8

The Boudican revolt (c. ad 60–1)

On the eve of rebellion

London’s destruction in ad 60–1 forms one of the more certain points in this narrative thanks to the attention given to the event by Roman historians. Archaeology shows that London was enjoying vigorous growth before disaster struck. It is argued here that London started life as a temporary encampment where the army of conquest waited on the emperor Claudius in the summer of ad 43, but that a more sustained use of this site waited until c. ad 48 when roads radiating from London Bridge were built. This first permanent bridgehead settlement may have been little more than an operational base, before town planning of c. ad 52 gave it a more urban character. New areas of housing were subsequently laid out west of the Walbrook as the settlement expanded. As a consequence London was Britain’s most important town in ad 60, eclipsing earlier seats of regal power in Colchester, Chichester and Silchester. Estimates of London’s extent vary from 39 to 45 hectares. ¹ These assume, however, that areas west of the Walbrook and on Southwark’s southern island were not settled until after the revolt. Since these districts were probably established a little earlier, the Neronian town may have spread over 60 hectares, making it twice the size of the contemporary Roman colony at Colchester. Hedley Swain and Tim Williams have reviewed a range of models to estimate population density, and concluded that the city was probably inhabited by around 10,000 people at the time of the revolt. If the city was more extensive than they assume, as argued here, then this total might sensibly be increased by a couple of thousand. If we think of London as a place of 10,000–15,000 souls, about the size of the modern Yorkshire town of Whitby, we are probably not far wrong.

The city was home to an immigrant community of soldiers and officials working for the provincial administration. Martin Pitts’ analysis of patterns of consumption shows that Londoners shared tastes with people from Rome’s German frontier, which differed from those of wealthy Britons and civilians of Gaul west of the Rhine. ² The dress accessories and dinner services used in London mirrored those preferred in contemporary forts and supply-bases, indicating that elite fashion took inspiration from people whose careers were forged at Trier and in the Rhineland. This is where the legions involved in the conquest of Britain were formerly stationed and many auxiliary troops deployed in Britain were recruited. The emerging Romano-British towns at Silchester, Canterbury, and Chichester drew, instead, on a Gallo-Belgic repertoire that incorporated cultural preferences inherited from the kingdoms that preceded the Claudian invasion.

A feature of the new urban foundations was the adoption of ‘Romanized’ grey wares, produced at kilns operated by immigrant potters, to the exclusion of grog-tempered wares common elsewhere. Pottery assemblages show that London enjoyed more elaborate forms of food preparation and consumption than other places in Britain, receiving greater quantities of imports and Romano-British regional wares through its superior connections. ³ Many items—writing equipment, glass vessels, coins, lamps, toilet equipment, and continental-style adornment—witness preferences likely to have formed on the Rhine frontier. It would be misleading, however, to see these as marking a military identity distinct from a mercantile or civilian one. Business affairs were dominated by military supply and official contracts, and the mercantile community drew its members from veterans and the familia of government officials, blurring distinctions between soldiers, administrators, businessmen, and merchants. As a result Londoners dressed, ate, and drank in ways that mirrored behaviour in contemporary military establishments, and differently from the self-governing communities of Gaul and Britain.

London destroyed

London’s bustling growth was halted when the city fell to Boudica’s rebels. The razing of the town’s earth-walled and thatch-roofed structures is marked by a distinctive black smear of charcoal beneath a band of bright-red burnt clay. The reading of this horizon is not without problems, since debris is often redeposited and other local fires can confuse the picture. ⁴ On many sites, however, the evidence is clear and the burning of c. ad 60/61 adds archaeological testimony to the history of the uprising.

