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Chapter 6.6: Geoffrey
and the legends of Vortigern and of
Guithelinus
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Geoffrey deviated from
both the Nennian passages relevant to the feud.
He had Merlin rather than Ambrosius as the
wondrous youth in the tale of the dragons and he
said absolutely nothing of a mysterious event
mentioned in the concluding chapter of
Nennius’ history of Britain proper, chapter
66: the Cathgwaloph. And while his
replacement of Ambrosius with Merlin is not a
misunderstanding, but - as I will show in
Appendix VI - the result of a choice between two
incompatible accounts (and he chose well; his
account of Ambrosius destroying Vortigern must
be, at least, significantly closer to historical
reality than the alternative notion of Vortigern
peaceably abandoning his royal tower to him), his
ignoring the Cathgwaloph, the one
traditional account mentioned by Nennius that
looks as if it had to do with the rivalry, was
not a choice. He knew, it can be shown, nothing
about it.
Nennius' chapter 66
contains a summary of his chronological
computations, with what he regarded as a
definitive sequence establishing solid historical
dates for British and world history - a matter
close to his heart[1]. Among the landmarks -
Augustus’ victory at Actium, the coming of
the Saxons - is a lost legend, dated to “the
twelfth year of Vortigern’s rule”
– “the discord of Guitolinus and
Ambrosius... that is the Cathgwaloph",
completing his picture of Britain and the world.
That is, he sees it as an event as important, as
decisive, as history-making as the foundation of
the Roman Empire and the coming of the Saxons.
He gives the event both a
Latin and a Welsh name: discordiam Guitolini
et Ambrosii... quod est Guoloppum, id est
Catguoloph. This is his standard procedure
when bringing in a person, episode or battle
which he expected his audience to know by a Welsh
name. Ipse est Catell Durnluc, “the
same man was Cadell Ddyrnlug” (ch.35);
-"Ambrosius vocor", id est Embris
Guletic ipse videbatur"("I am
called Ambrosius; that is, he turned out to be
none other than Emrys Gwledig himself";
ch.42); [Arthuri] septimum fuit bellum
in silva Celidonis, id est Cat Coit Celidon
("the seventh of [Arthur's] battles was in
the forest of Caledonia, and that is Cat Coed
Celyddon"; ch.57); a tempore istius belli
vocatur Gueith Lin Garan ("from the time
of this battle, it is called Gweith Llyn
Garan"); et Penda distribuit ea regibus
Brittonum, id est Atbret Iudaeu ("and
Penda distributed these things to the kings of
the British, that is Atbret Iudaeu"). It
follows that the Cathgwaloph was as famous
and proverbial as these famous episodes.
The narrative, whether
oral or written, existed in Welsh first, and was
later translated into Latin. This is proved by
the fact that the name of Ambrosius' enemy
Guitolinus is a Welsh form of an originally Latin
name, Vitalinus, Latinized back
uncomprehendingly. (And the Latin place-name Guoloppum
also sounds suspiciously like a transliteration
from Welsh.) That is, the Latin name Vitalinus
developped into Gwythelyn in Welsh and was
not rendered back into Latin until the original
had been forgotten; while it was never forgotten
that Emrys was Ambrosius. Nennius
knew it: “Ambrosius vocor”, id est
Embreis Guletic ipse videbatur. It was
understood that he was the same person as Gildas
praised so highly; but his heroic deeds at the
Cathgwaloph, whatever they were, were sung only
in Welsh, long enough for his enemy's original
Roman name to be forgotten.
Now the name Vitalinus
(Gwythelyn) turns up in close connection with
Vortigern. Nennius gives a Vortigernid genealogy:
Fernmail son of Teudebir, son of Pascent (II),
son of Guoidcant, son of Moriud, son of Eldat,
son of Edoc, son of Paul, son of Mepurit, son of
Briacat, son of Pascent (I), son of Vortigern,
son of Guitaul (Vitalis) son of Guitolinus
(Vitalinus), one of four "sons of
Gloyw", Bonus, Paulus, "Mauron"
(Maurus? Mauricius?) and Guitolinus, who are said
to have founded the city of Gloucester (Caer
Gloyw). Between the Roman names Pascent
(Pascentius)[2] and Gwytawl (Vitalis, a
popular late-Roman name), the Celtic Vortigern
sounds like an intermission; as we should expect
if, as I have argued all along, Vortigern were
not the man’s real name but a later insult
with racial connotations. Vortigern is the son of
Vitalis son of Vitalinus; that is,
Guitolin-Vitalinus is a Vortigernid family name,
and according to frequent contemporary Roman
usage, one would expect the son and grandson of
these gentlemen to carry a related name, perhaps
even that of his grandfather (cf. Constantinus,
Constans and Constantius, sons of Constantinus
- the Great - son of Constantius Chlorus).
This is perhaps one reason why the derogatory
nickname provided by the enemies of his dynasty
and beginning in V, stuck[3].
The Guitolin-Vitalinus
who was Vortigern’s grandfather was one of
four brothers with good late-Roman names, Paul,
"Mauron", Bonus and
Guitolin. Gloucester was, of course,
considerably older, but the fact that they are
identified as sons of its founder means that they
were identified with the lordship of the city,
and the fact that they do not bear tribal names,
but ordinary Roman ones, suggests that we are not
speaking about legendary tribal ancestors, but
about real people, only later identified as
tribal founders, "sons of Gloyw". The
names Bonus and Vitalinus both turn up in
late-Roman British contexts; Bonus is the man
whom Ausonius tried to castigate in that
galumphing piece of failed satire I castigated
earlier, and a Coimagnas son of Vitalinus turns
up in a Pelagian-type ogham in co.Kerry -
obviously a British Latin name taken to Ireland,
probably in the wake of the Pelagian emigration.
Gwaloph, the site of the cath
or battle (some discordia this must have
been!) may be a real geographical site, the
Wallops[4] in Hampshire, a
strategic valley along the Roman road between
Salisbury and Silchester, in the shadow of the
mighty earthwork called Danebury, within nine
miles' distance from Amesbury, ten from
Salisbury, thirteen from the great Roman and
medieval centre of Winchester, and no more than
six from Andover, whose Celtic name alone would
prove its importance in a traditional Celtic
geography, possibly pre-Roman, or possibly
Gildasian[5]. There is something that
stimulates the imagination about the presence of
so many Roman sites and roads, so close to the
place where the Cathgwaloph might have taken
place: in particular, of "the fortress of
Ambrosius" Amesbury, whose name means the
same as Dinas Emrys. Amesbury features
prominently in Geoffrey’s account of
Ambrosius. It seems quite a suitable spot for a
decisive clash between Romans; or a suitable spot
to imagine one, if you know the area and
are familiar with the concentration of important
Roman and pre-Roman spots... which Nennius and
Geoffrey certainly were not[6].
We can safely say that
there were two traditions, perhaps two separate
developments from a lost original: one that said
that Ambrosius avenged the usurpation of his
family’s throne on Vortigern by burning him
to death in a house or fortress; the other, that
Ambrosius had a violent clash, a battle (cath),
with someone called Vitalinus, in a place called
Gwaloph. They were both regarded as hugely
important: Nennius regarded the Cathgualoph as
comparable to the coming of the Saxons in
importance, and the account of Ambrosius coming
from the Continent to set matters right in
Britain and burning the usurper in his tower
became the model for the legend of two other
national founding figures, Constantine II(I) and
Germanus. In both cases, we have come to
postulate the existence of skeletal data about
the existence, age and role of these heroes,
accompanied by no narrative account; in both
cases, the story of Ambrosius was used as a
template for theirs, as if it came natural for
Dark Age British storytellers and historians to
imagine a rescuer and re-founder of British
institutions, whether temporal or sacred, as a
doublet of Ambrosius.
