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Chapter 6.5: Who
killed King Vortigern? A historical
mystery
Part 2
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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As for the legend of the
dragons, we have seen that it must go back to the
Ambrosian sixth century, a time when - as we know
from our analysis of St.Gildas – the
previous century’s events were still well
documented and understood. In other words,
someone in Gildas' time believed that Vortigern
had become aware of the Saxons' intention to
revolt, and began to build his highly symbolic
"fortress" which the Saxons could not
storm, only to be turned out of it by Ambrosius.
To be more precise, Vortigern was making
arrangements for one highly symbolic part of
Britain, a royal fortress on the island's highest
peak, to be a height - a symbolic height - that
the Saxons would not reach even if they
overwhelmed the rest of the island; as fate,
interpreted by his "wizards", said they
must. Then Emrys came and took that part of
Britain over for himself. The symbolism is clear:
the highest, unconquerable, level of British
sovereignty was vested in Vortigern, too
"high" for the Saxons to take: but
Ambrosius could and did. Emrys, says Nennius, was
later king among all the kings of the British
nation, rex inter omnes reges Britannicae
gentis; and Geoffrey agrees - Lord, how he
agrees! His Ambrosius is the greatest
British king before Arthur, and certainly subdues
the Saxons to the ends of the island.
There can, of course, be
no historical truth in the notion that Vortigern
yelded his sovereignty to Ambrosius without a
fuss, any more than we can believe Lugaid mac Con
to have surrendered his to Cormac mac Art without
a fight. The two stories certify each other
as legendary, part of a cycle of interpretative
legend about a major crisis in the history of a
sovereign dynasty; but if change in sovereignty
there was, it is in neither case likely to have
been more peaceful than such changes usually are.
For that matter, the imagery of contending beasts
does nothing to suggest a peaceful relationship
between deposed sovereign and successor. Nennius
gives a very rough time indication, when he tells
us that Ambrosius granted the lands of
Gwrtheyrnion to the son of Vortigern, Pascentius;
Vortigern must have been dead by the time
Ambrosius was in the position of granting lands
as a high king would. But did Vortigern die
in the catastrophe of 442: or did he linger on,
keeping some unconquered or perhaps undesired
shred of his sovereignty, until Ambrosius
"took" it from him?
There is a clue in
Geoffrey's most elegant reversal of meaning, so
subtle that we hardly see it coming: that is,
Merlin's prophecy about the doom of Vortigern,
which is either to be killed by the Saxons or by
the sons of Constantine. In Nennius, the
fortress is built because of a prophecy that, if
it is not, then the Saxons will kill Vortigern by
stealth; only to be lost to Ambrosius, who is to
take up the struggle against them. In other
words, Vortigern, by paying attention to what his
druids have to say, manages to escape one doom,
death at Saxon hands; but he suffers an
attenuated version of another - dethronement at
the hands of Ambrosius. In Geoffrey, on the
other hand, Merlin's prophecy brings together the
two dooms, and clearly tells Vortigern that if he
escapes the one he will suffer the other. The
prophecy is fundamental to the narrative
material, describing with the utmost clarity what
is happening, and only makes sense if it is about
the king's death; otherwise it would be seen to
place mere dethronement - indeed, mere demotion
to a lesser kingship - on the same level as
murder. What is more, the Irish parallel
shows that Merlin is now telling the truth at the
point where the moral courage of Vortigern's
druids has failed: just as Rigru Rosclethan
throws in Conn's face the fact that he must get
rid of his disastrous bride, so Merlin tells
Vortigern that,. if he escapes Saxon hands, he
will fall in those of the sons of Constantine.
Merlin rightly calls the
druids "lying flatterers", who would
rather kill a sinless boy than face their master
with the truth. They have managed to tell
him - according to Nennius' version - that the
Saxons wanted him dead, even before the Saxons
rebelled. But the truth this entails is in
two parts, as shown by Merlin's prophecy: that if
he escapes Saxon knives, he will die at the hands
of his dynastic rivals. The two things go
together. If the druids of the royal
household know this, they dare not say it. In
this light, indeed, the wondrous boy's attempted
sacrifice comes across as a stealthy attempt to
murder the future king, in which Vortigern, kept
in ignorance, is manipulated by his druids into
trying to kill the boy fated to replace him.
