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Chapter 3.1:
Reflections on Gildas' chapter 21
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Britain's strategic position after
410 was unpleasant. To the north she faced the
Picts, who had several times forced the Wall and
were, according to Gildas (probably quoting from
A), constantly bent on conquest. To the
west, the Irish may not have been as powerful as
the Picts, but they were perfectly capable of
raiding the island, taking large numbers of
slaves, and even occupying coastal strips. To the
east, seafaring Germanic tribes, though not yet
interested in settling in numbers, were more than
willing to go on fearsome pirate raids; and to
the south, neither the Empire, as long as it
remained a factor, nor the Franks which
increasingly tended to take its place, could be
regarded as well-intentioned to an independent
Britain. "The misfortunes of Britain"
seem to have become a cliché: mentioned by the
Gallic Chronicle of 452, they had by Procopius'
time found their way into the Sybilline Books,
the prophetic books of pagan Rome[1]. From the island of
tyrants, Britain seems to have become in popular
Roman imagination the island of the unfortunate.
Some of these misfortunes may have
been painted in grimmer colours than they
deserved. In its first thirty years of
independence, the island seems rather to have
been exposed to a drip-drip-drip of raids from
various directions, than to have suffered the
kind of vast settler invasions that tore the rest
of West apart. It is possible, indeed probable,
that the victory against A's Third Pictish
Invasion, discussed in the last chapter, put a
temporary end to any such threat, and without the
Picts to spearhead invasions, the Scots (Irish)
were not a serious danger. Constantius of Lyons
tells how the visiting Germanus of Auxerre was
present at the successful ambush of a barbarian
raiding party: the fact that the barbarians
turned and ran at a mere battle-cry (the
Christian shout "Alleluia!") suggests
that there weren't many and that they were not
looking for pitched battles - and would the local
Britons have invited the illustrious visitor to
the battle, as if to a fine entertainment, if
they thought the raiders dangerous?[2]
Why, if the lords of Britain
claimed some sort of pretender emperorship, no
British coins were issued in this period or
later, is a question I cannot answer. The most
suggestive theory known to me is over a quarter
century old, but I do not think it has been
superseded: it is that of Sheppard Frere in his Britannia.
“Between 378 and 388 there was a very marked
decline in the amount of new currency in
circulation, amounting almost to disappearance.
To some extent this was offset by the survival in
circulation of earlier issues; but even coins of
the house of Valentinian I are less plentiful in
the majority of British sites than those of
Constantius. Though coins of the period 388-402
appeared in somewhat larger quantity than those
of 378-388, there are very few sites where they
approach the proportions of previous decades; at
these sites, however, the percentage of
Theodosian bronze is very high. This indicates
that except at a few apparently exceptional
places, where business continued as usual, or
where money was changed for the collection of
taxation, the use of coinage for everyday
transactions decreased very notably during the
last twenty years of the fourth century, some
time before supplies were interrupted for good.
The reason may have been partly the inflation
which continued serious at this time, and partly
also the intermittent difficulty of obtaining
supplies of cash: for both these conditions would
favour the revival of barter. Indeed, this
tendency can be observed in western Britain as
early as the age of Valentinian I…”
“But another of the principal
factors influencing the decreasing availability
of coinage was implicit in the government’s
own attitude to currency. The foundation of the
fourth-century coinage was the gold solidus.
These coins were used for the payment of
government officials and the army, and it was a
main preoccupation of the state to recover the
gold thus issued. The bronze currency was used
for this purpose: the gold was recovered by
taxation (much of which had to be paid in this
metal) once it had been exchanged by its
recipients for the small bronze coins used for
everyday transactions. In general, then, the
government was concerned that enough bronze was
in circulation to recover the gold. But in
Britain from the time of Maximus the number of
troops on the payroll was greatly reduced, and
was shortly to be decreased even more
drastically. This must have meant a greatly
reduced dispatch of gold to Britain, and
consequently a greatly reduced dispatch of copper
too: for the government was less concerned for
the general utility of the currency as a means of
exchange than as a means of payment and taxation.
