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Chapter 6.5: Who
killed King Vortigern? A historical
mystery
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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The conclusions to be
drawn from the previous chapters are as follows:
the legend of the two dragons had originally
described a conflict between Ambrosius and
Vortigern. It was written, or told, from a
Vortigernid perspective. It was part of a
legend cycle which led up to the king’s
disastrous marriage with Ronwein, and to the
heroism of Vortimer. It contains a number
of evidently pagan Celtic ideas such as the
reincarnation of two dragons and the importance
and wisdom of druids; but while its basics must
have originated in an oral storytelling culture,
surely the same kind of story-teller class which
gave rise to A; its lost written original
was in Latin, written in the sixth century, and
comes from the same sophisticated Latin-speaking,
Bible-soaked Ambrosian culture as St.Gildas.
In particular, it shows a similar ability to
select biblical passages subtly and for effect.
By Nennius' age it was being re-read as
representing the conflict of Saxons and Britons,
with Vortigern representing the unfortunate and
betrayed Britons.
We notice that this
leaves no place for the power of the Ambrosiads;
which suggests that the house of Ambrosius was by
then no longer thought of or considered. Though
Nennius says that Ambrosius gave Pascent his
lands, he says nothing of his descendants. We
know from Gildas that Ambrosius had a descent;
but even in Gildas' time, the dynasty was
decaying (remember his stricture about their
falling-off from auita bonitate), and by
Nennius' time it seems to have vanished from the
earth. I know of no ninth-century Welsh
dynasty claiming descent from Emrys, and Nennius
only shows his part in the story of Vortigern.
This is a strong clue that the story was not only
originally created, but also preserved, in
Vortigernid surroundings, surely by that
Vortigernid dynasty in Powys whose pedigree
concludes the Vortigern section of Nennius.
It is however possible to
argue that the elimination of the Ambrosiads from
the equation was conscious, calculated, and the
work of Nennius himself. Nennius knew that
Ambrosius/Emrys was the supreme king of Britain:
he said as much; above all, he knew, and
recognized, in the same phrase, that the house of
Vortigern only carried on through his liberality.
Ch.48: Pascent, qui regnavit in duobus
regionibus Buelt et Guorthegirniaun post mortem
patris sui, largiente Ambrosio illi, qui fuit rex
inter omnes reges Brittannicae gentis -
"Pascent, who was legitimate king in the two
regions Builth and Gwrtheyrnion after his
father's death, bestowed by that Ambrosius who
was king among the kings of the British
nation". (Largiente, from largiri,
to bestow generously.) That illi is
especially damning: it means that Nennius is
harking back to an already mentioned Ambrosius, that
Ambrosius - who can be none other than the boy in
ch.42, hailed there by the sovereign title Emreis
Guletic.
The legend of the dragons
has Ambrosius taking the great fortress from
Vortigern, and commanding him to find himself
another land; ch.48 shows that the same Ambrosius
“bestowed” a new land on
Vortigern’s descendants. In other
words, Ambrosius is the ultimate source of
entitlements to the land: whether he commands
Vortigern to seek other land, thus authorizing
him to hold what he finds, or whether he takes
upon himself to assign to him or to his
descendants (which in the case of a legendary
Celtic hero means the same thing) a specific
territory at his own discretion; the common
element is Ambrosius' ultimate power to dispose
of the land. Vortigernid land-titles
descend from Ambrosius' decree - largiente
Ambrosio illi. (In the story of the
dragons, the lands in question are not the
historic Vortigernid lands, Gwrtheyrnion and
Builth, but rather a country ad sinistralem
plagam, towards the left-hand, northern, land
- neither Builth nor Gwrtheyrnion may be called
northern - called not Gwrtheyrnion but Gwynnessi.
This discrepancy is yet another strong clue that
other very early features are embedded in the
story; of course, if the descendants of Vortigern
had originally ruled largiente Ambrosio a
fief somewhere in the North, that could hardly
have survived the rise of Northumbria.)
Did Nennius, then, knew
that Ambrosius and Vortigern had been enemies?
He never states it for a fact. However,
this is almost certainly not ignorance, but
deliberate silence. He was ignoring the
accounts that told the story.
