Is Boadicea buried at a McDonald's?

Blackleaf · Is Boadicea buried at a McDonald's?

Is the red-headed British warrior queen, the leader of the Iceni tribe who fought against the Roman Empire, buried next to a McDonald's in Britain's 2nd city?

Bo buried at McDonald's?

By ANDREW PARKER

EXCITED archaeologists may have found the grave of legendary warrior queen Boadicea — beside a McDonald’s burger bar.

If their hopes are realised, the discovery will end a mystery stretching back 1,945 years.

Test digs have unearthed ancient artefacts suggesting the chariot-riding tribal monarch pegged it in the Birmingham suburb of Kings Norton, right by the local fast food joint.

Her 200,000-strong army was wiped out after making a last stand against Roman occupiers in 61AD.

And rather than be captured Boadicea killed herself near the battlefield by sipping poison.

Her struggle was memorably recorded in The Sun’s brilliant book Hold Ye Front Page, which reported on great historical events in our own unique style.

Birmingham’s planners have suspended plans to build houses and flats beside the restaurant so the archaeologists can carry out a full excavation of the site.

And local wags reckon that if the link with the battle against the Romans is proved, the burger bar will start serving Big Macs-imus.

Historians have always believed Boadicea’s rebellion ended somewhere near Birmingham.

They are sure the battle took place in the Midlands as Roman legionnaires marching from Anglesey, North Wales were confronted by English tribes heading up from London. The undulating and wooded topography of the area by the McDonald’s, known as Parsons Hill, matches descriptions given by Roman Empire chroniclers.

And test trenches dug in the soil have yielded Roman artefacts including ancient pots.

Local councillor Peter Douglas Osborn, an archaeologist and keen conservationist, said: "It’s thrilling to think we may unearth something so intriguing right here in Birmingham."

"Nobody knows exactly where the last battle took place but we know it is somewhere in the West Midlands. It would be priceless if Boadicea’s last stand was next door to a McDonald’s but this site does fit the only descriptions we know of.

It is on the route to Metchley, the Roman fort discovered in Birmingham.

If only because of this, it represents a real possibility. However, it is even more encouraging when you consider the evidence and well-preserved artefacts unearthed from trial trenches.

The location matches historical descriptions of the battle site in that it is hilly and surrounded by trees. I also hope the dig may unearth evidence of what name the Romans gave Birmingham."

A McDonald’s spokeswoman said: “We’ll be thrilled if it turns out Boadicea’s last stand was next to one of our restaurants.”

The big dig could take months or even years. Dr Mike Hodder, Birmingham City Council’s senior archaeologist, said: “There’s no doubt it’s an important site and may be the location of the Boadicea battle.

“We know that pots discovered mean Romans were probably there and we know her last battle was fought on a hilly site and was somewhere nearby.

“Everyone is very positive about the find.”

Boadicea was married to King Prasutagus, who ruled over the Iceni — the Celtic tribe occupying East Anglia under the authority of the Romans.

Emperor Nero, who ruled with an iron fist between 54AD and 68, provoked her by forcing her people to endure conscription and pay heavy taxes.

But the final straw came when Prasutagus died in 60AD.

The Romans plundered Boadicea’s chief tribesmen and brutally annexed her dominions.

She vowed to take on Nero and his legions.

And other tribes from all over South East England came to her side ready to die in the fight for freedom.
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She relished a battle

BOADICEA led an epic bid to make the Romans "burger off" before her death.

She revolted after Emperor Nero seized her Iceni tribe’s territory in East Anglia following the death of her husband, the clan’s king.

Boadicea, or Boudicca as she is often known, was tortured and beaten.

Her two daughters were raped and other members of the Iceni nobility were enslaved.

The warrior queen and her subjects responded by attacking the Roman colony of Camulodunum, now Colchester, where many inhabitants were former legionnaires and their families.

When Nero sent one of his top legions to crush the revolt, Boadicea’s forces wiped them out.

Her army, by then numbering more than 100,000, then launched bloody onslaughts on the towns of Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans).

Many imperial officials fled and Boadicea was on the point of winning independence for the Britons.

But Roman governor Paulinus Suetonius gathered 10,000 well-trained legionnaires and marched to meet the queen.

He chose his battleground carefully — on a hill between two woods, where his men could not be surrounded.

thesun.co.uk

Babygael

Noo ah remember whit ah did wae the rest ae that english breakfast! Idea

Thanks blackleaf!!

BG

kathyv

Poor, Bo. Defeated, dead and found at a McDonalds. . .
I can think of better fates! LOL

Babygael

Hai Kathyv,

Abieuan

Morph

well abieuan, as Goerge Orwell states, History can be changed to suit the state

Morph

I meant George Orwell, LOL, Goerge was his cousin and didnt write books he was a bricklayer from Wigan. Very Happy

Abieuan

Is that the guy who was on "House of Horrors" last week ?

elidir

Buddug (Boadicea) wasn't British! She was a Brythoneg Celt.

Chookie

All of you seem to be after forgetting who writes the history books.

Morph

what you do you mena Chookie?

Chookie

The bloody winners (who end up being the ruling castes) write the history books.

Take, for an instance the Battle of Mons Graupius. According to Tacitus, the Romans killed 10,000 of Calgacus' men for the loss of only 360 of their own men. Yet they immediately pulled back to the Lothians after kicking the crap out of the natives.

If you want a more up to date example, hiostory books will now record that G. W. Bush was elected honestly at the beginning of his FIRST term.

