Vulgar History Podcast
Boudica, Queen of Iceni
March 11, 2020
Ann Foster:
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. I’m your host, Ann Foster, and this is Season Two, Episode Three. This season’s topic is Women Leaders in History and the Men Who Whined About It, and for the third week in a row, we’re looking at Roman men whining about a woman because isn’t it interesting how in Ancient Roman society, there was this expectation that women should be seen and not heard and just, sort of, hang around and give birth to babies and maybe gracefully die by suicide if they became too inconvenient to the men around them? This was the society and what the Roman Empire was trying to make things be like, and then one after another, these super powerful, badass women got on their way, almost like their whole concept was incorrect and women had their own minds and brains and didn’t want to behave that way all the time.
So, we saw in Episode One of this season Cleopatra; Episode Two was about Agrippina. Today, the third, I always think of these women in a cluster of people together where it’s just, like, one woman who really annoyed the men of Rome and then, you know, she dies and then another woman pops up, then she dies and then another woman pops up and that’s who Boudica is, she is the third one. I’m going to pronounce her name Boudica because that is how I think it is said. Although, some people pronounce it [ph] Boo-dik-ah. For a long time, people thought it was [ph] Bo-di-see-ah, but that was based on just misreading somebody’s writing where they thought a C was an E at the end. But as we will learn, she’s a woman who a lot of what was written about her was, sort of, guesses by people who were around back then because she was… Well, let’s get into it.
So, the women who we’re talking about today lived about 2,000 years ago and the word Bouda, is an Ancient Briton word meaning ‘victory.’ So, it’s entirely possible that she was called Boudica by the Romans because they didn’t know her name, she just won a lot so they were just kind of like, “We don’t know her name. We’re just going to call her, like, ‘The one who wins all the time.’” Although, that could have also been her name, like, maybe she won all the time and people called her that or maybe, in sort of a fortuitous naming thing, they called her that as a baby and she grew up to fulfill the destiny of that name. We’re calling her Boudica because we don’t know anything else to call her. That is what we are going to call her.
So, even more so than when we were looking at Cleopatra and Agrippina, everything written about Boudica was written well after she was around by people who didn’t actually deal with her personally. So, rather than me saying “allegedly” in front of literally every sentence, just sort of imagine it, I’m just going to say “allegedly” right now and that will sort of encompass everything I’m going to tell you. So, the things that we have as sources are two men who wrote about her well after she was dead and also some archaeological evidence which, when you put it together, it sort of backs up what some of these men were talking about, but also the men writing had their own reasons for spinning things in a certain way and we’re going to get… We’ll get into it. I’ll explain everything but basically, again, with a big “allegedly” HTML code around all of this.
So, Boudica was probably born around the year 30 AD. She was born to an aristocratic family in the Roman-occupied city of Camulodunum, which was in the southeast part of modern-day England. So, it’s where modern-day Colchester is, if you’re familiar with the UK. I’m here in Canada, and that doesn’t mean a lot to me personally, but basically, southeast England, Camulodunum. So, she was born in this Roman-occupied place, and it was a sort of situation where the rulers of this place would have been behaving kind of like Romans because they were dealing with the Romans. So, that’s sort of what the first part of her life perhaps was like.
When she was probably about 18, she was married to King Prasutagus of the Iceni and so, she became the queen of the Iceni by virtue of this marriage. The Iceni were a Celtic tribe who lived in, so again, southeastern England. And do you remember how, if you heard last week’s episode, when we were talking about Agrippina and stuff, her husband Claudius is the one who was emperor at the time that the Romans invaded Britain? So, this is kind of where the stories overlap with each other a bit. So, Prasutagus, who is the husband, the king, like, in order to stay being king, while the Romans were occupying, he had to make some deals, make some compromises just to make his life as good as possible. So, for instance, the Iceni were permitted to remain independent of Rome as long as Prasutagus paid annual fees to the Romans and also supported them politically, like, against the local tribes basically. So, as part of this deal, Prasutagus agreed that when he died, the kingdom would be jointly inherited by his two daughters as well as by the Roman emperor, Nero. So, Nero, who you might remember from last week, was Agrippina’s shitty son who killed his own mother, had a gross neckbeard, and we hate him. So, he was the emperor at this time.