Gildas says nothing of
the end of the superbus tyrannus, and,
though he implies that it was a result of calling
the Saxons, to my mind this raises some ugly
conjectures. These Gildasian silences are
rarely casual. Had Vortigern been killed by
the Saxons, or even fled abroad and died in
exile, Gildas would have said so: it would have
been too obvious a case of God's punishment on
usurpers and bad kings, which was, after all, one
of his basic themes, and he would not have passed
the opportunity to compare the end of the superbus
tyrannus to what awaits the five tyranni
unless they mend their ways. But he does
not; no, not even by implication. At least,
if there is an implication, it is buried so deep
that the closest literary analysis cannot bring
it out. Gildas, while keen to blast the superbus
tyrannus with every weapon in his
well-stocked rhetorician's armoury, simply does
not seem to want to use his personal fate as a
moral example to castigate the successors to his
title of tyranni. He strives to
rouse anger and contempt, but does not bring that
anger and contempt to their logical conclusion -
the contemplation of a well-deserved fall. And
I must say that though this is the merest wisp of
a hint, no more than silence, it does seem to be
one of those rare cases in which an argument from
silence may at least be proposed. It feels as
though the royal house of Ambrosius, whose honour
and legitimacy are of great concern to Gildas,
might not have liked to be reminded of the
usurper's end.
Nennius, on the other
hand, has no less than three separate versions of
Vortigern's death. The first is the most
picturesque, a legend of doom and curse,
featuring St.Germanus - who is here to be
understood as a local Powys saint called Garmon,
whose identity with the great bishop has been
denied; this is universally
recognized as a separate strand in his narrative,
which he himself edited into the greater story,
and I shall call his source (now lost) the *Gesta
Germani.
This is the part that
concerns Vortigern. In a grand assembly of
the clergy and laity of Britain, Vortigern
accuses the celibate Saint of having impregnated
his daughter, presenting a baby as proof: the
infant then opens his mouth in the assembly (I
don't need to underline the similarities with the
various miraculous and truthful youths we already
met) and proclaims that he, Vortigern, is the
father! - by his own daughter! Silenced and
disgraced, the king is forced out of the
assembly; and his silence is answered by a flow
of loud sacred speech, as the Saint breaks into
preaching, "that he might be
converted". But Vortigern does not:
instead, he flees to Gwerthrynion, the land named
after him, ut ibi cum uxoribus suis lateret,
to hide there with his wives. The Saint
“with all the clergy of Britain", sanctus
...cum omni clero Britanniae (that's a lot of
priests!) follow him there and perform an epic
feat of prayer, standing on one particular rock
(which no doubt used to be pointed out to
visitors) for forty nights, and chanting aloud
for forty days.
A cynic might say that
all that chanting would be enough to drive anyone
away from anywhere: and a cynic would be less
mistaken than you'd think. For the point of
the story is the triumph of the power of truthful
sacred word over concealed evil and deceiving
public statements. Vortigern had hoped to
ruin Saint Germanus, as well as to push away the
taint of his own crime, with a loud public lie;
but the infans whose inarticulacy was to
be his instrument had spoken, and silenced him.
Vortigern had then been driven from the assembly
- which was a parliament, a place of
speaking - and the clergy, possessors of the word
of truth, had followed him across the island,
never allowing him to get far from the sound of
the truth of his misdeeds. And, by the
height of irony, the Saint had in fact adopted
the baby, granting him in law the paternity that
Vortigern had hoped to push on him by deception,
and removing the stain of a most horrible birth
both from him and from his family (since from now
on he is no longer a member of it).
When forty days and forty
nights had elapsed, Vortigern fled from
Gwrtheyrnion to a fortress in Dyved, Caer
Gwrtheyrn on the river Teifi; the avenging clergy
followed him there. They were no longer
chanting; instead, they fasted for three days and
three nights - and on the fourth, fire came down
from heaven and destroyed him, his wives and his
followers.
We already met this story
in the chapter on St.Patrick; as we saw, it is
part of a larger, unified narrative structure
whose elements, from the arrival of the Saint
from across the ocean to the defeat of the
national king, cannot be separated. It is
also a quite distinct unit within the body of
Nennius’ Vortigern legends. Germanus/Garmon,
the doom-bringer who destroys Benlli and his
whole royal fortress almost as soon as he
appears, only enters Vortigern's life when the
wicked king has committed the last and basest of
his sins, with his (presumably consenting)
daughter. He has nothing to
do with Vortigern's dealings with Hengist and
Ronwein, and indeed there is a contradictory
feel, in that this story suggests that if
Vortigern, after his humiliation in the great
assembly, had seen fit to repent and set aside
his daughter, he could still have been saved -
which seems to make nothing of the horrendous
crime of inviting the Saxons.
