[Elfsea] How Queen Boadicea stayed on the wagon

[Timothy Rayburn]

Here is the full text from www.thetimes.co.uk :

---
How Queen Boadicea stayed on the wagon
By Robin Young



ARCHAEOLOGISTS have finally discovered how Boadicea, the early British warrior queen, managed to ride her chariot into battle without falling off it.
In previous reconstructions of Iron Age chariots as depicted on coins of the time, passengers were unceremoniously bumped out of the cart as soon as it got up any speed or hit rough ground.

Yesterday the British Museum was presented with a faithful replica that actually worked, and to prove it the chariot was put through its paces in the Museum forecourt and across its lawns.

It carried two passengers and was drawn by two diminutive horses. Iron Age horses are known to have been the size of ponies.

The chariot, built by Robert Hurford, a wheelwright from Taunton, Somerset, is based on finds from a newly excavated chariot burial at Wetwang, east Yorkshire. A woman found in the grave has been referred to as “the Yorkshire Boadicea” although no weapons were buried with her.

The secret of the chariot’s rideability lies in two pairs of arches flexed at each side of the cart. With his knowledge of horse-drawn vehicles, Mr Hurford realised that these arches, which are shown on representations of chariots, were not a decorative feature but an integral part of the vehicle’s suspension system.

The arches, made of supple ash, each supported a Y-system of rawhide thongs that helped the chariot, floored with a further flexible webbing of rawhide straps, ride out over the bumps when driven at speed or over uneven ground.

It is known from the description given by Julius Caesar in his memoirs, De Bello Gallico, that the Ancient Britons used chariots driven at speed in hit-and-run raids against his forces in the 1st century BC.

Tests carried out by BBC2 for its TV series Meet the Ancestors showed that when the charioteer stood on a rawhide flooring in the reconstructed chariot, the ride was smooth enough for him to throw spears with some accuracy. The chariot could also be fitted with a wooden box in which a passenger could ride, perhaps for ceremonial parades at a more leisurely pace.

Archaeologists had confessed themselves mystified as to how Boadicea and her ilk kept their wheels on.

A common feature of Iron Age chariots excavated across Western Europe was a J-shaped linchpin topped by a small loop and with an attached ring. Until Mr Hurford turned his practical experience to the question, no-one had managed to puzzle out how it worked.

Mr Hurford came up with three suggestions, the most favoured of which involves tying the linchpin against notched wood to keep a rawhide washer in place, retaining the wheel. Mr Hurford said yesterday: “When the linchpin is tied, the ring is held at the angle at which it has been found corroded in place in all the examples we have found.”

The status of the Wetwang woman whose chariot has been reconstructed is still in doubt. She is known to have been 35 to 45 when she died, which was an unusually advanced age for a woman of the time. She was also 5ft 9in, which was exceptionally tall, and had a distinctive, and probably congenital, malformation of the face which may also have marked her out.

Few people in the Iron Ages were buried with chariots. Nineteen such burials are known, and Wetwang woman is only the second female to have been found buried in this way. Like the other woman found in a chariot burial, she was accompanied by a mirror of polished iron, which some archaeologists suggest may be the accoutrement and symbol of a priestess rather than of a queen.

The first programme of a new series of Meet the Ancestors, Chariot Queen, is devoted to the Wetwang excavation and Mr Hurford’s reconstruction of the chariot. It will be shown on BBC2 tonight at 9pm.

The reconstructed chariot will be on show in the British Museum’s Great Court for the next two months. It may then be taken to Scotland and the United States on tour.