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Chapter 6.4: The
origin of Hengist's legend
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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One thing that becomes
increasingly clear as we reflect on the Irish and
Welsh stories is that, while there is a place for
Ronwein in the comparison, there is none at all
for Hengist. The great fortress is built
against an unnamed mass of Saxons. No parallel
whatever exists in the story of Becuma for
Hengist and Horsa giving Ronwein away. And even
though the Irish legend does feature a
devastating invasion from overseas (from Britain,
natch), and though I believe that the reason for
said invasion - the violent controversy within
Munster - is late and adventitious, nevertheless
there is nothing whatever to parallel any of the
circumstances associated with the Saxon host: the
host of Beine Brit does not come in feigned
peace, does not first claim an under-kingdom in
Ireland - comparable to the taking of Kent from
Gorangonus - whether as bride-price for Ronwein
or for any other reason - does not revolt against
an Irish over-lordship as the Saxons do against
the British, does not indulge in any negotiations
at any point, and does not assassinate the elders
of Ireland. And conversely, neither of the purely
Anglo-Saxon sources for Hengist and Horsa, Bede
and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, know
anything about Ronwein; while on the other hand Ronwein
baganes, Ronwein the pagan woman, turns up as
Vortigern's seducer, unaccompanied by any
kinsman, in the Trioedd Ynis Prydein[1], and a frequent bardic
Welsh usage - which we would naturally assume to
be archaizing - calls the English "children
of Ronwein"[2]. This suggests that an
early layer of tradition, now lost, saw Ronwein
as the ancestor of the English nation: a
concept not compatible with, but rather
alternative to, the account of Hengist and Horsa
taking to Britain a Saxon tribe already formed[3].
Hengist's war against the British
is told more or less in the same terms in two
separate accounts, Nennius and the Saxon
Chronicle (henceforth ASC). That detail is
deceptive. Fifth-century English settlers were,
to the best of our knowledge, illiterate, at
least in their own language. One may suspect that
merchants or ambassadors may have familiarized
themselves with Latin writing, but the Teutons of
Kent are hardly likely to have had state archives
or durable records before 597[4]: and Hengist's war
against Vortimer is supposed to have taken place
after 442 - 150 years earlier, too long for
living memory. On the British side, any source
would have been in Latin. Kent must have been one
of the most thoroughly Latinized countries in
Britain. One fact proves it: according to
linguists[5], the name of Dover,
which was originally the plural of the very
common Celtic word dubr/dwyfr,
meaning water, passed into English with a
plural stem but an unchanged root. That is, the
first English settlers knew that the name of the
place was a plural, but did not know what it
meant, and simply turned into a plural, in their
own language, the unchanged root dubr.
In other words, Kent's first Saxon settlers could
not find anybody to tell them that the name of
the place meant nothing else than "the
waters"! Clearly, they only spoke with
people who spoke Latin. And it follows that
the Welsh names used by Nennius, in particular
that of the supposed lord of Kent Gorangonus or
Gwyrangcon, cannot be historical. Any
"lord of Kent" of the period would have
borne a Latin name and spoken Latin. The
rank and powers suggested for Gwyrangcon, apparently a local
kinglet of the usual Celtic type, are equally
unacceptable in this most Romanized ciuitas
of the Romanam insulam, at a time when the
Britanniae and Roman law were still
tangible realities. In other words, the
events Nennius supposes to have taken place in
Kent in the fifth century come, in fact, from a
Dark Age Welsh mentality.
Therefore the Nennian/ASC account
of war in Kent cannot be historical. It is
not even credible. They claim it was fought
between Hengist and Vortigern's heroic son
Vortimer, and, to all appearances, in Kent alone.
This will never do. Gildas, whose
reliability has been proved again and again,
states explicitly that the war raged from the
North Sea to the Irish Sea. (In one of his
most hilarious asides, Morris, who takes the
historicity of Hengist for granted, simply says
that "no account survives of the fighting
north of the Thames"!) And this
territorial restriction, coupled with Nennian
triumphalism - multiplied, if anything, by
Geoffrey - means that we get a thoroughly
un-Gildasian picture of the British continuously
attacking, driving the Kentish Teutons
practically into the sea, besieging them three
times in their island refuge of Thanet, and of
Hengist's people only surviving the storm thanks
to the help of repeated drafts of allies from the
Continent; all this under the leadership of the
heroic brothers Vortimer and Catigern, whose
names, are clearly built as calques on that of
their "father" Vortigern - a name,
itself, which was no more than a later racial
insult aimed at the usurper's memory! If
anything could more clearly show that Vortimer
and Catigern are legendary figures and in no
sense historical, I cannot think of it. Not
only is this legend: it is legend with no
discernible leaven of fact.
The three sieges of Thanet are
interesting in that there is evidence that the
siege of the invading English in an island was
part of a set of legendary ideas that could be
located anywhere off the coast of Britain. According
to Nennius, a fantastically unlikely coalition of
British kings besieged the northern English in
Metcaud, identified with Lindisfarne, until the
villain of the piece, Morcant, murdered the
leader - none other than our old friend Urien.
Some historians have believed this to be
historical, and it must be admitted that there is
more excuse in this case than in that of Hengist
and Horsa; but it is a legend all
the same. It would be more credible if it
involved more names, and less familiar ones.
The allies are Urien, Gwallawg, Rhydderch and
Morcant. Two of these are known to us from
the poetry of the historical Taliesin, two -
Rhydderch and Morcant - from the hagiography of
St.Kentigern of Glasgow: and in both cases there
are glaring unlikelihoods. Nennius claims
that Urien was the leader of the alliance; but we
have seen plenty of reason to believe that
Gwallawg was superior in rank - Gwledig as
opposed to theyrn - and even that he was
the lord of one Owein, probably Urien's son.