In other words, the fate
of the island of Britain as a whole does not seem
to weigh greatly on the author of the legend,
whose horizon, it becomes clear, is no broader
than Powys. The *Gesta Germani must
be understood as a mini-epic of the origin of
mediaeval Powys; nothing Germanus does is
unrelated to that. His one notable act
before the destruction of Vortigern had been the
destruction of Benlli and the promotion of Cadell
Ddyrnllug to king of Powys. The fact that he
establishes one dynasty, that of Cadell (the
servant of Benlli who fled his master's evil and
alone survived Benlli's destruction), and
purifies another, that of Vortigern, cannot be
separated from the fact that both dynasties ruled
in Powys in the eighth and ninth centuries, that
of Cadell over the whole province, and that of
Vortigern over Gwrtheyrnion (which took its name
from him) and Buellt (Builth), two tiny mountain
areas in its south. And it follows that the
reason why the story makes Vortigern’s
incestuous “marriage” his central
crime, is that the latter touches the succession
to the line of Gwrtheyrnion and Buellt. Clearly
its author was concerned with Vortigern only as
the ancestor of local kinglets; the claim to the
throne of Britain, though present, is both vague
and remote.
Indeed, the moral of the
story is that the political situation of
eighth-century Powys would last for ever. After
Benlli’s destruction, Cadell is promised, in
language borrowed from the Psalms, that non
deficiet rex de semine tuo in aeternum, there
will never fail to be a king of your seed, for
ever. And the rule of the Vortigernids over
Builth and especially Gwrtheyrnion is
established, if possible, even more firmly than
that of the Catellids over greater Powys. There
is a difference between Vortigern in Gwrtheyrnion
and Vortigern out of it. When he flees
there, he has already been publicly shamed and
deposed from the throne of Britain. He is
still clinging unrepentantly to his sins,
embodied in his incestuous "wife":
incest, slander of a Saint and royal untruth (we
should remember how important truth and True Word
were in the Celtic conception of royalty); and still all the
priests can do against him is sing. Only
the sound of truth can affect him, and even so, a
heroic effort is needed - forty days and forty
nights! But once he is winkled out of his
realm, things change fast. Germanus no
longer sings: instead, he fasts. Nennius
says that he fasts causaliter. John
Morris renders this as "to achieve his
end": I, though hardly an expert in Dark Age
Latin, would rather read it as "in the
manner of a plaintiff in a lawsuit, causa"
(this presumes a middle form causalis,
meaning a party or plaintiff in a causa).
If Morris' reading is correct, then he worked
directly to destroy Vortigern with the magic of
his fasting, compelling Heaven to act; if I am,
then his complaint to the Heavenly Judge brought
about the almost unprecedented punishment on a
king whose evil had been correspondingly
unprecedented. Either way, his purpose was
not, as according to Nennius it had been at the
beginning, that Vortigern might be converted;
after he had refused to do so and had been
correspondingly driven out of the rest of Britain
(symbolized by the assembly), he forced him out
of the only place in the land where he could not
be punished - and then brought down on him the
punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, for which the
fate of Benlli seems a sort of dry run (arguing
that Garmon must be understood as knowing exactly
what he was doing).
This would seem to
suggest that a king in his kingdom cannot be
reached by any such causa, even before the
throne of God; out of it, even if he has a
fortress to defend him, punishment can be
inflicted, and inflicted with comparative ease.
Three days of fasting are not on the same level
as forty days of chanting and forty nights of
standing. The former could be done by
anyone in reasonable health – I have done it
myself – while the latter is virtually
unimaginable, and an ecclesiastic such as
Nennius, familiar with penitential practices and
church singing, would understand the difference.
Once their sacred song had driven the villain out
of his own place, punishment was within fairly
easy reach.
The fate of Benlli,
however, warns us that this is an insufficient
explanation. Benlli's fortress, which is as
much his personal domain as Gwrtheyrnion is
Vortigern's, is destroyed exactly as Vortigern's
final refuge is, after he has left Gwrtheyrnion;
but Gwrtheyrnion is not destroyed. Now the
parallel with the legend of St.Patrick shows that
the fates of Benlli and Cadell are meant to
prelude to that of Vortigern: it is Vortigern who
is central – the story leads up to him.
It follows that the story actually flatters the
Vortigernids with an implicit comparison: Benlli
and his mob were destroyed – the line of
Vortigern was not. Its point is therefore
to explain and justify the survival of the seed
of the most disastrous king in British history:
why had not Vortigern and all his house been
destroyed by fire from heaven? Why had they
gone on being kings - though admittedly over the
narrowest, stoniest, most hopeless tract in
Cambria?
