Iceni

• 1. Introduction

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  The Iceni were an ancient tribe of eastern Britain whose name appears on the coins they minted, making them the only coin-producing group in their world to stamp their own tribal identity onto their currency. Their homeland covered what is now Norfolk, along with parts of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. They sat wedged between powerful neighbours: the Corieltauvi to the west, the Catuvellauni to the south. For most of their history, they are a footnote in Roman records. Then, around AD 60, they become impossible to ignore.

  What set the Iceni apart from other tribes absorbed into Roman Britain? How did a client kingdom that had surrendered peacefully to Claudius end up burning three Roman cities to the ground? And what became of the Iceni after the Romans finally crushed the revolt that nearly ended their occupation of the island? The answers reach from Iron Age coin workshops to a bronze-age henge, from a Welsh etymology debate to the place names still scattered across the Fens today.

• 2. A Name in Question

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  No one today can say with certainty what "Iceni" actually means. The coins themselves offer the earliest clue: Icenian coinage dating from the first century AD uses the spelling ECEN. D. F. Allen, studying those coins in an article titled "The Coins of the Iceni", noticed that some bore the inscription ECE while others bore ECEN. Allen argued that this shift in spelling marks the moment Prasutagus began his reign, because the tribal name did not appear on coins until around AD 47. Before that, under king Antedios, the coins carried the ruler's name rather than the tribe's.

  The Owen-Pughe etymological dictionary of 1832 offers one route into the meaning: the Welsh word echen means origin, source, or tribe. The current Dictionary of the Welsh Language extends that to include stock, lineage, and family, and notes that it is cognate with the Cornish eghen. In his 1658 treatise "Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial", the polymath Sir Thomas Browne proposed that "Iken" was an old name for the River Ouse, and that the tribe may have taken their name from it. Robert Henry, writing in 1771, pointed to the Brittonic word ychen, meaning oxen, as another possibility. The final "-i" in Iceni is simply Latin, a nominative plural ending attached to a two-syllable tribal name. Whatever the root, the word carried enough weight that the Icknield Way, the ancient trackway linking East Anglia to the Chilterns, may well take its name from this tribe.

• 3. Iron Age Coinage

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  Around 10 BC, the Iceni began striking their own coins. Their design adapted the Gallo-Belgic "face/horse" pattern, but Icenian craftsmen gave it a local character. In some early issues, concentrated near Norwich, the horse on the reverse was replaced by a boar. The earliest personal name to appear is Antedios, placed at roughly 10 BC, followed by abbreviated names including AESU and SAEMU.

  H. R. Mossop, in an article titled "An Elusive Icenian Legend", examined coins that D. F. Allen discovered at Joist Fen in Suffolk. Mossop wrote that two particular coins "give an advance in the obverse reading, confirming Allen's attractive reading PRASTO, with its implied allusion to Prasutagus". That single inscription on a small metal disc became evidence that the wealthy king's reign could be traced through the archaeological record.

  Sir Thomas Browne was the first English writer to treat these coins as archaeological objects rather than curiosities. In 1658 he described silver pieces found near Norwich, with "a rude head upon the obverse, an ill-formed horse on the reverse", bearing the inscription Ic. Duro.T. He left open whether those letters implied Iceni, Durotriges, Tascia, or Trinobantes, deferring to what he called "higher conjecture". A later coin study by Davies and Tony Gregory surveyed Roman coins circulating in Norfolk and found that before AD 60, the bulk of currency in use was Icenian rather than Roman. Roman coinage, they concluded, was not adapted into the Iceni area until after AD 60, and even then the supply from imperial mints was sporadic rather than steady.

• 4. From Alliance to Revolt

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  Tacitus records that the Iceni were not conquered during the Claudian invasion of AD 43. Whether they stood with the British resistance or apart from it is not recorded. The war against the Roman landings was led by the Catuvellauni, who had themselves only recently subdued the Trinovantes to the south. The Iceni's attitude toward the Roman arrival is unrecorded: they may have viewed the legions as a threat, or they may have seen them as a check on Catuvellauni ambitions. What is certain is that the Iceni were likely among the eleven kings who surrendered to Claudius at Camulodunum, after which they retained their independence as a client kingdom.