Do we believe for a minute that he would leave
the command of the army in the hands of a
northern cateran like Urien? And for that
matter, if the Owain of Mon of the Taliesin poem
is in fact Urien's son, then the likelihood is
that Urien was dead as Gwallawg reigned.
And this leads us to the small
matter of Urien's supposed murder. We have
seen that Taliesin's Conciliation of Urien
shows fairly clearly that the poet's hero had
grown old and no longer could fight; in an age in
which commanders - especially Urien himself,
Taliesin's splendidly vigorous hero who would
strike an enemy wherever he appeared - mounted on their
horses and fought with their men, this makes it
unlikely in the extreme that he could lead a
large army in a major war, and he certainly would
be unlikely to rouse what Nennius says was
Morcant's envy "because in this one, of all
the kings, was the greatest virtus in
designing war". Some of
Taliesin's poems - in particular his Keening
of Owain and The battles of Gwallawg -
hint at a situation where Urien no longer lived
and Owain was teyrn. Pacified and
de-powered by age, there is no reason to believe
that Urien did not die in his bed; all the
beautiful poems written by later poets, bewailing
the great fall of Urien and Rheged, are no more
than literary performances, informed by
embittered Welsh nationalism.
In fact, there seem to have been
at least four separate stories of the fall of
Urien: 1) that of Nennius, with Morcant as
murderer in the course of the siege of the
English in an island; 2) that of the Llywarch Hen
cycle, in which Urien's unnamed cousin, the poet
himself, beheaded him in the course of a
miserable family feud; 3) that in which he is
slain by two historical northern lords, Cynon mab
Clytno Eidyn and Dyfynnwawl mab Mynedawc Eidyn; and, 4), that which
featured one Llovan Llawdyvro or "Exiled
hand", who killed him at Aber Lleu,
"the river-mouth of the god Lug/Lleu",
which belongs to a set of legends in which a
figure or avatar of the supreme god Lug features
as avenger in a blood feud.
What are we to make of this,
except that there was no known story of the death
of Urien? These are facts of the same order
as the incorporation of Urien and Owain the
Arthurian cycle: the claiming of a famous hero
for a given period or legend cycle, according to
someone's interests or prejudices. By the same
token, Molly Miller showed that Urien had been
artificially inserted into the genealogy of the
Gododdin, whose kings claimed
descent from one Coel Hen: again, this is in the
context of the huge legendary importance of this
tribe, from which the poetry of Neirin and the
first royal house of Gwynedd had come. According
to Molly Miller, the siege of Metcaud is unknown
to Wales, belonging exclusively to the British
north, i.e. Stratchlyde; in Wales, we find Urien
in the Llywarch Hen cycle; on the continent, in
the Arthurian, probably from Breton originals.
Each British province assigned the hero to a
different heroic cycle. What we are to make
of this is obvious; Urien was pulled this way and
that by conflicting legendary and dynastic
claims, one group inserting him in the popular
legend of Llywarch Hen, another in the genealogy
of the Gododdin; he had no clear legend-cycle of
his own except what he got from being identified
with a pagan god. Urien was a prestigious
name - but only a name; thanks, no doubt, to his
wisdom in employing the man who became the
standard for Welsh poetry, the historical
Taliesin.
As for Morcant and Rhydderch, the
problem is that the likeliest candidate to be
identified as "that" Morcant is a
generation older than Rhydderch. According
to the Life of St.Kentigern,
"Morken" had a violent conflict with
the saint - who was bishop of Strathclyde in the
future town of Glasgow - in the course of which
he providentially died; but his grieving friends
ran Kentigern out of town. Some
considerable time later, the young Rhydderch came
to the throne and summoned the exiled bishop
back. To find Morcant and Rhydderch, kings
of Strathclyde in succession, as independent,
contemporary and allied kings, is surprising in
the extreme. I ought to say, however, that
the identification of the Morken of the
hagiography with the Morcant of Nennius is
anything but certain: that mighty expert Molly
Miller identifies him with one of two separate
Gododdin princes, grandfather and grandson.
In view, however, of the villainous character of
the Stratclyde Morken in the Life of Kentigern,
which corresponds to nothing known to me in the
admittedly scanty data about the Gododdin Morgan
I and II, I would much rather see the former as
the legendary killer of Urien - granting, of
course, that he is to be identified with any of
them rather than with any other, completely
unknown figure of traitor. After all, more
sixth-century British history has perished than
has been preserved.
Whatever the case with Morkent,
however, I think there is reason to see the
Nennian story as late and artificial, designed by
someone with very little idea of Gildasian-age
realities, who does not understand that a gwledig
would not follow a theyrn and that
Gwallawg was probably not Urien's contemporary.
Nor is the location anything but unlikely:
Lindisfarne did not become a place of any
importance until St.Aidan set up his lonely
monastery on it, more than a century after the
first English settlements in the north; and Aidan
picked it exactly because - in the Irish
tradition of island monasteries - it was lonely,
inhospitable and remote. What are the odds
of it having been an English invasion
headquarters?