The evidence that
Geoffrey knew nothing of the Cathgwaloph
is that, while the name Vitalinus belongs either
to Vortigern himself or at least to his family,
in Geoffrey’s work Guitolin-Vitalinus is
none other than Guithelinus, archbishop of
London, a friend and ally of his version of the
Ambrosiad dynasty. He summons their founder
Constantine from Brittany (and is dead before
Ambrosius becomes a factor); but, to Nennius,
Guidolinus was an enemy of Ambrosius.
Whatever else this may
show, it shows that the notion that Ambrosius
Aurelianus and Vortigern were the protagonists of
a blood feud did not reach Geoffrey by way of
Nennius ch.66, much less of the Cath Gwaloph; and
that Geoffrey is quite unaware that
"Guithelinus" and Vortigern were, in
all likelihood, one and the same person. He did
not learn of the Vortigern-Ambrosius blood feud
from Nennius, nor from his sources; on the other
hand, the *Gesta Germani, which he did not
use, looks as if it was somehow derived from a
source which also contributed to Geoffrey's
account the notion of a great personage come from
overseas to set matters right in Britain and
destroy Vortigern, the pursuit across country by
an avenging host, and the final destruction by
fire of Vortigern’s last redoubt[7]. In other words, the
tradition of Vortigern and Ambrosius’
blood-feud was ancient and widespread enough to
have taken many shapes and passed through many
hands.
But the identity of Archbishop
Guithelinus, and his relationship with Vortigern,
are not really so mysterious as they seem. They
are a part of the legend in which a few surviving
historical items about the British usurper
Constantine III and his son Constans (the one who
shocked Orosius by renouncing his monastic vows
to become his father's Caesar and gather armies
for him) have been woven into a wholly fictional
account of the origin of the independent British
monarchy. As we have seen earlier, the historical
items in this legend include the names of
Constantine and Constans, the fact that they were
father and son, the fact that Constans was a monk
who had shamefully broken his vows to become a
sovereign and his father's heir, the fact that
both died violent deaths, and the fact that
Constantine and Constans represent in some
fashion the end of the Roman period of British
history. Constantine is regarded as the first Rex
Britanniae after the end of Roman power, and
Constans as his successor. The rest of their
adventures are legendary.
Sent to Britain by his brother
Aldroenus king of Armorica in response to
Archbishop Guithelinus' urgent demand for help,
the young Constantine proves a great war-leader,
leading the desperate and leaderless British to
victory against Pictish invaders. Young and
unmarried at the start of his great adventure
(the historical Constantine III was old enough to
have an adult son) to suit his role as founder of
a dynasty - youth agrees with the notion of
beginnings, of starting things up - he marries a
ward of Archbishop Guithelinus as part of his
process of establishing (or, to Geoffrey,
re-establishing) the kingdom of Britain, and has
three sons, the teen-age monk Constans and the
babies Ambrosius and Uther (the father of King
Arthur). Murdered by a Pict after a reign long
enough for his elder son Constans to be in his
teens, he is scandalously succeeded at
Vortigern's instigation by the boy monk Constans,
who reigns (in name only) till it suits Vortigern
to suborn his murder. Vortigern forced his
coronation, even taking himself the role of a
bishop in his consecration, thus insuring that
Britain would be ruled by a cloister-trained
incompetent whom he could dominate. He then
induced Constans' Pictish bodyguards to murder
him, and took the throne, while Aurelius
Ambrosius and Uther were smuggled to Brittany.
His rule was disastrous, and the Saxons reduced
him to their puppet ruler, until a grown-up
Ambrosius came back from exile and, leading a
host of Armorican soldiers and rebellious
Britons, surrounded Vortigern in an impregnable
fortress and burned it down. The crown then
reverted to the rightful heirs, Ambrosius and
Uther ruling in turn, and a teen-aged Arthur then
took over with none of the complications of later
Arthurian romance.
The legend, I have argued, must
have been built on a few skeletal written
historical data, misunderstood at the source and
placed within a contemporary framework. A
hilarious demonstration of how easy it was to
scramble such data, even with unimpeachable
sources, can be found in the Penguin Gregory of
Tours' History of the Franks, whose
chapter on the Vandals' rule in North Africa is
absolutely pock-marked with corrective footnotes.
"Trasamund died, and so finished his
maltreatment of God's elect. Huneric became King
of the Africans [footnote: Huneric preceded
Trasamund]... Huneric... tore himself to
pieces with his own teeth and ended his unworthy
life in this torment which was a befitting death.
Childeric succeeded him. When he died, Geilamir
became King. [footnote: Huneric died in AD
484; Childeric became King of the Vandals in 523
only; Geilamir deposed Childeric in 530]".
How did this festival of chronological inaccuracy
happen? Quite simply, because Gregory's source
was an account of the sufferings of persecuted
Catholics under a century of Arian Vandalic rule,
never intended to be a history of the Vandalic
kingdom, and such data as were embedded in it
were incidental to the story it told. This does
not impugn its historical value, but shows how
even perfectly reliable documents - reliable,
that is, for what they are - may innocently give
rise to major misunderstandings when they are the
only documents to survive from a given period,
and when they are not cast in a solid and
well-researched chronological form. Certainly
anyone who tried to reconstruct the history of
the Vandalic kingdom from Gregory would be in
trouble.
There is no reason why whoever
invented the House of Constantine, whether
Geoffrey himself or an otherwise unknown Welsh
historian or storyteller, should not have
suffered a similar problem with basically
historical material. That someone like Constans
was remembered at all, and remembered as what he
was, a monk persuaded to turn Caesar to the
scandal of his fellow ecclesiastics, shows that
there were accounts of him and his father in
existence, for the systematizers to bring
together in the first place.
That, however, is as much as we
can suggest. Nobody, much less the historical
“Vortigern”, can have had the role of
mentor of the historical Constans which Vortigern
has in Geoffrey; for that matter,
Vortigern-Vitalinus took the throne seventeen or
eighteen years after the fall of Constantine III,
and may then have been quite a young man, since,
as we have seen, there is reason to believe that
he lived on - under Saxon control - to be
murdered at the start of Ambrosius' revolt, which
took place certainly after 452 and before 468.
That he had a position of moral, let alone
spiritual, authority, so much earlier, is almost
impossible.
This tells us that the author of
this particular fiction had no idea of British
fifth-century chronology. If the story of the
Ambrosius-Vortigern blood feud was as widespread
as we saw reason to believe, he must have known
of it (even supposing, which is overwhelmingly
unlikely, that a version of Vortigern's death at
Ambrosius' hands did not in fact form the climax
of his narrative), but he cannot have realized
that it was resolved at last half a century after
the fall of Constantine and Constans. He saw all
the major figures of the fifth century as part of
one picture of grandeur, treachery and misery.
