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Chapter 7.1: The
house of Vortigern
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Let me sum up what we have found
out about the enormously complex prehistory of
the legend of Vortigern. We have a Vortigernid
dynastic fiction - O - in which Vortigern and
Vortimer play parts comparable with those of
Conn, Art mac Conn and Cormac mac Art in
the great chain of legends of the dominant Irish
dynasty; it has survived in two separate
versions, that of Nennius clearly slanted in
Vortigern's favour, that of Geoffrey clearly
negative. However, while the overall result of
our analysis has been that the original must be
regarded as pro-Vortigern and actually a
Vortigernid family legend, there is evidence that
Nennius used a source (concerned to explain the
establishment of the Vortigernid fortresss in
Gwynessi) which had suppressed episodes
discreditable to Vortigern, preserved by Geoffrey
and paralleled in Ireland.
Quite separately, we have N, an
alternative account in which a different and much
more political reason for the summoning of the
Saxons is given - namely, that they were to serve
as support for an otherwise unsupported usurper
suspected of doing away with his predecessor. In
the version we have, this is followed by the
account of the meeting with Ronwein and
Vortigern's disastrous love for her; but while
the two reasons for the call to the Saxons are
not wholly alternative - and Geoffrey was able to
use them both, not only one after the other, but
to fine dramatic effect - they certainly do not
need each other, and the Irish parallel shows
that the arrival of the alien woman was the
beginning of the whole cycle of woes, rather than
a stage of it. In other words, we have no reason
to connect N and O in any way; we can read them
as originally quite separate and independent,
with only the central issue - the call to the
barbarians - in common.
N is not only about its division
between Good Guithelinus and Bad Vortigern; it is
a pseudo-history of Britain. Its Guithelinus
episode is the pro-Vortigernid (and pro-Maximid)
reworking of an originally anti-Vortigern
historical fiction, N1, in which Vortigern was
blamed for every evil in the fifth century,
beginning - both in time and in order - with the
seduction of Constans out of his monastic vows
(an act which, historically, seems to have had
more resonance than anything else in the
miserable career of his father Constantine III).
N1 also exculpated the Senatorial nobility and
even the Picts, in the tale of the murder of
Constans, to lay the blame on Vortigern alone.
N also incorporates N2, a separate
source welded into the longer cycle: an account
of Ambrosius which seems to have at least some
historical features, including possibly even the
story of his death and one credible item about
the historical Vitalinus, and which carries a
message of acceptance of, perhaps even
reconciliation with, the Saxons, which cannot be
dated to any known period of Gildasian or Welsh
culture. Any such account of Ambrosius (Gildas,
in the sixth century, had one) must have dated
close enough to his lifetime to be
historical; and Ambrosius can hardly have lived
beyond the end of the fifth century. If he died
before his time, of illness or of poison - as
hinted by the Eapa story - even this must be
substantially reduced.
The difference in character with
N1 is worth underlining: N1 begins with a clearly
unhistorical account of an event - the seduction
and murder of Constans - which happened between
407 and 411, but which is written from the point
of view of someone to whom the threat of war from
the Picts and the settlement and revolt of the
Saxons (432-442) are already ancient
history, and who does not know the relative
chronology of these kings, making Vortigern
succeed Constans. In other words, it can hardly
be earlier than the sixth century. However, N1 is
written from the viewpoint of someone who takes
Ambrosiad rule as a permanent reality, and
therefore cannot be later than the fall of
Britain (about 570-620).
These elements are welded together
to form a wholly artificial and remarkably
compact narrative unity stretching from the end
of Roman power in Britain to the enthronement of
King Arthur, whose underlying ideology shows a
strong kinship with the mind of the murderous
Cadwallon of Gwynedd, recklessly and confidently
trampling over the more humane views of
barbarians expressed in both N1's story of the
bamboozling of Constans' Picts by Vortigern and
the merciful approach of N2's victorious
Ambrosius. At a bare minimum, N must logically be
later than N1, but earlier than P, the *Gesta
Germani, which shows a quite changed mental
world and set of priorities.
These accounts resurface after
half a millennium in the glorious synthesis of
Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose legend of Ambrosius
includes plenty of quite unhistorical features of
almost certainly later origin, such as the story
of Tremorinus, Merlin and Stonehenge. He still
has a solid chronological framework (probably
derived from N), but a completely unacceptable
genealogy; and he probably has grace notes of his
own, which may or may not include the whole story
of Eldadus and Eldol as well as the inclusion of
Hengist as king of the English.
