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Chapter 6.7:
Geoffrey, the lost document
"N", its sources, and the
historical Ambrosius
Part 2
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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There is an interesting difference
in the way Ambrosius and Constantine relate to
the Church. Constantine, as we have seen, is
guided by Guithelinus, Archbishop of London,
throughout; Ambrosius, on the other hand, takes
on himself to nominate the chief priests of the
island. Whether these particular appointments are
historical or not, it seems likely enough that a
fifth-century Catholic warrior king who had just
re-established his own kingdom would take on
himself to select its chief ecclesiastics; quite
apart from practical considerations – a
church structure had to be re-established swiftly
and without wrangles – bishops at the time
were, as a rule, locally chosen. In other
words, this feature of the story of Constantine
has, once again, the feel of something late and
artificial, while that of Ambrosius feels
credible in terms of the circumstances we must
imagine for his reign.
Nor is there any reason to attack
the historicity of the appointments themselves.
Why is Ambrosius described as nominating
archbishops for York and the City of Legions, but
not for London? If this were fiction, it
would be bad fiction, since even if Geoffrey had
left London out, he would have to have done so
for a purpose - and there is no visible purpose.
The presence or absence of a head of the church
in London has no effect whatever on anything that
happens to Ambrosius; and as we are also told
that Ambrosius made his capital there, if
Geoffrey had invented the episode of the
consecration of the archbishops, he would have
most certainly supplied one for the metropolis.
It very much looks as though Geoffrey had
inherited this datum from an earlier account, and
there really is no reason not to take it as
historical.
A completely different document
seems to have supplied him with a different
bishop of the City of the Legions: one turns up,
alive and kicking, no more than a couple of pages
earlier, called not Dubricius but Tremorinus. He
is the person who suggests that Ambrosius - who
is looking for an unique idea for a monument to
the very same national parliament - should
consult Merlin. This particular story seems
to have a good deal in common with the Irish dindsenchas,
the specific lore of name-places, wanting to
account for the enigmatic bulk of Stonehenge (or
Avebury Ring): an explanation for a peculiar
feature in the country, to do with an ancient
king, a raid on Ireland, and a spell that cured
all illnesses[27]. This is folkloric
material and nothing to do with the historical
record of Ambrosius which, I argue, underlies
much of the rest of Geoffrey’s account.
By the same token, alas, we cannot take
Archbishop Tremorinus to be a historical figure -
much though I would love a name, any name, from
this period.
That a dindsenchas-like
text may have mentioned Stonehenge as the site of
Ambrosius' national assembly, however, opens up
the issue of its site. Geoffrey clearly had
read a text, possibly more than one, in which Ambrosius
was associated with the monastery of The
mount/cloister of Ambrius. All
Geoffrey’s information about the so-called
Ambrius was to do with the specifics of the
monastery, and (if we can trust his details) it
stated clearly that The cloister (at the
mount) of Ambrius was a monastery of 300
monks, where Ambrosius held his national
assembly, buried the fallen at Saxon hands, and
was buried himself (along, says Geoffrey, with
his "brother" Uther Pendragon); it was
near Salisbury and near a megalithic circle.
Geoffrey himself seems significantly uncertain
whether this means Avebury or Amesbury[28], with Stonehenge: this
must mean that his source referred to The
mount of Ambrius precisely enough to identify
the general area in which it lay, but not enough
to be certain which of two small towns it was.
It was a written source describing a geographical
area; never in a million years would a folktale
be so specific about a place in what was, by
Geoffrey's time, quite another country.
Of the mysterious Ambrius
Geoffrey seems to know nothing but the name.
He does not even say that he was the
Cloister’s founder. He apparently
takes him for an ecclesiastic, and seems to imply
that his Cloister already existed when the
national parliament was held there, and that
therefore Ambrius was earlier than Ambrosius.
Certainly he does not realize that Ambrius
is the same person as Ambrosius, obviously
a Latinization of Welsh Emrys; nor that
the Cloister of Ambrius, near Mount Ambrius, is
obviously the Monastery of Ambrosius, near the
Hill of Ambrosius. So Geoffrey had a text
which associated Ambrosius with the monastery of The
mount of Emrys, but did not understand that
the two names were one. (It tells us
something about his methods, that, in spite of
the temptation to equip this obviously very holy
monastery with an equally holy founder, Geoffrey
did not invent a legend for the so-called
Ambrius, though he had plenty to say about the
way the place was organized. It seems that
he would not make bricks completely
without straw; he embroidered at will, but did
not actually create heroes or saints out of
nothing, even where the story seemed to invite
him to.)