The narrative difference
between Benlli and Vortigern is that the saint is
admitted to Vortigern's parliament; though the
king tries to ruin him once he is there, this is
different from Benlli's behaviour, and suggests
that the mere presence of Germanus is a talisman
that will preserve a royal enclosure from
complete destruction by fire. Benlli keeps
him out - and fire destroys his fortress and
everyone in it (except for Cadell, who had taken
himself out of the precinct); Vortigern lets him
in - and though he is himself driven out, only
the guiltiest die. Even when he takes
refuge in Gwrtheyrnion, Gwrtheyrnion does not
suffer.
Story and genealogy
suggest another point: Benlli, unlike Vortigern,
had no righteous heir. Only one of
Benlli’s servants, Cadell, was deemed good
enough to live: clearly, Benlli's whole gens
was evil. On the other hand, Garmon blesses
and adopts Vortigern's incestuous son, who grows
up to be the saintly fifth-century bishop and
writer Faustus of Riez: whatever else this may
mean, it is a token that, despite the patriarch's
moral character, the family was not wicked.
If a child born out of the worst possible sin was
good enough to be adopted by a Saint of such
judgement and doom, then the family was fit to
live (and rule).
This, indeed, is the
point of Vortigern's children in every legend.
Elsewhere we find Vortimer and Catigern,
champions of faith and nation; Irish legend
offers Art and Cormac as partial parallels -
stainless heroes. And while Geoffrey of
Monmouth made Pascent a villain, opposing
"Aurelius Ambrosius" by rebellion and
treachery, Nennius makes him receive Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion largiente Ambrosio, which
argues quite a different relationship. The
wickedness of the Vortigernids is almost
certainly an invention of Geoffrey's, which finds
no parallel anywhere. In fact, none of
Geoffrey’s sources seem to have featured a
Vortigernid as a criminal: to stick them with the
villainous character he wants, he fathers on
Pascent the two princes slain by Gildas'
Constantine of Dumnonia, making them the
villains, and, incredibly, whitewashing
Constantine's character! Apart from
anything else, this is a genealogical and
chronological enormity - Constantine was
Gildas’ contemporary; Pascent(ius) is
claimed to have lived in Ambrosius’ time, a
full century before. It is my view that
Geoffrey, blatantly influenced by Carolingian
legend, wanted an equivalent of the treacherous
bloodline of Ganelon, which is wicked root and
branch throughout the legends of Charlemagne,
Roland and Renaut of Montauban.
On the other hand, the
presence of Faustus of Riez in the *Gesta
Germani asks the question whether any actual
fifth-century data underlie the creation of this
story. This well-known Gaulish bishop was
in fact a Briton. He was surely of very
high birth: firstly, because he was not only
admitted to, but made abbot of, the aristocratic
and highly intellectual monastery of St.Honoratus
in Lérins, and secondly, because the learned and
well-born bishop Sidonius Apollinaris describes
his aged mother with remarkable awe, as a being
of very, very high rank. Now Faustus of
Riez lived a generation after Germanus; he was
born about 405, entered St.Honoratus' house
between 426 and 433, was bishop of Riez by 462,
and died some considerable time later.
This cluster of
historical fifth-century figures does not look
coincidental. Cadell Ddyrnllug may be
chronologically out of place, as we will see when
we reconstruct the destinies of the Vortigernid
dynasty; but Germanus and Vortigern are of the
same generation and probably met; and as for
Faustus, he was a British aristocrat whose social
and intellectual quality means that he must have
been known to Vortigern from childhood (never
forget how small, at all times, must have been
the circle of Educated Britain), and to Germanus,
directly or indirectly, at least when he became
prominent in Lérins. Faustus was a
generation younger than either – and he is
presented as the son of the one and the adopted
son of the other! This sort of
chronological precision is not the patrimony of
oral tradition, which is quite capable of making
a third-century Ermanaric contemporary with a
fifth-century Attila and a sixth-century
Theodoric of Verona. And that the house of
Vortigern was laying claim to Faustus in the
ninth century is remarkable: why would anyone in
Wales think of claiming a by now surely fairly
obscure late-Roman bishop who received local cult
as a saint in south Gaul but whose name lay under
a cloud elsewhere because of what was later to be
called semi-Pelagianism?