It did not therefore interest itself unduly in
the plight of provincials who found themselves
unable to obtain sufficient currency for everyday
purposes.”
“Sites in Britain yeld very
few copper coins minted after 402. Gold and
silver coins are, of course, very rare as
site-finds, but finds from hoards make it clear
that coins in these metals continued to arrive
down to about 406 and, in the case of silver,
rather later. It seems probable, then, that
payments in gold continued to be received down to
this date, but supplies of copper were judged
adequate without reinforcement from 402. Silver
may have continued to arrive, though in much
reduced quantity, after 406, because of the
importance of Britain as source of raw
silver.”[3]
“There had been a
reorganization of the western mints in 395, after
which Trier and Arles produced very little
bronze; but this reform did not have the
catastrophic effect on British supplies of coin
which was once imagined, since it has been
established that the mind of Rome increased its
output to counterbalance the reduction. Issues of
the Rome mint in bronze down to 402 are found in
some quantity in Britain, but thereafter the
supply ceased. Though Constantine III did issue
coins, these are very rarely found this side of
the Channel, and the later issues of Honorius are
virtually absent. From 407 Britain was in effect
without new coins of any kind. Thereafter the
existing coins continued to circulate, getting
more and more worn; but increasingly few people
found it necessary to use them. They were hoarded
instead…”
This picture raised few problems
as long as people thought - basing themselves on
Zosimus 6.5.3 - that Roman government collapsed
in Britain after 411. I, however, am certain it
did not; and therefore the lack of coinage is a
problem. To issue coins was a cherished
prerogative of an emperor and a regular step for
any pretender[4]. Perhaps the British
authorities did not want to irritate the Western
Emperor. Certainly they did not have moneyers;
the mint of London had closed long since, and
Constantine had to seize the ones in Trier and
Arles before he could issue coins for the
standard donatives to his men[5]. Perhaps, too, a
pragmatic decision was taken that minting was a
luxury that a new state with long and difficult
borders could do without.
After all, it does not seem to
have hampered their trade. Gildas, indeed,
describes the period that followed the victory
over the Picts as one of prosperity such as no
previous age had known. Archaeology confirms
that, in spite of the end of organized coinage,
the Rescript was followed by a marked economic
recovery: "Evidence now indicates that,
although these [military] shipments [from the
continent] ceased arriving at the [Roman army on
the] frontier by the beginning of the fifth
century, shipments of Mediterranean fine wares
and amphoras reaching Britain (as well as
Ireland) in the later fifth century actually revived."
Fifty years later, Constantius remembered the
Britain of Germanus' time (429-437) as "very
prosperous"[6].
An important point could be that
the most politically important use of money in
the Empire was to pay the army. Now it seems
possible that the independent Britanniae's armed
forces were paid in kind; certainly that was what
the authorities offered the Saxons when they
settled - Gildas speaks of annona (food
dues), Nennius of cibum et vestimentum,
food and clothing.
This may have had something to do
with the peculiar history of the northern
frontier, as hinted at by A. What A suggests,
both in terms of implicit assumptions and of
explicit narrative, is that, after Constantine
III, the chief burden of defence fell on the
semi-independent tribes beyond the Wall. In terms
of assumptions, A, reflecting the views of a
later age, saw the tribes beyond the Wall as the
natural defenders of (Roman) Britain against the
Picts; in terms of narrative, A describes them as
suffering the brunt of the Pictish invasion. If
the Picts mauled them as badly as A says, with
crowds of starving refugees, armies hiding in
caves and woods, the most infamous famine in
history, then they had no option but fight or
die. They would need no payment to do it; and
once the war was won, the first thing they would
need would be large quantities of food. This
might set a precedent; and the government might
have found it less difficult to set up regular
food collections than to go to the trouble of
minting money to pay for food that the fertile
south-east of Britain could grow, and which could
be directly collected by government tax agents.