What all these Vortigern legends
have in common is the calling of the Saxons,
where O and N meet but for which they give
different explanations. However, there are two
later legends, very different from each other but
both of ecclesiastical origin, which have largely
or entirely forgotten the nature of Vortigern's
sin. The *Gesta Germani, a much later
legend of Vortigern, showing in every word and
feature the fingerprints of eighth- or
ninth-century Powys concerns, is interested -
from an ecclesiastical point of view - in
removing from the lineage of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion the stain placed on them by
Vortigern's sin, symbolized by his incest (a sin
which affects the purity of the bloodline more
than any other), and placing it on Vortigern
alone. From Brittany we have the cult of St.
Gurthiern, developed from a long-lived legend of
Vortigern as a saintly repentant, which might, in
a sense, be seen as the other side of the coin -
the protagonist expiating, alone, all the sins he
has committed, whatever they were, and positively
refusing any further contact with his family.
This cult started in Britain, possibly in
present-day Bradford-upon-Avon, but was almost
certainly extinct in the island by the time
Nennius wrote, and only some obscure allusions to
Vortigern wandering off alone shunned by everyone
seem to conserve a memory of its myth. It was
however, preserved in a small abbey in Brittany,
along with a text whose earliest part seems to be
roughly contemporaneous with one of Nennius' own
sources, the Annales Romanorum; that is,
to be probably older than Nennius himself. It
was, however, written in Brittany, when the
legend of Gurthiern was already so rooted in the
country that the saint was believed to have died
in Quimperlé.
Both legends preserve fragments of
a genealogy of Vortigern, which Nennius believes
to stretch to the then king of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion - almost certainly his own kinsman -
Fernmail. Its first names are attractive,
suggesting late-Roman realities of which Nennius
could not have been aware. They are specifically
late-Roman; Uitalis, Uitalinus and Mauricius
are typical of the later Empire and early
Byzantine period, Paulus (though a good
Roman name) is likeliest to be Christian in
origin, and so is Pascentius, "son of
the shepherd" - the latter probably a
reflection of the royal rank of his father,
"shepherd" of his people. And by a
coincidence, the Briton Bonus of Ausonius'
poem has a date not unsuitable for a man who was
Vortigern's great-uncle. Ausonius' epigram is
dated about 382[1]. Vortigern came to power
about 428, a space of two generations.The odds
are not in favour of Silvius Bonus being the
Bonus of Vortigern's family tree, but it is
possible: any man of wealth in late Roman Britain
would also be educated and very likely to dabble
in poetry and criticism - Ausonius himself was
immensely rich.
It must however be admitted that
the pedigree is dubious. The term for any
reckoning of the Vortigernid dynasty must be not
Vortigern himself, who was enthroned shortly
before 429 but whose date of death is very
uncertain, but Pascentius, who received his land
from Ambrosius - that is, he accepted Ambrosius'
overlordship, which cannot have been before 452,
and probably after 465. By 834 or so, Fernmail,
claiming to be his descendant, was king of Builth
and Gwrtheyrnion. I do not know whether he was
young or old, just come into his inheritance or
long on the throne; but a simple calculation will
tell us that there is a problem. Fernmail's
predecessors are listed as Teudibir, Pascent II,
Guoidcant, Moriud, Eldad, Edoc[2], Paul, Mepurit, Briacat
and Pascent I.Taking the usual estimate of 25
years or so to a generation, this gives us about
225 years between the end of Pascent I's reign
and the beginning of Fernmail's; which, even
taking Pascent to have reigned to the end of the
fifth century, would only get us to 725. Either
some names have dropped out; or some of the kings
listed had an exceptionally long reign (a British
king-list of the last three centuries would have
to show the enormous reigns of George III,
Victoria and Elizabeth II); or the connection of
this dynasty to Vortigern is adventitious.