And what this shows is
that at some stage in the development of the
material, someone envisaged the two fates of
Vortigern as being equivalent. That is, the
expulsion of Vortigern from the fortress entailed
his death. This cannot have been Geoffrey's
own work, for, in Geoffrey, it is not Ambrosius
who expels Vortigern from the fortress, but
Merlin, who is not directly an agent of his death
at all; his second, alternative, fate waits for
him... elsewhere.
Geoffrey had no warrant
in Gildas, and little in Nennius, to make
"Aurelius Ambrosius" the avenger of
Vortigern; nobody could have guessed from their
small hints at the full-blown saga of betrayal
and revenge he unfolds. An intelligent
writer (and God knows that Geoffrey was not
stupid) might invent it from Gildas' clear
contrast between the ill-fated tyrant and
Ambrosius the modest, heroic saviour king
(Geoffrey does say that "Ambrosius... was
moderate in all he did"), but not if he had
read Nennius, whose account of their relationship
was not just different, but alternative.
I wonder whether the
conflict between Nennius and all succeeding
tradition - especially Geoffrey - is sufficiently
realized. Geoffrey branded Vortigern a
usurper without any more ado; and every later
version agreed with him. Nennius, on the
other hand, was quite simply not disposed to
admit the charge of usurpation. The only
king mentioned by the Historia Brittonum
between Maximianus, last Roman emperor, and
Ambrosius, is Vortigern, and Nennius so
phrases his account as to make us understand that
Vortigern was the first king to follow the
Romans, and the only one to reign before the
Saxons came. Factum est autem post
supradictum bellum, id est quod fuit inter
Brittones et Romanos, quando duces illorum occisi
sunt, et occisione Maximi tyranni, transoactoque
Romanorum imperio in Britanniis, per XL annos
fuerunt sub metu. Guorthigirnus regnabit in
Britannia.... "It happened after
the just-mentioned battle, that is the one that
took place between the British and the Romans,
when the leaders of the latter were killed, and
[after] the killing of Maximus the tyrant, once
the rule of the Romans in the Britains was over,
they were under fear for 40 years. Vortigern
was king in Britain..." - that is,
Vortigern's rule is described as following on
from the Romans, and it is implied that it lasted
forty years. Vortigern "was
[legitimate] king" (regnabit, a word
for the lawful rule of a king). The
elaborate summary of previously-described events,
placed before the statement of forty years of
fear, casts a cloak of spurious credibility over
the notice, trying to tie it in with the
well-known tale of the end of Roman power; the
next thing to happen is the arrival of the
"three keels" driven in exile from
Saxony. Nennius implies, but does not
state, that Vortigern's title to the throne of
Britain was valid.
This goes with a more
general difference between our two primary
sources. Nennius - I mean the author of the
Historia Brittonum, whoever he might have
been – shows, as compared with Geoffrey, a
consistent if sometimes confused desire to
whitewash Vortigern. We have already seen
that he has chosen a decidedly favourable version
of the dragons legend, which deliberately edited
out the reason for his son Vortimer's death and
the circumstances in which he regained the
throne, episodes discreditable to him. Nennius'
own slant shows in his editing together two
legends in both of which he is ruined by lust for
women who are forbidden, either because of being
alien - Ronwein - or too intimate - his daughter;
Vortigern manages to be guilty of every abuse of
marriage, not only incest, but bigamy too. However,
as these two women come from different legend
cycles, their being brought together and their
common end must be Nennius' own invention, the
result of his attempt to harmonize separate
legends. And what he is doing is harping on
the illegitimacy of Vortigern’s sexual
desires, doubling and redoubling them. It
sounds very much as if he wants to say that,
whether or not Vortigern’s title to the
throne of Britain was valid, he was the kind to
want the forbidden, and to bring disaster on his
country and his successors by doing so; to shift,
in effect, the reason of his fall from usurpation
to illegitimate lusts.
