Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

Found it.  Apparently, it's due out in April.  The secret is not to look for it on the website (Silly me!  Fancy thinking I'd find it there!) but to search 'Hodder and Stoughton catalogue' on Google and then scroll through the non-fiction section of the 2023 Spring Catalogue.

Interesting the author goes for AD60. He'd better hope the war did happen then, as otherwise 'bringing the year to life' is just going to involve a lot of ploughing and taxpaying...

   

Nowadays I'm moderately convinced that the revolt did actually happen in 60, so I'm not as outraged as I might once have been...

I have read that three of the legions (II, VIIII, XX) had received drafts of recruits due to 20 year discharges...

By the imperial period legions were standing formations, recruited (as far as we know) regularly, and had been so for nearly a century. The supposed pattern of 20-year (or 16-year, or whatever) mass discharges is based on an idea about recruitment during the republican period, and is not relevant here.

Is it likely that the veterans settled in Colchester area were from either or both XIV and/or XX Legions? ... would it be likely that the veterans of all legions would be settled there?

Colchester was originally the fortress of the twentieth, so their veterans would have made up the majority of the settlers at first. I don't think there was any rule about who settled where though, and as there were no other colonia in the province I'm sure men from other legions settled there too, or went to London or other large settlements, if they wanted to remain in Britain. Long-standing legion bases like Wroxeter and Exeter probably had a population of retired soldiers living in the vicinity, perhaps with local wives and families.