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Hello. In 60 on A.D., an East Angle and Queen took on the might of the Roman Empire and lost. Her name was Budica.

The events of Budica's rebellion and defeat are graphically related by the great Roman historian Tassitus and is set against the backdrop of an empire in decline.

It's a tale of a leader fighting for freedom against an ancient superpower. But it's also the story of a woman savagely wronged, wreaking horrific revenge on the state that it promised to protect her.

Budica's resistance has been retowed and re-edited throughout history. She's been depicted as a freedom fighter and a barbarian queen as an icon of British strength and independence and as a warning against the corruption of female power.

In the 19th century, she was immortalized as a statue outside the houses of Parliament, ironically transforming the rebels against the Roman Empire into the champion of the British Empire.

To this day, she stands guard over the city that she destroyed almost 2,000 years ago.

We'd mean to discuss the life and mythologization of Budica and Juliet Wood, associated lecturer in folklore at Cardiff University, Richard Hingley, Professor of Roman Archaeology at Durham University, and Miranda Oldhouse Green, Professor of Archaeology in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University.

Miranda, before we talk about Budica, can you give us some idea what Britain was like in the first half of the 1st century A.D.?

I think the first thing perhaps to say is that Britain was not an entity. It was very fragmented. There were tribes, polities, all over Britain.

And the area which I think interests us today is the South East, which by the time of the Claudine invasion in 1843 was already becoming very sort of softened up to Rome.

And there were aristocrats, it was a very elitist society, and people were already beginning to turn their eyes towards Rome.

So on the one hand you have a very rural, non-urban society, but on the other there are certain people who are already beginning to get influenced by Rome to have Roman goods, and perhaps send their sons to Rome to be educated.

So it's already by the time of the Claudine invasion becoming quite a kind of almost a Roman part of the world.

Why do that happen? Is that because they've just drawn to the centre of power, like people, I suppose that's whether they always are.

I think it's partly that, and I think it's a new way for aristocratic Britons to show how powerful they are.

Rome is new and exotic, and whereas people used to show their wealth and their power by the ownership of land, the kind of new ways began.

So people began to think, well, if I become sort of Roman and sophisticated and urban, then I will gain more power.

You've said the Southeast, but I've seen who are going to come to it, talking more about what we now think of as East Anglia.

That's right, they're almost sort of periphery of this.

The I've seen are quite interesting, because the archaeology shows that they are really quite separate.

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