The obvious choice for the setting
of the Cloister is one town in south England, not
far from Salisbury or Stonehenge, whose name
means “the fortress of Ambrosius”,
which had a Celtic patron saint, and which seems
to have harboured a great monastery in Ambrosian
times: to wit Amesbury, Wiltshire.
Tradition, as well as etymology,
identifies Amesbury with Ambrosius' seat and the
site of his great parliament. The
Elizabethan historical pioneer William Camden
held that he was its founder and was buried
there. He could have drawn the notion of
his burial from Geoffrey, but not that of its
foundation, which Geoffrey all but denies; and
even so, he would have had to be a good deal more
confident about the location of the Cloister of
Ambrius than Geoffrey himself was. In other
words, Camden must have been in receipt of
traditions similar to those Geoffrey received,
making the cloister of Emrys central to
the life of Ambrosius and burying him
there, but must have been more able to interpret
them correctly. Unfortunately, we have no
written tradition earlier than Geoffrey and
Camden themselves, and Amesbury has been
unaccountably neglected by archaeologists, in
spite of a number of hugely promising features[29].
The error about Ambrius and
Emrys tells us in what language Geoffrey's
source was written. If Ambrosius' name had
been written in Welsh throughout, Geoffrey's
mistake would have been inconceivable; the text
was in Latin. However, Emrys as a
place-name was in Welsh; that is, the place-names
were given in a Latinized Welsh form. This
strongly suggests that the text from which
Geoffrey took his notice about the Cloister of
Ambrius could not be a direct source from the
Gildasian age, something like L or N2, in which
Ambrosius' name would most definitely not have
taken the form Embreis/Emrys; it comes from a
stage of culture much closer to Nennius', in
which Welsh names like Gwaloph or Gwythelyn could
be transliterated into Latin as Guoloppum or
Guitolinus, sometimes – as in the latter
case – unconscious of an original Latin
form. Only Nennius mentions no such place
or name. It follows that Geoffrey knew a
Latin Welsh text of the same kind as Nennius, but
different - possibly widely different - from him
in detail[30].
It is with Hengist that we first
hear of the Hill of Ambrius; he is supposed to
have slaughtered the 480 elders of Britain there
(Nennius mentions no particular place, and speaks
of 300 elders). The connection with the
site is almost certainly artificial, through the
invention of one survivor of the slaughter
(unknown to Nennius) called Eldol, Duke of
Gloucester. Eldol is the brother of
“Eldadus”, that is St.Illtyd; now, one
Galfridian manuscript states that monastery of
"Ambrius" was founded by Eldadus
several years after the massacre of the British
elders[31]. Eldadus is
Ambrosius’ counsellor, and his
“brother” Eldol is his chief hero.
Eldol is already an old man, the only one of all
the elders of Britain to have escaped
Hengist’s deadly trap; but his strength is
still green, it seems, since at Kaerconan he
captures Hengist by sheer brute force, dragging
him into the British ranks by the nose-piece of
his helmet; and after his brother has argued
before Ambrosius for the death sentence, it is he
who executes it.
In other words, these three
characters, Ambrosius, Eldadus and Eldol,
cooperate closely, and to the exclusion of any
other figure, in avenging the destruction of the
elders of Britain and in consecrating the
national shrine at Mount Ambrius; that is, there
is a line of narrative continuity that leads from
the massacre of the British elders to the
execution of Hengist and the creation of the
national sanctuary of Amesbury at the burial
place of his victims. The whole matter
could be removed from the greater story and make
almost no narrative difference: except that there
would be no stated reason for Ambrosius to summon
his parliament at Amesbury rather than anywhere
else. In other words, it is a legend of the
foundation of the monastery of the Cloister of
Ambrius.
The three heroes’ close
association is reminiscent of Rachel
Bromwich’s Triad 1[32], which lists teir
lleithiclwyth Ynis Pridein, translated as
“three tribal thrones of the Island of
Britain”, each of which lists a pen
teyrnedd – head of kings – a pen
esgyb – head of bishops – and a pen
hyneif – head of elders. This
threefold division of the chief men in any land
was clearly formulaic, and in our case, Emrys
clearly was pen teyrnedd, Illtyd pen
esgyb, and “Eldol” pen hyneif.
Triad 1 is unhistorical, associating figures from
separate areas and times; in the same way, the
association of Ambrosius with Illtyd is
unacceptable, and Eldol may have had no existence
at all – being perhaps a doublet of Illtyd,
a saint who, in his own legend, had also been a
great warrior. The triad seems designed to
suit a much later Welsh idea of the three chief
officials of a kingdom, at a stage in which teyrn
has lost the pejorative value it certainly had in
the earliest Welsh, and means simply
“king”.
