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Chapter 8.6: The
British invasion of Gaul and the origins
of Brittany
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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The biggest piece of evidence for
a British invasion of Gaul is of course Brittany
itself - the existence of a Celtic nation that
clearly came into being some time between the
collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the life
of Gregory of Tours. There is Zosimus, with
his capital misunderstanding, to show us that
this resulted from an anti-Roman movement that
began in the island of Britain; Procopius, to
show that in the 530s-540s the British had a
mighty and royal role throughout Gaul, figuring
in Frankish lies as royal partners. And we
have the historian of the Gaulish sixth century,
Gregory of Tours, to tell us… nothing.
Nothing; a most important piece of evidence.
Gregory of Tours, as we have seen
keeps a total and unnatural silence about
anything to do with Britain; even though one
piece of evidence - his knowledge of the Gospel
of Nicodemus - hints that he had contact with
British ecclesiastics. But that is not the
only area on which the bishop keeps silence,
where he should speak; not by a long chalk.
When we examine his third book, concerned with
the period in question, we find that this bishop
of Tours has nothing whatsoever to say about the
history of Tours, his own see. Indeed, he
is just as silent about every other area north of
Clermont-Ferrand and west of Paris. Book 3
covers over 20 years, and for all this period
Gregory can find nothing whatever worth writing
down about events in his own region.
To put this silence in context: in
the same period Gregory describes
Chlochilaicus’ raid on Frisia; Frankish wars
in Thuringia and Burgundy; the assassination of a
Thuringian king in Zülpich (west Rhineland); a
disastrous revolt against the Franks in
Clermont-Ferrand and Auvergne; the Frankish king
Childebert’s invasion of Spain; another war
in Burgundy including a siege of Autun; the
flight of Arcadius (the man who had caused the
revolt of Auvergne) to Bourges (held, Gregory
mentions, by Childebert) and the revenge taken on
his family in Cahors; the revolt of Munderic in
the Champagne and his murder in Vitry-le-Brulé;
the flight of a slave from Trier to Langres (both
under Frankish control, it is implied); the
murder of two royal princes in Paris; a royal
marriage with the Longobards (then settled in
Pannonia); Rodez and Béziers re-taken from the
Visigoths; the flight of a noble Frank to Arles
(held by the Ostrogoths but threatened by the
Franks) and then to Italy; a murder in the harem
of a Frankish king in Verdun; the attempt by the
Frankish kings Theudebert and Childebert to
eliminate their brother and uncle Lothar –
from which he was saved only by a miracle;
another invasion of Spain during which Saragossa
is besieged and a number of lesser places taken;
a wergild taken from the Ostrogoths in Italy out
of which Lothar is cheated; royal action by
Theudebert to restore the city of Verdun; a
vicious feud between Franks in the Dijon area;
and a riot in Trier against a tax collector.
The Franks are present and active on both sides
of the Rhine, in Frisia, Thuringia, Zülpich and
Trier; in Lorraine and Champagne, in Verdun and
Vitry; in Paris and on the banks of the Seine; in
Bourges; in Langres, Dijon and their environs; in
Clermont-Ferrand and Auvergne (where they put
down a serious revolt); in the Rhone valley
almost as far as Arles; in Aquitaine and Provence
as far as Rodez and Béziers; they invade
Burgundy, Thuringia, Spain as far as the Ebro,
and Italy as far as Pavia; and they contract an
important royal marriage with a princess from the
Danube valley. In all this period, a
period spanning over twenty years, nothing
whatever is said of events on the Atlantic shore (whatever
happened to Bordeax, let alone Nantes?), in
Brittany, the Loire valley, and western Normandy.
Above all, nothing is said about events in
Tours itself.
With the exception of a few
ill-established and fragmentary Saint’s
lives - of which the Life of St. Geneveieve of
Paris is by far the most important - Gregory
of Tours is literally our only source for Gaulish
history at this time; if he does not say it, it
does not get said, and that is that. And it should by
now be clear that he has left enough space in the
history of Gaul before 544 to accommodate a whole
epic of Arthur or any other conqueror. In
the same period, Gregory’s book contains
another sly little silence that seems symptomatic
of what is happening here. We know that at
the battle of Vouillé, Clovis, the first
Frankish king, drove the Visigoths out of Gaul as
far as the Pyrenees; but we know nothing of what
seems to have been a remarkable Gothic reaction
in the following decade – until we find,
about 525-530, that the Goths have got as far as
Rodez, and that it takes a combined operation
from two Frankish kings (the Franks had the bad
habit of dividing the kingdom between royal
heirs) to roll them back again. The
position of Rodez means that the Visigoths must
have reconquered more than half of Aquitaine, but
Gregory only mentions it to describe the further
Frankish victories that pushed the Goths back
again. Now, suppose that, in a similar
situation, he had in fact no Frankish victories
to report: is it not to be suspected that he
might not say anything at all?
The clincher is the account of the
succeeding bishops of Tours, placed not in the
second or third book, but at the end of the
history, in the tenth. It includes a few
contradictions with his other stories, and tells
us not one, but a whole series of interesting
tales. Before the Franks came, the
Visigoths dragged two successive Bishops,
Volusianus, enthroned in 491, and Verus, who
succeeded him in 498, to their own capital
Toulouse. This was the treatment they had
inflicted twenty years earlier, as soon as they
had conquered the Auvergne, to the aged Sidonius
Apollinaris, who had led Roman resistance against
them. In other words, they treated
Volusianus and Verus as possible or actual
leaders of Roman resistance in newly conquered
territory. Were it not for this item, we
would never know that the Goths had got as far as
Tours. Here are two important hints: first,
here as in the case of the Visigothic re-conquest
of Aquitaine, Gregory, or perhaps his source, is
apt not to mention unpleasant facts; second, he
is truthful in the matter of the succession of
bishops in Tours, and facts left unmentioned
elsewhere may be recovered from his episcopal
list in 10.31.