Trade by exchange and unminted bullion might have
turned out to be simply more practical, even
assuming that buyers and sellers could not lay
their hands on ready stores of coin from the
emperors of Ravenna and Constantinople at need -
the Hoxne hoard suggests they could.
It is probably a related point
that the underlying economic realities of the
British frontier were very different from most
other Roman military borders. The Rhine and upper
Danube were already becoming what they have been
ever since, Europe's central trade routes, and a
money economy had prevailed across the Empire's
Asiatic and African borders since long before its
rise. But the money economy in highland Britain
was quite artificial, resulting entirely[7] from military payments;
if these ceased, the country might find it
neither hard nor painful to revert to a barter
economy.
Understanding that the burden of
the defence of what was still a Roman Britain
shifted, after the 410s, from an organized and
waged Roman army to a forward line of
Christianized Celtic tribes bound to the
Romano-British state by semi-feudal bonds and
links of mutual interest is essential for the
understanding of the archaeological records.
Extensive and laborious study of all Roman
fortifications shows that they ceased to be used
by 425; which, of course, would spell disaster -
and not “unprecedented prosperity” - if
it was held to show that no defence system
existed in Roman Britain by that time. But what
it does show, in fact, is simply that those
particular defences were abandoned; that is, that
the Roman state had settled upon a different
scheme for defence. And A, as I have said again
and again, tells us what that scheme was:
reliance on, support of, the tribal militias
immediately beyond the Wall, who had their own
reasons for hating and dreading the Picts, and
needed only a little encouragement to fight them.
Certainly the "unprecedented
prosperity" of ch.21 has nothing to do with
the terrible four years 406-410, during which
Constantine III's ostentatious minting activities
had not prevented what archaeologists call
"lawlessness and pessimism... conspicuous
clipping and hoarding of coins"[8]; and the fact that
Coroticus, who probably reigned in or near
Strathclyde, is treated by Patrick as not just a
Roman citizen, but a member of the Romano-British
state, even suggests some territorial expansion -
that Pictish victory again?
Gildas' extremely impressionistic
language appears therefore to agree with other
records. I already pointed out that ch.21, where
the "plague" of prosperity is
denounced, sounds exactly like a recasting from
some earlier religious writer inveighing at the mores
of his day. It describes the period before the
first Saxon rebellion with a confidence and
detail that would be out of place unless Gildas
had a contemporary source.
I will call this source E.
Ch.21 (E) follows straight on from
A's epic victory over the Picts, but there is
nothing epic about the state of society it
depicts. It does not look back on a moment of
glory in the distant past; it has the feel of a
moralistic sermon and clearly depicts situations
actually known to the author, beginning with a
sexual scandal. Gildas' purpose in quoting E is
to give a credible account of the reasons why
post-Roman Britain collapsed; but it is worth
noting that the chapter itself does not look
forwards to it. It works itself to a natural
climax in the description of a diseased state of
society, supported by a quotation from Isaiah
(21.6, quoting Is.1.4-6), and there is little to
indicate that the author saw worse evils ahead.
In ch.21, the diseased state of society is itself
the punishment of British evils. On the other
hand, the following ch.22, states that its
plague, not metaphorical but terrifyingly real,
is not the end of a diseased state of society,
but the premise to the long Saxon disaster, whose
description, I intend to show, comes from a
source quite different from E. In other words, I
believe, and intend to argue, that E wrote before
the Saxon revolt, perhaps even before their
settlement in Britain; and that ch.21 is a
summary of E’s writings, surrounded on both
sides by accounts culled from other sources.
Chapter 21 has a sentence that
absolutely begs to be explained in terms of known
events: ungebantur reges non per Deum sed qui
ceteris crudeliores exstarent; et paulo post ad
unctoribus non pro ueri examinatione
trucidabantur, aliis electis trucioribus:
"Kings were anointed not through God but for
standing out as crueller than the others; and
shortly afterwards, they were slain by the
anointers without an examination of the truth,
others still more grim having been elected."