In my view this can only
be explained if Nennius was connected to the
Vortigernid royal family of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion, whose pedigree (the only Welsh[11] royal pedigree in all
his work) concludes his Vortigern episode. This
was probably as much as family piety cared to say
about an ancestor whom all the rest of Britain
remembered with horror; for even if we regard the
Nennian account of Vortigern as a family legend,
it still presents Vortigern as an unsatisfactory
person, who ruined his country and deprived his
descendants of their rightful claim to the crown
of Britain by his disordered lusts. The
point of revising the Ambrosiad element out of
the legend of the dragons would then be twofold:
first, it would focus the legend away from
seeming inessentials and dead issues on the very
live and abiding issue of the Welsh hate of
Saxons; and second, it would get rid of the image
of one British dynasty originally expelled by
another, then coming back and expelling it from
the throne of Britain, in turn and for ever.
That the Vortigernids, though they had lost their
claim to the high kingship, at least held their
lands by a firm and unchallengeable deed largiente
Ambrosio, might have been a consoling view
when the house of their ancestor's enemy seemed
to have triumphed for ever, and the best claim
that could be made for Vortigern was that he had
been Ambrosius’ own predecessor in the work
of defence and liberation; but it could not
please their descendants in the ninth century,
when British sovereignty - what there was of it -
was to some extent up for grabs, Ambrosian
supremacy a remote memory, and the idea that the
Vortigernids had been excluded from the crown for
ever could only be seen as unmixedly negative.
In other words, Nennius was writing in the
interests of the Vortigernid royal house of
Builth and Gwrtheyrnion.
We have seen that the
core of the polemic against Ambrosius' father,
the reason for his overthrow, was the legal
contention that he had not been validly enthroned
and therefore was no king; and, it can be shown
that the legend of Vortigern and Emrys
incorporates not only the echo, but the fullness
of this polemic. At the end of the
conversation, rather than at its beginning, the
wondrous boy states that his father was "one
of the consuls of the Romanic nation" and
reveals himself as Ambrosius. Nennius is quite
specific: Embreis Guletic ipse videbatur,
“he turned out to be none other than (ipse)
Emrys the gwledig” - that same Ambrosio
illi (note the use in both cases of the
demonstrative pronouns, ipse, ille) who
was "king among the kings of the British
nation". Ambrosius' claim of Roman and
noble descent echoes Gildas calling him
"almost the last of the Romans": but
that his father is said to be no more than
"one of the consuls of the Romanic
nation" goes clearly against Gildas' strong
assertion that his parents had nimirum
worn the purple, nimirum meaning
"whatever anyone else might say".
That is, someone else was saying - and saying it
still in Gildas' time, a century after the fact -
that Ambrosius' parents had done no such thing.
The authors of Nennius'
version of the legend, in other words, understood
the claim: Ambrosius was well-born, and of Roman
blood; but, in the view of the legend's authors,
his father was not a king, only a consul. And
we have seen that Nennius presents Vortigern as
the first king of Britain after the Romans,
leaving Ambrosius’ father no place. Could
anything be clearer? The only king on the
scene is Vortigern himself, even though Ambrosius
takes his royal fortress for his own - in other
words, takes over the kingdom. Ambrosius is
not so much an usurper as a man fulfilling the
mandates of Fate, which has dethroned Vortigern;
but certainly, if any usurper there be, it is not
the Vortigern of Nennius.
To be sure of this,
however, we have to be clear as to what Nennius
means by calling Ambrosius' father a
"Consul." He uses the word three
times. First, he calls Brutus/Britto a
Consul. Then, in a strange note in his
legendary account of the Roman emperors in
Britain, he says that from the time of the sixth
emperor, Maximus (not to be confused with the
seventh and last, Maximianus) Consules esse
coeperunt, et Caesares nunquam appellati sunt
postea - "they began to be consules,
and they were never called Caesares
after". Which "they" it was
who "began to be Consules, and never
were called Caesares after", is not
made clear. His last use of consules
is, exactly, in our story: "unus est
pater meus de consulibus romanicae gentis",
"one is my father out of the consuls of the
Romanic nation" (The strange phrasing
suggests verse to me: is it possible that Nennius
was quoting from a lost poem - in Latin?)