After the Frankish conquest, which
took place under Bishop Licinius (508-520), whom
we have already met, Gregory is generally quite
careful to mention who nominated the bishops, and
why. Clovis’ pious widow Chlothilde
nominated Licinius’ successors, Theodorus
and Proculus, in an extraordinary double
episcopate. These men were already
consecrated bishops and had been driven out of
Burgundy, an Arian kingdom. Chlothilde was
a power in the land at this time; according to
Gregory, she brought her sons together against
the Burgundians, and her nomination of the two
exiled bishops must be connected. The two
bishops were old men and only lasted one year,
after which (521) Chlothilde nominated Dinifius,
another Burgundian exile, who lasted even less.
(The sequence of Chlothilde’s Burgundian
bishops is so obscure that Gregory contradicts
himself between Book 3 and Book 10, and his
modern editor is not much the wiser.) Then
Chlodomer, one of Chlothilde’s royal sons
(who died in the Burgundian campaign she had
inspired), nominated Ommatius, a local nobleman
of very high rank, who reigned for three years
(522-525).
At this point, silence falls.
Three bishops, Leo (seven months of 526),
Francilio (527-529) and Iniuriosus (529-546),
succeed each other with nobody to tell us who
nominated them, or why. We remember that,
according to Geoffrey’s chronology,
Arthur’s wars in Scandinavia and Gaul began
about 528. Gregory tells us most about the
least important of them, Leo, and his description
of him focuses on such earth-shattering facts as
that he was a clever wood-worker some of whose
carved pieces were still in the Cathedral in
Gregory’s own time. Francilio, a
nobleman of senatorial family, dies by poison in
the interesting date 529, at Christmas, and
Gregory – not as a rule slow to apportion
blame – absolutely refuses to tell us who
was suspected of the crime. (Was it perhaps
that somebody suspected the loyalty of a bishop
with Frank- in his name?)
Then we have Iniuriosus, who
reigned for no less than seventeen years. Gregory
does not tell who nominated him or whose
interests he served. If it wasn’t a
Frankish king who nominated him, and if it
wasn’t a Frankish king who murdered his
predecessor – then who did? Remember
that this is the period in which a Frankish
pseudo-legend reported by Procopius suggests that
the so-called Arborychi shared the
sovereignty of Gaul and its Catholic defence with
the Franks. If the Franks had lost Tours to
someone, it could not be the Visigoths, who by
then were confined by the Pyrenees; but a people
identified with Armorica - whose capital Tours
was - must be a prime candidate.
Our first (and last) glimpse of
Iniuriosus as a person is in 544; fifteen years,
mind you, after his nomination. At this
point, Chlothilde is in Tours; no longer the
powerful widow of the 520s, gathering her royal
sons to send them to war, but a mere shadow of
the great age of Clovis – now more than
thirty years in the past –old, defeated and
shortly to die. She has seen her favourite
grandchildren butchered almost before her eyes by
two of her own sons, and it is a terrible and
telling fact that the king who is with her and
who is in charge of that particular part of Gaul,
Lothar (or Chlothochar), was the guiding spirit
among the murderers.
Lothar is now the power in the
land; but not, it seems, power enough to
challenge Iniuriosus. The king has imposed
a massive tax on the Church – one third of
income - apparently with no problem from any
other bishop. Iniuriosus, however, flatly
refuses to pay, and he does so in public and in
the kind of language that Merovingian-age bishops
simply did not use to their kings, didactic,
tart, and uncompromising. And far from
reacting as every other chapter in Gregory’s
book (in which people who get in the way of
Merovingian kings do not have long and happy
lives) would make us believe, Lothar apologizes
in the humblest terms. What on Earth is
going on here?
Iniuriosus certainly could afford
to pay. When he was kind enough to die, two
years later, his successor found the enormous sum
of more than 20,000 gold solidi in the
diocesan treasury; and the bishop had founded,
apparently on his own initiative and with his own
resources, two villages, and built two churches. To give an idea,
a grant-in-aid of 7,000 gold solidi,
properly distributed by a conscientious bishop in
a sort of mini-Marshall Plan, had been enough to
move the city and district of Verdun from famine
to prosperity; and when the emperor
Mauricius wanted the Franks to go to war against
the Longobards in Italy, he paid 50,000 gold solidi[7]: the price of a war, the
most expensive of all the enterprises of a
government. Iniuriosus was almost literally
as rich as a king.
Just as interesting is what
happened when he did Lothar the favour of dying.
The king replaced him with the first Frank ever
to hold office in Tours; and not just any Frank,
but his own referendarius (minister)
Baudinus. There is no mention of any assent
by the Tours populace, let alone an election such
as still often took place elsewhere. Baudinus
promptly demolished the diocesan treasury of his
predecessor, distributing the “more than
20,000 gold solidi” to the poor.
