The Importance of Being Boudica

The Importance of Being Boudica

During the course of history Boudica has had more names than you can shake a Scrabble set at. Bunduca is one of my favourites. Everybody knows her real name was Boadicea (that’s what my grandma told me anyway, and grandmas never lie) but these days we have to call her Boudica. I’m thinking of getting up a petition. If we popped back in time to year 60, stood on a hill in Norfolk and shouted, “Oh Boudica! Come out, come out, wherever you are!” we’d get no reply. But it isn’t up to Boadicea, or even Bunduca, to decide what her name was, it’s up to scholars and they’ve plumped for Boudica. I suppose we’d better do the same. If we do come across her in our trip to the past we’ll tell her she’s got the wrong name and advise her to change it.

Having the right name is vital if you want to take part in history. Imagine William Shakespeare had called himself Widget Shacklebottom. Who would have gone to see his plays? “We want Shakespeare’s plays, not Shacklebottom’s,” his audiences would have cried. There would have been riots. Luckily he knew enough to name himself after the person whose plays he wanted to write, so that bit of naming history is all nice and tidy.

But Henrietta ‘Boudica’ Hedgehopper lived in simpler times. “Bring me the primary sources!” she demanded of her generals. “I must know my real name!” Rufus Rottentooth, her Chief Decapitator, brought her the head of a chief. It was all he knew. Henrietta couldn’t get hold of the primary sources, nor yet the secondary sources, nor even any decent gossip and tittle-tattle. She gave up. She put on some woad, she would never be seen in public without her makeup, and went out to hate some Romans.

The Romans themselves got around having wrong names by translating them into Latin, whereupon they instantly became classical and cultural. Agricola, governor of Britain, fared better than most. Mr. Farmer would be an acceptable name in just about any period of history, although it would never have won top marks. He could never have written Shakespeare’s plays with a name like that. But it was a good, safe choice. Well done to his mum and dad.

Then we come to Caligula. You can picture his mum bending over his cot saying, “ah, bless, he looks just like a little boot.” So Little Soldier’s Boot was the name that blighted his childhood. Boys get teased mercilessly about things like that. It’s enough to drive an Emperor mad. And what about Chickpea? You can just imagine what he must have looked like as a baby. If he hadn’t translated his name to Cicero, who would ever have taken him seriously? It would have been too embarrassing. Classical scholars would have lied at parties and pretended to be industrial chemists.

The greatest irony of all was Julius Caesar, whose name meant Hairy. Not Harry, a very princely name if I might say so, but Hairy. Not only did he look like Jasper Carrott, a sad enough fate for anybody who wants to be admired for brave and noble deeds, but he went prematurely bald. Oh, how he longed for some hair. He tried to get his troops to call him Dances With Wolves, thinking that if they paid more attention to his feet they wouldn’t look at his head, but they were too set in their ways. Historians think this accounts for many of his character defects and why he spent such long periods away from home. They probably think nothing of the sort, but since people feel perfectly free to speculate about what scientists think, without ever having met one, I’m just scoring a point for my team.