The latter, however, seems to me
rather hard to believe. Why would any later
dynasty want to claim descent from the most hated
man in Welsh legend? I cannot, of course, be
certain that the dynasty of Gwrtheyrnion in
Nennius' time was descended, father to son, from
Vortigern. Nobody can prove that. But its claim
to Vortigernid descent was firm and clear; more
than one of its members, including Nennius
himself, had tenaciously worked at whitewashing
the ancestor or the line; and it had carried on
into the Carolingian age a number of legends and
other ideological wreckage from ancient
Vortigernid claims (while the lack of any
discernible properly Ambrosiad item - except for
the single stray monument of Gildas - is the most
remarkable feature of the transmission of culture
in early Wales). Vortigern never lacked for
advocates: when the dynastic legend of the femme
fatale Ronwein, absolving Vortigern of blame,
was darkened by the whole country's abiding hate
of the man who had let in the Saxons, there was
not wanting a Nennius to insist that, whatever he
may have been, Vortigern was the legitimate king
of Britain, and that nobody could call him an
usurper, since the truthful young Ambrosius had
himself acknowledged that his own father was only
a consul. It is only after the extinction of the
kings of Builth and Gwrtheyrnion that the
anti-Vortigern line finally triumphed in the
writings of Geoffrey, of William of Malmesbury,
and in Arthurian romance.
It is likelier that the loss of a
certain number of generations was due to a
rewriting to do with dynastic struggle. Indeed,
my look at the genealogy in the last book showed
that it could be read as a claim to Gwrtheyrnion
on behalf of the possibly intrusive son of a king
of Builth, which might suggest that dynastic
struggle was going on as Nennius wrote. Fernmail
ipse est, qui regit modo in regionibus duabus
Buelt et Guorthigirniaun - filius Teudibir.
Teudibir ipse est rex Bueltiae regionis. Fernmail
is the one who currently reigns in the kingdoms
of Builth and Gwrtheyrnion, son of Teudibir.
Teudibir is the one who is king of Builth - how
can this be read except to mean that, while
Fernmail was lord of Gwrtheyrnion, his father,
Teudibir, still lived and ruled over Builth,
perhaps jointly with his son? It was this kingdom
that claimed its distinct identity - always
connected, in the Celtic mind (and not only in
that) with that of its founder - by Vortigern.
The recital of the family descent seems therefore
to have a political edge, showing that the son of
the king of Builth, descended from Gwrtheyrn
Gwrtheneu, is by right king of Gwrtheyrnion. It
may also be for this reason that we are told that
Pascent ruled over Builth and Gwrtheyrnion by
Ambrosius' gift: a double validation, with
Ambrosius, the most illustrious king of old,
granting the Pascentiads, not just to find land
of their own - as Vortigern's search for Gwynessi
seems to say - but a specific territory, and that
territory none other than Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion, to which the Pascentiads of
Nennius' time seemed so eager to lay claim.
A great break in the fortunes of
the house took place with Vortigern. This may
seem a facile assertion, but it is borne out by
the nature of the Nennian genealogy, not
unsupported by the shreds preserved in
Quimperlé. Only two generations are registered
before Vortigern: his father Vitalis and his
grandfather Vitalinus, with his three brothers
Bonus, Mauron and Paul. This is as much as may be
remembered by the living memory of an uprooted
family with no preserved written records, as
ordinary daily experience will show: in other
words, the memory of the father, grandfather and
great-uncles of the usurper are the sort of thing
that would be handed down by word of mouth once a
great disaster has removed the records. We may
identify this great disaster either with the
revolt of the Saxons, during which towns and
villas indubitably went up in smoke along with
the records they contained; or with the return of
Ambrosius, whom we strongly suspect of having
burned Vitalinus/Vortigern to death in his
fortress - of course, any such conflagration
would be likely to destroy much of the usurper's
papers. It would be especially ruinous if it was
followed by the expulsion of the usurper's
survivors, scattering to the four winds with
little or nothing to show for their association
with the fallen king. This agrees with the
psychology we have seen both in Gildas' reference
to the superbus tyrannus and in the
survival of the cult of the hidden, penitent
Gurthiern, both of them speaking of an enormous
and sudden mental dislocation associated with his
fall, such as left both the educated classes and
the populace struggling to comprehend what had
happened; it is at the same juncture that we find
a Roman family which had produced an emperor -
whether or not usurping - left with nothing but
the remembered names of the previous two
generations.
The history of the family really
begins then.There is no obvious reason to doubt
that Ambrosius had granted one of them, by name
Pascentius, some lands in the north, in the
region of Gwynessi, where their royal
fortress was later known as Caer Gwrtheyrn.