By the same token, his family
relationships are - well, it is hard to do
justice to their bizarreness. The Archbishop is
cast in the role of a prestigious early figure
bestowing his daughter on Constantine. This is
typical Welsh genealogical lore, attaching a
dynasty to an early hero by means of an invented
daughter; that serves to flatter an existing
dynasty, by giving it a proud and legitimate
ancestry. In this case, however, it is not only
fantastically out of skew with everything known
or suspected about British history, but also with
everything known or suspected about Welsh
genealogical lore. Not only was there no
Constantinid dynasty; not only is it ridiculous
to imagine that Ambrosius or his descendants
– wildly affiliated to the Constantinids by
the story – would take it as a great honour
to be affiliated to Guithelinus or Vitalinus; but
no Constantinid dynasty can have existed. Where
would it come from, since Constantine and both
his sons died in the troubles of 410? This is not
genealogical lore, but genealogical fiction,
attributing to a fictional dynasty a fictional
dependency on a fictional early archbishop.
What, then, was its purpose? Well,
the one thing it does do is to allow Guithelinus
to overwhelm the prior claim of Ambrosius’
father to the throne by a kind of reverse
validation: Guithelinus is the father-in-law of
British monarchy, rising above the Ambrosiads in
terms of prestige and legitimacy.
Now the thing we have to
notice is that, in this legend, both Guithelinus
and Vortigern play prominent roles; and what is
more, they play two versions of the same role.
Guithelinus summoned and crowned Constantine; and
we hear that when Vortigern forced Constans'
coronation, the clergy were so shocked at the
breaking of his monastic vows that nobody would
perform the ceremony of anointing, so that
Vortigern acted as bishop himself. So Vortigern,
whose name we suspect to have been Vitalinus or
Gwythelin, took the place of the Archbishop
Guithelinus who had summoned and crowned
Constantine, to summon (from the cloister) and
crown Constantine’s son and heir?
(Guithelinus, Geoffrey tells us, had been long
since dead.) Methinks we have grounds to suspect
duplication.
We have come across this sort of
thing before. In the legend of the Seven
Emperors, Magnus Maximus, who had been a single
and quite legendary figure in Gildas, broke up
into the Maximus and Maximianus of the legend of
the Seven Emperors; and we have seen that it was
a conscious operation whose mechanics Nennius
understood quite well. It seems exactly the same
sort of thing when we find Good Guithelinus, the
ecclesiastical hero who travels overseas to find
the rescuer of Britain, crowns him king, and
gives him a noble wife; and Bad Vortigern, who
lures the rescuer’s son from the cloister
and imposes himself on him. The moral
predominance which makes Constans the docile
instrument of Vortigern’s will is not really
different from the influence that can be read in
Constantine, summoned, crowned and married by
Archbishop Guithelinus all off his own bat; both
Good Guithelinus and Bad Vortigern go out on
their own initiative and convince a candidate of
their own choosing to take the crown of Britain.
Both legends carry out the
separation between Good and Bad character in the
same way. Bad Maximianus follows Good Maximus in
time just as Bad Vortigern follows Good
Guithelinus, in time; but they have nothing to do
with each other and certainly there is nothing
whatever to suggest that they may be members of
the same family. The Bad character succeeds the
Good character in time, and any suggestion of
family or kinship between them is accurately
avoided. And need I belabour the point that the
existence of this duplication also works in
reverse, as evidence, showing that the character
called, in his bad sense, Vortigern, can be
duplicated with a “good” character
called Vitalinus, who is an arch-ancestor? In
other words, this is another reason to believe
that the actual historical name of the
Romano-British pretender Emperor who dethroned
the Mild King and became known as Vortigern was
in fact Vitalinus.
If this is, as in the case of
Maximus-Maximianus, a piece of genealogical
fiction or manipulation, meant to restore the
good name of a dynasty with a
“difficult” patriarch whose bad
character is too entrenched in legend to be
simply whitewashed, then the separation from the
blood-line is the very heart of the manipulation.
The troublesome ancestor is conveniently divided
into a Good and a Bad figure, the Good meant to
flatter the dynasty and the Bad to keep the
established villainous role; but the whole point
of the duplication is to separate the Bad
dynastically from the Good, leaving no connection
to the Good’s newly cleansed descendants.
Good Guithelinus' other major
contribution to the story is Constantine's bride.
Geoffrey tells us nothing about her except that
the archbishop brought her up and that she was
very nobly born, but she bore Constantine three
sons, Constans, Aurelius Ambrosius, and Uther
Pendragon. They were all to reign in turn, and
two, Ambrosius and Uther, were to be great
heroes; which makes their unnamed mother a major
figure[8]. This is in the same
area of genealogical fiction: Welsh genealogists
were fond of inventing daughters for great
figures of the past and marrying them off to the
patriarchs of dynasties in search of Roman or at
any rate ancient legitimacy. This was how
Maxen/Maximianus sprouted a pleasing crop of
unhistorical but apparently irresistible girl
children, all fated to marry the founders of
royal lines (lucky young ladies!). It was not
only Roman heroes who developed such posthumous
progeny: Tewdrig, for instance, a Gothic or
Frankish adventurer who established some sort of
lordship on both sides of the English Channel in
the first half of the sixth century and became
famous in legend[9], lent his genealogical
status to Brychan, Irish founder of Brycheiniog
or Brecknock, in the form of a
“daughter” – an acquaintance of
ours, none other than Marcella; and Brychan, in
turn, produced dozens of supposed mothers of
Saints.
Except that Guithelinus is not
said to be the father of Constantine’s wife,
this seems exactly the same sort of thing;
indeed, I feel certain that, in an earlier
version, she was not in fact the Archbishop's
daughter. Clerical celibacy was only decidedly
enforced in 1022, with the savage canons of Pope
Benedict VIII, and cannot have been an absolute
rule when this story was first drafted. Gildas[10] speaks of a bishop and
his son, both notorious fornicators; but he does
not seem to see anything special about a bishop
having a son - it is the bad example he gives as
a father, not the fatherhood itself, that he
condemns. (This strongly suggests that the story
was not invented by Geoffrey, but adapted from an
earlier source.)
Once we realize that what we are
dealing with is Welsh genealogical lore of an
absolutely typical stripe, we are a good way down
the road. Centuries of distortion and
self-interested invention lie behind the text as
we have it, and will make our lives interesting
trying to disentangle them; but it is something
to know what sort of thing we are dealing with,
and that it is a kind of fiction with whose rules
we are tolerably familiar – others more than
I, but I myself not badly. The whole Galfridian
description of the "House of
Constantine" is one extended genealogical
fiction. Someone reconstructed an idealized
British past by forming a double triad, a triad
of generations - Constantine,
Constans-Ambrosius-Uther, Arthur - the second of
which is a triad of brothers, Constans, Aurelius
Ambrosius, Uther Pendragon; a thoroughly
fictional triad, indeed the more fictional for at
least two of them being historical - for nothing
is more certain than that they never were
brothers and never met.
