Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

the road connection back to Angelsey was built by Agricola afrer the Iceni revolt, so that road connection is not an option without use of cross county movement

How do you imagine that Paulinus got his army to Anglesey, with all those thousands of men and mules and wagons?

you advance a time line that starts in summer, which has many problems, inc, if its the summer the crops have been sown and there is enough for a year, so T is wrong that grain was not sown.

The revolt began while Paulinus was on Anglesey. Unless you believe that a Roman commander would undertake a full-scale campaign involving a sea crossing in winter, or some time in early spring, that puts the revolt in summer. Since he had just concluded his operations when he heard about what was happening, late summer is most likely.

I've made the point repeatedly that the main crop was sown in the autumn in this period (quoting Varro and Pliny). Your single spring emmer crop was prehistoric - by the 1st C AD southeastern Britain was using the same agricultural calendar as the rest of northwest Europe.

I pointed out how you have the couriers system moving information fater than is humanly possible and faster than all the historical data that makes up Orbis contains, it was not mistake to point that out.

Slower than Orbis's estimate, and slower than our sources indicate, as I said. But let's move on...

S.L.A. Marshall's book Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation... concludes that a soldier could optimally carry 33 percent of his body weight.

Optimal is the important word here. Marshall (pp.24-27) also claims that legionaries carried 80lbs on the march, as did US troops landed at Normandy, French troops in the Crimea carried 72lbs, British redcoats 80lbs, etc. The number and variety of calculations of how much soldiers could or should carry throughout history is so great as to indicate no definite rule. Training, and campaign location and season, apply too many variables.

Vegetius (1.19) says that Roman soldiers were trained to carry a load of 60 Roman pounds (43lbs, or 20kg) on the regular march, in addition to their arms and armour - 'cruelly laden', as Virgil has it. He has already told us (1.9) that the regular march was 20 miles (18 modern miles).

With the cooking equipment, entrenching tools, stakes and tent carried on the contubernium mule, most of the individual soldier's load would comprise rations. 14 days ration at 2.5lbs per day would total 35lbs, well within Vegetius's load limit. We know that Roman soldiers could routinely carry more than fourteen days (Cicero), seventeen days (Historia Aug, Ammianus) or greater (Caesar, Livy) amounts of personal rations on the march.

Even so, with arms and armour too each soldier would start out carrying something around 80lb (36kg). But this load would decrease steadily with every passing day, as they consumed their rations. I have already cited Junkelmann's experiment showing that relatively untrained men can carry 43-46kg on lengthy marches.

It comes down to whether you choose to believe the sources and the studies that have been done on them, or not.

S klnow when he is in Anmgelsey that he cant get back to london and defend it, there is simply not enough time, so no he was not performing overkill, he prob did not march his foot to London either as he knew before getting there he would be marching back again as the best outcome.

Ah, the return of the totally and thoroughly debunked cavalry dash theory!

I wondered if something like that might lie at the root of your thinking.

Three questions: if Suetonius Paulinus knew, as you suggest, that 'he cant get back to london and defend it, there is simply not enough time', why would he ride all the way down to London, in person, at enormous risk to himself and his command? Why would he, as Tacitus says, have wondered 'whether he should choose it as a seat of war' if he knew his troops could never reach it? And how could the refugees from London possibly have kept up with him if he was travelling at speed, on horseback?

you will adopt this new grain called spelt, and or, this new 2 crop a year idea... importing Roman wines etc as it undermined traditional values... horses becoming plough horses instead.

Spelt had been introduced to Britain long before, so this 'new administrative policy of Rome' is solely your own invention. And nobody would try using a horse to pull a plough until the middle ages - oxen were the draft animals, and oxen pulled the wagons that the Iceni brought to the final battle, so any ideas of rapid dashing fleets of chariots should be considered purely imaginary too!

As for wine - Dio has Boudica claim that the terrible Romans drink unmixed wine, rather than diluting it like civilised people. But we should probably take his ideas on life in Britain as seriously as his claim that the Iceni made their bread out of grass...

It will be a lot easier and less fractious if you simply accept the site was Church Stowe...

Nice try.. but no.