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Chapter 8.1:
Preliminary Considerations
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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As our research went on, we have
become increasingly aware of the amount of
literate tradition behind all our authors. Except
perhaps for St.Patrick, they all come with their
own vast and largely lost literary history.
Gildas, Nennius and Geoffrey all imply
bookshelves of earlier written works, read,
absorbed, reworked and forgotten; and the past
even of minor sources such as Muirchu is not much
less diverse and interesting. To analyze their
sources and their individual methods of treatment
is of overwhelming importance; but nothing can be
done until those sources have been identified,
sorted and described, as far as the material
allows.
We have done so - I hope with some
success - with Gildas, Muirchu and Geoffrey, but
not yet with Nennius, whose work, much more than
the others, is clearly a weave of quotations from
otherwise lost written works. Now,
comparison reveals an interesting pattern. Nennius
has clearly read Gildas, and makes infelicitous
attempts to imitate what he regards as
distinguished Gildasian usages - trans
Tithicam vallem for "across the
sea", cyulae for
"warships"; but he never once excerpts
Gildas. He seems to have read L, making use
of his famous solecism magna discrimina;
but nothing in his episodic description of the
Saxon wars can be led back to such a document.
He has read Bede, but hardly used him: his
account of Roman Britain is drawn from earlier
sources, both continental and Welsh. He must have read
the Discordia Guitolini et Ambrosii, id est
Guoloppum; but he tells us nothing whatsoever
about it, though he regards it as so important
that he places his single mention of it in his
summary of the chronology of the world since
creation.
Take, besides, the Galfridian
source N, clearly another major piece of work.
We have seen reason to suggest that it was
written in the second quarter of the seventh
century, two full centuries before Nennius; like
Nennius, its author was a savant of Vortigernid
inclinations - though probably Catellid rather
than Pascentiad - working in the shadow of
Gwynedd power; it originated in the same
geographical area, and, unlike Gildas and some
items that Nennius did use - O, the Genealogy of
ch.17 - was not separated from
his time by the catastrophe of the rise of
England. Its author moved in an already
Welsh geography, between an already formed Powys
and Gwynedd. In short, if there is a work
Nennius is a priori likely to have read,
it is this one. And yet we have to wait for
Geoffrey. And finally, there is another,
equally significant kind of omission: there is
not a single note on the history of any of the
British kingdoms then existing, from Strathclyde
to Brittany; no legends, battles, not even
pedigrees. When you think how immensely
important - how truly fundamental - genealogy was
to the Welsh, this is an oversight of gigantic
proportions.
Bede, Gildas, L, Discordia,
N, Welsh genealogies: all prominent and
significant items, most of them fundamental to
Welsh culture, some of them so important that
they survived to our day. We are certain,
for various different reasons, that Nennius must
have known them all. He did not use any.
And what materials he did use is
equally significant. He has a marked
preference for out-of-the-way material and
for Vortigernid-Pascentiad material. The
only Welsh pedigree he does deliver is the
Pascentiad one; almost the only really extensive,
continuous strands of material in his work - as
opposed to summaries, notes and brief quotations
- are the Vortigernid-Pascentiad *Gesta
Germani and his visibly pro-Vortigernid
version of O, which concludes with Pascent being
granted land by Ambrosius. (Nennius did not
make up the *Gesta Germani; the fact that
its author clearly had not read Bede, while
Nennius just as clearly had, speaks for itself.
That he tried to edit it into other Vortigern
legends - not quite successfully - also argues
that he found it already made and regarded it as
authoritative.) Other than that, his
sources are fragmentary (the bizarrely confused
summary of A in ch.30), obscure (the Genealogy of
ch.17, of which Nennius himself did not know what
to make), foreign (the pedigrees of English
kings; the Kentish legend of Hengist; the Irish
account of the Conquests of Ireland, and of
St.Patrick; the Roman-originated notice that only
two Emperors, Septimius Severus and Constantius
Chlorus, died in Britain) or North British (the
"northern memoranda").
Whenever Nennius can, he points
out the connection with accounts and personages
known to his readers. He mentions that the
original name of his Patrick was Maun;
that the Aelfred son of Ealric of
the house of Northumbria is the same as Aedlferd
Fflessaur; that the servant promoted by
St.Germanus is none other than Cadell
Ddyrnllug; that the distribution of looted
goods back to the kings of the British is the
same episode as they know as Atbret Iudaeu.
In fact, he is too eager to connect his obscure
or foreign sources with known Welsh accounts, and
sometimes he makes big mistakes: as Dumville
pointed out, he identifies the Englishman Aeta
son of Leodwald with the Welsh hero Eata
Glynmawr - wrong both in race and, by several
decades, in time. But what this tells us is
that Nennius saw his business as clarifying these
foreign or fragmentary accounts by connecting
them with items known to his public; which is why
he so often quotes a Welsh, rather than Latin,
name for an event - he is using the words his
listeners would use for it in ordinary speech.
Even when Nennius brings in an
extensive and indubitably Welsh account, such as
the *Gesta Germani, it is clear from his
words and manner that his public does not know
it: "I have decided that some miracles
wrought by God through him should be written
down". Would any writer refer in those
terms to facts known to his readers or listeners?
It is obvious, then, that Nennius
is working at the margins of the Welsh historical
(or pseudo-historical) tradition. He is not
delivering a summary of all that may be known
about Britain in his time, but rather a
compilation of foreign and obscure sources for
the use of those who do not have the time or
resources to hunt them up for themselves. This
may have to do with the reason why his work
spread so fast and so far: it was meant, from the
beginning, as a standard summary of otherwise
obscure sources.
This is not actually a
contradiction of Professor Dumville's
interpretation of his work as an Irish-style
"stitching history", so much as a heavy
qualification. Nennius did indeed stitch
and interpret, but his visible and obtrusive, yet
often curiously vague chronological time frame,
is meant to place all these scraps of information
in a comprehensible structure, to supplement,
rather than replace, what historical writing
existed in his time. When it fades
into vagueness - as with the "northern
memoranda", where no event is dated even to
the century - it is because his sources allowed
him neither a date nor a hook on any datable
event. This, in turn, is clearly another
reason why he is so keen to find Welsh
correspondences, however mistaken - that is, at
whatever risk to precision - for his checkable
and superficially quite precise English
king-lists and for other sixth- and
seventh-century events.
The direct and indirect influence
of Gildas on the author of the Historia Brittonum
was immense, visible not only in the general plan
of his work, but also in passing matters of usage
such as his constant use of the Gildasian word cyulae
for "warships", which - whatever his
other debts, to the earlier and widely different
writers he copied or epitomized - he used from
start to finish. Nennius must have not only
known Gildas, but taken his work as canonic.
For instance, he misunderstood Gildas' statement
that Britain had twenty-eight ciuitates to
mean, since he probably had never seen a town - urbs, in his
writing, always means "royal fortress",
for which Gildas uses arx -, twenty-eight royal
fortresses; and, as Gildas did not bother to
list these twenty-eight ciutates, Nennius
simply made one up from all the town and royal
fortresses he knew, including a few that never
had existed outside legend. For instance,
after Caer Ceint (the royal fortress of
Kent, hence Canterbury), he placed the otherwise
unknown Caer Gwyrangcon: Gwyrangcon,
unknown outside Nennius, was the man from whom
Vortigern was supposed to have taken away Kent to
give it to Hengist. Morris, with his
typical tin ear for legend, takes the whole
Hengist saga as historical, and (in spite of the
Welsh name, completely unimaginable in a
fifth-century lord of Kent) assumes Gwyrangcon to
have been the original lord of Canterbury. This
is obvious nonsense; but it seems a great deal
easier to imagine that the dethroned Gwyrangcon,
like Vortigern himself after him, went on to take
refuge from the Saxons in some other fortress of
his own, defending a reduced space; as Gwyrangcon
is only a legendary figure, it must follow that
Caer Gwyrangcon, this fortress which nobody seems
able to find, is also a legendary place. But his
dependence on Gildas is as clear his complete
absence of anything properly Gildasian: he never
excerpts Gildas or sums up any Gildasian item.
