In the summer of 56 BC, western Gaul produced a moment that Caesar records in a single subordinate clause: the Lexovii killed their senate because its members did not want to be the authors of the war against Rome. That is all the text says. Yet from this one sentence we can see how a Gallic community made decisions, where that process broke down, and why the tribal name survives today in the words Lisieux and Lieuvin. This article separates what Caesar wrote, what coins and excavations show, and what later books made of it.
The Lexovii (Latin Lexovii) lived in north-western Gaul, south of the Seine estuary on the Channel coast. Their territory largely coincides with the later diocese of Lisieux, that is, the Pays d'Auge and the Lieuvin in today's département of Calvados and the west of Eure. Another place in their land was Brionne on the Risle, ancient Breviodurum. Their neighbours can only be given roughly. To the east lay the Aulerci Eburovices around Évreux; across the Seine to the north began the land of the Caletes and the Veliocasses; to the west lay the Viducasses around Vieux near Caen.
Not one written line by the Lexovii themselves survives from the time before Caesar. Everything ancient authors report comes from outsiders: from Caesar, who mentions them as opponents and later as auxiliaries, and from geographers who fit them into a list. The real material about their society comes from archaeology, and in Lisieux that record is unusually patchy, because large parts of the town were destroyed by bombing in June 1944. Anyone trying to understand the Lexovii has to assemble a story from a few, very different traces.
The spellings already vary in antiquity. Caesar writes Lexovii, Strabo in Greek form Lexobioi, Ptolemy similarly. On coins we read LIXOVIO, and on another issue LIXOVIATIS. The linguist Xavier Delamarre reconstructs a Gaulish *Lexsouioi or similar from these forms. As a possible meaning he considers "the slanting ones" or "the lame", related to Old Irish losc "lame" and Welsh llechwedd "slope". It could therefore be a name for dwellers on slopes ("those who live on the hillsides") just as well as a mocking name given by outsiders.
That is an interpretation, not a finding. The root is rare, the sound shape uncertain, and we do not know whether the Lexovii called themselves that. What is certain is that the name stuck for centuries: the late-antique civitas Lexoviorum became Lisieux, and the landscape of Lieuvin carries it to this day.
The geographers do not narrate events; they classify. In IV,1,14 Strabo describes the trade route along which goods from the Rhône valley were carried via the Saône and Doubs, then a stretch overland to the Seine. From there one sailed down the river to the ocean, to the Lexobii and Caletes, and from these peoples, Strabo says, it is less than a day's run to Britain. In IV,3,5 he mentions them once more, beside the Parisii and Meldi on the Seine; the Lexovii sit "by the ocean".
Pliny the Elder lists them in his catalogue of the peoples of Gallia Lugdunensis (Natural History IV,107). In the second century AD Ptolemy gives the Lexobioi and their town Noiomagos (Geography II,8). The three authors agree on the rough location and no more. Strabo's passage is often turned into a "trading people". The text says something else: it describes a route that ends at their territory. Whether the Lexovii themselves profited from long-distance trade does not follow from this passage.
In 56 BC the coast rises. The Veneti of southern Brittany detain Roman envoys, Caesar builds a fleet, and the Veneti look for allies. In III,9 Caesar lists them: Osismi, Lexovii, Namnetes, Ambiliati, Morini, Diablintes and Menapii. The Osismi, Namnetes, Morini and Menapii have their own articles on this site. The Veneti also summon auxiliaries from Britain.
So the Lexovii stand in a list. The chapter says no more, and one should not skim past it: "they join" is Caesar's language for a decision by whole communities. What happened inside the community before that decision was reached, or failed, appears only eight chapters later.
In III,11 Caesar sends his legate Quintus Titurius Sabinus with three legions to the Unelli (spelled Venelli or Unelli in the manuscripts, on the Cotentin peninsula), the Coriosolites and the Lexovii. Sabinus is to stop these peoples from coming to the aid of the Veneti. For the Lexovii this is a deployment area, not a battlefield.
Sabinus marches into the land of the Unelli. There stands Viridovix, who, in Caesar's account, holds supreme command over all the communities that had revolted and has raised an army from them. Then comes the sentence this article is about.
atque his paucis diebus Aulerci Eburovices Lexoviique, senatu suo interfecto quod auctores belli esse nolebant, portas clauserunt seque cum Viridovice coniunxerunt.
