus, a grandson of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who fled his home city to Italy after the Greeks’ sack, and whose descendants founded Rome. It is telling that Geoffrey needed to give Britain a classicising foundation myth, ascribing to it grand legendary origins on a par with Rome’s: the literary equivalent, perhaps, of building your castle on the ruins of a Roman temple. It is a story that nobody tells any more.
Monmouth’s story of Coel is a fairy tale, perhaps born from some false etymology relating to the name of the town. In fact Colchester is more likely to have got its name from the word ‘colonia’, the Roman veterans’ colony, added to ‘-chester’, the Saxon corruption of ‘castrum’, the Latin for camp. (The official Roman name of the town was Colonia Claudia Victricensis – the Claudian Town of Victory.) The story does, however, have one or two facts woven through it: Constantine the Great and his father, Constantius Chlorus, were indeed both in Britain. Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the empire, was proclaimed emperor in York in AD 306. But there is no evidence that the historical Helen, who is much more likely to have come from the eastern Mediterranean, ever set foot here, let alone was born here; and no evidence for a Coel at all. But the Helen myth stuck for a long while in Colchester: the town’s coat of arms, first used in the fifteenth century, has an image of the True Cross and its nails, fragments of which St Helen supposedly found on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It also bears three crowns, to suggest the Magi, whose graves she is also said to have encountered on her travels. The Orthodox chapel’s priest has written about St Helen: he reluctantly admits that the story of her connection to the town has no historical foundation. And yet, he argues, the tradition itself is what matters. She cannot be unstitched, now, from its history. Indeed, as a venerator of fragments from the past, and as a finder of the graves of those who died long ago, she might make rather a suitable patron for those who seek the revered objects of a lost Britain.
In fact, St Helen has, for the past century, had a serious rival as an ancient heroine for the town: Boudica. From the frontage of the town hall on the high street, which was built at the turn of the twentieth century, loom statues of famous figures from Colchester history. Here is a sculpture of Eudo Dapifer, and Edward the Elder, the son of Alfred the Great, who took Colchester from the Danes in 917. Tucked round the side of the building we see Boudica, gesturing portentously down a narrow side street. It is said that the spot occupied by the British rebel was meant for an image of Cunobelinus. Then, unannounced, in 1902, a sculpture of Boudica appeared in his niche – and not to universal acclaim, though perhaps the anonymous donor was inspired by the example of Thomas Thornycroft’s bronze sculpture, Boadicea and Her Daughters, which had recently been erected at Waterloo Bridge in London.
Boudica is, at best, an ambiguous heroine for Colchester, since her sole connection is that in AD 60 or 61 she and her men took and burnt the town, and massacred its inhabitants. And yet she has, from her appearance on the town hall facade, been embraced. In 1909, she was one of the stars of the Colchester Pageant – a grand event, running over six days, and involving a cast of 3,000, that staged tableaux from local history. One of the posters showed Boudica as a Wagnerian heroine, a horned helmet upon her head, borne along in her chariot by fiery black steeds. Another promised the re-creation of BOADICEA’S VICTORY – ON THE ACTUAL BATTLE GROUND, among other attractions. In the modern successor of the Colchester Pageant, the annual Colchester Carnival, another Boudica, face daubed with blue, rides through the town in her chariot. When I enquired whether there had been a St Helen in the last carnival, I was told by its organiser that no one had come forward to take her on, and that Boudica was, in any case, ‘far more representative of an important event in Colchester’s history than the fictional St Helen’. I saw that there was, too, a new school in Colchester called Queen Boudica Primary. It seemed that this bloody queen had been adopted as a secular saint, feminist role model and an example to the young. I felt sorry for St Helen, her piety out of tune with the times. But it was time to go in search of Boudica – in her homeland.
2
Norfolk
… and a woman,
A woman beat ’em, Nennius; a weak woman,
A woman beat these Romanes.
John Fletcher, c.1613
Caratacus and Boudica are the first British characters in history. They are entirely Roman creations. There is no convincing archaeological evidence that they existed at all, beyond a few finds of Iron Age coins marked ‘CARA’. They are written into being, as figures of the British resistance against Roman rule, by Tacitus in his Annals – his last work, a now incomplete history of Rome from Augustus to Nero, composed around AD 117. He tinges them with a dangerous glamour and a subversive nobility; they are tools in his often cynical, always penetrating, critique of the values of the Roman empire.
Caratacus, the son of Cunobelinus and brother of Togodumnus, had slipped out of the grasp of the Romans at the time of Claudius’s initial conquest in AD 43, and we next hear of him seven years later, leading the Britons in south and then north Wales – where no doubt the hilly, inaccessible territory helped him and his men as they slipped from wood to cave to mountain. But he was finally brought to ground by the relentess Roman war machine, and defeated in battle at a great hill fort, somewhere in Ordovician territory in north Wales. Caratacus himself escaped from the melee and sought protection in northern England with the Brigantes tribe, but Cartimandua, as a Roman ally, handed him over to the conquerors. As Tacitus has it, in the years that had elapsed since Claudius claimed Britain at Camulodunum, Caratacus had become a famous name in Italy. And so the capture of this elusive guerrilla leader, ‘whose name was not without a certain glory’, offered the opportunity for a spectacular public-relations exercise in Rome (as well as leading, according to Tacitus, to a false sense that Roman troubles in Britain had ended). ‘There was huge curiosity to see the man who for so many years had spurned our power,’ he wrote.