According to Tacitus, writing some 50 years after the event, the death of the client king Prasutagus resulted in the Roman annexation of his Icenian territories in East Anglia. ⁵ His account describes how abuses directed at Icenian nobles, in which the widow Boudica was flogged and her daughters raped, accompanied the confiscation of estates and foreclosing of loans. These excesses, undertaken at the behest of the procurator Decianus Catus, sparked an armed uprising. Colchester was the first city assaulted by the rebels. Since the governor and his forces were away in north Wales, the colonists appealed to the procurator for help but he could only send 200 troops to their aid. Since these soldiers were within reach of Colchester they may well have been stationed with the procurator in London. ⁶ Whilst Colchester was sacked the governor, Gaius Suetonius Paullinus, moved his cavalry to London. This testifies to London’s strategic importance, but Paullinus lacked sufficient strength to mount a defence and withdrew, reportedly ‘taking those who would follow as part of his column; and those whom the weakness of sex, frailty of age, or reluctance to leave their homes remained within the town were overwhelmed by the enemy…massacred, hanged, burned and crucified with a headlong fury’. ⁷

Excavations in the City show that few buildings escaped the flames. Southwark was also damaged, and fire debris has been traced from London Bridge along Borough High Street. ⁸ This destruction is largely restricted to the northern island, and Neronian buildings to the south may have survived unscathed, but shows that the Thames failed to halt the rebels. Either there was no attempt to defend the river crossing, or the rebellion raised support on the south bank. Burnt deposits of this approximate date have also been found in Putney, Brentford, and Staines, possibly marking a path of destruction towards, but not necessarily reaching, the town at Silchester. ⁹

London’s fire horizon helps to date the revolt. Tacitus placed its outbreak in ad 61 but the events he described took place over 2 years, and political appointments made in the rebellion’s aftermath are more consistent with an uprising starting in ad 60. This is the chronology preferred by most scholars, although doubts remain. ¹⁰ Tacitus provides sufficient contextual information for us to know that the revolt started around March, after the start of the campaign season but before the planting of crops. ¹¹ If we allow time for news to reach Paullinus in north Wales, and for him to reach London, the evacuation of London can hardly have occurred before May. This establishes an historical context for dendrochronological dates obtained from London’s timber structures. As already noted, the period c. ad 60 witnessed considerable investment in London’s urban infrastructure, possibly including the setting out of a new district west of the Walbrook. Dendrochronological evidence establishes that some new buildings were not built before ad 60, and would have been only a few months old if destroyed that summer. It is tempting to suggest that this investment was made in preparation for Paullinus’ campaigns in Wales, perhaps contributing to the financial squeeze that provoked the revolt.

We can also draw on dendrochronological dating to show that post-war rebuilding was in progress by the summer of ad 62. One of the earliest post-revolt constructions was a sump cut into fire debris at One Poultry using wood felled in the winter of ad 61–2, whilst timbers felled in ad 62 were used in road construction at Drapers’ Gardens. ¹² These imply that materials were being procured for re-building in the winter of ad 61/62. This is consistent with a chronology in which Paullinus defeated the main rebel army in the summer of ad 60 before engaging in punitive actions later that season. Subsequent to this a new procurator, Classicianus, replaced Decianus Catus and a new governor, Petronius Turpilianus, replaced Paullinus. ¹³ These political changes were finalized in the spring or summer of ad 61 and the woods around London were busy with loggers the following winter. The rebuilding of London can therefore be seen as an early action of the new regime, started soon after the crisis passed. The effectiveness of this restoration is demonstrated by a contract drawn up for provisions to be transported to London from Verulamium dated 21 October ad 62, found at the Bloomberg headquarters. ¹⁴

The status of London in ad 60

In ad 60, London was evidently a town. Most Roman communities had their status defined by charter, describing a legal relationship with Rome and establishing civil administrations with rights and responsibilities. ¹⁵ The principal chartered towns were coloniae and municipia, of which the former offered greater legal advantage. Lesser self-governing communities were recognized as civitates, or peoples, who retained ‘native’ administrative structures. In Romano-British scholarship the centres of these communities are generally referred to as civitas capitals. ¹⁶ These political instruments made it possible to appoint officials, raise taxes, enforce laws, and implement decisions. Places that lacked formal recognition were usually ruled from other places that held it.