This is in my view the only piece of British
history in Gildas earlier than the Rescript; and
what it is, is a strikingly appropriate
description of the British "year of three
emperors", 407AD, with the quick
enthronement and equally quick murder of the
pretenders Marcus and Gratianus municeps
(some sort of civil servant) and the temporary
success of Constantine III. We don't know whether
his government might indeed be called trux,
grim, and crudelis, cruel; but there is
evidence that his four years of rule - as I have
said - were terrible, a time of "lawlessness
and pessimism... conspicuous clipping and
hoarding of coins". The
"anointing" had certainly not been per
Deum[9]: the army had simply
acclaimed a pretender in the old historical
manner typical of so many Roman usurpations.
However, Gildas places the fate of
these Grim Kings, anointed without God's blessing
and murdered, somewhat later than the Rescript,
and together with a quite different sort of
usurpation. The text goes on seamlessly: ... aliis
electis trucioribus. Si quis uero eorum mitior et
ueritati aliquatenus propior uideretur, in hunc
quasi Britanniae subuersorem omnium odia telaque
sine respectu contorquebantur ..."...others
still more grim having been elected. If, indeed,
any of them appeared milder and in any way closer
to the truth, the hatreds and weapons of everyone
would turn towards him without consideration, as
if he were the overturner of Britain..."
The answer to that is in two
parts. First, what Gildas delivers in ch.21 is
indubitably a brief summary of far more extensive
work; not, for that matter, an organized history
or even pseudo-history such as A, but a quite
different sort of document, the kind of
moralistic polemic known to us from Salvianus,
St.Jerome, and indeed Gildas himself. In such a
polemic, historical cohesion might or might not
have a place, but there is no a priori
reason to expect the kind of care of a properly
historical account; and Gildas, ranging over it
in search of telling points, cannot have been as
careful to keep discrete items, such as
descriptions of the author's present and of the
recent past, as cleanly apart as a modern scholar
would like.
And there is a difference in tone
between the Grim Kings and that of the Mild King.
The former are historical rather than current:
ch.21 speaks in the voice of someone looking back
over a past, however recent, of usurpation and
military violence, looking at it as a whole:
"kings", in the plural, "used
to" be anointed and slain - again and again.
The immense unpopularity and eventual overthrow
of a particularly mild king, held, because of his
mildness, to be the ruin of Britain (hunc
quasi Britanniae subuersorem), on the other
hand, is a far more present and immediate matter.
Even through the medium of Gildas, a note of
personal indignation cannot be missed. It seems
almost as though the Grim Kings were invoked to
illustrate the injustice of the Mild King’s
fall; they, at least, got what they deserved; the
Mild King did not.
However, Gildas carries over from
the Grim Kings immediately, with no break
in continuity, to the Mild King's fall; the first
impression, despite the indignation, is that the
Mild King is only one of many anointed and slain
at the same time, the time of the Grim Kings.
There is no clear warrant for this
in Gildas' words, but I believe he may have
warped E's time sequence by stressing the
connection between the fate of the Grim Kings and
that of the Mild King. From a literary point of
view, Gildas' one sentence about the Grim Kings
leads up to, and underlines, the rather longer
and considerably more passionate treatment of the
Mild King's undeserved fall; which, in turn,
leads in to a wider picture of the triumph of
evil over good. ...sine respectu
contorquebantur; et omnia quae displicuerunt Deo
et quae placuerunt aequali saltem lance
pendebantur, si non gratiora fuissent
displicentia. Taking the passage as a whole,
there is a clear progression from the anointing
and murder of the Grim Kings, through the
rejection of the Mild King, to the complete
triumph of relativism and - implicitly - of plain
evil: "(1) Kings were anointed not through
God but for standing out as crueller than the
others; and shortly afterwards, they were slain
by the anointers without an examination of the
truth, others still more grim having been
elected. (2) If, indeed, any of them appeared
milder and in any way closer to the truth, the
hatreds and weapons of everyone would turn
towards him without consideration, as if he were
the overturner of Britain; (3) and all the things
that had pleased God and all the things that had
displeased Him weighed equally in the balance,
unless indeed the displeasing ones pleased them
more..."