In my view, every element of the
story of Eldol, Eldadus and the Cloister of
Ambrius is adventitious, secondary not only to
the actual story of Ambrosius, but also to the
legend of Hengist, to which the slaughter of the
elders of Britain belongs. As I believe
that the legends of Hengist and Ambrosius are
wholly separate in origin, the story of Eldol,
which crosses over from the one to the other, can
only have arisen after they have been conflated.
The whole element of revenge for the trap at the
Cloister of Ambrius, the duel between Eldol and
Hengist, the vote for death of Eldol’s
brother Eldadus-Illtyd, and the execution of
Hengist at Eldol’s own hands, have an
artistic symmetry that rarely belongs to real
life. They satisfy two needs that previous
versions of the legends, as we can envisage them,
did not – the need for a founder for the
Cloister of Ambrius, and the need for revenge for
Hengist’s wanton slaughter of the Elders of
Britain. (Eldadus is also used to argue for
mercy for the defeated Saxons, but his presence
is not in fact necessary; there is no parallel
figure of adviser in the parallel scene in
Gildas, where the Senate as a whole is struck
with compassion - which has its parallel here in
the presence of the whole gathered court of
Ambrosius. Eldadus may have been inserted
to suit his role as pen esgyb and close
adviser of the King, and to be symmetrical, by
his vote, with his brother’s part in
Hengist's death.)
So why Eldadus and Eldol? Probably
because of Eldadus’ role as a monastic
founder. There is a late Triad which speaks
of the Three Perpetual Choirs of Britain: the
monasteries of Amesbury, Llanilltud Fawr and
Glastonbury, each of which, it says, had 2400
members who sang the praises of the Lord day and
night in relays[33]. Save for the
absurd number of monks, this looks as if it had
something to do with Geoffrey’s notions
about the Cloister of Ambrius (the idea of
singing the Lord’s praise constantly in
shifts may be historical; it was fond in some
Byzantine monasteries). If the monastery of
Amesbury ever existed, it must obviously have
been wiped from the map when the English
conquered the area – that is, at some point
in the later sixth century (though it is
interesting to notice how persistently Saxons and
Normans insisted on starting and re-starting
monastic foundations in Amesbury, in spite of
reverses). As a result, it was the most
obscure of the three, and, in particular, it
lacked a founding Saint, an essential feature of
the Celtic notion of a monastic house. Amesbury
seems to have taken up a later Breton boy saint,
Melor, whose local cult may pre-date the English
conquest[34].
Glastonbury, on the other hand,
claimed – with the help of a confident and
fertile school of monastic forgers - a plethora
of saints, including Sts. Patrick and Benignus,
the latter being (mistakenly) identified with the
abbey’s founder, the obscure St.Beon; and
while Llaniltud did not have quite so many
supposed members, it did have a prestigious and
certain founder, and was never soiled by English
conquest. A Welshman in search of a
credible founder of monasteries for the
mysterious Third Perpetual Choir of Britain could
do worse than fasten on the reliably national
Illtyd; and so this sixth-century saint was
brought in, along with a probably fictional
brother, to cross the t’s and dot the
i’s of an already synthetized group of
accounts about Ambrosius, Vortigern and Hengist[35]. It is not clear
to me, either, whether the invention involved in
bringing in Illtyd and making him pen esgyb
and his brother pen hyneif is to be
attributed to Geoffrey or to a source; if it is
to a source, then this means that the kind of
artistic pseudo-historical invention constructed
on the bare bones of previous notices, which we
have seen at work in Gildasian and slightly later
contests, was still at work centuries later, at
some point between Nennius (about 834) and
Geoffrey (1136).
The national parliament at the
Cloister of Ambrius is the climax of a royal
progress of the main cities, York, London,
Winchester and Salisbury, during which Ambrosius
makes arrangements to put their reconstruction in
hand. His stay in London, however, stands
out like a sore thumb. He “set off for
the city of London, which the fury of the enemy
had certainly not spared. Grieved as he was
by the destruction of the town, he collected
together from every quarter such citizens as were
left alive, and began the task of rebuilding it.
