click here
|
Chapter 7.2: 442-468:
a historical Reconstruction
Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
I have suggested that the presence
of what I called "the Ambrosian file"
in Gildas is due to the selection made by
Ambrosius and his successors of genuine Roman-age
documents that favoured their point of view.
This suggests that the phenomenon was more
general; that great houses such as the Ambrosiads
and the Vortigernids each preserved their own
"files", each slanted firmly towards
dynastic views. It is surely from such
"files" that the positive view of
"Maximus the tyrant" comes, vigorously
contradicting Gildas, in the dream of Maxen
Gwledig, and also in N. Bards and monks
may both have collaborated in their preservation;
the clear influence of the Christian legends of
Constantine the Great and St.Helen on Maxen
tends to suggest that, however bardic its nature,
monastic institutions had something to do with
it. We find such "files" in both
the Gildasian age and early Wales, suggesting
that they - or rather, the habit of forming them
about a great family - were already in place in
Gildasian times, and went on being gathered and
preserved in surviving British dynasties and
monasteries long after the fall of Gildasian
Britain.
The Vortigernid files do not know
any history before Vortigern himself. The
Vortigernid-Brituid genealogy begins with Magnus
Maximus, whose son-in-law Vortigern is - with no
ancestry we know of; and this affiliation is
obviously fictitious. The
Vortigernid-Pascentiad one goes back two
generations further, to Vortigern’s father
Vitalis, grandfather Vitalinus, and three
great-uncles Paul, Mauron and Bonus. Before
this there is only the place-name of Gloucester.
The Quimperlé genealogy repeats the origin of
the house in Gloiu. But whether the house
was celebrated or obscure, whether Vitalinus was
a self-made military man or a wealthy senator of
lineage, his link with
Gloucester must have been important enough to be
remembered; and no doubt Gloucester, in its turn,
did not suffer by its connection with the
Emperor, legitimate or not.
Because of the prevalence of
northern and Saxon concerns in the written
evidence, I do not think that enough attention
has been paid to some archaeological data. To
quote Snyder, "The late Roman
walling and earthwork defences at Gloucester and
Worcester seem to be a part of a scheme to
fortify every major settlement along the
tributaries of the Severn... The Verulamium Gate
at Cirencester began the refacing of its tower
and the rebuilding of the front face of its wall
about 410." Began, mind you; not
completed. Everyone knows that a major
engineering project like that can take years.
To fortify every major settlement
on the Severn and its tributaries was a work that
demanded power on a national scale. And we
must remember that, as archaeologists date these
developments mainly by coins, a work "begun
about 410" might mean any time in the early
fifth century, since 410 is the last date in
which coins were struck for Britain or sent
there. Now, we know who defended the north
(the tribes beyond the Wall), and who was
supposed, from about 432, to defend the east and
perhaps the Solent (the Saxons); but who was to
defend these new, expensive and purposeful
defences for the west? Fortifications are
not primary; no government not demonstrably
insane builds or rebuilds large and expensive
defence systems without first being able to count
on the troops to man them; and we know that, far
from disregarding the question of trained
manpower, the government of Vitalinus were so
concerned with it that they sent for the Saxons
when a crisis struck.
The valley of the Severn,
therefore, must have had its own regular
defenders, trained, equipped, and paid. Where
they were recruited, we cannot be sure; probably
in the uplands of present-day Wales and the
Pennines, which would, then as now, not be
without their hardy but impoverished mountaineer
types, beloved of army recruiters the world over. The close
connection between Vitalinus and Gloucester, that
is with the lower Severn, may have involved
wealth: in late-Roman times the Severn must have
surpassed the Thames as a route for seaborne
trade with the rich Roman East, which was such a
major feature of British life for two centuries.
The pre-eminence of the maritime west may have
had something to do with the means by which
Vitalinus gained supreme power.
The 410s seem to have seen both
the beginnings of the Severn towns’
fortification and the defeat of the Picts. This
indicates a vigorous defence policy, which
probably insured order and economic stability in
the Britanniae, allowing that age of prosperity
that shone so brightly in the memories of
Constantius and Gildas. Two decades later,
we find the whole Romano-British polity,
including the armed forces, united in
disappointment and contempt towards the Mild
King. This seems to follow very
significantly on this period of apparent
successful military and political activity.
The Mild King may have succeeded a more bellicose
and successful predecessor; certainly he was
felt, not only to be absurdly wrapped up in
religion, but also inadequate to the task at
hand.
Vitalinus would therefore have
been called to the throne with the expectation
that he would return to the earlier path of
military endeavour and - according to E -
religious indifference; and there is nothing to
show that he did not at first fulfil that
mandate. To the contrary, N2 seems to
indicate that Ambrosius claimed to have improved
on, not discarded, Vitalinus' policies; and this
suggests that a favourable view existed, at
least, of his early years.
Apart from the plague, a number of
strategic demands may have arisen. Firstly,
the Franks were at their most active in the 420s,
and it is interesting that Vitalinus sent not for
them but for Saxons, who feature in later history
as their hereditary enemies. Second, it
seems that Pictish and Irish pirates, made wise
by past failures, learned to by-pass the
well-defended Wall and Severn valley areas, to
raid the broad and defenceless east. Then
or later, Irishmen from Munster settled in
numbers in Dyved, directly across the Welsh
watershed from the mouth of the Severn - an ideal
location for ship-raiding piracy. Gildas
(and N, and the sources for the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle) says that they were settled to
guard against the Picts. However, though
the lower Severn was a natural target for the
Irish, no Saxon was settled there. Archaeology
tells us that they were settled in a definite
area, the east, no nearer to the Severn valley
than Portsmouth, nor anywhere near the Wall.
The Wall had its own defenders: the visible
continuity between the tribes of the late Roman
age and the dynasties of the legendary British
"old North" shows that, from beginning
to end, it was the likes of the Gododdin who
defended the north.
Of course, the Irish settlers in
Dyved may themselves have been part of this
system of defence, put there to guard the mouth
of the Severn against their fellow-islanders.
South Ireland had a number of Christian
foundations that proudly claimed to have started
before Patrick, and even one high kingship - the
overlordship of Munster at Cashel - that does not
seem to have any pre-Christian roots at all; its
foundation legend is Christian, and its name
Roman (Castella). The Christian and
Roman features apply specifically to Cashel;
elsewhere in Munster, a good few origin stories
have clearly pagan, even druidic features, such
as the presence of the legendary druid Mug Roith
to divide two Eoganachta twins who represented
two tribes.
Now, let us suggest that political
penetration of Ireland, especially in Munster,
was part of Romano-British political activity.
How can we envisage it? It must have been
somewhat fitful; not only because of the limited
resources available to Roman Britain alone, but
also because of two major interruptions - first,
the unmilitary period of the Mild King, and then
the Saxon revolt. My point is that the
fitful nature of Romano-British involvement,
broken at a significant moment by the collapse of
Romano-British order, seems the chronological
correspondent of the curious pattern of early and
politically prominent, but fitful and patchy,
Christianization in Munster. The first
stage of a British intervention in Munster,
whether directly or through proxies, would
indubitably aim to conquer the central
institution, the provincial high kingship; hence
the establishment of Cashel with its Roman name
and Christian legends. The conquering push
would soon spend itself, possibly even before the
Saxon revolt, since it is to be doubted that
Britain had the resources to subdue an Irish
province in detail, tuath by tuath;
and this corresponds to the fact that while the
legend of Cashel is Christian in character, the
foundation legends of individual tribes within
Munster are pagan.
But British intervention in
Ireland had had one aspect which, though late in
its brief history, was itself permanent, and
survived its policies: the Pelagian migration.
It seems to me highly likely that the collapse of
Vitalinus’ government in 442, stranding the
Pelagian communities in their place of exile, was
a major impulse towards their cultural
assimilation to Ireland, including such things as
the use of Ogham rather than Latin for monuments
and grave stones. The Pelagian settlers
established church institutions that lasted for
centuries. They all come from the same area
of Ireland which formed an ogham-using cultural
province with suspected Pelagian features, and
took the writings of Pelagius - in some cases
even with his name proudly displayed as the
author - back to Wales and to the continent.
