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Appendix 3: Aurelius
Ursicinus at Hoxne
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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On the River Waveney, not far from
the Roman road from Caistor (Norwich) to London,
lies the ancient village of Hoxne, which has long
been known for a legend of a Christian king
fleeing the Pagans in vain, betrayed by the
glitter of his gold, captured and martyred.
The story goes that on the road from Hoxne to
Cross Street - a neighbouring village bearing the
traces of both Roman civilization and
Christianity in its two names, although it lies
some way off the main via strata - King
Edmund of East Anglia hid from the Danes under a
bridge after a great defeat. A newly
married couple detected the glimmer of his gold
spurs in the water and gave the alarm, and the
king was captured and murdered. He cursed
the bridge, and from then on it was forbidden for
newly-married couples to cross it on their way to
church. The bridge was called the
Goldbridge from then on, and the king's golden
armour was said to shine in the water from time
to time.
Hoxne was not a part of the
earliest stratum of the legend of St.Edmund.
Its first redaction by Aelfric (about 955-1020)
located the king’s last battle and death at Haegelisdun.
Wherever this place might be – in modern
English it might give something like Hailston
- Haegelisdun cannot possibly be
identified with Hoxne, whose name is ancient -
first registered in the Domesday Book, that is a
few decades after Aelfric - and confusing to
philologists. Aelfric's account
of King Edmund is held to be a hodge-podge of
hagiological commonplaces, but such an item as
where he died is likely enough to be historical,
since it would be so easily transmitted by means
of single annalistic entries. In fact,
there is no reason not to think that Hoxne became
attached to the cult of St.Edmund exactly because
of the legend of the Christian king betrayed to
the pursuing pagans by the glitter of his gold.
In 1992, Hoxne suddenly became
famous for the most spectacular Roman treasure
hoard ever found in Britain: almost 15,000 coins
(of which no less than 565 were gold solidi)
and hundreds of the most amazing, exquisite
precious objects, many for personal and daily use
- spoons, a pepperpot, ear cleaners - but of
silver and gold. Even the padlocks of some
of the smaller boxes in which the treasure was
stored were of silver (it was buried ready packed
in handsome wooden boxes with metal fittings,
which suggests either that it had been packaged
ready to be moved, or that it was already being
carried away when an emergency forced the fleeing
party to bury it). The coins are dated up
to 408, but that could date the treasure to any
time after that. It cannot however be dated
to any time after the first Saxon revolt, which
placed East Anglia in a Saxon grip that seems
never to have been broken even by the most
powerful British kings; and, as we have seen, I
am certain that that revolt is dated correctly to
441-442. Until then, such evidence as we
have makes Britain particularly prosperous, and
certainly this astonishing treasure does nothing
to contradict the notices of E in Gildas and of
Constantius.
It amounts to this: that at some
point between 408 and 442, someone accumulated
this treasure - or rather, the treasure of which
this was surely only a part - in what is now East
Anglia; that at some point, he or they buried it;
and that they never were able to come back to
claim it - which, given its enormity, was only
conceivable if he or they were dead or
permanently exiled, with absolutely nobody - not
a retainer, not a henchman, not a surviving
relative or local friend - to come back to look
for it. The treasure is not only enormous,
but personal: many of its items were marked with
such names as Faustinus, Iuliana, Peregrinus, and
Siluicola; and there were objects of art and
beauty that nobody who had taken the trouble of
commissioning them would ever care to lose.
Even the spoons were glorious little things,
deliciously shaped and delicately decorated, that
glimmer and shine from photographs. This
strongly argues that the disaster against which
the owners tried to provide by burying their
treasure - and which prevented them from
recovering them - was the Saxon revolt. Previous
pirate raids were not likely to effect such a
complete separation between owners and treasures,
such total impossibility to reach them.
This is visibly different from
other British Roman hoards, not only in being the
greatest, but also in another respect: it is by
far the "finest and most conclusive of all
putative Christian treasures... All twenty-four
inscriptions are undoubtedly Christian. A
Chi-Rho appears on two spoons, and a monogram
cross appears on two sets of tableware and on a
necklace, while another spoon carries the
expression uiuas in Deo, may you live in
God." One of the
pepper-pots appears to be made in the likeness of
the Empress Helena, whose cult as a Saint was
just then gaining ground, not least thanks to
St.Ambrose of Milan, the first known source to
ascribe to her the finding of the True Cross.
This constant Christian theme (there is,
admittedly, a Hercules wrestling Anthaeus) is out
of keeping with what may be gathered from earlier
or contemporary hoards, where the occasional
Christian theme mingles merrily with secular or
outright pagan scenes, and a Bishop may make a
gift to a Church of a precious and showy silver
lanx (rectangular plate) with not a single
Christian design on it. (St.Patrick to the
British bishops: "Maybe we are not of one
flock and one shepherd".)
