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Chapter 1.7:
Resurgent Celticism: Function and power
of Gildas' kings
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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The culture of Gildasian Britain
was not, except for the Catholic faith,
Roman. Procopius regarded the British
ambassadors who frequently visited Justinian's
court as "barbarian"[1], like the Huns; in spite
of the fluent Latin we must expect in Gildas'
contemporaries, their fundamental alienness
struck him forcibly. In the late 460s Sidonius
Apollinaris had addressed the British general
Rigothamus in terms that suggest that he saw him
as a fellow member of the Roman world, cultured
and worthy of respect[2] (though his men were
something else again, disregarding Roman law and
making free with other people's slaves); in the
530s, Procopius saw the British emissaries to the
emperor as alien to Roman civilization, though
these are bound to have been men of wealth and
culture, the social equivalents of Rigotamus.
We hardly need this evidence to
prove their alienness when we have Gildas, but
comparison between Sidonius and Procopius is
instructive about the time element. Gildasian
Britain must be regarded as a barbarian successor
state, no less so than the Vandals and Franks,
Longobards and Arabs. And we have found time and
time again that comparison both with later Wales
and with the related Celtic culture of Ireland
help explain the peculiarities of its vigorous
and independent literate culture (Gildas was the
product of no stammering herd of illiterates).
Given the national distaste for Picts and Scots,
Gildasian culture is unlikely to originate in
Pictland or Ireland; given the evident and
intricate continuity between Gildas and later
Welsh tradition, there must be a strong
presumption that Gildasian British culture was in
fact British Celtic or proto-Welsh, with a small
admixture of Roman elements mostly in the area of
religion.
We have seen that Gildas' view of
the Roman Empire had a lot to do with the Roman
Empire of his time, to wit Justinian's; but at
the same time, that his tale of the Roman
conquest of Britain - that is, his view of the
Romans in Britain, as part of his view of
Britain itself - was quite legendary. It centred
on Britain, embodying ideas about the nature of
the British people in its origin story. To those
who composed and first recorded this myth, the
Romans were - as they could not be to Gildas -
part of the past. This suggests that they
originated in an area which simply did not
appreciate - at least at first - that a Roman
power, in the distant East, had survived the
fifth-century catastrophe; an area neither
cosmopolitan nor well informed. But they became
the standard for Gildasian Britain: Gildas
re-read them in the light of a far more
cosmopolitan and informed set of concerns, but he
took their basic tenets for granted; he reversed
many of their meanings, but assumed their basic
truth. This argues that Gildasian culture
originates from this distant uncultured area, and
spread from it to the rest of the island. Where
this was will become clearer as we examine the
evidence further.
The myth of the Roman invasion,
however, was directly relevant not only to
Gildasian Britain, but to the isolated parent
culture whose existence I just suggested; despite
its concern with a bygone and legendary empire,
it was directly relevant to those who formulated
it. And its content tells us why. Though
Maximus’ folly took the Romans as a body
from the island, we know that Britain still has a
few left; in particular the house of Ambrosius.
These people carry in themselves the special
status that belonged to Rome as a whole when Rome
took over, or married, the island. In other
words, a number of leading families believed
themselves, rightly or wrongly, the inheritors of
Roman rank.
Do these Romans make up the whole
of the contemporary aristocracy? Certainly not;
Gildas clearly implies that Cuneglasus, at the
very least, is decidedly native and
inferior. And Cuneglasus fights ciues
- he was a Briton fighting Britons, for to Gildas
ciues and Romans were not one and the
same, but opposite and complementary. Ambrosius
was "almost the last of the Romans",
and in all of Britain there were only a few
sturdy reliquiae; but there were plenty of
ciues, who flocked to him. In other words,
ciues and Romani were two separate
groups. The ciues gather to Ambrosius because
he is one of the few Romans left. The ciuis
is the ordinary Briton; the Romanus is the
descendant of that ancient, wonderful, vanished
race of heroes and kings, who ruled the island
long ago.
But there was an even older race
of kings, and they were not wonderful; and, like
the Romans, they affect the way the island is
today. Gildas clearly postulates a continuity
between the "tyrants" who ruled
Britain, under gods even more loathsome than
themselves, before the Romans came, and the
"fresh shoots of tyrants" (tyrannorum
uirgultis crescentibus) multiplying again in
the last days of Roman rule. His imagery is
always apt and carefully chosen: this picture of
the damaging return of life to an unwelcome
plant, something like the unwanted growth of weed
in an otherwise fertile garden, implies that the
plant in question had been subjected to severe
pruning before. Now its shoots are
multiplying again, "just now", iam
iamque, that is in the last decades of Roman
rule, while the pruning or weeding in question
took place long ago: it can only refer to the
legendary massacre of the traitors of the leaena
dolosa.
What Gildas is saying, therefore,
is that the Romans did not exterminate, or nearly
exterminate, the British people as a whole; what
they exterminated was the aristocracy - that
loathsome aristocracy of originally pagan
"tyrants", that bowed in feminine
cowardice to Roman demands, then tried to break
their yoke by stealthy murder, and finally proved
utterly incapable of standing up and fighting
like men. Gildas defines them as perfidi,
the faithless, and implies that they were part of
the leaena dolosa’s conspiracy to
slaughter the rectores. The Romans killed
many (multis), but had the bad judgement
to leave a few (nonnullis) as mancipales. Dr.Winterbottom
translates this word as "slaves", but
the etymology means more precisely "those
who have been caught by hand", manu capti,
the subdued-by-force. Therefore, though we are
told that these mancipales were reserved ad
seruitudinem, this cannot refer to slavery in
the same sense as a bondsman working the land is
a slave, for what Gildas is describing is the
replacement of a vast majority of the British
upper class - which had conspired to destroy the rectores
but had then not been able to organize any
defence against Roman revenge - by an immigrant
Roman nobility, and the survival of a remnant as mancipales
to be kept in seruitudinem, in a reduced
condition parallel to slavery - but within the
context of the world of lords and kings.
This is clearly reminiscent of the
common Irish fact of "unfree" tribes.
Irish “unfree” tribes have their own
political existence, but have subject status as
compared with the tribes whose ruling dynasties
were at the head of a province. The kings of
these tribes were not slaves in our sense of the
term, but their rank was servile with respect not
only to the provincial kings, but also to the
kings of the "free tribes". These
latter are generally reckoned to be
genealogically close to the royal provincial
lineages, sharing common ancestors and holding
definite rights.
