The Druids of Anglesey

In AD 60 or 61 the governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, attacked the island of Mona, modern Anglesey. Tacitus says it had become a refuge for fugitives and a stronghold of the druids, the priestly order of the Britons and Gauls. To reach it, Paulinus built flat-bottomed boats to carry his infantry across the shallows of the Menai Strait, while the cavalry followed by fording or swimming beside their horses.

Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola was serving in Britain at the time, describes the scene on the far shore. The enemy line stood dense with armed men. Women dressed in black, like Furies, with their hair loose, ran among them carrying torches. Around them, the druids lifted their hands to the sky and poured out dreadful curses. The strangeness of it, he says, stopped the Roman soldiers in their tracks, until Paulinus and their own pride drove them on. The defenders were overwhelmed, and the groves where, Tacitus claims, the altars were stained with the blood of captives were cut down. Then news arrived that Boudica had risen in the east.