A gloss in some of the Cambridge group of
manuscripts of Nennius identifies this with the
hill-fort of Old Carlisle, on a Roman military
road south of Wigton in Cumberland, and there is
no need to doubt the identification, though
already by Nennius' time the legend and
place-name had been shifted - like many other
northern legends - to Wales, and identified with
a site on the Tovey, or, according to Geoffrey,
with Little Doward in Monmouthshire. (Both these
locations have to do with the particular concerns
of their authors: the author of the *Gesta
Germani, obsessed with Powysian politics,
probably found it attractive to place the cursed
spot of the wicked king's destruction in the
unfriendly territories of Dyved, and Geoffrey,
whose picture of Wales is for most practical
purposes restricted to Gwent and Glamorgan, would
of course place his fall there.) This agrees
with the other notice, that Ambrosius executed
the leader of the Saxons but then accepted
submission of his followers, and with his
traditionally
“moderate”/”modest”
character: it would seem to be his modus
operandi to execute the principals but
forgive their followers. Pascentius may or may
not be the son of Vitalinus: the fact that he
follows him in the pedigree only means that later
ages regarded him as his legal heir.
Four centuries later, we find
their supposed descendants in Powys. Powys as an
entity is unknown to Roman Britain, and must have
come into existence some time between the end of
Roman power in Britain and its appearance in the
*Gesta Germani in the eighth century, in
which it is seen as an ancient and enduring
reality. I think however that we can be a good
deal more precise than that. Scholars agree that
the name of Powys derives from a Latin word, pagenses,
that is "men from the villages", from pagus,
village. This is no more than the Latin
translation of a well-known Celtic tribal name, Atrebates,
which is etymologically close to the famous
Breton, Welsh and Cornish root word tre-
or tref, i.e. "village": the
Atrebates, that is, are the
"villagers". History records two tribes
called Atrebates, one at the edge of Continental
Belgic Gaul, placed between the Belgic Nervi (a
famously aggressive and militant tribe) and
non-Belgic tribes such as the Bellovaci and
Suessiones; and the other in Britain, again
placed in a border position between the
conquering Catuvellauni and an unconquered area
of Dobunni and Durotriges[3].
The suspicion that these kingdoms
of "villagers" may have something to do
with the borders of powerful conquering tribal
confederacies is strengthened by an Irish fact:
there was a tribe in Ulster called the Airgialla,
which stood practically in the middle between two
rival conquering confederacies - Ulster proper,
the Ulaid, and the great Ui Neill group of
kingdoms. The peculiarity of the Airgialla is
that their name comes from their social position
rather than from any legend of founding heroes: Airgialla
means "hostage-givers", and, like
"villagers", refers to a plural number
of people in something of a subject position. A
"villager" is any person residing in a
settlement. This must imply an inferior position
as compared with the Man in the Big House, the
tigernos, let alone the Man of the Country,
the gwledig or high king; and a tribal
name referring to hostage-giving must place the
tribe concerned in an inferior position as
opposed, not only to a high king, but to any king
- "he is no king who has no hostages in
chains", says an Irish legal adage[4]. In other words, here we
have two tribal names which imply inferiority to
the whole royal level of society for all of its
members; properly speaking, these tribes could
have no king of their own race. (This raises an
echo in the Gildasian-age idea of Britain as a
land for Britons to live in but for Romans to
rule.) And Atrebates and Airgialla
were at the edge of powerful tribal
confederacies.
What this suggests is that Powys
came to exist as the result of the conquering
activities of a Celtic tribal confederacy, and
represented its effective outer border; but - and
this is important - this Celtic confederacy must
have used, not a Celtic language, but Latin, as
the vehicle for its obviously Celtic social
ideas, since the name of Powys is not Celtic but
Latin in origin.
In the light of all that we have
learned so far, this absolutely demands to be
read as Gildasian. It was in the age of Gildas,
and in no other known period of Insular history,
that Celtic political ideas were expressed in
flowing Latin. Earlier, the Britanniae were
simply a Roman country with Roman political
ideas, who would not have found it easy to invent
a kingdom of "villagers" - a word with
no Roman political connotations; later, however
much Latin the British and Irish monastic classes
might know, their legal and political ideas came
to be expressed in native idioms. Powys,
therefore, is a Gildasian-age creation. Its
founding hero Cadell was known as a historical
figure to Taliesin, who claimed that his patron
Cynan Garwyn was of his line[5]. He is not likely, in
spite of his name Roman (Catellius) to
have been a contemporary figures such as
Vitalinus/Vortigern, Faustus and Germanus.