To judge from the lack of Ogham
“son of” stones, they did not settle in
the north. I suspect southern Ireland could
find common ground with the Romano-British
against the northern tribes of Ulster, Meath and
Connaught. Romano-British policy must
certainly have treated the latter as enemies, to
judge by the direction of Coroticus’ slaving
raids; I do not think it is a coincidence that
Coroticus, almost certainly the British-sponsored
king of Strathclyde, raided Patrick’s
converts. Patrick was based in Ulster.
It seems likely that Romano-British diplomacy
played on age-old rivalries in Ireland itself,
sharpened in the course of the years by the
relative proximity of Leinster and Munster to
Roman culture, and the distance of Ulster and
especially Connacht. As I pointed out,
St.Patrick feels that the Romans to whom he
writes will not have much sympathy for the
northern raider - he works the charges against
him as hard as he can, to make the
“truly” Roman aristocracy disgusted
with him - but they will want to back him for
political convenience. What political
convenience? I doubt that the Pelagian
infection had gone so deep that the Roman British
aristocracy could commit itself to the
destruction of Catholic outposts; not if two
journeys by St.Germanus were enough to deal with
them. However many sympathizers Pelagianism
had in Britain, they were not enough to force a
break with Rome or even to resist an unarmed
envoy. It is likelier that Coroticus’
armed power had made him indispensable; and by
the same token, strategic success in Ireland has
been achieved probably at least in part by giving
his likes free rein. Coroticus was, in my
view, active in Vitalinus' reign, and his
impunity may have been a part of what seems to
have been an active and vigorous, if perhaps not
far-sighted, defence policy.
It must be of this period that the
Gallic Chronicle of 452 was thinking when
it spoke of Britain being struck by various
disasters before it fell to the Saxons. These
were to become a locus communis and find
their way into Rome's Sybilline Books. However,
the Chronicler was looking at British history in
the light of the Saxon revolt, and may well tend
to see any British misfortune as part of a chain
preluding to the great disaster. We hear of
a plague and of an attempted Pictish invasion;
later, there is trouble between Saxon settlers
and Romano-British landowners, who felt the
burden of annona too much for them (this
might indicate a decline in farm production); in
429 we hear of at least one barbarian raid,
though it does not seem to have amounted to much,
and of a fire that destroyed a large part of a
town. We perceive a quite vicious kind of
litigiousness in the great quarrel between
Patrick, Catholic Bishop-elect of Ireland, and
the British episcopate, who seem to have used
every legal trick in the book to destroy his
position - not excluding Coroticus' raid; and E
seems to think that British addiction to legal
quarrels had reached danger level. (If E's
reaction to the Mild King's fall was immediate,
he was probably writing before the height of the
row between Patrick and his British seniores,
which I would date to the late 430s and up to the
Saxon revolt of 441-42.) Intense
litigiousness and reduced scruples tend to
reflect a situation of increasing tensions and
decreasing opportunities in a society, and it
might be that by the late 430s, and in spite of
what might have been Vitalinus' activism, the
gloss was going off the earlier British
"economic miracle" (which seems to have
done quite well without its own money, using
bullion or continental coins).
The Mild King fell as the Frankish
crisis of the 420s was still in full swing.
As we remember from our study of St.Patrick, the
Franks took advantage of the chaos left by the
enthronement and destruction of the usurper John
in Rome (425) to raid and sack Gaul at will,
until Aetius slowly reimposed order. As I
pointed out, Vitalinus did not look for hired
swords or settlers among the closest Germanic
tribes - Franks and Frisians - but among Saxons,
who appear in later history as the Franks'
hereditary enemies. However vague the Roman
use of the term Saxon, it can hardly have
stretched as far as mistaking them with the
Franks; and if the Angles indeed came from Angeln
- at the throat of the Schleswig-Jutland
peninsula - they were quite as distant from the
Franks and from Roman territory as a British
mission could reach. It looks as though
Britain wanted swordsmen who not only would fight
the Picts, but would not be too easily tempted to
make friends with Franks and Frisians either.
What we can see of the northern defences suggests
that the local British armed forces were largely
tribal, with all the problems
this entails: limited technical resource,
excessive local loyalty, an incapacity to move
out of area swiftly or efficiently, and probably
an equal incapacity to return once the war was
over. Tribes only leave their own home
grounds to settle elsewhere. The British,
perhaps, found it simply impossible to move their
northern or western troops to cover the flat and
all too easily invaded east. A believable
if not necessarily reliable Galfridian item tells
us that the English leader asked Vitalinus for
official status and was refused. If he was
in fact from Angeln, in the distant depths of
Germany, this shows an interesting knowledge of
the niceties of Roman attitudes and how an
ambitious northern gentleman might make a career
in the imperial army. Vitalinus' refusal
did not, perhaps, set off the relationship on the
best footing; within ten years at most, the
Saxons were at war against him.
The harder we look at what we can
find of the first Saxon revolt, taking all the
evidence into account, the less like Gildas'
apocalypse it seems. It was surely nasty
enough; but there is little to prove that any
Saxon actually claimed sovereignty over the
island. The earliest Welsh legend, O -
written when records were still available -
remembered that Vitalinus went on being king,
however emasculated his rule, until he was killed
by Ambrosius; later legends never actually
disagree – his sovereignty always goes on
until destroyed by the Avenger from the
Continent, though the latest legend replaces
Ambrosius with Germanus. Vortigern is never
the victim of barbarians, but always of
Ambrosius or of a figure incarnating Roman
righteousness.
And that being the case, the Saxon
revolt seems to have intended, not to take over
the island - whatever the impression left on
Gallic observers that it had passed in dicione
Saxonum - but to impose their point of view
on the government; not unlike the occasional
clashes between Constantinople and its barbarian
troops, in which food was always an issue. The
continental Roman century is dotted from
beginning to end with such revolts, from the
great war of Alaric and the Visigoths (407-411),
whose reaction to hunger took them to Rome and
then to the fertile fields of Aquitaine; to the
two successive outbursts of Theoderic Strabo and
then of his enemy Theoderic the Great, both of
whom, though they were officials of the Empire - magistri
militum - revolted over a matter of
non-delivery of food supplies. Both Strabo
(481) and the other Theoderic (487) besieged
Constantinople, whose walls, however, unlike
Rome's, proved proof against both. Both
wars were followed by new agreements between the
imperial government and the armies, including
restoring the title of magister militum to
their commanders; Theoderic the Great ended up
being sent to Italy, as a perfectly loyal
imperial ally, to dethrone Odoacer. In
effect, all that these wars amounted to - in the
minds of the German soldiers, at least - were a
kind of rather violent soldier's strike,
demanding their rights even from the Emperor;
once they had got what they wanted, they were
perfectly willing to settle down again under the
same imperial ensigns they had so recently
burned.
Gildas' notice that the Saxons did
not stay after their first revolt, but "went
home", means that they did not settle all
the regions they had devastated, even in the
meagre form of a few settler families taking over
large estates left vacant. Why? Given
that Welsh legends are unanimous that Vortigern
became their puppet ruler, the likeliest reason
is that they have regarded the whole war as a
punishment raid to extort the annona they
had been denied, and that, having taught the
British a severe lesson and installed what they
regarded as efficient arrangements for its
collection, they were content to return to what
they regarded as theirs by right, the parts of
the island they had been living in before the
war, enlarged perhaps, but not hugely so. Gildas
speaks with his usual precision: the flames of
the Saxon war "licked" the shores of
the western ocean, occidentalem trucique
oceanum lingua delamberet, that is they did
not completely burn the western parts of Britain;
but this "licking" is preceded by the
complete and savage destruction of a number
(plural) of walled Roman towns. Gildas
implies that these cities were not re-occupied or
rebuilt, but left to moulder with their corpses
unburied in the streets; as he is not speaking of
the west of the country, he must be speaking of
the east - and this agrees (apart from recent
scholarly doubts) with the condition of
Caistor-by-Norwich, a Roman town of some size
subjected to violent destruction and never
rebuilt.
