05-12-2021, 09:55 AM
I just thought I'd add a brief additional note here, which may interest some people.
I've been reading lately about agriculture in medieval England, and I realise that I've been quite mistaken about the sowing and harvesting seasons (which were presumably the same in the Roman era, as the germination time of wheat cannot have changed much). I was assuming that the main wheat crop was sown in the spring, but it is, of course, almost entirely sown in the autumn. I think Deryk tried to point this out to me several times - sorry, Deryk!
Traditionally, the wheat harvest begins at the start of August (Lammas), and is mostly finished by the end of that month. September is for winnowing and threshing the grain, and preparing the ground, which is then sown with the new seed, beginning in October.
So Tacitus's point that the Iceni faced famine after the revolt "for they had been careless about sowing corn, people of every age having gone to the war, while they reckoned on our supplies as their own" relates to people being away at war in late autumn, not the spring or summer.
But what about the preceding harvest? Why would the Iceni need to seize Roman supplies if they'd only just harvested their own crops? I think this might point to one of the most important reasons for the revolt, and one which could easily have been overlooked by Roman historians at the time.
If the harvest of AD61 was very poor, the Iceni would have been facing a hungry winter. Worse, their new Roman overlords would be expecting taxes paid in kind - all the more frustrating for the Britons to know that they would have to hand over part of their meagre crop to the Romans, who meanwhile had their own supplies of grain brought from Gaul to feed their troops. With the recent memory of the atrocities carried out by the Romans against the family of the late king, and the absence of the Roman governor and his army in Wales, this could have provided the spark for rebellion.
By the end of August, Paulinus would have been wrapping up his conquest of Anglesey, as both Tacitus and Dio point out. If the revolt started gathering momentum among the harvest workers late in the month, Paulinus could have received word of it and have got his troops on the road by the beginning of September.
With this chronology, the attack on Colchester falls around the end of the first week of September. Paulinus reaches London shortly after that, and London is sacked by the Iceni around the second half of that month. A short period of delay ensues (not too long, or Paulinus would have been reinforced by his remaining troops in Wales), and then the final battle happens in the first few days of October. That still leaves just enough time for the reinforcements from the Rhine to arrive before the close of the sailing season and to go into winter quarters in Britain. The visit of the Polyclitus mission from Rome and finally the arrival of new governor Turpilianus probably happened after spring 62.
Anyway, I think that's the only timescale that makes sense of the note in Tacitus. It does make the events of the revolt, from the initial uprising to the main battle, very compressed though - no more than a month, really. Certainly no time for lengthy long-distance manoeuvres, or for the Iceni to return to their lands and sally forth again later, for example.
I've been reading lately about agriculture in medieval England, and I realise that I've been quite mistaken about the sowing and harvesting seasons (which were presumably the same in the Roman era, as the germination time of wheat cannot have changed much). I was assuming that the main wheat crop was sown in the spring, but it is, of course, almost entirely sown in the autumn. I think Deryk tried to point this out to me several times - sorry, Deryk!
Traditionally, the wheat harvest begins at the start of August (Lammas), and is mostly finished by the end of that month. September is for winnowing and threshing the grain, and preparing the ground, which is then sown with the new seed, beginning in October.
So Tacitus's point that the Iceni faced famine after the revolt "for they had been careless about sowing corn, people of every age having gone to the war, while they reckoned on our supplies as their own" relates to people being away at war in late autumn, not the spring or summer.
But what about the preceding harvest? Why would the Iceni need to seize Roman supplies if they'd only just harvested their own crops? I think this might point to one of the most important reasons for the revolt, and one which could easily have been overlooked by Roman historians at the time.
If the harvest of AD61 was very poor, the Iceni would have been facing a hungry winter. Worse, their new Roman overlords would be expecting taxes paid in kind - all the more frustrating for the Britons to know that they would have to hand over part of their meagre crop to the Romans, who meanwhile had their own supplies of grain brought from Gaul to feed their troops. With the recent memory of the atrocities carried out by the Romans against the family of the late king, and the absence of the Roman governor and his army in Wales, this could have provided the spark for rebellion.
By the end of August, Paulinus would have been wrapping up his conquest of Anglesey, as both Tacitus and Dio point out. If the revolt started gathering momentum among the harvest workers late in the month, Paulinus could have received word of it and have got his troops on the road by the beginning of September.
With this chronology, the attack on Colchester falls around the end of the first week of September. Paulinus reaches London shortly after that, and London is sacked by the Iceni around the second half of that month. A short period of delay ensues (not too long, or Paulinus would have been reinforced by his remaining troops in Wales), and then the final battle happens in the first few days of October. That still leaves just enough time for the reinforcements from the Rhine to arrive before the close of the sailing season and to go into winter quarters in Britain. The visit of the Polyclitus mission from Rome and finally the arrival of new governor Turpilianus probably happened after spring 62.
Anyway, I think that's the only timescale that makes sense of the note in Tacitus. It does make the events of the revolt, from the initial uprising to the main battle, very compressed though - no more than a month, really. Certainly no time for lengthy long-distance manoeuvres, or for the Iceni to return to their lands and sally forth again later, for example.
Nathan Ross