"And in those few days the Aulerci Eburovices and the Lexovii, having killed their senate because its members did not wish to be the authors of the war, shut their gates and joined forces with Viridovix."Caesar, De bello Gallico III,17; own translation
The sentence is brief and leaves several things open. Nolebant is plural although senatus is grammatically singular; apparently the individual members are meant, who refused. Who shut the gates, and against whom, Caesar does not say. The obvious reading is that the communities closed their towns or strongholds against Rome and joined the uprising. That is not compelling. It is also unclear whether "killed" means an execution after a formal decision or a popular outbreak, and whether all senators died or only the spokesmen.
The reason given is remarkable. According to Caesar, the senate did not want to be among the auctores belli, the instigators or those responsible for the war. That sounds like fear of Rome and like knowing that defeat would hold individuals accountable. But it is still Caesar's view, a Roman explaining the behaviour of opponents.
Caution is needed even with the word. Senatus is a Roman term that Caesar applies to Gallic councils. He does so repeatedly: of the Nervii he reports in II,28 that after the battle at the Sabis, of six hundred senators only three were left. What lies behind the Latin label in detail, such as how one became a member or whether the council could decide or only advise, we do not know. Scholars generally assume that many Gallic communities of the time were led by aristocratic councils and elected officials rather than kings. For the Lexovii, this assumption is supported above all by a find from the period after Caesar, discussed below: coins with the Gaulish title vergobret.
The sentence from chapter 17 shows two things. First, the community was not a bloc. The same people who appear in III,9 as allies of the Veneti had a council that rejected the war and a group that forced the opposite. Second, the means of such a dispute evidently were not limited to votes. Anyone who wanted to prevent a decision in a Gallic community could take the decision-makers' lives. That is not a "barbarian" trait; the late Roman Republic knew plenty of political violence. It only shows that cooperation between council and war-minded circles was fragile.
No constitution can be derived from one sentence. The text supports no more than the picture of a community under pressure, with an aristocratic council, a war party and an outside threat.
The outcome is quickly told. Sabinus stays in a camp on high ground and waits. He sends a Gaul as a supposed deserter to Viridovix, who reports that the Romans are in trouble and intend to slip away the following night. Viridovix believes him. His men, as Caesar describes it in III,18, rush up to the camp in confidence of victory, charging the slope so hastily that they arrive out of breath and can no longer withstand the Roman sortie. Caesar gives the distance as about a thousand paces, roughly a kilometre and a half. The Romans win easily.
After that, Caesar says in III,19, all the revolted communities surrendered without delay. That is Caesar's conclusion, and he adds a famous remark: the Gallic mind is quick to begin a war but soft and little resistant in bearing setbacks. This judgement says more about Caesar's picture of the Gauls than about the Lexovii. What matters here is something else. The battle took place in the territory of the Unelli, on the Cotentin peninsula, not near Lisieux. Modern accounts that say Sabinus defeated the Lexovii or destroyed their main town transfer the events to the wrong community.
At the end of the campaigning season of 56, Caesar distributes his troops. In III,29 he places the legions in winter quarters "among the Aulerci and Lexovii and the other communities that had most recently made war". For those affected this was a heavy burden, since the troops had to be fed and housed, and it could be read as a signal: those who had risen received the garrison.
Four years later, in 52 BC, the Lexovii appear in Caesar for the last time. In VII,75 the Gauls decide to raise a relief army for Vercingetorix at Alesia. Each community receives a quota. The Lexovii are to supply three thousand men, as many as the Veliocasses and the Aulerci Eburovices, fewer than the Atrebates with four thousand. The numbers are demands of the Gallic war council, not counted soldiers, and Caesar does not say how many actually came. A second detail stands out: the coastal communities that Caesar groups as "Armorican" are listed in a separate group in this chapter. There we find among others the Coriosolites, Redones, Caletes, Osismi and Veneti, but not the Lexovii. They stand instead with the Veliocasses and the Aulerci Eburovices. Whether they should therefore be counted as "Armoricans" is a matter of modern definition; Caesar himself does not do so here.