So, Prasutagus had two daughters, no sons. And this is the sort of situation where— I mean, we look at so many different times in place on this podcast, and I do just in my various historical researching and stuff. And it’s often, in what I’m reading about, which tends to be Renaissance England, tends to be what I’ve read a lot of before, but just other cultures too, like, some medieval scenarios and stuff, Ancient Rome as well, where it’s just like, women just didn’t have the rights to inherit stuff. Usually, the father would just be like “I need to have a son,” because he had to have a boy who was going to inherit everything. These daughters, like they do with our daughters is just marry them off, that’s it. But seemingly, in this situation, among the Iceni, it was cool that his daughters would inherit from him. So, good for them, I guess. A little more forward-thinking than the grosso Romans.
Anyway, so Prasutagus’s will basically said when he died, the kingdom would be jointly shared by his daughters and Nero. So, it would be part of the empire, but Boudica would be the regent until the girls came of age, which is, like, a very specific thing to put in a will. He’s really writing this out as though he expects to die before his wife and just really wants to make sure everything is figured out in a very specific way, which I mean, on the one hand, good for him, but on the other, it’s like… I don’t know, after the Agrippina episode last week, I’m just really suspicious of people writing wills and did they mean to say what they wanted to say? The important part of this is, effectively, that the kingdom upon the death of Prasutagus would be sort of inherited by Nero, shared with the daughters. That’s what he wanted, but he wasn’t in control of very much.
Anyway, so for this first part of their married life, Boudica was probably hanging out, being sort of, like, a Roman-style woman, perhaps speaking Latin, sitting around, you know, drinking wine, wearing a toga, just sort of being, like in I, Claudius sort of situation with just, you know, people making funny jokes, maybe even plays for each other. I don’t know. Just, like, aristocracy. Which I find really interesting because what we’re going to get to and what, how Boudica is known as this kind of, like, feral warrior person, but she started off her life not like that. There’s going to be a shift that’s going to come in a really awful way in probably a few minutes. I’m going to talk about it.
So, what did she look like? There was a Roman writer named Cassius Dio who never met her, but he seems to have read accounts by people who did meet her, described her as (and this is a translation), and this was like a hundred years after she was ever around. Anyway, so he wrote:
In stature, she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying in the glance of her eye, most fierce, and her voice was harsh. A great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips. Around her neck was a large golden necklace, and she wore a tunic of diverse colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.
So, a few things there. First of all, #goals. One day, I hope someone describes me as “In the glance of my eye, most fierce.” So, he was grossed out by her because she was a woman and he thought women were gross, especially when they weren’t just staying quietly in a house raising children. So, he says she was tall, she looked terrifying, she had these intense eyes. He goes on about how her voice was unpleasant, which I think to him was more just, like, she was a woman who talked and had a voice and that was enough to bother him. A hundred years later, he’s like, “Eugh! There’s this woman. Sounds like she like raised her voice sometimes. Gross.”
He also mentioned her hair was… This translation I would just read called it tawny, some people call it red. The word that he used is a similar word that he uses in another part of his writing to describe a lion. So, it could be her hair was, like, golden-coloured, like a strawberry blonde type of thing. She’s sort of famously known as being this long, red-haired goddess. So, we’ll never know what colour hair it is. I have red hair, so I like to think her hair was red, but my hair is also kind of strawberry blonde so I’m okay with that as well. But basically, she was an imposing, intense-looking person who sounds amazing.
So, just getting back to sort of what the ancient culture was like that she was living in. The whole thing about the daughters co-inheriting the kingdom from their father. So, this wasn’t, like, literally a matriarchy, but women in the Iceni kingdom were allowed to own property, they could inherit land and titles and, you know, we’re allowed to go outside and, like, be seen as people, unlike women in Rome. So, basically, what happened is that Prasutagus died, which seems, sort of like, I guess that’s why he’s writing his will. Maybe he was sick? I don’t know. So, he had this will and everyone was like, “This is what’s going to happen.” But then the Romans came in just like “Psych! We don’t care what this will said. We’re horrible imperial colonizers,” and they seized control entirely themselves.