More indirectly but more
tellingly, we might say that there is a line from
Colchester to Lincoln and to Kingston-upon-Hull,
east of which there is no continuity between
Roman and modern geography. In most of
England, the majority of Roman towns and cities
have carried on into the present day as county
and episcopal seats and market towns, and the
Roman road network has remained the backbone of
trade and movement; and conversely most modern
towns can be traced back to the Roman age. In
East Anglia all the major towns - Ipswich,
Norwich, Great Yarmouth - are of Saxon or later
vintage; and while the kings of neighbouring
English kingdoms settled in Roman cities - the
king of Essex in London, that of Lindsey in
Lincoln, that of Kent in Canterbury, that of
Wessex in Winchester - the kings of East Anglia
established new royal villas such as Rendlesham,
with no relation to previous Roman settlement.
Smaller-scale analysis shows no continuity
between Roman and Saxon settlement patterns; it is as if the Saxons
had emptied the land even of existing farm
borders and buildings before redistributing it
among themselves. Nothing quite like this
is visible in the rest of Britain.
Gildas himself, however great his
emphasis on Saxon destruction, tells us that the
Saxons were not out to destroy Britain for the
fun of it, but to take control: the issue,
remember, was unpaid annona. Therefore
the annihilation of Roman life east of the Fens
should not be seen as mere wanton revenge, but as
a deliberate political act. Its political
effect was to fence off for themselves a part of
Britain which was so indubitably
"Saxon" that even Gildas unconsciously
accepted that, when the "most savage
raiders" went "home", they do not
leave the island: their "home" is a
place from which they can keep control over the
rest of the island - that is, a part of it.
That Gildas said that the flame of
war reached right across the island to the
western ocean, suggests that the first spate of
destruction, intended to carve out territory for
themselves, was followed by a direct assault on
the core of Vortigern's power near Gloucester.
This would have been meant to show that there was
no place where he could hide from his angry
troops; and it would be at that point, I think,
that the emperor and his senate would decide to
capitulate and accept the rebels' terms. As
I pointed out, a distorted mention of this seems
preserved in Nennius ch.45. Vitalinus was
not overthrown; his government was not destroyed;
Gildas does not say that they were, and even the Chronicle
of 452 can be read to mean that the Saxons
controlled Britain, not that they ruled it.
All succeeding British ages were clear that
Vortigern lived, to be killed by Ambrosius (or
St.Germanus); and given that the dynastic hatred
between the two houses lived on, one tends to
give some weight to their unanimous witness.
An important fact is that Gallic
and Gaul-related notices about Britain’s
plight cluster in a few short years, a decade
after the first collapse. The Chronicle
of 452 was written at some point between 452
and 455; the Letter to Agitius was written
at some stage between 446, Aetius’ third
consulate, and his murder in 455. An extremely well
dated Gaulish document, Sidonius
Apollinaris’ panegyric to the pretender
Avitus, has a political message about Britain: it
is a Roman country beset by barbarian enemies and
in need of rescue by “Caesar”. Rather
than say so explicitly (probably because Avitus,
a Visigothic front man with roughly as much power
as Sooty the glove puppet, had not the least
chance of doing anything about it), Sidonius
draws a wholly unhistorical picture of Julius
Caesar entering Britain not in order to conquer
it but to defend it from Picts, Scots and Saxons.
What Sidonius is doing here is setting up an
image of the first Emperor “rescuing”
Britain in front of the pretender Emperor (Avitus
happened to be his father-in-law) and of his
backers; “Caesar” carrying his
protective, law-enforcing function even across
the ocean. It is, of course, as ridiculous
a device as the rest of the poem, of whose
absurdity I think Sidonius was aware; he was too
learned a man not to know what Caesar went to
Britain to do, but perhaps he thought that
Avitus’ Visigothic backers did not. Sidonius’
panegyric was written, with contemporary
conditions firmly in mind, in the last months of
455, to be recited at Avitus’ enthronement
at the start of the year. It can only be
read as a picture of contemporary conditions,
with Britain being then, at that precise
date – 1 January 456 – a Roman country
beset and occupied by barbarians, and in urgent
need of rescue from overseas.
The reason for this burst of
interest in the condition of the Romanam
insulam is also found in the panegyric.
Sidonius informs us that Saxon naval raids
against Armorica, of the utmost ferocity, had
suddenly started in the reign of Petronius (13
March-31 May 455), only to die down with equally
dramatic suddenness in the early months of that
of Avitus (who was “enthroned” on July
9, 455). It seems certain, from the way
Sidonius refers to these horrors, that they had
been mercifully short-lived. It is not
until the 470s that he has occasion to refer to
Saxon pirates again. In fact, we can
probably accept his testimony that they had all
taken place in a few months in the spring, summer
and autumn of 455.
The Letter to Agitius is
certainly earlier, since Aetius was murdered
early in 455; in fact, the
“enthronement” of Avitus was part of
the fall-out from his murder. Some at least
of the surviving British potentates appealed to
Aetius, in typical but grossly uninspired
"artistic" rhetoric, to come and free them
from the barbarians. As it seems to have
come to Gildas via the Ambrosian file, it must
have been preserved by the Ambrosian party; it is
not at all unlikely that it originated with them
in some fashion, perhaps as representatives of a
previous government not involved with the call to
the Barbarians. This would make it a party
document and put its testimony in some doubt.
Certainly Aetius showed no great desire to
intervene in Britain, but this is more likely to
be attributed to cold-blooded political
calculation than to any problem with the source
of the appeal..
However, it suggests a
reason for the sudden burst of Saxon pirate
activity and Gaulish-Roman interest in Britain.
The Saxon raids follow suspiciously close on the
fall of the letter’s addressee; and it was
those raids that awakened the interest at least
of Sidonius, and perhaps of the author of the Chronicle
of 452, in Britain’s barbarian
oppressors. So why would the Saxons decide
to raid Gaul in 455? It sounds as though
they had heard of the appeal to the uir
Romanae potestatis, possibly following his
dramatic defeat of his former ally Attila in 452
and the latter’s death (of natural causes)
not long after. Cowed, perhaps, by the
great name of Aetius, the fox of Gaul, they had
not done anything until he was known to have been
killed by the emperor Valentinianus III, and he
in turn killed by a friend of the dead general.
At this point, they may have decided to give a
memorable reminder to Gaul, to discourage any
further bright ideas about meddling in British
affairs.
There is another possible
reason. In a diplomatic letter of 448,
Attila the Hun claimed to be overlord –
among other Germanic peoples – of “the
Islands of the Ocean”, that is probably
Britain; and the popularity
throughout England of place names in Hun-
(e.g. Huncote, Hundon, Hunningham, Hunston) might
suggest, at least, that the Huns loomed large
enough in the minds of the early English to name
people (a name Hunstan is attested) and
places for them. It might therefore be that
the death of Attila, rather than of Aetius, was
the deciding factor, and that Saxon raids and
general violence were a by-product of the
collapse of his empire, that brought chaos to his
previously subject Germanic tribes.
However this may be, we
notice that they seem to have singled out
Armorica for what seems to have been a fearsome
but temporary series of raids in 455 – but
no earlier or later. Can it be a
coincidence that this sudden outburst of Saxon
activity against a single Gallic province, with
the corresponding and equally sudden Gallic
interest in matters British, came at a period of
sudden and momentous political change, in which
both the Western Roman Empire and the Hunnish
Empire lost their heads, and both disintegrated?
There was no stability in the Roman West after
the deaths of Aetius and of Valentinianus III,
nor among the barbarians after that of Attila.
Either way, what this
sudden squall of raids, swiftly begun, swiftly
ended, strongly suggests, is that the Saxons
raided and murdered not haphazardly and
routinely, but at significant times and
responding to political conditions. As with
my analysis of their activities in the great
revolt, we are left with the impression not of an
uncontrolled and disorderly horde, but of a
political entity directed by an intelligence
(whether that of a single man or perhaps of some
sort of council of elders) with its own plans and
strategy, capable both of unleashing relentless
and frightful violence and of putting a dead stop
to it whenever it suited it. We do not hear
of Saxons in Gaul again until the 470s, when a
messenger comes hot-foot from Saintes to Sidonius
in Clermont-Ferrand, bringing the unwelcome and
surprising news of their return as the bishop was
half-way through a letter.