It was from that city that he ruled his kingdom[36], bringing new life to
laws which had been allowed to fall into disuse,
and restoring to their rightful heirs the
scattered possessions of long-dead folk. Any
estates which… had no-one alive to inherit
them were shared among those who had fought at
his side. The entire energy of Ambrosius
was devoted to restoring the realm, rebuilding
the churches, renewing peace and the rule of law,
and administering justice.” What this
really describes is a minimum of several years of
royal activity, not only setting into motion, but
to some extent achieving, the reconstruction
intended. It seems that a fragment of a
separate description of Ambrosius’ long-term
activity has been inserted in an account of a
shorter, inaugural royal progress; the logical
inference is that they came from two different
texts. Indeed, the ceremony of social and
legal reconstruction that is the national
parliament is the necessary premise for the
long-term work of reconstruction described in the
London passage; in other words, the one can
hardly have come before the other.
Ambrosius’ dealings with
London have the smell of history; and
interestingly, if this passage has any historical
value, the "laws which had fallen into
disuse" and into which Ambrosius
"breathed new life", "renewing
peace and the rule of law, and administering
justice", can only be the old Roman law of
the province, so highly prized and furiously
applied before the Saxons came - if words mean at
all what they say. This seems to rule
Ambrosius out of being identified with the
revolution which, according to Zosimus, swept
away Roman institutions, replacing them with
"native British laws", i.e. resurgent
Celticism. Another fact has the same
implication: as I pointed out, the great
parliament was probably remembered as a source of
legitimate titles and land-claims. Yet it
does not seem to have any place in Welsh law as
we have it, with its still strongly Celtic
character. This suggests that it belonged
to a system of laws and land tenures which was
suppressed and supplanted, though not forgotten,
afterwards; and that seems likeliest to mean a
Roman dispensation replaced by a Celtic one.
We have seen that Gildasian culture had its roots
among the Celtic over-Wall tribes, and there
seems to be nothing implausible – I will put
it no more strongly at present – in a
picture of Roman law being consciously restored
by Ambrosius and then consciously abolished in
the course of a later Celticizing revolution.
Whether or not it has anything to
do with actual history, the final feature of
Geoffrey’s Ambrosius – his death story
– has much to tell us. Unfortunately,
it is the only feature of the Galfridian
Ambrosius for which there is no comparative
material at all. We remember that the
deaths of the other members of the house of
Constantine are clearly constructed on Ambrosius'
own, and therefore cannot be used to evaluate its
historicity; Gildas says nothing about the
hero’s death; and no other source known to
me seems able to help. Vortimer was also poisoned
by a Saxon - Ronwein - and Vortimer, in my view,
represents among other things a Vortigernid
attempt to appropriate the themes of
Ambrosius’ life for the rival dynasty: a
hero who defeats the Saxons almost to the point
of destruction, reconstructs the sacred buildings
of Britain, and is eventually poisoned by a
representative of the defeated Saxons. However,
all that this proves - as with the network of
imitations in N - is that the legend of Ambrosius
included a poisoning episode. The only
thing that can be said is that the account was in
existence when N and O were composed.
The story as we have it in
Geoffrey is unhistorical nonsense, expressing
only British hatred and fear of the English.
Consider: a named Saxon, Eopa, takes upon himself
to eliminate the victor of Maes Beli and
Kaerconan. (Geoffrey says that he is
suborned by Pascent son of Vortigern, but I do
not believe that there is any evidence that
Pascent and Ambrosius were at odds.) And
the device he hits upon is – he will
disguise himself as a monk “learned in all
dogma” and pretend to want to cure the hero,
who is lying in bed, seriously ill. Eopa
feeds him a slow poison and vanishes. Consider
the unlikelihoods! How was an unlettered
Pagan to deceive every member of the court, all
of them surely familiar with monks, many of them
monks themselves? How could he pretend to
be “learned in all dogma” for five
minutes at a time, in front of so many
discriminating experts? And as for the
medical side... forget it, just forget it. The
bedside of a sick Ambrosius will have crawled
with half the medically qualified persons in the
country; the consideration about deceiving
discriminating experts would go double[37].