The importance of Guithelinus may
have been reduced by Geoffrey, who stretched out
the monarchy of Britain to a prehistory long
before Rome, and, in particular, created a
visibly artificial succession of kings of Britain
under the Roman Empire. He should not be blamed:
his view of the Roman Empire was based on the
Holy Roman Empire of his day, a feudal realm
including several kingdoms and kings - Germany,
Burgundy, Italy, Bohemia - and with an
ill-defined suzerainty over others such as
France. He would naturally think of Britain as a
kingdom within a larger feudal Empire, and, where
no documents for such a "kingdom"
seemed to him to have survived, he would simply
go looking, among the genealogies which he
certainly knew by the score, for ancestors who
could be credibly placed in what seemed to him a
glaring gap in the evidence. My point however is
that this is his own creation, redolent of his
age and viewpoints. As there evidently were no
kings of Britain in the earlier legend - only
seven "Roman Emperors" - the arrival of
Constantine from Letavia must have been seen as
the foundation, not the re-establishment, of a
British kingdom, and Guithelinus, his daughter,
Aldroenus, and Constantine, must have been seen
as founding heroes. Therefore the marriage of
Constantine and Guithelinus' daughter was more
even than just a royal hieros gamos, a
sacred marriage consecrating the king: it was a
foundational event establishing the royalty of
Britain. The Archbishop, senior to the
young king and conferring on him the bride
through whom the future of kingdom and dynasty
pass, is the foster-father of monarchy itself.
Celtic monarchy is everywhere
essentially a military power, but consists of a
marriage with the fertile land (Guithelinus'
unnamed daughter is no doubt to be identified
with the spirit of the land, married by the first
king) and therefore has the ultimate claim over
the land's wealth. If we remember the separation
of royal and sacred function in various legends
we encountered, we must be struck by the
ideological parallel between this creation of a
monarchy and the sequence of Roman interventions
in A. A's first Roman invasion establishes,
peacefully, their ultimate claim to the land, de
iure, in the realms of law and consecration
typical of the Dumezilian first function; it is
the second invasion, following upon the first and
justified by its precedent, that establishes it de
facto, with its military power and its
economic correlation in the ultimate Roman claim
to all British wealth. The same set of
relationships, personalized in a group of heroes,
is to be read in the story of the origin of the
kingdom of Britain: it is the supreme
first-function authority of Britain, the lord of
the Sacred, Guithelinus archbishop of London, who
summons, consecrates and blesses the future king,
and, by bestowing a sacred bride on him, makes
him the head and source of succeeding legitimate
rightful monarchy[11].
The first author of the legend
seems to have wanted to underline the importance
of Guithelinus and his consecration by working in
a false start. The great crisis that leads to the
complete disarticulation of Britain's society
begins when, by emptying Britain of her soldiers,
Maximianus - Bad Maximianus, the last Roman
emperor - leaves its "witless"
peasantry exposed to the savagery of Picts
"and Huns", whose two leaders, Wanius
and Melga, are named[12]; however, when
Maximianus hears of their ravages, he sends two
legions commanded by Gratianus mancipalis,
the freedman Gratianus, a name in which we
recognize the Gratianus municeps or
civilian officer who was briefly thrust into the
usurper's role in the British Year of Three
Emperors[13]. But when Maximianus'
own bid for power collapses in Rome, Gratianus
crowns himself king of Britain, soon proving a
tyrant so bad that the British murder him - and
are immediately subjected to Pictish assaults
again, so that the whole of society collapses
into a rubble of hunter-gatherers skulking in
woods and caves.
It is at this point that
Archbishop Guithelinus first appears on the
scene, edited into Gildas' account of the last
two Roman expeditions, speaking at a grand
national assembly summoned by the Romans for the
building of a very Gildasian version of the Wall,
trying to rouse their spirits and encourage them
to fight for themselves. (And thank God that we
have Gildas' original for these events, with no
Guithelinus or popular assembly; if we did not,
it would be all but impossible to recover the
original narrative structure. This gives some
idea of the difficulties in dealing with an
elaborate written tradition such as we have in
Nennius and Geoffrey, with several different
pre-existing accounts edited together often with
no obvious sign of where one ends and another
begins.) He does not succeed, and is next heard
from in Armorica, trying to get Aldroenus to come
to the rescue of Britain, and obtaining
Constantine instead.
Guithelinus, interestingly, is not
mentioned as part of the embassies that procure
Rome's two expeditions, which Geoffrey has taken
almost verbatim from Gildas: he first appears
trying to weld together an almost disarticulated
British people, and then crosses the Channel to
summon Aldroenus to the rescue of Britain -
having found British peasants, as Geoffrey makes
brutally clear, quite useless to defend the
country[14]. The doctrine that
underlies this story is that, without a social
class dedicated to the use of weapons - a
fighting nobility headed by a warrior king - the
peasantry cannot do their proper work of
producing food, and society collapses.
The distinctive feature of this
theory is the description of the collapse of
society, without its royal defenders, into a
primitive hunter-gatherer mob. The legend (which
we shall call N) ascribes the
gathering of the survivors to the presence of
Constantine; which is an instance of its author's
constant and indeed quite able fusions of
different narratives into one whole. The template
for N's arrival of Constantine to free Britain
from the Picts is the historical coming of
Ambrosius to free Britain from the Saxons; but
there is nothing in Gildas’ description of
the Saxon conquest to match the element of
reduction to hunting-gathering. Indeed, even
Gildas' report of A’s third Pictisn invasion
describes not so much the kind of reversion to
the stone age that this theory presupposes, as a
credible picture of hosts of refugees driven out
of their homes to starve - a picture we know all
too well, but which has no necessary connection
with any return to hunting-gathering. Refugees,
then as now, set out on metalled roads in search
of some civilized community to feed them for
pity's sake, and if they do not find anyone, they
do not revert to hunting or gathering, but simply
starve.
In other words, credible though it
may look, the collapse into hunting-gathering is
in fact a false picture. The ruin of the military
defenders of a country does bring regression and
social chaos - as may be seen by the
well-documented contemporary death throes of the
Western Roman Empire - but not regression to such
a point, for the very simple reason that the
enemies from whom military power had defended the
country sweep in and take over - the classic
description of a barbarian invasion. They then
proceed to exploit the conquered land for
themselves. No historical description of Saxon or
even Pictish conquest could have served as
template for the description of a completely
disarticulated British society given by
Guithelinus in Geoffrey: it is a legendary
picture. It is even possible that some featurs of
Gildas' own description of the Saxon war owed
more to this model of a war of conquest than to
the facts: in particular, the self-surrender of
British persons into slavery because of hunger,
which echoes episodes both in the Third Pictish
Invasion and in the Roman dolosa leaena
punishment raid, seems somewhat out of place as
part of a blitzkrieg, which, while no
doubt atrocious and horrible in its effects,
might not last long enough to affect food stocks
or planting and reaping - which people will do
even in the direst circumstances, because they
know it's either that or starve. Besides, the
Saxons, who were fighting for annona, had
an interest in the continuity of planting and
reaping even in the lands they pillaged.
This, in short, is nothing but a
Celtic political doctrine, which seems to hinge
on two things: a vision of the enemy as
destructive and irrational, not dedicated to
their own advantage (which involves taking over
the land with its productive system as intact as
possible) but purely to the irrational desire to
destroy; and an unconsciously self-serving
picture of the indispensability of the Celtic
aristocracy itself, without which the helpless
peasantry could never survive or organize itself.
(Caesar: "The commons are regarded more or
less as slaves, are never consulted on any matter
and never dare to act for themselves.")
Neither the idea that the peasantry could
organize itself, nor that there existed another
leadership in the world capable of taking over
from the Celtic aristocracy itself, seems to
cross their minds.