So, at this point in time, the Roman governor of Britain was a man named Suetonius Paulinus. He was not literally there in person when they took over after the death of Prasutagus. So, it was likely some Roman veterans and others who weren’t off with Suetonius at this time who did the actual pillaging. And what they did is they plundered the palace, Boudica’s home palace, they plundered the homes of all the Icenian nobility, they turned Prasutagus’s relatives into slaves, they stripped all the Icenian nobles of their property. So, they just, like, fully… Not just like, “Oh, we’re going to be king now,” or whatever, they’re like, “Oh no, we’re going to destroy you.” So, claiming that Prasutagus had died, still owing debt to the Roman Empires, they publicly stripped and flogged Boudica and allegedly raped her young daughters.
So, the purpose of doing something like this would be just to sort of make the people, the Iceni, not revolt against them. To make them see, like, “This is what we’re doing to your queen, this really respected woman.” Like, to rape the young daughters would be a way of saying like, you know, “We have ‘ruined’ these young girls.” To strip and flog Boudica, like, that’s a treatment that maybe enslaved people would have been treated to. So, to do this to the queen was them saying like, “We don’t respect you or your people at all.” So, this was basically an act of war. And so, these acts were specifically malevolent to the Iceni. I mean, for obvious reasons, she was their queen and this was awful, but also just culturally, to them, Boudica in her role was sort of like a priestess as well as sort of a representation of a goddess on Earth. So, it’s not just, like… So, they had assaulted these two girls and their mother but in so doing, they’d also sort of desecrated the Iceni’s entire culture and religion.
Another one of the sources here is a Roman writer named Tacitus, who was writing a few decades after the fact but again, he might have talked to people who knew what was up. And so, as per him, after this happened, Boudica swore then and there that she was going to get revenge against the Romans for all of this; for the way that she was treated, for what they did to her daughters, for the way they just pillaged the town, for how they didn’t honour her late husband’s will. So, Tacitus says, Boudica said, “Nothing is safe from Roman pride and arrogance. They will deface the sacred and will deflower our virgins. Win the battle or perish. That is what I, a woman, will do.” And so, it was on, basically. She’s just going on her revenge battle streak, like, it’s happening.
So, one of the ways that the Romans had been able to so completely take over Britain, the island, which was comprised of all these different groups and tribes of people, was that they took advantage of the intertribal rivalries between the different kingdoms. Because everybody was fighting against each other, they weren’t they didn’t even think of teaming up together against the Romans. But in so doing, the thing is that it meant that all of these groups now had a single shared enemy, i.e. the Romans. All they needed was a leader strong enough to unite them, and they found this in Boudica.
So again, Suetonius Paulinus, the governor, was yet again out of town, and Boudica got to work building up an army of, sort of, all tribes put together. So, first up, she and the Iceni people joined with their neighbouring tribe who were called the Trinovantes, which were possibly the tribe that she herself was from originally, so it makes sense that they would team up with her in this situation. So, the Trinovantes had been allied with the Romans for almost 100 years, during which time they had come to despise them, because the Romans were awful to them, awful in many ways, frankly, in this period of time.
So, the Romans had taken over the Trinovantes’ capital city, which was called Camulodunum, Camulodunum, which is just a really delightful word to look at. Anyway, so Camulodunum was sort of a retirement community for military veterans. The Romans had forced the Trinovantes to build a temple there in honour of Claudius — because remember, Claudius was the emperor when they first took over — he was dead at this point, Claudius, but this was to honour his memory. So, the Romans basically took over the city, bussed in all of their military veterans and made them build this temple in honour of an emperor who none of them really liked, who was responsible for them being there in the first place. So, the city and its temple symbolized everything that all the non-Romans hated about the Roman occupation.