It is also worth pointing
out that Faustus' place and mission are
misunderstood: the *Gesta Germani make him
the founder of Riez (he was not), a big place (it
is not) by a river (Riez lies on the tiny stream
Colastre, too small to feature on most maps) and
apparently completely unaware of his work as
reformer, preacher, teacher and controversialist.
Nobody can misunderstand anything unless
something exists to be misunderstood; ergo,
a statement about Faustus being bishop of Riez
pre-existed the *Gesta Germani.
Dumville speaks with
unconcealed scorn of Myres' theory that the
legend carried over a memory of Saint
Germanus’ mission; and yet, why not? There
is nothing to show that whoever wrote the *Gesta
Germani was aware of its anti-Pelagian
thrust. To him, he comes exclusively to
oppose Benlli and Vortigern. In fact, the
Benlli episode shows him engaged in converting or
destroying pagans. And yet we have
seen that the Mild King must have been Ambrosius'
father, that he must have been overthrown by the
Evil-Starred Tyrant, and that the Evil-Starred
Tyrant must have been Vortigern; we have seen
that it was against the success of the Pelagian
party in Vortigern's reign that Germanus came.
Germanus' anti-Pelagian mission was directly
caused by Vortigern's religious policy; but
neither Constantius nor Bede could have told the
author of the *Gesta Germani so, or given
him any reason to make Germanus the avenger of
Vortigern, whom Constantius never mentions and
whom Bede never connects to the Saint. It
is, I suppose, possible to argue that Germanus
was placed into opposition to Vortigern simply
because Vortigern was the villain of the age; but
it is one of those coincidences that take a lot
of believing. A historical bishop, now
turned into an object of legend, is arbitrarily
placed, without any knowledge of the events
whatever, in opposition to the very man whose
policies he must historically have opposed: is
this possible? Is this likely? And
even harder is to believe that a local saint with
no connection with either the historical Germanus
or the historical Vortigern should be identified
with the one and placed into conflict against the
other: what are the odds? I would rather
believe that, whether or not Garmon was Germanus,
the story had some roots in the historical
conflict between the historical Saint and the
historical Pelagians whom the King befriended and
protected.
Certainly, the parallel
between the legends of Patrick and Garmon proves
that the bulk of the story of St.Garmon and
Vortigern is unhistorical. But the
Patrician story was about historical figures.
Remove the legendary elements, and what have you
left? That Patrick had once been a slave in
Ireland; that he had fled his master (since he is
now said to want to compensate him with the price
of two slaves); that he has come back from Gaul
to Ireland to preach the Gospel; that he became
(chief) bishop in Ireland; that he lived in the
time of king Loegaire; and that Loegaire was a
pagan; all undeniable historical facts.
Remove, likewise, all the
mythical elements from the story of Vortigern and
Germanus, and what do you have? That
Germanus preached in Britain in the time of
Vortigern; that there was a mysterious shadow
over Vortigern's royalty, implicit in the legend
of his incest (violating the Celtic idea of
kingship with its duty of a clean home life) and
which led to his overthrow; that Faustus of Riez
was the son of Vortigern; and that he was adopted
by Germanus. Now the former two points are
certainly historical; the third, Faustus being
the king's son, is unverifiable but hardly
impossible; and the fourth, while unhistorical -
we know nothing of any contact between Faustus
and Germanus, let alone adoption - involves a
certain and inarguable fact: Faustus did go to
Gaul - Germanus' country - and had a great career
there.
Faustus’ career had
certainly been stunning. Compare it with
that of his older contemporary Patrick: both were
Britons who went to Gaul to become monks and be
consecrated priests, studying under the best
masters: Faustus in Lérins, Patrick with
Germanus. But Faustus was Abbot of Lérins
in his twenties, Bishop only three years later;
and he managed to survive the blight that so
often settles on early brilliance, remaining to
the end of his days one of the luminaries of the
Gallic church. Patrick, by contrast,
remained an obscure presbyter until his forties,
and it took him two successive historical
accidents – the establishment of an Irish
mission for which he was unusually qualified, and
the sudden death of its leader – to reach
the episcopal grade; and while Faustus had
universal esteem and commendation, Patrick seems
to have been the subject of obloquy and
defamation. It is, then, not only our own
impression, but a verifiable fact, that
Faustus’ ecclesiastical career was of
extraordinary brilliance. This would
explain his fellow-Britons placing him on the
level of Germanus; and this suggests that the
legend may have incorporated aspects of real
history, including a contemporary British
reaction to the career of Faustus, Abbot and
Bishop.