In other words, he expected his readers to have
Gildas' book on their shelves.
His relationship with L seems
exactly similar. He quotes the peculiar
expression magna discrimina from him as he
quotes the peculiar expression cyulae from
Gildas, though, it must be admitted, to better
purpose; but so far as I can tell, there is not
one word in him which can help reconstruct L.
Unlike the Nennian version of A, whose
peculiarities gave us such an interesting time,
there is no Nennian chapter that has anything to
say about what Zosimus, more than Gildas, shows
to be L's central issues. Zosimus'
statements are few and clumsy, but clear: in the
course of an incredibly dangerous struggle
against the Saxons, the leaders of British poleis,
tribes, resolve to reject Roman law and revert to
"British" customs, a movement which
spreads to Armorica and unspecified other Gaulish
provinces, which overthrow the upholders of Roman
law - rhomaios archontas. Nothing of
this may be retrieved in Nennius, even though the
author was keen to run down and copy even the
most obscure and pointless bits of lore, such as
the Genealogy of ch.17. And if he did not
copy L out anywhere, this must mean that - like
Gildas, like the history of Gwynedd, like the
genealogy of King Mervyn - his audience already
knew it all.
In other words, the Welsh educated
classes of Nennius' time (which must mean mainly
the monasteries) had comparatively common access
to what we might call a "Welsh historical
collection" consisting, at a minimum, of
Gildas, L, N, Saints' lives (the fact that he
only excerpted the *Gesta Germani and an
Irish *Vita Patricii, the one obscure by
his own admission, the other foreign, tells its
own story) and royal pedigrees; and he wished,
not to integrate this "historical
collection" into one single vast narration,
but to add a volume of obscure and otherwise
unobtainable items to it. His work's
success - Professor Dumville followed a
backbreaking paper trail of dozens of manuscripts
and variants - and the disappearance of other
sources except Bede and Gildas, have muddied the
waters in quite a fantastic fashion, leading to
the universal scholarly impression that Nennius
was typical of what Welshmen knew and thought of
their own past in his time; a mistake which
begins with the writer of the Preface
apologizing for the supposed ignorance of
Nennius' predecessors, and carries on even to the
most learned and insightful of our own scholars -
even though the earliest copyists, at least, seem
to have understood Nennius' purpose,
supplementing it with equally obscure material of
their own, so that some of the most useful
Nennian items come from glosses and
interpolations.
(From this point of view, his
treatment of St.Patrick is of extraordinary
interest. First, the fact that he placed a
complete Irish Life of St.Patrick in his
work seems to suggest that the heroic Irish view
of the Saint was still obscure and exotic in
834AD Wales; and secondly, the fact that he
inserted an explanation of Patrick's name Magonus
which has no Irish correspondent and which uses a
form - Maun - which, according to
Dumville's authority, is flagrantly native Welsh
- shows that his readers must have been familiar
with a different account of Patricius/Maun
- as I argued on other grounds.)
The Welsh historical collection
excluded A, and Nennius' attitude to A shows us
why: while it is still a central account to
Gildas, who both accepts and modifies its scheme,
Nennius does not even bother to try to understand
it, and in fact jerks it to pieces. It had
clearly lost all interest to his age, while the
scheme of the Seven Emperors seems to have held
complete sway (common to Nennius and Geoffrey,
echoed both in Maxen and in Triadic
material, and preluded to in the legend of
Casswallawn in the Third branch of the
Mabinogi). On the other hand, L is
treated as part of the common heritage of
Gwrtheyrnion and Gwynedd, probably of all Wales.
And this raises the question: Where did it go?
Why did L altogether vanish in the few centuries
that separate Nennius from the bulk of written
evidence from Wales? What happened to so
completely erase what was, to both Gildas and
Nennius, a capital part of the British/Welsh
heritage?
There is an obvious watershed in
the time span indicated: the publication of
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum
Britanniae, one of the most epoch-making
events in the history of British literature.
Nothing in the English, Welsh, indeed European
image of the past, was left untouched by this
literary triumph. In Wales, its influence
was so enormous that translations and adaptations
came to form a new literary genre, the Bruts
(from the name of the founding hero, Brutus).
It seems by no means unlikely that this literary
earthquake, proposing a striking, frequently
novel, nationally flattering, and artistically
magnificent picture of the British past, may have
removed the hold of L on Welsh culture. It
could not, however, have done so unless it filled
its semantic space to some degree.
What Nennius had no intention of
doing, Geoffrey had and did. His
compilation includes all the things Nennius had
left out: Gildas, Bede, N, famous saints such as
Illtyd, Dyvrig and Samson, native mythology about
such figures as Brân and Beli, and genealogy
galore. The most important feature of its
immense success is its eager and universal
reception into Wales, with not a trace of the
doubts aired by Anglo-Norman savants such as
Gerald "of Wales" and William of
Newburgh: from the moment the
first Brut enters Wales, the future of
Welsh culture belongs to it. And yet
Geoffrey had done incredible things with
genealogy, backdating dynastic ancestors by
centuries or even millennia, placing the
well-known Cunedda or Cunedag (which Nennius had
clearly dated after the fall of Maximus) to the
sixth century BC, and so on. If all of his
work treated Welsh culture in this hucksterish
and dishonest fashion, would not the Welsh reject
it?
But in actual fact, not all his
dealings with Welsh classics were as careless as
that. He used Gildas with great care, if
with the evident purpose of subverting everything
the older author had to say (and do we not know
modern historians approaching the work of earlier
colleagues with pretty similar intentions?).
Whole passages are quoted almost word for word,
in their right place in the chronology. And
we remember that, of all historical subjects,
genealogy was the most pawed-about, dishonestly
handled and obviously variable: by the standards
of what not only the Welsh, but all European
noble houses did to their own pedigrees, awarding
themselves descents from everyone from Priam of
Troy down, Geoffrey's treatment is, I will not
say nothing special - it has rare breadth and
single-mindedness about it, intending to include
everything possible and to form a single line of
descent - but at least in the mainstream. To
us, it is an absolute barrier to believing
anything in the great hoaxer's compilation; to
medieval savants, familiar with the vagaries, let
alone dishonesties, of pedigree writing, it was
nothing of the kind. Indeed, if they had to
choose between an old pedigree attributing
descent from all sorts of famous men of old to
unremarkable and perhaps despicable contemporary
lordlings, and a much grander vision placing the
same ancient heroes in a much longer
chronological perspective (familiar to them all
from their annalistic studies, that regularly
took them back to such ancient kings as Ninus of
Babylon and Busiris of Egypt) and separating them
from the little self-interested men of their day,
I think I know which they would instinctively
choose.
My point is that the genealogical
fictions of Geoffrey only look odd to us because
we live in a different world: in medieval Wales,
as in the rest of Europe, they would not be
surprising except by their thoroughness and
brilliance. He was the ace of aces, the
champion at a game they all played; but that does
not necessarily disqualify his renderings of
other historical material. And we have seen
reason to take his rendering of N and his version
of O seriously, reproducing genuine material that
Nennius either ignored or suppressed.
