Londinium Falling - 61AD

by Tim Walker

With some historians now casting doubt on whether Julius Caesar ever actually came to Britain in 55 BC (could it really have been Roman fake news - a PR campaign by his supporters?), greater importance is now placed on the invasion by the forces of Emperor Claudius in 34 AD. An army of eight legions (40,000 men) that included cavalry and elephants, led by General Plautius, established a foothold on the south coast before pushing northwards towards the River Thames.

Imagine Iron Age fishermen, open-mouthed to see Roman galleys, rowed by slaves, moving up the River Tamesis (as the Romans would name it), and dropping anchor at their village - a place the Romans would turn into the port and fortified town of Londinium. These Romans were the first of many men of vision who would come to shape the city we see today - but not before disaster struck one fateful day in 61 AD.

Londinium soon became a bustling garrison town, from where new roads radiated north and west towards frontier towns. A wooden bridge was built across the river and a settlement sprang up in what is modern-day Southwark. General Plautius soon made peace with the local Catuvellauni tribe, and occupied their town of Camulodenum (modern day Colchester in Essex and some people’s tip for the source of the name ‘Camelot’ – King Arthur’s fabled fortress). This became the capital of the new province of Britannia and its administrative headquarters, some 60 miles north-east from the port of Londinium.

Plautius and his successor, Paulinus, did not have an easy job of subduing their new province. The Briton tribes put up fierce resistance, their blue-painted faces terrifying even seasoned legionaries as they ran screaming from the dense forests with their primitive weapons. They were whipped-up into a frenzy by their religious leaders – The Druids – whose liking for human sacrifice helped them keep a powerful grip over the locals.

In the year 61, when General Paulinius was in the north-west with most of the ninth legion chasing druids, there was a revolt. Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni, was a friend of the Romans. When he died, he left half his kingdom to the Roman emperor, then Nero, and half to his wife, Queen Boudicca. The Romans, however, wanted it all. They also wanted extra taxes and they wanted Boudicca to give up her throne.

Boudicca was humiliated and publically flogged for voicing her objection to being disinherited, and her two daughters were raped by Roman soldiers. Well, this would be enough to raise anyone’s hackles, and soon she had an army baying for Roman blood. They first swooped on the Roman capital, Camulodenum, killing all and burning it down, before turning their attention towards Londinium.

There may only have been one or two cohorts (between 500 and 1,000 men) to defend Londinium. At that time there was no stone defensive wall – most likely just a ditch and earth bank, with perhaps a wooden stockade. It is now a known fact that Boudicca’s army swept the defenders aside and burnt the town down, killing all who stood in their way.

This day of murder and mayhem is the subject of my historical fiction story, Londinium Falling, in my book of short stories, Postcards from London. My research took me to the excellent display in the British Museum, and on a tour of the London Wall. The Romans returned to the ruins of Londinium some time after the Britons had returned to their tribal lands, and set about re-building it, this time surrounded by a wall of stone.

The city of London has suffered many fires in its history – most notably the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz of the 1940s – both of which cleared the way for new building to spring up around the site of St Paul’s Cathedral that miraculously survived both events. But it’s first major calamity and destruction by fire occurred in 61 AD at the hands of Boudicca’s tribal revolt.

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Tim Walker is an independent author and former journalist based near Windsor in Berkshire, UK. Born in Hong Kong, he grew up in Liverpool and studied in South Wales, before gravitating to London where he working in newspaper publishing for ten years. In the mid-90s he went to Zambia in Africa to do publishing-related voluntary work. Following this, he stayed on and set up his own publishing and marketing business, before returning to the UK in 2009.

His publications include Thames Valley Tales, a collection of fifteen contemporary stories, a near-future/dystopian thriller novel Devil Gate Dawn, a children’s book, co-written with his 12-year-old daughter Cathy, called The Adventures of Charly Holmes. In September 2017 he published a collection of short stories, Postcards from London. Currently, he is writing an historical fiction series, A Light in the Dark Ages. The first two parts, Abandoned! (a novella) and Ambrosius: Last of the Romans (a novel) are now available from Amazon in e-book and paperback formats. Part Three, Uther’s Destiny, should follow in early 2018.

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Book Links:
Postcards from London
Abandoned
Ambrosius
Devil Gate Dawn
Thames Valley Tales
The Adventures of Charly Holmes

Ancient Roman London As Destroyed By Boadicea: Briton's Warrior Queen

A learned antiquary, Thomas Lewin, Esq., has proved, as nearly as such things can be proved, that Julius Cæsar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o'clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Cæsar's Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, and known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians. Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants the desirability of such a depôt as London, with its great and always navigable river, could not have been long overlooked.