If the story of
Faustus’ adoption had its roots in actual
memories of his British birth, it would show a
neat symmetry. The only common ground
between the historical Germanus of Prosper and
Constantius, and the legendary Garmon of Powys
legend, is that both came to Britain from Gaul to
set it in order; but so too did Faustus, a
generation later, go to Gaul from Britain - and
he was well known as a reforming bishop. The
point of view this suggests is indubitably
British rather than Gaulish. Given the
relative roles of Germanus and Faustus, only a
fool or a Briton could have suggested that the
activities of the two were equivalent; despite
Faustus’ reputation in his lifetime,
Germanus was much greater, and nothing that
Faustus did compared to the rescue of Catholicism
in Britain. The parallel suggests a
provincial, insular perspective on larger church
matters, in which the fact that a Briton had
actually gone to Gaul and been highly successful
there was worthy of commemoration and celebration
- as if someone had blessed his endeavours.
But it is not too great a leap for someone who
was aware of his success in Gaul, which is a
historical fact, to assume that at some point in
his youth, and just before he left Britain for
ever, he had been blessed in some fashion by
Britain's illustrious, miracle-working visitor,
Germanus.
The conflict between
saint and king was a central mythological feature
which the legend of Germanus shares with that of
Patrick. Yet there is good reason to
suspect such a conflict in Britain, at least to
the extent that Vortigern sympathized with
Germanus' Pelagian opponents; and in Ireland, at
least to the extent that St.Patrick took
residence among the king of Tara's Ulster
enemies. Both legends therefore rest to
some considerable extent on fifth-century fact.
Their common plot was applied to real historical
figures: Benlli, Dichu and Miliucc may be dubious
or wholly legendary, but Patrick and Loegaire,
Germanus, Vortigern, Cadell and Faustus are all
historical figures who (with the probable
exception of Cadell) were contemporaries. It
follows that we should not deny the possibility,
at least, that the Nennian legend of Germanus may
have the same kind of relationship with
historical fact as the legend of Patrick and
Loegaire: to the contrary, the weight of the
evidence, such as it is, is in its favour.
Its function, we have
seen, is to account for the political landscape
of eighth-century Powys (even the island-wide
significance of Vortigern's crimes and downfall
has been replaced by local concerns); the ideas
that underlie it are immemorial and Celtic; and
there is some ground to suspect that certain
fifth-century facts, especially the relationship
of Germanus, "Vortigern" and Faustus of
Riez, may be woven in it. We may add that
there is an obvious ecclesiastical tinge, not
only in its promotion of ecclesiastical heroes
(Saints) such as Germanus and Faustus, but also
in its commitment to the power of the True
(Sacred) Word, and its complete lack of interest
in aristocratic values. Now Wales was
always a literate society, carrying over from
Roman times not only a tradition of written
learning, but actual institutions such as
monasteries and bishoprics, and objects such as
manuscripts; and it is in ecclesiastical circles,
such as preserved the thread of literacy and
learning, that the *Gesta Germani
indubitably originate.
The thread is of course
thin: nothing escaped the rise of England, save
remote and mountainous areas, where Roman,
Christian, even Gildasian culture, was always
thinnest on the ground. The sixth-century
catastrophe must have wiped out most of
Britain’s centres of Christian learning.
It was reconstructed largely in the shadow of a
lay highland culture, largely discontinuous with
the ecclesiastical Gildasian-age Latin
civilization; the difference is clear to whoever
reads, in succession, Gildas’ work and the
poems of the historical Taliesin. The
influence of highland Celtic ideas on the
monasteries seems to have been pretty much
one-way, with each new wave of Celticism
distancing the church structure more and more
from its common Latin past and taking it further
along a still Christian, but highly eccentric
path. And the reason has to be the
socio-cultural position of the monastic class, a
mandarin group cultivating a language (Latin) and
skills (Latin writing) quite alien to the broader
society in which it lived, but which was
nevertheless not self-perpetuating, and had to
rely for its physical continuation on constant
recruiting among the laity. Each new wave
of recruits would come carrying, consciously or
unconsciously, the burden of its ideology and
life experience; while the Latin Christian
heritage, by contrast, was to some considerable
extent petrified, largely extraneous to the lay
Celtic world outside. Each new generation
would perceive it only through extraneous native
categories learned at their mother’s knee.