In other words, the epic accounts
of the country's reduction to hunting-gathering
and complete societal disarticulation are not
historical but legendary, and they are to do with
the self-justification of the Celtic royal upper
class. But that social class, in turn, needs
consecration from something higher than itself,
namely first-function figures such as
Guithelinus. Gratianus had received his command
in Britain from something no higher than himself
- that is, another king, Maximianus - and his
rule was based only on the strength of his
armies, with no element of consecration or
righteousness: he had therefore become a tyrant,
and force had turned in on itself, with his
subjects revolting against him and the universal
darkness of Pictish-Hunnish invasion covering
all.
That the ruin of Gratianus was
meant to serve as a contrasting parallel to the
success of Constantine, summoned by a higher
authority and obedient to it, is clear by the
fact that the original author has distorted his
data. He must clearly have started from a brief
notice about Britain splitting off from Rome
under the usurpers Gratianus municeps and
Constantine; and he knew that Gratianus had been
murdered by his own people within a short time of
seizing the throne, while Constantine had lasted
rather longer and fallen, when he did, at the
hands of his enemies. To fashion his romance, he
illegitimately connected Gratianus with
"Maximianus" and separated him from
Constantine.
Why? Well, the effect of this
distortion in the story as we have it is to place
between the failed regime of Gratianus and the
triumphant rule of Constantine the terrifying
interval of the Pictish invasion, which, in this
author's story, are the fault not so much of
Maximianus as of Gratianus. Maximianus is indeed
responsible for emptying Britain of troops, but
then does his best to repair the damage by
sending Gratianus and no less than two legions.
nd this represents the result of
the author's intervention, not only on Roman
annalistic notices, but on Gildas as well. We
remember that, in Gildas, one legion was enough
to free Britain of Picts and Scots; our author
had read Gildas, and therefore his use of two
legions is meant to indicate solicitude and
indeed some overkill on Maximianus' part.
This is reminiscent of the
attempts to clean up Vortigern's character which
we are analyzing. Maxen had already, like
Vortigern, been the subject of an attempted
clean-up through duplication; it may be that,
when that failed (the connection between the
villainous Maximus of Gildas and the Good
Maximus/Maxen of legend was not forgotten), the
same Dark Age author we are talking about may
have wanted to offer some Maximid ruler or other
another figleaf.
Why do I think that the author of
the legend of the House of Constantine had read
Gildas? (Geoffrey has, of course, but the
appearance of Guithelinus in Gildas' national
assembly might be Geoffrey's work rather than
that of his source; that is, it is not evidence
that his source knew the great writer.) Because
of a significant mistake. To Roman historians,
Gratianus is municeps, a civilian
functionary; to Geoffrey, he is mancipalis,
a freedman. We have met this word before: it is
Gildas' word for the group of unslaughtered
survivors of the Roman punishment on the culprits
of the leaena dolosa conspiracy. Gildas
uses this word to signify a definite class or
caste, that from which, in fact, Maximus himself
has sprung: the tyranni of British lesser
kings. Here, however, the title is specifically
ascribed to Gratianus. This seems parallel to the
author's desire to clear Maximianus of blame for
emptying Britain of troops: as he is not the
ruinous culprit of British helplessness, so he is
not actually a mancipalis or serf-king -
it is Gratianus who is both of those things. And
it is because of Gratianus' illegitimate and
therefore tyrannical rule, not because of
Maximianus emptying her of troops, that Britain
collapses into foreign invasion and anarchy: when
he made himself king, the country was not
undefended - it had two legions.
The author's mistake may have been
unintentional; it is quite possible that he
simply misread two similar words, especially,
perhaps, if we assume that the rank of municeps
functionary had ceased to exist by his time and
the word gone out of use. Mancipalis, on
the other hand, would have lived on, buttressed
by the high authority of Gildas, and defining a
social reality which our author seems to have
understood; and this might have spurred his whole
invention. But there can be no doubt, unless we
refuse to see any purpose in his very elaborate
distortion of historic data, that his purpose is
mirrored in his results: and his results are to
separate Gratianus, a tyrant with no consecration
and no successors, from Maximus, the last and not
the worst of the Emperors of Rome in Britain, and
from Constantine, heroic, beloved, and
consecrated. Gratianus is the figure of a tyrant,
a king promoted only by his own force, sterile
and without descent; Constantine, of a legitimate
and fruitful monarchy. He must have been
remembered as the true founder of British
monarchy, and the historical enormity of
attributing to him Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon
as sons was simply an inevitable corollary of his
legitimacy - succeeding British kings had to be
of his blood.
A whole prehistory seems to loom,
not just as a battleground for dry if fraudulent
genealogical data, but also for an entire cycle
of legends with, perhaps, historical fact behind
them, yet developed in ignorance of most
historical facts about Constantine and Constans.
But even this story has a
prehistory. We have to start from the fact that
history meets legend at the point when Constans
is persuaded to leave the cloister and take the
crown. Both legend and contemporary opinion
condemn this: Orosius, a contemporary historian,
was shocked – proh dolor!, he
exclaims – and the legend agrees to the
point that no clergyman is willing to anoint the
vow-breaker[15]. It follows that the
person who convinced him to do so, for good or
for ill, must be seen as a tempter. This person
is Vitalinus/Vortigern, and cannot be anyone
else. If the actions of Good Guithelinus,
bringing Constantine from Brittany to save and
rule over Britain and to marry his own
foster-daughter, were of the same order - if not
of the same moral value - as those of Vortigern
in taking Constans from the cloister to the
throne, if the two figures formed a couple or
dyad, then one of the two stories, and one of the
two characters, was built on the other; and the
model can only be that of Bad Vortigern, since it
is the supposed result of his actions,
Constans’ vow-breaking, which is historical.
A related point is that, according
to Geoffrey, there were no elders anywhere in
Britain, save for Vortigern himself, when he
crowned Constans: every other person of rank
happened to be young and callow. This agrees with
the fact that Guithelinus and Vortigern are the
two figures who confer the kingdom. After
Archbishop Guithelinus’ desperate message,
King Aldroenus takes measures to restore a
British aristocracy, sending his younger brother
Constantine and 2,000 selected men from his
kingdom’s provinces to be the core of an
army of liberation – and, surely, of a
future British aristocracy. But one elder at
least was present in this unshaped Britain: that
is, Archbishop Guithelinus, who had a foster (?)
daughter old enough to marry Constantine.
Guithelinus does seem to be the only elder in
Britain in the days of Constantine's youth[16] - like Vortigern with
the youth Constans.
So: on the historical event of
Constans’ vow-breaking is built the legend
of Vitalinus-Vortigern, the bad adviser luring
him; and on that, in turn, is built the picture
of Good Guithelinus, and the thoroughly
unhistorical summoning of Constans’ father
Constantine. In the parallel duplication of
Maximus and Maximianus, the Good character was
worked out of the Bad one, and Bad Maximianus is
a closer reflection of Gildas’ Magnus
Maximus; in the same way, Bad Vortigern must be
taken as closer to the original than Good
Guithelinus.A revision was made to preserve the
pride of a still notable house of Vitalinus; but
it had no future – or rather, its future was
to completely forget the connection of Good
Guithelinus, the saintly, elderly archbishop,
joint saviour of Britain and partner in the
founding of a great dynasty, with the most hated
man in Welsh pseudo-history.
