Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Renatus]

Although we also have to bear in mind the rest of the statement. They were 'careless about sowing corn, people of every age having gone to the war, (or 'turned to war'?) while they reckoned on our supplies as their own.' (omni aetate ad bellum versa, dum nostros commeatus sibi destinant.)

So they were not neglecting their crops because they were about to embark on revolt, but because it had already started and they were not physically present!

The Curse of the Translator strikes again.  The problem with Tacitus is that his style is so idiosyncratic that he defies literal translation and even the most conservative of translators has to paraphrase him to some extent in order to produce something in readable English.  We have seen this recently with the episode of the ships and Suetonius' replacement.  The result is that we end up interpreting the translation, rather than the text.  This is my attempt at a literal translation of this passage:

'but nothing so much as hunger beat down unconcerned with the sowing of crops and with every age turned to war, while they intended our provisions for himself.'

You see the difficulty.  A pronoun is missing and has to be understood, and singulars and plurals are mixed.  Tacitus is explaining why there was a famine and his explanation seems to be that everyone's attention was directed towards preparation for war, to the neglect of husbandry, on the assumption that they would be able to seize what they needed from Roman stocks.  Whether that was a reasonable assumption is another matter, of course.

However, if we imagine that March was the sowing season, and the Britons were not already at war - why would they not sow crops? They could hardly have assumed that they would be away from home until October or so. Not to do so would not just be 'negligent', but amazingly stupid.

But not as stupid as thinking that they might delay the uprising until after the autumn sowing, which is the other alternative.  I think it highly likely that they expected the revolt to carry on past the normal time for harvesting and, as I have said before, they were not going to waste valuable seed corn in sowing a crop that they were unlikely to be able to harvest.

Tacitus does not give us any dates.  All we know is that the outbreak of the revolt coincided with the final stages of the Anglesey campaign and we do not know how long that lasted.  The impression given is that, once a landing on the island had been accomplished, it was over quite quickly.  March is obviously too early and October is too late.  There is a lot to  pack in between the outbreak and the final stages of the incident but it can be done, if the revolt started early enough.  Tacitus tells us that the revolt broke out in AD61 and I am not going to disbelieve him on the unverified assumption that this occurred after the summer harvest.