So, Boudica was like, “Hey, Trinovantes people, what if we invade Camulodunum?” And so, the Trinovantes were like “Where and when? Sign us up, let’s do it.” So, rebellion commenced. Boudica delivered a scathing speech, like, a super psyching everybody up sort of moment, and everyone got really excited about it. And then she did something that I will quote from Cassius Dio to explain. She gave a speech to these sort of, like, allied forces. As per Cassius Dio, what happened next is:
When Boudica had finished speaking, she employed a species of divination, letting a rabbit escape from the fold of her dress. And since it ran on what they considered the auspicious side, the whole multitude shouted out with pleasure.
So, this was sort of like a Groundhog Day scenario. So, in Boudica’s culture, the rabbit or the hare was likely some sort of a holy symbol. And so, which direction ran in, just sort of, one way it was auspicious and one way was not. So, the hare went the way they wanted to, and so things were great and so off they went.
So, when they arrived at Camulodunum, the Roman army was mostly not even there because they were off fighting somewhere else, and this was unexpected to them. This was a surprise ambush attack, they weren’t expecting to be invaded by tens of thousands of irate Britons. And the people who are living there, remember, it was like a little retirement community so they were sort of older people, maybe not in as amazing shape as some other soldiers so they were entirely unprepared. They sent a messenger to try and get help from the governor, from Suetonius, but Suetonius was like, “Mmm, not a big deal. You’re fine. You’re all military veterans, deal with it.” So, what happened is that Boudica and her forces decimated the city to the point that archaeologists who’ve examined the site 2,000 years later were like, “Oh shit, look what happened here.”
So, the city was entirely destroyed via burning. There was a layer of burnt ash, underneath were Roman items from, like, literally this year, the year 60. There are also, like, dead skeleton bodies all over the place and the skeletons themselves have been butchered, like, the people had been just killed in the most brutal ways, and then maybe, like, ripped apart afterwards or something. So, it wasn’t just human bodies that were decimated. In the course of the battle, or maybe, like, post-battle victory party, the team decapitated the head from a bronze statue of Nero. So, the temple was built to honour Claudius but there was a giant statue of Nero and Boudica’s forces decapitated the head off of a Nero bronze statue, which is just, like, so satisfying. I mean, must have been so satisfying to them. And they kept it with them as a trophy, like, they just carried the head around! Badass.
So, then this military guy named Quintus Petillius Cerialis tried to be a hero and tried to take the city back with his own forces, but did not work. Boudica and her team, they were just, like, running on adrenaline and just being amazing warriors. So, she killed almost all of his forces and that was, like, step one of her multi-step plan to just, like, destroy all the Romans in Britain.
So, word of her military amazingness spread, and her army grew as she marched with people from all different former warring tribes. Like, she was just kind of going around conscripting people. She’s just like, “Hey, do you hate the Romans? We do too. Join Boudica’s army!” And so, it was a group of all people from different tribes, tribes who used to hate each other, but they all just hated the Romans so much more because they all just wanted revenge because the Romans had been shitty to all of them.
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So, the further she marched, the bigger her army became until it was up to something like 100,000 people, oppressed Britons just sent on destroying their oppressors, just like, the revolution is here. And she was still just getting started.
So, the next place that they went on to was oldey-times London. Back then, London was called Londinium, and it was a pretty recent-ish city. It was about a 20-year-old city, and it was a commercial/trade centre and home to about 30,000 people. And when the 30,000 people in Londinium heard the Boudica and her, like, 100,000 people were on their way, the entire population just peaced out and fled without even attempting to defend the city. Like, they were just like, “We’re just going to let Boudica’s army have the city so we don’t die.” Again, archaeological evidence that’s been found more recently revealed that Boudica’s team literally burned down the entire city. They tortured and murdered any Romans unlucky enough to have been left behind.
The whole torturing, murdering thing… Again, if you put everything in the context of what was up, like, they were at war, they were this rag-tag group of people who were using sort of shock and terror in the same way the Romans had assaulted Boudica and her daughters, where it’s just, like, if you kill a bunch of people really gruesomely, and then just leave their bodies up on sticks or whatever, like Vlad the Impaler style, the bodies would rot, which is gross, smells bad, might keep people away. But also just shows people it’s a warning of like, “Hey, do you want to cross me? Here’s what I’m going to do to you.”