Therefore he was inserted in the
Vortigernid-Pascentiad legend of St.Germanus for
a specific reason.
The Catellids themselves claimed
descent from Vortigern through a quite different
line: Cadell's father Britu was meant to be
Vortigern's son from his wife Sevira (Seuera?),
whose Roman name may be historical though the
idea that she was Maximus' daughter certainly is
not[6]. It simply represents
the typical Welsh doctrine that, as Dumville puts
it, "Roman power had ended with the death of
Maximus in 388, and that from the descendants of
this last British emperor all legitimate
post-Roman power flowed."[7] In spite of the fact
that "this gave some of the Northern heroes
Maximid ancestry", there is no trace of this
doctrine in the better Northern genealogies, who
trace their ancestry either back to mysterious
names such as Fer and Cursalem, or, through the
much-loved Gododdin ancestor Coel, to fabulous
antiquities and the inevitable Beli[8].
Now whatever the ancestry of
Cadell, Taliesin’s mention - which is
unlikely to be later than the 580s - shows that
the Catellids were lords of Powys since before
the fall of Britain. The Vortigernid-Pascentiads,
on the other land, were certainly late arrivals.
Their legend shows that their original lands were
in the north, probably in Cumberland. The
Vortigernid-Pascentiads did not claim Maximid
ancestry; the Vortigernid-Brituid dynasty of
Cadell, did. ( did, for their Saint, the
Gurthiern cult in Brittany.) This indicates
that these two dynasties, in spite of the common
ancestor, came to formulate their doctrines of
kingship under different influences.
To judge by their dynastic legend
O, the Pascentiads were already thoroughly
Celtified by the sixth century, or at least they
had loyal Celtic storytellers[9] at their court. Yet the
political doctrine expressed by their Nennian
pedigree does not include any descent from
Maximus. This does not reflect the views of
Nennius himself, who was quite convinced that
"from the descendants of [Maximus] all
legitimate post-Roman power flowed". As
Dumville rightly observes, Nennius "ends his
Roman history with Maximus [in fact, Maximianus,
but the duplication is evident] and turns at once
to his British successors... Cunedda [and]
Gwrtheyrn” (Vortigern). As I am confident
that Nennius himself was a Vortigernid - to be
precise: a Vortigernid-Pascentiad - what this
shows is that by his time the house of Builth and
Gwrtheyrnion had completely accepted normal Welsh
assumptions about the primacy of Maximus. The
more interesting, then, that the pedigree trotted
out by Nennius himself (and partially confirmed
by the Quimperlé document and by one of the
Morgan ab Owain genealogies) should not conform.
Its arch-ancestor is one Gloiu, whom
another Northern-originated notice (in Cullhwch
and Olwen) describes as the son of a
mysterious Casnar Wledig.
And just as the two dynastic
legends bespeak separate theories of monarchy, O
and N bespeak different narrative literary
cultures. N, like its predecessor N1, is a
brilliant historical romance, built on Celtic
values and categories indeed, but presupposing
and making inventive use of existing historical
records. It is very free in its use of its
material, and tends to form entirely new stories
- like a modern historical novelist; and it is
interesting that two writers out to prove exactly
opposite points and, in fact, to contradict each
other, should share a similar method and similar
daring[10]. It is N, not O, that
decidedly incorporates the Maximus-derived idea
of British sovereignty, shifting the blame for
the disasters that followed its end from
Maxim(ian)us to Gratianus mancipalis; and,
though he makes no use of his historical
material, its author has read Gildas. O knows
nothing of the Maximus theory; shows no clear
evidence of knowing Gildas; and arises from a
storytelling culture which applies a pre-existing
account to explain historical events, even at the
price of leaving in some incompatible material
(as I pointed out in the case of the druids'
supposed unwillingness to tell the king the
truth).