We do not know how early Roman London was governed. Important questions are raised by Tacitus’ description of the Boudican revolt where we are told that London wasn’t distinguished by the name of colony (cognomento quidem coloniae non insigne), but famed for an abundance of dealers and supplies (sed copia negotiatorum et commeatum maxime celebre). ¹⁷ This last phrase can be translated as ‘large numbers of merchants and great quantities of merchandise’, but this misleadingly evokes an image of retail trade. Merchants were more usually termed mercator, whilst the noun negotiator described civilians concerned with organizing and financing long distance shipments. Furthermore, the term commeatus was associated with food supplies, and regularly used of military provisions. ¹⁸ The implication of the passage is that London was a hub for supplies needed by the Roman administration and housed the many businessmen involved. It was sufficiently unusual in this regard to warrant the description provided by Tacitus, which implies that local land-owning classes who usually controlled civic affairs were either absent or unimportant.

Although Tacitus describes the sacking of Colchester, London, and Verulamium, other sources mention only two cities as having been destroyed in the revolt. ¹⁹ This offers indirect confirmation that London lacked civic status, distinguishing it from the municipium at Verulamium and the colony at Colchester. London also differed by virtue of the fact that it had not been a seat of pre-Roman power. The establishment of a colony at Colchester was, in part, a strategic response to the need to control newly conquered peoples. It had been an important centre of pre-Roman political authority, and the governor, Scapula, needed to maintain control of this Catuvellaunian capital whilst releasing troops for redeployment elsewhere. ²⁰ The settlement of a veteran colony was therefore politically expedient, putting former soldiers where they were most useful. This foundation might have drawn fully on the available pool of veterans. Similarly, the existence of a powerful pre-Roman community at Verulamium may have encouraged the formalization of a relationship with Rome through the grant of a city charter. The arrangements made for these other cities were less necessary at London.

As Martin Millett has explained, London was an anomalous site: not a formal colonial or chartered settlement, but nor a self-governing civitas capital of the sort developed elsewhere in Roman Britain. ²¹ This may be explained by London’s status as a foundation populated without recourse to pre-existing communities or colonial settlers. The provincial authorities may have found advantage in arrangements that did not require surrender of political control. As Guy de la Bédoyère has observed the absence of legal status does not mean that there was no formal intent behind the foundation. ²² The archaeological evidence identifies a series of enhancements of transport infrastructure at times when forward campaigns were planned by incoming administrations. In recognizing that London was unlikely to have built on the initiative of local elites, Millett has suggested that it was deliberately created to function as an entrepôt for the developing province. Since he finds no evidence that Roman state had a policy of creating such towns, in line with the minimalist view on the role of the Roman state advanced by Moses Finley (above p. 29), he prefers to see London as the creation of enterprising traders from other provinces. This leaves us to speculate as to how and why such an association might have come together, how coordinated programmes of investment in London’s infrastructure would have been achieved by such agents, and how successful their venture might have been without the patronage and protection of the Roman provincial administration. Christopher Fuhrmann has usefully challenged the scholarly consensus that imperial government was essentially passive, and depended on the contribution of local elite society because it lacked the bureaucratic instruments and institutions that allowed direct control. ²³ Drawing on the evidence of Roman policing he describes a powerful, organized, and avaricious state. David Mattingly has similarly emphasized the exploitative nature of Roman imperial power and the large-scale impact of the state. ²⁴ In the light of these arguments, and since minimalist views of the Roman state have been called into question, it is timely to reassess the role of the provincial government in making and ruling London.

