Elodie Harper

So, Paulinus was specifically fighting the Druids in Anglesey in Mona at this point where they had a stronghold.

And it's because of the hold that the Druids had religiously, but also politically and probably judicially as well.

So,

Again, we know very little about the Druids apart from what has come down to us through Rome, who were very prejudiced about them.

Tacitus records both men and women in Mona fighting against Paulinus or resisting him.

And Prasutagus, the father of Selina and Belenia,

his name means magic chief.

So there's a possibility that he was also a druid, that far from being these just purely mystical figures, as they have kind of come down in popular imagination, it might have been more of a kind of caste system.

They were the repositories of knowledge, learning the lore,

power.

And so I made Prasatagus a druid and I also made Selina a druid because this seemed like a possibility.

We don't know entirely how their power structure worked, but we know that the druids were very important and that this wasn't just a purely religious thing.

I guess with all ancient cultures at this time, the separation between religion and politics and legal systems is not fully separated.

Definitely.

And I think that's one of the things that makes the rebellion very complex, quite morally grey.

And, you know, not just a story of kind of plucky rebels and thuggish Romans, is that there must have been a fair degree of intermarriage violence.

by this stage.

When you look at Colchester or Camulodonum that Boudicca sacked in the Boudiccan lair of destruction where everything was burnt, some of the surviving treasures from that time, like the Fennec hoard, the suggestion is that that might have been treasure belonging to a family in which the woman, the wife was British and the father a Roman veteran.

And that perhaps many of the women

in the town might well have been local, married to Roman settlers whose children were both Roman and British, and where their allegiances might have lain some of the women or the children or even people who had made a living or a business out of trading with the settlers, collaborating with them.