The author of O does not seem to
have been naive: to the contrary - as I pointed
out - comparison between the divergent versions
of Geoffrey and Nennius shows that there was a
very early written Latin version, making
sophisticated and inventive use of two important
Gospel quotations, Mark 6.23 and John
13.27. The difference is therefore not in
literary sophistication, but in different
attitudes to the past and to the art of
storytelling. N and N1 live in a world of written
history, of argument and counter-argument, in
which data can be interpreted and reinterpreted
according to different ideological or dynastic
views; O lives in a world which sees the past in
terms of a certain number of accepted truths,
expressed in stories which can be used to
understand otherwise incomprehensible events. The
culture of O is not in the habit of considering
historical data as independent items to be drawn
into a web of interpretation; in other words, in
my view the culture of O is oral at heart. It has
not really come to terms with the implications of
written preservation and manipulation of stories.
(P, the *Gesta Germani, has a great deal
more in common with O than with N and N1, even
though it does seem to have integrated a certain
amount of historical information within its basic
mythological shape.) Neither N nor O are very
close to what we would today call history, but in
the case of O the reason is the habit of applying
more or less ready-made categories, expressed in
the form of wholly unhistorical narratives, to
known personages; in the case of N and N1, it is
the grave shortage of proper and connected
historical accounts (when N had one at hand, that
of Ambrosius, he made use of it), that left too
much space to inventive rewriting, argument and
point-scoring. Apart from our great historical
novelists, such as Mary Renault, there is a close
parallel to this sort of thing in China, where
the mighty Romance of the three kingdoms
is generally taken to be a largely fictional
reconstruction of largely lost history,
incorporating a certain amount of fortuitously
surviving data.
It follows that the two different
narratives arise from two different environments;
and we can identify them with some confidence -
the northern world of Pascent's kingdom of
Gwynessi, and the Welsh one of Cadell's Powys
(which, before the fall of Britain in 570-620,
looked to the lowlands through the valley of the
Severn). We can take the association of Pascent
with Gwrtheyrnion to be late; the dynasty spent
some time in Gwynessi in the North. This could
also explain the mess in the pedigree: if we take
some at least of the Gwynessi generations to have
been forgotten, with only the earliest
generations from Gloiu to Pascent being
remembered with any precision, then the
"generation gap" no longer looms so
large.
My point is that there is nothing
impossible or unlikely in the theory that
Pascent's descendants, after having been
ensconced in Gwynessi for a few generations - the
date of their establishment there is beyond
conjecture, but they evidently were there when
the first version of O was written down -
eventually ended up in a remote Welsh highland
tract, still cherishing the title of kings and
their royal descent, still determined - as the
writers of the *Gesta Germani and the Historia
Brittonum show - to whitewash, if not
Vortigern's moral character (which was by then
impossible) at least his legitimacy. The dynasty,
which fragmentary Nennian allusions and glosses
place in the north (ad sinistralem plagam)
and near Carlisle, turns up after the fall of the
north (though in a time when Strathclyde still
held on) in a tiny kingdom subsidiary to Powys,
which is ruled by another dynasty claiming
Vortigernid descent. It looks as though the two
royal houses, beleaguered by the overwhelming
power of Northumbria, had managed to appeal to
the better natures of their distant kinsmen in
their still-defended mountain fastnesses.
Now, there are a number of reasons
to believe that, in the wake of Saxon conquest,
Wales may have become the refuge of a number of
dispossessed northern dynasties.
I have already suggested that the
house of Maelgwn ended up in Gwynedd not because
it was their ancestral property but because they
were driven from Maelgwn's conquests in the
North; but among their dynastic fictions there
nests another probable case of a refugee dynasty,
that of Ceredig. Dumville has analyzed the
king-lists of Cunedda's supposed descendants, and
found that the list which begins with his
supposed son Ceredig is missing at least two,
perhaps three generations. His conclusions are
eloquent: "On the evidence available,
Ceredig of Ceredigion may with modest confidence
be assigned to the sixth century... It is clear
from the comparison of the pedigree of king Gwgon
[a descendant of Ceredig] with those for the
other kingdoms of Greater Gwynedd, that it has a
different origin and history". In other
words, the relationship of Cunedda with Ceredig
is a genealogical fiction, intended to legitimize
a dynasty intruded into Greater Gwynedd, where
legitimate royal power was held to spring from
Cunedda. It is an interesting coincidence that in
the mid-610s one Ceredig, king of Elmet, is
driven out of his kingdom, or possibly killed[11] completing the English
conquest of Northumbria. The coincidence is by no
means perfect: the date for Ceredig's expulsion
or death is about a generation later than that
suggested by Dumville - if only "with modest
confidence" - for the death of Ceredig of
Ceredigion. But Dumville relied for his dating on
a generation-length of twenty-five years, by no
means a safe measurement in that age of
uncertainty and violence. On the other hand,
while Dumville's chronological calculations do
not exclude that his Ceredig should have lived on
into the six hundreds, they certainly do exclude
his traditional dating, which would demand a
generation-length of 37.5 years - completely
unimaginable in the circumstances.
