Elodie Harper

There's the Snetisham Hoard in Norfolk, this incredible collection of golden torques and jewellery that was found buried, possibly for religious reasons, possibly as a means of hiding material from the Romans.

I mean, I think the stress is probably it was a more religious moment perhaps left as an offering before the rebellion.

So we know that they were a complex society, but the detail is lacking.

You can get a kind of atmospheric sense of it if you go somewhere like Butser Ancient Farm that has recreated roundhouses.

But even the roundhouses are surprisingly hard to pin down in that one of the key buildings for Boudicca and her family, which was in Thetford, was a potentially multi-storey

roundhouse, which is not kind of how we think about it.

And this was some sort of political or religious gathering centre, probably built by Boudicca or Prastatagus, her husband, who was the client king to Rome and the father of the two daughters.

And I think if we just kind of look at the bare bones of the sort of family story of Boudicca and her daughters at this time,

that, you know, Prasutagus was the Iceni king.

He was a client king to Rome, which meant that he was ruling on their behalf.

Rome would be extracting taxes and financial gain from this society, but at the same time, probably benefiting by collaborating with Rome.

The hope would be a slightly less repressive regime where the Iceni would retain some autonomy and

And when he died, he left the kingdom to his two daughters, who I named Selina and Belenia, they're not named in the record, in the hope that he would be able to continue this client relationship with Rome after his death through his daughters.

And it wasn't unusual for ancient Britons at this time even to send their sons to Rome as a type of cultural exchange to sort of build alliances and have a cultural exchange.

into play of some type.

So he wasn't wildly deluded in trying to do this, but the Romans reacted very violently.

The procurator, Decianus, who was in London, responded to this will of Prasutagus by sending Roman soldiers

to the family home.

The two daughters were raped.

Boudicca, the mother, was flogged.