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Introduction: Sources
and their Treatment
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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This book is dedicated to
Donatella Barbieri and her family for being good
people, and to Debbie*Wallace.
Darkness lies over the earliest
English and Welsh history. One awesome cry
of pain, the polemic of the British Saint Gildas,
comes from a time shortly before the English
conquest; one Welsh monastic writer, three
centuries after him, makes a compilation of a few
Latin sources known to him, themselves mostly
legendary and, when they are not, Irish and
English in origin, and does his best to make
sense of them; his name might, or might not, have
been Nennius[1]. And that is
all. On the English side, little exists
before the tremendous phenomenon of Bede: a great
genius indeed, but more than two centuries
removed from the birth of his people, and, like
Nennius[2], either unable or
unwilling to consider any source not in Latin for
the earliest histories of Britons and English. A
scanty few Greek and Continental sources supply a
scanty few dates; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, even
later than Bede, recovers a few tribal traditions
he had not seen fit to take down; hagiographic
legend mentions saints and kings, with what
credibility it is often hard to assess. (One such
hagiography, that of Saint Kentigern/Mungo, may
have a few things to tell us.).
But from the moment the Roman
Emperor Honorius, caught between several rocks
and hard places, gave the local administration of
Britain (ciuitates) unprecedented leave to
organize their own defence without imperial
authority - an act that was widely interpreted as
a grant of independence - no coherent historical
narrative exists. The curtain falls over Britain,
still a Latin country and a Roman province, in
410AD; and it rises again with the arrival of the
first Archbishop of Canterbury, to a country
divided between Teutons and Celts, in 597. Even
then, historical narrative only reaches the
islands in stages, along with the return of the
Roman church. Coherent accounts are scarce
for Wales and the Welsh-speaking lands (Brittany,
Cornwall, Cumbria, Strathclyde) before the ninth,
the tenth, even the eleventh century.
What is left then? Archaeology, of
course; but more importantly, a considerable
literary heritage. Nennius, Bede, Gildas,
Saints lives, chronicles, bardic poetry,
bardic legend, and Geoffrey of Monmouths
majestic reworking of mostly lost lore: these
may, individually and collectively, be dubious,
dangerous or surely false as direct historical
narrative - but they are literature. Therefore
the tools of literary scholarship may be used on
them, and - so long as we treat them for what
they are, and not allow ourselves to take for a
direct historical source what is clearly not - do
a lot towards discovering actual historical facts
or developments. Sources may be elucidated,
showing which parts of a narration are the
authors own work and which the work of
others; discrepancies discovered, indicating that
the author has misunderstood his source,
therefore discovering important facts about both.
Authors views of their past may be
clarified; so may the views of their sources,
showing how the former and the latter differed,
and what the difference has to tell us about
intervening events. This can show us the social
and ideological assumptions held by the various
authors, and discover their personal feelings
about their time and people. They may, as a work
of supererogation, suggest actual and definite
events, or even give unexpected credibility to
the odd fragment of legend. And once the results
from these various individual analyses are
brought together, along with the data from
historical and archaeological sources, they may
form a considerably more elaborate and detailed
picture than we thought possible.
The approach I will follow is not
exactly new in the field of history. It
represents, in my view, the joining together of
two well-known kinds of investigation: Quellenforschung,
investigation of sources, which has been for
generations the staple of Biblical, especially
Old Testament, studies; and the literary and
psychological investigation of text, which is
coming more and more into its own as a major area
of historical research. To quote a few examples I
have read and appreciated, the eminent classicist
G.W.Bowersock used it to great effect in his
remarkable Fiction as History; Erich
S.Gruen, another eminent classicist, made telling
use of literary analysis in Heritage and
Hellenism; and Paul Strohm, Tolkien Professor
of English at Oxford, made a telling and almost
revolutionary contribution to medieval studies -
overturning, it seems to me, several accepted
facts - in his Englands
Empty Throne: Usurpation and the language of
Legitimation, 1399-1422.
I mention these three books
because I am familiar with them, but I have no
doubt that they represent a more general progress
in the study of history, in which text is
approached primarily as text and not just for the
direct actual data it can supply. What I think is
peculiar to the present study, however, is the
determined use of Quellenforschung to
recreate a whole bookshelf of lost sources, and
the cumulative use of conclusions already reached
to establish new facts. This makes for a
formidable bulk, for which I do not apologize.