What we have, therefore, is the
end of a powerful northern dynasty (Taliesin,
writing one or two generations before the end of
the North, makes Gwallawg of Elmet an ordained gwledig
- ordained, here, must mean anointed - whose
field of action is the whole island) in a period
compatible with the establishment of a new
kingdom in Gwynedd, whose founding hero has the
same name as the last king of Elmet. There is no
record or suggestion that Ceredig was an
interloper; but the sources seem to conspire to
confer on him a Cuneddan legitimacy to which he
obviously wasn't entitled. This would make it the
third dynasty to come to Wales from outside,
after Maelgwn's and Vortigern's. It does not seem
casual; and it would be no more than sense to
look for a remote, sheltered hiding-place when
the English came a-calling.
We do have a genealogy of the
lords of Elmet showing their descent from Coel
and a relationship with Cunedda through his
marriage with Coel's "daughter" Gwawl.
It stops at Gwallawg and (implicitly) at his son
Ceredig, last king of Elmet, and knows nothing of
any descent in Wales; but it almost certainly
comes from the north, in particular from
Strathclyde, and has every reason to have lost
contact with more southern realities when Elmet
fell in 616, and even more when the Gododdin
ceased to exist probably about 638. In other
words, we probably have two separate documents
about the house of Ceredig; one, of northern
origin and some historical value, up to its
expulsion from Elmet; the other, Welsh in origin
and valuable only from Ceredig himself on, from
their arrival in Ceredigion. It is even possible
that Ceredig himself may never have seen the land
named for him: if, as the Annales Kambriae
seem to indicate, he died in the fall of Elmet,
it may be that his descendants carried his memory
with them to their land of exile as that of a
patriarch, in which case his supposed reign and
death in Ceredigion would be a notice of the same
order as the supposed death of Gurthiern in
Quimperlé.
The North, we must remember, fell
to the English later than the South: the seismic
collapse of central and southern England (as it
is today) began, in my view, a few years after
Gildas completed his masterpiece about 561, and
was complete by Augustine's arrival in 597 -
indeed, by the time Gregory the Great started
planning the English venture, in the early 590s,
showing that he had lost any confidence in the
possibility of a British recovery. Gregory's own
well-known passage from his commentary on Job[12], describing in
allegorical terms the conversion of the English,
is heavy with the recent terror of a sudden and
apparently irresistible wave of conquest, which,
he seems to be saying, had been going on right up
to the minute when Augustine reached Kent - but
which is now at rest. But Chester only fell in
606 or so, and Elmet as much as ten years later.
It is even possible that the northern lords may
have seen the disaster coming and prepared some
bolt-holes in advance; this would explain why all
the intrusive dynasties in question seem to be
from the North - the South did not have the
chance to escape its doom.
Two centuries later, the situation
seems to have changed. There is a visible
discrepancy between the *Gesta Germani and
the Powys genealogy: in the former, Cadell and
Vortigern are contemporaries, while in the latter
Cadell is the grandson of Vortigern. And from
what we have seen, the latter is decidedly the
more credible dating: Cadell's Powys belongs in
the Latin-speaking resurgent Celticism of the
sixth century, not in the Roman Britanniae of
Germanus, Vitalinus and Faustus. Whatever drop of
historical data there may be in the bucket of
legend of the *Gesta Germani, it does not
include the presence of Cadell. In fact, I
argued, it seems calculated to put the Catellids
in their place, kings of Powys indeed, but
descended from a servant. It also denies the
authenticity of the Catellid pedigree - proudly
raised by an eighth-century Catellid king in the
Pillar of Eliseg, an unusual gesture for a Dark
Age Welsh lord - and the common Vortigernid
blood. Only the house of Pascent, ruling the land
named for the ancestor, are truly descended from
him. Was the Pillar of Eliseg something of a
Catellid polemic in stone, against such
insinuations?