In fact, I think I can suggest
that Geoffrey's success in Wales, and perhaps
elsewhere too, was due largely to a purposeful
and successful recasting of the whole "Welsh
historical collection" in one stupendous
whole. This, according to Rachel Bromwich,
was the universal view of Geoffrey among the
first generations of Welsh antiquarians –
men such as Robert Vaughan: that he was a
transcriber or collector, not an original author,
whose sources were good witnesses for the
earliest stages of British history. In
spite of his shameless and even whimsical
twisting of sources, his work was close enough to
known material to be accepted; and – in
spite of flaws on which later scholars pounced,
such as the relationship of Arthur with Anna,
Howel and Gawain - it performed the acrobatic
feat of binding everything together, giving that
clarity and breadth of vision for which all
thinking minds yearn. It was also
brilliantly accessible. Geoffrey's Latin,
except where he is copying, has none of the
mandarin quality of Gildas, deliberately forcing
the listener or reader to work and impressing
them with his rhetorical abilities; Geoffrey's
fireworks are of a different kind, in the nature
of peacock-like displays of learning rather than
of verbal brilliance. He wrote beautifully,
but easily, yet never allowed his readers to
forget that he knew a lot more than they did.
As Virgil's version of the Aeneas
myth obliterated those of Naevius and Ennius, so
Geoffrey's history of Wales obliterated all his
predecessors except Bede, Gildas and Nennius,
whose work contained information his did not. He did not even
have much of a struggle. Few manuscripts
probably existed at all; Geoffrey's work
corresponded with a great expansion of book
production and reading in Europe, and in
particular in England and Wales, when books
entered the houses of private persons and began
to be read individually and not aloud. Lewis
Thorpe: "From the very
beginning Geoffrey makes it clear that he is
writing [for] the solitary reader, not to be
declaimed aloud in serial form... There are none
of the calls for silence so common in medieval
vernacular literature, none of the three-fold
repetitions felt necessary in the Chansons de
geste." It is by entering British
and European culture at this new level (which was
soon to produce Aquinas and Dante), the level of
the private rather than institutional reader,
that Geoffrey's vision of Welsh history
triumphed. It filled the historical horizon
of people who had never been acquainted with the
bound products of monastic scriptoria, and who
therefore could not appreciate how badly it
clashed with the most illustrious of his sources
- Orosius, Bede, Gildas. For every educated
monk acquainted with the facts - and how many
even of the members of the average monastery will
have been? - there will have been twenty members
of nobility, gentry and urban upper bourgeoisie
who read Geoffrey if they read any British
history at all; and soon there would be fresh
recruits to the monastic educated classes who had
grown up with a volume of Geoffrey in their home,
and who - exactly because they had a bent towards
learning and reading - would have absorbed it
before they ever started on a course of higher
studies, thus entering college with their minds
already full of his particular brand of learning.
(A kind of problem with which modern university
teachers are all too well acquainted.)
Geoffrey did not respect his
public, but he understood them. As Neil
Wright's analysis clearly shows, his treatment of
Gildas and Bede is nothing short of impudent; he evidently felt, like
many expert but opinionated scholars who, in
today's world, stop contributing to learned
publications and start collaborating with
newspapers, that he could get away with murder.
But the basis of the "impudent expert"
syndrome is real knowledge, manipulated in the
service of the author's ego or hobby-horses; and
Geoffrey really had read the authors whose work
he so carefully twisted. It follows that
where he is our only source for other stories and
legends, we are entitled - knowing what he did to
those of his predecessors whom we know - to pull
a long face, but not to deny their previous
existence.
The biggest of Geoffrey's lies is
that he could read Welsh - let alone "the
ancient language of the British", which, in
this context, suggests Old Celtic. If he
could, he would never have made his howler about
Ambrius: any Welsh speaker would immediately hear
the name Ambrius as cognate to Emrys,
and know what to think. All his sources
must have been in Latin; it is significant that
he shows no knowledge of those materials which
enter the written tradition directly in Welsh,
such as the Mabinogi[10] or Welsh poetry. Compared
to his imitator Saxo Grammaticus, it is
remarkable that he does not quote a single line
of native verse (one thing of which any educated
Welshman would have been proud) while Saxo not
only quotes extensively but even recognizably, so
that under the surface of his cleverly used Latin
metres we still hear the Icelandic poetry of the
skalds. Saxo spoke Icelandic/Old Norse;
Geoffrey spoke no Welsh. But the most
prominent lost item of the Welsh historical
collection, L, was certainly in Latin: even if we
could conceive of a written prose work in a
Celtic language at so early a date, it opened
with a Latin solecism - magna discrimina -
that became famous. We need not doubt that
L was regarded as a classic, and, what is more,
it was enduring. Not only did Gildas, in
the sixth century, react to it as one master
facing an earlier one; but, most tellingly,
Nennius did not treat it - as with the Genealogy
and A - as an outdated archaic curiosity, but as
a widely known contemporary text which he quotes
but does not excerpt.
Gildas and Nennius may be full of
allusions to and quotations from L that we cannot
identify. We may be certain, from Gildas,
that L was at least in part a contemporary,
perhaps eyewitness account, and that it concerned
the struggles of valiant heroes against terrible
odds; in other words, that its picture of the
Saxon wars was heavily personalistic, centred on
the activities of a number of named individual
heroes. (This is oddly reminiscent of the Gododdin
in the emphasis on the enormous odds faced
against a numerically superior Saxon enemy, its
claim to be eyewitness material, and its praises
and descriptions of individual heroes.) From
Zosimus, we gather that the war it described
began in Britain and that it coincided with, or
was followed by, a genuine political revolution
in which Roman laws were rejected and Roman
political leaders ejected – the latter being
particularly associated with the spread of the
war/revolution to Armorica and unspecified other
regions of Gaul. We may be certain that it
was not part of the same document as A, the
conclusion of whose story was at an earlier point
in time, and which, I have argued, must have
showed a grasp of Latin more close to that of
Gildas than to that of a man who could apply the
adjective magnum to a discrimen;
also, L only knew one Saxon invasion, which led
Zosimus to misattribute his account to the only
Saxon raid on Britain that he knew, the famous
one of 409-411, and Gildas to speak as though no
Saxon had ever invaded the island before
Vortigern.
We have seen that what documentary
evidence there is tends to attribute to the
generation of Ambrosius the character, not of
innovators in the name of a "British",
Celtic system, but of would-be restorers of Roman
law and religion. While the witness of
Sidonius' attitude to Rigothamus and Rigocatus,
by itself, proves little, and Geoffrey's notice
that Ambrosius worked to restore (presumably
Roman) ancient law proves even less, the fact
that two such widely separate sources coincide,
that they are supported by the still Roman mind
shown by G, and that there is no opposite
evidence of any kind, does rather strengthen
their message. Living in a fully Celticized
Britain, Gildas still saw Ambrosius as the last
of the Romans, looking back to the ancient empire
(and overseas to the power of Constantinople)
rather than forwards to a British present Gildas
hated, and to a future as black as pitch. There
are therefore no grounds to attribute Zosimus'
political revolution to Ambrosius; on the
contrary, it seems likely that he was responsible
for the restoration of those rhomaios
archontas later driven out - for the
attempted reinstatement of a fully Roman system.
The fact that L does not seem to
know any Saxons invasion before 432-442 is also
suggestive, since it seems to indicate that it
regarded that one as the beginning of all things,
in the light, that is, of an already ancient
past. This is very unlike other documents
we have met. Both the Ambrosian file and the
Vortigernid legends look back to a time before
442, are interested in conflicts and questions
that mattered in the time of Pelagius, Germanus,
Vitalinus and the Mild King; L seems to neither
know nor care about any of these things. He
is only interested in "the dangers of most
valiant soldiers in grim war" against the
Saxons: this is the horizon of his mind. This
separates him not only from Roman Britain, but
also from the mental world of the descendants of
Ambrosius and Vortigern; for we have seen from
some legends - in particular the Vortigernid
legend of O, and the bits of possibly genuine
Ambrosian lore I have called N2 - that there was
a stage in which the Saxons were regarded as
defeated for good and for all, and the Picts as
merely amusing, clumsy drunken barbarians from
the north, easily manipulated by a more
sophisticated villain such as Vortigern; while
the ancestral claims of Vortigern and his enemies
were regarded with great seriousness. And I
cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that the
Vortigernid documents represent a late stage of
British culture, with N certainly going back to a
period when the beginnings of the British state
had been forgotten, and O to a literary culture
no different from that of Gildas; while the
Ambrosian file represents Ambrosiad claims as
they were known to Gildas in 561. In other
words, there is nothing to indicate that they
were written earlier than A or L; the imaginative
language in which they express fifth-century
Ambrosiad and Vortigernid claims is clearly not
the same in which G had stated Ambrosius’
case against Vitalinus and the Saxons in the
fifth century itself.