What this expresses is nothing
more than a whole-hearted British rejection of
any idea that the Saxons could ever be
Christians. A tonsured Saxon, says the
story, is only a Pagan in disguise, a wolf in
sackcloth, with poison and dagger at the ready;
let him anywhere near your house, and he will
kill you. This is reds-under-your-beds
stuff, as paranoid as it is nonsensical. And
there is a sinister side to it. Let us take
this account to be as credible and historically
plausible as so much of the rest of the Ambrosius
story: what, apart from paranoid surmise, does it
tell us? If we take it for an account of
actual events, we have to assume that its first
redactor only knew the events at court, and that
he had no authority at all for Eopa’s
origins and motives – Eopa would scarcely
have told him. So, what does the story tell
us happened at court? Simply this: that
Ambrosius was seriously ill; that among those who
tried to cure him was a Saxon-born monk called
Eopa, who claimed to know medicine; that in spite
of everyone’s effort, the hero died; and
that Eopa was promptly accused of his murder and
fled the court. What does this convey to an
unprejudiced reader? Clearly, that the
wretched Christian Saxon was made a scapegoat for
the King’s death; and that if the king was
sick and in danger of his life when Eopa appeared
on the scene, the likelihood is that he died of
his illness. (One wonders whether saner
individuals around the court ever took this
position, only to be overwhelmed by the
hysterical majority and charged with insufficient
mourning, insufficient patriotism and
Saxon-loving. It seems a natural enough
development.)
If there ever was an Eopa[38], if there is any history
in the legend, then the events that followed
Ambrosius’ death must have been disastrous.
Assuming some truth in the story, the English
must have lived as Christians among the British
long enough for at least one of them to become an
able monk, “learned in all dogma” and
in medicine, and be welcomed at court. (This
suggests that the peace lasted several years, and
was not broken until after Ambrosius' death;
which agrees with Geoffrey's account of his
reconstruction of London, a work of peace
demanding a longish span of time.) When
Eopa had to flee the terrible charge, the effect
on Britons and English must have been electric.
The story, obviously, must have spread like
wildfire, feeding on every British fear and hate.
If Eopa was a real monk – and if the story
has any truth at all, he must have been –
then this must have been disastrous for every
prospect of converting the English: likely
enough, English-born monks were turned out of
every monastery in the country, and English
laymen driven out of Christian congregations.
The result is easy to imagine[39].
But the long-term historical
significance of the story would not be very
different if we decided that it is, from
beginning to end, wholly and not just partly
unhistorical, and that we know nothing of how
Ambrosius died: since the existence of such a
horrible myth would be crying evidence that the
British were utterly opposed to any prospect of
integration with, and conversion of, the English.
One way or another, these two nations would not
come together, as, in the long run, the Franks
and the Gallo-Romans, the Visigoths and
Hispano-Romans, the Longobards and Italo-Romans,
the Arabs and half the former Empire, did. The
future was for war. The English lived in
Britain for a century without the least
indication of British attempts to convert them,
and it was only once the British had been totally
and utterly defeated that organized Christianity
began to creep back, from Rome to Kent and from
Iona to Northumbria, to the great disgust of
surviving Britons. Everything goes to
suggest that the phrase reported by Geoffrey,
that the British would not preach to the English
because they regarded them as less than their own
dogs, was an accurate expression of their
attitudes.
The literary genius whose name is
lost for ever, who wove together so brilliantly
N1, N2 and other pre-existing documents (such as
the annalistic fragment where he found mention of
Gratianus municeps) certainly purposed a
similar message of national hate, bending all the
force of his narrative talent into a vision of
victorious heroism flawed by mercy. Associating
Constantine "II" to Ambrosius by making
him a forerunner of the national saviour,
performing the same mission against an earlier
enemy, is an example of a not infrequent strategy
for the legitimisation of royal power. It
is not so long ago that Italian schools taught a
version of "history" in which the house
of Savoy strove for centuries to free and unify
Italy, in other words, to perform the task that a
Savoy sovereign - Vittorio Emanuele II - actually
did achieve between 1859 and 1870; but which
would have been beyond the imagination, one
suspects, of his thirteenth- or even
seventeenth-century ancestors[40]. The nation-making
role of a single king - hesitantly and
disastrously foreshadowed by his father Carlo
Alberto, whose quivering late venture into
national liberation resulted in catastrophe and
disgrace - was projected over the whole dynasty,
which, through most of its history, had been more
French than Italian. A similar process of
legend-making went into designing the fictitious
House of Constantine; and this suggests that,
even though Ambrosius' genealogy was forgotten,
the issues touched by his story were very
relevant to whoever composed it, indeed that they
legitimized whatever royal power its author
served.