Now the Catellid claim to
Vortigernid and Maximid ancestry is
probably quite early, since N - as I pointed out
again and again - seems bent on clearing both
Maximus and Vitalinus/Vortigern of blame for the
misfortunes of Britain, and N is most probably to
be dated to the time of Cadwallon of Gwynedd,
that is the second quarter of the seventh
century; this argues that there was already then
a royal house - allied with Cadwallon - who
claimed descent from both Maximus and Vortigern,
and the only such house known is that of Powys.
(Being squeezed between Gwynedd and Mercia -
ruled by Cadwallon's great ally Penda - Powys
probably could not opt out of an alliance with
these two powerful "friends" even if it
wanted to; and to judge by N's apparent
enthusiasm for Cadwallon's exterminating policy -
an enthusiasm apparently shared by all those
Britons who formed Cadwallon's "huge"
army - they may not even have wanted to.) In
other words, the Powysian claim to Vortigernid
descent was already in place by about 630, a long
time before the author of the *Gesta Germani
tried to demolish it. It seems that by his time
the two royal houses were not on the best of
terms. I already suggested that the relationship
of Nennius with king Mervyn's Gwynedd suggested
an alliance against Powys, and this consideration
strengthens it.
I have done enough to explain the
effect of Vortigernid-Pascentiad ideas, though
Nennius, on my material; I have nothing more to
say. But I do have one parallel in mind for the
status to which they were reduced by the age of
Charlemagne. Their pathetic position in the rocks
of Builth and the headwaters of the Severn, and
their desperate clinging to ghostly ancient
claims, has a rather touching echo in Ireland. In
the words of Professor F.J.Byrne, "time and
again it was the fate of dynasties who lost their
hold on these plains [the valleys of the Liffey,
Barrow and Slaney, centres of ancient Leinster]
to retreat eastwards across the mountains into
political impotence: the Ui Garrchon and the Ui
Enechglass in the sixth century, and the Ui Mail
in the eighth, were to be followed after the
Anglo-Norman invasion by their supplanters, the
O'Tooles and O'Byrnes of Ui Duinlange... Even in
the seventeenth century a sept of the Kavenaghs,
claiming to be the heirs of the twelfth-century
Mac Murchada kings of Ui Cheinnsselaig and
Leinster, and living at Garryhill in county
Carlow, 'betaking themselves to that place for
securitie it being a place of fastness and
compassed with very large woods and bogs',
maintained a forlorn relic of their royal
dignity. 'This House of Garrchoyle for a
testimony that they were the eldest of the
Kavenaghs and descended from the stock of the
Kings of Leinster had a great seate and a vessell
or cup to drinke out of called Corne-cam-more.'[13]"
These Kavanaghs had even more in
common with the house of Vortigern than other
dispossessed east coast families, since Diarmait
Mac Murchada, calling in Strongbow and
precipitating Henry II's intervention, had a
thoroughly Vortigern-like role in the history of
Ireland[14]; and their survival in
the desolate corners of Carlow is exactly
parallel to the survival of the house of
Vortigern in the mountains of Radnor, at the
extreme limits of the Severn area on which their
power had originally been based. Builth is an
isolated area, walled in by high mountains and
unable to affect the rest of Wales or England;
Gwrtheyrnion, though less completely fenced-in,
represents the extreme or fag end of the Severn
lands, barely worth forming a lordship out of,
and shut off from the greater Severn valley by
the sizeable obstacle of the kingdom of Powys.
Maps of prehistoric Welsh settlements show few or
no fortifications in this area, and, for what
it's worth, it was this one sliver of worthless
land that had received the name of the
"usurper", as if in a further act of damnatio
memoriae. It is possible that, hemmed in
everywhere else, they may have expanded into
Builth as the only direction in which they could
exert any influence. If I have read the origin of
Ceredigion correctly, it is worth comparing the
allotment of the valuable area of Cardiganshire
with the unpleasing land allotment and evident
isolation of the Vortigernids of central Wales.
The Catellids had Cadell himself - praised, to
the exclusion of Vortigern, as the very example
of a mighty warrior, in Taliesin's ode to Cynan
Garwyn - to resort to as a great ancestor; the
Pascentiads had only Vortigern; by the time of
Geoffrey, the poisonous nature of his image had
blackened even the name of Pascent.
Notes
[1]SNYDER op.cit.,
pp.72-3.
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
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