It may have been a
coincidence that Sidonius was writing that letter
to one Namatius, an admiral of the Visigothic
king Euric, by then unchallenged lord of
south-east Gaul; anyway, Sidonius – by then
a bishop and the most prominent Roman in Auvergne
– hurried to give Namatius a load of what he
regards as good advice, telling him all he
remembers of the Saxons – no doubt, from
those terrible days in 455 - with the prosy
self-confidence of an old man whose writing has
been admired all his life. (A particular
warning not to be lulled into complacency by bad
weather suggests that Sidonius knew of an
occasion when Saxon craft surprised a Roman fleet
or town by attacking during a storm.) There
is no doubt that the Saxons of whom the old
bishop knows so much are those settled in
Britain, since he speaks of them turning their
sails away from the continent. And they are not
nice people, these Saxons: their terror tactics
include sacrificing every tenth prisoner by
hanging or drowning. No wonder that English
historians so rarely quote these remarks of their
old bishop’s; they certainly put the
earliest English in what might be constructed as
a somewhat unattractive light (though not
unsuited to a nation that still makes heroes of
such loathsome pirates as Drake and the butcher
of Naples, Nelson). This makes it perhaps
easier to understand why the British, forced to
live near them and under their control, hated
them so much.
One tends to assume that, after
the disaster, Vitalinus lived in Gloucester,
behind newly-built city walls and as far as
practical from his terrible supposed vassals; but
there is another town that might have pertained
to him in the days of his decline - none other
than Amesbury. O did not place Vortigern's
great fortress - the sacred spot of British
royalty, which the Saxons could never take even
when they had taken all the rest of the country -
in any known Roman town, let alone in Vitalinus'
own Gloucester, but in a place called Dinas
Emrys, whose location in Eryri (Snowdon) is
patently late and adventitious. Emrys/Ambrosius
is said to have taken it from Vortigern -
commanding him to find a lesser royal fortress
elsewhere - and to have made it his own: that is
why it bears his name. We must see it as
the sacred centre of his royalty and the last
resort of the British monarchy. Amesbury is
English for Dinas Emrys, "Ambrosius'
burgh" or castle, and sits across the Avon
from an undeniable hillfort, Vespasian's Camp -
the exact kind of place on which the imagination
of a Celtic bard would seize as a sacred site and
fortress; and we have seen that the storytellers
who applied the interpretative legend of the
fortress and the dragons to the house of
Vortigern were steeped in Celtic ideology to a
point where their Christianity, if it existed at
all, must be regarded as no more than nominal.
Legend connects Amesbury directly to Ambrosius'
war of liberation against the Saxons and to his
re-establishment of British monarchy; it is, in
that sense, the sacred resort of British monarchy
- just as the "impregnable fortress" of
Dinas Emrys is said to be.
In turn, whatever Ambrosius'
relationship with the Wiltshire-Hampshire Avon,
it seems quite likely that his family had
originally nothing to do with it. If the
considerable wealth found in the Hoxne Hoard
marked as belonging to someone called Aurelius
pertains to Ambrosius' family, then they must have
hailed from what is today East Anglia. The
Mild King, says Gildas, was murdered in the
very same storm, that is, by the Saxons who
were destroying East Anglian Roman sites such as
Caistor-by-Norwich, and apparently taking
particular care to destroy every vestige of Roman
landowning patterns east of the Fens and north of
the Essex Stour, as if there was something there
that they had reason to want obliterated. Nothing
of this proves anything, but it does suggest that
there is at least a possibility that the Mild
King might have lived, after his dethronement,
cheek by jowl with the barbarians; and it is just
possible that this might have given him an
incentive to throw in his lot with the party that
wanted to force their expulsion. Contact
with them may not have endeared them to him; as a
devout Catholic, he would have loathed their
unreformed ways (they are unlikely to have
invented human sacrifice ex novo for the
benefit of Armorica in 455). Indeed, it
seems not unlikely that these same practices
motivated Vitalinus to refuse their leader the
rank of “consul or princeps”.
Now why would Vitalinus, after
being reduced to the condition of the Saxons'
puppet emperor, want to take his residence in
Amesbury? There is a sinister and fitting
parallel in modern history. When Hitler
captured France, he decided to govern it largely
through the puppetized remnants of its defeated
government; that government took its residence,
not in the ancient capital of Gaul, Lyon, nor in
a great city like Marseille or a historical town
such as Avignon, but in the insignificant spa
resort of Vichy. Likewise, when Mussolini,
overthrown by the legitimate Italian authorities,
was set up again by Nazi bayonets to be the
puppet ruler of however much of Italy they could
control, he took residence not in Rome, Florence,
Turin or Milan - not even in his own province of
Romagna - but in the otherwise virtually unknown
lakeland resort of Saló. The symbolic
value of this may or may not have been intended;
one may also suppose a certain unwillingness on
the part of the occupying authorities to allow
their puppets even direct contact with the real
power centres of the country, and, on the other
hand, a sort of shrinking on the part of the
puppets themselves from excessive closeness with
their masters, and from the power centres those
masters effectively controlled. In both
cases, we are speaking about the country's former
governments, put back into the semblance of power
and effectively controlled by a very ruthless
foreign army. The similarities are
striking, though I do not claim that they prove
anything.
Gildas sometimes describes events
for which he gives no authority and whose sources
we cannot trace even by inference, and that yet
must have happened in the way he describes them.
The most important is his description of the
period of Saxon power that followed the war.
He admits that "a certain amount of
time" passed between the shattering Saxon
victory and the gathering of the ciues to
Ambrosius; and this is a fact. Saxon
pre-eminence, whatever form it took, was
unchallenged long enough for the Gallic chronicle
of 452 to record as a fact that Britain had
fallen to the Saxons in 441/42; as late as ten
years after the fact, it still seemed quite
stable. The fact that Verulamium, one of
Britain's largest Roman cities, went on, if not
untroubled, at least with a strong continuity,
until about 470, shows that an
accommodation with the surviving Romans could be
reached.
We probably have the name of the
Saxon leader, the one who had originally been
refused the title of consul or princeps.
The Saxon Chronicle speaks of one Aelle of
Sussex, said to have come to Sussex with
"three keels", the same number known to
Gildas, and, after eight years, to have fought
the British at mearcredes burna, a
vaguely-named "river of the agreed
frontier" or "of debate". This
suggests that until then there had been peace
between the British and Aelle's Saxons in their
"agreed frontier"; eight years from
settlement to rebellion, of course, suit the
maximum of ten years I have suggested. Bede
calls him the first high king or breatwalda
of the English. If we accept the Saxon
Chronicle's dating, something like a century
stands between him and Bede's second breatwalda,
Ceaulin.
Aelle is all but unknown to later
legend, which hardly bothers to coordinate
Hengist and Horsa with him. No English dynasty
except the kings of Sussex claimed him for their
ancestor. This is particularly significant
because it has been shown that Anglo-Saxon
genealogies are very artificial, and therefore
could contain any ancestor the current king
wished. The Sussex claim is very
implausible. Fifth-century Saxon settlement
there, as in Wessex and Essex, is thin to
nonexistent, and the land was not conquered until
the later sixth century. The very name of
Saxons for the Teutons settled in those areas
shows that they lived originally among Britons,
since Saxon was (and remains) the British
word for the people who call themselves English.
The three "sons" attributed to Aelle by
the Chronicle were, even John Morris could see, the names of much later
tribal entities; one, Cissa, is the eponym of
Chichester, which stayed British long after
Aelle's time. It seems very likely that
these tribes affiliated themselves deliberately
to a great hero of the distant past; and it
follows that no other English dynasty was
claiming him when the learned of Sussex claimed
him for their own, wanting a prestigious
ancestor for this most obscure of Saxon kingdoms. If Aelle was not
claimed by anyone except the isolated, obscure
and late-settled Sussex, it means that there was
something about his memory that made him
usnsuitable for a fictional ancestry; and what
could it be - given that he was remembered as the
first English king of Britain - except that he
was known to have died without heirs?
Aelle is not a legendary figure.
His very pale and faded quality shows that his
claim to memory was not the colourful, lively
presence of a legend. He remained in
English minds as a great figure in the earliest
days of Saxon settlement, not the first in a
regular succession of English high kings of
Britain so much as an illustrious early
precedent, establishing an English claim to high
kingship over the island that must already by
Ceaulin's time have been in the realm of ancient
things. Conversely, while Ceaulin cannot be
said to have ruled anything like all of Britain
or even England, he was probably the first
English leader in a century to successfully raise
the standard of English revolt against the
British (in about 560-70) and begin their
complete overthrow; he might be said, in that
sense, to replicate the achievement of whoever
led the first English/Saxon revolt, establishing
the Teuton settlers as a legitimate kingdom.
