Issue 87

March/April 2006

Contents

news

Unique Roman tombstone may leave UK

"No synthesis of British prehistory is right"

Neolithic road is unique

Bottle message is dry

The dead make way for iron age warrior

In Brief

features

When Rome left Britain: the Bosnian perspective
Buckles and Bosnia - Stuart Laycock has a dark vision of early historic Britain.

Telling the story of the people who made London
Archaeology in London: Peter Rowsome reviews a year of new publications.

Boudica: a queen in search of a husband
Finding Prasutagus: Amanda Chadburn deciphers iron age coins.

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ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

The currency of kings

In history Boudica outshone her husband: but his name appeared on the coins – or it did until coin specialists revised their reading. Now it seems Prasutagus may be there after all, and modelled himself on Caligula. Amanda Chadburn explains.

In 1960 a hoard of iron age and Roman coins was recovered from Joist Fen in Suffolk. It had been buried in the first century AD, in the region of Boudica's tribe, the Iceni. The discovery was important for two reasons. Firstly, archaeologists used a military mine detector to find all the tiny objects, apparently the first time for a metal detector on a British excavation – a now standard sight. Secondly, clearly puzzling the finders, there were some unique silver coins bearing the words SUBIDASTO and ESICO. They show a Romanised head on one face with a realistic horse on the other, quite unlike the highly stylised designs on other Icenian coins.

Over the next few years, particularly during the 1970s when detectors became commercially available, further coins were found in the field, presumably from the same dispersed hoard, to bring the total to nearly 200. These allowed a fuller reading of the words by two numismatists, Henry Mossop and Derek Allen.

Mossop thought the legends were SVB TI PRASTO and on the reverse (back) ESICO FECIT, a mixture of Celtic and Latin to be read as "under king Prasto, Esico made me": ri is interpreted as the Celtic word "ricon" or "rig", which means "king". Mossop concluded that these must be the hitherto unseen coins of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni.

Prasutagus was Boudica's husband. Unlike his more famous wife, he is only mentioned in one classical source, Tacitus's The Annals of Imperial Rome (translation mGrant 1956):

Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, after a life of long and renowned prosperity, had made the emperor [Suetonius] co heir with his own two daughters. Prasutagus hoped by this submissiveness to preserve his kingdom and household from attack. But it turned out otherwise. Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war, the one by Roman officers, the other by Roman slaves. As a beginning, his widow Boudica was flogged and their daughters raped. The Icenian chiefs were deprived of their hereditary estates as if the Romans had been given the whole country. The king's own relatives were treated like slaves.

Tacitus added, when discussing the period after the Roman conquest of AD43, "we had not defeated this powerful tribe [the Iceni] in battle, since they had voluntarily become our allies".

These passages tell us that the Iceni were ruled as a client kingdom: they could govern themselves under their own rulers, as long as they submitted to the overall control of Rome – a technique the Romans (and centuries later the British) used to subdue areas they had conquered. So Prasutagus was a client or friendly ruler, like his counterpart Cogidubnus in Sussex, or Herod in Israel and Cleopatra in Egypt.

Mossop's translation seemed to fit the evidence well. With his usual foresight, the great 19th century antiquarian Sir John Evans had suggested that if any coins of Prasutagus – "a mere creature of the Romans" – were discovered, they would probably look Romanised. Surely it would be too great a coincidence if some of the last Icenian coins, Romanised in style and inscribed king Prasto, were not issued by the Prasutagus described by Tacitus? Mossop's theory was accepted.

All this changed when a new hoard of Icenian coins was discovered by metal detectorists in "south-west Norfolk", and reported to the county museum service under the portable antiquities scheme. Amongst the eventual total of 210 objects were three new PRASTO coins, found in 1995 and 1999. On two, as the British Museum's Jonathan Williams pointed out, the legend SVB ESVPRASTO could be read clearly.

Areexamination of the Joist Fen coins shows that Mossop's RI ("king") is difficult to sustain. The ruler's name is therefore undoubtedly ESVPRASTO not RI PRASTO. Williams also noted that some coins of the Corieltauvi, a tribe north of the Iceni, bear the name IISVPRASV, or more usually ESVPASV (Van Arsdell types 920 and 924) – both remarkably similar to ESVPRASTO. He concluded that the ruler on the coins and Boudica's husband were not the same person: these were not evidence for king Prasutagus. The story made national news, the Times declaring "Confusion over the role of Boadicea's husband" (December 29 1999).

But was Williams right? Certainly the legend reads SVB ESVPRASTO, but what does this mean? SVB is "under" in Latin, but ESVPRASTO appears to be a Celtic personal name. This linguistic mixture is echoed on the coin's reverse in ESICO FECIT or "Esico made me".

ESVPRASTO may be a compound name partly derived from the Gaulish divine name ESUS or a cognate form. Some Celtic scholars suggest ESU- or ESUS means "lord", "master" or "honour". Perhaps ESV is such a title, giving a new translation as "under lord Prasto" – ironically similar to the original reading, "under king Prasto".

The Prasto coins, the only Icenian ones to echo the Roman fashion of a name with a portrait, appear to imitate Julio-Claudian Roman coins. Allen believed the model was a young Nero, but it looks to me as though the Roman prototype was an earlier Julio-Claudian bust.

My detailed study of the coins shows that there are three obverse (front face) dies, with close parallels with Roman coins. My die I shows a marked similarity to coins of Claudius (AD41–54) and in particular to Caligula (AD37–41). By complete contrast, the ESVPASV and IISVPRASV coins of the Corieltauvi appear to be earlier, and show no Roman influence whatsoever: they depict a typical Corieltauvian horse. Despite the similarity of the names, ESVPRASV and ESVPRASTO are probably not the same person; certainly their coins did not circulate in the same areas.

So on the one hand we have a pro-Roman ruler, Esvprasto, modelling his coins on Roman designs (Caligula's?) and using Latin. His coins were circulating within Iceni territory and were probably minted around AD30–45, but continued to circulate after the conquest in 43. All this suggests that Esvprasto was an ally of the Romans.

On the other, we have a historical figure Prasutagus, who probably died early in AD61 after a "long and prosperous life" as a known friendly king of the Iceni, and who appears to have minted no coins.

In other words we have two friendly kings, at the same time, in the same place, with very similar names, the one known from archaeological evidence and the other from historical evidence. The current academic fashion is to be extremely cautious when relating classical texts to archaeological evidence. But it would seem perverse not to consider that there is a strong possibility that Esvprasto is indeed the king Prasutagus of history, and that archaeology can correct Tacitus's inaccurate record.

Whatever the truth, the coins are extremely important. They seem to back the classical sources. Prasutagus or not, they show us something of the power structure of late iron age society in East Anglia. The coins were apparently minted under the authority of a ruler, implying a high degree of political centralisation and sophistication, crucial factors in early state formation. Moreover, the authority to mint was divested from the ruler to a second tier of power. Esico, who "made" the coins, was presumably a moneyer in charge of production, not a person striking them out at a mint. Again, this implies a society consistent with political statehood – a picture far removed from the Roman image of barbarian Britain. So even if esvprasto is not Prasutagus – and I believe he is – this ruler certainly governed the Iceni during the last stages of their self-rule, before the tragic events of the Boudican rebellion in AD61 quashed their independence forever.

The articles by Allen and Mossop are in the journal Britannia (1978–9, vols 9–10); for Williams see Numismatic Chronicle (2000, vol 160). The hoard has still not been fully published. Amanda Chadburn is an inspector of ancient monuments with English Heritage and an expert on the coins of the Iceni.

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