The influence of the
aristocratic Celtic/Welsh laity on the
British/Welsh church seems to me fundamental and
unarguable. I would say, under correction,
that what can be described as an aristocracy,
owning the attitudes and claims of a noble class,
was numerically quite a large part of Welsh
society. Because of the country's political
fragmentation and the close connection of large
family networks, there must have been plenty of
poor enough fellows, with barely enough to keep a
cow, who were not only ready to identify with the
claims of some second or third cousin who was -
or claimed to be - lord of a cantref, but were
allowed to do so. That is to say, there
would be far less opportunity for specifically
peasant or bourgeois viewpoints to develop, since
a good deal of people whom we would see as purely
peasant, and poor peasant at that, would regard
themselves as part of a kingly group. They
might share in common activities, as certainly in
the occasional raiding; they might be present
when bards praised the generosity of their more
powerful relatives; and from such contact they
would certainly absorb a largely aristocratic
mentality, however reduced by circumstances.
If such men entered the cloister, the mental
background they took to it would be hardly less
aristocratic than that of an heir of Gwynedd or
Ceredigion.
The active force in the
development of Welsh monasteries, therefore, was
to an extremely large extent the world of
outside, lay, aristocratic ideas. Religion
was perceived largely in terms of power, and the
religious were part of a very rank-conscious,
caste-ridden society, chronically unstable,
shaken by feuds and English meddling, and
remarkably inward-looking. Those of the
laity which joined monastic establishments
expected to be a part not so much of a
brotherhood dedicated to apostolate, sacraments
and charity, as to a mandarin caste of educated
people of the same kind as the highly structured
and self-conscious class of Welsh poets, only
dedicated to religious rather than worldly
learning. Mediaeval Welsh writing shows
evidence of mutual jealousy between monks and
poets, the poets speaking of “monks howling
like a dog pack” and being in turn described
as abusing their gifts and reviling Christ and
the Virgin.
Nevertheless, we cannot
speak as though there was no continuity whatever;
it is perfectly possible that some basic data had
survived in Cambrian monasteries, to be misread,
misinterpreted, and woven into much later
pseudo-historical schemes, by a culture that had
developed along completely different lines in its
mountain fastnesses. Monastic libraries
would not be particularly concerned with
preserving history, so much as religious writing;
but Professor Wendy Davies' close analysis of the
charters of the Book of Llandaff has shown the
survival of vast amounts of data, however
corrupt, that goes right back, beyond the Welsh
dark ages, even to the time of Gildas. And
if one monastery had such things, why not others?
Of course, the Book of Llandaff as a whole is a
barbaric document - this said not as a negative,
but as a descriptive term. The synthesis
achieved in Welsh monasteries, as we see it in
much of Nennius and in the truly barbaric Welsh
tradition of hagiography – something which
has no exact parallel anywhere else, even in
Ireland – was not even with Gildasian
culture, but with an uprooted, localized, and
somewhat tribalized Christianity and a thoroughly
tribal society, speaking not Latin but Welsh.
The differences with the culture of Gildas, let
alone his standard of Latin, are glaring.
What I am saying,
therefore, is that generations of monks brought
up in the essentially tribal mentality of Welsh
society will have approached such Roman and
Gildasian relics as they had from a largely alien
framework, with no real cultural continuity.
We can be certain that it was from such a
mentality, among the royal house of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion, that Nennius, with his peculiar
view of history, came; and before Nennius, came
the author of the *Gesta Germani. It
follows that there is no contradiction between
saying that the story and political picture of
such a product of Highland Welsh monastic
activity as the *Gesta Germani are
entirely eighth- or ninth-century; and saying
that we may find, embedded within it, useful and
much earlier historical information, which has
been misunderstood at the source.
Of course, such things
must be suggested with extreme care; though I
argued for similar historical processes in the
chapter on St.Patrick, “entities are not to
be feigned without necessity”. Within
clearly legendary and anachronistic frameworks,
the survival of scraps of history, over centuries
and across cultural borders, is only to be
suggested for very good reason. But in the
legends of Patrick and Germanus, we know on other
grounds that historical features exist: that such
people as Patrick and Germanus did come from
across the sea and preach Catholic Christianity,
against the wishes of Pagan or Pelagian ruling
classes. What I argue is that some Powys
ecclesiastic concerned with Vortigern and his
line, almost certainly from Buelt or
Gwrtheyrnion, worked the elements of a written
notice about the opposition between Vortigern and
Germanus, whose context he did not understand,
into the framework of an immemorial Celtic legend
of the clash between an ancestral king and a
heroic founding holy man, and into the categories
of eighth-century Powys politics that made sense
to him. This was the world he lived in, the
world he knew, and therefore any reference from
the past to rivalries between the royal ancestor
and a great bishop, or to the connection with
another bishop in Riez, could only be interpreted
in its light.