Later, the name Aelle was given to, or taken by,
a very early member of the dynasty of Deira
(south Northumbria), a kingdom established in the
late 500s; which suggests that it was attractive
to English would-be founders of kingdoms. In
short, there is no reason not to think that Aelle
was a historical figure, and the leader of the
Saxon revolt.
Whatever the state of Saxon
control over the Britanniae, they cannot have
ever managed untroubled authority. Sidonius’
panegyric suggests a Roman country threatened,
rather than occupied, by Picts, Scots and Saxons;
Gildas tells us that isolated groups managed to
keep some sort of independence or at least
autonomy, resorting to hill fortresses, forests
and fortified sea promontories: alii montanis
collibus, minacis, praeruptis, uallatis et
densissimis saltibus marinisque rupibus... in
patria, licet trepide, perstabant. We
should expect Saxon control to be weakest in the
furthest regions, where dense forests, rocky
hills and mountains, and rugged promontories,
were common; and where Roman civilization was
thinnest. Indeed, it seems likely that, by
weakening the British government to the point of
puppetization, the Saxon may have encouraged
already independent-minded northern caterans of
Coroticus' kind to further stretch their freedom
of action, especially if, as Sidonius seems to
suggest, Saxon success had emboldened Picts and
Scots to try it on in some parts of the country
at least. To defend themselves, the
Northerners must have taken action even more
independently than usual.
A local power of Coroticus' kind
cannot have been greatly affected by events in
the distant south of the island, and may have
accepted Saxon power far more in theory than in
practice - if at all; and any Saxons among such
tribes would find themselves not only very
distant - even by their favourite sea routes -
from their home base on England's east coast, but
among an unfamiliar people and culture, speaking
an unfamiliar language and acting and associating
in unfamiliar ways. Living in the Romanized
parts of the island, they must have been most
familiar with Roman talk and Roman habits. In
the cold and distant highlands, they would hardly
be more at home than Cumberland's English
soldiers among the clansmen. From the
beginning, the North, and perhaps the rocky West
- Lancashire, Wales, Devon-Cornwall - must have
been almost beyond Saxon grasp.
It is from this new political
landscape, of scattered local powers and
terrifying yet ineffective Saxon might, that the
rebellion matures. The precision of Gildas'
language leads us to notice that, when he speaks
of those who perstabant, remained, he
makes no mention of actual resistance, though he
said that they stood licet trepide,
"however fearfully"; this suggests a
certain amount of accommodation, however unstable
and two-faced on both sides, between surviving
British powers and conquerors. But the
Saxons felt secure: the "most cruel robbers
then returned home". The period that
followed must have been one of uneasy peace, with
Saxon dicio resented or not even
recognized by outlying British powers - all those
hill-forts, forests fastnesses and promontories -
and eventually resulting in war.
As Gildas describes it with
typical accuracy, the process has two stages: Roborante
Deo reliquiae, quibus confugiunt undique de
diuersis locis miserrimi ciues. First, Roborante
Deo reliquiae, "as God was strengthening
the remnants"; as these reliquiae are
contrasted with the ciues, they clearly
are the "remains" of the upper class,
still in control of various regions or estates.
Remember Gildas' usage, in which Britannia is to
be identified, not with the whole citizenship,
but with the upper classes alone: the reliquiae
of Britain are the reliquiae of its
aristocracy. Then, quibus confugiunt
undique de diuersis locis miserrimi ciues, to
whom most miserable fellow-countrymen fled for
refuge from every place; that
is, once they were aware that these reliquiae
were still independent and "being
strengthened by God", that is growing,
rather than diminishing, in power, ordinary
Britons started fleeing to them. And the clash
came, duce Ambrosio Aureliano uiro modesto,
the leader being the modest hero, Ambrosius
Aurelianus. The first effect was a rush of
victory: quis uictoria Domino annuente cessit,
to them Victory yelded, the Lord assenting
thereto. Suddenly the Saxons
found themselves faced with a large and angry
enemy, not broken up into many unorganized little
local powers, but with one coordinating centre
and a leader. The result was an overthrow
so thunderous that its noise rang as far as
Ravenna.
We next hear of Britain from
Gaulish sources in connection with the war of the
Loire (468). In an important passage, Gregory of
Tours mentions British forces in Bourges about
468. Unfortunately this part of the History
of the Franks (II.18) is unfinished, or else
– as has been suggested – a fragment of
an annal edited into his work; but what we have
is clear enough. He describes a war
involving the military adventurer Odovacar, the
Visigoths, and two Romano-Gaulish potentates,
Syagrius and Count Paul (whose late-Roman title
suggests a high functionary at an imperial
court), as well as the Franks of Childeric
(Clovis' father). If we take the passage to
be in chronological order, it reads something
like this: 1) Childeric fights a battle at
Orléans. No victory is mentioned. 2)
In the next sentence we hear that "Odovacer
penetrated as far as Angers". This
must mean that Odovacar was the victor at
Orleans: he pushed Childeric back and drove hard
for the mouth of the Loire. Odovacar’s
soldiers are described as Saxons. 3) A
pestilence kills many people, and Aegidius, the
chief Romano-Gaulish potentate, dies. (As
plagues do not happen or end overnight, this must
be seen as going on all the time while armies
rage around the Loire.) Aegidius' son
Syagrius takes over. 4) British troops are
occupying Bourges; the Visigoths, in the wake of
Odovacer (which makes the British allies of
Aegidius), drive them out and defeat them heavily
at Bourg-de-Deols. The geography shows that
the British were holding the Cher valley to cover
the strategic Loire bend, but that, by driving
for the mouth of the Loire, Odovacar had isolated
them. 5) A mixed army with a Frankish
contingent led by Childeric drives back the
Visigoths under Count Paul; but 6) Odovacar takes
Angers, his strategic target. 7) The next
day, Count Paul and his Frankish allies swoop on
Odovacar. 8) Count Paul is killed in
battle, but the Romano-Gaulish and Franks are
victorious; the future king of Italy is driven
back, never to return. 9) Saxon contingents
left on Loire island strongholds are then mopped
up by Franks and Romano-Gauls. 10) Odovacar
has meanwhile switched allies, using the Franks
to smash an Alamannic invasion of Italy. (This
proves this really is the Odovacar, not a
homonym.)
The wording suggests a large
alliance involving Visigoths and Saxons to
conquer the whole course of the Loire; unless
indeed the fact that the Visigoths are not
actually mentioned until after the battle of
Orleans should suggest that they
opportunistically joined Odovacar's campaign
afterwards. But the refined international
diplomacy to which the new Germanic kings of the
Mediterranean had quickly become used suggests
that such concerted action was hardly beyond
their abilities.
By the same token, the British
presence in Bourbon is not in the nature of a
raid, but of a major and probably permanent
operation. The Visigoths only destroy them
after Odovacar has taken Orleans and cut them
off, and are said in turn to carry much booty
when Count Paul beats them. What is more (if,
of course, I'm right) the fact that they only
seized Bourges from the British after Odovacar
had cut them off suggests that until his
intrusion, the Romano-Gaulish-British-Frankish
group was too strong for them. Bourges, a
great fortress Caesar found necessary to subdue,
covers the Loire bend and the Seine, the core of
Aegidius' and Syagrius' Romano-Gaulish dominion;
the fact that British troops fought there proves
they had a strategic interest in protecting the
Romano-Gaulish lands from the Visigoths.
The events of this war as it
concerns Britain are not entirely clear, since
two other sources – Jordanes and Sidonius
Apollinaris – contradict each other flatly.
According to Jordanes, bishop of Ravenna and
writer of a history of the Gothic peoples,
Anthemius, beleaguered Emperor of the West, Brittonum
solacia postulauit[23], "begged the help
of the British" to rescue Gaul from Odoacer
and the Visigoths, both Arian. His appeal
was not vain: the British were able to send no
less than 12,000 men "across the
ocean", under the command of one Rigothamus.