Most Christian, no doubt, but was there any need
for it? If 7,000 gold solidi were
enough to resurrect the shattered economy of the
diocese of Verdun, did the poor of Tours really
need this inflationary gift of 20,000? What
leaps to the mind is that there is king
Lothar’s minister, intruded by royal order
into a see that had never received a royal
official or a Frank before, demolishing the
diocesan treasury of his predecessor – the
predecessor whose power had enabled him to
reproach Lothar without fear and without
consequences. When Baudinus died (552),
Lothar replaced him – again off his own bat
– by another high official and another
Frank, Gunthar, a trusted ambassador.
Gunthar only lived three years,
and proved a severe and probably very damaging
disappointment. Gregory was a young man in
his time, and his testimony is surely eyewitness
material: Gunthar “became almost
half-witted… he was unable to recognize
guests he knew very well, and would assail them
with insults and abuse”. When he died,
“the bishopric remained vacant for a whole
year”; clearly, Lothar’s plans had been
upset by the senility and early death of his
trusted ambassador, and he could not find a man
of similar reliability and prestige to hold Tours
for him.
Lothar then seems to have changed
tack: his next nominee was not a minister but an
outstanding churchman, and not a Frank but a
Roman, the presbyter Cato. The people of
Tours were busy, at the same time, selecting a
candidate of their own. Lothar would have
nothing to do with him, refusing even to hear his
name; only when Cato disqualified himself by
asking for the see of Clermont-Ferrand (which was
held by a quite unsuitable incumbent) instead,
did the king even try to find out who he was.
He was told that it was the well-born Eufronius,
a cousin of Gregory himself, and answered
resignedly: “That is one of the noblest and
most ancient families in the kingdom; let
God’s will and the will of St.Martin be
done”. You can almost see the Gallic
shrug.
Gregory says nothing about the
reasons for the behaviour of any of the
participants in this drama, but their actions
speak for themselves. Lothar refusing to
even listen to the name of the Tours candidate
means that he regarded the citizens as
disaffected and any candidate of theirs as bad
news; which explains why he twice intruded his
own household’s most trusted men in the see,
and also why the first of them deliberately
demolished the see’s finances. Imposing
able and trustworthy candidates from his own
household shows that he was concerned to keep
control of Tours; and changing direction after
Gunthar to look for a credible Roman ecclesiastic
shows that his concern, though abiding, had taken
a different direction – he was now concerned
that not to have such a candidate would sap the
town’s loyalty. And the Tourangeux
knew what the king thought, which is why they
went out of their way to find a candidate that
would not offend him. For more than ten
years, everyone was treading as if on eggshells,
the leading citizens of Tours afraid to offend
the king, the king afraid of snapping whatever
thin thread of loyalty held Tours in check.
Gregory himself ascribes the ruin
of Gunthar’s mind to drink; yet what he
describes is clearly senile dementia, a common
enough condition and not hard to recognize.
It follows that Gregory’s view of his
bishop’s disease may well be a matter of
racial prejudice: Franks, to Romans such as
Gregory, were drunkards, so that as soon as he
saw the mind of one slowly falling apart, he did
not trouble to look hard for the reason. This
suggests that the still highly Roman town of
Tours, where such titles as Senator still meant
something, may well not have welcomed bishops of
Frankish blood; and if Gunthar’s illness and
early death had been widely interpreted as
Gregory interpreted it, it would have reinforced
Roman prejudice and made the task of finding a
reliable successor that much harder.
And the delicacy of the situation
in Tours explains the events of 544. It is
clear that Lothar regarded the situation in Tours
in 544 as so delicate that he was even willing to
swallow the shameless defiance of Iniuriosus with
every appearance of compunction; indeed even when
Iniuriosus was dead, he did not, apparently,
re-impose the tax (Iniuriosus’ defiance had
been public and that the city knew about it; a
king would not keep his hands off a third part of
20,000-plus gold solidi without a reason)
but reduced the excessive power of the diocese of
Tours by the less obvious and, from a Christian
point of view, morally unchallengeable resort of
dispersing its wealth to the poor.
Several features of Gregory’s
account prove abundantly that the year 544 was
some sort of watershed. It is at this point
that Gregory first introduces British noblemen in
Brittany, indulging in a ferocious joust for
power, fratricidal even by Frankish standards.
The way in which they fight and betray each other
without fear of reprisal except for what they can
inflict on each other, shows clearly enough that
they have no superior power, no king or emperor
above themselves, no common res publica to
refer to; yet their position is strong enough,
and that of Lothar so weak, that they can indulge
in this murderous internal strife – the kind
of thing that makes any potential invader lick
his chops – with absolutely no concern about
any Frankish intervention. Indeed, it seems
very likely that Lothar has in fact already been
pushing his luck as far as it will take him: the
weakness of his position in Tours in 544 suggests
that he is a barely tolerated presence in the
city, with none of the proprietary power of
Frankish kings elsewhere.
There is one verifiable lie about
the period before 544 in Gregory’s work:
that Queen (Saint) Chlothilde came, after the
death of her husband Clovis, to live in Tours,
and stayed there all the days of her life, save
for rare visits to Paris. This cannot be
true. Every notice from this period places
Chlothilde not in Tours but in Paris. It is
there, and not in Tours, that she kept and raised
the three sons of her dead son Chlodomer – that is, she was living
in Paris, not just visiting it briefly. She
was living in Paris or near when Theudebert and
Childebert, some considerable time after, nearly
put an end to Lothar in the Forêt de Bretonne on
the Seine; it was only as a last
resort (which suggests difficulty and even
danger) that she travelled to the grave of
St.Martin in Tours to pray for his safety. And finally, four
church foundations are associated with her: Les
Andelys, St.Peter’s in Paris, the Holy
Apostles in Rouen, and St.Peter’s in Reims.