The study of no single text in isolation - not
even Gildas or Nennius or Geoffrey of Monmouth -
is capable of giving us a reliable picture of any
part of this mysterious past of ours; as too many
scholars have found out. It is necessary to use
every available source, and to use each of them
separately, at least at first, to gain all the
information it is capable of giving us. Also, the
process of investigation is part of the
demonstration itself: a reader who started
half-way through the book would simply not
understand how and why I reach my conclusions and
the weight of evidence for them.
The texts available to us vary
greatly, as we would expect, both in quality and
in length, from mere scraps and folktales to
powerful and refined works of literature; and
each, therefore, demands to be treated in
different ways. The literary approach suitable to
great and accomplished writers such as Bede and
Geoffrey of Monmouth, or to a soaring poet such
as the historical Taliesin, or even to a
self-taught but brilliant preacher such as Saint
Patrick, would be wasted on the scraps of data
and mere annalistic detritus that forms so much
of Nennius; which is not to say that attention to
the way that Nennius assembled his material, or
to the differences of style in various chapters
will not pay dividends. (As a matter of fact, one
chapter in Book 6 will consist of nothing but a
word-by-word analysis of several Nennian
chapters.) Nennius tells a little about Gwynedd,
a lot about Powys, and next to nothing about
Dyvedd, south Wales and Cornwall. This must be
borne in mind when finding, for instance,
Geoffrey "of Monmouth" delivering a
completely non-Nennian account of
"Cunedagius" - the final G is an
archaic element of the spelling - and the life of
Cadoc shows a lively and individual Arthurian
tradition apparently unknown to the author of the
Historia Brittonum. They probably were
picking up on South Welsh matters to which the
earlier compiler had no access, either because of
war or of poor communications with the South.
It is worth paying attention to
the fact that Nennius was held to be very
authoritative for three centuries, translated
into Irish and widely attributed to the hallowed
authority of Gildas the Wise. Jejune though his
accumulation of documents may seem to us, the
tenth century seems to have disagreed; which is a
reason to treat him with some respect. Also, some
writers are more relevant than others; I will
only pay attention, for instance, to certain
chapters of Geoffrey of Monmouth, without wanting
to make an analysis of his whole work. Each work,
in short, demands its own particular kind of
attention and analysis.
The greatest writer of our corpus,
with apologies to the genius and holiness of
Bede, is the earliest: Saint Gildas, an almost
unknown literary giant; and it is after him that
I intend to style the heart of the period I am
studying thus far inelegantly and
irrelevantly called sub-Roman:
Britain before the English will, from now on be
Gildasian Britain in this book. But I
will begin not from him, but from the mysterious
person we call Nennius[3], a Welsh cleric who,
about 834AD, wrote is an oddly mixed little book
in seventy-five extremely short chapters,
covering all sorts of things from the origins of
mankind to a small but colourful selection of
travellers tales.
Nennius choice of materials
is curious. That he says nothing at all about
Gwynedd is explained by the fact that he was
certainly writing for a Gwynedd audience, in the
fourth year of King Mervyn (about 830AD) and
expected them to know all about it anyway. He had
more to say about Powys, and a lot about Builth
and Gwrtheyrnion, two tiny twin kingdoms about
the headwaters of the Severn and Wye. But he says
almost nothing about South Wales and contemporary
related countries, Cornwall, Brittany,
Strathclyde, Cumberland. What is more, the
tales of miracles and oddities with which he
fills his last few chapters almost all come from
South Wales and the Bristol Channel area, proving
that he found them as alien and legendary as
darkest Africa. Other areas are developed at
surprising length for a document that is mostly
more in the nature of a summary than of extended
narrative; in particular, there is so much about
the history of English Northumbria that the
narrative is left quite unbalanced. A number
of notices about the north of Britain (where the
ebb and flow of English conquest from Northumbria
left for centuries a number of Welsh-speaking[4] principalities, of which
Strathclyde was the most enduring) have no
chronological framework, but have, in recent
year, drawn the interested glances of scholars.