Sidonius, however, tells us that, even before the
Visigoth Euric actually began hostilities, the
British were already “on the Loire” (super
Ligerim) and implies that they were there to
buttress an imperial and Catholic order
threatened principally by Burgundians and
Visigoths (Odovacar was clearly an opportunistic
interloper).
Insufficient attention has been
paid to this testimony of Sidonius’. It
is absolutely contemporary, coming from a letter
in which he describes his attempts to save his
former friend Arvandus, Prefect of the Gauls, who
had been caught red-handed encouraging Euric to,
(1) refuse recognition to Anthemius, a
“Greek emperor” who, truth to tell, had
been imposed by Constantinople; and (2)
“make war against the British placed on the
Loire”; because, (3), the “law of
nations” had decreed that Gaul should be
partitioned between Burgundians and Visigoths.
In other words, the purely diplomatic refusal to
recognize Anthemius is to go together with an
effective and bloody war against the British,
whose forces are already on the Loire, and who
are the main military obstacle – no fear of
military action from Italy is felt – to the
division of Roman Gaul between Visigoths and
Burgundians. The British had occupied the
Loire before Euric ever went to war; and this
agrees with the conclusions I had drawn from the
Gregory passage, “a major and probably
permanent operation”. Jordanes is
wrong.
On the other hand, there is no
need to reject his testimony altogether. He
says two things: one, that Anthemius appealed to
the British; two, that they came from the ocean
in ships. If Jordanes had by any chance
misunderstood a notice that the British had come
from the ocean in ships before Anthemius
appealed to them, the sequence of events would be
perfectly clear. There had been British
soldiers in Gaul, reinforcing the Romano-Gaulish
territories still defying Visigothic expansion.
The army of Rigothamus has sometimes been
understood as an army of exiles, driven out by
the 442 war and settled in Armorica; but even if
such an army was still battle-ready 26 years
later - and what had they been doing in the
meanwhile? - Jordanes tells us very clearly that
the British "came from the ocean in
ships", ueniens... oceano ex nauibus.
Can "came from the ocean" possibly mean
sailing from Brittany... to the Loire? (In
Biturigas ciuitatem - to the region of
Bourges.) And with Roman roads still in
place (the disasters of the fifth century are not
understood unless we visualize the barbarian
hordes merrily marching and plundering along
beautiful, stout Roman roads), would such an
expensive sailing even be necessary? Of
course not; and of course not.
What is more, Jordanes knows
nothing of exiles in Armorica. There is a
long and ferocious battle, as certified by
Gregory; the Visigoths win, and the remnants of
Rigothamus' army withdraw... into the land of the
Burgundi, who were then Roman allies. We
have already seen that Jordanes said in the
clearest possible terms that he used only written
sources - nos enim potius lectionis credimus
quam fabulis anilis consentimus; therefore he
must have had a written source for this, the more
so since the note is nothing to do with Jordanes'
main theme, adds nothing to his narrative, leads
to no further development, and is in effect
completely unnecessary.
The British exiles in Burgundy are
never mentioned again; but a few years after the
fact a group that sounds very much like them
turns up in a letter of Sidonius Apollinaris to
that other famous British exile, Faustus of Riez.
The latter had apparently written a book for
their edification and sent it to them via a
British monk and bishop, Riochatus, whom
Sidonius, who had a good opinion of him (ille
uenerabilis - "that venerable
man"), describes as "twice an exile in
this world" - by which he almost certainly
means once as a monk in orders, and once as a
Briton far from home. There is no
indication that this community, deserving the
pastoral attention of Faustus and of what sounds
like their own exiled British bishop, was
anything but the one known to Jordanes. An
exiled community with its own bishop must have
been quite large. We are very far from
Armorica: Sidonius lived in Clermont-Ferrand, and
Faustus in the mountains of Provence, near Italy.
Between 452 and 468, something
cataclysmic had happened. In 452, a Gallic
neighbour regarded Britain as stably in
dicionem Saxonum; by 468, the Christian power
in the island was strong enough to hold part of
Gaul as well as Britain, and for word of it to
have reached Anthemius in distant Ravenna. Jordanes
and Gregory both show that the wars of the
British on the Loire were no common event; 12,000
men and a bishop do not argue a small commitment;
even after they had been thoroughly routed, there
still were enough of them to form a distinct
community among the Burgundians.
This cataclysmic event can only
have been the revolt of Ambrosius. The
death of his parents, and the sack and
destruction of his estate, must have at first
destroyed what standing he had. But some
time after 1 January 456, the process described
by Gildas began to take place - the strengthening
of the reliquiae, the flight of the ciues
to Saxon-free areas. That it took something
like twenty or twenty-five years for the Mild
King's son to be accepted as national war-leader
may tell us something of the detestation that his
father's memory still drew; and the killing of
Vitalinus/Vortigern may have been not only an act
of family revenge, but the disposal of a rival
whose very presence prevented the gathering of
British forces. Geoffrey places the killing
as the first of Ambrosius' deeds, and the lost Cath
Gwaloph - if it referred to the same events -
placed it in the time of Vitalinus' own reign.
The sudden apparition of Celtic
names such as Rigothamus and Rigocatus strongly
suggests that the armed forces of this new
Christian power were of Celtic origin, and after
all we have seen, I do not think we need hesitate
in guessing at a Northern origin for them. In
point of fact, a fascinating complexs of
linguistic evidence shows that there are reasons
to suggest that Ambrosius or his supporters had
aimed at least some of their propaganda to the
northern tribes, aiming it against Vitalinus
rather than the Saxons; and that the result was a
significant change in political vocabulary.
The Vortigernid-Pascentiad
storytellers attributed to Vortigern's legendary
son a name which is not a personal name but a
title: Vortimer, Vortamorix. Vortamorix,
we remember, is the figure who parallels the Iris
hero Art mac Conn, through whom passes the
legitimacy of the dynasty; Vortamorix must
have the same function, and indeed he shows the
imperial nature of a national and ever victorious
leader. I argued that O, the earliest
version of his story, had been written down in
Latin in the sixth century (by someone whose
intellectual attainments were comparable to
Gildas’), but that it had been attached to
“Vortigern” from the store of
interpretative stories of a class of Celtic
storytellers bound to ancient traditions.
I have argued that O makes a
deliberate effort to confiscate the theme of the
great national revolt from Ambrosius, ascribing
his great deeds and story features to Vortimer.
Not only is he responsible for the revolt against
the Saxons, but he is ascribed the rebuilding of
churches, and, like Ambrosius, dies of being
poisoned by an evil Saxon at court (Ronwein in
his case, Eopa in that of Ambrosius). And
his name represents a claim to the imperial
title. Vortamo-Rix means
"highest king"; vortamo being
the superlative of the prefix vor, and rix
- as it still is in Taliesin, ri, plural rieu
- the word for every kind of king, both teyrn
and gwledig. What this word means
is, quite simply, king of kings: Emperor. The
Vortigernids of the sixth century saw themselves
as the children not only of the Vor-tigernos,
the over-successful kinglet, but of the Vortamo-Rix,
the king above all kings: these are not personal
names, but titles implying political claims.
The meaning of the name had
already been forgotten by the time it passed into
Welsh, since the final rix fell apart into
a meaningless closing sound -yr (Gwerthevyr,
Vortimer). Its significance
is therefore archaic; and when we find it
attached to the entirely legendary hero on whom
the Vortigernids had fastened all their belief in
themselves as the natural leaders of Britain, we
are also entitled to suggest that his so-called
name Vortamorix, “Highestking”,
is part of it. This title represented the
self-image entertained in the court of Pascent's'
descendants, propagated by their storytellers and
bards, and which certainly had some relevance to
their practical political activity.
That historical Wales had
apparently forgotten the meaning of both Vertigernos
and Vortamo-Rix is interesting in itself.
In one of the earliest known Welsh poems, Geraint
Filius Erbin, the title of king of kings is
Welshified as Ameraudur (applied to
Arthur, with the added force of an internal rhyme
Arthur... ameraudur). That is, by
then the word Imperator had taken the
semantic space of Vortamo-rix even in the
Celtic speech. This explains why its native
equivalent was distorted into the uncomprehending
Gwerthevyr: already by the time that Geraint
filius Erbin was written, it had been
superseded by the more prestigious Latin word.