What we have, then, is two legends
of British heroes besieging the English on an
island off the British coast, only for the
British chief hero to be treacherously murdered
on the verge of victory. Vortimer besieges
the English in Thanet "three times";
Urien does so in Lindisfarne, "three days
and three nights". I will add one
point: Nennius claims that the English came
originally "from the isle Oghgul"
across the ocean (Nennius rather absurdly borrows
the over-elegant trans Tithicam uallem
from Gildas, another of his schoolboy
imitations). But whether or not the
English, or a large body of them, came originally
from Angeln in Jutland, we may be sure
that they came from no island. What is
more, they themselves did not believe so: unlike
the Goths, who did claim to come originally from
an island in the ocean, the English regarded
the continental region of Old Saxony as their
home. In other words, this is a piece of
British legendry, placing the origin of the hated
barbarians in some island in the ocean, not at
all unlike, in fact, the Irish picture of the
demonic Fomoire. It was in this island Oghgul
that some ancient body of Britons was held to
have once besieged the barbarians' first
ancestors; and I further surmise
that the story was originally vague and
unconnected with any recognizable historical
period, since it could be borrowed with the same
ease to glorify both Urien and Vortimer. It
is reminiscent of the Irish story of the assault
of Conan's Tower, in which the people of Ireland,
after driving the demonic invading Fomoire from
the island, besieged them in a crystal tower in
an island in the ocean, until besieged and
besiegers both were swallowed by the waves.
Now the isle of Thanet also turns
up in the legend of Hengist and Horsa, but it is
used differently. It is the first territory
granted Hengist by Vortigern. The legend
does have a clear geographical picture, if
totally incompatible with that of Gildas, and -
unlike the British material - we need not doubt
that the story means to make Hengist and Horsa
possess Thanet and no other island. According to
Nennius, Vortigern granted them first Thanet, and
then, over the head of its current ruler
Gwyrangcon, the whole kingdom of Kent. Hengist
then got Vortigern to send his brother Octha in a
mission to Northumbria; finally, he had an
open-air meeting with the king, at which he
destroyed all his (Vortigern’s) elders, but
ordered that not a hair on his head be touched -
and had vast tracts of land handed over,
"for the salvation of [Vortigern's]
soul". But all these steps, except the
last, are the result, not of force and illegal
seizure, but of perfectly legal royal grants:
first Thanet; then, after an appreciable passage
of time, the whole of Kent; then Northumbria;
then most of the rest of the future England.
Only then does force come into play, and even so,
it is not the force of war, but rather another
royal grant - though one extorted at the point of
a Saxon knife.
It cannot be a coincidence that
the progress of Hengist mirrors point by point
that of St. Augustine, first Archbishop of
Canterbury. Aethelberht, king of Kent and
(it was claimed) Breatwealda or high king
of the English, admitted him as a territorial
bishop within his kingdom, but he didn't at first
allow Augustine or his followers on the mainland.
He ordered him to reside in Thanet, a peculiar
territory, easily reached from Canterbury yet
isolated by the sea, central yet peripheral, as
it were. The magical significance of this
is fairly obvious, and it is reinforced by Bede's
source, who describes the King refusing to stay
in an enclosed place with the Christian high
priest because he was afraid to be magically
ensnared if he did. And why not? Aethelberht
knew that Christian priests consecrated certain
buildings (churches), in which their God was held
to reside in a particular way; at least one such
building, the ancient church of St. Martin, stood
just outside the capital; and he had in his own
court a consecrated Bishop, the Frank Liudhard,
house chaplain to his Christian Frankish wife.
Franks and Britons the King could handle; but
these new priests carried their magic direct from
Rome. They also bore - one wonders how
clear he was about the meaning of this - an
archiepiscopal title and the claim to rule every
Christian in the island; especially all those
free Britons who hated him and his whole race.
Of course he would want to be sheltered from any
maleficent influence.
From then on Thanet must have had
a special significance to the English in general
and the Kentish in particular. It was the
first place from which salvation dawned on them.
And it is easily seen that the progress of
Catholic Christianity in England is exactly
parallel to that of the English in the legend of
Hengist as we have it. First Thanet; then
Canterbury; all of it legally, all of it by the
gift of the local sovereign. And Bede's
source claimed that Aethelberht was a Breatwalda,
a high king over the whole island; in effect, a
successor of Vortigern. Therefore, when he
grants the missionaries entry into Kent, he is
granting them, like Vortigern, only a part of
what he is supposed to rule as overlord. The legend then
tells us that the most important of the early
English landings was that of Octha and Ebissa in
Northumbria, procured by Hengist by personal
pressure on Vortigern; parallel to the immense
importance of Paulinus' mission to Northumbria,
and, in and of itself, thoroughly unhistorical,
since English settlements north of the Humber in
the fifth century were quite insignificant, if
indeed they existed at all. Then there is a
great clash whose stake is nothing less than the
whole island, and the newcomers - the English
first, the Catholic missionaries after -
eventually triumph, in spite of a strong
resistance by a powerful "native"
element: Hengist and his successors triumph
against the Welsh; Augustine and his successors
triumph over the paganism of the English (and the
schism of the Welsh Christians).
Hengist does on the temporal plane
exactly what Augustine will do on the spiritual
level. Hengist destroys the powerful men of
Vortigern's kingdom in a meeting presided over by
Vortigern himself, but he actually gives an order
that not a hair should be touched on Vortigern's
head. Augustine, destroys the king's belief
in demons, on which Aethelberht's reign is
founded - beginning with an open-air meeting in
Thanet presided by the King - but does not touch
a hair on his head. In these early
centuries of Christianity, missionaries did not
doubt the existence and power of the pagan gods,
but regarded them as demons to be defeated in
spiritual battle; and it is clear that the
mission of someone like Augustine would be
regarded literally as the equivalent of a
military campaign against the evil spirits of the
Germanic North. And this campaign began,
like Hengist's conquest, from Thanet; which, as
in Hengist's case, was granted to the future
conquerors by the king himself. In both
cases, though for different reasons, the king may
be described as deluded; Vortigern is the
self-blinded king of a people ripe for
destruction; Aethelberht - until his baptism - is
dominated by demons. But their destinies
are opposite, Vortigern ruined, Aethelberht saved
- according, one supposes, to the design of God
to destroy one nation and elevate the other: Gesta
Dei per Anglos. The people who
identified Thanet with the landing place of the
legendary father of their race were placing the
latter within their own picture of the
providential design of God for the Angles; and,
incidentally, they were placing Kent at the heart
of it.