The account of Vortigern seducing
Constans is primary. It depends on one historical
fact - Constans' vow-breaking - whose context it
no longer perceives, but which it still regards
as outrageous and ill-omened, and attributes this
disgrace to the evil advice of Vortigern.
This strange claim would, itself,
make no sense; but if we look at how the story
develops (eliminating the opening episodes of
Gratianus’ tyranny, Aldroenus, Guithelinus,
and Constantine, which were added later), it
becomes clear that it works within a calculated
purpose - namely, to attribute all the woes of
Britain, form the vow-breaking and death of
Constans, to Vortigern, with the coming of the
Saxons as the final outrage. What happens to
Constans, once Vortigern has placed him on the
throne? That Vortigern then induces his Pictish
bodyguard to kill him. This is part of the same
story, in that it only makes sense as the sequel
to his promotion of the boy monk; also, it is
clearly based on the same kind of extremely
fragmentary data - the author knew that Constans
the monk had died a violent death, but not where
or at whose hands. Another historical fact he
knew is that Vortigern-Vitalinus had not killed
anyone: here, he is only shown spurring on the
Picts. As in the seduction of Constans, he is a
tempter and a counsellor of evil, but never a
first-person murderer. He can plausibly, indeed
correctly (for he never actually recommended
murder to his Pictish tools), deny any
involvement with Constans' murder; and he can
suitably punish the killers. This, in turn, leads
to another disaster: the fellow-countrymen of his
Pictish scapegoats come to suspect his part in
the events, and prepare for war; for the same
suspicions, Vortigern's own British subjects
withdraw their support; and as a result, he must
needs call the Saxons - with what results,
everyone knows. This is the climax of the whole
sequence, and, although Geoffrey or his source
edited it in with the legend of the dragons, it
amounts to an alternative account of the call to
the barbarians.
My method of analysis always
starts from the question, what is the central
issue of this or that legend? And the central
issue of this one is decidedly the coming of the
Saxons, to which the war against the Picts is
strictly accessory. It is at this point that the
Bad Vortigern of this legend meets history and
other legends: Vortigern is always, from Gildas
on, condemned as being the man who brought the
Saxons in. And at some point, a talented
storyteller concocted a story which bound him to
all the other evils of the early fifth century,
in particular the vow-breaking of Constans and
the Pictish wars, into a relentless progression
towards the call to the barbarians. The very
Pictish danger which the Saxons were meant to
meet was in fact the work of none other than...
Vortigern. It is nobody else's fault that the
Picts are his enemies at all! Their sudden
preparations for war after a long peace are due
not to Pictish land hunger or even to ancient
hostility and the desire to reverse a stunning
previous defeat – but to their thirst for
revenge for their fellow-countrymen, first
encouraged to murder Constans and then punished
as regicides.
These Picts are a million miles
from the vicious, ever-watchful northern enemy of
A, everlastingly waiting for a weakening in
Britain's defences to invade, plunder, enslave
and condemn to death by starvation: they are
uncomplicated, ignorant barbarians, prone to
drink, easily misled by a show of friendship, and
ultimately the victims of a more sophisticated
scoundrel. Though not unused to violence,
they are boisterous, simple-minded innocents and
fundamentally no more than a bunch of big babies
used and abused by Vortigern, who gets them drunk
and convinces them to assassinate Constans
becaushe Vortigern ish - hic! - their deeearesth
frie - hic! -friend, and should - hic!
-sh-sh-should be made King himshelf (hic!); only
to disavow their "horrible act", and
have them punished for regicide, the moment he is
on the throne. They are indeed dangerous, and
when they go to war the king of Britain worries;
but they do not go to war unless provoked, and
the provocation is that the man now on the throne
has used and abused the boisterous good nature of
their fellows, and left them to be hanged for a
murder he had suborned.
The direct relevance of this to
the calling of the Saxons is that there was no
need for them, no Pictish threat and no
depopulation. It is a defining characteristic of
this kind of semi-legendary explanations for
historical events that they are always
personalistic and often casual; if X had not done
Y, war would not have broken out. No structural
reason or historical inevitability is ever
recognized. So, in this case, the historical
Pictish war was caused by the individual crime of
Vortigern and by no other more general cause. The
Picts would have kept nice if only Vortigern had
not seen fit to use and abuse them in his bid for
illegitimate power. As for the plague –
plague, what plague? Geoffrey knows nothing of it[17]. This is all in direct
and total contradiction with the statements of A
and Gildas.
The story comes, I would suggest,
from a lowland perspective: the Picts, naive
highlanders, more dupes than threats, are not
seen as a very great menace; the Saxons,
on the other hand, apart from being militarily
far more fearsome, are a great dear more subtle.
Vortigern deceives the Picts, but is deceived by
the Saxons. And while the Picts threatened the
highlands, the Saxons occupied large chunks of
the lowlands.
The purposes of N are not properly
Ambrosian. The Ambrosian file, as we can see it
in Gildas, charged the Senate of
Vitalinus/Vortigern with complicity in the
calling of the Saxons, and with not being a
properly constituted Senate at all. On the other
hand, N, while hostile to Vortigern and therefore
pro-Ambrosian more or less by reflex, exonerates
the aristocracy around Vortigern from blame.
There is something familiar about the way that
“the Britons” in general, all the
citizens of Britain – or at least, all those
entitled to present their opinions to Vortigern
– are against the Saxon settlement, part of
the “can’t pay won’t pay”
party, from the beginning. One has the impression
of a common historical phenomenon – all the eroi
della sesta giornata (“sixth-day
heroes”) who turned out, to the surprise of
those who had done the fighting, to have taken
unspecified and indeed invisible part in the
“Five days of Milan”, the smashing of
Radetzky’s Austrian army, in March 1848; or
all the people who turned out jamais to
have supported the Vichy government, and toujours
to have been secret members of the Free French,
after June 6, 1944. It is always amazing how
popular victorious parties turn out to have been.
An exactly similar claim is part
of Nennius' chapter 36, though most of its
account is unmistakably parallel to Gildas’.
"It then happened, after the Saxon were
measured out on the aforementioned island of
Thanet, that the aforementioned king promised
that food and clothes would be given them without
fault; and it pleased them, and they promised to
powerfully overwhelm his enemies. But as those
barbarians were multiplied in number, the British
could not feed them. When they asked for food and
clothes, as it had been promised to them, the
British said: 'We cannot give you food and
clothes, for your number is multiplied; but go
away from us, for we are not in need of your
help.' And they made a council with their elders,
to break the peace."[18]
This chapter, the first about the
Saxon war, is visibly out of sequence with those
that follow it. At the end of ch.36, the Saxons
are threatened with starvation by the British
refusal to feed them, and their elders are taking
counsel to break the peace; ch.37, implausibly,
has Hengist begin a long series of diplomatic
manoeuvres as if he had all the time in the
world. And we notice that it is strikingly close
to Gildas. It is written in the unmistakable bad
style of the Annales Romanorum: even in
such a small space, it manages to place two
separate groups of irritating repetitions - dari
illis victum et vestimentum - Cum postularent
cibum et vestimentum - Non possumus dare vobis
cibum et vestimentum; cum multiplicati essent
numero - quia numerus vester multiplicatus est;
and we find the verb promitto turning up
three times in as many sentences. It is both
preceded and followed by passages concerned with
Hengist and Ambrosius, but, as well as being
singled out from them by a notable difference in
content and emphasis, this sudden multiplication
of repetitions - far less frequent and obtrusive
in the Hengist- and Ambrosius-related passages -
marks it out as not being by the same author. It
would seem that the author of the Annales Romanorum
had access to a pre-disaster source, not
dependent on Gildas but equally based on fact. It
is significant that he makes no mention of any
Hengist: clearly, by the time he wrote, the name
had not yet reached the learned classes of Wales.