Not one of them is anywhere near Tours: three of
them are on the lower Seine, and one further east
still. In hoc loco commorata est omnibus
diebus vitae suae, raro Parisius visitans?
Not hardly, my Lord Bishop. One does not
build four large churches during the intervals of
“rare” visits; nor, if one has such a
passion for church building, does one omit to
build any in one’s supposed place of
permanent residence, especially when the memories
of one of Gaul’s greatest saints are there
to be honoured. At the same time,
Iniuriosus built one church, rebuilt another, and
reorganized worship in the cathedral; would
Chlothilde not at least have taken part in these
pious activities, if she had been anywhere near
Tours?
Before 544, Lothar’s power
seems to have dwindled continuously. In
511, he took a share of his father’s
inheritance. By the 530s, he was clearly a
secondary figure. In a dreadful if rather
moving story, showing the bandit-like morals and
behaviour of these conquerors, Gregory shows him
pressured by his brother Childebert into killing
the nephews who, in Childebert’s view,
threatened their expectations. His true
position is shown by the fact that, while the
princes, being resident in Paris, were nominally
under Lothar’s protection, his brother
Childebert could decide and execute such a plan,
roping him in, in his own kingdom. Alternatively,
if we think that Lothar actually already wanted
the princes out of the way, it equally shows his
weakness, that he could do nothing about it until
Childebert conceived the idea independently.
Not long later, he is swindled out of his part of
an Italian wergild, and has apparently no
recourse (this seems to relate to his tax on the
Church, in that both episodes suggest that he was
short of money). Finally, Childebert and
his nephew Theudebert unite against him and
nearly destroy him: apparently unable to field an
army, he flees into the Forêt de Bretonne, and
only a miraculous hailstorm (plus, one imagines,
the expense and difficulty of keeping a
Merovingian army in the field) dissuade his angry
kinsmen. Gregory says nothing of why they
would be angry at him, but it is clear that by
the time he is driven into the Forêt de
Bretonne, he is reduced almost to the status of a
private person, a persecuted king with no army
and only a handful of followers.
From 544 onwards, Lothar’s
fortunes change. There are no more
successful attempts against him, and even though
we have to wait until 555 to hear of his being
involved in war again, when he does, it’s a
big one. He waits for his nephew Theudebald
(lord of the Frankish heartland of Neustria, that
is Lorraine and the Rhine valley) to die, and
when he does he steps in and takes over his
kingdom and his wife (till the bishops object),
the latter probably by way of claiming a magical
succession to his royalty. He then unleashes
a campaign against Saxons and Thuringians. The campaign
fails, but Gregory (whose testimony is by this
time beginning to be based on his own memories,
since by the late 550s he was an adult) claims
that this was the fault of his men, who insisted
on fighting against the will of the king himself,
and promptly threw away his victories with a
disastrous defeat. It is when his position
is weakened by this defeat that the citizens of
Tours propose their own choice of Bishop to him;
Gregory explicitly links the two events.
Lothar is a consistent
personality, whose approach is clearly shown in a
number of episodes. When the Saxons
surrender to him on terms, he accepts their offer
and tries to restrain the hatred of his men.
When he is swindled out of his part of the
Italian wergild, he seizes the treasury of his
dead brother Chlodomer (whose sons were the
princes he and Childebert had murdered), which
was in his power. In 555, he walked in and
seized the inheritance of his recently dead
nephew Theudebald; in 558, when (in the middle of
the umpteenth attempt against him) his brother
Childebert died, Lothar calmly walked in and took
over his lands and his treasury. At the
same time, he had to deal with his rebellious and
bad-tempered son Chramn, who had allied himself
with Childebert; he managed to manoeuvre Chramn
into a disastrous flight into Brittany, which
gave him the opportunity to enter the peninsula
(hitherto closed to him and threatening all his
lands) with a vast Frankish army, and nothing to
fear at his back – and crush all his enemies
at once.
In short, his method was that he
would not make any rash attack, but as soon as an
opening presented itself, he would go in as fast
and as hard as he could, and take everything in
his reach, whether or not it legally pertained to
him. The same mixture of prudence and
sudden aggression seems visible in the affair of
the two princes, in which he did nothing until
Childebert approached, but proved the more
ruthless and decisive of the two when, faced with
actual live children, Childebert’s nerve
faltered. And the same kind of behaviour is
evident in everything to do with Tours. When
Iniuriosus denied him his tax in almost insulting
and certainly insolent terms, he did not seek a
confrontation; but when Iniuriosus died, Lothar
appointed his own man, with a mandate to weaken
the diocese financially. After ten years,
he seems to feel that some conciliation of
Tours’ feelings is called for, and so he
seeks for a suitable Roman candidate to follow
the two intrusive Franks; and when the candidacy
of Cato falls apart in his hands, he does not
cling stubbornly to his own views, but decides to
make the best of a bad job.
It follows, or it is at least a
reasonable inference, that when we find him
making a swift retreat in front of
Iniuriosus’ intemperate refusal to pay, it
is because he does not want to risk his position
in Tours. And that in turn may well mean
that he has only now taken possession of the
city, with one of his sudden dashes at
opportunity, and that his position, in front of
an old, established, politically powerful and
hugely rich bishop, is very weak. One of
Chramn’s advisers, Leo, was reputed to have
said that St.Martin of Tours and St.Martial of
Limoges had left nothing of value to the kings of
the Franks; meaning, of course, the treasuries of
their dioceses. (Limoges is another town
that only appears in Gregory’s account after
544.) This sort of talk must have been
commonplace in the corners of Frankish courts.