Even in Nennius, the parallel is
heavily signposted. When Vortigern, after
the destruction of his elders, surrenders vast
tracts of Britain to the Saxons, we are told that
he does so "for the salvation of his
soul", pro redemptione animae suae,
an expression which applies much better to
Aetheberht receiving Baptism from Augustine.
In other words, Nennius understood perfectly well
the analogy between the Kentish legend of Hengist
and Vortigern, and the story of Augustine and
Aetheberht. And if Nennius,
who hated the English and looked forwards to the
day when "God shall give aid" to the
exiled Britons in the sacred cause of throwing
them out of Britain, clearly understood it, then a
fortiori must the English have understood it!
What of the legend of Hengist,
then? One certain fact is that it cannot
possibly have been known in such terms in 597AD,
for Aethelberht would never have ordered
Augustine to dwell in Thanet - and his stay there
is historical - if the pagan King, so worried by
the magic of the incoming priests, had regarded
Thanet as the first British home of his
ancestors. Anywhere but there: to place the
alien wizard/priests in the place where the
national patriarch's virtue was first manifested
would surely have been the same as allowing them
a magical path to the complete conquest of
country and people.
It follows that this aspect, at
least, of the legend of Hengist, must date to
some time after the arrival of Augustine, to a
time when even Augustine's own journey had had
time to become a legendary event and a cultural
institution. It can hardly be earlier than
the final success of Christianity in Northumbria
(because of the Octha/Ebissa element). On the
other hand, in Nennius’ version, Hengist
does not end up ruling all of England; only Kent,
Essex, Sussex and Northumbria. Although
this picture corresponds to no known stage of the
growth of English Christianity, it might indicate
that it originated before the complete conversion
of the English. The great kingdoms of
Mercia and Wessex are conspicuous by their
absence; now Mercia was one of the last English
lands to be converted, and while Wessex became
Christian comparatively early, Nennius might have
confused it with Sussex, the last pagan kingdom,
still unconverted in the early 680s. This
would date the first written version of the
legend to something like the mid-600s, which, as
I will show, is likely on other grounds.
That all three battles credited to
Hengist take place in Kent suggest that the
original significance of the legend was purely
local. What is more, if his progression to
the fatal conference with the British elders
mirrors Augustine and Christianity's
"conquest" of England, then there is no
reason to accept that the conquest of Britain was
a part of whatever legend of Hengist and Horsa
pre-existed Christianization. Hengist began
as a Kentish local hero. Nor do we have any
actual reason to believe that his legend had any
original anti-Roman or anti-British content.
And having reason to reject his historicity in
the terms we have, we have no reason not to
reject it altogether. The kings of Kent did
not call themselves "Hengistings" but
"Oiscings", supposedly from a son or
grandson of his. This smells of
genealogical fiction a mile away, for if Hengist had
actually been the first king of Kent, his
successors would have been called Hengistings as
a matter of course. That would be the best
evidence that such a king existed; to the
contrary, the fact that the name of the dynasty
names its founder as Oisc denies Hengist
historical reality. The first English king
of Kent, at least from that particular dynasty,
was one Oisc; Hengist was a legendary figure.
Oisc is actually mentioned, with
the alternative spelling Ansehis[23], as the first Saxon
prince to settle in Britain, in the anonymous
Cosmography of Ravenna, a text which
pre-dates Nennius by almost 200 years. To
unravel the complexities of the anonymous
cosmographer's view of Britain would take more
knowledge of late-classical and early mediaeval
geographical lore than I have, or than I have
time or patience to acquire. But I think I
can make a guess as to the origin and reliability
of this peculiar piece of information.
I shall, under correction, take
the Cosmographer as a Latin-speaking member of
the clergy of Ravenna, writing in about 650AD.
The Europe of the time was no longer the largely
unified Roman cultural area it had been even a
century before. A process of
regionalization had taken place, due to several
factors: the Arab conquest disrupting seaborne
trade, the instability of Frankish politics, the
schism of insular Celtic Christians after Rome
sent an archbishop to the hated English, and the
intrusion of three aggressive and vigorously
independent groups of barbarians - the English
between the British and Gaul, the Longobards
between Catholic Byzantines and Catholic Franks,
and the pagan Slavs and Avars between Greece and
the West. At no time before or since have
the various areas that make up Western
civilization been so little able to communicate.
As an isolated outpost of the
Eastern Roman Empire, Ravenna must have
particularly suffered from this process; indeed,
the Cosmographer's work may well be seen as a
heroic attempt to hold on to the knowledge of a
wider world in a shrinking environment. The
city dominated the fertile but swampy lands south
of the mouth of the Po, but was surrounded west
and north by hostile Longobards. A thin
stretch of land, the Pentapolis, connected it
with Rome: otherwise, it was orientated wholly
towards the Byzantine East and South (itself in
the process of falling to the Arabs), with no
possible direct contact with the rest of Europe
except through Rome, then still a nominally
Byzantine province, and the Papacy, its effective
lords. Peace between Byzantines and
Longobards was not made until a few decades after
the Cosmographer wrote. We cannot imagine
any direct contact between Longobards and
Byzantines, especially since most Longobards were
still Arians, and therefore beyond the pale for a
Catholic ecclesiastic such as the Cosmographer;
and the Longobards would do everything in their
power to avoid any direct contact between Ravenna
and Frankland, seeing that the Byzantines had in
the past intrigued with the Frankish kings to
invade them.