Later manuscripts of Nennius bear
a Preface describing his work and the sources he
used. Professor David Dumville attacked its
authenticity with powerful arguments: it is
almost certainly a well-made piece of fiction in
which an eleventh-century editor takes on the
authors voice to explain to his
contemporaries what must have seemed, even then,
an odd and unwieldy piece of historical
writing. The range of materials available to
the eleventh century was already much larger than
that from which the author of the Historia
Brittonum had had to work, and the editor
took it upon himself to apologize for his author
(as editors do), explaining in
Nennius voice what problems he
had met. The editor assumes (a mistake that
has dogged every reading of Nennius since) that
the reason for Nennius very peculiar
selection of materials is that he did not have
that much available: Coacervavi omnes quod
inveni, he says: I, Nennius,
gathered and piled up every record I could lay my
hands on. This involves a value judgement on
his predecessor: as these records seem to have
mostly been English and Irish, I find
myself forced to say that Doctores
insulae Britanniae - the learned of the
island of Britain, that is of the Welsh nation - nullam
peritiam habuerunt, used to have no knowledge
[of the past] whatever. Editorial cleverness
stretches to the use of a typically Nennian word
- peritiam - for knowledge, item of
information; but all these are statements
that anyone who had read the Historia
Brittonum with any care could easily
make. The predominance of English and Irish
records, especially for the sixth and seventh
centuries, is blatant, and what British records
Nennius knew are fragmentary, flagrantly
legendary, mutually contradictory, and have
little and sometimes nothing to do with the
Classical historical tradition that dominated
mediaeval minds.
The writer of the Preface divided
Nennius sources into five separate
headings: 1) Annales Romanorum; 2) Chronicae
Sanctorum Patrum; 3) scripti Scottorum;
4) scripti Saxonum; and, 5) traditio
veterum nostrorum. It is important to
understand the kind of documents Nennius worked
from. If we took the terms of the Preface
for what they mean to us in the twentieth
century, with our libraries full of mediaeval
texts from every part of the Christian West; then
the five headings - Roman annals such as
Orosius; the vast medieval production of
hagiography; the considerable annalistic and
hagiographic tradition of Ireland and the
kingdoms of England; and a less easily defined
but not negligible body of inherited native Welsh
legends - would make Nennius a formidably learned
figure by any standard, and his book a terrible
disappointment. Yet the Historia is
in fact visibly assembled from many different
sources, and the sources named in the Preface can
be clearly recognized as separate strands in the
collection; as I said, the Preface is a clever
piece of fiction, written by someone who had read
the text with care. Nennius really did read
several separate books, assembling their accounts
with as much order as he could achieve. It
is just that the annals and traditions that he
consulted had not reached anything like the
elaboration and complexity of later annalistic
tradition. They represented an earlier
stage, coming in a few cases directly from a
vaguely Christianized pagan British Celtic
tradition; others may have been shreds of decayed
and largely lost documents, or even - as I will
argue in the case of ch.30 - confused memories of
books read by the author considerably earlier,
whose originals he no longer had available.
But one thing cannot be emphasized
enough: what we are talking about is a written
tradition. Not a single Nennian passage can
be shown not to derive from written
documents. It is too easy to imagine an oral
origin for obviously legendary narratives, but we
should never forget that the ancient Welsh could
read and write (or at least their leading classes
could, which for my purposes comes to the same
thing), and that they carried on - with their own
modifications - the institutions of a religion,
Christianity, based on books. The techniques
of research we need are not those of Axel Olrik[5] so much as those of
Erich Auerbach[6]. Even texts of
decidedly oral origin, such as the early Welsh
poetry of Taliesin and Aneirin, passed through a
written phase long before the earliest
manuscripts we have; they also must be regarded
as having a close affinity to written text in the
sense that their text is largely fixed, through
demanding memory techniques, in much the same way
as Sanskrit sacred poetry, which remained both
oral and largely unchanged for
centuries. Even more to the point, these
texts existed as part of a book-writing culture,
and cannot be treated as though - even at the
time of their creation - writing were not a part
of the highest-status activities of the culture
(namely learning). The historical Taliesin[7], the earliest of all
known Welsh poets, calls his patron Urien
in truth the king of the baptized world[8]; baptism is part
of Christianity, and Christianity creates a
learned (priestly) class of book readers and book
writers. In other words, the historical
Taliesin may not have mentioned books and priests
in his poems (they were not the sort of thing he
made poetry about), but he damn well knew that
they existed.
Of all Nennius material, the
easiest parts to unravel are the Irish and
English strands; we have a good deal of similar
material from England and Ireland
anyway. Nobody will reasonably contend that
the legend of Patrick or of the four conquests of
Ireland are not of Irish origin, or that (pace
the late John Morris) the stories of Hengist and
Horsa and the dynastic lists of various English
kingdoms do not come straight from English
documents, with some elaborations of
Nennius own doing[9]. It is more
important and more interesting to try to assess
what other documents, otherwise unknown to us,
were known to Nennius or in his possession when
he wrote.