The sequence of events in Gildas
and in Nennius 43 is exactly the same, with the
addition of the wholly credible claim that the
Saxons were "measured out", metati,
evidently for the purpose of reckoning the annona.
The king[19]promises them food and
clothing; they, in turn, promise to expugnare
his enemies - to take them by storm, overwhelm
them - fortiter, mightily or courageously.
Given the emphasis that both Gildas and this
source place on this exchange of promises, there
can be no doubt this was a ritual and public
ceremony, which the embittered Gildas savagely
cast in a satirical imitation of the incipit
of L - a story of genuine British heroes,
defending the land of Britain against these same
supposed defenders.
Both authorities make the same
charge: the Saxons have grown in numbers - Gildas
says, because they have called in
"satellites and dogs" from the mother
country. This is evidently the point of saying
that the Saxons had been metati, measured,
before the oaths were echanged: we know how many
you were when we let you in, say the British, so
don’t come the crafty barbarian with us. On
the other hand, Gildas is not as blunt as the
Nennian source, whose message was simple:
"there is no food for you here; go away, we
don't need your help". (That this was a
pretext is clear by the fact that the British
wanted to make the alleged increase in barbarian
numbers an excuse to stop all payments
altogether, and demanded that all the
barbarians should go "since we no longer
need you.") The end of the affair is the
same: "the starved and indignant Goths
rebelled", the elders of the barbarians
decided on war.
In this thoroughly historical
picture, however, one matter differs from Gildas:
"the British", the aristocracy of
Britain, are from start to finish against the
Saxons, whom the king, in effect, invites in off
his own bat. Not that the Annales Romanorum
are as tendentious as Geoffrey's sources. They do
not say that "the Britons" opposed the
summoning of the Saxons, only that they
eventually decided to stop payments - which is no
more than we had already determined from Gildas;
and their charge that Vortigern alone decided to
summon the barbarians, could easily be seen as a
development of the Gildasian argument that the
body that voted for their admission was no
legitimate Senate but a gang of consiliarii
at the tyrannus' beck and call. But it is
at the deepest level that it is in contradiction
with Gildas' picture. To Gildas, the British
aristocracy of Vortigern's time was guilty as a
body, the tyrannus being only the head of
their collective sins, and would be punished as a
body; to the redactor of the Annales Romanorum,
Vortigern was the only guilty party – the
only mention of the “British”, that is
of the aristocracy, is that they try to get rid
of the Saxons whom the king, apparently alone,
had summoned. His brief sentences are already
half-way to Geoffrey's description of an
unsupported usurper, suspected of doing away with
his predecessor, calling in alien mercenaries in
order to have one party in the state he could
trust.
There is no doubt that this view
of the aduentus Saxonum pre-existed
Geoffrey. (I will call the Annales Romanorum,
and specifically their source, M.)
This attitude to history, shifting the
responsibility for all the woes of Britain on the
usurper alone, is clearly responsible both for
historically based accounts such as M and for the
legend of Vortigern and Constans, a legend
clearly alternative, if not indeed contradictory,
to that of the dragons. There Vortigern calls in
the Saxons out of love for Ronwein; and there is
no hint whatever that any native sedition or even
foreign war threatened the stability of his
throne until he saw her face. That Vortigern was
a settled king over Britain, with druids (!) at
his court and swarms of officials ready to search
the island, at his behest, for a stable fortress
or a fatherless boy; this one is a usurper unable
to trust anyone, threatened at home by the
suspicion that he had his predecessor murdered
and abroad by the anger of the Picts, turning to
the Saxons because he has no other support.
It seems as clear as the sun that
the original story of the seduction and murder of
Constans, and its effects, did not originate in a
Vortigernid environment. It is therefore equally
clear that the antefact of the story - with Good
Guithelinus convincing Constantine, saviour of
Britain and founder of the independent monarchy,
to come to the land, just as Bad Vortigern
convinced his son out of the cloister - is a
Vortigernid revision of an originally hostile
account. (The concern pointed out earlier, to
whitewash Maxen/Maximianus, is probably a part of
the same revision, since the vilification of
Gratianus mancipalis, which is part of it,
is the counterpart of the invention of Good
Guithelinus and his protegé Constantine.)
Even before the invention of Good
Guithelinus, this must have been a work of
considerable complexity and more than ordinary
ability. The artistry of its plot, that can weave
all the evils of Britain - political instability
and the presence of two powerful and hostile
barbarian groups, Picts and Saxons - into the one
single man's career, is remarkable, and one
invention - Vortigern's usurpation of the title
of Bishop - is first-rate. It must have been
invented for the purpose: no other legendary or
historical material suggests that the usurper had
anything to do with holy orders, but the
Vortigern who seduced Constans was a false
bishop; and the Guithelinus who called
Constantine to Britain, the whitewashed
"true" Vortigernid ancestor, is a true
Archbishop. This is scarcely likely to be
historical: I cannot imagine that the
extraordinary situation of a British bishop,
perhaps an archbishop of London, being both an
usurping head of state – almost impossible
in the first place! - and favourable to
compromise with Pelagians, would have escaped
notice by Prosper Tiro and Constantius of Lyons,
let alone the host of other church writers and
historians, all too familiar with schismatic and
heretical bishops from Nestorius of
Constantinople to Priscillianus of Avila. It
seems much likelier that Vortigern's false
episcopate was part of the original legend.
As Guithelinus was designed to
offset the evil image of Vortigern, so his
episcopal rank must have been designed to offset
the original account; therefore Bad Vortigern's
usurpation of the title of Bishop must have been
a very impressive feature of the story. Even we,
left as we are with less than the bare bones,
cannot help but find it striking. There is
something like a ghastly reversal of sane norms,
almost a plunge into madness, about the picture
of this subtle elder, with no previous
pretensions to clerical character or faith,
suddenly appearing in the golden robes and mitre
of a crowned Bishop, to lead his callow,
unsuspicious charge – whose tonsure is just
beginning to become overgrown with hair –
into a cathedral or basilica full of sycophantic
assembled nobles, but devoid of clergy. The
amount of birds it manages to kill with a single
stone gives me a high notion of the literary
abilities of whoever invented it.
Vortigern’s rape of the country's religious
order is an appalling confusion of lay and
religious rank in artistic symmetry with
Constans’ surrender of the religious life:
while he, an ecclesiastic, broke his vows, his
layman seducer usurped a churchman's robes to
facilitate his oath-breaking. It also preludes to
his other usurpation: he is an usurping bishop
even before being an usurping king[20]; and the fact that he
could not find one single solitary clergyman to
perform Constans' ill-advised coronation is a
foretaste of the usurper's loneliness and lack of
support, that is to lead him to call the Saxons.
