Nervii

The Nervii were the most warlike of the Belgic peoples, occupying what is now western Belgium, and were notable even among their neighbours for refusing wine and imported goods on the grounds that luxury weakened courage. They admitted no merchants and had no cavalry, fighting on foot and planting hedgerows woven with thorn as field fortifications against horsemen. In 57 BC they ambushed Caesar's army as it made camp on the river Sabis, probably the Selle, waiting in the woods until the legions were dispersed and their baggage strung out, then attacking at a run across the river. It was the closest Caesar came to catastrophe in Gaul: two legions were surrounded, the centurions of the twelfth legion were killed or wounded almost to a man, and he took a shield from a soldier and fought in the front rank himself. The arrival of the tenth legion and the rearguard decided it. Caesar records that of sixty thousand fighting men some five hundred survived, and that the elders who came to surrender said their council had been reduced from six hundred to three. The figures are his own and are probably inflated, but the Nervii were broken as a power. They joined the revolt of 54 BC and again in 52, and were finally absorbed into Gallia Belgica, with a Roman town at Bagacum, now Bavay. Caesar's account of the Sabis is the most detailed battle narrative he wrote and is also the one where he most obviously casts himself as the hero, which historians read accordingly. Their territory was among the last in the north to receive Roman towns. The hedgerow tactic he describes reappears in accounts of Norman warfare a thousand years later.

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