Although heavily outnumbered, the Roman army led by Gaius Suetonius Paulinus decisively defeated the allied tribes in a final battle which inflicted heavy losses on the Britons.

Tacitus describes the Romans as seizing lands, enslaving Iceni, and violently humiliating the royal family; his widow, Boudica, was flogged and her daughters raped.

[9] In AD 60 or 61, while the Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was leading a campaign against the island of Mona (modern Anglesey) off the northwest coast of Wales, a refuge for British rebels and a stronghold of the druids, the Iceni conspired with their neighbours the Trinovantes, amongst others, to rise in revolt.

[10] Cassius Dio says that at the outset Boudica employed a form of divination, releasing a hare from the folds of her dress and interpreting the direction in which it ran, and invoked Andraste, a British goddess of victory.

[13] The future governor Quintus Petillius Cerialis, then commanding the Legio IX Hispana, attempted to relieve the city, but suffered an overwhelming defeat.

[8] When news of the rebellion reached Suetonius, he hurried through hostile territory to Londinium, a relatively new settlement founded after the conquest of AD 43, which had grown to be a thriving commercial centre with a population of traders and probably Roman officials.

Suetonius considered fighting the rebellious tribes there, but with his insufficient numbers of troops and chastened by Petillius's defeat, he decided to sacrifice the city to save the province and withdrew to regroup his forces.

Suetonius, however, with wonderful resolution, marched amidst a hostile population to Londinium, which, though undistinguished by the name of a colony, was much frequented by a number of merchants and trading vessels.

Uncertain whether he should choose it as a seat of war, as he looked round on his scanty force of soldiers, and remembered with what a serious warning the rashness of Petillius had been punished, he resolved to save the province at the cost of a single town.

Those who were chained to the spot by the weakness of their sex, or the infirmity of age, or the attractions of the place, were cut off by the enemy.— TacitusThe wealthy citizens and traders of Londinium had fled after the news of Catus Decianus defecting to Gaul.

Archaeology shows a thick red layer of burnt debris covering coins and pottery dating before AD 60 within the bounds of Roman Londinium;[18] Roman-era skulls found in the Walbrook in 2013 may have been victims of the rebels.

Another excavation by Sheppard Frere between 1957 and 1961 revealed a row of shops alongside Watling Street which had been burned at around 60 AD, but the full extent of the destruction remains unclear.

Excavations in the centre of Verulamium, the 1996 extension dig before the new museum entrance was built, went through thin layers (up to 2 cm thick) of burned material from early Roman construction.

[1] Dio's account gives more detail; that the noblest women were impaled on spikes and had their breasts cut off and sewn to their mouths, "to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behaviour" in sacred places, particularly the groves of Andraste.

[23] The prefect of Legio II Augusta at Isca (Exeter), Poenius Postumus, did not obey the order to bring his troops,[24] but nonetheless Suetonius now commanded an army of almost 10,000 men.

These precautions would have prevented Boudica from bringing her considerable forces to bear on the Roman position other than from the front, and the open plain would have made surprise attack impossible.

Tacitus, who described the battle more than 50 years later, imagined Boudica's speech to her followers: 'But now,' she said, 'it is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters.

[11] After providing a speech to the Roman troops by Suetonius, Tacitus describes the battle: At first, the legionaries stood motionless, keeping to the defile as a natural protection: then, when the closer advance of the enemy had enabled them to exhaust their missiles with certitude of aim, they dashed forward in a wedge-like formation.

The glory won in the course of the day was remarkable, and equal to that of our older victories: for, by some accounts, little less than eighty thousand Britons fell, at a cost of some four hundred Romans killed and a not much greater number of wounded.

[24] After the battle, Boudica is said by Tacitus to have poisoned herself,[24] though in the Agricola, which was written almost twenty years before the Annals, he mentions nothing of suicide and attributes the end of the revolt to socordia ("complacency").

After the uprising, Suetonius conducted widespread punitive operations among the Britons, but criticism of this by Classicianus led to an investigation headed by Nero's freedman Polyclitus.

[41] Most modern historians favour potential location sites in the Midlands, possibly along the Roman road between Londinium and Viroconium (Wroxeter) which became Watling Street.

[47] Considering Akeman Street as a possible route from the south-west, the Cuttle Mill area near Paulerspury and Church Stowe in Northamptonshire, have been suggested as a site for the battle.

[52] A travel writer in the 18th century, Thomas Pennant, suggested that a hill named "Bryn Paulin", on which the north Wales town of St Asaph stood, may have been so called because Paulinus and his troops had made a camp on their way to or from Mona (Anglesey).

[53] A later writer, Richard Williams Morgan, described as "patriotically fanatical, a man who drew creative inspiration from his inexhaustible capacity for self-deception", imaginatively "turned a collection of unrelated local landmarks" in this area "into the narrative of a desperate battle", in which, among other details, he cited as evidence a "Stone of the Grave of Vuddig".

[54][55] Morien suggests that Boudica was supported by Celts who were enraged at the killing of druids on Mona and moved towards the Roman force in North Wales, with battle possibly ensuing at Trelawnyd.