 
ANCIENT ROMAN PAVEMENT FOUND IN THREADNEEDLE STREET, 1841

In Cæsar's second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, &c., in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than a modern English town) perhaps already called London—Llyn-don, the "town on the lake."

After a battle at Challock Wood, Cæsar and his men crossed the Thames, as is supposed, at Coway Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton and below Weybridge. Cassivellaunus, King of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Mandubert's subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and the Catyeuchlani. Straight as the flight of an arrow was Cæsar's march upon the capital of Cassivellaunus, a city the barbaric name of which he either forgot or disregarded, but which he merely says was "protected by woods and marshes." This place north of the Thames has usually been thought to be Verulamium (St. Alban's); but it was far more likely London, as the Cassi, whose capital Verulamium was, were among the traitorous tribes who joined Cæsar against their oppressor Cassivellaunus. Moreover, Cæsar's brief description of the spot perfectly applies to Roman London, for ages protected on the north by a vast forest, full of deer and wild boars, and which, even as late as the reign of Henry II, covered a great region, and has now shrunk into the not very wild districts of St. John's Wood and Caen Wood. On the north the town found a natural moat in the broad fens of Moorfields, Finsbury, and Houndsditch, while on the south ran the Fleet and the Old Bourne. Indeed, according to that credulous old enthusiast Stukeley, Cæsar, marching from Staines to London, encamped on the site of Old St. Pancras Church, round which edifice Stukeley found evident traces of a great Prætorian camp.

However, whether Cassivellaunus, the King of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had his capital at London or St. Alban's, this much at least is certain, that the legionaries carried their eagles swiftly over his stockades of earth and fallen trees, drove off the blue-stained warriors, and swept off the half-wild cattle stored up by the Britons. Shortly after, Cæsar returned to Gaul, having heard while in Britain of the death of his favourite daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, his great rival. His camp at Richborough or Sandwich was far distant, the dreaded equinoctial gales were at hand, and Gaul, he knew, might at any moment of his absence start into a flame. His inglorious campaign had lasted just four months and a half—his first had been far shorter.

As Cæsar himself wrote to Cicero, our rude island was defended by stupendous rocks, there was not a scrap of the gold that had been reported, and the only prospect of booty was in slaves, from whom there could be expected neither "skill in letters nor in music." In sober truth, all Cæsar had won from the people of Kent and Hertfordshire had been blows and buffets, for there were men in Britain even then. The prowess of the British charioteers became a standing joke in Rome against the soldiers of Cæsar. Horace and Tibullus both speak of the Briton as unconquered. The steel bow the strong Roman hand had for a moment bent, quickly relapsed to its old shape the moment Cæsar, mounting his tall galley, turned his eyes towards Gaul.

 
PART OF OLD LONDON WALL, NEAR FALCON SQUARE

The Mandubert who sought Cæsar's help is by some thought to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King Brown), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brute of Troy. The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban's; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)—a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it—had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.

Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated. The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it controlled; by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depôt and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.

Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline, that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though not, indeed, dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic.

In the year 62 London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban's). When the Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back still "bleeding from the Roman rods," she slew in London and Verulamium alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome; impaling many beautiful and well-born women, amid revelling sacrifices, in the grove of Andate, the British Goddess of Victory. It is supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is, that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice laying scattered like flower leaves, and above that of a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the débris of charred wooden buildings. This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King's Cross (otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage and despair, took poison and perished.

London probably soon sprang, phœnix-like, from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years.

  BOADICEA.


  While about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries
  Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess,
  Far in the East Boadicea, standing loftily charioted,
  Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility,
  Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune,
  Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters o'er a wild confederacy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson


 Compiled From Sources In The Public Domain.

See Boadicea, Warrior Queen of the Iceni.

Teresa Thomas Bohannon,
MyLadyWeb, Women's History, Women Authors
Regency Romance A Very Merry Chase
Historical Fantasy Shadows In A Timeless Myth.

FenMaric, one of the main characters in my historic fantasy novel, Shadows In A Timeless Myth, was a member of the ninth legion who fought and died attempting to stop Boudicea.  He still exists to appear in Shadows because he was battle cursed by a Druid Priest to the same fate that the Druid Priests believed themselves fated for, soul transmigration...but with a vengefully, punishing twist!