In the same way, the British
nobility whose foundation legend we may read in
Gildas seems to have divided itself between
"Roman" houses and "British"
ones. The "Roman" dynasties, to which
Ambrosius claimed to belong, claimed descent from
the conquering nation that punished the traitors
and replaced them in the distant past, and were
therefore free and of kingly rank; the
"British" dynasties, on the other hand,
bore the stigma of treason, rebellion and defeat
and were seen as of inferior rank. They were, in
that sense, like the "servile" tribes
of Ireland; but, like them, they actually had
their own political existence. Gildas emphasized
that the evil of Magnus Maximus' days was caused
by the resurgence of a previously
nearly-destroyed class of British
"tyrants", or, in his richly metaphoric
language, the re-growth of the "tyrant
thickets" native to the island. What has
poisoned the ruling classes is the growth in
importance and power of British blood which
eventually sent forth Magnus Maximus
That such a person was able to
take over the resources of the island under the
plausible guise of being a Roman proves again
that we are speaking, not of slaves proper, but
of people who could plausibly pretend that they
were equal to the Roman-descended aristocracy;
therefore, “British" dynasties or
tribes were not "subject" or
"servile" in any modern sense, in spite
of Gildas' talk of whips and torments - they were
actually independent enough to carry on their own
policy and be able to aspire to great power (in
the same way as the most famous of all the high
kings of Tara, Brian Boruma, began as the king of
one such "servile" tribe, the Dal Cais
of west Munster). In Gildas' world, the conquest
of power by a "British",
"tyrannical" family, is possible,
though wrong. And it is - it must be - from the
traitors of the leaena dolosa, that the
class of "British", inferior, lords is
descended.
In later Wales, the mythological
figure that stood for the inferior kind of
lordship described by the Latin tyrannus
was Beli son of Manogan. When, in Nennius, the
British tyranni oppose Roman claims, he is
their national representative or leader. And The
dream of Maxen Gwledig shows that his
"rule", however we are to understand
it, represented anarchy and localism. Elen, once
married to Maxen[3], ordered roads to be
built to criss-cross the island, unifying its
various tribes[4]. The story, therefore,
opposes her rule to his in terms of unity against
separation, contact against isolation: the
various tribes and lordships of Britain are
separate under him, but become knit together
under her. This is clearly the difference between
a small, isolated kind of lordship and a large,
national, coordinating lordship. The marriage of
Elen with Maxen, that is the submission of
Britain to Rome, represents a unifying act for
Britain itself[5].
I think it is possible to trace a
closely similar set of concepts in the poems of
the historical Taliesin, the earliest
Welsh-language documents. Taliesin, court bard of
the northern kinglet Urien of Rheged, wrote such
marvellous songs of praise for his lord that he
became something like the standard of Welsh court
poetry, and drew to his own name the legend of
the sage poet/wizard; as did, for much the same
reason, Virgil in Latin-speaking medieval Europe.
(He also managed to bring his lord to the
attention of every subsequent Welsh and Breton
learned person, with the result that more
unhistorical legends were written - and believed
- about Urien and his son Owain than about any
other early Welsh hero except Arthur; some of
them, such as the supposed "siege of
Lindisfarne", still bedevil to this day the
work even of brilliant historians who really
should know better[6])
Now, Taliesin seems to me to draw
a marked distinction between two words for
"king", Teyrn and Gwledig.
(He never uses Brenhin, which is
significant, but if I make out the original Welsh
right, he does sometimes use the very archaic Rieu
for "kings in the mass, the whole class of
kings, both gwledig and teyrn".)
When Urien's bard praises his lord in the most
emphatic and ringing terms, he calls him gwledig.
Urien is the gwledig of cattle-lifters at
his great battle at Gwenystrad, in the sense that
nobody in the world is better at taking wealth
away from enemies. Gwenystrad must have been a
tremendous triumph for Urien: speaking of it,
Taliesin describes this single northern lord as
the scourge of the men of all the island,
gathered in battle-lines (gwyr Prydein
adwythein yn lluyd). Clearly a large
coalition had been gathered to teach the impudent
cateran a lesson - and had ended up learning one
instead[7]. It is by virtue of this
great victory over men from many parts of the
island that Taliesin awards his lord the title of
gwledig, qualifying it, even then, as gwledig
only in that he takes cattle away from so many
enemies. He still is not said to rule over them,
even though he defeated them. It seems clear that
the sovereignty of Rheged, alone, does not make a
gwledig. Gwledig is a term of
praise, specifically for victory, and in
particular for the kind of victory that proves
supremacy over a large number of competitors.
Indeed, the posture of Urien and
his son Owein is mostly defensive, more often
meant to defend Rheged and to deny tribute than
to raid or subdue other countries. Owein's great
deed was the defeat and destruction of
Fflammddwyn, lord of Lloegr[8], who had claimed
hostages from his father. On more than one
occasion[9], Taliesin smartly
underlines Urien's role as diffreidyat gwlat,
defender of the country (gwlat),
suggesting the word gwledig without
employing it. But when Urien goes beyond the
borders of his own country, he is not very
successful: his northwards raid into Aeron and
Alclud (in the poem "Rheged arise") is
half a disaster, if not indeed a whole one.
Taliesin seems to have a positive
dislike for calling Urien a teyrn; even
when he has to mention his specific title to
Rheged, he avoids the word and calls him glyw
Rheged, the (generic) lord of Rheged. You can
see why when you look at the use he makes of the
term. Defeated enemies and submissive lords are
always teyrned (in the plural): for
instance those Brecknock-men and Cornishmen (or
Cornouii from Wroxeter, perhaps?) who tried to
extort tribute from Cynan Garwyn (another patron
of Taliesin) and had to cry for mercy, or the teyrned
whom Urien first holds at bay and then mows down
at Gwenystrad. In the same poem, Taliesin is also
dismissive about their horses: they are kaffon,
mere nags or ponies[10] - do teyrned ride
no better? And it is relevant that the word teyrn
is most often heard in the plural, teyrned.
So is tyranni in Gildas' Latin. Teyrned,
to Taliesin, are a class, not individuals.
There are two exceptions, both
heavily qualified. In Ni'th oes cystedlydd,
Taliesin does use the word teyrn several
times; but not without having first called Urien gwledig,
in a mood of high exultation, affirming his
military and personal superiority over all and
any enemies, and ending in magnificent praise:
"there is more glory in the world/ because
Urien and his sons exist", a sentence for
which alone, I think, he deserved the gift of
Llwyfenidd and Eirch (whatever they were) and the
"gold upon gold" that Urien gave him.
But this is a rather general kind of gwledig-hood,
that does not imply that he is actually the gwledig
of anything in particular. Only after this
does he mention that he is a teyrn - and
not without qualifying it with the most splendid
attributes: he does not call him teyrn glewhaf,
"the bravest teyrn", without
saying that he is "the bravest of the race[11] of the brave, unrivalled
among those who have been and will be",
exalting him to a position almost above mankind;
then he is teyrn gocnaw, "imperious teyrn",
and eurteyrn gogledd arbenhic teyrnedd,
gold-teyrn of the north, foremost of teyrnedd.