  That independence was first tested in 47, when the governor Publius Ostorius Scapula ordered the Iceni and other client kingdoms to disarm. The Iceni rebelled. Ostorius defeated them in a fierce battle at a fortified place, with Stonea Camp in Cambridgeshire identified as the most plausible candidate. Despite the defeat, the Iceni kept their nominal independence and their king, Prasutagus.

  Prasutagus died around AD 60. He had tried to protect his family by leaving his kingdom jointly to the Emperor and his own daughters, a compromise that D. F. Allen believed placed the kingdom in Breckland, near Norwich. The Romans ignored the arrangement entirely. The procurator Catus Decianus seized the entire estate. Prasutagus's widow Boudica was flogged, and her daughters were raped. Roman financiers chose that same moment to call in their loans. While the governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus was away campaigning in Wales, Boudica raised the Iceni and the neighbouring Trinovantes in a revolt that would bring down three cities.

• 5. Boudica's War

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  A Roman source describes Boudica in striking physical terms: very tall, with a harsh voice, fierce eyes, and a great mass of tawny hair falling to her hips; around her neck a large golden necklace; over her tunic a thick mantle fastened with a brooch. This was, the source notes, her "invariable attire". The same account credits her not only with rousing the tribes but with directing the entire conduct of the war.

  Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium fell in sequence, burned and looted. A Roman account records that two cities were sacked, and that eighty thousand Romans and their allies perished. The author notes, pointedly, that all of this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, "a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame".

  Suetonius Paulinus returned from Wales and met the Britons in battle at an unknown location, possibly somewhere along Watling Street. The Britons outnumbered the Romans significantly, but Roman discipline and tactics proved decisive. The rebellion collapsed. Today, a large statue called "Boadicea and Her Daughters", depicting Boudica armed with a sword and charging on a chariot, stands on the north bank of the Thames by Westminster Bridge in London, a visible reminder of how far the memory of that war has carried.

• 6. After the Rebellion

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  The immediate fate of the Iceni after the revolt is not clearly documented. Suetonius Paulinus imposed harsh retaliatory measures on the rebellious Britons before being recalled and replaced by a governor who took a more conciliatory approach. Roman historians note that the British had neglected their fields during the uprising, leading to famine.

  A settlement called Venta, referenced in the Ravenna Cosmography and the Antonine Itinerary, likely became the civitas capital of the Iceni after the rebellion. Ptolemy's Geographia names a people whose Greek rendering is usually taken as a copying error for Icenoi, and places them at a town called Venta. That settlement sat near the village of Caistor St. Edmund, about 8 kilometres south of present-day Norwich, and roughly 2 kilometres from the Bronze Age Henge at Arminghall. The city of Norwich, as Sir Thomas Browne noted in 1658, "arose from the ruins of Venta".

  Ken Dark has argued that the Iceni heartland experienced a period of depopulation during the fourth century, followed rapidly by the arrival of Germanic-speaking settlers from the continent beginning at the start of the fifth century. Toby Martin has identified East Anglia as an area where a mass migration of these incomers likely occurred; Celtic place names are sparse across most of the region. Some scholars have suggested that descendants of the Iceni may have persisted longer in the Fens. The Life of Saint Guthlac, a biography of the East Anglian hermit who lived in the Fenland during the early eighth century, states that Guthlac was attacked by demons who spoke Brittonic languages. Bertram Colgrave and Lindy Brady have argued that these "Britons" were intended as figments of the saint's imagination rather than real people. Yet place names including Chatteris, Chettisham, Crowland, Ely, and King's Lynn all contain possible or probable Brittonic or British Latin elements, and lost toponyms such as Bretlond and Walecroft suggest land held by Britons well into the Anglo-Saxon era.