None of these uses have
anything to do with the historical Roman
magistracy. The Roman Consuls were
originally the heads of state, elected annually
by the assembly of the Roman people. Under
the emperors, they continued to be elected
annually, though by the Senate, and until well
into the Byzantine age years were known by their
name. That Nennius knew nothing of this,
just leaps to the eye.
What did he mean by
Consul, then? Well, when he said that
Brutus was consule Romano, a Roman Consul,
he cannot have meant that he was so styled in his
own time, since as far as he is concerned the
style of Consul only came to be in the reign of
Maximus, two ages of the world[12] later. He is
rather saying: "this Brutus was what we
would call a consul". His
Brutus was the first-born son of the heir to the
throne of Aeneas: had he not killed his parents
by mistake, he would have succeeded his father
and grandfather. The first impression is
therefore that consul means heir to the
throne. But it can hardly be as simple
as that. Brutus is permanently excluded
from the Roman throne and forced to wander to the
ends of the earth, an exile and an outcast, Brutus
Exosus - Brutus the universally-hated. But
he is still a consul; and so is the father
of Ambrosius, who, in the Nennian legend, is only
“one out of [many] consules of the
Romanic nation”, unus... de consulibus
romanicae gentis. His son, however, is
the predestined lord of Britain, who can give
orders even to Vortigern; it is in his right and
in his power to become a King. When
Ambrosius proclaims that he is the son of a Consul,
he does it so as to assert his right to give
orders and to interpret destinies – even
before a crowned king such as Vortigern. Vortigern
asks last the question he should have asked
first, the question that the rank-conscious
mediaeval Welsh would always ask a stranger: who
is your father? Meaning, what is his rank
and yours? Ambrosius, who understands him,
does not answer by his father's name, but by his
rank: he is a consul. And having
said that, he has said all. Vortigern has
nothing more to say; he leaves according to
Ambrosius' orders, to find a place of his own ad
plagam sinistralem.
The Nennian meaning of Consul
seems therefore to be to designate those who are
capable, by reason of their blood, of inheriting
or founding a throne, of being made kings; royal
material, rather than royal heirs. We have
seen that, in Gildasian-Ambrosian ideology, Roman
blood automatically made you a possible king, and
that it is on this ground, much more than on his
actual royal birth, that Gildas saw Ambrosius as
deserving the throne. Nennius, or someone
before him, may have assimilated Consules
to Caesares because in later imperial
usage the Caesar was the heir designate to
the throne of an Emperor, and to some extent an
Emperor himself; it is also possible that the
ending of the rank of Caesar had, in
Nennius’ mind, something to do with the end
of Roman emperors in Britain, which only outlast
it by one generation.
The rank of Consul,
as seen in the legend of Ambrosius, implies the
right to talk back to Kings; as seen in that of
Brutus, implies that you cannot be killed even if
you have committed the awesome crime of
parricide. The worst that justice can do is
to exile you, and once you go away you may well
establish a kingdom of your own[13]. So: Nennius'
source admitted that Ambrosius' father was of
royal blood and able to be made king, but
absolutely denied that he had been a legitimate
king. He was "one of the consuls of
the Romanic nation", one of the number who
belonged to that royal race. Nennius makes
his own son, who is both royal and truth-telling,
state, at the height of his power and at the
mystical moment in which he is acting as the
mouthpiece of fate itself, that his father was a
consul and no king; that is, the statement that
Ambrosius was not born from a king has the same
charge of irresistible truth as the order that
Vortigern should vacate his royal tower, which
Ambrosius (that is: and his descendants) would
take over.