So, having now destroyed the two largest Roman settlements that they could find, Boudica’s army turned to the third largest because I guess they’re, like, working their way down. Solid planning. And so, the next place was called Verulamium. So, the thing with the city is that it was run by a tribe called the Catuvellauni, who hadn’t been enslaved by the Romans, but more, like, they had just sort of rolled over and let the Romans take over without really fighting them about it. So, they were sort of… not as respected, and also not as likely to rebel against the Romans because they just kind of were okay with it.
So, Boudica’s army just kept marching, kept getting bigger, like, just the image of just, literally, like a snowball going down a hill and just becoming bigger and bigger and more people. You know, word would spread this was happening, it’s like, “This is our time. All the oppressed, join with us.” So, this huge army heads toward Verulamium. Taking a cue from the people of Londinium, who were smart enough to run away, the people of Verulamium dropped what they were doing and ran away rather than face the forces. And again, Boudica and company burned the entire empty city down, and then they went off to hunt down, torture, and kill anyone they could find to just continue being like, “We’re serious about this, we’re scary. Beware the Romans.” Hopefully, they could just be terrifying enough that the Romans themselves would just like peace out on their own but au contraire.
The Romans having now lost basically their three biggest settlements in Britain were a little bit upset by all of this. Adding to their annoyance was the fact that these really successful and gruesome military campaigns were being run by a woman and they hated women. So, the Romans thought that all the people in Britain were sort of, like, uncivilized monsters, like, savages sort of thing. They also thought that women were sort of, like, trophies for men and not people in their own right. So, to be outsmarted three times by a woman from Britain was just, like, brain-exploding to them, they’re just like, “What is even happening?” So, this was 30 years after Cleopatra had thoroughly challenged the Romans and just a year or two after Agrippina the Younger had sort of made her own power move. So, the Romans are like, “What is happening vis-à-vis women keeping bothering us?” So, they were a little frustrated and annoyed by having yet another warrior woman to face off against. And this is sort of like on top of their general baseline cultural hatred of women, they were at a point of just like really being tired of women getting in their way.
So, Cassius Dio, decades later, wrote, “All this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, the fact that in itself caused them the greatest of shame.” So, the Romans were like, “Let’s deal with this.” So, what they did was they amassed 10,000 men to face off against Boudica’s band of rebels. She had hundreds of thousands of people; the Romans had 10,000 people, which is like a lot of people. Boudica had something like 300,000 former enslaved Britons fighting on her side. Rather than sitting around waiting to be attacked, Boudica’s ever-growing army marched right over to meet the Romans to do battle with them. But little did she know, leading the Roman forces that day was the same guy who had been out of town when she started this campaign, the one who had ordered to have her hometown destroyed to have her assaulted, et cetera, basically her arch-enemy, the British governor, Suetonius Paulinas.
Now, the site of this battle is unknown, but we do know that beforehand, famously, Boudica rode around in a chariot with her two daughters, her two daughters are often with her, sort of like, to show, I don’t know, maybe a reminder of like, “They tried to defeat me and my daughters by attacking us, but look at us, we’re stronger than ever,” et cetera. So, she just kind of like… If you picture Coachella or something, just like, a huge field full of so many people, and she was just riding around in a chariot with her daughters hyping everybody up, these 300,000 people. She gave an amazing speech in her “harsh voice” that Dio thought was so annoying. I mean, just an amazing moment. I love this for her. So, as recorded by Tacitus, her speech included the following line, and this is a quote of a thing Boudica allegedly said:
We British are used to women commanders in war, but I am not fighting for my kingdom and wealth now, I’m fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters. You will win this battle or perish. That is what I, a woman, plan to do. Let the men live in slavery if they will.
And then everybody’s, like, ready to rumble and the battle began.
