The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts. Rodney Castleden

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      Queen of the Iceni tribe. Boudicca was born in about AD 25 and lived at Thetford in Norfolk at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. She married Prasutagus in AD 48, when she was about 23 and he was perhaps ten years older. He was King of the Iceni, one of three Celtic tribes to have treaty arrangements with Rome; the others were the Regnenses and the Brigantes. Boudicca gave birth to two daughters: one in AD 49 and one in 50. On the death of Prasutagus, in AD 60, she became regent.

      Prasutagus bequeathed half his kingdom to Nero, reserving the rest for his widow and daughters. The Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus was away on campaign in Wales when Prasutagus died, and the procurator, Decianus Catus, decided to swoop in and take the whole of Prasutagus’ estates for Rome. Decianus Catus was ruthless and acquisitive, and his officials were backed by undisciplined troops. The operation was bungled and army discipline broke down. The soldiers raped Boudicca’s daughters, who can only have been 11 or 12 years old, and flogged the queen herself.

      The Iceni rose against Rome behind their humiliated queen, joined by their neighbors to the south, the Trinovantes, who had also been roughly handled by greedy legionaries at Camulodunum (Colchester). Together, the Iceni and Trinovantes attacked and burned down the new town. Then Boudicca and her army moved on to sack Verulamium (St. Albans) and London. Paulinus brought 10,000 legionaries back from Wales to confront her somewhere to the north-west of London. At an unidentified location somewhere along Watling Street, Boudicca’s army was slaughtered. The queen herself escaped from the battlefield but died shortly afterward of some illness, perhaps after taking poison; according to Dio Cassius she was given a rich burial. Boudicca’s treasure-laden grave has never been discovered.

      Boudicca was famously described in Rome: “She was huge of form and terrifying of aspect and with a harsh voice. A great mass of red hair fell to her knees and she wore a great twisted gold necklace, and a tunic of many colours.”

      Dio Cassius makes a point of describing her as invariably wearing a “great twisted golden necklace.” The marvelous gold torc found at Snettisham was made in about 50 BC, which at first sight makes it too early to have belonged to Boudicca. But royal regalia is often several generations old—its antiquity is part of its ceremonial value—and it is possible that this torc, and the rest of the Snettisham hoard, did belong to the queen.

      BOYA

      See David.

      BRENDAN OF CLONFERT

      Brendan (486–578) was a pupil of Bishop Erc of Kerry. He was a navigator and sailed to Iceland. From there he sailed west to a “beautiful land beyond the fogs.” He also sailed to the Fortunate Islands (assumed to be the Canary Islands). The ocean voyages took place in the years before 560.

      Exactly where Brendan went is the subject of endless speculation. Some believe he discovered North America long before Columbus. What is certain is that he traveled to Wales, to Iona, and then to Ireland, where he founded a monastery at Annaghdown. There he spent the rest of his days, dying there in about 578 while visiting his sister Briga. Before his death, he arranged for his body to be taken secretly back to the monastery he had founded at Clonfert; it was transported hidden in a luggage cart. What he feared was that his followers might dismantle his body for relics. He was buried, intact, in Clonfert cathedral.

      BRENNUS

      There were two Gaulish chiefs of this name, both leaders of invasions. It is possible that “Brennus” was a title, meaning dux bellorum or “commander-in-chief” rather than a personal name.

      Diodorus Siculus tells us about the second Gaulish King Brennus, who lived in the third century BC:

       Brennus the King of the Gauls, on entering a temple [at Delphi in Greece] found no dedications of gold or silver, and when he came only upon images of stone and wood, he laughed at them [the Greeks], to think that men, believing that gods have human form, should set up their images in wood and stone.

      The implication is that the more sophisticated Gauls did not think of the gods in anthropomorphic terms and this tallies with their art, much of which at that time did not feature humanoid forms.

      It was an earlier Gaulish King Brennus, who was the King of the Senones tribe, who led the Celtic warriors in the sack of Rome in 387 BC. He caused more havoc there than would be seen again until Alaric the Goth descended on the city in the fifth century AD. Brennus demanded his own weight in gold, with the cry, “Vae Victis!” (“Woe to the defeated!”) He was interested in loot rather than conquest, which was perhaps unfortunate in the longer term, though the Celts remained a force to reckon with in Italy until 295 BC.

BRIDEI

      King of the Picts, who reigned from 555 to 584. He is the only British king from the fifth or sixth centuries to be mentioned in a chronicle on the European mainland. Bede describes him as rex potentissimus, “most powerful king,” which suggests that the Picts had their own overking. Bridei, СКАЧАТЬ