Iceni

The Iceni held Norfolk and northern Suffolk and were a wealthy people, issuing gold coinage and burying gold torcs of extraordinary workmanship - the Snettisham hoards contain more Iron Age gold than has been found anywhere else in Europe. They submitted to Rome without being conquered in 43 AD and were left as a client kingdom under Prasutagus. What destroyed them was the terms of his will. He left his kingdom jointly to his two daughters and the emperor, expecting the arrangement to protect the succession; Roman law did not recognise a client kingdom as heritable property at all, and the procurator's staff moved in to annex it as an inheritance. Tacitus records that Prasutagus's widow Boudica was flogged and her daughters raped, and that Roman creditors simultaneously called in loans made to the Icenian nobility. The revolt of 60 or 61 AD that followed drew in the Trinovantes and destroyed Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, killing by Tacitus's account seventy thousand; the burned layer is still visible in excavation in all three cities. Suetonius Paulinus beat the rebel army in a single battle at an unidentified site in the Midlands, and the reprisals that followed were severe enough that Rome recalled the procurator for making the province ungovernable. Boudica died, by poison or illness. Icenian territory was thereafter administered directly and stayed poor and thinly Romanised, which for a people that had been minting gold is the measure of what happened. Boudica's burial place is unknown and the various claimed sites are all modern inventions. The Snettisham torcs are in the British Museum. The statue of her beside Westminster Bridge was erected in 1902, when a queen leading a revolt against an empire could be celebrated by the largest empire then in existence.

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