Indeed, the whole chapter forms
such a progression. Gildas starts from a
description of a diseased state of society,
brought about by excessive prosperity, in which
sexual sin is indulged shamelessly. Other sins
are equally rampant, but the foremost of all (praecipue)
is an intellectual sin: the genuine, Satanic
revolt against the good and true, the preference
for wickedness and corruption - so he describes
it - and the positive welcome to evil, admitted
into the country on a footing of equality with
good. It is at this point that the Grim Kings are
brought in, as the first of three steps to
universal dissolution. The second step is the
overthrow of the Mild King, as we have seen; and
the third is the triumph of universal relativism
- things pleasing and displeasing to God being
treated as exactly of equal value. This implies
not only an ideology, but a definite succession
in time. The Grim Kings, ruling in an atmosphere
of moral provisionality and terror, are the first
stage on the road to ruin; but the decisive stage
is the overturning of the Mild King, and it is
after he is overthrown that relativism celebrates
its public orgies. After this comes the climax of
the chapter, which, typically for Gildas, takes
the form of an extended quotation from Isaiah
denouncing the moral and material diseasedness of
Israel; and after this the despairing note that
the Church, from which one ought to expect
relief, is sunk in torpor and drunkenness, and
far too concerned with greedy legal quarrels
ending in most dubious judgements - a dreadful
picture of worldly, indifferent prelates
concerned only with their own wealth and status,
allowing the one king who was "closer to the
truth" to become the butt of the whole
nation's hatred.
It follows that E was committed to
the Mild King and regarded his overthrow as a
disaster for "truth". We have to regard
the whole polemic as a defence of the Mild King;
his undeserved fate must be the centrepiece of
E’s denunciation of British society. The
centrality of the values of loyalty and
disloyalty to E’s polemic suggests one
reason to bring in the Grim Kings: E may have
used the awful history of the British year of
three emperors, whose horrors, though a few
decades away, must have been present to
everyone's minds, as a fitting instance of the
"British vice" of rebellion and
treachery (an argument that would appeal to
Gildas) and of the evils that follow it; and for
this reason may have stressed the British element
of the usurpations, even to the point of not
making it clear that the kings in question were
in fact Roman imperial pretenders. On the face of
it, the parallel is clear: an a fortiori
argument that, just as Marcus and Gratianus had
been killed for being – shall we say –
“soft”, so the current king had all the
hatred of the country for being milder and
"closer to the truth" - more religious
- than the average.
As this is probably the most
difficult and subjective argument in this whole
study, I had better set out in clear my reasons
to separate chronologically Gildas' Grim Kings
and his Mild King:
a) my belief that that already
examined first sentence - ungebantur reges non
per Deum sed qui ceteris crudeliores exstarent;
et paulo post ad unctoribus non pro ueri
examinatione trucidabantur, aliis electis
trucioribus - must be describing the year of
three emperors, while we may be sure that E wrote
somewhat later, in the post-Roman period. Gildas
dates him for us, by asserting that his was a
truthful description of the political and moral
landscape after the defeat of the Picts, but
before the plague and the Saxon settlement[10];
b) the different tone adopted in
the description of the Grim Kings, regarded as
one common massa damnata, treated in bulk
and awakening more contempt than indignation, and
the anger roused by the fate of the Mild King;
c) the curious phrasing of the
sentence that follows: Si quis uero eorum
mitior et ueritati aliquatenus propior uideretur,
in hunc quasi Britanniae subuersorem omnium odia
telaque sine respectu contorquebantur;
"If indeed any of them [=contemporary kings]
seemed more mild and closer to the truth, the
hatred and the weapons of everyone were twisted
against him without respect, as if he were the
ruin of Britain". This does not describe an
assassination, such as the Grim Kings suffered;
rather, it suggests the placing of extreme
political pressure upon the king by the mass of
the nation, backed by the threat and perhaps the
reality of armed revolt. It is not said that the
Mild King died, only that he was universally
hated. This is the more significant since Gildas,
and certainly E before him, is trying hard to
assimilate the fate of the Mild King to that of
the Grim Kings; the fact that the Mild King is
not said to be murdered leaps to the eye and
demands explanation.