N wants to clear the names of
Maximus and of the family of Vitalinus; this
suggests a sympathy with the house of Powys,
which claimed both for ancestors (while the
northern Vortigernids of Gwynessi and
Gwrtheyrnion knew nothing of Maximus). Conversely,
while not bent on running down the names of the
great kings of legend, Constantine and Ambrosius,
he has a decidedly mixed view of their long-term
effect on British history. Their reckless
mercy to inevitably treacherous Pictish and Saxon
enemies has left the treacherous barbarians to
devour the island, as well as costing both kings
their lives. To prove the folly of a policy
of toleration, N had the clear-headed artistic
daring to quote N2, an Ambrosian document
describing as a positive achievement the
surrender and pacification of the English -
probably according to an established ritual,
given the similarities with the surrender of A's
Britons to the Romans; and to have followed it up
with the story of Eopa's murder, which implicitly
destroys N2's message - the king who had been
pleased to subdue and pacify the English had
fallen victim to their guile. Whatever one
thinks of the political views, which are far more
extreme than those of Gildas' The Ruin,
this is a procedure of astonishing literary
maturity, confronting conflicting points of view
to deliver an implicit, as much as explicit,
conclusion. That these layers of meaning
from previous accounts, contradicting the
fundamental thrust of the whole, can still be
read not even in his work, but in that of a
writer such as Geoffrey, who had no qualms about
reworking other people's pictures, means that he
must have excerpted previous accounts pretty
freely, probably in the certainty that the whole
picture would justify his exterminating views.
The heroes of the past had trusted barbarians;
they were dead. Period.
Now there is a period in Welsh
history which the psychology of this story fits
like a glove: the age of Cadwallon of Gwynedd,
which reached its climax and its end in the
unforgettable years 633/634. The rule of
the Britons over Britain is already in the past,
near enough in time to be remembered - the last
generation to have experienced the age of Gildas
was just dying out - but far enough to be hazy
and unclear. Dynastic relationships are
forgotten, but written items about ancient kings,
including the founder and the great hero
Ambrosius, are still in place, some of them
surprisingly reliable; and the legend of Uther
Pendragon and Arthur is already seen as the
climax of the British heroic age before the
catastrophe. The author saw the best the past
could offer with a rather critical eye. He
had no profound connection with it: he does not
look to the dynasties of the past for
inspiration; and this suggests that it was not
from the Ambrosiads, the kings of the past, that
he hoped for deliverance, but from a new power -
the Cuneddan line, I would argue, of Cadwallon,
unrelated to any previous king. This is
what I just argued must be the point of writing N
in these terms: "that, even though
Ambrosius' genealogy was forgotten, the issues
touched by his story were very relevant to
whoever composed it, indeed that they legitimized
whatever royal power its author served".
The legend's hatred for both
Saxons and Picts reminds us that, according to
Bede, the Northumbrian princes driven out by
Cadwallon found refuge among the Pictish
Christians; but though the Picts are villains, it
is the English who disgracefully put on a
Christian disguise in order to betray and murder
the king of Britain. The story's only named
barbarian is Eopa, who reaches the court of
Ambrosius disguised as a Christian monk and
poisons the king; that is, even a supposed
English convert can only be regarded as a
disguised enemy, bent on killing you with poison
if he cannot do so with weapons. This is
the same murderer's psychology that led
Cadwallon, having temporarily re-conquered
Northumbria, to commit himself, according to
Bede, to a policy of genocide[41]. He attempted to
destroy from the roots an already partly
converted English population, paying no attention
at all to their Christian baptism. And it
must be admitted that his time had grounds to
doubt the depth and significance of English
conversion, especially in Cadwallon's own hunting
grounds north of the Humber, where Edwin - who
had been a scourge of the British for decades,
destroying Elmet in 616 and following that up by
subduing every state north of the Humber except
the Picts - had only converted in 625, for what
must have seemed, to British eyes, flagrantly
self-interested reasons. His empire
included by now more Christians than English
pagans, while the greatest threat to his
supremacy, Penda's Mercia, was still
unchallengedly heathen.
Bernicia seems to have been the
ultimate target of Cadwallon's invasion. Most
of his battles are recorded there, and it is
there that he suffered his decisive defeat at
Oswald's hands; and we read with astonishment
that in Bernicia there was not a single Christian
shrine standing before Oswald set up a cross
before the battle. This cannot be literally
true, since Bernicia, homeland of the Gododdin
before the English came, had been Christian for
centuries; but it must mean that the local
English had no Christian cult site, and
therefore, one suspects, no church to speak of.
The impression is supported by the fact that
Eanfrid and Osric, claimants to the throne of
Bernicia and converted to Christianity among the
Picts, renounced the faith when they made their
bid for the Bernician crown.
In other words Bede's heroic
convert Edwin seems to have done little or
nothing to convert the Bernicians. To be
fair, they were mostly enemies of his Deiran
house. Describing Christian preaching in
the region during Edwin's reign, Bede delivers a
curious circumlocution that clearly indicates
that success was less than universal: "as
many as were predestined to eternal life believed
and were baptized" - and it turns out that
those he mentions were all royal converts,
members of the king's own immediate family, who
would follow his choices as a matter of course.