We have seen that Gildas'
contentions rest largely on Ambrosian documents
and viewpoints: here, in Nennius, we catch a
whiff of what opposite viewpoints and documents
were saying. The victory of the Ambrosiads
has become total; Vortigern's downfall is seen as
inevitable; Ambrosius is a majestic, mysterious
boy who can decree the destiny of the reigning
king of Britain and of his descendants, and who
is to inherit the duty of defending the realm
from the Saxons; Pascentius, son of the fallen
sovereign, even consented to have his own lands
awarded to him largiente Ambrosio - but at
whatever cost, it will not be admitted that the
claim of Ambrosius to the crown was prior to
Vortigern's! Fallen he may be; but he fell
from a legitimate throne.
This is more or less the
same attitude - though more firm, more clearly
defined, more articulate - as we find in the
story of Vortigern and Germanus. The same
relationship exists between the house of
Vortigern and that of Ambrosius, as with that of
Cadell in the *Gesta Germani: a newer
dynasty come from the complete ruin of a previous
order, while the Vortigernids, while their
scapegoat ancestor was destroyed, remained in
their royal rank. In both cases, the
Vortigernids have a prior claim to the whole
British crown, though the *Gesta Germani
weaken the link by the fact that the house of
Cadell are lords not of Britain, as the
Ambrosiads, but of Powys alone. Neither
story starts with any king of Britain other than
Vortigern; he falls, and, because of his sins,
his house falls below that of Ambrosius - or even
below that of Cadell, a mere king of Powys
descended from a low-class freeman owning a
single cow and calf. The claim of Ambrosius
to Britain is based on his being a Roman; that of
Cadell to Powys, to his being blessed by
Germanus. (It seems that here, as in A, God
- and the Catholic Church - have, consciously or
unconsciously, taken up the semantic space of the
Romans.) But the house endures. Its
fate is deliberately contrasted with that of a
possibly fictitious[14] tyrant called Benlli,
whose dynasty was destroyed to give way to
Cadell's. And here we may see a certain
amount of Vortigernid arrogance even towards
their own Powys overlords: the house of Cadell
may be the stronger, but let us never forget that
it arose late and from a servant, whereas we - we
come from the first king of free Britain. In
other words, the same attitude is witnessed
across a gulf of maybe three centuries, handed
down with the claim to Vortigernid identity.
The legend of
Germanus-Garmon can only have originated in a
Vortigernid environment. Indeed,
Nennius’ language when introducing it to his
Gwynedd readers suggests that he is introducing
something new, that they may not have heard
about. “I made up my mind”, he
says, “that a number of miracles which God
accomplished through him should be committed to
writing”; Aliquanta miracula quae per
illum fecit Deus scribenda decrevi. That
decrevi, “I made up my mind ”,
even “decreed”, is a strong expression,
implying a fairly major decision on Nennius’
part, as if he had embarked on a novel and
unexpected venture, and the tone of the whole
sentence suggests that he is not expecting his
public to be familiar either with Germanus’
journey (as he imagines it) or with his miracles.
Nennius is taking to Gwynedd a story they did not
know, and where else should he have found it,
except among the dynasty to which it mattered
most?
Comparison with the
Patrician legend brings out a relevant related
point. The shared plot of the two legends
involves motion from outside to inside to the
centre of the nation, and the last figure the
hero meets, the protagonist of the supreme
battle, is, as we would expect, the king of the
whole country. In Ireland, he is also the
ancestor, or at least the patriarch, of the royal
line that dominated the island as the legends
took shape (the Ui Neill). This is a structure
that makes perfect sense: the plot involves, or
should involve, an expectation that the sacred
hero’s final opponent, and his descendants
– who are always involved in whatever a
Celtic ancestral hero does – would be high
kings of the whole sphere of sovereignty (island)
involved, world without end, amen. On the other
hand, the king defeated by Germanus only gave
rise to a tiny local dynasty. That the
descendants of Vortigern ended up in fact as
under-kings, mere teyrnedd, goes against
the spirit of the story. And this suggests to me
that, when it first took form, the Vortigernid
claim to overlordship over all Britain was still
living reality to its authors. The same goes, if
anything, even more strongly for the parallels
between the legend of the dragons and that of
that other Ui Neill ancestor Conn. The
Vortigernids of the age of Nennius, reigning over
rocks and forests, still dreamed of empire.
