Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Hanny]

There's an interesting note in Caesar (Gallic War 1.29), which I've mentioned before in the depths of this thread. After the defeat of the Helvetii 'records written out in Greek' were found (conveniently!) in the enemy camp, giving a full register of all the tribal groups, both combatants and non-combatants. The total was 368,000, of whom 92,000 were able to bear arms - 1 person in 4, in other words - the rest being 'children, old men and women' (as Caesar puts it; we might be suspicious of the neatness of this calculation).

Using the same ratio on the figures given by Dio - assuming they are based on something genuine-ish, and also assuming (as Tacitus has Paulinus suggest in his pre-battle speech) that the Britons were all mixed up, unarmed women among the warriors - this would give 30,000 Iceni and Trinovante warriors at the start of the revolt, and 57,500 warriors by the final battle. That sounds at least plausible, although we have no way of judging its accuracy.

(on the numbers of Britons slain, it would be tempting to assume that whoever came up with 70-80K dead Britons just took the figure from whatever source Dio was using for the complete army and divided it roughly by three...)

 We can also use WHO population models, West II iirc is what Blunt used for his work on manpower, 28 to 34% as being mil age cohorts,  we can also do so guess work of our own, lets say iceni land area is 2800 square miles and they have above average pop per square miles, say 50, using say 3 million for roman brittain at the time, we get around 140,000 iceni population.

Convenient, wouldn't you say? I mean, he couldn't bless the weapons if they'd already been taken off to war!

Not as inconvieniant to a Roman as not having the gods on your side

Mars was originally a god of agriculture, I believe - traditional fighting seasons are based on agriculture in central Italy. Seasonal differences elsewhere mean differences in practical military matters. I would rather trust evidence from contemporary sources than ideas about traditional beliefs.

He still was, Mars in war protected the crops, when war came if you dont protect your crops and hide inside the walls the enemy takes your crops and you risk starvation, a martial race like Rome prefererd to come out and fight to protect those crops, so Mars was also god of war and that war was used to protect crops, unlike Greek Ares.

When are you referring to? As I understand it, the single emmer crop was prehistoric. The book I linked above suggests evidence both for spelt cultivation, manuring and autumn planting in Britain in the late Iron Age. Again, I would rather trust modern archaeology over whatever Pliny thought was going on..

Pliny and others, tell us that natural cerrial crops require 4 months of fallow following a harvest. This has been tested at Butser and others, and the average crop yield measured between spelt and emmer, emmer is better in modern testing, just as the ancient comentators, Pliny, Columella and Varro tell us its emmer that was the main crop of choice for breadand tells us how to grow it. The romans built London as an import port to bring over cerials to sustain the extra poulation they had put into Britain, the cetrials came from the Rhine ports and emmer was the dominated cerrial crop grown there.

So we have natural cerial growth, sown in spring, harvested at end of year, then we man made adpatation, spring and autumn crops to replace natural cycle, we have manure added crops to allow sowing and maturation of the 100 to 140 day cycle, it does not really matter if its spelt of emmer, what really matters is that experimental archeology has show manure changes output from c1.65 to c3.5 so its this intesive use of manure that was the game changer. Not all pop groups had the cattle or horses to produce the manure, to use that method, but we also know the Iceni was a warrior and horse culture, as the most common finds are horse/chariot finds, and that more torcs have been found in Iceni lands than all the rest of Brittain combined.

So to make use of the reference to not having sown crops and sufferring famine late in the year, we really only need to know roughly when cerial crops were sown, and then maintained with manure, weeding and so on to get full output as harvest time.

This is the problem - the revolt began while Paulinus was away at war (Agricola, 18), but had almost completed his operations. The war was in progress during the planting season, which the Iceni missed as they were away on campaign.

Varro gives us the sowing, and reaping timeline.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/r...ca/1*.html

Butser does it for all examples of spring and autum crops with and without manure, including crop growthn by month so June is 15% of the weight of the crops growth, so we know your timeline is not in acord with crop cycles.
http://www.butser.org.uk/Cereal%20Yields...Option.pdf

The distance a legion could march was defined by the stamina of the troops and the state of the roads, not time measurement. Vegetius (I.9) says that 'at the military step, 20 miles should be covered in five hours, at least in summer time.' That would be 18.3 modern miles.