Evil counsels are a leitmotif: Vortigern
advises badly, first Constans, but then himself,
which results in the settlement of Saxon
barbarians on a divided island whose usurping
sovereign has no support among his own people.
The genius of the person who
revised this in favour of the Vortigernids seems
quite equal to his predecessor's. His invention
of a true Archbishop of London reverses his
picture of Vortigern's assault on the sacred
things of Britain; and the fact that he not only
nominated the hero Constantine but actually gave
him a bride - that essential part of Celtic
royalty! - answers the sacrilegious and
anti-royal role of the false ecclesiastic and
false monarch.
It also shows that the
Vortigernids were still not resigned to playing
second fiddle in Britain. By making Good
Guithelinus into the foster-father and the sacred
validator of the institution of British monarchy,
he vaults over even the enormous amount of evil
attributed to Vortigern by his predecessor; he
polishes the Vortigernid claim, indeed adds one
layer of self-validation to it; and by his
manipulation of the sequence of Gratianus mancipalis
and Constantine into a duality of unhallowed and
hallowed king, usurper and consecrated lord, he
both clears Maximianus/Maxen of the charge of
ruining Britain, and turns the story into a
comprehensive sequence of the establishment and
first great epic of the kingdom of Britain.
Finally, he is almost certainly the inventor of
the House of Constantine, a romance which brings
together all those great names, from Maximianus
to Arthur, whose individual reputations, good or
bad, still towered across the historical horizon:
his capacity for brilliant systematization and
large-scale invention seems, if anything, even
higher than the earlier writer's.
This is already the third legend
of Vortigern we have met. They begin to multiply
beyond ease: therefore, from now on, I will refer
to them by letters.
1.
M will be the source of Nennius ch.43, that is
the Annales Romanorum and its source;
2.
N will be the tale of the house of Constantine;
3.
N1 will be the original tale of Vortigern and the
seduction of Constans, with all its consequences;
4.
O will be the legend featuring Emrys, the two
dragons, and Ronwein;
5.
P will be the *Gesta Germani
We can see that the prehistory of
the Vortigern material is enormously complex, and
the material itself multifarious beyond anything
we have yet met. And we are beginning to see why.
Nennius intervened on his materials in the
interests of the Vortigernid house of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion; but Vortigernid fingerprints are
also on N, which Nennius never touched, tacking
on to the wicked Vortigern of N1 the good
Guithelinus of N. What is more, we have seen that
the original of O was itself a justification of
Vortigern, making him, like Conn and his
descendants, an unhappy victim of love and a
patriot struggling to undo the evil he had done;
in other words, there was already, by the time O
took shape, a need to excuse and justify the
ancestor.
The legends date to different
periods: the first redaction of O, I date to the
age of Gildas; P assumes that the political
set-up of eighth-century Powys is a permanent
reality and cannot be much earlier; and N cannot
(at this point in our inquiry) be dated with any
confidence, but comes from a period - or from a
social group - which no longer knew the dynastic
and political history of the British fifth
century.
All these seem to move in the same
direction, towards whitewashing to some extent,
not necessarily Vortigern himself, but certainly
the Vortigernid succession; however, they start
from different positions. The original of O must
have presented Vortigern as basically a tragic,
well-meaning hero and patriot; on the other hand,
P and N assume the truth of the Black Legend,
seeing Vortigern as unforgivable and damned, and
only strive to clear the name and legitimacy of
his successors. In other words, O - the
presumably earliest of all the legends - was
concerned with justifying Vortigern himself; by
the time N developed, the focus had shifted from
justifying the ancestor to removing him from the
pedigree, by inventing a wholly different
Guithelinus; and P may be seen as a final stage,
using all the ingenuity available to clean up the
blood-line, and - if the claim to being a
legitimate king of all Britain was part of the
original *Gesta Germani - to preserve the
ancestor's ancient claims, but making no effort
either to clean up Vortigern's image or to remove
him from the lineage. The Black Legend of
Vortigern has triumphed.
As I pointed out, the Black Legend
did not exist in Gildas, and the evolution we
notice strongly suggests that it was the product
of the fall of Britain. There is a definite point
after which any defensio of Vortigern as a
person was no longer possible, and it seems
obvious that it must be when the barbarian danger
he summoned to Britain - which Gildas and O
regarded as subdued and under control - suddenly
awoke and exploded across the island. It hardly
seems unrelated that, at some still unspecified
point (I will propose a chronology later), the
emphasis in the Vortigern stories shifts from
defending Vortigern to defending the blood-line.
As with the division of Gildas'
Magnus Maximus into Good Maximus and Bad
Maximianus, it seems reasonable to see dynastic
self-defence at the heart of the division between
Good Guithelinus and Bad Vortigern; and indeed,
the common motivating element of most Vortigern
material is not so much loyalty to the ancestor,
but rather the honour, the rights and the claims
of the family. N and P accept the Black Legend
with little qualification; the one simply asserts
that Bad Vortigern was no part of the blood-line
at all, the other that, whatever his crimes
(probably felt with far less intensity now that
they were so distant in time, and so far removed
from the Powys stage that, alone, really
interested this author), he still was a
legitimate king and his blood (cleansed by
St.Germanus) is the blood of kings.
So, in the sixth century, again in
the eighth or ninth, and at some unestablished
point in-between, we find Vortigernids defending
their line through legend. Only O, the
earliest, can be said with any confidence to have
begun with them; the other two represent
some sort of reaction to pre-existing stories
witten by others. N would not have duplicated
Vitalinus/Vortigern, rather than rewrite N1 in
any other way, unless Vortigern was already known
as irredeemable, and P seems derived in some
fashion from an account of Ambrosius, the
flawless hero, coming to Britain and destroying
an obviously wicked and irredeemable Vortigern.
(Another interesting conclusion is that the
author of N, though ignorant enough of
fifth-century fact to make Vortigern the seducer
and murderer of Constans, still knew that
Vortigern’s real name was Gwythelyn or
Vitalinus, and left the opprobrious nickname to
the Bad character while giving the Good one the
proud Latin gentilicius.)
As works of literature and
history, they cannot all be judged in the same
way, since they come from indubitably widely
different environments: O from the blazing
noonday of Gildas' age of superb Latin, with most
of Britain still under British control; N and N1
both from an age in which literary ability is
still very high - witness the way in which they
both work the few data of known history into
their own particular point - but in which the
Saxon invasion has become a chief concern, and
the man who summoned the Saxons can no longer be
excused in any way. P is the product of a
narrower and far less sophisticated world, in
which the little kingdoms of Wales dominate the
landscape, the idea of a greater Britain is close
to the horizon if not beyond it, and political
points are made not by the clever manipulation of
historical data within a contest of creative
fiction, but by the flat adaptation of a
previously existing legend. P is also incapable
of the clever use of Biblical quotations apparent
in O's meeting of Ronwein and Vortigern; the one
Biblical passage he quotes, the Psalmist's
promise of an everlasting succession of kings, is
pretty obvious stuff. The mental horizon has
indubitably shrunk; though it is worth pointing
out that the concept of creating fictional
pseudo-histories incorporating the thin trickle
of data of ancient documents - such as the
apparently skeletal references to St.Germanus'
visit to the Britain of Vitalinus, and the
success of the Briton Faustus in Gaul - has not
died out.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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