Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

Does anyone know when the term "Battle of Watling Street" was first coined and by whom?

That's an interesting question!

I did a quick search on Google Books, and the phrase itself seems to appear first in Guy de la Bedoyere's 2003 Defying Rome - however, the preview snippet doesn't show the bit in question, so it's hard to check.

Joel Levy's Lost Histories of 2006 is the earliest to show the full phrase in a preview.

However, interestingly enough it seems that the exact phrase was in use as early as 1979 to describe some sort of stock market panic! This would suggest that it was used before that to refer to something else - probably the Boudicca battle, maybe in common vernacular...

(*quick search on the Times online archive turns up a couple of mentions of the 1979 financial thing - maybe that was the actual source of the phrase after all? - and a first usage in the Boudiccan sense dating from 2011 - the Steve Punt radio programme!)

The suggestion that the battle happened on or near Watling Street is much older though - Charles Oman's A History of England before the Norman Conquest of 1910 cites Professor Francis Haverfield's suggestion that 'we must suppose the battle to have taken place somewhere along the line London-Wroxeter (Watling Street) on which the troops must have been moving" - this is the same Haverfield who came up with the 'cavalry dash' theory, of course.