Not really, the limiting factor is food and water, you can only make the 18 miles a day while your forward carry capacity, be it on the legions or on the mules, gives you that rate of manouver, the amout a man carries and mule carries can be varied to suit circumstances, but a value of 15 days rations on a man and 250lbs on amule gives us the average 18 mpd, for the period of self sustainment last, after its gone you have no rations and no water, and you mpd drops to next to nothing as you have consumed the logistics that give you that mpd capability.

The Roman day always lasted twelve hours (at least in Italy), but the summer hours were longer. The first hour always began at sunrise, and the twelfth ended at sunset.

In our estimates above of how long the battle might have lasted, we were referring to sunset and sunrise, mid-morning, noon, etc - not Roman hours (we have no sources giving the times as they would have been judged by contemporaries). The stages of the day, and the length of the day, would remain the same however they were counted.

7 hours, making it one of the longest battles of antituity, and 70,000 casulaties, is still 10,000 an hour, vastly more than the hourly death rate of ww2 battles, and more than the first day of the somme, so arguing for a longer period of battle time, when the enemy is 10 miles away in ox carts, is trying to force fit a pre concieved concept.

c.June – Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, dies. His will divides the Iceni kingdom between Rome and his own two unmarried daughters. His widow Boudica becomes regent.

c. June/July – Paulinus advances from Wroxeter into North Wales, heading for Anglesey, building roads and bridges and subduing resistence as he marches.

c.July/August – After questioning the terms of Prasutagus's will, Procurator Decianus Catus sends men to flog Boudica and rape her daughters. Boudica begins to muster her forces over the harvest period. Paulinus builds landing barges in his camp on the Menai Strait.

August 25th – End of harvest. Boudica holds tribal assembly and calls for revolt. Paulinus begins his amphibious operation against Anglesey, crossing the Menai Strait using barges and attacking defenders on the shore.

August 26th – Iceni begin mobilisation. Paulinus expands his landing area on Anglesey and pushes inland.


August 27th – Attacks on outlying Romanised settlements and villas begin. News of Iceni mobilisation reaches Colchester. Request for military assistance sent to Catus. Conquest of Anglesey continues.

August 28th – Romans engaged in subduing remaining resistence on the island of Anglesey. Iceni sending messages to outlying settlements and to the Trinovantes, requesting alliance.

August 29th – Roman troops burning Druid groves on Anglesey. Catus gets request for aid from Colchester. He forwards message on to Paulinus by express courier. Iceni begin mustering at Thetford.

August 30th – Paulinus completes his conquest of Anglesey and begins establishing and garrisoning forts around the Menai Strait and North Wales. Catus sends 200 men from his bodyguard and office staff to reinforce Colchester.

August 31st – Iceni, having completed muster, move from Thetford to Bury St Edmunds.

September 1st – Catus’ message requesting military support against the Iceni reaches Paulinus at his camp beside the Menai Strait. Catus’s 200 men reach Colchester.

Paulinus plans to go to Angeley, c 120 miles, and take it, he starts from a base of supply that has at least a years supplies as Tactitus tells us thats how legions were operating here, so his plan is to march 120 miles, with a legion of 5000 and 1000 mules, take angelsey and establish a new base of supply to sustain himself there.

Each man a day requires 2.2 lbs ration, 10lbs water. Thats 4.5 litres a man, ( lots of dis information about water requirwements on the board, and comparing logistics from the age of muscle to that of motorization, see here for why https://www.sto.nato.int/publications/ST...BBA61A7%7D )
Each mules a day requires 5lbs ration, 20 lbs water.

Legions could be logisticaly configured with load outs for quite a range of circumstances, ill use a high end food load ou of 15 days carried, the mules ill take 240 lbs gross carry weight and take 60 lbs for all other items except food and water leaving nett 190 lbs for food and water.