And so Claudius laid on a show, carefully stage-managed to make the capture reflect as gloriously as possible on himself. A parade was organised, with Caratacus’s splendid gold torcs and war booty carried aloft, and his companions, wife and children forced to follow. Finally came Caratacus himself, who, accor
ding to Tacitus, was the only prisoner-of-war who walked with his head held high. Approaching the tribunal on which Claudius sat, he boldly addressed the emperor on equal terms, saying that under different circumstances he might have been welcomed to Rome as a friend, rather than dragged there as a captive. He added: ‘I had horses, men, arms, riches: is it any wonder that I should lose them unwillingly? If you wish to rule the world, does it follow that everybody else should accept slavery? If I had been dragged before you having surrendered immediately, nobody would have heard of either my defeat or your victory: if you punish me everybody will forget this moment. But if you save me, I shall be an everlasting memorial to your mercy.’
Claudius was convinced by this shrewd appeal to his reputation, and pardoned the Briton and his family: nothing is heard of them again, though there was some (rather wishful) speculation in the nineteenth century that a woman whom the poet Martial mentioned some forty years later – Claudia Rufens, ‘caeruleis … Britannis edita’, ‘sprung from the woad-painted Britons’ – might be a descendant, suitably named after the merciful emperor. At any rate, Tacitus’s description of these events is remarkable: the historian has the Briton employing the quintessentially Roman skill of rhetoric and using it to best the emperor himself. Not for the first or last time, a Roman writer was using the figure of a defeated enemy – one who is shown to possess true Roman virtues – to launch a bitter attack on the imperial project. It is precisely this treatment of Caratacus that allowed the character to be created, by later British readers, as a heroic figure. The carefully described moment of the Briton standing before Claudius lent itself to artistic depiction: George Frederick Watts, for example, submitted a painting of the scene for a competition held in 1843 to select artists to decorate the new Palace of Westminster. But Caratacus seems now to have drifted out of fashion and out of memory. There is no place for him in Colchester’s annual carnival, though you might argue that he has a better claim to inclusion than Boudica. It is probable that more modern Britons have, thanks to the Asterix comics, heard of Vercingetorix, the Gaul who rebelled against Julius Caesar, than Caratacus.
In any case, it was Boudica whom I was now seeking: the other great British rebel leader, who, in AD 60 or 61, a decade after Caratacus’s capture, rose up against the young Roman administration. Under the rule of her husband Prasutagus, the Iceni had been a Roman ally. But when he died, leaving his kingdom and property equally divided between the emperor Nero and his own daughters, things went badly wrong. The Roman military, according to Tacitus, seized Iceni property, flogged the queen, raped her daughters. The flagrant abuses and grotesque humiliations were too much. With the brunt of the Roman forces far away, tackling a Druid stronghold on Anglesey, Boudica and the Iceni seized their chance. They rampaged through the south-east, and took on Camulodunum, where the behaviour of the Roman colonists – driving Britons from their land, treating them like slaves – had sparked outrage. Terrifying portents were witnessed by the Romans: in the town, the sculpture of Victory spontaneously toppled and the theatre rang with the sound of hideous supernatural shrieks; in the Thames estuary, the sea took on the appearance of blood, and people saw an image of the colony overthrown. Those who could took refuge in the temple of the deified Claudius, which itself had become a hated symbol of foreign rule. The Romans sent to London for help, but the procurator (or chief financial officer) sent only 200 ill-equipped troops. Camulodunum was otherwise entirely undefended. The temple held out for just two days before the town was captured and burnt, the inhabitants massacred. Finally, the 9th Legion arrived, but the rebels defeated it, slaughtering its entire infantry and forcing its commander, Petilius Cerealis, and the cavalry to ignominious flight. The procurator, or chief financial officer, fled to Gaul from his base in London. Finally, the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus marched back to the south-east from Anglesey and, despite the appeals of the inhabitants, decided to sacrifice London for the sake of the province as a whole. Everyone from the city who could not follow in his baggage train – the old, the sick, children – were left to be slaughtered by the Iceni and their allies. Verulamium, the Roman town beside modern St Albans, met the same fate. Finally Suetonius Paulinus engaged the rebels on a battlefield of his own choosing, somewhere near London. His victory was total. Fleeing Britons were trapped by their wagons, which ringed the battlefield. Women were not spared. Dead pack animals bristled with spears. Eighty thousand Britons (or so wrote Tacitus) were slaughtered; 10,000 more than had been killed by the rebels. Boudica took poison and killed herself.