The first reference to a source
not Irish or English or otherwise known to us, is
that to the annals of the Romans in
his chapter 10. For four centuries before
Nennius, the study of time-reckoning was a major
academic field throughout the Roman and
post-Roman Christian world, stimulated by the
need to achieve a uniform measurement of the time
from the life of Christ, and by related problems
such as settling the date of Easter. A
by-product was the writing of annals,
lists of years with their main events. There
is nothing strange about the existence of a set
of Roman annals; but the content
Nennius ascribes to them is worth quoting it at
some length, to show what kind of document these
annals were, and what view we should
take of them.
... in the annals of the
Romans, it is so written: after the war of Troy,
Aeneas came to Italy with his son Ascanius, and,
having overcome Turnus, took Lavinia, daughter of
Latinus son of Faunus son of Saturn, for a wife,
and, after the death of Latinus, took the
kingship of the Romans or Latins. Aeneas
moreover established Alba and then married his
wife [there[10]], and she bore him a son
called Silvius.[11]
Thus far, this is a reasonably
accurate account of the Roman national legend,
apart from one understandable blunder, the
disappearance of Picus from Latinus
genealogy[12]. Now it gets
interesting:
Silvius also married a wife,
and she became pregnant, and it was announced to
Aeneas that his daughter-in-law was pregnant, and
he sent word to Silvius his son that he should
send word to his magus to examine the
wife, and discover what she bore in her womb,
male or female. And the magus examined the
wife and returned. For that prophecy the magus
was slain by Ascanius, for he told Ascanius that
the wife bore in her womb a boy, and he would be
a son of death, for he would slay his father and
his mother and be hateful to all men. So it
happened...[13]
We need go no further to prove
that we are suddenly into a different world. From
the point of view of Roman legend, the blunders
are scarcely credible. Aeneas only reigned over
the Latins three years before being taken up to
the gods, or killed: the notion of his surviving
to see his sons wife pregnant is
preposterous. What is more, Nennius knew this,
and reported Aeneas three-year term, with
no apparent sense of incongruity, in the very
next chapter. Conversely, his son Ascanius
reigned for fifty years - it must have
taken him a long time to bear his son of
death!
No less significant is the fact
that the previous few sentences had clearly
understood the difference between Ascanius, who
was with Aeneas before he reached Latium, and
Silvius, born in Alba (Silvius, not
Ascanius, was the actual forefather of the Latin
kings in Alba Longa, while Ascanius was the
ancestor of a priestly dynasty in Lavinium); but
suddenly the two are confused and - though the
narrative is not clear - seem to become one and
the same; unless we are to take it that Ascanius
murdered the magus for bringing bad news
about his half-brother.
I dont need to belabour the
point. This is a rather clumsy attempt to insert
a native origin legend of Britain into the
Classical framework, making the founding hero
Britto, or Brutus, a previously unknown grandson
of Aeneas, and indeed an heir of the Roman royal
line (since he is the first-born son of the heir
Silvius). The legend itself is highly Celtic in
type, with the exotic word magus thinly
concealing, as it does so often in Welsh and
Irish Latin, the native Druid of the royal
household, sent to predict the fortune of the
heir. The murder of such a personage - druids
were sacrosanct in pagan Celtic courts - opens
the sequel of misfortunes that include the death
of Silvius and his wife, and the exile and
wanderings of their son, Brutus exosus,
Brutus the universally-hated.
The chapter that follows (11) is
an unobtrusive and intelligent effort to
harmonize Roman and British traditions further,
for it names the successor of Silvius and brother
of Britto as Posthumus. According to Dionysios of
Halikarnassos (1.71.1) and Livy (1.3.6-7),
Silvius successor was Aeneas Silvius;
according to Virgil (6.767), Procas Silvius;
according to Ovid, Latinus Silvius. The name
Posthumus does not appear in any Roman dynastic
list known to me, except that the first Silvius
was sometimes known by the name. Posthumus means
born after his fathers death,
there can be no doubt it was meant to designate
Britto/ Brutus younger brother, born after
Brutus had already committed his unintentional
parricide.
The author of this chapter had
access to a good annalistic tradition: he
correctly gives Aeneas time as ruler of
Latium as three years, and is aware that all the
kings of Alba after Aeneas son were named
Silvius. It was placed next to the Annales
Romanorum entry by someone with access to
more sources and a better understanding of them -
probably Nennius himself.
This means that the legend in
Chapter 10 is certainly not by Nennius.