So, allegedly, Boudica’s team was so certain of victory that they had brought along their families and children to watch the battle take place, which wasn’t, like… Apparently, this is the thing that maybe people in Britain just did in general. This is just not an out of the ordinary sort of thing to have the wives and children, but also if you’re all just, like, marching around, 300,000 people going place to place, burning, it’s like, “Sure, bring your families with you,” sort of like Star Trek: The Next Generation, sometimes you just want to have your family with you when you’re going off doing work. So, this is a situation where we have the 10,000 Romans versus the 300-something thousand rag-tag group of Boudica’s forces. And the thing is that numbers aren’t always everything.
So, the Roman army was a highly skilled, highly-trained war machine. They were people who would like, they’d run drills, they had tactics, they had armour, they had plans and were all organized versus Boudica’s team who had a numbers advantage and rage, lots of passion, a drive for revenge, but they all had sort of like their own fighting style, most of which didn’t include armour, they were from all different places. Boudica was the leader, but I mean, one person can’t lead 300,000 people, there’s probably, like, all different local leaders and how do you communicate your plans and stuff? So, basically, despite being massively outnumbered, the Romans pulled it out to the point that many of Boudica’s allies began to flee. They were trying to escape. But tragically, all the tents they had set up for their families to watch got in the way and so they got kind of smooshed up against them. They weren’t able to escape, and the Romans slaughtered everyone. The precise body count is not known because we don’t even know where this happened. But it might have been something like 80,000 dead Britons and 400 dead Romans. That was a number that was reported by one of the people 100 years later. The rebellion was over. The Romans had won this battle.
In the aftermath of this loss, the lands of the Iceni and Trinovantes were destroyed by the Romans. So, this is where, again, in a sort of standard war playbook, the Romans wouldn’t have wanted any chance of further rebellion coming from any of these people ever. On top of that, many of the tribes had been busy fighting these battles and marching around the whole island, they hadn’t had time to plant seeds for the growing season meaning that many of those who hadn’t died in battle died in a famine that followed right after. Boudica’s daughters, we don’t know what happened to them after this. I mean, we don’t know what happened to them before this, really, other than the attack because there wasn’t a lot being written about them because they were not a literate society who wrote stuff down. We only know about Boudica because of her interactions with the Romans. So, the daughters, we don’t know what happened to them.
Boudica herself seems to have died shortly after losing this battle to the Romans. She may have fallen ill. She probably didn’t die in battle because if she had that would have been so dramatic, they would have written about it, probably. One of the records suggests she poisoned herself to deny her enemies the pleasure of killing her, which is very Cleopatra of her. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted until the year 410. So, that’s, I mean, just under 400 more years. Many of their structures became crucial elements in later battles for the Anglo-Saxon people who were the next ones to take over most of Britain. There’s still evidence of the Roman occupation there today. So, this whole thing was kind of a great rebellion, didn’t work, but Boudica became this great, sort of, folk hero-type person.
So, most of what we know about her comes from the writings of Tacitus; Dio also wrote about it, but he was later on. So, Tacitus’s father-in-law, Agricola, had been governor of Britain a decade after Boudica’s revolt so he might have heard from him some stories about what happened. His writings, they weren’t well known until they were unearthed during the 16th century. So, that’s when Queen Elizabeth I became Queen of England, the first really, really, really successful woman monarch in England; she also had red hair, she also went into battle. So, you could see where she might have wanted to connect herself with Boudica to show— Because when she was Queen as well, people were just kind of like, “Eugh! A woman leader? I don’t know. She has a funny voice and she has a period every month.” So, just to look at Boudica as, sort of, someone who’d done this before was maybe a way that she could reassure the patriarchal society she lived in that actually, yeah, guess what? Women can do this, especially cool, red-haired women in armour.