Matthew and I were heading to the Iceni heartlands of Norfolk. As we trickled south from Yorkshire, the camper van’s engine, instead of emitting its usual musical gurgle, began to roar and cough. Finally, with an unpleasantly acrid stench, it gave out, and we were obliged to continue by the less romantic means of a hire car. It was a relief, at least, to be in a vehicle that could comfortably travel at more than fifty miles an hour. The road into Norfolk, sweeping us east into England’s rump, was not designed for gentle puttering, but was a great trunk route, with lorries hurtling through the flat agricultural heartlands. Finally, in the market town of Swaffham, we ate a picnic in the graveyard – then ran for cover inside the church as a sudden downpour came. Its medieval ceiling was carved with phalanxes of angels, wings outspread. I lay on a pew and gazed upwards, soaring with them.
Past Swaffham, we came upon a sign inviting us to visit something called the ‘Iceni Village’. Since it was Iceni country we had come to see, and the Iceni Village promised us a reconstruction of an Iron Age British settlement, we each handed over our £6. We crossed over a wickerwork drawbridge stuck with plasticky heads on poles. Inside the enclosure was a clump of sketchily made roundhouses. Within, they were dripping from the rain. A few garden-centre ceramic pots were scattered around. Sinister-looking shop mannequins, with blue-stained faces, bad wigs and some distant approximation of Iron Age dress, leered at drunken angles through the gloom. They reminded me of the Ugly-Wuglies, the creatures made of pillows and old suits that come alive in E. Nesbit’s story The Enchanted Castle. Wherever Boudica was, she was certainly not here.
We retreated, out of sorts, to the village of Castle Acre, through which runs the Roman road known as the Peddars Way – now a footpath that can be followed from the north Norfolk coast to Suffolk. Grateful for something solid and true instead of the Iceni Village fakery, we wandered through the ruins of the village’s Cluniac priory: the chevrons and diapers carved into the Norman arches were so crisp they looked as if they had been cut from paper. As the June evening elongated into dusk, we meandered along the river Nar, past fields drenched blue by oceans of prickle-stemmed viper’s bugloss. As we rounded a corner of a tree-arched lane, we saw a barn owl bowling along towards us, low to the ground through the dark-green tunnel. Its impossibly wide wings shone white in the gloaming. It was perfectly silent, and perfectly uncanny, like a bird in a dream.
The following day we went east again, and drove to the village of Caistor St Edmund, a couple of miles outside Norwich. In a field on its outskirts lie the remains of a Roman town. Some 400 years before, the scholar William Camden had come here too, researching his magisterial work, Britannia, a county-by-county description of Britain that drew on his acute topographical and antiquarian observation as well as his learned knowledge of the classical texts that, thanks to the printing press and the great surge of humanist learning on the Continent, were now in circulation. First published in Latin in 1586, it had already run to multiple editions by the time it was translated into English by Philemon Howard in 1607. By way of its learned and beautifully written descriptions of Britain’s towns, cities and antique remains, it was the work that, more than any other, began to wrest British historiography out of the grasp of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythography. Camden’s aim was, he wrote, to ‘restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britaine to his antiquity’.
Camden thought the ruins at Caistor were those of the Roman town Venta Icenorum (meaning ‘the mar
ketplace of the Iceni’) mentioned by the second-century Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy. Most people since have agreed, not because there is any firm evidence that this was its name – no Roman inscription has been found on the site that definitively identifies it – but rather because there is no other settlement discovered in Iceni territory that has such a good claim to be ‘the marketplace of the Iceni’, the region’s administrative or ‘civitas’ capital. Now only the town’s walls can be seen above ground: where it once stood is sheep-grazed pasture. As Camden wrote, ‘It hath quite lost it selfe. For beside the ruines of the walles, which containe within a square plot or quadrant about thirty acres, and tokens appearing upon the ground where sometimes houses stood, and some fewe peeces of Romane money which are now and then there digged up, there is nothing at all remaining.’
We walked around the walls, taking in the scale of the place: assuming it really were Venta, it would be the smallest known civitas capital in Britain, a backwater. Not far to the west, trains streaked past en route to Norwich, and the main road thrummed away, a bass line to the cawing of irritable rooks. The south-facing wall was covered in plants: the alkaline Roman mortar, which bonded together the flints when it was built in around AD 200, had created a narrow strip of chalky habitat, an anomalous island amid the plain green pasture for lime-loving flowering plants. And so the ancient wall was covered with blooms: gentle mulleins, with their silvery furred leaves and tall spikes of yellow; buttery ladies’ bedstraw; delicate pink convolvulus creeping low along the turf; lipstick-red field poppies. We wandered down to the river Tas, now a gentle stream ambling through cattle fields; once, it is supposed, a busy artery to the North Sea, with goods loaded and offloaded at Caistor’s wooden quay. In the dry summer of 1928, aerial photography – then a brand-new archaeological technique – showed the complete plan of a Roman town marked out in neat lines of parched grass where the foundations of buildings were buried shallowly under the soil. Excavation then brought to light traces of a basilica, baths, a forum and two temples. But even a recent dig has discovered no evidence of an older, Iron Age settlement that might have been Boudica’s, despite the fact that Roman towns in Britain were often built over, or near, their native predecessors. Boudica had slipped away again.
Under Another Sky Page 4