Any information about Britain must
therefore have reached Ravenna either from the
Greeks or from the city of Rome. Now
Oisc/Ansehis was - on this there is no doubt - a
king of Kent. Which, therefore, of the two
possible sources was likelier to know about him?
By this time, Greek trade with Britain, so
vigorous in the previous century, had fallen off
to nothing; the various ports were falling to the
Arabs, and their trade being re-orientated
eastwards and landwards - for centuries, the
Arabs of North Africa showed little interest in
sea trade, and all their capitals were built away
from the sea. Therefore any
knowledge of Britain from Greek sources was bound
to be outdated and bookish; as is shown, indeed,
by the Cosmographer's long and uncomprehending
list of British place-names, clearly reproduced
from different sources. He manages to
reproduce the name of London twice, with slightly
different spellings.
It is however unlikely that he got
his mention of Ansehis from a Greek source.
Contact between Greeks and Saxons is highly
unlikely, both because the Saxons of Ansehis'
time were pagans, and more importantly because
they were closely connected with the traders of
Frisia and the Rhine, who remained pagans even
longer than themselves. Greek sailors would
not be welcome, and they could not compete.
All evidence of Greek trade is on the west of the
island and in the south of Ireland, in the
Christian, Celtic, Gildasian areas.
Papal Rome, on the other hand, was
the one European entity still defiantly resisting
the forces of regionalization and collapse.
The city's very reason to exist, now the Empire
was gone and Italy separated from her capital by
Longobard enemies, was to be the seat of the
Western Patriarchate; all Western episcopates
were not only in contact with her, but (at least
in theory) under her jurisdiction. And in
spite of the British schism, religious unity was
stronger in the West than it had been for
centuries; the Visigoths of Spain had long since
given up Arianism, the Longobards were on their
way, the Vandals no longer existed, and, more to
the point, English Britain was in the process of
being integrated into the Catholic West - a
process which had started from Canterbury in the
reign of an Oiscing.
Genealogical tradition makes Oisc
Æthelberht's grandfather through one Eormenric, but says nothing
whatever about what either of them ever did as
kings. This silence becomes particularly
suspicious when we realize that, by the time when
Augustine came to Kent, there must have been
plenty of living Kentish men who remembered the
king's grandfather. And the dates are also
almost impossible. John Morris, who (like
Tolkien) believed in a
historical Hengist, has to stretch the
generations to impossible lengths, making Oisc,
the grandfather of Aethelberht - who, as everyone
knows, reigned in 597 - suceed Hengist in the
late 400s! What on Earth is this, a dynasty
of centenarians? Sensible
reckoning means that Oisc must have conquered the
Kentish throne in the sixth century; and the fact
that nothing is preserved about how he won it,
and that an impossible genealogy was concocted to
make him the son of Hengist, means that, as with
all parvenus, there is something to hide.
Other royal houses, in particular Mercia's,
reckoned their ancestry back to Continental kings
with names such as Offa and Icel - hardly known
to us, but prestigious to them, and clearly
datable to the fifth century. The Oiscings
were a latecomer among English dynasties.
The date and the alienness of the
Oiscings suggests an identification. John
Morris, following a suggestion from his then
pupil Wendy Davies, argued, from a couple of
references in mediaeval compilations, for the arrival about
527 of a new wave of Teutonic invaders, turned
entirely against the already-conquered English
lands. Morris identifies them with settlers
in southern East Anglia, to whom he ascribes its
division into Norfolk and Suffolk - with Suffolk,
in defiance of natural geography, holding (to
this day) "the lands by the Lark" and
keeping Norfolk in strategic check. (Another
attractive suggestion of Morris' is that this was
caused in some way by British policy, calling in
this second wave of Teutons to take the English
in the back and weaken them.) But the
apparently traditional date for this invasion,
527, also seems an acceptable date for the
settlement of Oisc in Kent. There is no
reason why Morris' attractive conjecture should
not also be right; the text he reconstructs
speaks of a large number of nameless pagan tribes
without ranking kings (which corresponds with the
evident parvenu status of the Oiscings)
and there is no reason why both Suffolk and
Oiscing Kent should not have their origin in this
movement of tribes.
The fact that the Cosmographer
knows "Ansehis", and him alone, as a
"Saxon" king and conqueror in Britain,
clearly points to a situation where contact is
mostly or entirely with Oiscings, and this fits
nothing so well as the early contacts of the
Church of Rome with England. The
Cosmographer is our only source not polluted by
the Kentish legend of Hengist, and he is close
enough to St.Augustine's time to have some idea
of what Rome knew of the people Augustine was
sent to. We must remember that the first
real blossoming of English ecclesiastical
learning in Canterbury was in the time of the
great Archbishop St.Theodore of Tarsus, which
only began a few years after the Cosmographer; if
there is a likely time for the invention of
Hengist and Horsa, in view of the canonical
authority it was to receive throughout England
and Wales, this is it - a time in which Saint
Theodore effectively established a common English
church and created and directed the first great
church school in the country. I also think that
memories of Oisc, living and even personal in the
time of Augustine, would have faded away by the
time of Theodore, more than half a century later;
the stage would be ready for the invention of a
different origin for the Oiscing royal family -
in all but their revealing name, which, being
universally known, could not be easily changed to
Hengistings.