So: we have a royally rich
household, providing the richest hoard yet found
in Britain, which was nevertheless certainly only
a part of their wealth; of unusually strong
Christian convinctions; driven out of East Anglia
beyond recovery by the triumphant revolt of the
pagan Saxons; leaving behind, surely against
their will, a minor fortune (and that is only
what we have recovered); and with some slight
suggestion of devotion to, or at least reading
of, St.Ambrosius of Milan. This is at the
same spot where, 1300 years later, legend tells
of a Christian king fleeing victorious Germanic
pagans with a fortune in gold (which peasant
imagination casts as a golden armour), betrayed
to his enemies by the glimmer of his wealth, and
foully put to death. Then we know from
Gildas that the father of Ambrosius Aurelianus
- whom Geoffrey of Monmouth, a source more
authoritative than once thought, calls by the
rather more credible Aurelius Ambrosius -
lost the imperial throne of Britain on account -
among other unstated failings - of his excessive
devotion to a stoutly Catholic brand of
Christianity, which was shown among other things
by naming his second son after the famous and not
uncontroversial patron Saint of Milan: but that
he was allowed to retire to his estates and live
there in the style of a landowner - one of those
immensely wealthy Roman landowners some of whose
villae, according to Morris, were of a scale
comparable to Blenheim Palace - until he was
butchered with his wife and probably other
members of his household, by the rebellious and
triumphant pagan Saxons.
Can we go further? Oh yes we
can. The name most frequently found on the
treasure - on no less than ten spoons - was that
of Aurelius Ursicinus, probably the head
of the family, whose family name seems to be the
same as that of Geoffrey's Aurelius Ambrosius
and of Gildas' Aurelius Caninus. Of
the two versions of the hero Ambrosius' Roman
name, there really seems to be no reason to
prefer that of Gildas to that of Geoffrey; to the
contrary, Ambrosius seems a most unlikely
family name, and there is every reason to believe
that it was a personal name bestowed on the Mild
King's second son in memory of the great saint
beyond the Alps. Roman historians more
steeped than myself can tell what the likelihood
is that the same area - Britain should hold two
separate high-ranking families, both using the
name Aurelius: but it does not seem
coincidental that the Aurelius of the Hoxne
hoard, who never returned to dig out his precious
objects, should be apparently datable to the time
of the revolt.
Hoxne is not on the Roman road to
London, but it is only a couple of miles away; it
is the kind of place where people wanting to
follow the road, but unwilling to be seen on it,
would hide at night. And the Norwich area,
from which the road comes, has an Arminghall,
that is *Amer-inga-healh, "nook of
land of the men of Ambrosius". Of the
several Ambres- place-names in England,
this is the only one known to me which includes
his -ing, his tribe or family; and it is
quite distant from the others, in a land of early
and enduring Saxon settlement. In other
words, Saxon memory attributed that particular
settlement, far though it was from the territory
which Ambrosius may have been thought to dominate
- which, to judge by the number of Ambres-
place-names in Essex, stopped somewhere near the
Orwell - to the kin of the great and terrible
king. That the name only describes a healh,
a nook of sheltered land, suggests that the real ham
or centre of the tribe or kin - the putative *Armingham
- was somewhere else, now lost; but the *Ambresingas
are located in Norfolk and nowhere else on the
map of England, in spite of the wide spread of Ambres-
names from Worcestershire to Sussex. No
doubt the great king would subsume, in Saxon
eyes, the memory of his father, and if he had a
claim to land deep in Saxon territory, that claim
might become famous.
Do we believe that the memory of a
Christian king butchered by pagans could have
lived on for so long among the common people of
Hoxne? Yes we do. The legend is not
of a common kind, and I doubt that its topoi
could all be found in Stith Thompson’s
guidebooks. What is more, there is a
geographical focus for it which might explain its
survival: the bridge, the site of the king's
unfortunate discovery, which would obviously
become known as a martyrium. We know
from Gildas that a number of martyrs' shrines was
known to exist within Saxon territory in his
time, and that, separately, the Saxons still had
with them slaves - that is, surely, bondsman
tenants - with a recognizable Christian identity.
We know from the letters sent by Augustine to
Gregory the Great forty years later, and from
Gregory's responses, that at least one shrine of
a local martyr, one Sixtus, not known to
Augustine, was still a focus of pilgrimage and
Christian ritual of some sort in Kent, even
though Kent had been Saxon for decades if not
centuries. Nothing easier, then, than to
imagine that the place of the Mild King's fall
should become the focus for a native cult,
concentrating the sense of identity of the
surviving Christians of the east under their
pagan masters on the image of a virtuous and
unfortunate ruler who fell long ago. Pilgrimage
cults such as that of the Kentish Sixtus are not
only important, binding regions together
socially, but profitable, featuring considerable
exchange of the market-fair kind; and their
participants would certainly do everything
possible to keep them going, even under heathen
or hostile kings. The cult, an enduring
social institution, rather than any indefinite,
semi-mystical phenomenon of "peasant
memory", would justify the survival of the
story.
In short, I believe that the name
of Ambrosius' father was Aurelius Ursicinus; that
he was the Mild King, dethroned in 427-428 but
allowed to live on in imperial yet Christian
splendour on his estates; that, caught by
surprise by the Saxon uprising of 442, he tried
to flee with the treasures of his house; that he
was caught, for some reason to do with his gold,
at Hoxne, and murdered along with his wife; that
his house scattered to the four winds, or fled to
Armorica, where they remained for a quarter of a
century; that his second son Ambrosius invaded
Britain and largely recovered the country; that
the location of his father's estates in Norfolk
were still remembered in his time, a quarter of a
century later, and received some lustre by the
connection with him; and that in spite of his
victories, he was unable to locate and recover at
least a part of his father's buried treasure.
It remained in the ground until it reappeared
1550 years later, to give silent witness to the
splendour of even a dethroned Romano-British
imperial house.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
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