The village of Venta Icenorum, the tribal settlement of Boudicca, lay so near to the sea that the smell of seaweed was as familiar as that of bread.
It was a grey place, of round stone huts with their reed-thatched roofs, set in a little hollow and surrounded by groves of oak-trees. The men of that village were proud of its main street, made after the new Roman style. It was a short street, hardly more than a hundred paces long. To make it so, many of the older huts had had to be torn down. At first the men of the Iceni had not liked this, for their fathers and grandfathers had lived in those huts. Many of them had been buried beneath the cow-dung floors of the huts. Their bones were the gods of the houses.