Here is clearly, then, a whole
section of history lied about, hushed and buried.
Who was in power in Tours before Lothar made his
dash for it? What changed so suddenly in
544, that he felt able to move into the town
– taking with himself, like a lucky charm,
the elderly dowager who had made her home in the
city so many years before and who was known for
her devotion to St.Martin? And is this not
the exact counterpart of the effective silencing
of a large-scale, royal presence of the British
in Gaul in the same period, which we have argued
on different grounds from the evidence both of
Gregory and of Procopius? I say that the
two things go together; that between at least 528
and probably 543, the British held Tours; and
finally, that the situation of which Lothar took
advantage to seize the city and, in all
likelihood, the whole Loire valley, was the same
which led the remaining British lords in Brittany
to – I quote myself - “fight and betray
each other without fear of reprisal except for
what they can inflict on each other, [which]
shows clearly enough that they have no superior
power, no king or emperor above themselves, no
common res publica to refer to”.
In other words, there has been a British collapse
of authority that left the British lords to
squabble for position in the conquered Gaulish
territories, and gave the nearly landless Lothar
his chance.
This also explains Gregory’s
extraordinary silence about Britain and all
matters British, as well as about the history of
Tours between Chlodomer’s nomination of
Ommatius – in fact, between
Chlothilde’s anti-Burgundian activities
– and Lothar’s spat with Iniuriosus.
Gregory was not only a man of great and
wide-ranging curiosity, always in search of the
next anecdote, the next pious story, the next
dire omen or tragic family squabble or natural
oddity; he was also an enormously brave man, who,
believing that the living and powerful queen
Fredegund was a murderess several times over, and
that she had actually had a bishop murdered in
his own cathedral (that is, that episcopal rank
would not protect him if he crossed her),
nevertheless denounced her in writing and in the
clearest possible terms. Whether or not
Fredegund was as bad as he painted her, this was
a heroic act, showing a temper not to be
silenced. For what reason, then, is this
free-spoken bishop so completely silent about all
things British?
One reason, and one only, can
explain it: sense of responsibility for his
diocese. Gregory did not mind risking his
own life by denouncing a sadistic royal
murderess; but, like the city leaders who had
proposed his cousin Eufronius’ name to
Lothar, he is desperately eager not to raise, in
whatever form, the ghosts of the city’s
recent past.
Gregory was elected bishop after
Eufronius, to the tune of a praise poem by his
young friend Venantius Fortunatus (Venantius’ Poem
5.3). Addressed to the people of Tours, it
invites them all, strong youth and bent elder, to
rejoice in the consecration of the man who had
received their “recent votes/wishes” (noua
uota), the “hope of the flock” (spes
gregis) of Tours. Their “concerned
eyes” (sollicitis oculis) had
demanded for him (quem… uota petebant),
and now that he comes, they can rejoice. The
saints of the town rejoice in his arrival. Throughout
the poem, Venantius works very hard the
significant pun between his Greek name Gregory
and grex, gregis, flock: he is the
shepherd of the city’s flock (pastor in
urbe gregis), the lover of the town, the
father of his people – a shepherd over and
over again, but always specifically the shepherd
of Tours.
Who elected him? The people
of Tours, and they alone. The then Frankish
king, Sigibert, favours and hails him; his wife
Brunhilde (whose presence here is of great
interest – it cannot be often that royal
ladies are specifically thanked for their
menfolk’s political decisions) honours him,
and the king’s noble decision is the climax
to this enthronement (Huic Sigiberthus ouans
fauet, et Brunichildis honori;/ iudicio regis
nobile culmen adest). In other words,
the king has not decided on the nomination, but
“highly approved” (ouans fauet)
of it, in part thanks to his wife’s
pressure; his approval (for thus it is that we
have to read that multivalent word iudicium)
is not absent (adest) from the man whom
the uota, the citizens’ votes, have
asked (petent) for bishop. There is
a strong suggestion that the journey to get the
king’s approval was not without danger
– not exclusively the danger of royal
rejection – in the way the citizens are
invited at length to rejoice and sing, in tones
more suited to a battle won, or a grim jeopardy
successfully negotiated. The rest of the
poem is dedicated in equal parts to
Venantius’ forecast of the way that the new,
conscientious shepherd will both foster the
increase of his flock and protect them from all
dangers, watching over its sleeping lambs day and
night, that they may not be devoured by wolves
nor struck by any robbery. It is notable
that the verses speaking of the dangers from
which he will protect them (20-25) have no
explicit spiritual meaning whatever; Venantius
does not say that Gregory will protect his flock
from spiritual dangers, from temptation, sin or
hell; he just says – and says with some
emphasis and deliberate repetition – that he
will protect them. Which is obviously
related to the rejoicing Venantius encourages,
probably with good reason.
