Elodie Harper

The wooden stakes were taken from the ground rather than just burnt.

The idea that it was completely erased is...

In my version of the rebellion and its aftermath, I have them before this point, before they dismantle it, using it as a Roman garrison in a sense of kind of completely taking it over, repurposing it, Romanizing it, polluting it in a sense because it was likely a religious center because there was this artificial grove.

was built there.

And again, because it's so nebulous, exactly what went on with the Druidic religion.

But Pliny writes about the importance of the oak tree, the importance of forests to the ancient Celtic peoples of Britain and the rest of continental Europe.

So the idea that there was this artificial graveyard, there was this massive multi-story roundhouse, a political and religious center,

Yes.

The majority are farmers.

And they also, on the Norfolk coast, quite a lot of industry around sultans, so salt extraction, which was very valuable.

And it's thought one of the punishments for the Iceni after the rebellion was having their ability to

extract salt from the marshes was taken away.

So that's possibly one of the reasons the Iceni were quite a wealthy people within ancient Britain was their access to salt.

I mean, the Romans' salary that the soldiers were paid in comes from the word for salt because it was such a valuable commodity.

So although it's an agricultural society at this time, they did have means of having quite a lot of clout in trading terms with some of their materials.

So there are two sort of main accounts of the rebellion.

There's the one that I drew most heavily on because it's almost contemporary.

So it's written by Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola, who actually fought against Boudicca with the Roman forces of Paulinus.

So, although Tacitus' speeches he gives to Boudicca, no, Agricola wasn't there with a notepad writing it down in presumably a language he didn't even speak.

But nonetheless, I think he was a contemporary witness to the fighting and to the general mayhem of this period.