An oppidum is a fortified large settlement of the late Iron Age, often a centre for craft, markets and cult. The one of the Lexovii lies about three kilometres south-west of Lisieux in the communes of Saint-Désir and Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs and is called Le Castellier. It was recognised as early as 1831. Systematic research began only in the early twenty-first century; geophysical surveys in 2004 and 2005 covered about thirteen hectares, and an excavation campaign followed in 2007.
By current figures the enclosure covers about 167 hectares, and some researchers consider up to 200 hectares possible. Its rampart follows the murus gallicus technique, a wall built of a timber lattice whose cells were filled with earth and stones. At the Castellier a rampart body about eleven metres wide was identified, containing charcoal, clay and iron remains, and perhaps faced with flint. The finds include traces of ironworking, storage buildings, cremation and inhumation graves and, for Lower Normandy, an unusually large quantity of imported material. That points to a settlement with connections far beyond the region.
That the senate of 56 BC met here is a plausible but unproven guess. The sequence in time is secure: the peak of occupation falls in the late La Tène period. Under Augustus the enclosure was partly dismantled, and later a Roman farmstead stood on the site. Few sherds from the first century AD have been recovered.
The Lexovii minted coins, and these carry something the written sources withhold: names of officials in the Gaulish language. They are mostly bronze. One frequently described variant shows on the obverse a heavily stylised four-petalled flower inside a ring of beads and the legend PVBLICOS LIXOVIO SIMISSOS, and on the reverse an eagle with the legend ARCANTODA MAVPENNOS. A specimen of this type is listed in auction catalogues at a little over 6 grams and dated around 50 to 40 BC. Other issues name CISIAMBOS CATTOS and the word VERCOBRETO, read as the Gaulish title vergobret, and show for instance a lion in front of an ear of grain.
The vergobret is known from Caesar's account of the Aedui (I,16): an annually elected chief magistrate with power over life and death. That the same title appears on coins of the Lexovii confirms independently of Caesar that such offices were not restricted to the Aedui. Just as revealing is MAVPENNOS with the addition ARCANTODA. Scholars regard this as a Gaulish title containing the element arcanto-, "silver", and therefore interpret it as a money steward or mint official. For PVBLICOS and SIMISSOS various explanations are considered, among them equation with Latin publicus "public" and semis "half piece"; this is not certain, and PVBLICOS could also be a personal name.
The exact dating of the individual types is not settled in numismatics. In the catalogues the range runs from the middle of the first century BC into the early imperial period. What matters for our subject is the connection: the money was struck in the name of the community and issued under the responsibility of officials. It therefore presupposes a community that knew magistrates, which fits a society in which a senate could play a role at all.
After the conquest the centre shifted. Under Emperor Augustus the Roman town Noviomagus Lexoviorum arose on the Touques and the Orbiquet, on the site of present-day Lisieux, about 28 kilometres from the sea. The name consists of Gaulish novio-, "new", and magos, "field, plain", sometimes also understood as "market". It is therefore no proof of a marketplace but at first means "new field". The same name occurs several times in Gaul and on the Rhine, for example in Nijmegen in the Netherlands (Noviomagus Batavorum), Speyer in the Palatinate (Noviomagus Nemetum) and Neumagen on the Moselle. This shows how widespread the place-name type was; it does not connect the places.
How long and how completely the inhabitants abandoned the Castellier is not precisely known. The move to the plain is regarded as part of the Augustan reorganisation of Gaul, which produced towns with forums, temples and baths. The town reached its greatest extent in the second century; estimates for its heyday give areas of about 16 to 20 hectares. These figures come from French specialist literature and rest on limited rescue excavations.
What is visible or well documented of the Roman town is spread over a few places. About 1.8 kilometres west of the town centre, in Saint-Désir, lies a theatre that could also serve as an amphitheatre. It was recognised in 1818 by Louis Du Bois, has been protected as a historic monument since 1984 and has never been systematically excavated. Size estimates vary: Arcisse de Caumont thought about 68 by 40 metres, Claude Lemaître about 100 by 70 metres. It belonged to a sanctuary district on the edge of the town. It is dated to the second or early third century.