Clearly, it would be rude to call one's lord a teyrn
without at least loading the term with majestic
praise. And then there is Dadolwch Urien, The
conciliation of Urien, which strongly hints
that Urien's status had fallen off[12]; in this poem, it is the
sons of Urien, not he himself, who go to war
against the enemy, and we are shocked to discover
that Taliesin's hero has grown old. Even there,
when he does he call him a teyrn, it is as
the best of teyrned. Other than that -
especially in passages that report military
victories - Taliesin does not care to use the
word. Certainly no court poet ever served his
king better; but it is clear that Urien is a gwledig
only because he is so personally impressive -
like "Count" Basie, "Duke"
Ellington and "King" Oliver.
Teyrned, therefore, are
those of the lord class who either cannot fight
or are defeated in battle, an inferior kind of
lordship. Gwledig are the kings who assert
their right to rule by victory, who take cattle
and do not have cattle taken away from them
(surely a poetic version of the claiming and
refusal of tribute). But this is not merely a
contingent fact depending on the changing
fortunes of arms: these ranks are at least to
some extent permanent. Gwallawg, subject of two
Taliesin poems, is a Gwledig without
qualifications, and the poet twice mentions the
whole of Britain as in some way his natural
sphere, reaching from Edinburgh (Eidyn)
and Ayr to Brecknock, Anglesey, and a number of
otherwise unknown regions - Pencoed, Coed Bayl,
Gwydawl, Gwensteri, Rhos Eira - which presumably
are now part of England. Taliesin seems less
impressed by Gwallawg as a person than by Cynan
Garwyn or Owein, let alone Urien, but he mentions
his disciplined force, and his manifold
activities (and again comes up with a splendid
phrase: "he has not seen a man who has not
seen Gwallawg", Ny wyl gwr ny welas
Gwallawg). He even reviews four great heroes
of his day, including Owein, as if they were in
some sense part of the praise of Gwallawg; this
can only mean that they were part of his sphere,
retainers or subsidiary lords. (Because he
mentions Owein, but not Urien, as one of the
famous heroes of Gwallawg's time, we must
conclude that Urien was dead by then.) Teyrned
submit to him in silence; Urien has to fight to
subdue them. Gwallawg is also involved in a
market economy of some sort, selling off the
increase in his herds of cows at the end of each
summer, which suggests that he had a Texas
rancher's amount and the ability to escort them
to market unharmed; and he has a fleet ready for
battle, with a full arsenal of spears. Even if we
take Taliesin's notice about the whole of Britain
as hyperbole, it seems clear that Gwallawg was a
much greater lord than Urien or Cynan Garwyn; if
he was only "the ordained magistrate of
Elmet", then Elmet must have stretched much
further than South Yorkshire in his time. Where,
if nothing else, would he anchor that fleet - in
Sheffield?
Therefore the distinction between teyrned
- lords indeed, each with his tribe and/or
territorial lordship, but dependent and carrying
the status of a defeated or unmilitary person -
and gwledig - a lord with subsidiary lords
around him, a lord who won supremacy by the sword
or is born to it - is both in and out of time. Teyrned,
especially in the plural, are always seen as
somehow defeated, even if that defeat did not
actually come in battle; they carry defeat as it
were in their rank, even in their birth perhaps.
Urien is reduced to a teyrn when he can no
longer mount his big horse and fight[13]. And conversely, a gwledig
carries victory, and therefore command, as part
of his nature[14].
This is quite close to the
Gildasian notion of "Roman" and
"British" aristocrats. The former carry
in their own selves a victoriousness and an
absolute right to command that derives from a
victory far in time (in fact it never happened)
but yet as active in its effects as if it had
happened yesterday; and the latter carry in their
own being, though they are in fact aristocrats
and lords, the status of defeated persons, of mancipales,
people captured and put under authority. And
nevertheless their status can change: in the
range of his activities, Urien gains, in
Taliesin's eyes, the right to be called a gwledig
so long as he is victorious, and especially so
long as he is victorious over many tribes like he
was at Gwenystrad. This is, seen from a positive
and admiring angle, a process of promotion not
unlike that which Gildas hated, and declared
illegitimate, in the case of Maximus, certainly
of Cuneglasus, and probably of Vortigern and
Maglocunus.
We have already seen that the
Celtic word Tigern(os), "dominus,
lord of the house", may have been connected
in Gildas’ mind with Greek and Latin
"Tyrant"[15]. The "British"
lords are therefore "unfree" and
"tyrannical" by definition, as opposed
to the "Roman" lords. Even in Nennius,
300 years later and in greatly changed
circumstances, the British lords oppose Caesar's
claim of right over the island cum essent
tyranni et tumidi, as they were tyrants and
swollen [with pride above their station].
Tyranny, "British" lordship, resistance
to legitimate "Roman" authority,
military defeat, and treachery, apparently all
went together in one bundle of concepts.
I speak under correction here; but
I think there is a clear difference, if not
opposition, between teyrn, *tigernos,
lord of the house or ty, and gwledig,
lord of the country or gwlat. The latter
clearly represents a broader kingship, a country
rather than a house. It is surely no coincidence
that Welsh poetry and Breton legal texts closely
associate the teyrn with courts or halls
(Welsh Llys, Breton Latin aula) in
which the Breton teyrn offers surety and
deals with lites, quarrels, between his
subjects[16]. Evidently the
qualifying element of the teyrn was the
great house: he was the man in the Big House - an
idea easy to understand to any rural society;
think of the "country houses" that
later lords of Britain were to raise in the same
countryside - something a step above the ordinary
paterfamilias, but decidedly inferior to
someone who is qualified as pertaining to the
whole gwlat. It is peculiar to Celtic
society that the man in the Big House should be
recognized as an independent lord, rather than as
one of a number of local squires or petty
aristocrats; but that is the dimension of his
lordship. He belongs to the class of kings, but
over no more than the shadow of his Big House; he
is no king of a country or of a whole nation.
There is something about this
bundle of concepts that is quite extraneous to
our thinking, and that we already came across,
hardly realizing it, in discussing Blathmac mac
Con Brettan's poem on Christ's passion Blathmac's
attitude is that there is a complete
correspondence, with no difference in category,
between the fact of treachery and the condition
of slavery; that is, that the permanent condition
of subjection is exactly correspondent with the
individual crime of rebellion against a
previously accepted sovereign. He is not saying
that the one thing follows inevitably, as a
punishment, on the other, but that they are one
and the same thing.
The difficulty with pointing out
the difference between this sort of thinking and
our own is that ours is so rooted in our mind
that we do not conceive of it except as
universal. It just does not occur to us that a
permanent category, something that is, or is
assumed to be, in the nature of things, that a
man is or is not at birth and that he cannot
change, should have any overlap, let alone a
perfect correspondence, with individual actions
such as treachery. Certainly, treason is a crime,
a terrible crime, and may well be paid for with
death or with life in jail. But what the Celtic
mind says is something else: that certain men are
born traitors, and therefore slaves, so
that the act of treachery, if and when it
happens, is only the manifestation of an inner
nature that might be manifested just as well by
their being in slavery.