Scholars better versed than I in
the problems connected with the Cosmographer will
be able to tell whether I am talking sense or
not. The Cosmographer's date is especially
important, since it makes a good deal of
difference whether he had access to Frankland
(and therefore England) or not. But if my
suggestion is correct, then we can almost put a
date, and certainly a place, to the invention of
Hengist the father of England - and banish him
once and for all from our books of history, into
the more welcoming and suitable lands of legend.
That Hengist is legendary and
unhistorical, however, I am quite confident.
That his legend of conquest is patterned after
Augustine's mission is obvious; take the pattern
away from his legend, and you not only remove the
Christian influence, but also any suggestion of
Vortigern's involvement, since Vortigern has no
other role in the story than to fill the semantic
space of both Aethelberht and English paganism in
general. Indeed, take the pattern away, and
you will have no island-wide or English-wide
scope. All that is left is based in Kent.
The Kentish chronographers were not only
inserting their pagan founding hero into a
Christian world-picture by making him a shadowy
and violent precursor of Augustine; they were
also claiming for themselves the founding event
of the English people, the great war described by
Gildas. It was the Kentish Hengist, not the
ancestors of the Angles north of the Thames, who
had fought Vortigern's heroic son Vortimer and,
in spite of eventual defeat, established the
English people on British soil beyond expulsion.
These Kentish chronicles, despite
claiming that the war went on for the nice round
sum of ten years, could only describe three
battles - all in Kent. This must, on first
sight, mean that there were three and only three
places in Kent directly associated with the
legend of Hengist and Horsa in its pre-Christian
stage. But these places are also singularly
difficult to identify, and one blunder by Nennius
strongly suggests that they may not have
originally corresponded to any actual place at
all.
According to both ASC and Nennius,
Horsa died in battle at a place called the Ford
of Horses. ASC calls it Horseford, but
Nennius Episford. Now this
extraordinary name is not English at all; rather,
it joins the English word ford with an
obsolete and virtually forgotten British Celtic
word for horse - *epi- (cognate to Irish ech,
Latin equus). In other words,
Nennius did not know the place-name in English,
and had not enough English to make it up for
himself: he used the most uncommon Welsh
way to say horse that he knew, and hoped
nobody would notice. This is particularly
certain since the English name would also have
given "ford of Horsa" - and
Nennius had not enough English to realize that:
he did not understand that the name of the hero
was a word for "horse". This,
in turn, shows that his source, which is also the
source of the Saxon Chronicle, did not have any
English name or place for the place where Horsa
died. Almost certainly, it used a Latin
word - something like Vadum equorum -
which Nennius rendered first in ordinary Welsh - Rithergabail,
Rhyd yr afael - and then in the English he
did not have and which he regarded as a late and
barbarous intruder in the island. He was
convinced that any local place-name in the time
of Hengist would be in Welsh, the language of
Britain; to invent a Welsh name for the "ford
of horses" was an act of linguistic
repossession. But if the text had referred
to any actual Kentish *Horseford, do we
doubt that the English name would have been
given?
From our point of view, the fact
that there never seems to have been an actual Horseford
removes our attention from the word horse
to the idea of horse, which is what
Nennius and his source had in mind: the ford is a
place for the animal horse - in whatever
language - rather than a definite place in Kent
named after a horse. That is, it is a place
connected with the equine name and probably
nature of both twins. Hengist is the
"Stallion", Horsa is the
"horse"; and among them, the one who
dies there, and with whom the place is
particularly connected, is the "Horse"
- who, not being a "Stallion", has no
descent. According to existing accounts,
Catigern, Vortimer's younger brother, also fell
there; but by now we have a reason or two to
disassociate Vortigern and all parts of his
legend from Hengist and all parts of his legend.
The names and characters of Vortimer and Catigern
are built on that of Vortigern - the Vortigern of
the Black Legend; and everything Vortigern is and
does here has to do with his parallel with
Aethelberht. There is therefore no reason
for him or his "children" to have had
anything to do with the death of Horsa. So,
what we have is a place that pertained to two
brothers named "horse" and
"stallion", of whom “horse”
died there, while “stallion” survived.
If we find that, in the process of amalgamating
it with another legend, two other brothers have
been put there as their enemies; that one of
them, Vortimer, is one of the greatest heroes of
Welsh legend, while the other, Catigern, has no
mythology of his own at all and seems to have
been put in for the express purpose of dying at
“Horse-ford”; then it looks very much
as though the point of “Horse-ford” was
to be a place where one brother died and another
- pre-eminent in his own mythology - survived.
I feel confident that the hero "Horse",
and he alone, fell there. Of course, once
Hengist had been identified as the arch-ancestor
of the Saxons, Vortimer, the hammer of the
Saxons, would be identified as his natural enemy;
and as Hengist had Horsa, so Vortimer had to be
given Catigern, as a doublet.
Who did Horsa fight, and at whose
hands did he die? Not, as we have seen,
Vortimer or Catigern. At the end of the
day, the only people we find at the Ford of Horsa
are Horsa - and his brother. Several
elements connect the legend, once stripped of
Vortimer and of Augustinian elements, to a couple
of well-known Celto-Latin legends of dynastic
origins: Romulus and Remus, and the Irish
national founders Eremon and Eber - legends of
quarrelling twins. A couple of twins
establish a dynasty or city. The senior
twin receives a senior lordship by means of
divination or magic wisdom. Romulus,
disputing with his brother as to who shall found
the city and where, takes the role of a Roman
augur and sees twelve vultures as against Remus'
six; in the division of the land, he receives the
northern Palatine Hill, while Remus receives the
southern Aventine; and he names the city. In
Ireland, the sage Amergin is a speaker of truth
to such an extent that the very gods give way
before him: he has already partitioned the island
between the divine Tuatha De Danann and the
mortal Children of Mil, whose leaders Eremon and
Eber are; and it is this truth-telling sage who
assigns the noble Northern half of the island to
Eremon, who becomes the overlord of his brother,
Eber, lord of the lower-caste South. The
names of the greater twin, Eremon, Romulus, is
formed from the name of the country, Roma, Eire;
the lesser twin's name assonates with his but has
no such positive content of its own (this finds
no parallel in the Kentish story, unless an
assonance be found between Kent and Heng[ist]).
