Trinovantes

The Trinovantes held Essex and southern Suffolk and were the first British people to appear in written history: they sent envoys to Julius Caesar during his second expedition in 54 BC, asking for protection against the Catuvellauni, whose ruler had killed their king. Caesar took hostages and grain, secured their submission, and left - which set the pattern for a people whose politics for the next century consisted of being squeezed between a stronger neighbour and a distant empire. Cunobelinus of the Catuvellauni took their capital Camulodunum outright and made it his own, and by the time the legions landed in 43 AD the Trinovantes had effectively been absorbed. Rome did not restore them. Camulodunum became a colonia - a settlement of discharged legionaries - built on Trinovantian land taken without compensation, and a great temple to the deified Claudius was erected there and paid for by local taxation, which Tacitus says was resented as a citadel of eternal domination. When Boudica rose in 60 AD the Trinovantes joined immediately and the colonia was the first place destroyed; its inhabitants held out in the temple for two days and were killed. The reprisals afterwards fell heavily on them. Their territory was reorganised as a civitas administered from Caesaromagus, now Chelmsford, and Colchester was rebuilt with walls. Their name survives in no modern county, which is the ordinary fate of a people conquered twice. Caesar's account is the earliest written reference to any named British people. The temple of Claudius survives as the foundation of Colchester Castle, which was built on its podium by the Normans. Colchester still describes itself as Britain's oldest recorded town on the strength of this.

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