This is the same concept that lies
at the back of Gildas' distinction between
"Romans" and "Britons", born
kings and born traitors. A man may be born into
treachery, as into slavery: that is why the
treachery of the leaena dolosa is an
active force to this (Gildas') day. Conversely, a
man may be born, like Ambrosius Aurelianus, into
valour and victory, as into royalty. This frame
of mind not only does not recognize the
difference between events and conditions: it
positively denies it[17].
We cannot be sure whether this
picture had any racial connotations in the mind
of Taliesin, who never mentions any alien folk
except for the English (Eigyl); one might
read all his poetry without once realizing that
there was such a place as Rome, and at any rate
he would not be likely to place any emphasis on a
distinction between Roman and British lords
which, if it existed, placed him and his lord
Urien on the wrong side of the fence. But to
Gildas, tyranni are both a lower and a far
older component of British society than Romani;
they are the first bloodlines to establish royal
power of any sort in the island, and have
survived near-destruction at the hands of the
ever-victorious Romans, to grow back into life
and power.
We will not understand the full
force of the survival of this remnant of an evil
old world, and its return to strength in its
ancient haunts, until we realize that Gildas'
picture of the nature and relationships of
kingdoms, especially of conquest, is
fundamentally different from ours. What happens
to Britain after the Romans came? Not annexation.
Although we are told that the name of the island
is changed from Britannia to Romania[18], we are never told that
the island is annexated to the Roman empire.
Indeed, Gildas seems to have trouble with the
idea of annexation, of an existing state being
absorbed into another. He sees the empire of the
world as a central entity of immense military
power, surrounded by tributary kingdoms. These
kingdoms are permanent: the Romans can oversee
their government and even engineer massacres and
population transfers[19], but they seem either
unwilling or unable to destroy them as entities.
Even after most British tyranni are
exterminated and replaced by Romans, there does
not seem to be annexation. The Romans had
originally sent rectores to oversee the
native lords; but even after the destruction and
punishment, the system does not change. These new
settlers do not herald political union with Rome;
they are simply a much reinforced and more
ironbound layer of rectores. We can say
this because we are told that Maximus'
hare-brained enterprise deprived the island of
her rectores; which means that for all the
period of Roman rule, the island had been ruled
by them.
Roman settlement, it seems, does
not mean Roman annexation. These tributary
kingdoms are expected to provide the first line
of their own defence; the Romans proper, those
from Italy, may come to help when native strength
fails, as they are "outstanding
helpers" (auxiliares egregii). As a
matter of fact that is never put to the test,
since, so long as they are overlords and their
kinsmen live in the island, there is no mention
of any external threat whatever; it is only when
Magnus Maximus denudes the island of its armies
that we first hear of Picts and Scots. It is also
at this point that the Romans first send armies
over to help defeated Britons - which begs the
question, surely, what point there was in having
any Roman connection so long as Britain had its
own Romans as rectores and could marshal
itself. (It is at this point that utter legend
begins to shade, through vague memories of the
circumstances surrounding the "Rescript of
Honorius", into history.)
Gildasian language and ideology
have a feature we should notice. Although he sees
every free-born man in Britain as a ciuis,
when he speaks of Britain as a nation, as a
corporate body, he only means the upper classes;
in particular, when he speaks of "the
Britons" being slaughtered by "the
Romans", we have seen reason to think that
he is speaking of the upper classes alone - the tyranni,
the teyrned, those who effectively own the
land. Ciuis therefore does not mean
"citizen" in the Roman, let alone in
the modern, sense; only fellow-countryman. In
fact, it covers precisely the semantic area of *combroges,
from which comes modern Welsh cymry:
fellow (com) country (brog) man.
The combroges is the man of the same
country, the born Briton, but the word does
not imply political rights. And as "the
Britons" mean the British aristocracy, not
the whole people, the body that replaced the
massacred "Britons" must have been a
similar aristocracy.
This explains why the end of Roman
rule (Maximus' rebellion) takes the form of the
general desertion of Britain by her rectores,
Roman rulers. The fact is that there is no
difference between the way the rectores
incarnate the power of Rome in their own persons,
and the power of Rome itself. As long as Roman rectores
are in Britain, directing British states, then
Rome is there; the moment they are taken away
along with the Roman "great military
youth", is the moment that the Britons begin
a series of increasingly desperate appeals to
Rome, invoking the very thing they could no
longer claim to have - their nomen Romanum,
the Roman name.
This also sheds some light on what
Gildas meant by wishing that Britain, in his own
time, had more rectores: what he wanted
was in effect a complete takeover of the affairs
of the peripheral kingdoms, ruled by the likes of
the Five Tyrants, by the centre, a replacement of
their whole aristocracy with rectores
nominated by, and loyal to, the Ambrosian central
state. He believed that the mere existence of a
large number of rectores would restore
Ambrosian primacy, just as, long ago, the
presence of a Roman aristocracy in power, even
(he thought) without any administrative
contiguity with Rome, had kept the island Roman.
The rectores guarantee
order and political sense. When the Romans,
called back to Britain by an urgent and abject
British plea, try to set into place measures to
keep the Picts from further invasion, the first
thing they do is to order a wall built across the
neck of Scotland; but as they take no direct part
in its building, the wall is built by
inexperienced Britons, uulgo irrationabili
absque rectore, a multitude incapable of
reasoning, deprived of a rector. (The
Latin construction, by placing the words
together, strongly suggests a causal connection: being
absque rectore, the uulgo is irrationabili;
hence, it seems that the uulgo is irrationabili
just because it is absque rectore.)
Therefore it is only made of turf and does little
good. (This is the wall of Antoninus, across the
neck of Scotland.) If they had had proper rectores,
it seems, the uulgus, however irrationabilis,
would have been sanely directed into building a
proper and militarily valuable wall of stone. The
Rectores in this case direct public
endeavour according to rational plans; they also
seem to be in charge of military technology and
large-scale political projects; and they can
establish permanent borders - a matter whose
importance will become clear in a minute.
Now the reason why Gildas takes
the Wall of Antoninus to be British-built is that
it is no different from an earthwork, a kind of
building technology which he regarded as
typically British; when the Romans take charge
themselves, they build a wall of stone. Gildas
must have had in mind the numerous dykes that
seem to have sprung up across Britain in the
fifth and sixth centuries. These dykes are later
than the Roman period, but the first English
settlers found them already made. As John Morris
saw, the English thought they had been raised by
the gods long ago; wherever they went, from the
Wall of Antoninus to the Wansdyke, they called
them by such names as Grim's Dyke or Ditch,
Grim being a name for Odin/Woden. The Wansdyke
bears the god's name undisguised (Wansdyke
= Woden's dyke). And that means that they
found them not only already made, but made long
since. They did not know their origins. The dykes
were part of the landscape.