The thought keeps coming,
more and more strongly, that the author of the Historia
Brittonum must have been a Vortigernid
himself. I cannot believe that anyone except a
member of the family would take so partisan an
attitude to dynastic history. It is even possible
that his connection with the court of Mervyn of
Gwynedd, whatever it was - he may have resided at
his court; he may lived in an affiliated
monastery, he may have visited Gwynedd; he may
have written the Historia Brittonum on
commission from Mervyn while living in
Gwrtheyrnion or elsewhere - may have been a part
of a Builth-Gwrtheyrnion-Gwynedd connection
against Powys, with the little kingdoms seeking
support in the powerful North Welsh state against
their stronger neighbours. But certainly one
driving principle of Nennius' picture of history
is to assert the legitimacy and sovereignty of
Vortigern, against claims that he had usurped the
throne from the house of Ambrosius.
This valiant Vortigernid defensio
had, alas, no future. Five hundred years
after Gildas, three hundred after Nennius, the
charge of usurpation comes back in triumph in
Geoffrey; along with the feud with the
Ambrosiads, which Nennius had certainly
suppressed, or at least ignored. God only knows
where that almighty jackdaw Geoffrey of Monmouth
got his version of the feud of Ambrosius and
Vortigern from, but it certainly owes nothing to
Nennius, and in any case I doubt that he had ever
read Nennius (he had certainly read Gildas and
Bede). It may, for all we know, contain elements
of historical truth even beyond the clear account
of a feud. Every element in it, from the
exiled prince coming from overseas with an army
to claim his rightful kingdom to the burning of
the usurper in his tower, can be seen to be
traditional and paralleled by many admittedly
unhistorical Celtic legends, such as the saga of
the destruction of Dind Rig. On the other
hand, it is more than possible, it is probable,
that Ambrosius, come to Britain with a host out
of Armorica, did pursue a weakened Vortigern and
burn him to death in a fortress. The role
of Ambrosius in Geoffrey has clearly been
imitated by the authors both of the legend of
Constantine taken up by Geoffrey himself, and by
those of the *Gesta Germani, which suggest
that it was an ancient and famous story; the *Gesta
Germani certainly suggests that pursuit
across country and death by fire formed part of a
very ancient version of the death of Vortigern,
and two out of Nennius’ three versions
mention fire from heaven, while the third, as we
will see when we get to the Breton cult of
St.Gurthiern, can quite possibly be connected
with a story of a fallen king and a burning
fortress.
But the great importance
of the Galfridian account is in the evidence it
gives that – in spite of its Nennian
suppression – the story of Vortigern’s
death in a blood-feud resulting from his
usurpation of the throne was well known in Wales.
Was there a reason for Gildas to disguise it?
By heaven, yes! - not for Gildas directly, but
for the Ambrosian party, who would not like to be
reminded that their power was built on civil war
and possibly murder. And was there a reason
for the descendants of Vortigern to play it down,
as they certainly did? By heaven, there
was! For as long as the descendants of
Ambrosius were in one way or another at the
centre of British affairs, it would never pay the
descendants of his enemy - an enemy, too, who had
already gained the reputation of the superbus
tyrannus - to remind them; much better to
play up the fact that the family lands were given
to Pascentius largiente Ambrosio, by the
generous gift of Ambrosius the gwledig. Even
after the fall of Britain, the name of Ambrosius
still held a residual magic, as shown not only by
the awe still evident about his name in Nennius
himself - Embreis Guletic ipse videbatur...
Ambrosio illi qui fuit rex [magnus[15]] inter omnes reges
Britainnicae gentis[16] - but also by the
remarkable number of place-names that survived
the English conquest[17], showing that to the
English, too, Ambrosius was a name to conjure
with.
