Ordovices

The Ordovices held the mountains of north and central Wales and were annihilated as a people, which is stated flatly in the sources and almost nowhere else in the history of Roman Britain. They were a upland society of scattered hillforts with no urban centre worth capturing, and their country was the hardest terrain the army faced in the province. They sheltered Caratacus after his defeat in the south-east and fought his last battle with him around AD 50, at a hill site never identified, where his family was captured and he fled north to the Brigantes. Roman campaigning in Wales then continued intermittently for a quarter of a century, interrupted by Boudica's revolt and by the civil wars of AD 69. In AD 77 or 78 the Ordovices destroyed a Roman cavalry squadron stationed in their territory. Agricola, newly arrived as governor and with the campaigning season almost over, marched into the mountains at once, and Tacitus - his son-in-law, writing to praise him - records that he cut down almost the entire people. The phrase is his and it is not qualified. Agricola then crossed to Anglesey and took the island, ending the druidic centre that had survived the massacre there under Suetonius Paulinus eighteen years earlier. Wales was thereafter held by garrison rather than settled: two legionary fortresses at Chester and Caerleon, a dense network of forts and roads between them, and almost no towns or villas. The Ordovices left no civitas capital and no successor name.

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