What dangers may have threatened
Tours at the time are suggested by the
contemporary fate of Limoges, another one of
those places which go unmentioned until 544,
compared by Chramn’s friend Leo to Tours for
the anti-Frankish wealth of its bishops. In
578, the city saw what Gregory describes as a
fairly ordinary kind of tax revolt against savage
taxation by Lothar’s son Chilperic. Nobody
was killed; the one proposed victim, Marcus the
tax collector, had been given shelter by the
local bishop. Nevertheless, Chilperic, a
murderous paranoiac reminiscent of Henry VIII in
his intellectual and religious pretensions,
punished Limoges with unheard-of cruelty,
striking with particular savagery at the
ecclesiastical leaders, whom he suspected of
having tried to destroy the tax returns. The issues are
exactly the same as in the clash between Lothar
and Iniuriosus: taxation on the Church, the
resistance of leading ecclesiastics suspected by
the Franks of having taken the wealth of the land
away from themselves, and the close relationship
between these rich ecclesiastics and the people
of their city, to the exclusion and to the danger
of the Frankish kings (we have seen that the fact
that Lothar did not dare claim the tax even after
Iniuriosus was dead meant that the issue was
known to the city, and that Lothar had reason to
fear for their loyalty if he tried).
Gregory, the conscientious bishop,
was demanded by his fellow-citizens and accepted
by the Frankish king at his wife’s
insistence. The political climate was
dominated by Frankish paranoia about Roman
bishops and their flocks colluding to keep the
wealth of the nation away from Frankish kings.
Gregory the conscientious bishop is silent about
his city’s whole recent past, and about its
political attitudes – even though they can
be read well enough in the grain of what stories
he does tell. I repeat that if one thing is
clear, it is that Lothar had reason to doubt the
loyalty of the citizens of Tours; what is more,
the fact that he still was nervous about their
initiatives a good ten years after 544 means that
his fear was ingrained and depended on something
which had proved true for a very long time.
We are not talking about a few months of British
– or at any rate non-Frankish –
occupation. He regarded the city as a nest
of disaffection; and even thirty, indeed fifty,
years after 544, Gregory was trying to keep any
thoughts of possible disaffection from Frankish
minds. And we remember that L claimed that
Armorica (to which Tours belonged) and some other
Roman provinces in Gaul had followed Britain in
both rejecting Roman law and going to war with
“the barbarians from over the Rhine” (hoi
hyper ton Rhenon barbaroi), a description
that fits the Franks.
This puts another event of the
time in a new light. In about 532,
Clermont-Ferrand and the whole of the Auvergne
rebelled, not, apparently, in favour of the
still-hated and Arian Visigoths (who had managed
to push as far as Rodez, on the very margins of
Auvergne) but simply against the Franks. Gregory’s
account is very unclear, both
about the details of this revolt and about its
political goals; we only hear (typically) of what
the Frankish kings did: the occupation and savage
repression of Clermont-Ferrand, the siege of two
fortresses (Vollore and Chastel-Marlhac) and the
ravaging of the whole region. This had been no
mere riot, but the concerted rising of a whole
area, defeated by measures worthy of a major war.
In other words, there is reason to
think that something happened in or shortly
before 532, to give Romans in Auvergne (a region
with a tradition of loyalty to Roman ways) a hope
that the Franks, still aliens and barbarians,
might be got rid of. Gregory explains it
with a rumour of the death of Theudebert in the
war in Thuringia, but this is simply not enough:
if the Auvergnats were as our maps represent
them, isolated in the middle of an ocean of
Teutons, with no recourse against the Franks
except for the even more odious, heretical Goths
and Burgundians, they simply would not have
rebelled; a jacquerie of some sort is imaginable,
but not the widespread uprising, with fortresses
in arms and the local senatorial nobility in
revolt, which one reads between Gregory’s
lines. Arcadius, the leader of the revolt,
was the grandson of Sidonius Apollinaris, who had
led the last stand of the Romans of Auvergne
against the Visigoths sixty years earlier. The
Franks had refused to allow his father
Apollinaris to become bishop of Clermont-Ferrand.
Gregory seems to suggests that Arcadius tried to
play Childeric against Theuderic, to whom
Auvergne was assigned; but Childeric does not
seem to have done anything to stop Theuderic
ravaging the country, contrary to precedent and
expectations.
Geoffrey of Monmouth dates
Arthur’s invasion of Gaul to about 528-529;
which is also when Francilio dies of poison in
Tours, to be replaced by an incumbent who seems,
after 544, to have been neither well disposed to
the Franks nor popular with them. Succeeding
events show that the two great cities of Tours
and Limoges – the latter half-way to
Auvergne – are regarded as nests of
disaffection; the careful Lothar takes measures
to weaken Tours and keep loyal men in charge,
while his paranoid son Chilperic deals with
Limoges cruelly. The revolt of Auvergne and
its ferocious reduction in 532 and following
years take place while the Franks are engaged in
reducing Burgundy, which falls in the next couple
of years, enlarging Frankish territory and giving
them more space to resist – shall we say
– any intruder who might be coming in from
the west and the ocean.
There is a discrepancy between the
end of Frankish influence in Tours, which seems
to have happened about 525-26 with the
episcopates of either Leo (whose name is
curiously the same as that of Arthur’s
“Roman” enemy) or Francilio, and the
actual arrival of Arthur, which seems to coincide
with the poisoning of Francilio and the
enthronement of Iniuriosus. Poisoning a
bishop for political reasons is of course quite
in keeping with Arthur’s notorious ways with
the Church – practically every negative view
of him from the Vita Paterni to the Dialogue
of Arthur and the Eagle is of ecclesiastical
origin – but it is not clear that Francilio
was in the service of the Franks, in spite of his
name.