And this agrees with his own witness: he claims
to be quoting an earlier document called Annales
Romanorum (in annalibus autem Romanorum sic
scriptus est) and to be quoting it word
for word - sic scriptus est: so [and
in no other way] it is written. Now, quite
apart from the sudden fall into un-Classical
legend, here the chapter suddenly acquires a
style quite unlike most of the rest of Nennius: a
style, quite frankly, of ghastly ugliness, but
hideous in very idiosyncratic ways. It has a
dreadful habit of repeating words and expressions
in successive sentences: Aeneas autem Albam
condidit et uxorem duxit - Silvius autem uxorem
duxit; ut mitteret magum suum ad uxorem
considerandam - et magus consideravit uxorem,
and so on. Practically all the entry is built out
of these jejune repetitions. Repetitions may be
found in other Nennian passages, but to nothing
like this extent[14] (except, as we will see,
in a passage that probably came from the same
source); and their consistency indicates the hand
of a conscious, if perverse, literary artist who
was not Nennius.
The repetitions suggest to me the
rhythms of song or chanting, possibly a heroic
lay, in which the repetitions would be balanced
in lines rather than merely strung out in
continuous prose; this immediately suggests a
literal translation of a lost Welsh-language poem
about the woes of Britto/Brutus. We notice that
personal names grow much rarer when the native
material is introduced; Brittos unfortunate
mother is never named, nor is the magus,
and Silvius and Aeneas are often described only
as pater or filius; as if the
author had other names in mind, and in order not
to slip - and indeed, not to confuse his public -
preferred to refer to the characters only by
their relationships. That is to say, he
identified legendary Roman figures with native
ones. But the bad style is equally present in the
first few sentences, the ones which come from
genuine Roman tradition. Therefore this is not a
translation, but rather evidence of a manner.
This is the way in which the author of the Annales
Romanorum would tell a heroic story, whether
in Welsh or in Latin.
This conclusion is reinforced when
we realize that the unknown author, in spite of
his grotesque Latin style, is a very good
storyteller, with a fine understanding of writing
for effect. Withholding the prophecy of the magus
until after Ascanius has murdered him increases
its force. We know that it something horrible
before we ever hear what it is; nor does the
revelation let us down, for surely no worse
horror can be imagined than a child fated to
murder both his parents. There is also the power
of extreme economy in the two words that follow, sic
evenit, so it happened. Though they open
another period, they do so in an admirably dry
and firm manner, like the stroke of a dead bell.
This man could tell a story; he just could not
tell it in Latin[15].
These, then, were the so-called
Annals of the Romans. They did not
belong to a primary Roman or Continental
tradition, but represent rather the attempt of
some unknown Welshman or group of Welshmen, at
some point between the age of Gildas and that of
Nennius, to harmonize native traditions such as
the legend of Britto with some sort of Roman
history textbook. The text does suggest that the
unknown author had read Roman annals of some
sort: the information about Aeneas in the first
few sentences is correct enough, but only as much
as might be expected from an annalistic entry,
nor does the writer show more understanding than
such a basic source might have given him. He had
not read Virgil (he knows nothing of
Virgils invention of the town Laurentum) or
anything of like complexity. And he was almost
certainly the first to attempt to marry British
and Classical tradition - at least, the first he
himself knew of. He was drawing on no other
mans work. The rough edges and uncorrected
blunders, as well as the Welsh style clearly
perceptible under the Latin, clearly suggest that
he had no previous example to correct, that he
was the first. But he felt the work had to be
done: though quite unaware of Classical elegance
and variation, he clearly saw the Roman tradition
as primary, and sought, not to graft any Roman
branch on a British tree, but, to the contrary,
to insert a British twig - if a noble and
impressive one - in the great oak of Roman
traditions.
Were the Annales Romanorum
actual annals, written in chronological form?
Heroic verse had little to do with plain
annalistic style; but, except for the style,
there is no reason to doubt, and that is easily
explained. Our author wished not only to join his
national traditions to the great learning of the
Mediterranean, but to do so in the high literary
manner; and this suggests that he was
disappointed by the bald and unadorned form in
which his source had cast the high history of
Rome. But however he may have felt about his
source, he prized at least its testimony of a
great past. He may have taken it upon himself to
rewrite every entry; he certainly did so with the
important episode of Aeneas. Stylistically, he
failed, since the manner of his time - whatever
its origin - was pretty nearly everything good
Latin prose ought not to be, but the attempt is
visible. (Metrical chronicle, after all, was to
become a major literary form in the Middle Ages.)