d) Following from the previous
point, there is the matter of a completely
different mental landscape. The Grim Kings live
in an atmosphere of usurpation and violence, in
which the solution to an inadequate king (or at
least, a king perceived to be inadequate) is to
cut the so-and-so's throat; the Mild King lives
in an atmosphere in which political pressure is
used to force him off the throne - an atmosphere
of law, if not of order. This agrees with the
atmosphere E describes within the Church. The law
is the dominant feature; lawsuits, he says, are
everywhere; everyone, including the church,
coveting everyone else's land and property, makes
up spurious legal claims to it. In the world of
the Grim Kings, it would not have been necessary
to bring any political pressure on the Mild King;
but he lives in a world of politicking and
immoral manipulation of documents and claims - in
other words, a world of peaceful and settled
order.
If, therefore, the Grim Kings and
the Mild King belonged to separate periods, this
raises again the question of Gildas' treatment of
sources. E comes to us through the medium of
Gildas, who has to connect him with A, the Letter
to Agitius, and a few other sources; does he have
the instruments to make proper connections, or do
we have to look at each of his sources with the
suspicion that he may have placed it out of order
and made false connections? In at least two
cases, we know that this is exactly what he has
done. He has connected - though probably not
without encouragement from A itself - A's notice
about the arrival of Christianity in
"Britain", after the Second Roman
Invasion, with the rise of Christianity itself in
the reign of Tiberius, thus backdating the event
A actually described by more than three hundred
years; the point here being not so much that he
should have known better - since he had no way of
understanding the real origin of A's legends - as
that he had not scrupled to impose an arbitrary
synchronicism on two separate strands of
material, thus making Christianity reach Britain,
under Tiberius' supposed imperial protection, at
a time when Britain was not even conquered (which
also led him to placing the martyrdom of St.Alban
in Diocletian's time, a dating which most church
historians doubt). And as Morris and
Sims-Williams point out, he has misdated the
Letter to Agitius.
Gildas quotes a fragment from
"letter to Agitius", a diplomatic
missive in the formal style, sent from an
unidentified group of British leaders to Aetius;
and his use of it proves that he was not able to
deal with quite simple and ordinary Roman
chronological data. Every scholar since Bede
knows it: the Letter is addressed to Agitio
ter consuli, "Aetius three times a
Consul", which meant that it cannot be dated
earlier than his third consulate (446). Anyone
able to interpret Roman consular list would have
understood this as a matter of course. It is not
just a matter of not having access to a
consular list: Gildas, who claims to have been in
correspondence with overseas centres of learning
in pursuit of historical data, could easily have
procured what was, after all, one of the most
basic tools of Roman scholars. It is that Gildas
simply had no idea of it, and therefore, being
unable to read what was in front of his eyes, he
"dated" the Letter, if anything so
vague may be described as dating, to the
"third" Pictish invasion of A - when
Aetius was a child.
I believe that Gildas could not
reckon years chronologically. There is not so
much as one definite date in all his work; I mean
an absolute date, rather than one relative to
another, as when he claims that Badon Hill took
place 44 years and one month before, because he
was born then. What is more, he was not alone.
Some contemporaries had heard of consular dating,
but it can be shown that they had no idea of the
skills involved. An inscribed stone at Penmachno
in Snowdonia is dated In tempore Iustini
Consulis - about 540, Gildas' time; but its
formula is doubly unorthodox, first because it
mentions only one consul, and second because the
expression in tempore... for a consulate
is unusual and too vague (it might even suggest
that the scribe did not know that the Consulate
was annual). In other words, this is not the
product of a correct Roman reckoning of years in
the proper manner and with the proper formula,
but of someone who had heard the name of the year
in a language other than Latin - either in
proto-Welsh or, more probably, in Greek - and
translated it back into Latin as his language of
government. The Penmachno Stone's language is
described as "magniloquent", influenced
by Byzantine models[11]; it suggests, in other
words, an education not unlike that of Gildas.