There is likewise nothing to
indicate that the conflicts of Ambrosiads and
Vortigernids had any interest for L: his theme
seems to be the war against the Saxons, seen,
probably, in the light of the heroic exploits of
individual warriors; and linked with the
rejection of Roman law and ways. And in
turn, neither of these themes is prominent or
even identifiable in any document that can
confidently be identified as either Ambrosiad or
Vortigernid. The only exception is the
unhistorical figure of Vortimer, whose only
activity is to fight the Saxons. Now O is
probably contemporary or later than L, dating to
a settled Celticized Britain which sounds like it
came after Badon Hill, rather than to a long
period of uncertainty and Saxon war. Indeed,
Vortimer, no less than the whole business of
building the great fortress, seems to represent a
Vortigernid attempt to claim the whole theme of
the great war, quite possibly designed at a time
when L - as Gildas shows - was an unchallenged
classic that formed attitudes. O is written
from the perspective of the great royal houses,
Ambrosiad and Vortigernid; and it is worth
pointing out that L seems to leave no room for
what all other sources - Procopius, Gildas, N -
imply to have existed - a monarch of all Britain,
succeeding in some fashion from Constantine III.
To Zosimus, the poleis act collectively to
reverse to "British" customs, with no
reference to a superior all-British authority.
And it is L, and L alone, that stresses the
multiplicity of the poleis of Britain.
It is as though the idea of Britain as a monarchy
with a single identity has faded from sight; only
to reappear, at least in a literary guise, by the
time of O and Gildas.
A third important feature for the
dating and understanding of L is his clear
allusion to the British settlement of Brittany.
There is no need to postulate a fifth-century
Celtic Brittany. The character of
fifth-century British intervention in Gaul was
quite different. Ambrosius, or a successor
to the claim of Constantine III, must have been
responsible for Rigothamus' disastrous
expedition. Its purpose was not to conquer
Armorica and other parts of Gaul for a non-Roman,
British Celtic system, but, quite to the
contrary, to re-establish some sort of Roman
authority in central Gaul. Gregory of Tours
implies that the British were part of a common
Gallo-Roman and Frankish front against the
Visigoths. Sidonius Apollinaris implies
that they were there to defend Roman law against ius
Gentium. Jordanes says they were there
in the name of Anthemius, or at least with his
approval: an ambiguous alliance between two
titular emperors, each holding only a shred of
the Roman West, and neither possessed of an
unchallengeable title. On the other hand,
two characteristics of L's world - Armorica being
ruled according to "British" rather
than Roman principles, and the existence of a
plurality of tribes or poleis - are
clearly in charge in Gregory of Tours’ vivid
accounts of his own time - 590, more than a
century later. This hiatus does not allow
us to suggest that the conquest of Brittany had
anything directly to do with Rigothamus and his
men.
The Letter to Lovocatus and
Catihernus, written in the 510s, points to an
intermediate stage in which, while British tribal
groups of a wholly Celtic kind were present
somewhere in the dioceses of Tours, Angers or
Rennes (that is, not necessarily within the bonds
of historical Brittany) they had neither
political power nor social prestige – to the
point where the Bishops could sneer at their cabanas
and threaten their priests in the most brutal way
and without any fear of political retribution.
This hardly suggests the massive anti-Roman
phenomenon hinted at by Zosimus, with Armorica
“and other provinces” swept by an
anti-Roman, Celticizing movement. On the
other hand, we are not talking of a stranded
community like that of Rigothamus and Rigocatus,
cut off from its British roots somewhere in
Burgundy, but of a group which kept contact with
the British mother land and was better informed,
through Britain’s contact with the Byzantine
East, about Byzantine ritual practices, than the
Bishops themselves. Christian priests do
not risk excommunication, let alone the worse
things with which Licinius, Melanius and
Eustochius threatened them, for no reason: but
here we see a conflict which has come to the very
edge of a final break, because the Celtic priests
were so obstinate in admitting deaconesses to the
altar. In political terms, this suggests a
weak but continuing British presence in Gaulish
Armorica; armed, probably, since the point of
getting tribal Celtic groups to Gaul would no
doubt be that they were the fighters of Britain;
and not altogether disposed to go down on its
knees before the powers of the Gaulish Church,
even though they represented spiritual authority
and were backed by the victorious Franks.
Between the time of Lovocatus and
Catihernus and that of Gregory of Tours stands
Procopius, whose picture of the British Isles is
notoriously troublesome. He has two
separate ideas in mind: Britannia, a former
province of the Western Roman emperor, the
greatest island in the world, which he knows only
from books and which is mainly in the past; and
Brittia, the Franks' large northern neighbour,
populated by Angiloi, Frissones,
and by those same Brittones whose
ambassadors had struck him or someone else at
Justinian's court as barbarians. Internal
evidence tells us that Procopius must have had
his information from Franks, certainly one of the
many Frankish embassies to Justinian, probably
from the ambitious Theudebert; and, crucially,
they managed to convince him that Brittia and
Britannia were separate entities, and that
Britannia alone had been the ancient Roman
province. (They seem to have placed
Britannia to the west of Brittia - in other
words, to have tried to identify it with
Ireland.) The Franks, he was told, were
just then allowing members of all the three
nations of Brittia, which all suffered from
overpopulation, to settle in Frankish-owned land.
It is a good question how even
Procopius let his informants get away with their
explanation for this, that they were settling
people from Brittia in Frankland so as to gain
themselves control over Brittia. How does
the one follow from the other? However, the
trend of the argument is clear: lands in which Angiloi,
Frissones and Brittones are settled are
lands which belong to the Franks. Which
is rubbish. One thing that we cannot doubt,
even with the scarce sources that we have, is
that the relationship of those Britons who
settled on the Continent, ancestors of the
Bretons, with the Franks, were anything but
friendly; the very notion of them settling in
Brittany by Frankish permission is nonsensical.
And an even more fantastic lie is the inclusion
of the Frissones in the claim of coming
from Brittia and being settled in Frankish land:
these can only be the Frisians of the North Sea,
and the only "continental" land we can
be speaking of is Frisia, their own homeland!
There can be no doubt that these Frankish
embassies to Constantinople intended to dazzle
the Greeks with false claims, that they told as
many lies as they thought they could get away
with, and that their claim to be overlords of
Frisians and Britons was one such lie.
The only group which entertained
such relations with the Franks were the
Saxons/English. It seems to be widely
accepted that a certain number of Saxons, at
first of Continental origin, but soon replaced by
islanders, settled in some specified regions of
Gaul, namely the hinterland of Boulogne (where
John Morris counted an astonishing cluster of a
hundred place-names which closely resemble
English place-names in their most ancient
settlement, East Anglia), Ponthieu, the Bayeux
and Caen areas of Normandy, and the mouth of the
Loire. This distribution
may seem to simply mirror the motions of a
seaborne invader, peppering favoured maritime
entranceways into Gaul - the pas-de-Calais,
Normandy, the Nantes area; but there are features
that hint at a different story. The
settlement behind Boulogne is by no means
orientated towards the sea, but rather placed
across the land from west to east; and it becomes
clear that, strategically, it stands between the
early-settled Frankish lands of the Low Countries
- largely equal to today's Flemish Belgium and
southern Netherlands - and the part of Gaul which
was still Roman in the third quarter of the fifth
century, before the start of Clovis' conquering
career. The fact that most of this
territory is today Walloon rather than Flemish,
means that the Saxons were settled as a minority,
surely armed, among a dense Roman population
whose language they eventually absorbed; and the
dimension of the settlement - a hundred villages!