He would also have been unhappy about the lack of
information about Britain to be expected in a
late-Roman chronicle[16]; and as he went to
native Welsh accounts for information, he
evidently regarded them as reputable sources,
comparable in truth if not in dignity with the
great Mediterranean frame of history.
As for Nennius himself: if one
thing is clear, it is that he treats the Annales
Romanorum exactly as he treats Irish and
English annalistic. He is unaware of their Welsh
and comparatively recent origin, betraying no
sign of doubt, reading them as an old book of
unquestioned authority. Indeed, he seems to
regard them as more authoritative than the
alternative source quoted in chapter 17[17], which he places as it
were in appendix. For this there are two possible
explanations: either that the Annales had
been written in a far away country of which
Nennius knew nothing, like those parts of
South Wales of which he told such curious tales;
or that they had been written before the horizon
of living memory.
Now the author of the Annales
evidently had no direct contact with any living
Classical culture. He almost certainly got his
learning from one single source, annalistic in
nature, which he valued enough (as a source of
information) to want to rewrite it in what he
considered the high style; in other words, when
the Annales Romanorum were written, a
single annalistic text was a precious treasure.
The age of Nennius was different: Nennius sat
down to write with at least three different sets
of annals (the Annales Romanorum and at
least one item each from Ireland and England) and
sundry other documents in front of him. It
follows that the author of the Annales
Romanorum must have lived at the height of
Welsh isolation, in the long obscure period in
which Wales was separate from the Roman church,
and therefore from international European
culture, and had even drawn the irritation and
contempt of Irish ecclesiastics[18]; in which they were
talking with nobody. Now the later seven hundreds
were an age of rapprochement, completed in
768 on the initiative of bishop Elvodug of
Gwynedd (claimed by the Preface to have taught
Nennius himself). The late six or early seven
hundreds seem a good guess for its date[19].
Nennius had an orderly mind,
though his methods need some explaining. He opens
chapter 10 with a clear statement that he knew of
two separate traditions as to the first men to
reach Britain. Chapter 10 was one: Nennius took
it, because of its Roman colouring,
as the more trustworthy account, and accordingly
placed it as the first item in what he regarded
as a canonical list of British peoples and their
origins. Nennius first nine chapters had
been dedicated to an account of the general
chronology of creation and mankind; chapter 10
was the first of what we might call an
ethnography of Britain and surrounding islands.
From 10 to 15, each chapter details the origin of
one of their nations - Picts; Scots of Ireland;
Scots of Britain; even a brief mention of the
Saxons, who could not be left out of any list of
peoples of Britain, though their origin would
have to be treated later. Chapter 16 wraps it up
with a chronological calculation of the date of
King Mervyn of Gwynedd.
Having completed its overview of
contemporary British peoples, Nennius then turns
back and warns the reader that, however much more
credible the Roman account may be,
there is another peritia of British
ethnogenesis in existence. Chapter 17 is surely
this other peritia, tradition. It is not
an oral account; it is written, ancient, and in
Latin, ex veteribus libris veterum nostrorum,
out of the ancient books of our ancients; and
therefore not to be disregarded, however unlikely
it may sound to educated contemporary
ninth-century ears. In effect, chapter 17 is in
the nature of a footnote. In other words, Nennius
aligned together all the traditions he could make
to fit each other, not necessarily in a
chronological order - the ethnography of Britain
in chs. 10-16 includes accounts from different
supposed dates - but in a clear one at least.
Where he had one which absolutely did not fit, he
placed it at the end of the group of chapters to
which it was an alternative. Not having such
devices as footnotes, it was his best way to
signal incompatible material.
His historians desire to
make as much of his material as possible agree,
however, led him to a considerable amount of
harmonization. Britains name was said to
have come from the first ancient hero to have
settled the island, known, from Nennius until the
enlightened eighteenth century, as
Brutus, a prince from Aeneas family. He was
the hero of a long and complex legend told first
by Nennius himself and then, at far greater
length, by the immensely influential Geoffrey of
Monmouth. Now, his original name was not Brutus
at all; Nennius sometimes calls him that, but he
uses at least as frequently the name Britto.
Britto is the standard late-Roman noun and
adjective (plural Brittones) for anyone or
anything from Britain. The poet Ausonius, a Gaul
from Bordeaux - then as now a main sailing port
for Britain - uses it as standard for a Briton;
more interestingly, two centuries later a
Frankish embassy in Constantinople hoaxed[20] the historian Procopius,
who knew of the greatest of islands
only from literary sources, into believing that
his literary Brettania was different from
an island called Brittia, close to
Gauls shores and inhabited by Brittones.
