Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

You are still under the false impression i am under an obligation to do/give you what you want... But i dont need to do that to know your wrong, and simply dont like being wrong.

Not at all. You are not obliged to do anything here, except follow the basic rules of debate. But neither is anyone else obliged to read what you write or to engage with it, and if your posts are filled with bluster and sarcasm, riddled with typos and grammatical faults, and often resting on errors of calculation or interpretation, you cannot expect others to give your efforts the attention you desire.

If you read back through this thread, you will find that I have been wrong many times, and have changed my ideas several times too. We all welcome discussion and critique, but it is possible to disagree with somebody without trying to insult their intelligence.

Nobody is winning any prizes here. All of us accept that we will perhaps never find the answers to the questions we are asking. The fun is in the debate, in trying out ideas, and in questioning assumptions and challenging theories. But to offer only carping objections and no positive alternatives is to try and disqualify everyone else on technicalties while refusing to participate yourself.

The roman road from N wales to Chester does not exist yet, Agricola build it next decade, so the first 60 od miles with 100lbs on their backs is done cross country to get to the road to go to Godmanchester.

As you mentioned in your previous paragraph, Paulinus had to build his road to get his army to Anglesey. He was marching back along a route he had laid and supplied himself only a month or two beforehand. It is Chester itself that dates (by dendrochronology) to Agricola, not the road.

However, discussions of the Anglesey campaign are fairly superfluous here. We know the Romans could conduct campaigns of several months in Britain with armies of several legions, and not starve to death or grind to a halt. If you doubt this, you only need look at the marching camps in Scotland, the size of army they would have supported, and their distance from the nearest legion base. And there were certainly more than 10K auxiliaries in the province - Agricola had 13,000 of them at Mons Graupius.

Paulinus, in my projected timeline, only needs to move fast for fourteen days; a single expediti march, on established roads and lines of supply, to confront an emergency. Your calculations are directed towards what is average, and you want this to be the limit of the possible. As we have seen with your mistakes about couriers above, there is a great difference between an average speed or timescale and what could be accomplished under exceptional circumstances (I think we can agree that the imminent revolt of a province and slaughter of a citizen colony counts as exceptional!)

Some recorded speeds of Roman armies are exceptional indeed - Caesar marched from Rome to Spain 'with a heavily-laden army, by a very long route' in only 27 days, according to Appian (Bell Civ 2.103): he would have needed to cover over 20 miles a day every one of these days to even pass the Spanish border. Perhaps an exaggeration (did the full army join him along the way?), but Appian and his Roman readers must have considered it within the spectrum of the possible.

If the spring crop is not sown, how come the Romans dont think thats odd, why is that?

As we discussed above (using sources you cited yourself), the main crop during this period was sown in the autumn.

If there was a second crop, sown in the spring of AD61, both crops would have been harvested in August, just before the outbreak of the revolt.

Then there is how much weight you give to the druid influence... if P heads for Angelsey in Spring... why would P need 20k? to defeata a total pop of 15k.

I doubt there was any Druidic connection. None of our sources mention it, and Dio had Boudica acting as a priestess herself.

The campaign season in Britain began in summer (Agricola 20). We don't know the size of Paulinus's army - I guessed 20K above somewhere, which seems about right for a legion plus strong detachments of at least two others, and an equal-ish number of auxiliaries. But the figure may have been lower. Paulinus would have used all the men he could muster though - there was a lot of construction required, he needed to garrison his forts, and using a sledgehammer to crack a nut was entirely Roman practice. You need only look (again) at the size of armies taken into the sparsely-populated north-east of Scotland.

When he marched against Boudica, Paulinus took only a fraction of his total force; he wanted to leave sufficient troops to hold his conquests in Wales, and knew he could move faster with a smaller body of men. He probably took exactly the number he knew he could provision for two weeks or a little more on the road. As it happened, the revolt was a lot larger and went on longer than he'd anticipated, and he apparently ended up surrendering all or most of what he had won in Wales as he pulled his army back to crush the rebels.