Every scholar recognizes
that the story of Germanus is a self-enclosed
unit within Nennius. It is not to be treated as a
part of a larger Vortigern cycle (though Nennius
did his best), but as an alternative account,
whose interests and development were wholly
different. But though it is about the
origin of Powys, it includes ideas about
Vortigern and the Vortigernids that are also
found in earlier and broader-sighted legends.
It is not his role as king that keeps Vortigern
safe in his kingdom, but the goodness of his
family: and this reminds us immediately of the
heroic Vortimer/Gwerthevyr the Blessed, whose
very bones might have saved Britain, had not his
followers disobeyed him. Both legends end
up flattering the Vortigernid line even as they
execrate the ancestor.
Now even in Nennius'
unadorned Latin, this account of Vortigern's end
is fine, dramatic stuff, with a strong
development and a clear message. The same
power - the clergy of Britain's prayers - that
could have saved the evil king, had he seen fit
to repent, becomes the power that destroys him
when he stubbornly refuses. Yet, Nennius
himself does not credit it more than so much.
He gives two other versions: in one, Vortigern
simply wanders away, deserted by everyone, until
he dies of heartbreak; in the other, the earth
opens up amidst a storm of fire and devours him
and everyone in his fortress, so that no trace of
them is ever found. We notice with interest
that of these three death stories, two involve
fire as an agent of vengeance. But all that
can be said from these accounts, all that Nennius
would tell us, is: he died, no-one quite knows
how.
In keeping with his
supremely confident and straightforward manner
– the stock-in-trade of a truly great hoaxer
– Geoffrey, who never admits alternative
accounts or elements of doubt and obscurity, has
only one version of Vortigern’s end, told
with typical vigour and brilliance... and yet, he
may well be far closer to historical truth than
anyone would expect of him. What does the
main Nennian version say? - that Vortigern was
pursued across country by a posse of praying
British clergymen led by the outstanding figure
of Saint Germanus, come from the Continent to set
things right in Britain, till he took refuge in a
fortress built ad hoc to escape his
pursuers, and was destroyed by fire. What
does Geoffrey say? That Vortigern fled
across country, pursued by a large British host
led by an outstanding figure come from the
Continent to set things right in Britain, to an
impregnable fortress built in the expectation of
his pursuers, and was destroyed by fire. But
it was not God, St.Germanus and the clergy of
Britain, who pursued and destroyed him - it was
Ambrosius Aurelianus (whose Galfridian name is Aurelius
Ambrosius), returned from exile with a small
army of Armorican Britons quickly swelled by a
floodtide of British volunteers.
And this leads us to the
fascinating and disturbing point that all the
strands of evidence we have state very definitely
that Vortigern lost his sovereignty not to the
Saxons, but to Emrys/Ambrosius, with whom he had
a family feud. Geoffrey describes
Vortigern’s overthrow and killing; the
legend of the dragons, both in Nennius and in
Geoffrey’s version, make the houses of
Ambrosius and Vortigern enemies down the ages,
and attribute to Ambrosius the final victory;
Nennius admits that the descendants of Vortigern
only got lands by Ambrosius’ grace; and
Gildas refuses to speak of the relationship
between Ambrosiads and Vortigernids, not even
saying who it was, exactly, who overthrew
Ambrosius’ father - but at the same time he
lambasts the political stupidity and blindness of
the superbus infaustus tyrannus, for all
the world as though he were dealing with
today’s news rather than with events over a
century old. The only exception is
Nennius’ legend of St.Germanus, where it is
the Saint who is the avenger of Vortigern; and
that seems to have been calqued on the account of
Ambrosius coming from the Continent to sort
matters out in Britain, later used by Geoffrey.
Germanus was not the only
ancient hero to receive a legend calqued on that
of Ambrosius. As we have seen, the
Constantine of Geoffrey also was largely a
doublet of his supposed son. And if two
such major figures as Constantine and Germanus,
one the establisher of the British crown after
the end of Roman power, the other the protagonist
of the legend of the coming of the Sacred, both
received (from flagrantly different sources)
legends partly imitated from that of Ambrosius,
it must follow that this legend – including
its story of revenge against Vortigern – was
famous and important.
Part
2
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
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