- shows that this was a major event. In
other words: a great number of Saxons was
settled, at some point in the fifth century, in a
border area facing the Romans of northern Gaul.
Even before Clovis, the Franks had a very
volatile relationship with these people, one
moment allies against encroaching Visigoths, the
next targets for invasion. If the account
of the Life of Ste. Genevieve of Paris is
historically based, then, long before Clovis, his
father Childeric was liable to occupy the Paris
area militarily, judge and condemn prisoners, and
exact onerous dues from the locals - in fact,
behave like a conqueror - though he was also open
to persuasion by the saintly lady.
The best way to make sense of this
is that the Franks took a leaf out of the Romans'
book and treated the English as foederati,
settling them across a dangerous frontier;
ironically, the very same use Vitalinus had
thought of finding for them. But the
Boulogne area ceased to be sensitive when Clovis
finally became the uncontested master of north
Gaul in the 480-90s; there would be no reason to
place foreign tribes on it afterwards. It
follows that if any Saxons from Britain were
settled there, they were settled before 486.
And the conclusion forces itself on us that the
only reason for large numbers of Saxons to leave
Britain in this period must have been Ambrosius'
victory. It may have helped that the
Franks, at the time, were still pagan, and
religion certainly was an issue between Britons
and Saxons. Some tribes may have fled
Britain to escape forced baptism or worse; if so,
the vast number of settlements - about a hundred
villages! - suggests that Ambrosius' victory was
a major shock. For that matter, Morris
argues that some more Saxons were sent to the
Thuringian border; and we don't even have to
believe that all the Saxons who fled the island
went to the Franks! It must have been quite
a migration.
This is also the time when the
sudden reawakening of Saxon piracy startles the
tired and aging Sidonius Apollinaris, reawakening
dreadful memories, as he is writing a letter to
another Roman who, like him, had had to swallow
the bitter pill of Visigothic power and had
become their admiral. It also follows the
great war of 468, in which Saxons – it is
not clear whether continental or British –
came to the mouth of the Loire to join the party
opposed to the alliance in which the British were
involved. This suggests a first massive
shock - during which a good many Saxons simply
flee the conquering British Christians to pagan
Frankland - followed by a great recrudescence of
conflict of which "Saxon piracy" and
the Saxon participation to the war of 468 are two
symptoms. It is impossible to be more
precise than this, and it may be that I have
already leaned further towards the Morris type of
historical fantasy than I would care to; but the
various pieces of evidence outlined show, at
least, that something happened; and nothing I
suggested is in the least unlikely.
Now, unlike the Boulonnais tract,
the other Saxon areas of settlement in Frankish
Gaul - Ponthieu, Normandy, lower Loire - face the
sea in the general direction of Britain and
Ireland; and they bracket Brittany. The
Franks themselves, in spite of their connection
with the river-borne Rhine trade, were not
particularly a maritime people, and most of what
trade there was - and in the fifth and sixth
centuries there was almost nothing - passed
through their neighbours the Frisians. But
their relationship with the Frisians seems to
have been quite as tense, ambiguous and yet
mutually dependent as with the Romano-Gauls; if
they wanted to defend their new conquests from
seaborne intruders, they might not want to trust
to Frisian settlers - it might make the Frisians
too strong. Procopius' legend of the
English princess invading the land of the Varni
from the sea with 100,000 soldiers shows that the
Franks who told it to him envisaged the English
as capable of crossing the ocean in strength; the
detail of their ships having no sails but
depending exclusively on rowers agrees with
Sidonius’ description as well as with
archaeological evidence; and if the Franks
regarded the English as mighty sea warriors, it
would be easy to think of them for a seaborne
defence.
The reason why they would want a
seaborne defence is hinted by a number of
inconsistencies and obvious lies in Procopius and
Gregory of Tours. Procopius was told that
the Frankish kingdom originated in an equal
fusion of three free peoples, Franks, Romans and Arborychi
(obviously, Armoricans), based on a common
Catholic faith: the kingdom's unnamed Frankish
founder was said to have married an Arborychan
princess and then intervened with the forces of
both peoples when the Catholic Romans of Gaul
were threatened by Arian invaders. Procopius
was told that the integration of the three
nations was so complete that Romans units served
in the Frankish army with their own panoply of
weapons. In point of fact,
a good deal of this was nonsense; in particular,
the integration of Franks and Romans was at least
rather defective, and Frankish law codes
attributed to Romans a lower rank and honour
price than Franks. There is no record of an
Armorican princess marrying any Frankish lord,
and the story seems to be a very curious melange
of the role of the still-pagan Franks in driving
out the Arian Visigoths in 468 along with a
valiant but defeated British army, the marriage
of the pagan Clovis with the Catholic - but
certainly not Armorican - Chlothilde, and Clovis'
invasion of Aquitaine in 507. As memories
of Clovis were apt to be still green, one can
only wonder at Procopius' informants.
But this is by the by. The
significant element is the importance given (at
some point in the 540-550s) to the political role
of the Arborychi. They are described
as equal partners of the Franks in the work of
defending the Catholic faith in Gaul in other
words, as joint protectors of the native Romans
against the Visigoths - and as an equal third in
Gaulish ethnic realities along with Franks and
Romans. The only nation this can refer to
are the Britons of Armorica; and it follows, one,
that their political importance was far greater
than what we gather from Gregory of Tours or the
Pseudo-Fredegarius, and, two, that it spread over
as much of Gaul as the Franks themselves.
Suddenly we are reminded of
Zosimus' claim that the anti-Roman revolution
spread not only to Armorica, but to vague and
unspecified other regions of Gaul (and let us
bear in mind that Armorica included not only
Brittany, but also the lower Loire and
present-day western Normandy; an area larger than
Armorica must have meant a considerable share of
the whole of Gaul). We have seen that this
refers not, as Zosimus thought, to the early
fifth century, but to some generations later;
now, let us see what it looks like in the light
of these suggestions. "As they
advanced, the barbarians from beyond the Rhine
gained control of everything, and brought the men
of the British island and some who dwelled among
the nations of the Celts [oikontas twn en keltois
eqnwn enia] to the necessity of
rejecting/revolting against [aposthnai] the Roman
principles/government [archs] and live in their
own way without submitting to their [the Romans']
laws. Those in Britain therefore armed
themselves and ran terrible danger to free their ciuitates
from the menacing barbarians, and all Armorica
and other provinces of Gaul imitated the British
and likewise made themselves independent, threw
out the Roman magistrates [arcontas] and set up
their own independent government."
We have already seen that this
describes a rejection of Roman ius - archs
- in Britain, followed by the defeat of
“barbarians dwelling above the Rhine”
within the territory of Britain itself; after
which the revolution spreads to Gaul, and only
then do we hear of actual Roman rulers - arcontas
- rather than Roman “rule” or
“principles” - archs. But there
is another inference: that the spread of the
struggle to Gaul, although it resulted in the
expulsion of “the Roman rulers”, was
somehow connected with the struggle against
“the barbarians from beyond the Rhine”.
And I would add that that curious expression,
“the barbarians from beyond the Rhine”,
which does not altogether suit the Saxons who
reached Britain, is in fact an excellent
description of the complex of separate Germanic
tribes - Saxons, Franks, Alamans, Burgundians -
who, between the mid-fifth century and the sixth,
overwhelmed Roman Britain and Gaul. Far
from being a vague and poetic expression, 'hier griekse
text!!! seems therefore
quite a clear definition for those who
“gained control of everything” on both
sides of the Channel. In other words, L
contained an account of a British-led,
Celtic-minded invasion which competed with Clovis
and his successors for control of the fertile
plains of northern Gaul and which intended to
destroy residual Roman institutions there.