And yet the scribe of Penmachno had not
learned the ordinary Latin usage for consular
years; he had had to re-learn it from Greek
visitors who still had Consuls in their New Rome.
Gildas' education did not help him to understand
the meaning of Agitio ter consuli, and
while his fellow-Educated Briton in Penmachno
could have given him a pointer, he was only a
little further along.
Gildas' ignorance of chronology
cannot be sufficiently emphasized. Where the
habit of chronicle-writing and time-measuring has
taken root, it is bound to affect the whole cast
of mind, bubbling up in all sorts of casual
remarks and unexpected connections. In his
mobilization of the Latin language, Gildas leaves
no literary device known to him unused; notice,
for instance, his brief but telling burst into
interlinear Biblical commentary in 62.2-5, where
he starts on a line-by-line interpretation of the
opening words of the Wisdom of Solomon, both to
show that he could do it, and to point out how
far short of the ideal of a Solomonic good prince
his contemporary kings fall. A man who makes such
sharp rhetorical use of a rather dry scholarly
procedure is not going to pass up dates and
places; but he never mentions them. He knew
Rufinus, a historian in the classical manner; he
may have known entries, at least, of chronicle
historians such as the author of the Narratio;
but he virtually ignored the chronological
element in both. Like Nennius failing to
understand the actual meaning of Roman power over
British wealth, these things were not part of his
mental landscape, and he simply failed to see
them for what they were.
This underlines the importance of
such people as Nennius and his predecessor, the
author of the Annales Romanorum. As I
pointed out, these Dark Age Welsh scholars took
upon themselves to reconcile Classical and native
traditions; I believe that can be explained by
the impact of the annalistic tradition, finally
registering on the consciousness of the Welsh
monastic communities - possibly long after Gildas
was dead. Gildas’ writing shows evidence of
a very high cultural level, but no evidence of
annalistic skills; but in 830, Nennius, though in
many ways less learned than Gildas, is absolutely
dominated by the chronological frame of mind. The
Historia Brittonum is framed by a series
of chronological calculations, so much so that
one almost gets the feeling that the narration is
an excuse to mention people and things involved
in its time-reckonings. As for his nameless
predecessors, the name alone of the Annales
Romanorum, let alone the obviously annalistic
source from which it drew its properly Roman
material, suggest that its Welsh author was
conversant with annalistic time-reckoning.
There is an alternative possible
explanation, to do not with time but with place.
Welsh tradition uniformly made Gildas a son of
Caw of Prydyn, a king in Strathclyde. Now, there
is at least one lost document that originated
almost certainly in Strathclyde, written more
than a century after Gildas, which also shows
evidence of ignorance of chronology: the
so-called “Northern memoranda” from
which Nennius drew his “North British
section” a probably reliable account of
North British history, covering material from
about 550 to about 685, and written no later than
780. Its defining feature is that it was reliable
as a narrative but without chronology, so that
Nennius hardly tries to harmonize them with his
other time schemes – and when he tries, he
fails (e.g. with Eata Glynmawr). Professor
Dumville insists that these were in fact annals;
but, if they were, they must have been so
clumsily written as to deny Nennius any hook both
in the rest of his Welsh historical knowledge and
in the Anglo-Saxon annals to which he also
resorted. I think it is easier to imagine that
they amounted to a number of historical items,
with no clear dates except perhaps for a certain
idea of their succession[12]. They come to an end in
the memorable year 685, in which the Northumbrian
rule over north Britain collapsed and Strathclyde
recovered her independence, which suggests that
they were originally written down shortly after
and with some sort of apologetic or
propagandistic goal in mind (not unlike Gildas
himself), and may perhaps not have paid much mind
to the niceties of time-reckoning; but what their
existence seems to show is that more than a
century after Gildas, it was possible, in
Strathclyde, to produce some sort of historical
writing that did not involve any chronology
– unimaginable to anyone whatever involved
in the study of history anywhere in the
post-classical tradition. Strathclyde was both
the last surviving part of the British old North,
where I have suggested Gildasian-age culture came
from, and Gildas' own homeland.