The lesser twin also has a kind of legitimation
of his own: Remus did see six vultures, and Eber
did become king of a half of Ireland. But
in both cases the lesser twin has ill-disposed
men in his retinue who poison his mind against
his lord and brother; there is a revolt, a
battle, and the lesser twin perishes, after which nobody
questions the greater twin any more, and he
becomes the very picture and incarnation of
kingship.
Once you divest the legend of
Hengist and Horsa of its Christian and
English-national elements, what is left has a lot
in common with the legend of the embattled twins:
1) Hengist is always the leading
spirit of the two and, like Romulus, is often
mentioned alone. When negotiating with
Vortigern, it is always Hengist who acts; his
brother is never mentioned, even though, at this
point, Horsa is still alive.
2) All the clashes take place
inside the borders of Kent. In both the
Irish and the Roman stories, events take place
within the bounds of the kingdom: Eremon strives
to enter Ireland, where he puts a violent end to
the rule of the last descendants of the divine
Tuatha De Danann, and Romulus fights both his
brother and, more improbably, the whole Sabine
people, inside the perimeter of Rome.
3) Indeed, both myths are part of
a larger overall motion from outside inwards: the
Irish come from Spain to Ireland across the
ocean, and Romulus, though a royal heir of Alba
Longa, has spent his whole life outside any
organized community, and, once he and his brother
have restored the royalty of their grandfather
Numitor, they return to the wild until they are
ready to carve out a new sacred space for a city
- moving from a disorganized outside to a
self-defined inside, which he will not allow even
his brother to open up again (Remus dies for
having kicked over, or jumped over, the wall that
Romulus was building).
4) Specifically, the legends of
both Romulus and Eber are legends of settlement,
of colonization. Romulus found and settled
the empty site of Rome, and Eremon and Eber came
to Ireland from the sea. And surely this
element must have been present in the origin
legend of the Kentish dynasty; whatever they
remembered of their origin, the Teutonic Men of
Kent must have known that they came from the
continent.
5) Horsa perishes in a battle,
after which Hengist "takes over the
monarchy". The death of Vortimer's
lesser brother Catigern at the same battle seems
to indicate that a theme of the death of a lesser
brother was bound up with that particular place
or episode; and while there is nothing to suggest
a rivalry, it is certainly the case that Vortimer
is the type of the ideal king. On the other
hand, the name of Categirn - "tiyern
of battle" - suggests the aggressive
character shown in some episodes by both Eber and
Remus.
6) In Rome, Romulus is the
grandson of Jupiter, and in Ireland, Amergin, the
druid who favours Eber, is certainly one of the
many incarnations of the supreme Celtic god Lug. Now, there is
less distance between Hengist and Woden than
between any other dynastic founder and the
Germanic Supreme God. Other English and
indeed Germanic kings are descended from Woden,
but through other deities such as Freyr,
Seaxneat, or Baldaeg (Balder), and then through
many generations; Hengist has no other divine
ancestors, and only three colourless figures
called Wihtgils, Witta and Wecta. As Patrick
Sims-Williams pointed out, they are probably only
there to connect the Jutes of Kent with the other
Jutish tribe on the Isle of Wight; their names
represent three versions of the isle’s
ancient name. It is probably a lucky
coincidence that they assonate with the
All-Father.
7) However, Romulus is also
descended from the kings of Alba. What
Sims-Williams does not seem to have seen is that
to have three ancestors named for one of
Britain’s largest islands, whatever the
ethnic relationship between men of Wight and Men
of Kent, must mean that Hengist was not really
the originator of the English or Saxon ethnic
group in Britain; he too, like Romulus, had local
ancestors.
8) Like Romulus, if not Eremon,
Hengist is notable for asserting his will in
default of anyone’s agreement, by any mans
necessary.
9) Hengist's slaying of the
British elders has a surprising amount in common
with one of the stories of Romulus' death, an
affair about a secret killing, concealed swords
in a place of safety and an assembly of the
elders of the land. In Latin legend,
Romulus is killed by the assembled Senators, who
carry concealed daggers to murder him, either in
the Senate house or in the temple of Vulcanus;
that is, in two sacred places. They
dismember his body, and each carry a piece away
under their togas. In Hengist's
story, as we have it, it is Hengist who slays the
assembled British elders in a place of safety
(which Geoffrey identifies with the Cloister of
Ambrius, Ambrosius' national monastic shrine), by
getting his young Saxon warriors to conceal
swords in their clothing and shoes; but the
elements are the same, from the secret
assassination carried out with knives in a sacred
place to the conflict of Hengist, as leader of
young warriors, with the elders of Britain.
Romulus had signalled his royal independence from
the Senate, the elders of Rome, by appointing a
sacred bodyguard of 300 Celeres, whose
number designates them as a youthful counterpart
of the Senate or assembly of elders. In
view of the possible importance of the opposition
between the Senate and Romulus' celeres,
it is interesting to find that when the death of
Remus is not attributed to Romulus himself, it is
to his companion Celer, who seems to be an
incarnation of the power of these young royal
bodyguards, and was, according to the annalist
Valerius Antias, their first leader. A more
than casual grouping of forgotten religious ideas
seems to outline itself, vague, but suggestive.