Perhaps the fact that Edwin himself, a disliked
Deiran, had ostentatiously accompanied the
missionary Paulinus to the royal Bernician seat
of Yeavering in his preaching mission, did not
exactly endear the missionary to a tribe that
sullenly resented Edwin's power and that was
pushed up hard against the Christian and
unremittingly hostile Gododddin.
One can imagine what a hostile
Welshman would make of that. Behind the
poisoner's hands of Eapa the monk one seems to
see the bloodstained hands of Edwin - remembered
for centuries as an oppressor on the level of the
legendary monster Cath Palug[42] - reaching for the Host.
There is no reason why Eopa should not be a
historical figure, but whether or not he was, he
must have served as a most efficient Aunt Sally -
the supposedly converted Christian, the oily
"pious" monk, making ready to destroy
great Ambrosius. It seems likely that his
poisoner's hands under the monk's habit were
raised by whoever represented the war party, any
time when early Welshmen thought of making any
peace or agreement with recently-converted
English.
N also shares with Cadwallon a
complete confidence that, in a fair fight, the
barbarians not only can but must be defeated.
The English only ever win by treachery; the
Picts, by internal conflicts among the British -
such as those which destroy Gratianus - or by the
disattention of the British government. When
the British nation meets either of these enemies
united, under a single, upright and valiant
commander, they win as inevitably as the sun
rises: their forces are superior. Everything
Cadwallon did in the decisive years 634-5 depends
exactly on this assumption - Bede: "the
great size of his armies, which he used to boast
of as invincible” - including the fateful
decision to meet Oswald's smaller but highly
motivated and Christian-led army at Denisesburn.
He was probably the last Welsh leader who could
honestly believe that the Welsh could defeat and
destroy the English in a fair fight[43]; Nennius by the
mid-800s, and the prophetic poem Armes Prydein
Fawr a century later, can only see the help
of God as being able to free them from what they
still regard as the invaders. The
implication is that human strength cannot.
Cadwallon’s vast army does
not sound as thought it came from Gwynedd alone;
and knowing as we do that the North was still
largely British/Welsh in character (years after
Cadwallon's invasion, St.Wilfrid was able to
claim large tracts of land known to have belonged
to British monks for the use of his new church in
Ripon[44]) and that Cadwallon
himself was of Gododdin origin and may have
claimed the title of Brigantinos, king of
the Briganti: it seems likely that it was raised
largely among the conquered but not yet subdued
British population of the North and from the
Gododdin. It represented a final, savage
uprising of the natives against their conquerors.
For Cadwallon - a mere king of Gwynedd, expelled
even from that mountain tract by Edwin and
finally returning to destroy his enemy and gather
a host greater than any tribe's in a stupendously
successful campaign of destruction - it would be
natural to brag about the size of his armies;
indeed, it would be not so much personal
braggadocio as a witness to the national nature
of his campaign. His treacherous
murder of the Bernician prince Eanfrid does not
therefore indicate any fear of what this man
might do in a fair fight (after all, the tribe
whose heir he was had already been massively
defeated) but a belief that any means are fair to
kill an enemy that will always betray and murder
you anyway.
Cadwallon certainly does not seem
to have erred either in mercy or in straight
dealing. He destroyed his enemies not only
by brutal violence, but also by treachery, laying
an ambush for Eanfrid under guise of a parley,
and killing women and children indiscriminately.
The fact that these methods seem not to have
stood in the way of his gathering a national
army, does seem to suggest how the natives felt
about twenty or thirty years of rule by Edwin -
of whom the English, according to Bede, used to
say that in his reign, a woman with child might
cross the kingdom from sea to sea with no fear of
harm! Clearly his conquered British
subjects did not feel quite so secure.
But the justification of policies
of deliberate extermination and complete lack of
scruple is not only in popular resentment and
oppression; it is part of the development of
British culture not just at the popular, but at
the educated level, to be found in N more than in
any other text, not excluding Gildas[45]. Though Gildas
wants war, he does not actually speak of
extermination; but N makes it very clear that any
king who had ever accepted the surrender even of
a thoroughly defeated barbarian enemy had not
only regretted it, but died of it. It was a
regularity of history that either the British
died, or the English (and the Picts) did. N’s
conclusion is obvious: kill before you are
killed.
