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Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.
Hello John,

No problem with you using figures from essay.

If I understand correctly, what you are asking is for an attribute entitled 'distance from tribal borders to the prospective battle-site' to be either added to the list of attributes or replace 'distance from London'.

I'd guess we can leave aside for now the question of weighting for this new attribute.

As you say, the applied weightings are carefully balanced and don't shift the base GIS calculations, i.e. the attribute values, too much. This was a deliberate policy to try and avoid too many people claiming I'd skewed the results using the weightings. So, your Church Stowe (CS) has a weighted rank of 49 but without the weighting comes in at 55. If I calculated a weighting called 'distance from tribal borders ...' then CS would not climb very much above 49. But without doing the calculations I cannot be precise.

To be clear, I did consider adding your attribute when working on the data but decided not to because:

1) the borders are not really known (largely based on single coins and hoards of same)

2) we don't know much about the population densities within the tribal areas - so, to where would the tribespeople return? Would there have been many different routes 'home' for the Iceni?

3) and what about the Trinovantes?


Using the western borders as a distance attribute would have been messy.

Plus, Tacitus and Dio tell us that London was destroyed. So we know the horde - or one of them? - was in that location. We know Suetonius was there too and that he marched away to eventually 'turn and fight'. We know the horde followed him because of the large reported number of men, the presence of wagons etc., and because Tacitus makes the point of telling us that Suetonius was clever enough not to have any enemy to his rear.

So, all-in-all, I chose to use the 'distance to London' attribute. Much more simple.

However, the 'distance from tribal borders ...' attribute might have merit. But, that merit depends on the starting conditions and how + what sort of units are crossing that border. Put another way: are you advocating, 1) a general flow of tribespeople across the border, or 2) two or more hordes of tribespeople moving across the border, and 3) that we place too much reliance on Tacitus saying Colchester and London were destroyed, and that we falsely assign a large horde to this undertaking?

As you can see, I'm unsure of your reasoning for having the attribute 'distance from tribal borders ..'.


Regards, Steve
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Messages In This Thread
Re: Calling all armchair generals! - by Ensifer - 03-11-2010, 03:13 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-18-2012, 06:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 12:02 AM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 02:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 05:40 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 11:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 05:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 09:42 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 10:10 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:25 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 08:36 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-26-2012, 02:57 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-27-2012, 01:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 08-05-2012, 02:24 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-07-2014, 02:18 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-08-2014, 01:50 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-11-2014, 02:03 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-18-2014, 07:54 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-20-2014, 02:37 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-25-2014, 08:29 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 03-04-2015, 06:27 PM

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