Now it was part of the Germanic
myth of creation that Odin made a wall to keep
giants and trolls out of the countries of men[20]. Less important than the
fact that the barricade was made, according to
Snorri, with a giant's eyebrows, is that there is
plenty of evidence that the giants, enemies of
the gods, could in practice be identified with
any hostile human tribe. Hence it made perfect
sense to identify a borderline against hostile
tribes, delimited by a great earthwork, as built
by the gods against the Giants. Giants did not
live in distant lands: both Germany (the Riesengebirge,
on the Bohemian frontier) and Norway (the Jotunheimen)
had their "mountains of the Giants".
There is no way that the Wansdyke, or even
smaller dykes such as the various ones built on
the borders of East Anglia[21], could be seen as
military assets. To serve a military purpose,
they would require standing armies tens of
thousands strong, and a whole system of
fortifications, lodgements, barracks, supply
lines and magazines, easily found in the case of
an effective defence line such as the Roman Wall,
and completely absent in the case of British
earthworks such as the Wansdyke. The military
requirements for the defence of two large
contemporary fortresses, South Cadbury and
Cadbury-Congresbury, have been worked out[22]: they are, respectively,
850 and between 400 and 650 men. This agrees with
other ideas we may form of the permanent armed
forces available to a local British lord; the
kind of army needed to defend the Wansdyke line
definitely does not.
So: for what reason, other than
for defence, would such a pharaonic undertaking
as the Wansdyke, which stretches from Somerset to
Hampshire, have been built? Reflecting upon the
effort it must have taken, it seems clear that
only something of ultimate importance could have
had a claim on so much labour, in an age not
noted for prosperity or advanced technology.
English names suggest barriers between different
realms, the realm of "our kind", men
worshipping Woden and living according to proper
law, and the Outside where alien men, often
identified with foreign nations, live in
conditions of fabulous evil and shade off into
demonic giants and trolls. In other words, what
the English ideas suggest is borders between
kingdoms and regions of the world. The
English themselves eventually raised a dyke,
Offa's Dyke, to seal off their own land from the
remaining Welsh; not that the dyke had any real
military value, but it marked clearly enough for
anyone to see the point after which any marauding
Welshman might find the air rather hot.
Therefore, we have good reason to suspect that
dykes and earthworks were meant, not as military
defences against any invaders, but as border
markers. The Wansdyke, with its enormous outlay
in time and labour, must have marked a
particularly important and disputed border;
almost certainly that of that leaena among
British kingdoms, Dumnonia.
But Gildas' comment about the
uselessness of turf walls to hold back invaders
is telling in another way; what he is saying is
that, in spite of their apparently robust aspect,
these dykes have done nothing to define
territorial control beyond dispute, since wars
can and do rage across them. The existence of a
series of parallel dykes near East Anglia,
showing where a border had moved forwards and
backwards like a tide[23], seems to support him.
Now the important thing about this is that Gildas
wants borders to be beyond discussion. He
ascribes to the Church the duty of defining
tribal borders indisputably; indeed, he blames
churchmen for failing to do so in the middle
(70.2) of the Quis...? sequence, that is
of his general complaint about the failure of his
colleagues when compared to splendid examples
from the Old and New Testament. Because they have
not delivered an infallible definition of
borders, they have failed in their duties. They
should, like Joshua and Phinehas, have defined
borders between the tribes of Israel (Britain)
wisely enough to ensure that each tribe should
know what belonged to it.
This is a very remarkable claim. I
very much doubt whether the Catholic Church, even
at the height of its powers and pretensions, ever
claimed to make such definitions authoritatively
and above any temporal power; the only occasion
that occurs to me is the Treaty of Tordesillas,
in which the Pope arbitrated between rival
Spanish and Portuguese claims already in
existence - an arbitration, not a sovereign act,
which still does not compare with Gildas' claim
that the Church should divide up the land between
tribes and kings. And Gildas slips the claim with
the air of someone stating something obvious. On
other occasions, his subversive intent is clear;
he makes claims that deliberately hit at the
weaknesses and pretensions of his age; but this
idea that churchmen should, by virtue of their
rank, be able to speak a final decision about the
borders between states, comes out of nowhere,
goes nowhere, has little to do with the centre of
his argument - it is just given as one out of
many duties in which the Church of Gildas' age is
failing.
In other words, Gildas' claim is a
local British feature. His contemporaries
expected the Church to make such divisions. This
is so sharply at odds with every other European
practice before or since that we could almost
fail to notice it. We have been brought up in a
history and a theory in which the borders of
kingdoms and tribes were always a matter for
political power, defined by treaties and backed
by the force of the contracting parties and their
allies; so that France, if strong enough, could
take Alsace from Germany, and vice versa, and
both countries could give their annexation the
force of law according to the situation. We could
and do assume that this attitude to kingdoms and
territories is permanent and universal; after
all, we have all been educated out of history
textbooks full of maps detailing which country
took over which territory after which war. But to
Gildas borders are a matter above politics, to be
resolved by religious authority. The borders
of kingdoms must be permanent, a part of the
elemental religious truth of things.
This agrees with what we just saw:
that Gildas' idea of an "empire" did
not comprehend annexation and administrative
takeover; as well as with the fact that Celtic
wars were about tribute. If the borders of states
were something implicit in the nature of things,
to be decided (or should one say revealed?) by
religious authority until they can no longer be
questioned, then it is only by exacting tribute
that the superior power can be recognized from
the inferior. In actual fact, state borders did
change in Celtic countries; but much more so in
Wales than in Ireland, where change was as slow
as molasses, and heavy prescriptive rights were
claimed for each tuath and larger kingdom
as if they were written in timeless truth. And
Wales, the mere leftover of a colossal historical
loss and subject to violent and unpredictable
change dictated by a far larger neighbour, is not
a good indication of how a Celtic culture, left
to itself with no overwhelming alien pressures to
bear, would behave[24].
We can also see why it is so
interesting that a rector should be said
to be able to determine a border line; evidently
this power, or rather this wisdom, resided in the
ultimate emperor of the world as well as in the
Church. The rector, incarnating the
authority of "Rome", could deliver a
judgement as perfect as a good churchman's; it is
even possible that the reason why the British
failed to build a successful wall against the
Picts without a rector is not so much
because they lacked the technical ability as
because only a rector - or a suitably
qualified churchman - would be able to bring the
right kind of semi-mystical power and wisdom to
the task.
But the perfection of boundaries
is only an ideal to Gildas, who laments that a
firm division of the land had not been achieved.