This attitude is a work of the
intellect, basing itself not merely on the
perception of direct contemporary wrong, but on
the contemplation of a long past - to be found
only in books - of constant wrong, and on the
equally intellectual commitment to a definite
theory of sovereignty that made the lords of
Britain, descended from the Romans, into the
inevitable and rightful owners of the country,
and the English, called over on sufferance and
treacherous towards their lords, into the basest
kinds of creatures - rebellious, treacherous
serfs, guilty of "denial after
acceptance" and therefore liable to be
enslaved or destroyed without mercy. These
attitudes go far beyond resentment for definite
wrongs: they develop from a definite system of
values which we have seen to be inherent in the
whole of Celtic learning.
It is therefore not really
surprising that at least some members of the
house of Gwynedd, from Maelgwn to Cadfan, were
known for their learning. There are
indications that the court of Gwynedd may have
been the centre of an attempted renaissance in
British letters in the early seventh century.
Cadwallon's father Cadfan (Catamanus) was
praised in his tombstone as very learned and very
respected. Cadwallon himself was remembered
as an oferfardd, a royal poetic
extemporizer like Arthur[46]; and he patronized a
bard, Alan Little-Bard, who was regarded as one
of the great classics – and who, typically,
was famous for carrying a spear and fighting[47].
It is also surely not a
coincidence that North Wales’ great saint,
Beuno, was a contemporary, said to have died on
the sunday after Easter, 642[48]. These saints,
Patrick, David, Dubricius, Samson, Paul Aurelian,
were, as a rule, either bishops or at any rate
church organizers on a large scale, and the fact
that the corresponding figure in North Wales is
so much later, must mean that the local Church
was either first organized, or thoroughly
reorganized, in his time. (A generation
earlier, Kentigern is supposed to have been
responsible for an organization or reorganization[49], setting up the
bishopric of St.Asaph). Beuno's legend
connects him with Maelgwn; insanely, from the
point of view of chronology - the great bandit
had died in the previous century - but showing
the dynastic allegiance of the saint, that is, of
the monasteries and other church foundations he
established. And if Beuno was bishop,
abbot, or any sort of church leader, in the days
of Cadwallon's murderous onslaught on
Northumbria, it is frankly impossible to acquit
him of complicity in Cadwallon's genocidal
activities.
Finally, another feature which
dates N fairly conclusively is the listing of
Picts and English, to the exclusion of any other
menace, as the enemy: the Roman Empire (known to
one of Nennius' sources as one of Vortigern's
three great fears) and the Irish are both quite
absent, while the victories and betrayals of the
four ancient kings are shared out equally between
Picts and English. In Cadwallon's time
there was a certain understanding between these
two peoples, based largely on a common hostility
to the British of the north, so that Edwin does
not seem to have included the Picts in his
conquering activities, even though the sons of
his enemy Ethelfrid - Eanfrid, Osri and Oswald -
had taken refuge there. However, that
understanding did not long survive the growth in
English and especially Northumbrian power, and
within a few years of Oswald's victory, we hear
of his successor Oswy bringing the Picts under
his sway - not, we may be sure, peacefully.
From then on, the Pictish cause was the cause of
anyone struggling against Northumbrian supremacy,
and a by-product of the final Pictish victory
(685) was recovered freedom for the British of
Strathclyde. It is only in the first half
of the seventh century that the Picts and the
English might be seen as the enemies of the
Welsh, exclusive of any other nation.
I think the sum of all these
arguments establishes for us the date of N to
within a few years; it was from this limited
highland intellectual world, struggling to
reconstruct a British identity and - in the time
of Cadwallon - to re-establish British power at
least north of the Humber, that the effort was
made to reconstruct British history - from no
more than a couple of narrative accounts, one of
which, unknown to the Gwynedd historian, was
almost pure fiction - and in the light of the
bitter decades of defeat, 560-630, which had
taught the Highland Britons that no pact with the
English would be respected, and that the only
good barbarian was a dead barbarian. And
that being the case, it means that the documents
it uses are earlier, indeed probably already
canonical. This does not actually do much
to establish that N2 is contemporary with
Ambrosius (there are, after all, a couple of
centuries in between); but, by the same reasons
of cultural likeness, it is enormously unlikely
that any piece of writing dated to after his time
could ever contemplate the absorption of the
English in a British or Romano-British polity. If
the argument for N stands, the argument for N2
also stands, since both documents show what look
like unmistakable and datable political concerns.
And we can take from the unlikeliest of sources,
Geoffrey, some credible notices - if not
necessarily a joined-up account - of the real
concerns and policies of the historical Ambrosius
and Vitalinus.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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