One theory might explain it: that,
before Arthur ever entered Gaul, the Ambrosiads
had somehow managed to re-occupy Tours. While
we have no reason to believe that Arthur had
anything to do with Gaul before 528, we know that
the Ambrosiads had ancient and long-remembered
connections with Armorica; and two separate items
of information – the Lovocatus-Catihernus
affair and Gregory’s notice that “the
British” were regarded as having the rank of
Frankish counts in Gaul since 511 – show a
continued British presence in Gaul, however
feeble. Forty years earlier, the British
had been strong enough to represent the mainstay
of Roman power in Gaul. The war of the
Loire saw them defeated, only for an army of
Frankish pagans led by Childeric (father of the
future conqueror Clovis) to take their place as
defenders of Catholic Romans against the
aggressive Visigoths, and win the war (468).
In the following years, the area between the
Marne and the Loire was apparently held by a
Roman nobleman, Aegidius, and by his son
Syagrius. Much later accounts (followed by
modern historians, whose maps mark a large area
in north-west Gaul as the “territory of
Syagrius”) make them “Kings of the
Romans”; but what little evidence there is,
is that their title was magistri militum,
army commanders, a title which implies a higher
power above them. You can only be magister
militum for the Emperor, or at any rate for a
fully functioning Roman government. We know
that Aegidius de-recognized the Emperor of
Ravenna in the 460s, but there is no indication
whatever that Aegidius and Syagrius ever claimed
the imperial title for themselves. At the
same time, the Ambrosiads claimed from Britain to
be legitimate imperial claimants. Their
roots, since 442, were probably in Armorica; and
the Roman province of Armorica actually made up
the bulk of Aegidius’ territories. All
this demands to be read as meaning that Aegidius
and Syagrius were magistri militum of the
Roman Emperor in Britain.
During the same period, the Vita
Genouevae (Life of St.Genevieve of Paris)
tells of Childeric leading a heavy Frankish
presence around the Paris region. I do not
think that any historian doubts any longer that
the Life was written, as it claims, within
eighteen years of Genevieve’s death, and
recent French historical writing treats its
account of Childeric’s operations as
untroubledly historical. It would seem
that Childeric’s tribe had tried to follow
up his successful part in the war of the Loire
with some sort of intromission in Roman northern
Gaul. We have seen that the Franks seem to
have felt the need of a border settlement of
Saxon foederati between themselves and the
Roman territory, which does not indicate friendly
relations.
In 486, Clovis defeated Syagrius
(what happened to the defeated commander is not
known). It was only after this that the
Visigoths managed to seize Tours, as shown by the
arrest and exile of Bishops Volusianus (491) and
Verus (498), treated as leaders of Roman
resistance. In other words, they took Tours
from what they regarded as Roman opponents, not
from Clovis. What is more, they did so at
least five years after Clovis had supposedly
defeated Syagrius and conquered “his”
territory; yet, it was not until 507 that Clovis
felt strong enough to move against them.
From this I argue that not only
until the fall of Syagrius, but even later, a
Roman presence remained on the Loire, defeated
only in Bishop Volusianus’ time. This
must be connected with the continued British
presence, which, as we have seen, was at a very
low ebb, but had not ceased to exist, by the time
of Lovocatus and Catihernus. Gregory -
followed in every important respect by the
chronicler pseudo-Fredegar - wrote a full century
later, and when he attributes the Frankish
conquest of north-west Gaul to a single war
between Clovis and Syagrius, we do not have to
think that he is particularly well informed.
The struggle for what became Frankish Neustria
was longer, more bitter and more inconclusive
than we realize.
Another piece of evidence is the
attitude of the authors of the Life of
Germanus and of Genevieve. To
the former, whose identity we know – the
aged and sick Constantius of Lyons, devoutly
Catholic and devoutly Roman, trying hard to write
and think as though the fallen Western Empire
were still a reality – Germanus’
mission to Britain, rescuing that country for
Catholicism, was one of his central achievements,
perhaps the central one; and he does not fail to
remind his readers that Britain had remained
Catholic to his day.
What was Constantius saying here?
Obviously, that his readers owe Germanus
gratitude for this great deed. But it is
perhaps not realized how much gratitude
Constantius feels. In the 480s, not only
was Germanic Arianism ascendant throughout the
West, with Odoacer’s conquest of Italy
completing the ring of Arian Teutonic kingdoms
around the western Mediterranean – the
Ostrogoths in the Balkans, Odoacer in Italy, the
Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Vandals –
but the Catholic Church was even at odds with the
last reigning Emperor, Zeno of the East, whose
ill-judged henotikon or proposal for
reconciliation between Catholics and Monophysites
had been rejected in most quarters and left
Constantinople in schism with Rome and Rome
itself with no political support anywhere in the
Mediterranean.
It is at this point that
Constantius writes a biography of Germanus of
Auxerre that stresses his success in keeping
Britain Catholic - and mentions as if in passing
that, thanks to Germanus, Britain is orthodox to
this day. Is it not clear that this
Catholic Britain is the one ray of light in the
profound darkness of the struggling Catholics of
Gaul - indeed, of the entire Roman world? In
the dying days of Constantius - he was old and
ailing as he wrote the Life - Britain must
have shone to Gallic Christian eyes as the only
light over a black horizon; a country where the
Church had not only been rescued, but was
actively busy rescuing others elsewhere. It
may be that word had reached Gaul of the growing
success of the Irish mission, where a nation once
as pagan as the Franks was being won over by
stages we can no longer perceive, but which had
produced a solid Church by the time the plague of
547 devastated it; certainly, Britain had managed
to survive the onslaught of pagan tribes and
establish a presence in Gaul which defied both
Franks and Visigoths.
