Boudica's real name may be lost, and Boadicea began as a typo
Boudica means roughly Victorious Woman in the ancient British language, and it may have been an honorific rather than the name she grew up with. The familiar Victorian spelling Boadicea, meanwhile, grew out of copying mistakes: Tacitus added an extra c, and medieval scribes swapped letters until the name drifted far from the original.
Almost everything known about her comes from Roman writers. Tacitus wrote decades later but had an inside source, since his father-in-law Agricola served in Britain during the revolt. Cassius Dio wrote about 140 years after her death, and his fuller version survives only in a summary by an eleventh-century Byzantine monk, with details often judged invented. Both gave her rousing battle speeches that nobody actually recorded. No description from her own lifetime exists; Dio's picture of a very tall woman with a harsh voice and a mass of tawny hair came more than a century later.
The trigger, by any account, was a broken deal. Her husband Prasutagus ruled the Iceni, roughly today's Norfolk, as an ally of Rome and left his kingdom jointly to his two daughters and the emperor Nero. Rome ignored the will, annexed the land and seized property; Tacitus reports brutal treatment of the queen and her daughters. Dio stresses money instead: loans pressed on Britons by the philosopher Seneca were suddenly called in, and earlier imperial gifts were reclaimed.
In AD 60 or 61 she led the Iceni and neighbouring tribes to destroy Camulodunum, now Colchester, a colony of retired Roman soldiers with a costly temple to Claudius. The governor Suetonius Paulinus, campaigning on Anglesey, rushed to London but could not defend it, and the rebels burned Londinium and Verulamium too. Then, with almost 10,000 men in a narrow pass backed by woods, he crushed her far larger army. Tacitus says she took poison; Dio says she fell ill and died.
Renaissance readers rediscovered those Roman texts, and by the Victorian era she had become a national heroine, a symbol of resistance to overwhelming power.
Source: Boudica