But there is evidence that Imperator
entered the Celtic speech even before the
phonetic changes that turned it into Welsh, and that ameraudur
represents a re-entry at a later stage (in the
same way that, in Italian and French, the Latin causa
became, by natural phonetic evolution, cosa/chose,
but was then re-introduced in its two technical
meanings, "cause" [philosophical] and
"lawsuit" [legal], to give modern
Italian and French causa/cause).
Triadic tradition and hagiographic
legend know one Emyr Llydaw. Emyr,
according to Rachel Bromwich, derives from Imperator,
and the name therefore gives Imperator,
(king) of Brittany (Llydaw). This
has gone through the same sound-change that
turned Ambrosius into Emrys, and
indeed there are a few points to suggest that the
two are closely related. Ambrosius came to
Britain from Brittany, and we have seen that some
manuscripts of Nennius, including the very early
"Irish Nennius", call him Regem
Francorum et Brittonum Aremoricorum,
"King of the Franks and of the Britons of
Armorica". This is a mad claim,
anachronistic twice over, since by Ambrosius'
time the Franks had not yet conquered Gaul, much
less tried it on with the Britons of Armorica;
and the British themselves, in my view, had not
yet settled in Armorica in numbers. However,
it shows that, centuries before Geoffrey,
Ambrosius was strongly connected with Armorica.
The consonance between Emrys and Emyr
suggests a connection, Welsh being a language of
significant consonances. It also reminds us
that the creator of the legend of the House of
Constantine knew that Ambrosius had an older
brother, though he did not know his name.
Now if the Ambrosiads carried on
their pretension to the Romano-British imperial
throne in their Armorican exile, then it would be
the heir - the older brother - who, after the
Mild King's death at Saxon hands, would be
regarded as Imperator in Letavia - which
is at least assonant with Emyr Llydaw.
Also, there is something about the faded quality
and evidently isolated nature of this
impressive-sounding personage, who turns up in a
few notable places but of whom we know nothing,
that reminds us of the fading from memory of the
Ambrosiad house (except for Ambrosius himself) to
the point where, already by the 630s, the author
of N had no idea whatever of their actual
pedigree. The author of N was a
contemporary of St.Beuno, the reorganizer of the
North Welsh church, and St.Beuno's new structure
seems to have been imposed over a fifth-century
one set up by a wave of churchmen two of whom,
Derfel and Cadfan, were said to be grandchildren
of Emyr Llydaw. This reminds us of
Ambrosius' reorganization of the British church
at his great parliament, and considering that the
hagiography itself does not seem to show any
knowledge of Brenhin Emrys, it is at least
significant that these ecclesiastics are
associated with the fifth century and with
Brittany: we seem to see, here, a fragment of the
fifth-century Ambrosian re-establishment of
Romano-British institutions, with its context
forgotten, preserved in amber at the edges of a
later structure.
The important point, however, is
that Imperator became not Ameraudur,
but Emyr; that is, that it entered Celtic
speech ahead of the sound-changes that turned Old
Celtic into Welsh. This puts it closer in
time to Ambrosius' revolt, and, more to the
point, before the sound-change that lost at once
the form and the point of Vortamo-Rix
(and, by the way, it agrees with the
fifth-century dating of Cadfan's group of church
founders).
What we find, therefore, is an
evident native imperial title ("the highest,
vortamo, in the whole class of
kings") displaced to the point where its
sound is changed in a way that obliterates its
meaning; except in the interpretative legends of
a dispossessed dynasty, where it becomes the name
of the wholly legendary hero who represents their
enduring imperial memory/claim. We remember
that the Vortigernid author of N, creator of the
noble Archbishop Guithelinus, still remembered,
in the 630s, that Vortigern’s real name had
been Gwythelyn, if not Vitalinus;
while the rest of Britain and Brittany, including
the Vortigern cult in Quimperlé, had forgotten
any name but Vortigern. In other
words, the clinging to names with ideological
meanings - and the rejection of competing names
with competing ideological meanings - was a
common instrument of ideological warfare, well
understood by Vortigernid circles. Vortigernid-Pascentiad
circles held on to the word Vortamo-rix
and to its meaning, to the point where
sixth-century Pascentiads invested it with the
narrative and emotional content of their claim to
the throne - while we find the Latin term, Emyr,
Imperator, entering the language, and
probably dominating it.
Let us not forget that the concept
of Emperor or king of kings, of world-governor,
was not a theoretical or fabulous one to
contemporary Romans and Celts: it embodied the
reality of the only State of their common
historical background and their natural idea of
government. Even if we assume that no
effective imperial government was in place in
their time, political ideas change too slowly for
this to have become obsolete.
Vortamo-rix is not the only
word that receives a personality and a legend in
support of dynastic claims: Emyr, Imperator,
is also applied to a definite, possibly legendary
figure who is said to rule the very region from which the hero
Ambrosius, a second son, came to free Britain -
and incidentally to kill the father of the Vortamo-Rix.
It is not hard to see why both the
title of Vortamo-Rix and that of Emyr
Llydaw (Imperator Letaviae) ended up
turning into individual heroes. The title
of supreme sovereign, emperor, king of kings, shah-in-shah,
cakravartin, is by nature unique and
indivisible; and therefore it lends itself to
being individualized to the point of
identification. In most of our history, the
identification has been from real individuals -
Caesar, Augustus, Charles the Great (from whom
comes the Lithuanian for "King", Karalius)
- to rank, but there is no reason why the
opposite should not be the case; and in a system
in which even the large class of kinglets or teyrnedd
had their individualization in Beli son of
Manogan, to individualize the concept of the
individual, unique rank of emperor would not even
be a long step.
We also find that the father of
the Vortamo-Rix is given another Old
Celtic name, which - reversing the linguistic
royal progress of the conquering word Imperator
from Latin into Old Celtic - is imported into the
Latin accounts of his life and death, and thence
into Welsh, Old English and the Old French of the
Arthurian romances, obliterating his actual Latin
name altogether. Both elements of this
nickname modify those of the Vortamo-Rix
in a reductive sense, vor reducing the
prefix from the superlative to the standard
grade, and tigernos reducing his royalty
to its lowest grade. If, therefore, we
assume that Vortamo-Rix was the British
Celtic word for the king of kings, then Vor-tigernos
must be a caricature of the title. And if
we assume that the still-reigning emperor
Vitalinus was in fact known by this title among
his Celtic subjects in the North, then this means
that sticking him with the insult vor-tigernos
must have been part of the propaganda of a rival
party. It implies the racist views of the
northern tribes’ own legends, A, which we
have seen had a long prehistory, and which stated
that Britain was a land for Britons to live in,
but for Romans to rule. It follows that the
proper sovereign is Imperator, not Vortamo-rix;
indeed, there can be no Vortamo-rix, but
only a Ver-tigernos, because only
under-kings, tigerni, would use Celtic
rather than Latin. The Vertigernos,
to his enemies, was the sort of person to be
described not in Latin but in Celtic.
The insulting nickname had early
and universal success. Gildas latinized it
as superbus tyrannus, and it crossed the
sea to establish itself in the earliest layers of
Irish ecclesiastical legend as a typical
"British" name (though it is also in
Ireland that we find an ogham featuring a
"son of Vitalinus"). I think that
we have to see Vortigern as established in
Gildasian culture from the beginning - and by
"beginning", I mean a period so early
that the language it developed had become
formulaic by Gildas' time, and he could speak of
the superbus tyrannus without fear of
being misunderstood.
To sum up: the extreme,
pre-Gildasian antiquity of the ideas embodied in Vortamo-Rix
and Vor-tigernos is shown not only by
Gildas' use of one of them as a formula, but also
by their form. They are not proto-Welsh,
but Old Celtic, and evolution of one of them into
Welsh modified it right out of any recognizable
meaning. Linguistically, therefore, the
Ambrosian claim seems to impinge on Old Celtic by
introducing the Latin word Imperator to
signify true monarchy. This implies that
true monarchy can only be expressed by a Latin
word; and reducing a vortamo-rix to a ver-tigernos
seems to imply that Roman titles carry a natural
supremacy over British, the latter amounting to
no more than teyrnedd, under-kings.