Let us argue the
opposite: suppose that there was no lasting
tradition of a rivalry between Ambrosius and
Vortigern; that Geoffrey made up the story of
"Aurelius" and his army killing
Vortigern out of whole cloth. This, for a
start, would be another miraculous resurrection
of historical fact, placing again, quite by
chance, a group of historical personages
transformed into legendary figures, in the same
positions with respect to each other as they had
in historical fact. Vortigern had in fact
usurped the throne from Ambrosius' father;
Ambrosius, whatever he may have done to
Vortigern, had taken it back, and had been the
leader of the national fightback against the
Saxons. The only question is whether or not
he stepped to the throne over the usurper's dead
body; but the general outline of Vortigern's
usurpation and Ambrosius' recovery of the purple
is in Gildas. As I said in the case of the
clash of Vortigern and Germanus: what are the
odds that facts would be so faithfully
resurrected, centuries later, and purely by
guessork? And what are the odds against the
same thing happening twice – once in the
ecclesiastical legend of St.Germanus, and once in
a Galfridian genealogical scheme? They can
only be reckoned in children’s numbers: a
squillion bazillion to one.
Still, let us suppose it
happened: why, of all the possible avengers,
Germanus, the Picts, the Saxons, just about
anyone, would Geoffrey single out Ambrosius to
eliminate Vortigern? The Nennian ch.3l
offers him Picts, Scots, Romans and Ambrosius.
Why, exactly, choose Ambrosius, excluding the
Picts, who, in Geoffrey's own story, also had a
blood-feud against Vortigern for betraying some
of their fellow-countrymen to death; or why
deprive himself of the opportunity to present the
wrath of God on the page in the person of
St.Germanus? Geoffrey is not shy of the
supernatural, nor of calling God on the side of
his heroes. But it is Ambrosius, and
Ambrosius alone, that he selects; though goodness
knows that he had given enough people reasons to
hate Vortigern.
The charge of usurpation
was a hot issue in the fifth century, and - to
judge from the dynastic hatred of Gildas' sources
for the superbus tyrannus - quite alive in
the sixth; but if it was preserved, it was
certainly not Nennius who preserved it.
Geoffrey made him usurp
the crown from a member of Ambrosius' family; an
idea he could not have found in Nennius, nor in
Bede, nor - explicitly - in Gildas. But
while Geoffrey rightly[18]called Vortigern a
usurper, he does not seem to know from whom he
usurped the throne. His ignorance of this
fact can be proved, whether or not my
reconstruction of the Mild King as Ambrosius'
father is correct, simply by the fact that in his
version, Vortigern's victim is the monk Constans
son of Constantine. This is clearly none
other than Constantine III, who predates
Vortigern by a couple of decades; and Constans is
avenged by his "brothers" - Ambrosius
and Uther Pendragon, both of them sons of
Constantine! What is more, Ambrosius’
“father” Constantine is the only member
of the “family” who has nothing to do
with Vortigern at all.
This does not argue
historical knowledge. Constantine may or
may not have been related to the Ambrosiads[19], but he certainly did
not die in Britain, and neither did his son; they
were not slain in the course of a competition for
the crown of an independent Britain, but for the
Western Roman Empire; and none of the people who
betrayed them or compassed their deaths can
reasonably be identified with Vortigern. Conversely,
if Vortigern usurped the throne of Britain at
all, it was not against them; and it was
Ambrosius’ father, not his elder brother
– whatever their names – that he
usurped it from[20]. What is more, in
my view the man remembered by legend as Vortigern
killed nobody: the ruler he overthrew, the Mild
King, was allowed to live on in his estates.
In other words, Geoffrey was aware in general
terms of an opposition between Vortigern and the
Ambrosiads, and conscious of the fact that
Ambrosius was the man who rescued the family
crown, but he was unaware of the actual
circumstances of usurpation.
In spite of Nennius’
silence, however, it is clear that a tradition of
family enmity survived. On a separate
level, that is also suggested by the imagery of
the legend of the dragons. But Geoffrey did
not realize that the legend of the dragons was
connected with the family rivalry, which reached
him through the entirely different account
involving Constantine and Constans. There
were, therefore, at least two separate strands of
evidence to argue that the rivalry between the
houses of Ambrosius and of Vortigern was real and
profoundly important to Gildasian culture. Separate
traditions went on alongside Nennius (who ignored
them in the interests of the still-existing house
of Vortigern), to be picked up by Geoffrey three
centuries later.