Clearly there were conflicts, and in actual fact
wars must have been fought not only for tribute
but also over disputed borders. Independent
Britain had emerged from a Roman administrative
world where borders were an administrative
convenience, not a firm rooted reality; and one
of the by-products of the cycle of Saxon wars
must have been an unstable and repeatedly altered
map, determined more by the accidents of war and
a surely treacherous diplomacy than by any
ultimate right. The doctrine of permanent land
borders determined by wisdom or by religious
decree, therefore, was not grounded in the recent
historical experience of the island. It must have
been something imposed upon it, for ideological
reasons. But it was an ideal taken very
seriously; the enormous collective effort that
must have gone into building the Wansdyke is an
indication of the value everyone placed on
definite territorial delimitation - especially,
perhaps, in the case of Dumnonia, the
she-monster.
Now if the boundaries of states
were seen as something eternal, as much a part of
the nature of things as the course of rivers and
the location of mountains, then the matter of who
ruled each state became absolutely
fundamental. Political change could only
happen by a change of rulers. This is what the
legend of the Roman conquest means: that a race
more suited to rule had come to the island,
taking it over from a lesser race of
"tyrants". The king is the central
social institution of Gildas' world. His choices
are choices for the entire social body, with no
limiting factor. Gildas speaks as though it was
absolutely up to him to choose the members of his
court, so that if his commanipulares
happen to be sanguinarios, superbos,
parricidas... adulteros, Dei inimicos ...bloodthirsty,
arrogant, parricidal, sex-maniacs, enemies of
God... the guilt and shame of it is far more his
than theirs. He shows no trace of the belief
often found in many monarchic or authoritarian
systems, that "the King is all right, it's
his advisers who are bad", the shifting of
blame for perceived injustice or dishonesty from
the sovereign to the court; even when he does
speak of evil advisers, as in the case of
Maglocunus, he makes the king alone responsible
for all the evil committed.
There are two
exceptions. Gildas does blame two, and only
two, classes of society, for their own actions,
independently of the kings (though royal
wickedness is a factor with them as well): the
clergy and Maglocunus' bards. The clergy have the
ability and indeed the duty to resist royal
corruption and denounce royal crimes; as for the
corruption of the bards, it is self-generated,
not really Maglocunus' fault, except in that he
listens to them and pays them. Both groups share
the distinction of being able to initiate
societal good or societal evil independently of
the king, who is otherwise responsible for all
the wrong in society - indeed, to a very large
extent he incarnates it.
It is perhaps worth pointing out
that this category of all-responsible sovereigns
includes every kind of king, from the
highest to the lowest, high kings, gwledigs
and teyrned. Gildas starts by
blasting all the kings of Britain, awarding to
them all, impartially, the name of tyranni
- that is, the lowest kind of king, teyrned
- and proceeds from there; and we have seen that
his five prize specimens are visibly of different
ranks. The whole class of kings, along with
priests and (secondarily) bards, is responsible
for the evil state of Britain; and no other group
of people is.
The omnipotence of the Gildasian
king is another aspect of Gildas’ general
habit of speaking only about, and to, Educated
Britain. The poor, the mass of the people, are
simply not his subject. It is not that Gildas
despises them. He is fond of the honest working ciuis,
and, more to the point, he is incapable of
letting ideology get in the way of his
appreciation of individuals. His ideology may
tell him that Cuneglasus, a British ciuis,
should not in principle be a sovereign, but
Gildas is only interested in the real man
Cuneglasus; racist ideology would insist that, by
getting into the place of his betters, Cuneglasus
has committed the unforgivable crime, but Gildas
says nothing of the kind. He may accept the
racist beliefs of his time, but, faced with a
real human soul, what prevails is his Christian
belief in God's special creation of every single
soul and in His will that all should be saved.
The same Christian morality leads
him to despise clergymen who, while they flatter
the rich (by which he certainly means the kings -
Gildas never speaks of a rich man who is not a
king), at the same time regard treat the honest
poor with the physical unreasoning horror of a
man seeing a snake (66.2). Gildas was not
exaggerating: John Morris[25] quotes a hideous passage
from a Breton Life of St.Malo in which the
so-called saint loses a cloak and, when it is
returned to him, refuses to wear it because a
poor cottager had used it as a blanket. It was
beneath him to touch what such a man had touched.
Another Breton "saint", Winwaloe,
refused to call the poor "brothers".
Before this sort of caste
arrogance, Gildas' protest on behalf of the poor
is simply good Christianity. He was no social
revolutionary. One of the pronouncements
collected in the Penitential of Gildas
declares that it is just as right to offer Mass
for a good king as it is wrong to do so for a bad
one. Though he reproaches proud clerics who avoid
the poor, his letters are just as hard on
rebellious rigorists who "prefer slaves to
masters and commons to kings". He has
nothing against the established order, and only
wishes it were ran with some decency; it is his
profound Christian feeling that makes him protest
at caste attitudes and sentiments that are, after
all, the inevitable product of the social system
that seems so natural to him.
In the light of his contempt for
caste arrogance, then, it is remarkable how
little he has to say about or to the poor in The
ruin of Britain. The call to care for them is
good Christian morality, and it makes their
apparently complete exclusion from the sphere of
political discourse - an exclusion that seems
quite unconscious, as if Gildas had never even
thought that they might be addressed on the
future of their own island - that much more
noticeable. It may be said, no doubt, that they
are not what the book is about: from the
beginning, Gildas announces that his subject is
the ill-behaviour of the British clergy and
nobility, and, as he always does, he sticks to
his point. But it is also the case that the lower
classes are never seen as any-thing but the
object of others' activities. They are never a
political subject in their own right; not even as
mobs. So far as we can judge from Gildas, the
power to act and decide is vested entirely in the
two educated classes, nobility and clergy[26], and that is the reason
why their moral decline is so disastrous for the
nation.
Does this remind us of anything?
Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6.1:
"In all of Gaul there are only two classes
of men to be considered of any real
importance." (Caesar, of course, meant
political importance.) "The commons are
regarded more or less as slaves, are never
consulted on any matter and never dare to act for
themselves." Caesar might have been
describing the situation in Gildas' Britain; a
very different society indeed from Rome, where,
from beginning to end, the "mob" never
ceased having political weight.
Caesar believed that the commons
were held down by economic means, reinforced by
the abuse of law: "Most of them, crushed by
debt, heavy taxation or the pressure of more
powerful people, enter the service of noblemen
who exercise the same control on them as masters
have over slaves." And who were these
noblemen? "The two privileged classes are
the Druids and the Horsemen." The Druids are
in charge of religious matters; the Horsemen take
part in the virtually perennial tribal wars, each
accompanied by a retinue, that has to be as large
and splendid as possible - their sole criterion
of prestige.
This, from the sociological point
of view, is no doubt why Celtic free men suffered
from so many pressures to enter the retinue of
noblemen. It is also certainly why the sin of
"denial after recognition" was so
dreaded; and why it was directly connected to the
idea of slavery. Once a retainer has given up his
allegiance to a lord, committing "denial
after recognition", the only way he can be
brought back into line is by depriving him of his
legal, though hardly factual, freedom. In other
words, the dreadful sanction hanging over those
guilty of "denial after recognition"
reinforces the social position of the heads of
retinues, even though it seems clear that to
control slaves is not as socially prestigious as
to head a large retinue of legally free men.