Boudica’s rise to prominence as a sort of British folk hero came during the next most successful woman ruler in English history, which was Queen Victoria, which is interesting because Victoria is a name that also means ‘victory’ so the parallels are even stronger there as well. So, Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, commissioned a sculptor named Thomas Thornycroft, great name, to create a bronze statue of Boudica in her chariot with her two daughters. Albert was all about horses, he was all about statues, and again, just connecting the current queen to this legendary queen of the past to, sort of, connect the current woman leader with a past woman leader to be like, “Look! Women leaders can be cool sometimes.” So, the statue is called “Boudica and her Daughters,” actually it’s called “Boadicea” because that was back when there was the spelling mistake in her name. So, this statue was put up in, I think, the early 1900s after Prince Albert had died. Anyway, the statue is very famous, I’ll put a picture of it on Instagram in case you haven’t seen it.
It was erected in London on Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament, which is really interesting so, like, pause to think about it. So, Boudica, who she was, what she stood for was anti-imperialist, anti-colonial rebel, who didn’t… right? She became identified with Victoria and with Elizabeth, who were both heads of imperial colonial empires of their own. So, Boudica was… Just weird that she became identified with them when, actually, if she had lived in those days, she would have been against them, basically. But what I find really interesting/ironic in a sort of Alanis Morrisette way, is that the statue of Boudica with her daughters and the horses stands guard over London, which is the new version of the old city of Londinium, which is a city that Boudica famously, like, thoroughly destroyed and burned down in her quest for liberation. So, now the statue is sort of like Prince Albert erected it to be like, “Look at this cool great leader! Britain has this cool history of women leaders,” when actually it’s just, like, a statue commemorating a woman who burned down the city that they all live in because she hated imperialism and colonialism.
So, just in terms of bibliography here… Boudica, I learned a lot about her. So, the Rex Factor podcast has a special episode dedicated to her, and I also listened to the You’re Dead to Me podcast about Boudica, both of which I super recommend. I think it’s a story that cannot be told too many times. There’s all different angles that you can look at it from. Those two podcasts get more into, like, the military details of it and kind of more of, like, the where in England that this all take place. So, you can fill in those bits there as well. There’s a couple of films. There’s a 2003 film called Warrior Queen, which stars Alex Kingston, River Song from Doctor Who, is Boudica and Emily Blunt, a little, baby Emily Blunt plays one of her daughters.
Most of the research I did was from a variety of different historical websites, which I will link to in the show notes. But I want to mention as well, there is a very recent biography of Boudica called Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain by Caitlin C. Gillespie, and you can get that. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. If you decide to purchase that, the eBook or the book-book or whatever, if you click through the link in the show notes, then I get a little monetary bonus so you can support this podcast while also getting a cool book. Speaking of this book, Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain by Caitlin C. Gillespie is also available on Audible. And I’ve got my little— This is my commercial corner time. If you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory, you can get a 30-day free trial of Audible, including getting one free audiobook. So, you can get this Boudica book and just learn more about her deal and what she was up to.
And it’s time to score her. This is an interesting one because, well, so little is known about her and the whole story took place over such a sort of condensed period of time. So, the first category is Scandaliciousness. Now, I didn’t mention this in the podcast, because this was sort of, like, an overview of her whole situation but the whole killing people brutally and then leaving their dead bodies up as a warning for other people included some stuff, like, allegedly, she beheaded babies, she cut off women’s breasts and stuck them in their mouths and then, like, threw the dead bodies down. Usually, the Scandaliciousness we’re looking at in these stories is more, like, sexy, love affair-related. But, like, acts of war and terror— But other people are doing that too so it’s not like Boudica was doing stuff that other people weren’t doing at the same time and place. The fact she was a woman, though, made it more scandalous. So, it’s a different sort of scandal than what we’re usually looking at. I’m going to give her just a 4 for Scandaliciousness. I think maybe there was cool other Scandaliciousness stuff happening behind the scenes, especially when she was living like a Roman lady before everything went to shit but we don’t know about it so I can’t score her on that.
Schemieness. I feel like is pretty high. For some people, when we’re grading them on the podcast, the schemieness is like, you know, gossiping around the court or, like, making secret plans to run off with your lover or whatever, and those are the schemes they do. Boudica’s scheming is more on par with more like a Cleopatra level where it’s, like, making literal plans for literal war actions. Schemieness is more sort of like planning-ness. But I mean, the fact that she got together this band of previously warring factions to, like, team up and go with her and, like, burn down three cities, it’s more than schemieness; it’s cleverness, determination, ambitiousness. But we call it schemieness. So, I’m going to call… I mean, she incited an entire rebellion! I’m going to give her an 8 for Schemieness, I think. And again, if we knew more about her, maybe I could give her more, if we knew more about, like, the details of how she snuck into places and how she burned down the places and stuff like that.