The Life of Ste.Genevieve of
Paris is a very different work from that of
the conscious, educated, aristocratic rhetor
Constantius: its author, whether or not he was a
cleric, was a man of the people, with no
political or indeed administrative view beyond
theirs. When Genevieve wants to rebuild the
church of Saint Dionysius or Denis, she appeals
personally to the local priests and then finds
the building materials by miracle (a miracle in
which we retrieve some of the features of the
legend of Vortigern’s fortress, and other
features of Celtic legend). There is no
notion of administration, government,
organization: matters are always settled face to
face with some powerful person, with Genevieve
storming to face Childeric or sailing upriver to
get supplies for Paris in person. The Latin
is of a piece with the mentality - inelegant,
often ungrammatical, always earth-bound and
approximate. The Life clearly tells
the stories of Genevieve that were current in
Paris in the writer’s time, with little
effort to deepen or harmonize them (the bishop
supposed to have consecrated Genevieve, one
Villicus, appears in no other document); that is,
they are the precious and fascinating document of
a developping cult.
Political perspectives are
therefore not to be expected. But when the Life
has Germanus consecrate her in two successive
episodes, each of which takes place just as he
is about to set out on one of his journeys to
Britain, is it not clear that Genevieve is
meant to be a sharer in Germanus’ triumphs? And
if so, how? She never went to Britain; yet
her consecration is part of Germanus’ great
mission. In other words, it shares in the
special blessing that God had offered the Church
and the Catholic West, thought that particular
mission, in preparation for the dark days of the
end of the fifth century, when Arians,
Monophysites, schismatics and Frankish pagans
seemed fated to share the fallen inheritance of
the Empire of the West. The author of the Life
of Genevieve, writing in a period of Frankish
power (520AD) and perhaps dreading more British
intervention, made Genevieve the inheritor of
Germanus’ mantle; so that her contacts with
Childeric and Clovis, helping to Christianize the
new Frankish power, could be seen as part of that
Saint’s great deeds. In other words,
it is the Franks, not the British, who are
Germanus’ heirs, defenders of the Catholic
faith. That religion was the fundamental
issue is clear by the fact that even after he
defeated Syagrius by force of arms, Clovis was
not safe until he had allowed himself to be
baptized; almost twenty years elapsed before he
felt secure enough to go forth against the
Visigoths in the name of his supposed new faith.
And when he went, he found Catholic Britons
settled in his new territories - and it was his
own man, the Bishop Licinius who gained the
throne of Tours (508) after the battle of
Vouillé (507), who dealt with them in the savage
manner we have seen.
And if the British presence in
Armorica had lasted into the period of Bishop
Licinius (508-520), there is no reason to think
that it had not regained enough strength by 525-6
to recover a city, Tours, which they had held
within living memory (it was, I repeat, lost to
the Visigoths only in the reign of Bishop
Volusianus (491-98). The Franks had
evidently never managed to banish them from the
Continent, and it is even possible that
Arthur’s triumphs against Saxons, Scots and
Picts may have reinforced the Ambrosiad position
in Britain, and therefore their ability to
project force in Gaul, for a while. Alternatively,
the rising power of the rex rebellis in
the north may have encouraged the Ambrosiads to
strengthen their position in Gaul, to have more
resources to meet him and less threats behind.
The invasion of Gaul and the war
with the “Romans” is easily explained
as a pursuit of the Ambrosiads all the way to the
original base of their power, the north-west
Gaulish territories from which Ambrosius launched
his war of liberation. One of the things
that the Lovocatus-Catihernus affair has proved
is that there remained, even at the height of
Frankish conquest, a distinctly British presence
in Gaul, with clear and unbroken links with the
British homeland and through that with the Roman
East; and that has to mean an armed, military
presence. It may be, as Morris has
suggested, that Britons such as these, still in
arms and settled in Armorica, reached some sort
of compromise with the Franks involving a
juridical fiction that they were
“Counts” of the Frankish king rather
than kings over their own tribes, which Gregory
later invoked. However, this tribal
presence must have had leaders whom they regarded
as kings. A tribal presence such as
Lovocatus and Catihernus hint at would naturally
regard their leader as of royal rank, though
probably a teyrn rather than a gwledig.
(Forty years earlier, Rigothamus had taken his
royal title to the war of the Loire.) Again,
the fact that their presence left apparently
undisturbed the Roman power in the Church must
mean that they lived in a still basically Roman
society (though Armorica had always been rather
at the edge of Roman civilization in Gaul) and
may have represented only a part of the Ambrosiad
power in the land, the rest of which probably
expressed itself in Roman rather than Celtic
forms. I see Ambrosiad Brittany as
representing, like the rest of the Ambrosiad
“Empire”, a compromise between a still
upheld Roman ius and the effective
military power of the tribes, with their Celtic
law and culture. We remember that I argued
that the English saw Britain as a patchwork of Wealhas,
Latin-speaking Romans, and combroges,
Celtic-speakers; this suggests the same pattern
in Brittany, as well as the reason for it –
regiments of tribal Northern levies were taken,
with their chieftains, to live in and defend the
Roman lands south of York. This is the
“historical compromise” that Arthur
wanted to smash, in the name of an all-Celtic new
order.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
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