How the ancient ‘Queen of the North’ was forgotten

She was a warrior like Boudicca and yet few today know who Cartimandua was. Is it time to put up statues of her, asks David Barnett

Caractacus, King of the Silures, delivered to Ostorius, the Roman general, by Cartimandua (Public Domain)

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has earned himself the nickname the King of the North for his campaigning ways. But Burnham is merely following in the footsteps of the region’s first actual ruler 2,000 years ago.

We all know of Boudicca, the warrior-queen of the Iceni tribe who took on the invading Romans in the 1st century AD. But Boudicca was never officially recognised as a queen, while her contemporary – who you’ve probably never heard of – was: Cartimandua.

I first heard of her a couple of months ago, when I was chairing a panel on northern writers at the Bradford Literary Festival. Two of the panellists both mentioned Cartimandua in their books – Kate Fox in Where There’s Bras, which tells lost stories of the women of the north, and Brian Groom’s Northerners: A History.