Significance is a tricky one for her because ultimately what she did didn’t win, the Romans stayed in power for whatever I said before, 400 more years or something. But then she reemerged as this kind of folk hero. A lot of people know who she is and she’s become sort of almost like a feminist hero, just as a woman who emerged in a world where not a lot of women were known for doing this sort of stuff. But her personal significance… Nnhh, I don’t know. I feel like because I scored people like Cleopatra, not super high in significance, like, how high can I score Boudica for the same thing? At the same time, everybody… It’s relative, isn’t it? I’m going to give her a 5 for Significance, I think.
And then the final category is the Sexism Bonus, which is where we give points to make up for how much did the fact that she was a woman affect her life in a negative way. This is where I think if she had been a man, things might have turned out. I don’t know if they would have turned out differently, honestly. I think, obviously, the writing about her would have been different. Tacitus especially, apparently when he was writing, he was writing about how he thought that Rome was kind of shitty at this time. If Boudica had been… He was almost cheering for her side because he thought that the Rome period around when Nero was there was really shitty. But because she was a woman, he was just like, “Eugh! But she had a voice that she talked with, so I can’t super respect her.” I think her historical record would have been different if she was a man. And I don’t know, but then part of what happened was she was driven to this point by the sexualized, gender-based attack on her and her daughters. I’m going to give her a 6 for Sexism, I think.
So, let’s just add this all up… So, we’ve got 23 points for Boudica. That puts her… I mean, again, the scoring, why am I doing this? It’s a nice way to wrap things up and also just sort of see where people land on a scale compared to each other. Not that anyone is better than anybody else, but it’s just kind of, like, where do they land comparatively? So, Boudica, she’s at 23, that puts her above both Caroline of Brunswick and Mary Toft, who both had 20, and then she’s just a bit below Frances Howard, who had 26, tits-out Frances Howard. I mean, come on. So, considering how little we know about Boudica, I think that’s a pretty fair score. And had we known more about her, it might have been higher. Who knows? And I guess that’s the episode.
So, if you want to catch up with me, I mean, there’s the whole Season One you can listen to, there are the previous episodes of Season Two, there’s more Season Two episodes to come, and Vulgar History is all over the place. So, we’re on Twitter and Instagram, just like up “Vulgar History,” we are there. If you want to email me, if you have thoughts about things about women, or if you want to discuss the score I gave somebody for something, like, you think it should be higher or lower, if you have suggestions for people who you think it would be cool for me to write about, you can reach out at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. You can find more of my writing, including an essay I wrote about Boudica at AnnFosterWriter.com. I mentioned before, you can support the podcast by clicking through any of the Amazon links in the show notes, as well as if you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory and do up a little Audible trial, you can get a book about Boudica, for instance, or another woman from history and also, we got a little bonus from there. Or you can just start up support the podcast at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
I believe this is being posted on March 11th so coming up super soon, I’m going to be doing a March Madness thing on Twitter. So, if you follow me @VulgarHistory on Twitter, you can see all the information about that. But what is going to be happening is it’s Vulgar Madness. So, I’ve made up a list of 64 of the most scandalous women from all world history, not from just British history, which is what a lot of these podcast episodes are about, from all over the place, all different countries. It’s divided into four brackets; the Ancient World, Medieval, Renaissance, and then the modern periods. So, that goes from the minuses, like, before the year 0, all the way up to 1900, because I had to cut it off at some point. So, I would say follow me on Twitter just to get the details of that. I think I should be getting it all started probably, again, it’s March 11th when you’re listening to this, so I think probably this weekend coming up. Keep your eyes peeled for that.
And that’s the episode. So, I hope you enjoyed yourselves and I’ll talk to you all next time.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