But what must be understood is
that this feature was not a historical accident,
but a structural feature, a basic part of
whatever made up a specifically Celtic society.
Caesar, born and bred to an economy which was,
like ours, basically mercantile and
individualistic, in which property was individual
and indivisible, observed Celtic society
accurately; he just did not have the frame of
mind to understand what he saw. He saw the
envelopment of the Celtic free man by a weave of
debts and legal obligations as a contingent
phenomenon, the result of the economic triumph of
the upper classes, a process that could be
outlined and that deviated from some earlier
model in which Gaulish freemen would have been
freer and more like proletarian Roman citizens.
That was not the case at all. The
close correspondence between the description of a
society which, as a conqueror who lived among the
conquered for eight years, Caesar must have come
to know very well, and the implicit facts to be
recovered from Gildas' intensely political tract,
cannot be casual. The "fingerprint"
element, the peculiar feature that leaps to the
eye, is that, though the commons are entirely
powerless and in the hand of the two upper
classes, which alone determine the politics and
religion of the country, nevertheless they are not
slaves in law; they have, theoretically, the
rights of citizens - like the helpless native ciues
of Gildas. Gildas' society was related to the
Gaulish world of Caesar's day not directly, but
genetically; they were two historically separate
growths from a common origin, which I insist in
calling Celtic. And when we find an exactly
similar state of society, down to the peculiarity
of a class of freemen treated as if they were
slaves but legally distinct from slaves proper,
then we have to believe that this state of
society was a common Celtic one.
In Celtic society, wealth must
have always been bound up with the core of
society, that is the king. It was not, as it is
in a Roman or modern world, parcelled up,
invested in individual or juridical persons,
tradeable, and above all absolute: it was
fundamentally vested in the royal element of
society, however we see this element. The royal
element handed it down to its actual users, but
retained ultimate ownership and an absolute claim
to it. This claim to wealth is what Caesar saw as
being " crushed by debt, heavy taxation or
the pressure of more powerful people" - only
it was not contingent, but structural, a part of
the whole social world. All the lines of economic
power simply went back to the king or lord, to
the man in the Big House or the man who held the gwlad.
Archaeology shows that
Gildasian-age British courts tended to be at the
centre of trading networks: foreign merchants
went there and goods tended to be gathered there.
Whole animals, say archaeologists, were taken to
the royal fortress of Dinas Powys and butchered[27]. In Cadbury Castle, a
comparatively small excavation has discovered
over 160 sherds of imported pottery, but not one
local one; quantities justified only by
large-scale trade[28]. The Egyptian trading
ship described in the Byzantine Life of St.
John the Almsigiver naturally takes its cargo
to "the chief man of the district" when
it reaches Britain.
The heroic accounts of Celtic
princes feeding great retinues in their halls,
for as much as a whole year, have been seen as
reflections of their raiding and plundering
activities; the king was generous to his
followers out of the plunder he and they had
gathered. Professor F.J.Byrne calls heroic-age
kings "vainglorious parasites"[29], dependent for their
splendour on stolen goods. But that is the one
thing that Taliesin does not say of Urien;
rather, he describes him as having two
outstanding characteristics: Yt lad, yt gryc/
Yt vac, yt vyc/ Yt vic, yt vac/ Yt lad yn rac!:
"He kills, he hangs/ He feeds, he dispenses/
He dispenses, he feeds/ He kills in the
van!". The act of feeding followers and
scattering largesse is not dependent on the act
of fighting and raiding; it is an equal and
separate aspect of Urien's glory, which Taliesin,
with exquisite simplicity, places in an
inextricable opposition/connection with the
ferocity of his fighting strength. Fury and
nourishing generosity are the two opposite
aspects of the good king, woven together out of
antithetical elements like the coiling and
counter-coiling animals in an Irish book. As he
gathers, says another poem, he scatters, and so
does his son Owain in yet another.
What this means is that the wealth
of the kingdom all passes through the court of
the king, and is from there redistributed back
into society. There is archaeological evidence
for this: "the Mediterranean imports that
have been used to identify these high-status
settlements also found their way, though in fewer
numbers, to smaller rural settlements that were
seemingly farmsteads, trading posts and
industrial sites"[30].
Social anthropology calls this a redistributive
exchange system. According to a textbook[31], "in a redistributive
exchange system, one person or group
accumulates goods for the purpose of subsequently
distributing those same goods to members of the
society, including those who were the original
producers and contributors. While some form of
reciprocal exchange is found everywhere,
redistribution, a broader system, is usually
found in societies that have a hierarchical
sociopolitical system. In such a system there are
rules concerning the organization of labour and
the ownership of the products of labour, unlike
the rules of such societies as that of the !Kung
Bushmen, which are characterized by reciprocal
exchange. In the kingdom of Bunyoro in Uganda,
East Africa, for example, the king had the
authority to grant land to his subordinate
chiefs, who, in turn, gave the use of the land to
their subjects. In return, everyone was required
to give the king vast quantities of foodstuffs
and other goods, which the king then
redistributed to the people after keeping a share
for himself. The redistribution, however, was not
equal; a larger proportion of the goods went to
members of the royal family, to high-ranking
subjects, and to those who distinguished
themselves in military endeavours".
The Bunyoro are not the only model
of redistributive system: "More equal
redistribution exchange occurs in a number of
Pacific island societies also ruled by a king or
chief. The Buin, for example, live on the island
of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. The Buin
collect herbs, roots and berries, and also do
gardening. The main crops are taro, sago and
sugar cane. Barter is an important part of the
economic system. The main objects of value for
barter are pigs and shell money. Of these -
symbols of wealth - the chief "owns"
most of the pigs, but a system of redistributive
exchange works to insure that everyone gets a
more or less equal share of the pigs. In this
society, the chief is dressed and housed in a
manner somewhat better than, but essentially
similar to, that of his subjects..."
There is no trace of
egalitarianism in the Celtic system, in which it
is clear that the comitatus of the king,
poets like Taliesin, and favoured ecclesiastics,
get the best pickings. Gildas complains about
ecclesiastics accepting the tainted gifts of bad
kings; but the community he belongs to is itself
well off, surely as a result of royal gifts.
The royal claim to all the land's
wealth has a clear ideological justification: I
mean what is absolutely the best known and most
widely explored of all Celtic mythological ideas
- the sovereignty marriage, the king's wedding to
the land[32]. It may be said that
every Celtic king was inaugurated by being
ritually married to his kingdom, and every tribal
legend tended to centre on the marriage of a
prehistoric patriarch with the goddess of the
country. Dynastic legend after legend after
legend, from Scotland to Massilia, repeat with
infinite variations the image of the land as a
bride awaiting her manly and beautiful
bridegroom, the king; to the point where
mythographers have grown used to suspecting it
every time they meet scenes of marriage or even
adultery in any Celtic legend. There can hardly
be a known Celtic kingdom or royal family without
its tale of a king wooing and marrying a goddess
of the land, or else a heroine in whom such a
goddess can easily be discerned.