Historians have come to understand
that the Frankish conquest of Gaul is really a
rather obscure process: even such a capital event
as Clovis the Frank’s conversion to Catholic
Christianity can be dated with as much as twenty
years' margin of error (indeed, Roger Collins
thinks he may never have been converted at all!). Geographically,
the territory that is now northern France was not
part of the Frankish lower Rhine heartland, and
we must imagine the territories west of, say, the
Somme, as rather a Frankish colony than a
familiar land. Attempted penetration by a
rival power is certainly not hard to imagine; in
fact, that was what the Visigoths were up to
until Clovis crushed them. And the many
place-names Bretteville in north-west
France, especially in Normandy, do seem to
testify that the people known to the Frankish
sixth century as Britti settled in numbers
and considerably beyond the border of Celtic
Brittany.
The majority of Brettevilles
are found in the Bayeux region and in Cotentin,
one of the areas settled by Saxons; we know that
Saxons and Britons were, in the same way, both
settled at the mouth of the Loire, which later
became part of historical Brittany. It
seems likely enough that the Saxons were placed
there to keep local British entities down and
outside British powers out. Even so, one event
recorded by Gregory makes us curious about their
relationship: it seems that, during the great
Frankish raid against the British chieftain
Waroch in the late 580s, the Saxons settled near
Bayeux put on British dress and fought on
Waroch’s side, helping to inflict a
frightful defeat on the Frankish commander
Beppolen, who fell on the field. Gregory
attributes the Saxons’ treachery to the
Frankish queen Fredegund , whom he hated,, but
his testimony is contemporary and as reliable as
these things ever are. Whatever the case,
this swift veering to the side of the British by
those who should have been their hereditary
enemies asks all sorts of questions about the
relationship between Saxons, British and Franks;
but it does nothing to contradict the suggestion
that these Saxon settlements had a particular
connection with the British presences in the same
area.
The British presence in Armorica
is unmistakably Celtic, with no admixture of
Roman culture or poetry whatever: it is a direct
descendant of the proto-Welsh culture which, I
have argued, spread south from the debatable
lands beyond the Wall. Some features of
early British culture may have been preserved
more faithfully in Britain than in Wales; take
for instance the distinction between high kings
and teyrnedd, which is implicit in a
number of quite late ecclesiastical sources, with
the higher lord of Brittany being routinely
described as consul and his enemies as tyranni.
The long survival of elaborate versions of the
legend of Taliesin, a caste legend of bards - the
fables of N'oun-Doaré and Koadalan,
collected in the nineteenth century - shows that the class
of bards reached and rooted itself in Brittany;
Brittany knew the great caste legend of the
bards, and it follows that it knew the bards.
In other words, all the typically Breton cultural
and political institutions (bardism was both)
pertain to an advanced stage of the resurgent
Celticism that can only have developed after the
death of Ambrosius, and some of which (wars
between independent kinglets, cattle raiding,
bardism) Gildas saw as unwelcome and recent
developments. I say that all these facts
point to one conclusion, and one alone: that
whatever the relationship between Armorica and
Britain in earlier decades, the British
settlement should not be dated earlier than the
sixth century. And as we have seen, while
the affair of Lovocatus and Catihernus shows that
British tribal entities were present in north
Gaul by the 510s, it also shows that they had
nothing like the power of the “Counts”
of Gregory of Tours’ time, let alone the
reach suggested by Procopius and L. It
follows that the events described by L took
place, if they took place at all, after Lovocatus
and Catihernus, but before Gregory’s account
of the British “Counts” of his time.
Perhaps some of the tribal entities of Lovocatus
and Catihernus served as a fifth column.
In Gregory's history, the Brittones
of Brittany only become visible in 544. His
only item from Brittany or its environs before
544 is the life of St.Friardus, a hermit in the
Nantes area, which he includes not in his History
but in his collection of Lives of the Fathers;
and that has its own ideological point. To
begin with, the name of Friardus is unmistakably
Teutonic, probably Frankish; the fact that a
member of the conquering northern horde, settled
in Roman Gaul, was able to develop the eminent
Christian qualities shown in Gregory’s brief
Life conveys a strong message about the
future of Franco-Roman relationships (another of
his Fathers, St.Senoch, was a member of the
notorious raiding tribe, the Theifali, who were
settled around the modern village of Tiffauges,
not far from Nantes). The whole point of
Gregory’s Lives is to show that Gaul
and Frankland have had their own Fathers, as
high, as saintly, and as much in the bosom of the
Lord, as the great names from Christian
antiquity; and many of them – such as
Friardus and Senoch – were Gregory’s
contemporaries. It also shows a man of
Teutonic blood blessing with his presence - for
the presence of Saints was regarded as inherently
a blessing - an area coveted and partly settled
by Britons. At the same time, Friardus is
very humble, a typical man of the people, as far
as anyone can be from the values of the warrior
aristocracy; as if to say that if you look away
from the unpleasant and often monstrous realities
of aristocratic conflict in that area, you can
find lives of unblemished nobility and
saintliness. (There is also a swipe at
Gregory’s least favourite colleague, Bishop
Felix of Nantes, who is gently chided by the
dying Saint for keeping him waiting.) In
the light of what we are seeing of the conflict
between Britons and Franks, I doubt that any of
this is casual; Armorica was, at the time, full
of British monks, some of whose Lives have come
down to us, and at least one of whom –
Samson – was well known to the
Franco-Gaulish church; but Gregory does not
mention a single one of them, except for the
wretched Winnoch, who, after showing signs of
sanctity, lost his mind and died drunken and
insane.
He does, however, mention a
British bishop of Vannes; a scandalously usurping
one. In 544 the British lord Macliaw (whose
name is the same as that of the later monk and
bishop St.Malo), usurps the bishopric of Vannes
to protect himself from the murderous attention
of his brother Chanao, who has already accounted
for three other brothers - 4.4. There is a
wildness, a rootlessness, about the adventures of
these Breton lords, Boudic, Conomorus, Macliaw,
Chanao, Waroch - ranging all over the peninsula
and beyond, killing each other, exchanging lands
and subjects - that suggests a first generation
of settlers, not yet rooted in the country they
have conquered; certainly without any of the
signs of ancient and untroubled rule which we
should expect if their presence in Armorica went
back to the previous century. The way these
local British lords fight each other for control
leaves the impression rather of the absence of
any superior British authority, with local
proconsuls trying to carve out their own
territories; it is consistent with a power
vacuum; and it is notable that by the time
Guntram set up his ill-fated Breton expedition,
the factional fighting seems to have died down,
and the Bretons face the divided Franks as a
united body politic (10.9), to the latter's great
discomfiture.
They have, however, been there a
while: ...semper Brittani sub Francorum
potestatem post obitum regis Chodovechi fuerunt,
et comites, non reges, appellati sunt -
"after king Clovis’ death [511AD], the
British were always under the power of the
Franks, and were called counts, not kings".
The word "Counts", in Gregory's
post-Roman world, still retained much of its
original bureaucratic significance and stood for
an office that the king could bestow and remove.
That is, Frankish kings after Clovis claimed that
the violent and undisciplined British lords who
held Armorica with armed force, indulged in feuds
that were unpleasant even by Merovingian
standards, and regularly raided Frankish
territory, were still functionaries -
"counts" - in the post-Roman
administration of Frankish Gaul, supposedly
reporting to the Frankish King. Given the
undoubted hostility between Franks and Armorican
Britons, this can only effectively represent a
concession on the Franks' part, legitimizing the
British military presence in Armorica. The
Franks would not recognize that the British
kinglets were "kings" - legitimate,
independent sovereigns on the same level as the
Frankish kings, images of the Emperor in their
own land - but granted them the title of
"counts", direct representatives of the
King's sovereign power (the word means
"companion", that is companion of the
king or emperor) not unlike, indeed, the way in
which late Roman emperors granted Roman military
titles to men who were in effect independent
barbarian kings at the heads of war-bands.