The word Brittia is clearly a
back-formation from britto; therefore the
Franks of 530-550 or so knew Britto, Brittones
as the word for people from Britain, and
specifically for Romano-Celts (the passage
distinguishes the Brittones from the Angiloi,
English, and from the Frissones,
Frisians).
The name Britto, clearly formed on
the ordinary national name or adjective, is a
typical founding-hero name, like the Ion
of Euripides tragedy and the Israel
awarded to Jacob after he wrestled with the
angel; whereas Brutus is clearly a
secondary form. By the time Nennius wrote, this
change of name was already on the way; in fact,
the evidence shows that he must have contributed
to or even decided upon it himself. He first
mentions the hero, calling him Brutus, in chapter
7; now ch.7 is surely Nennius own work, his
systematic medieval Christian account of human
origins. In the non-interpolated, original part
of ch.10 the hero is definitely Britto and no
other name is used; but this is the part that
Nennius, as we have seen, copied word for word
from the Annales Romanorum. The chapter,
in various manuscripts, is followed by a number
of interpolations, which all ignore the spelling
Britto and go for Brutus; which shows that by the
tenth and eleventh century, when they were added,
Brutus had become the standard spelling. In
chapter 11, Nennius uses Britto, probably to
agree with the previous chapter, which ch.11 was
meant to correct; he is Britto again in the vast
and wholly un-Classical genealogy of the European
nations in chapter 17; but in the following
chapter (probably interpolated), he is Brutus - Brittones
a Bruto, the British [are named] for
Brutus.
The move from the natural and
native name Britto to Brutus, Roman and unnatural
(you cannot derivate the sounds britto or Britannia
or even Prydein from Brutus - the
two Us and the N are in the way), is parallel to
the insertion of Britto/Brutus legend,
which we have agreed was native, into a framework
of Roman historical legend. Nennius stopped for
us, as it were in a photograph, the process of
normalization away from the archaic and native
spelling into the regular Latin name, by a
process of guesswork that argued that, if the
ancestor of the Britons came from the Troyans of
Latium, then his name must have been recognizably
Latin. Just as such savants as those who wrote
the Annales Romanorum and the Historia
Brittonum had made up their minds that their
national founder had to be inserted into Roman
historical traditions, so too one or more of them
decided that his name had to be a normal Roman
name: not the eccentric and probably barbarous Britto,
unknown as a personal name to the Roman annals
they consulted, but the widespread Brutus, which
shared at least its consonants, and which
belonged to not one but several celebrated
figures of Classical history. The fact that the
most famous Brutus was a murderer, and that his
victim Caesar was rumoured to be his physical
father, may also have influenced the choice of
name for a hero who killed his own father and was
exosus, universally hated; certainly
Caesar, the supposed first Roman conqueror of
Britain, loomed large in Nennius mind.
The consistent keynote of Dark and
Middle Ages thought was the effort to fit the
various traditions inherited from half a dozen
barbarian cultures, from the Church, and from
mere folklore, into the Classical frame of
learning which, however deformed and only
half-understood, dominated all minds. In this
respect, both Nennius and the author of the Annales
Romanorum are in the mainstream of Mediaeval
thought, however strange and alien their products
may seem to us. The Historia Bittonum is
quite clearly based upon a selection of
previously existing Latin written evidence.
However much respect he may show towards five
early Welsh poets he obviously regarded as
classics[21], nothing suggests that
he would use anything except written Latin texts
as historical sources. A well-known hypothesis is
that the list of Arthurs twelve battles in
ch.56 is originally from a Welsh-language heroic
poem; that is certainly possible, but it is at
odds with the rest of the book, whose sources are
all ecclesiastical, written and, so far as anyone
can tell, Latin (some at least of his Irish
sources may originally have been in Old Irish).
If such a versified battle list existed, my guess
is that it may have gone through a written stage
and a Latin translation before Nennius picked it
up, as did, for instance, the legend of
Britto/Brutus[22].
Nennius says almost nothing else
about Arthur, and the little he says comes from
travellers tales; this helps to prove my
point, since nothing is more certain than that
Welshmen of his time knew far more of Arthur than
the little he uses. His own travellers
tales include a mention, as of something everyone
would know, of the hunt of Twrch Trwyth (ch.73),
later written down in Cullhwch and Olwen[23]. The only reason for him
not to relate this or similar legends of the
great warrior king is that they were not cast in
a form suitable for Latin-language historical
writing. Had he been willing to use
Welsh-language and oral sources, the indications
are that he could have written a book several
times as long. The brevity of the Historia
Brittonum is a function of his rigorous
attitude to sources: they must be written and
Latin.
