Atherstone woman's note to British history: Time to 'Man' up over special name of our village being more proof of where Boudica fought her last battle

'EACH HALF OF MANDU-ESSEDUM IS UNIQUE IN THE WHOLE GAMUT OF ROMAN-BRITISH PLACE NAMES . . AND STICKS OUT AS ODD'

NUB News has decided to pick a fight with British history and join a Atherstone woman's quest in a male-dominated field to prove conclusively the staging of the most important battle in British history before Hastings .

Atherstone Civic Society secretary Margaret Hughes has spent at least half her life seeking to prove Mancetter was "beyond doubt" the site of Queen Boudica's last stand in 60AD against the Romans which could have changed the course of our island narrative over the next 2,000 years.

Mrs Hughes has already pressed the case forcibly in her book Boudica at Mancetter , and sees the challenge – at 82 and "proud of it" – as the "only woman" fighting the corner against up to 10 other male candidates' claims identified by experts in terms of archaeological, archival and circumstantial evidence as well as military suitability.

Her theory goes wider than the straightforwardly martial focus of the other researchers.

And today we have invited the civic society officer to begin a series of articles covering the subject and attempting to establish an undeniable bridgehead of evidence to show Mancetter is the 'genuine' claim to a conflagration that saw East Anglian Iceni tribe leader Boudica's army of 230,000 men, women and children without protective armour take on the 10,000-strong crack 14th Legion, led by Gaius Suetonius Paulinus.

A Channel Select's 5 programme Britain's Lost Battlefields, under the title Battle of Watling Street, shown earlier this month, left the civic society "disappointed" and viewers to make their own minds up over the exact location.

Here, Mrs Hughes take over the narrative . . .

Q: Here's a pub-quiz question: Virginia Water, Dunstable, Heydon Valley, Arbury Banks, Towcester, Church Stowe, Clifton-on-Dunsmore, Catthorpe, High Cross, Hints. What links those 10 places?

A: They are all battle-sites suggested as THE place where Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, challenged face to face the best of the Roman legions, before meeting a mysterious death.

I should have made that list 'eleven', by adding Mancetter, but that would immediately have given the answer away; even more so had I used Mancetter's old name 'Manduessedum', from when Britain, under the Romans, was Britannia.

I decided to list those other places jostling to own Boudica's last battle-site precisely to highlight the oddity of Manduessedum, just how unusual a name it is among all those other names, with their Anglo-Saxon roots.

But it becomes even more special when we learn that throughout the whole Roman Empire there seems to be only ONE other place (it's in Gaul) whose name includes that first part "mandu".

One other, only! It's beginning to seem that this name is pretty rare. Without doubt, Manduessedum is already very different from any other name in that list of candidate sites in our pub-quiz question.

Each half of Mandu-essedum is unique in the whole gamut of Romano-British place names.

When we turn to the second part of the name, essedum, again a singularity jumps out at us.

At this point, let's say 'all hail, Caesar!', because we know from Caesar's descriptions of fighting the Celts in Gaul that he was fascinated by the whirling manoeuvres of the Gallic chariots.

So much so that he took back into the Latin language the name of their chariots: essed for more than one, essedum for a single war-chariot. (Charioteers in arena races became known as essedarii.)

So here we are with a place name standing out as odd even in Roman times, where a big chunk of the word means Celtic war chariot. Now, a chariot needs a horse, doesn't it?

Well, we have one. It's mandu. Mandu is a select word for the select Celtic war pony.

You may very well have heard already that Manduessedum means "horse and chariot".

That derivation has been in circulation for quite some years, un-earthed by place-name specialist, Margaret Gelling and others.

But now when you hear it said, you must add "but it's not just any horse and chariot, it's the very specific, very particular Celtic war-chariot".

And now comes a clincher of an idea.

We do know that the name Manduessedum was certainly in use by the middle of the second century.

But why would the people of those days choose such a rare label? Why this unique coinage?

Professor Kenneth Jackson puts his finger on it: "The answer must be that some local legend or historical event is involved".

What more of a legend could there be than Boudica? What more of a historical event than the battle which guaranteed a Roman occupation for close on 400 years?

Whatever other powerful clues there might be that Mancetter could have been the site of Boudica'a last battle, it certainly seems that the Manduessedum name alone could well be sufficient.

So, then, what's in a name?

For Mancetter, it surely must be a link to that major British battle.