This isolated note, however, comes
with the description of wild internal British
feuding in 544, and it sounds almost as though
Gregory is trying to squash any notion of actual
British independence in Brittany by invoking a
much older precedent – one from the age of
Lovocatus and Catihernus. We do not doubt,
from what we have seen, that any British presence
at that time would indeed be sub Francorum
potestaem; but the uncontrolled adventures of
the Bretons of 544 tell a different story. Nor
should we forget that the tribe of Lovocatus and
Catihernus does not seem to have even resided in
the borders of historical Brittany, but at some
point between Tours, Angers and Rennes; territory
that, in their time, indubitably pertained to the
Franks. Licinius’ enthronement in 508
is suspiciously coincidental with the Frankish
conquest of Aquitaine after the battle of
Vouillé, 507; we have seen that Tours had been
held by the Visigoths in the time of his
predecessors Volusianus and Verus. There is
no evidence whatever that any arrangement had
been reached, or could have been reached, between
the Franks, and any British settlers in Brittany
proper; or that any such settlers were there at
all.
And please note that what Gregory
is doing is trying to sneak an answer to an
implicit question whether "the Britons"
of 544, as a whole, should be called
"kings" or "counts"; as if
there were no Britons in Armorica except
sovereigns. If "the British" - as
a whole! - had been successful against the
Franks, they could have been called kings, but,
as they were not, they were - again, as a whole -
called only counts. The Armorican Britons
known to Gregory were definitely an alien,
conquering aristocracy. Gregory - who is
rarely so consistent elsewhere - consistently
regards the "British" element in
Armorica as being made up purely of the royal or
comital houses that had gained power there:
dynastic, small and intrusive. And as he
was theoretically the metropolitan of the
Armorican British, and as in any case his diocese
of Tours was not far from the front line and
witnessed the by-products of war with Brittany
more than once in his episcopate, we must take
his testimony as significant. He tells us
that his contemporary Bishop Regalis of Vannes
described them as masters which the people of
Vannes, not excluding himself, "have to
obey"; for that matter, in the 540s Macliaw
had actually usurped the bishopric. This
could not be more at odds with the picture of
British status and power implicit in the letter
of Licinius, Eustochius and Melanius.
It is therefore possible to smell
some fish - quite a lot of fish - about this
title of "counts"; both its
significance, and its date. Gregory is of
course best informed about his own period
(570-590 approx.), in which we need not doubt
that the Frankish view of the legal status of the
Armorican British lords was what he reports.
But a few decades earlier, Procopius’
supposed dynastic marriage of Frankish king and
Armorican princess shows that the Frankish
emissaries who made it up saw the
"Armoricans" as equally royal as the
Franks, and all of Gaul as their field of
activity.
Gregory's dating of the title of
"counts" is vague and non-committal.
He does not report who gave the British such
legal recognition, how, or when, though he knows
for certain that it had not been granted, even
provisionally, until at least 511. Now if
the British in Armorica were regarded as royal in
the 530-540s by the Frankish envoys to Byzantium
from whom Procopius gained his information, this
means that the doctrine that they were
"counts" of the Frankish Kings did not
gain the universal currency assumed by Gregory
till later; in which case, the vague post-511
date probably amounts to an attempt to back-date
a much later political agreement, invoking,
perhaps, some vague or partial earlier deal.
To push the argument further, it is possible that
some such agreement had been reached with the
minor tribal entities testified by the
Lovocatus-Catihernus affair, only to be broken
and forgotten (until much later) when the Arborychi
of Procopius became, in ways yet to be clarified,
a much bigger and indubitably royal presence.
Once they were bottled up in Brittany – as
they certainly were by Gregory’s time - the
Franks had every reason not to preserve any
record of a rival claim to a recently conquered
territory that was essential to their political
power and, under the name of Neustria or
Westland, often became the exclusive appanage of
one or more of their crowned kings in the
successive partitions that cursed their kingdom.
Therefore the Franks did not only
lie to Procopius and his fellow Byzantines; they
lied all the time, consistently, and as a
principle. The partiality and outright
mendacity of their records may be judged by their
absolute refusal to mention whatever dealings
Clovis and his successors had with the British.
That they did not dare to back-date the title of
"counts" to the reign of their great
founder, otherwise represented in Merovingian
accounts as the ultimate in royal valour and
triumph, obviously means that Clovis must have
dealt with them not as "counts" but as
kings; and his successors two or three decades
later treated the Arborychi not only as
royal but also as involved with all Gaul. Therefore,
that no record of any such incident, whether
peaceful or - much more probably - military, can
be found anywhere in Gregory of Tours, the
pseudo-Fredegar, or any other source, means that
all such information had been deliberately
suppressed. And this means that there was
something to hide: if Clovis had been as
victorious against the Britons as he was with
Goths and Alamans, there would be no reason to
conceal the fact. If Zosimus and other
clues strongly hint at wide-ranging British
intervention in Gaul some time between the time
of Lovocatus and Catihernus (the 510s) and 544,
we are not allowed to deny the suggestion on the
evidence of clearly deceitful Frankish records;
if anything, Frankish untruth means that there is
something to hide.
Let us also remember that
Procopius' legend of the marriage of a Frankish
king and an Armorican princess was Frankish
propaganda designed for self-aggrandizement; and
what is perhaps more cogent, to warn the
aggressive Byzantine power of Justinian off
Frankish spheres of interest. The Frankish
claim of fostering the intrusion of this
ambitious, troublemaking minority into
territories they regard as their own is
flagrantly a lie ad usum
Constantinopolitanorum. The importance
of what Procopius calls the Arborychi is
therefore truly remarkable: they are described as
potential equals of the Franks in Gaul, whereas
the local Romans are objects of conquest - or
rather, "protection" against Arian
Goths. By the 530-40s, the Franks wanted
the aggressive Justinian to understand that they
had an equal agreement with the Armorican British
to defend Gaul from the Arian Visigoths - the
sub-text being, clearly, that there was no need
for any Byzantines to butt in.
Gregory of Tours never
describes the Britons of Armorica as more than
squabbling provincial lords. This argues
that by his time, British ambition such as led
the Frankish ambassadors to Byzantium to describe
the Arborychi as an equal partner in the
defence of all Gaul had been well and truly
beaten back; but Gregory is amazingly silent
about Britain. Of all neighbouring
countries - from Denmark to North Africa and from
the Suebi of north-west Spain to Armenia -
Britain and Ireland are the only two of which he
has nothing, but nothing, to say. In ten
extensive books, he barely refers to the great
islands, so close to Tours. But the History
itself contains evidence to suggest that Gregory
was in touch with British and Irish matters: he
based his account of Joseph of Arimathea (1.67)
on the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, an
apocryphal item which, in his time, was known
only in the Greek East and in the British Isles
(it is said, I don’t know on what authority,
to have been condemned by the Papacy and its
distribution discouraged). This proves
nothing, for Gregory might as well have received
this book from an Eastern as from a British
source (an exiled Armenian bishop was his guest
for a while); but if the “gospel” had
in fact been condemned, a well-educated Easterner
would be likelier to know it than a provincial
Briton, who, with the best intentions in the
world, may have been less well informed. Indeed,
we may be sure that "he" was - simply
because the "Gospel" was in fact
circulated in the British Isles, with no visible
doubt as to its orthodoxy, for long enough to
affect the formation of the Arthurian legends,
centuries after Gregory. But whether or not
Gregory knew more of Britain and Ireland than he
let on, his account of the British colony in Gaul
can hardly not have been affected - and distorted
- by what is all too clearly a deliberate silence
about the mother country.
