Boudicca

📍Venta Icenorum region, Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk, England, UK

“I was queen of the Iceni tribe of eastern Britain, and my home was among the marshes and oak forests of what the Romans called East Anglia — a landscape of mist and river and deep silence that was nothing like the stone cities of our conquerors. We lived in roundhouses of wattle and thatch, our tribal settlements surrounded by earthwork ramparts, our lives governed by the rhythms of farming and cattle and the turning of the Celtic year. When Rome broke its treaty with my people after my husband Prasutagus died — seizing our lands, flogging me and assaulting my daughters — I rose in revolt not from ambition but from fury. I burned Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium to the ground. For one extraordinary year, Britain belonged to us again.”

Sources: Tacitus, Annals Book XIV (117 AD); Cassius Dio, Roman History (3rd century AD); Hingley, R. & Unwin, C. Boudicca: Iron Age Warrior Queen (2005), Hambledon Continuum