The government of London

Two key officials ruled Neronian Britain: the governor and the procurator. Britons are supposed, in Tacitus’ account, to have complained of this arrangement because ‘we used to have our kings one at a time, but now two are imposed, with a governor to savage our lives, a procurator for our goods. Whether the two are in concord or discord with one another, it’s equally deadly for their subjects, as both add insult to injury—the governor with his bands of centurions, the procurator with his slaves’. ²⁵ The governor (legatus Augusti pro praetore) held supreme military and juridical authority on behalf of the emperor, serving terms that usually lasted 3 or 4 years. He commanded the armies stationed in Britain and often campaigned from spring to autumn. Soldiers detached from active forces served clerical, administrative, and policing duties within the governor’s office (officium). Troops also sometimes worked on construction and engineering projects where these served the interests of the provincial government, as described in the letters of Pliny, although cities were expected to draw on their own resources for civic building programmes. ²⁶

The procurator (procurator Augusti) was a salaried official employed by the emperor to manage his wide-ranging interests and provincial finances. Many rose to this position after service as equestrian officers in command of auxiliary regiments. The procurator’s duties involved raising revenue through taxes and tolls, and profitably managing the imperial property acquired as spoils of war and in confiscations and inheritances. The procurator drew on these resources to supply and pay imperial forces, and deliver imperial building programmes. ²⁷ He was supported by a bureaucracy of freedmen and slaves from the imperial household, known collectively as Caesariani, and small contingents of troops detached from the governor’s command. The events of the Boudican rebellion suggest that the procurator was already based in London at this time. This would explain how Decianus Catus was near enough at hand to be able to send a small contingent of men to the aid of the colonists in Colchester. ²⁸ This finds confirmation in the fact that Catus’ successor in post, Classicianus, was buried in London where his tombstone has been found (p. 105). We have already noted that if London occupied the redundant site of a military encampment it would have been built on captured lands, and as such been imperial property managed by the procurator. Since London was not recognized as a self-governing chartered city it may have remained imperial property, a situation which would have facilitated the implementation of sweeping changes such as those described in Chapter 7.

From at least ad 52, and perhaps as early as ad 48, London was a major port and financial centre. This made it the most convenient place for the procurator to establish his place of business, and hence David Mattingly’s suggestion that he was housed in the high-status building complex at Winchester Palace (p. 79). The procurator had a clear incentive to develop infrastructure to speed the passage of goods through London’s port. His responsibility for military supply would have brought him into a close working relationship with the private shippers and businessmen acting as middlemen in this exercise, as well as with those who won contracts to manage taxes, mines and estates under his jurisdiction. This business community may have been prevailed upon to take responsibility for some of the actions needed to run the city.

Whilst there is a strong case for placing the procurator in London before the revolt, there is greater uncertainty over whether the governor was also seated here. These two commands overlapped but could operate from different cities. ²⁹ Elements of the provincial administration, most notably the provincial council and imperial cult, were initially established in the pre-Roman capital of the defeated kingdom at Colchester, but we don’t know if this caused the governor to take up an official residence there. ³⁰ London was the more convenient site, and officers serving with the governor were based here before the end of the century. ³¹ London was destined to house the governor’s main palace (praetorium), and it may have sometimes been the seat of both procurator and governor before the revolt.

The governor and procurator held distinct and competing commands, and the geography of early London might have been engineered to accommodate their different spheres of influence. We have noted that the elite residence at Winchester Palace might have housed the imperial procurator, and it has long been speculated that a high-status building found near Cannon Street station on the north bank was the governor’s palace. ³² Both identifications are highly speculative, but there is an attractive symmetry to the idea that these rival commands occupied riverside palaces on opposite banks of the Thames, foreshadowing the fraught relationship between County Hall and the Palace of Westminster in the 1970s. Differences in the character of the Roman settlements north and south of the river might have followed from such an arrangement. It is also the case that the relocation of different offices of the provincial administration might have been a spur to London’s urban expansion and account for the addition of new areas of planned settlement c. ad 52 and c. ad 60.

