If you have ever speculated about anything, you will realize how difficult it is to get something right when you are working from very partial information. Recently, I engaged myself in the process of trying to understand why the Roman legion which was supposed to be in Dumnonia, the Second Augusta Legion at the time of Boudicca's rebellion, did not come to the rescue of the Romans attacked by Boudicca in the east of England near London or Colchester. In fact, what happened was that instead the forces that had just finished their slaughter of peoples on the Isle of Mona in North West Wales were redeployed in the rescue attempt of fellow Romans, but only too late. They were in fact out for revenge, and the locals were also out for revenge. The fact that the history of the period was either lost by the Romans or deliberately suppressed makes it very interesting historically, but no one, yet, really knows what actually happened. My attempt at reconstruction is a struggle.
I am concerned, however, by the huge drop in population that occurred at the time of the Roman incursions into Britain. We might assume, as do many historians that the population was only one million instead of four million. If I assume four million, I want to know where the three missing millions of people disappeared to. I am not happy that they may have been forgotten in history, nor do I doubt that they, in fact, existed. The estimates of local people living at the time of the Romans arriving are much higher than the numbers at the end of the Roman period, unless, we are all missing something. One explanation is that the locals vacated realizing that the Romans were bent on the slaughter of all religious peoples. The Romans were embarrassed by there prior losses on the Eastern front and it would be no stretch of the imagination to think that they scared the 'piss' out of the island people, devotees of druidism, who as a direct result decided to evacuate en mass.
We have some evidence that some of the people living in Britain came from the continent and were very afraid of subjugation by Roman forces. We must therefore consider that many of the people that ended up in Scotland were relatively well endowed technologically, as in the case of knowing how to live in a cold climate, build shelter, feed themselves, organize and cloth themselves.
It seems to me, that the traditional explanation for Boudicca's rebellion may be missing the fact that she may have been aware of the imminent attack by the restrengthened Romans at Mona, the druid island, and may have been motivated to divert attention back towards her and away from the druids. The Roman leadership had switched from a military to an economic and religious fanaticism that focused extremely harsh solution to the British problem! These Romans were absolutely wicked by modern standards of warfare by no little stretch of the imagination. As in the case of the later tactics by Henry II in the hundred years war, noone was left living to tell the story. The numbers of people killed were immaterial to those doing the . Possibly, the Romans stationed in Dumnonia were occupied and the whole of Britain was struggling to divert the Romans from slaughtering their Druidic leadership.
In the received versions of history, we get the Roman slant on things which suggests that the Druids were rather diabolical and Rome was doing everyone a favour. This is also the position of the Roman church as it evolved. We may, however, be missing the obvious fact that the druids were very nice thank you and did not deserve to be wiped off the face of the early world map by any stretch of the imagination. We must not make the mistake, however, of judging them the same way that we can now judge the acts of the Romans of that day.
What history omits is the many attempts at genocide by the Roman forces in Britain and the continent. It is my theory that the population of Britain fell propitiously as the Romans arrived because people feared a second Veneti type genocide. Where did all these nice people go. Its fairly obvious that they may have taken their coracles and made it fast for Cumberland!
The Romans seemed to be proud that they slaughtered over a million people in order to gain control of Gaul. Did they slaughter three million in Britain, or did many of these people escape and eventually put a certain end to the Roman Empire? If one looks at Hadrian's wall, one gets the firm impression that there were more people North of Roman Britain than is commonly defined. The wall is much more of an effort than the weak fencing that USA puts up between it and Mexico. The Romans were, indeed, frightened of the people in the North, to the extreme, if we take on board the idea that their numbers were small and that they were backward.