SLG

Morph, some British historians have tried to paint Boadicea and all the Brythonic Celts as being British - and some how equated with the modern British state. It is one of the justifications for the Union, that Britain was once united as an island with a common ethnicity across it.

Lothian Sky

elidir

You have that right Lothian Sky and you'll be hard pressed to find english historical orthodoxy using aything but euphamisms for "Welsh" whether it's british, briton, brittonic, romano-british, cymric, cumbrian - etc. And yet, the saxons and angles are reffered to as english as if the english identity was already fully formed before the Norman conquest and occupation: english language and the english actually emerged with this norman-french linguistic and cultural influence or domination.

I think the Scots are, if I may say so, the most complex nation within the Atlantic archipelago in terms of their origins: is there also a nordic influence in the north as well?

The conflation of british - modern with ancient - is a deliberate propaganda strategy. It's a kind of retrospective appropriation to push back the idea of britain (modern state) and england backwards in time (as is the homogenising of a conglomeration of germanic tribes and kindoms into english before the emergence of english culture). And of course supports a terratorial claim on the Atlantic Archipelago with a false provenance for the english who do so want the status of first nation.

Slg you'r bang on with your point. The archeologist/historian Richard Rudgely did this recently with a three part series on cha. 4 Barbarians (if I remember its name correctly, he has done so in other projects) when he tried to legitimise the term "british" as representing a racial and even cultural continuity from pre-Roman times to the present, i.e. a british people with an unbroken pedigree- including and especially the english. He seemed to suggest that were all the same because of the term british. That is if he's british and they were british then there is an ancestral (in terms of blood) and therefore cultural connection, which seems to be a circular argument as well as establishing culture as racially dependant.

Part of his argument was based on the now increasingly popular historical attack on Celtic identity; that is: the Celts were not a people (race); as what migrated to the Atlantic archipelago were not Celtic people en mass but a Celtic culture: no Celtic blood - no Celts. Now this migration theory is probably true, but its significance in interpreting what constitutes a Celt is based upon a misunderstanding of what constitutes identity and Celtic identity specifically- which is culturally situated (as are all identities, I suggest) and not dependant upon a racial purity: a dogma which finds its clearest expression and most committed adherents in Germanic cultures and is framed within a discourse of blood identity, lineage or pedigree that has to be pure and continious to retain its viability.

I suggest that if your culture is Celtic then you are Celtic: it is not dependant upon genetics. Nobody can be pure of course as race does not have a biological basis in fact; the idea of racial admixture is an error as what is being mixed are molecules not identities of race.

But Rudgley falls into this error and seemed to be saying that if the Celts were not genetically distinct then they cannot be called Celtic - identity dependant upon genetic inheritance: the solution is - they must be called (and "be") british. If there is no reason to think of them as different in racial terms they can, therefore, be the same people as the late arrivals - the english or their germanic precursors and they become part of the same historical continuity by geographic proximity and historical contemporaneousness. And- even if the Celts were racially distinct subsequent racial admixture with the english makes us all the same anyway (which only works if you beleive that identity is in the gene). Rudgley can then claim that he's a descendant and inheritor of pre-Roman Celtic britishness because it still continues in its contemporary british state fabrication. You notice how he coveres both bases to ensure his inheritance is secure- he really wants to be indigenous.

This is of course not about being british at all its an english nationalist agenda. If the Celts were not a distinct people then we cannot talk of indigenous Celtic identities/people or their subsequent nations before the english, or british (which has a more accurate definition more akin to "greater england") only some ill defined tribes or petty kindoms. This is an ideology motivated by the desire to establish the english as the founding nation in the isles- the first organised people- that's why the early Welsh have to be called britons or Romano british etc (the same euphomistic-ology is true for the other Celtic nations).

However, Rudgley overlooks (or ignores) the mass-migration into these islands from germanic europe inc. the ancestors of the English and this has concrete evidence from population genetics. So even by his principle of "blood" Rudgley, as an englishman, cannot claim such a provenance or pedigree even in its british guise unless he's a Welshman or a Pict or an Irishman: and even then his culture is english and that is where his national or ethnic identity lies. So he fails in his historical colonisation of the past; both by his criteria and by mine. One could argue that as english identity developed in the Isles then it is indigenous to the Isles but even so the english are not autochthonous and england does not have primacy as it was, of course constructed in opposition to those already here - and already distinct.

The notion of national primacy is a strange thing but it seems to be essential to many english thinkers regarding theiridentity. One of the consequence of this is that the legitimacy of their position becomes unsustainable without appropriation (the Arthurian legends for example) of others peoples past: indeed to sanctify their position they have to appropriate that which was here before them to give the illusion of continuous occupation. The Welsh intellectual Raymond Williams was once reminded by an english collueage during a heated historical debate that the english had been in these islands for a thousand years, to which he answered: "And are you enjoying it here?".

Chookie

SF102

Blackadder

Dear dear dear ... is this what passes for history now? I can see the Education system has become somewhat corrupted since we allowed you plebs to participate in it.
It's all a myth you know ... the English have always ruled this sceptred Isle ... well, those of us who deserve to ... the rest of you little people are just fun for us when we get bored.
Boadicea, the Romans, Celts ... ha-ha! As if it mattered. Now why are you not all out tending to the turnip fields ... and the lucky ones, the mushroom stores???

Wolf of Badenoch

Blackadder

You think we're going to waste them on the lower orders??? Dear me ... no! Even Balders isn't allowed to harvest them ... Mind you, I'm perfectly willing to let you have him. One whiff from under his armpits gives much the same effect as amanita muscaria! Could you bring yourself to part with half a crown for him???