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Cader Idris. Our only knowledge of these tribes and the lands they occupied comes from what the
Romans themselves recorded on their campaigns. How accurate this is, we cannot know.
The relentless expansion of the Roman Empire was nowhere near as well thought out as we
might imagine. It was much more of a hit-and-miss affair, and when the invasion was launched, the
Romans had very little idea of the extent or the geography of Britannia. They probably did not even
realize that beyond the easily subdued fertile lowlands lay barren mountain tracts which were far
more difficult to conquer and then to hold against stubborn and spirited resistance. The mountains
were also hardly worth having anyway, since the land was so poor that it could never yield much in
the way of taxes. Everywhere there was the problem of secure frontiers.
The first frontier in western Britannia between the Romans and the unconquered tribes
followed the diagonal course of the Fosse Way from Exeter to Lincoln. This proved to be an
unstable border and was repeatedly attacked by the Silures in AD 47 and 48, encouraged by
Caratacus, the fugitive chieftain of the defeated Catuvellauni who had taken refuge in Wales. To
contain the Silures, the Romans built fortresses at Gloucester and Usk. Caratacus moved north to
the Ordovices in Snowdonia, and after their defeat in AD 51, and the capture of his wife and
children, he fled to the court of Queen Cartimandua, leader of the Brigantes in northern Britannia.
There his flight ended and he was handed over to the Romans by Cartimandua and taken to Rome in
chains. Rather than execution, which captured ‘rebels’ could usually expect, Caratacus was
released by Claudius after a defiant speech in which he is said to have exclaimed, referring to the
grandeur of Rome, ‘Why do you, who possess so many palaces, covet our poor tents?’
Welsh resistance to Rome did not end with the capture of Caratacus. The Silures resumed their
attacks and defeated the twentieth legion in AD 52. Eventually the Emperor Nero, who had
succeeded Claudius in AD 54, issued instructions to subdue the entire island of Britannia and in AD
58 a new governor arrived in Britannia to carry out the orders of the Emperor. Suetonius Paulinus
was a professional soldier with campaign experience in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, so he was
used to dealing with independent-minded tribesmen the hard way. In two years of campaigning he
had Wales in an iron grip. Refugees fled to Anglesey, the centre of the Druids, and Suetonius
launched an attack. Tacitus records the scene with the British lining the shore of the Menai Straits:
‘Among them were black robed women with dishevelled hair like the Furies, brandishing torches.
Close by stood the Druids raising their hands to the heavens and screaming dreadful curses’.
Tacitus was a historian, but he needed to sell books, so his popular histories were always
written to appeal to his readers in Rome. His description of the Druids’ habit of ‘drenching their
altars in the blood of prisoners and consult[ing] their gods by means of human entrails’ was bound
to boost sales.
Neither the sight of wailing women nor the threat of evisceration on a Druid altar was likely to
deter Suetonius Paulinus. His troops swam across the Straits and easily defeated the Celtic
refugees and the Druids, not only killing all they could find but destroying the groves of trees that
were sacred to their religion. However, Suetonius was forced to withdraw immediately to deal
with the revolt of the Iceni under Boudicca and it was left to Tacitus’s father-in-law, the general
Julius Agricola, to complete the subjugation of the Ordovices in AD 78, which he did, according to
Tacitus, by killing them all, before moving off the following year to deal with Caledonia.
Containing the Celtic tribes of Wales proved to be a long and costly operation for the Romans.
Legionary forts at Chester, at Wroxeter near Shrewsbury and at Caerleon near Newport in south