Now, the fact that the
paradigmatic wearer of the title, "the"
Imperator par excellence, is The
Emperor in Letavia, would be hard to explain
- Armorica is not exactly closely identified with
mighty imperial sovereigns or with the height of
Roman glory - were it not that legend closely
associated Ambrosius with it from a very early
period (while Vitalinus/Vortigern had nothing to
do with it); and this means that, even if we
refuse to identify the character called Emyr
with a suppositious older brother of his, it
inevitably leads the concept embodied in the name
Emyr back to the house of the Mild King
and Emrys Gwledig[28]. I think it would
be harder to suggest a separate explanation for
these various data, than to say that they come
together to explain each other.
That the original process took
place in Old Celtic - already a literary rather
than a spoken language by the time Ambrosius
started his war - shows that this propaganda was
addressed not to popular strata, but, as you
might expect, to the influential, opinion-forming
tribal upper classes, with particular reference
to bards and storytellers. It clearly
depends on the racist ideology I explored in
Gildas: hence Vitalinus (of whom we have no
reason to believe that he was less Roman than his
rival) is attacked - slandered, if you accept the
racist premise - as a jumped-up British teyrn.
It is possible that even the use of the
preposition vor- before tigernos
was sarcastic, like saying "the High
Prole" or "the Exalted Hoi
Polloi". The Celtic mind was naturally
hierarchical, and would find nothing strange
about one nation ranking higher than another; and
we strongly suspect, as we have seen in analyzing
A, that all or most of the royal houses of the
border tribes were of Roman descent and had made
this part of their ideology. The partisans
of Ambrosius worked on established and basic
attitudes, as indeed did Gildas a century later.
We may also suggest that their
insistence on the Latin title had a double edge:
while it called on established, Celtic North
British race and caste attitudes, it also
expressed that desire to re-establish a properly
Roman order and law. This is what we found
in the British leaders met by Sidonius
Apollinaris, King Rigothamus and Bishop
Rigocatus. Both have Celtic names and Roman
manners and concerns. Rigotamus’ name
means "most royal", but he has enough
Roman education and manners to deserve the
respect of such a very Roman and very learned man
as Sidonius; Rigocatus (“king of
battle”) is “that venerable man”,
a monk-bishop for whose character and mission
Sidonius has nothing but good to say. And
we think of the Ambrosius of Geoffrey 8.9,
restoring ancient laws and ruling (like the
national leadership of Britain before the revolt,
according to E.A. Thompson's penetrating analysis
of Constantius) from London, the city called
Augusta.
The further back we go, the more
certain we can be that British culture worked in
Latin, and that Celtic - whether Old Celtic or
demotic proto-Welsh - was restricted, as a
language of government and culture, to the
northern tribes. What I am suggesting,
then, is that the propaganda of Ambrosius had two
prongs: a Latin one, found in the Gildasian vir
modestus, the Galfridian hero who "was
moderate in all things"; and an over-Wall
Celtic one, which mocked the native imperial
title of Vitalinus - Vortamo-Rix - by
reducing it to Vor-Tigernos. I think
that the insult *vertigernos was created
among or for the northern tribes from which so
much of Gildasian culture comes, as a
native-language, one-word explanation of
Ambrosius' revolt. To say that Vitalinus
was not a supreme king or emperor, but merely a vertigernos,
an upper kinglet, would explain in one word the
reason why Ambrosius, of the true imperial blood,
was right to kill him.
The stress, that is, is not even
on the Saxons: it is that the illegitimacy of a
jumped-up lesser lord claiming the crown
justifies killing him. This is actually the
emphasis we find in the earliest layer of
material, that of O, N1, and to some extent
Gildas; and while the Saxons grew in importance
as time went on, the concern with
Vitalinus/Vortigern's legitimacy never went away.
It follows that anyone who took a loyal view of
things in the wake of Ambrosius' victories would
call the usurper Vortigern - the Vortigern
- just as any good law-abiding Briton, in the
wake of that inglorious usurpation known as the
Glorious Revolution, would refer to the rightful
kings as the Old Pretender and the Young
Pretender. There is an etiquette in the use
of language to justify revolutions or usurpations.
Certainly the tribes went to war
for Ambrosius. By 468, he or a successor
had no less than 12,000 men to spare for the
defence of Gaul. Where else, except in the
north, could Britain have found so many Catholic
swordsmen (part of the issue of the war of the
Loire was the heresy of the Visigoths) ready to
go fighting abroad on a long-term, maybe
permanent basis? Rigothamus' soldiers were
Catholic and could be relied upon to be willing
to fight Germanic barbarians (though the
Visigoths won their battle, they seem to have had
a devil of a time doing so); they were also, as
we will see, undisciplined and disrespectful or
ignorant of Roman law. With the possible
exception of Patrician Ireland, where tribes may
have by then been converted in numbers, there is
no other area in Britain or the rest of the
empire that can be imagined as being able to
spare so much manpower in exchange for Roman gold
and Catholic glory.
This seems to me the commonsense
explanation of the written evidence: Gallic
chronicle, Jordanes, St.Gregory of Tours,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, and St.Gildas. We
have had to reconsider a couple of items -
Zosimus 6.5 and the Letter to Agitius -
but on the whole, written evidence has proved out
best friend. Much unnecessary fuss is
caused by admitting unnecessary hypotheses, such
as the existence of a major British colony in
Armorica at too early a date, or by not tying
together the various documents and considering
each in isolation. But the keystone of this
interpretation is Gildas. However brief and
impressionistic, his description is precise.
He admits that the Saxons "went back
home" after satisfying their fury; that is,
they put an end to the war on terms agreeable to
themselves, and withdrew to areas of the island
so thoroughly settled as to be regarded as their
home. He admits that it was "some
time" before the remnants of the British
body politic gathered around Ambrosius. Therefore,
for that period the Saxons exerted some sort of
supreme power over the former Roman Britain.
The dates supplied by the Gaulish Chronicler and
by Jordanes complete the picture, and
incidentally usefully inform us of what time
frame Gildas meant by tempore... interueniente
aliquanto, "some time coming
between": he meant something like twenty or
more years, 442 to some time between 456 and 468.
(We remember that he said that the Saxons had
lived in peace with the British multo tempore,
for much time, as long as their annona
was paid. That cannot have been more than
ten years.)
These things are admitted, in
spite of their distasteful nature, because they
form the background to the eventual triumph of
Ambrosius; but they also correspond with the few
data registered elsewhere, and shed light on
them. Gildas, therefore, had a fairly
precise narrative - though not chronological -
idea of events between 441 and 468; an idea whose
precision cannot be the result of oral tradition,
but must depend on written accounts, since they
took place upwards of fifty years before he was
born. As we have already seen that Gildas
had written evidence for every major event in
Britain between independence and the beginning of
the Saxon war, there is nothing particularly
surprising about this.
(A suggestion. Is there any reason
not to think that the dispatch and loss of
Rigothamus and 12,000 good men to the Continent
may have prolonged or renewed the war in Britain?
There is something about it of the overconfidence
of unexpected, total success. Ambrosius, or his
successors, feeling sure of Britain, imagined
that he/they could turn the tide in Gaul as well.
Ambrosius, who had grown up in exile in Armorica,
might have had a direct interest, or at least a
sentimental concern, in saving northern Gaul from
the barbarians. This cannot be proven, but it is
interesting that the Visigothic invasion was,
according to Gregory and the Pseudo-Fredegarius,
supported by a seaborne Saxon army who seized the
islets at the mouth of the Loire and, even after
the defeat of Odoacer and the Visigoths, needed
much more fighting to be dislodged. A fleet of
Saxons might have come from Britain to
help the Visigoths on the principle that my
enemy's enemy is my friend. Even if war had not
already been renewed, it seems quite possible
that the disaster of Bourg-de-Deols might have
weakened the British and fatally encouraged the
Saxons, leading to fresh hostilities at home.
Anthemius was under the impression that the
British had won decisively enough to be able to
come to the rescue of beleaguered Gaul; and yet
we hear that the next half-century is a time of
war and constant danger, in which, according to
Gildas, the British were defeated more than once
- ex eo tempore, nunc ciues, nunc
hostes uincebant; "from that
time on, now the British won, now the enemy".
What had stopped that first British victory from
being as decisive and final as Anthemius
believed?).
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