During the same period, the acts
of the Second Council of Tours (567) deal with
the scandal of British clergymen crossing the
Channel to Armorica be uncanonically ordained
bishops. This is Gildas' scandal of
irregular episcopal ordinations, confirmed by an
unchallengeable official document; but notice the
wording of the law enacted by the Council:
"We add also that, in Armorica, neither
Briton nor Roman shall be ordained bishop
without the consent of the metropolitan and his
provincial colleagues". As E.A.Thompson rightly saw, this means
that in 567 "British newcomer and Roman
native had not yet fused in Armorica".
Twenty years later, in History of the Franks 10.9,
Gregory of Tours describes his contemporary
Bishop Regalis of Vannes and his people welcoming
the troops of the Frankish king Guntram as
liberators, and Regalis telling the Franks that
"We have to do as the British tell us, and
that irks us very much". That is,
Regalis and his people were not British or Breton
at all, and the Brittones were in effect a
group of conquering trouble-makers whose
fundamental alienness was still evident to
everyone.. This may be
Regalis' diplomatic talk ad usum Francorum;
but, at the very least, it cannot be completely
divorced from reality, or else the Franks - who,
according to Gregory, had suffered much from
British depredations and treachery - would be
expected to disregard it and take revenge on
Vannes. But they don't; instead, they
accept the homage of the Vannetais with every
evidence of pleasure.
This does not agree with Zosimus'
picture of Gaulish provinces following the
British lead against ius Romanum of their
own free will. But then, we would not
expect it to. As I argued that
sixth-century British culture starts from the
Scottish borders, the long distance from the Wall
of Hadrian to the Armorican peninsula can only
have been negotiated by conquest and invasion;
what would probably be a popular movement north
of York would not be apt to be anything but a
foreign conquering horde across the Channel.
Even long-time Celtic British settlements such as
Lovocatus and Catihernus’ might not
necessarily welcome them. Certainly L would
have features of self-excuse, just as, on the
other side, Gregory of Tours may have exaggerated
Regalis' welcome to the Franks. L sees the
relationship between Britain and large tracts of
Gaul undergoing a sea-change, in the direction of
much greater closeness, during and on account of
the revolution: in other words, and stripped of
the revolutionary double-talk which - as we have
seen in the twentieth century - is quite capable,
indeed eager, to misrepresent a foreign invasion
supported by a fifth column as a native and
popular decision, this means that Celticizing
British forces entered Armorica and other parts
of Gaul en masse, enforcing their own
political system. The existence of a
smaller British colony in north-west Spain
suggests deliberate large-scale action, a British
naval policy aimed at controlling the western
approaches, looking towards Gibraltar and
Byzantium; and if Britain committed itself to an
aggressive policy of naval expansion
south-westward to secure a sea-link with the
heart of the Roman world, this would explain how,
in distant Constantinople, Zosimus got to hear of
- and garble - it.
The British who colonized Armorica
and competed with the still barbarous Franks for
the control of northern Gaul were no less
barbarian – I mean non-Roman - than they. To
quote myself, “Breton cultural…
institutions… pertain to an advanced stage
of resurgent Celticism”. Everything moves L
away from the days of Ambrosius, and from the
kind of environment he must have moved in, and
into the sixth century. Annals and accounts can
and do lie; but a man cannot lie about his basic
social assumptions, about the things he does not
even think about because they are as natural to
him as the air he breathes. And Roman social
ideas were obsolete, in Britain, by the time of
L. The superior value of Roman citizenship was
obvious to Patrick; it was not to L or A. The
direct connection between learning and high
social position was obvious to Patrick; it was
not to Gildas or to Taliesin. L associates the
political revolution with the decision of
Armorica and other continental provinces to
follow the British into war. This cannot be
associated with, and can only have come after,
the last Romanizing attempt of Ambrosius and his
followers: it is to be associated with the
triumph of the highland Celticizing forces.
As late as 468 Britain had a
Romanizing government disposed to aid the Roman
Empire against Arian barbarians, if perhaps for
its own purposes. Yet by the time Gildas wrote,
the resurrection of Celticism was complete across
Britain except for the language. The king of
Britain to whom he appeals is not a Roman emperor
employing the machinery of the State to crush a
rebellious subject, but a Celtic high king going
to war (as Gildas hopes) against a recalcitrant
tributary king. Gildas even imagines the Roman
Empire of old in the same light; which tells us
that by his time the idea of Roman Empire had
become completely integrated in the purely Celtic
view of monarchy. It had surely done so through
the incorporation of such ideas in the
imperial/royal succession, so that the high kings
of Britain kept the claim to be Roman emperors
but became effectively Celtic overlords; so that
a man who was only familiar with the local
"Roman Emperors", would inevitably
project their kind of politics on to the Empire
of old.
The revolt against Roman ius
had completely triumphed. I date Gildas' great
work very late, about 561; his visibly
unhistorical and Celticizing idea of the Roman
Empire, expressed with never a doubt, shows that,
as far as he was concerned, resurgent Celticism
was fully in charge. The author of L had a
sufficiently clear idea of the difference between
Roman and British/Celtic ius; Gildas had
not, except in a literary sense - his ius
is all of one colour. We must assign L to a
generation early enough to have influenced Gildas
and Zosimus in the sixth century. And finally, I
would say - though this is a subjective rather
than a historical argument - that L must be dated
close enough to Gildas' youth for him to regard
it, not so much as a work of the past, with which
one does not quarrel, as much as the measure
against which a young author of great promise
would measure himself - which argues a modern
rather than an ancient classic. Young authors do
not want to emulate Shakespeare; in our day, they
want to emulate Martin Amis, or at most Dylan
Thomas.
The dating of the Lovocatus and
Catihernus affair shows that we cannot place the
revolt as early as the 510s; Gildas’
relationship with L shows that it was recent but
established history in 561; Procopius’ tale
of the powerful Arborychan princess
suggests that it was at its height in the
530-540s. Now, we have seen that while Geoffrey's
genealogical history was no better than that of
the inventor of the House of Constantine - to
which, indeed, he added several freaks of his own
- his chronological framework is surprisingly
good and suggests the survival of some sort of
moderately accurate record. What we have seen of
his chronology of Vortigern and Ambrosius tells
us that he (or N) had access to a basically sound
year-list or account, but to no acceptable
king-list. Aware that certain kings - Constantine
II(I), Vortigern, Ambrosius - succeeded each
other, he had however no idea of their family
relationships (and nor, of course, do we); and
the chronology we can extract from his adaptation
of N has a rather simple and bare air, which was
of course never going to satisfy such an
extravagant literary talent. Therefore he strung
on it all sorts of stories, drawn from all sorts
of sources, from N to heroic fables about
Eldadus, Eldol and Hengist (unless of course he
wrote those himself), to the dindsenchas-style
item about the building of Stonehenge. Indeed, it
was probably his instinct as a story-teller, his
taste for a good tale, that made him prefer one
item over another when he came across two
alternative and incompatible items. He must have
known, at least, Aelle's name and his claim to be
the first Breatwealda; but finding himself faced
with a vigorous and already ancient narrative
account of a quite different leader of the
English against the British, he chose Hengist as
a suitable villain, granting him even a good deal
of martial vigour (Eldol's capture of him is
clearly a great deed).
My point is that there is no
reason why his sound chronological source should
stop at Ambrosius. The period 470-560 was not
always without history: sufficient, perhaps even
abundant documentation existed - and is lost. L
existed. And N does not stop at Uther Pendragon;
it would not be possible, because Uther
Pendragon, in that as in every subsequent source,
is only a prelude. He is there to have children.
In N itself, his position in the trifunctional
triad of brothers is conditioned by the fact
that, unlike them, he is fertile: he has a son
and a daughter. And that son is Arthur.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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