In the first century, London became the site from which Britain was ruled. It is not certain that this was the case c. ad 60, and most scholars are more comfortable seeing it as a later promotion. ³³ Whatever the political geography, this doesn’t tell us how affairs within London were governed. Most Roman cities depended on a town council (ordo decurionum) to appoint magistrates needed to supervise markets, raise taxes, maintain civic buildings, and supervise religious matters. Where did London find its magistrates? It is widely assumed that it must have had a town council, but there is no evidence for the existence of such a body. ³⁴ John Mann suggested that London might instead have remained a vicus, a subsidiary administrative district perhaps nominally within the territory of the Cantiaci. ³⁵ We know that a vicus in London was later able to take responsibility for building activities: an inscription found in Budge Row in 1854 commemorated the restoration of a shrine to the mother Goddesses by the district (vicinia) at its own expense. ³⁶ A lead sheet found at Billingsgate Lorry Park in 1984 also mentions a ‘Vico Iovio’ (vicus of Jupiter), although this need not have been a place in London. ³⁷ It is possible to imagine a city divided between separate vici: perhaps providing separate district administrations for Southwark, the Cornhill settlement, and Ludgate Hill. Mann’s suggestion has been criticized, however, for underestimating the legal complexities of the Roman world. ³⁸ Those exercising political authority in a place as important as London are unlikely to have been left within the jurisdiction of a native civitates, such as the Cantiaci whose administrative centre was found at Canterbury. London is more likely to have been an autonomous community, even if it drew on territory carved from Kentish lands.

London’s immigrant community may have included a sufficient body of resident Roman citizens to form a responsible authority (a conventus civium Romanorum). It has long been argued that such an arrangement would explain the absence of a chartered settlement. ³⁹ Roger Wilson has questioned this conclusion on the basis that we only know the arrangement to have been adopted in places where the Roman population needed separate juridical status from a non-citizen community, which was unlikely to have been the case at London. ⁴⁰ Harvey Sheldon has alternatively proposed that London may have been excused the legal instruments normally deployed for the governance of urban communities, leaving the emperor’s representatives to rule directly through appointed subordinates. ⁴¹ Roman political systems were designed to serve aristocratic interests, but these were not a natural or necessary fit for Roman London where the military administration was probably paramount. The absence of a local aristocracy of consequence meant that there was no pressing need to use civic office as a vehicle for the promotion of political careers and social status. More politically convenient options were available. We have no evidence for the existence of a town council in early Roman London, and it is possible to question if one had ever existed. Governors were able to appoint an official (praefectus civitatis) to take charge of local government, and could place areas under the military command of a ‘centurion of the region’ (centurio regionalius). ⁴² The physical presence of governor or procurator in London might have made it unnecessary, however, to delegate powers in this fashion. The governor’s intervention in managing London’s affairs is indicated by the record of a legal judgement made on 22 October ad 76, preserved amongst the writing tablets found at the Bloomberg headquarters. ⁴³ The judge opened his decision by declaring that he had been given this responsibility by the emperor. As Roger Tomlin has explained, the appointment would have been made by the governor or his representative. In chartered towns, judges were appointed by the annually elected city magistrates, but the intervention of the governor in this case suggests that London lacked these instruments of self-government in ad 76.

London may have remained imperial property, where the governor ruled using his authority, office, and patronage to have others undertake duties that elsewhere fell to city magistrates and officials. Londoners might therefore have found themselves in a similar legal situation to peasants who farmed imperial estates, who lacked access to traditional organs of municipal organization but relied instead on a direct right of appeal to the emperor. ⁴⁴ This may have given rise to a situation in which parallel forms of political association would flourish (below p. 151). The truth is that we don’t have enough evidence to know how London was governed, and in any case the arrangements would have changed through time. Notwithstanding such uncertainty, power ultimately resided with the emperor’s representatives: the governor and procurator. These officials probably took the decisions that resulted in the foundation of London. They would have been equally important in post-war reconstruction, to which attention now turns.