So the black legend of
Vortigern did not develop in a void. We
already knew that Nennius' age had not quite lost
cultural continuity: Nennius had access to
sixth-century sources such as the Genealogy of
ch.17, A, L, and Gildas. This was surely
not his own isolated privilege, but a condition
of the culture he lived and worked in, since he
assumes the same knowledge in his public: for
instance, he has a lot to say about the history
and genealogy of England, but nothing about that
of Gwyneddd, for whose rulers he was writing.
He clearly expected them to know their own
ancestors.
Geoffrey knows Vortigern
legends unknown to or unmentioned by Nennius, and
gives a far fuller account of Ambrosius. He
ignores Nennius' account of St.Germanus and
decouples the Saint from Vortigern altogether,
returning him to his historical role of opponent
of Pelagianism, and allowing him only a brief
contact with his heroic son Vortimer in which he
asks for the churches destroyed by the Saxons to
be rebuilt[21]. Given that, in
Nennius’ version, Germanus is the destroyer
of Vortigern, this counts as a major structural
change; another instance in which Nennius and
Geoffrey follow structurally different accounts.
The evolution of the
story seems to depend as much on dynastic as on
national concerns. If Nennius and his
sources dedicate as much energy to refuting the
charge of usurpation as that of national treason,
it means that it must have been just as well
known, and just as influential in shaping the
black legend. And both are rooted in
history; I mean that Vortigern is not just a
purely mythological character acting out purely
mythological tragedies, but rather that the
development of his legend, however unhistorical
in itself, grows from two certain historical
facts. The man who became known as
Vortigern usurped the throne from the Mild King,
that is from the house of Ambrosius; and he
called in the Saxons. Both factors affected
subsequent history, and both, therefore, are
reflected in the legends.
The final point I want to
make in this chapter, before I move on, is that
there is no evidence that Geoffrey ever read
Nennius. Given the amount of legendary
material that they do share – from the tale
of Brutus to the Seven Emperors, from Vortigern
and the dragons to Arthur’s great massacre
of enemies at Mount Badon – it has been easy
and natural for past authorities to treat Nennius
as a source for Geoffrey; however, close analysis
shows that in every story they share there are
divergences that rule out direct borrowing.
Their accounts of Brutus’ fate, including
his genealogy, are different. So are their
legends of Caesar. So is their list of the
Seven Emperors. So – as we have seen,
point by point, in my table earlier on – is
their account of the legend of the Dragons,
carrying on into the story of Vortigern and
Vortimer, in which both their sources seem to
deviate from a common original: Nennius in
eliminating everything to do with Vortimer’s
succession to the throne (in his story, it is not
even clear that Vortimer is a crowned king) and
his murder by Ronwein; Geoffrey in blackening
what must have originally been a comparatively
favourable account of Vortigern. So is the
number of Arthur’s victims at Mount Badon:
960 in Nennius, 470 in Geoffey. So, in a
minor but telling moment, is their triadic and
clearly traditional list of the Three Fears of
Vortigern: Nennius (ch.31) lists the Picts and
Scots (as one entry), a Roman invasion, and
Ambrosius; Geoffrey (6.9) lists the Scots, the
Picts (as two separate entries) and Ambrosius.
I could go on, but I think the point is
sufficiently made: I do not believe that there is
a single place in the stories they share in which
Geoffrey may be shown to depend on Nennius. In
all the stories they share, without exception, he
has a clearly separate source. Either a
compilation of earlier sources, or an outright
narrative history, existed for Geoffrey to read;
for it is plainly not within the realm of reason
that he should simply have lucked upon a series
of unconnected narratives and still have cast
them in the same sequence and within the same
chronological framework as an author of whom
– since he never quoted him – he can
have known nothing.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
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