In the Archaeological Garden of the hospital, baths and a dwelling could be studied. They were discovered in February 1967 during the building of a boiler room, and between 1978 and 1985 a team around Claude Lemaître and Michel Batrel excavated. The house was built at the end of the first century, the baths in the early second, and a fire ended the complex between AD 268 and 280. The bath building covered about 1300 square metres, and the recovered wall painting amounted to some 300 square metres. Today low hedges trace the ground plan.
Another witness is the votive column of Lisieux, found in 1947 during reconstruction after the war damage. It bears reliefs of Jupiter, Venus, Apollo and Daphne, as well as inscriptions, and is dated to the second or third century; scholars still debate its classification. One line of inscription is read as saying that the monument was erected at the expense of the local senate. If that is correct, it would be a late echo of the body whose violent end Caesar describes. As evidence of continuity it is not enough, because in the imperial period such a council was a Roman-style town council and something other than the Gallic aristocratic council of 56 BC.
The most famous find from the land of the Lexovii is not a coin hoard but a temple treasure. In March 1830 the farmer Prosper Taurin, ploughing near Berthouville in the département of Eure, struck Roman silver only about twenty centimetres below the surface. By recent counts the find comprises 93 objects weighing about 25 kilograms, mostly bowls, cups and jugs, plus two statuettes of Mercury. Many vessels carry dedicatory inscriptions to the god in his local form Mercurius Canetonensis. The silver dates from the first to the late second century and was hastily buried in the late second or early third. Today the treasure is in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and in 2014 to 2015 it was restored jointly with the Getty Museum.
Berthouville lies in the area usually attributed to the Lexovii. The sanctuary is therefore a witness to the provincial population of the Roman period, not of the Iron Age. It shows how a Gaulish epithet (Canetonensis) was attached to a Roman god. In VI,17 Caesar calls Mercury the most revered god of the Gauls; the equation is a Roman interpretation and says little about the native god. Anyone interested in the religious side of the Iron Age will find more in the article on the druids.
In the third century the town shrank. A late-antique fortification enclosed only about eight hectares, a rectangle of roughly 400 by 200 metres. Such walls in northern Gaul are usually linked with raids from the coast, which older literature attributes to the Saxons. How the construction date works out in detail is disputed; the fire in the baths between 268 and 280 fits the same picture but does not prove it.
Around 400 the community appears in the Notitia Galliarum, a list of the Gallic provinces and cities, as the civitas Lexoviorum in the province of Lugdunensis Secunda, with Rouen as its capital. The name of the community had displaced that of the town, as happened with many Gallic centres, for example Le Mans. Lexovium became Lisieux. The church later made Lisieux a bishop's seat, and the area around the town was called Lieuvin, after the Lexovii.
The land of the Lexovii later belonged to the region we call Normandy. The name goes back to the Normans, to whom the West Frankish king in 911, in the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, ceded land on the lower Seine; their leader Rollo was the first ruler of this territory. In the following decades Norman rule expanded westwards. When exactly the country around Lisieux came in, the sources do not say clearly, and we do not claim it here. How Rollo and his successors shaped the region is told in the article on Rollo, and the wider context of Viking raids and settlements in France in the text on Vikings in France.
There is no connection between the Lexovii and the Normans. Both peoples lived in the same land, with a thousand years between them. The survival of the name in Lisieux and Lieuvin is the only continuous line.
Much remains unresolved. We do not know how the body was composed that Caesar calls a senate, nor who shut the gates. Whether the Castellier was the seat of this council is a guess. The meaning of the tribal name is open. The dating of the coin types varies, and of Lisieux itself only a fraction lies excavated beneath the modern town. Still, the case shows what Caesar's text can do and what it cannot: it describes communities as acting units, and only occasionally does it flash through that these units consisted of people who disagreed and took up arms against one another. Anyone who wants to see the same coastline in context will find it among the Veneti, whose war swept the Lexovii along, and among the Aulerci Eburovices, who took the same step.
The Veneti · The Eburovices · The Veliocasses · The Caleti · Rollo of Normandy · The Vikings in France & Normandy · The Nervii · The Osismii.
All History & Finds articles →
A Viking army had no national flag, no passport and no uniform. It was made up of men who had joined a leader and men …
Read more →A monastery on a tidal island off the coast of Northumbria, a summer's day in 793 – and a shock that echoed all the way …
Read more →