Daily requirement
Man 5000*2.2=11000 lbs
Mule 1000* 25=25000
Toal per day 36000 lbs

Aviable, man with 15 days rations, mules 190 lbs.
Man 5000*33=165000 lbs
mule 1000*190=190000 lbs
total forward lift =355000

So at start of operation, Paulinus has with him 355000/36000, a 10 day period of 18 mpd as he carries everything with him to achive that, after that he has re supply himself, of course he has options, crops are in the fields at diffeing rates of maturation in the months of the year, so he can live of the land, which takes time and lowers march rates to 9 mpd or so, using HB movement rates in italy to gatther supplies in a hostile land, and he is buildingroads etc, or he can supply from base which is the safe bet, and use his unused mules capacity to replace consumed, a mules round trip of 250 lbs is 9 mpd, or 18 mpd single trip, so once he reaches Angelsey, he has 7 marching camps linking him to his base of supply, he can achive a daisy chain of mules moving along this to deliver each day, 13300 lbs to the legions that is consuming 11000 120 miles away from the base of supply, this means, it will take 3 months of that rate of supply to create the new base of supply. So we have a 2 month operation to get there and take it, and 3 months to create the supply base to hold it, a 5 month operation which fits a single campaign season.

Its now he gets the bad news and has to make a plan, his prob logistics is that he has 15 days on the legion, and has a small on hand stock being built up by by the daisy chain mules, allowing for a weeks combat and most mules involved in getting supplies to the other side of the water. Whatever he choses to do must be logisticaly feasable to achive. Wroxeter is also 120 miles from Godmanchester, so he can still use smae base of supply, but instead of being 120 miles away from it in Angelsey, he switches his area of operations to Godmanchster, can he do it in your tim3eframe?, to establish a daisy chain from wroxeter to Godmanchester, he sends word to wroxeter to re direct the mules to Godmanchester, instead of return trip to Angelsey, lets say the dispatch gets there and re directs the incomming mules from Angelse he has not kept with him, they also take 3 days to get to Wroxeter and 11 more to get to Godmanchester, so its day 14 before the first 250 odd mules arrive and day 17 for the last. Each of these 3 days single runs, delivers, 250*190 =47500 lbs less consumed in the 11 day march, 250*25*11 = 68750 so there is not enough mule capacity to do a single run to supply them at godmanchester, so he lacks the time to establish an alt supply route.


Lastly August was not the sowing season,you have conflated sowing with reaping now would be the reaping time, and tacitus tells us its the sowing time that was the problem , ie the spring time when crops were not sown, so if they sowed in spring, they have enough for teh year, even if it was, it implies the entire iceni were military incomptents going to war instead of gathering their basic foods. If we look back at Ceasers acount for the helveti, they took 2 years agricultural peparation, to prepare to go to war.

September 2nd – Paulinus musters an expeditionary force.

September 3rd – Paulinus, with c.7000 men (14th Legion, plus 4 auxiliary units) begins a march of c.198 miles to Godmanchester: Paulinus march day 1. He sends messengers to Cerialis to meet him at Godmanchester for operations against the Iceni. Iceni move south to Sudbury, attacking Romanised settlements.

In two days, he will have stopped mules from going back and aquired 2 days supplies, so he now has on hand c300 mules, so 57000 on the mules, 165000 with the legions, total of 222000. Each day he consumes, 11000 on legions, and 7500 on his mules, total,18500, so he can march for 18 mpd for 12 days and then has consumed everything, he is marching to fast for any of the other mules to catch up, even he directs them to follow him and half are empty doinga return trip to get supplies, so when he reaches Godmanchester on your day 11,he has a single days supplie on hand.

September 14th – Paulinus marches south from Godmanchester towards London (c.56 miles away). Catus arrives in Gaul and sends a message to Rome, reporting the imminent loss of the province. Iceni and Trinovantes begin to muster outside Colchester and advance south-west towards London.

Two problems with compressing it all into a single year, first is tacitus records it as a 2 season event, second is the problems of logistics and time and crop cycles, when you compress it to a single year, so to do so means getting creative.