I mentioned earlier the importance
of dynastic change and renewal in the history of
Celtic kingdoms, and it is part of all the
legends of Sovereignty that Sovereignty can and
does change husbands. From this point of view,
the arrival of the Romans to the kingdoms of
Britain represents the arrival of more suitable
bridegrooms for the land. The land, it is clear
from the beginning, is to Gildas a different
entity from the British as a people (that is,
never forget, the British aristocracy); the
British he describes with contempt, but the land,
he all but sings about. It is clear that the land
of Britannia is not stained or shamed by the
unworthiness of its citizens; rather, we may feel
sure that she confers nobility to those who marry
her - and, in turn, has the right to expect
exceptional bridegrooms.
It is significant, from this point
of view, that Gildas clearly regards a king's
duty to marry and have a virtuous home life as
fundamental. Listen to his invective:
"Britain does have kings, but they are
tyrants, judges, but irreligious. They often
attack and take prey - from the innocent; they
offer lord’s protection and stand security -
for thieves and villains; they have as many
wives as they can - whores and adulteresses;
they often swear - and perjure themselves; they
make vows - and continuously, continuously lie;
they start wars - but civil and unjust; they
greatly pursue bandits all over the country - but
those who sit at their table, they don't only
love but reward; they give alms - but pile up a
mountain of crimes from the ground; they sit in
the seat of arbitration, but rarely ever search
the rule of right judgement; they despise the
harmless and humble, but raise to the stars their
proud, bloody, parricidal patrol-companions and
their God-despising adulterers (if Fortune, they
say, so wills), men whose very names ought to be
wiped out; they hold many men in chains in their
jails, not so often because they deserve it as
because of deceit...[33]"
This gives us a list of the duties
of a king in Gildas' world: to fight just wars:
to offer lord’s protection, stand security,
swear oaths[34] both for himself and for
his subjects; to give alms; to pursue bandits,
throw villains into jail, arbitrate in disputes -
and to have a wife and a clean home life. All
these obligations are on the same level. It is no
coincidence that, according to the penetrating
insight of the Reverend Hugh Williams
(Gildas’ last editor before M.Winterbottom),
it was the sequence of outrages against marriage
that joined together the five villains in
Gildas’ mind. “After waiting ten years,
his patience came to an end in the enormities
witnessed ‘this year’, when the prince
of Dumnonia, disguised as an abbot, murdered two
royal youths in the church. British law and
custom, as we know from the laws of [Hywel dda],
allowed divorce under conditions which the
Christian Church had no choice except to condemn[35]. Every one of these
five had been guilty of forcible divorce,
accompanied by other crimes, and the old cry
of Jerome against Roman imperial law repeats
itself in the work of a Briton: ‘The laws of
Caesars are different from those of Christ:
Papinianus says one thing, Paul another’[36]. [In other words,
Gildas’ treatise] is no empty declamation,
but a truthful man with instances of real
criminality before his eyes, becoming witness,
like one of the Hebrew prophets, and availing
himself of their words, for righteousness and
good living. We have before us, in fact, a page
in the large volume of the history of
morals…[37]”
This heartfelt testimony to the
honesty and courage of Saint Gildas (and it is
worth noting that those who study him the closest
- Williams, Winterbottom, myself - love him the
most; it is those who make superficial and
inattentive contact with him, who dismiss him)
misses however the importance of
“clean”, unchallenged marriage,
marriage as unchallenged sexual lordship, within
Celtic ideas; something of which Gildas is
consistently making use, to insist that his five
tyrants are no true kings - “they have as
many wives as they can - whores and
adulteresses…” - their kingship was
fouled at the source.
The Celtic king was an
arch-bridegroom, married to the land in a very
real sense. The King's power was a sexual power,
and if anyone proved able to seduce his bride, he
would have proved sexually more powerful than
himself - in other words, more royal. And from
this point of view it seems clear that Gildas'
adumbration of Britain the Bride, chosen and
awaiting her bridegroom, belongs to the same
theme, though he only hints at it. But there is a
marked difference between Gildas' figure of
Britain the Bride and such stories as the meeting
of the future Niall Noigiallach and the
Sovereignty of Ireland: Britain the Bride can
only be properly married to a Roman lord. Gildas
describes all the kings who ruled in Britain
before the coming of the Romans, without
distinction, as tyranni, and he is
followed by Nennius (ch.19) who says that the
kings of the British denied the Romans, already
lords of the world, the two attributes of a
Celtic high king - tribute (census) and
hostages (obsides) - because they were tyranni
et tumidi, tyrannical (or: teyrned)
and over-swollen. Gildas invests the Roman nation
with the attributes of royalty, and though he
does not show it married to Britannia, there can
be no other view.
It is easy to slip into loose talk
about "the Celtic goddess of
sovereignty", or even simply "the
goddess", as if there was only one, taking
infinite forms. In fact, the number of such
figures in Celtic legend is nearly infinite. And
what we have seen about the nature of kingdoms
tells us why: the king is married only to his own
kingdom, one out of many; and that kingdom is a
permanent reality in the world, with limits that
the wise should be able to determine beyond
dispute and for ever. It must follow that every
kingdom however big or small must have its own
Sovereignty, and that the Sovereignty of Ireland,
or of Tara, was only the greatest of a number of
definite goddesses, each with her own kingdom to
confer. The same, surely, must have been true for
Britain. Vagueness was not a characteristic
of the Celtic mind, though its categories are not
always those to which we are used.
The ultimate royal claim to the
wealth of the land, a claim that included and
transcended, rather than substituted, the claim
of every single individual, is clearly rooted in
this sacred marriage of the king to the land. As
all men are children of the land, the king is
their father and the land their mother; he has
the same ultimate claim as a father has over his
family, where, even if wealth passes through the
hands of his children, it still is ultimately
his. Caesar saw the ways in which this ultimate
possession worked, through a highly developed and
intensely felt complex of legal obligations -
typically Celtic in the importance it laid on law
- but he failed to understand it; six hundred
years later, Gildas gave us the bones of its
meaning in a few sentences, but, as the concepts
involved are so far from our own, we understood
him no better than Caesar.
The argument is long, but the
conclusion is simple. There is nothing whatever
in Gildas' depiction of society that is not
thoroughly Celtic, except the belief in suum
seruare ordinem, which he has probably
absorbed from Roman army textbooks. His
sociology, in its entirety, represents a reborn
and triumphant Celticism with little or no leaven
of Roman law or practice: even the place of the
Church is better explained by comparison with the
rank of the Celtic Druids than with the legal
powers and concessions that the likes of
St.Damasus and St.Ambrose won from Christian
emperors within the framework of Roman law.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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