10) The detail that Hengist and
his people were originally driven into exile has
no support in the properly historical account of
Gildas, where the Saxon settlers keep close
contact with their mother country and therefore
must have been on good terms with it. It is
however closely parallel to the story of Romulus,
whose followers were base-born - that is why the
Sabines reject them as bridegrooms for their
maidens - and were a uer sacrum, a band of
youthful exiles driven out of their own country
for religious reasons. However, once
Romulus had established his city as a place of
refuge, his numbers quickly grew with settlers
coming from all directions; just as Hengist, once
settled in Britain, kept calling in more and more
settlers.
11) Both Romulus and Hengist have
a basic connection, at the level of identity,
with fertility and/or the Dumézilian third
function. Romulus is the incarnation of the
third-function god Quirinus, lord of grain (the
basic foodstuff in Italy) and of men in numbers;
Hengist is a "Stallion" by name, and,
unlike Horsa, he generates a long descent.
12) In the story of the ambush
against the British elders, the element of saving
the king's life while destroying his counsellors
has a strong parallel - though in a positive way
- in the legend of Romulus and Remus, who, before
setting out to establish their kingdom, deliver
their grandfather Numitor, titular high king of
Latium, from the overmighty and threatening
presence of his brother and counsellor Amulius,
who, though not a king by rank, has all but
usurped the kingship. This, too, happens by
means of a trick such as Hengist uses against the
British elders. This is part of a wider
Celto-Latin theme of a great hero delivering a
powerless king from an overmighty and practically
usurping presence at his court - e.g. Æneas
destroying Turnus and Mezentius, thus setting
Latinus free from their threatening presence.
Of course, the legend of Hengist brutalizes the
theme; especially perhaps as told by Nennius, who
had no love for the English.
13) The stories of Romulus and
Hengist, though not that of Eremon, have a
suggestion of a totem-animal element: Hengist and
Horsa are named after the horse - to this day the
heraldic animal of Kent - and Romulus and Remus
are famously raised by a she-wolf - to this day
the totem animal of Rome. (Stand within a
mile of the Olympic Stadium any time the football
team Roma are playing, and you will hear
the thunder of the city's youth: Daje lupi!
- Get'em, you wolves!) This may well
go with the notion of progress from the outside
to the inside, from the wild to the domesticated,
from the world of monsters and wild animals to
the world of social men. Also, it is
perhaps not casual that both the horse and the
wolf are known to be symbolic of the Dumézilian
second function - war, strength, kingship.
14) However, this totem-animal
aspect also has a third-function element. The
wolf is a warrior animal, but the creature
through which the twins are associated with the
wolf is a she-wolf, whose role is to feed them
with her milk; in other words, a fertile mother
animal. Likewise, though the horse is a
warrior animal, the name of Hengist,
"stallion", stands for an animal whose
chief function is procreation. This is
probably not unconnected with the way that
several Germanic royal dynasties are descended,
not directly from Woden/Odin, but from
third-function gods such as Freyr or Seaxneat.
For that matter, Romulus himself is, of course,
the functional equivalent of Freyr, being the
incarnation of the standard third-function god,
Quirinus. A king must be a warrior; but for
the kingdom to last, he must also be fertile.
Given all these similarities, it
is highly likely that Hengist and Horsa formed
originally a variant of the Contending Twins
legend, and that Horsa was killed by none other
than Hengist, or by his followers. I think
it eminently probable that the fratricide
embarrassed its Christian chroniclers, since,
however much of the blame may fall on the
defeated twin, the proper heroic-stroke-Christian
procedure would have been for the victor to be
inconsolable in his grief and give up his claim
to the throne to some conveniently neutral heir,
not to take it over exultantly and enjoy it
without shame for many long years (as Romulus
did, not only after the death of his twin, but
also after that of a shadowy colleague by the
name of Titus Tatius). Turning the story as
it were outwards, making it a war against the
British, they could make the lesser twin be
honourably slain by the national enemy.
If my parallel with the
legends of Romulus and Eremon is correct, then
that is another reason to deny that the story of
Hengist had originally anything to do with the
national conflict of English and British. Though
promoted by Christian Kentish historians (who had
the advantage in literacy and record-keeping over
the rest of England), Hengist must have
originally been concerned exclusively with
Kentish territory. There is in fact a
strong likelihood that his first legendary role
may have had to do, among other things, with the
delimitation and subdivision of the state of
Kent. It was a localized, inward-looking
Kentish affair whose chief feature was the
settlement of the kingdom itself and the rivalry
of two twin brothers. The story of Eremon
has no place for any equivalent of Ronwein and
little for Vortigern (though some distant echo
might be found in the defeat of the Tuatha De
Danann, previous lords of the island); the story
of Romulus has no space for any equivalent of
Vortigern - the site of the future Rome is
deserted - and little for Ronwein (the issue of
marriage does come up, but the story of the Rape
of the Sabines could not possibly be farther from
that of the seduction of the British king by the
foreign maiden).
Two important conclusions may
therefore be drawn. First, the story of
Ronwein is to be separated from that of her
"father" Hengist; she is no part of the
original Kentish legend. Secondly, no faith
whatever is to be placed in the tales of Nennius
and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in this respect.
Nennius is not, as John Morris thought,
independent of the Chronicle; he has drawn on
mainly English sources. He has ably edited
them in with his own Welsh stories, but, unlike
the legend of Vortigern and Emrys, they do not
represent a native or ancient tradition - though
they have a lot to tell us about Kentish
influence in the early centuries of English
history.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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