To us, ignorance of chronology is
a wholly alien condition: we have had a sequel of
certain and inarguable dates drummed into us from
the moment we first learned to read, so that the
skill of chronology is as familiar as the
alphabet. We cannot easily imagine the condition
of a powerful and elaborately educated mind with
no chronology. Yet nothing is more important to
understand Gildas' picture of history. That mind
so large, so brilliantly articulate, so capable
of able and elaborate writing, had no space for
the measured passage of time. It is not that he
has no notion of stages in the past - this came
before that which came before the other - so much
as that he has no instrument, except for his own
reason and the various teachings handed down to
him, to properly arrange his information.
Many scholars have failed to
appreciate the point; and if it vitiates some of
the arguments of such a learned and careful man
as Dr.Snyder - who cannot break himself of the
habit of speaking as if Gildas was a late Roman
with Aurelius Victor and the Codex
Theodosianus in his blood - on the other hand
it leads John Morris to fatally underestimate his
value as a witness.Morris speaks as though Gildas
knew nothing else than oral accounts of the past
and could only be trusted with matters within
living memory; a theory contradicted, if nothing
else, by Gildas' knowledge of the Rescript of
Honorius and the Letter to Agitius, two
first-class historical documents, the latter
preserved by no other historian. Ch.21 is recast
from a written source; Gildas had read somewhere
that in 410 Britanniae sublatae nomini Romano
in aeternum fuerunt - read it, not heard it;
and he was familiar with several other pieces of
British writing, some of which indubitably went
back to the previous century.
When we realize that Gildas,
taking into account the legendary nature of some
of his sources, is trustworthy in most things except
in time reckoning, we are almost home. We can
picture him sitting down to write with several
scrolls and/or codices in front of him, all open
at various points, and his beloved Bible in the
middle - drawing up schemes for the succession of
events, not in the manner of a historian
establishing a time scheme, but of a novelist
designing a plot; or rather, of a lawyer setting
out an argument. This was his skill; chronology,
alas, was no part of it. Therefore he built a
scheme more ideological than chronological,
placing events at the stage where they seem to
him to make the most sense (and to come most
tellingly together to prove his theses). For
instance, he knew of two Pictish invasions
stopped by the Romans after heart-rending British
appeals for help; what is more natural than that
he should place the Letter to Agitius, an
unquestionably authentic such appeal, at the
third Pictish invasion - the one that the British
eventually repelled by themselves, trusting to
the Lord? The sequence teaches an instructive
lesson about military courage, national
self-reliance and trust in God: the British
prayed to Rome for help against their eternal
enemies; Rome refused; then, on the brink of
enslavement and destruction, they prayed to God -
and began to prepare for battle; and as everyone
knows, God helps those who help themselves. It
only happens to be, alas, as factually wrong as
so many other schemes of intellectual
interpretation of history, up to and including
our current orthodoxies. It was not from the
Picts that the British sought protection from
Aetius, it was from the Saxons.
I conclude that there is nothing
to deny that E was referring to the "British
year of three emperors". Gildas used his
narration, visibly closer to events, to follow
the more distant and "historical"
narration of the Three Invaders of Britain and
the Three Pictish Invasions. In the process he
produced a chronological mess, yet another,
placing the "year of three emperors"
later than the end of Roman Britain, which has
misled readers ever since; and making it
contemporary with another story of usurpation, a
political coup against a mild king, which in my
view took place much later and in a changed state
of society. We must get used to Gildas making
havoc with dates because of inadequate
information, no chronology, and a too intense
interpretative imagination.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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