This attitude is common to
virtually every historian between the Roman
Empire and the Carolingian renaissance. Only
Latin sources, preferably Classical, are to be
used. Jordanes, the Roman historian of the Gothic
peoples, refuses to consider the fabulae
of his own subjects about their own origins[24]. Bede says nothing of
English and Welsh origins except what could be
found in the Latin writings of Gildas and the
Life of St.Germanus. Gregory of Tours fills page
after page with Roman witnesses to Frankish
antiquities, however transient, but says hardly a
word of the Frankish account of themselves; we
find out more about their legends from that
notorious fable-believer Procopius, who had been
clearly taken for several rides by one or more
imaginative Frankish ambassadors, than from him.
As for Procopius untypical willingness to
use barbarians as sources - which his Frankish
contacts seem to have thoroughly abused - the
fact is that he was not a trained historian, but
a Byzantine high bureaucrat who turned to history
to record the great (and evil) events he had
witnessed. The craft and near-priestly rules of
late-classical historical writing had far less
hold on him than on cloistered and actually
ecclesiastical figures such as Jordanes, Gregory,
Bede and Nennius.
An unspeakable amount of nonsense
has been written because of disregard of this
obvious point. Historians suspicious of any
Christian writer of history and everlastingly on
the look-out for everyone's "bias" but
their own have suspected Bede of every kind of
misrepresentation under the sun, in particular
with regard to the poor dear Welsh - to whom he
is held to have been unfair - and to Germanic
paganism, on which he is held to be deliberately
silent for nefarious purposes of his own (in
particular, not to remind the kings that in the
pagan world they were priests too). The point is
quite simply that Bede had no written or
eyewitness sources for any of those things, and,
unlike the authors of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, was not disposed to risk his neck
on unreliable oral accounts of things beyond the
horizon of living witness. His introduction
clearly shows that he restricted himself to two
kinds of source: either written and Latin ones,
or oral accounts from people close to the facts,
no more than one generation or one witness
removed from events. He says next to nothing
about the Welsh church because, as he tells us,
the Welsh did not speak to the English or even
consider them proper Christians (his account of
Augustine's unfortunate negotiations with them
must come from a Canterbury source), not because
he was hell-bent on defaming them; by the same
token, he speaks of St.Columba in tones of solemn
doubt. What would be his reason to doubt the
holiness of a man whose influence over the North
- not excluding Bede's own home country, through
his beloved Aidan - he regarded as an almost
unmitigated Good Thing? For one reason, and one
reason alone: that he had no written Latin
account of him.
The fact that Nennius shares this
attitude to the full tells us two things: first
that he belonged basically in a post-Classical
culture; and second, that his intended public was
one that shared such attitudes. Not long before,
Alcuin had blasted the predilection of some
English monks for their native English heroic
traditions, making it perfectly clear that as far
as he was concerned such things had nothing in
common with the world their minds were supposed
to inhabit; but Roman legend, transmitted through
so many church historians and annalists, did. The
history of the Roman empire, however full of
paganism and violence, touched the sacred history
of the Christian faith, in particular in that
God-given period of Augustan peace which allowed
Christ and His church to first preach the Gospel;
the very tale told in the Gospels and Acts, let
alone the subsequent history of the Church, from
the age of the martyrs to the imperially
sponsored great councils, made Roman history a
necessary part of sacred learning, excluding
alternative sources. Therefore anything in
that period that took the form of
historical/annalistic writing, had to ignore
non-Roman, non-Latin sources.
Different attitudes must have
prevailed in Wales in the previous century. The
author of the Annales Romanorum valued
Roman annalistic, but his use of Welsh traditions
tells us that he was not dominated by the same
exclusive mentality. Other possible translations
from Welsh may include the native legend of
Caesar, which Nennius edited into a framework
derived from Bede; some of the traditions
connected with the Seven Emperors who
were supposed to have ruled Britain in the days
of the Romans; the catalogue of Arthurs
battles; and the various legends of Vortigern
which will concern us further on. All of these
must, in my view, have been turned into Latin
before Nennius[25], since they are far too
few to represent a fair selection from what we
cannot doubt was an ample and vigorous native
storytelling tradition. Geoffrey of Monmouth did
something truly revolutionary when he wrote, in
Latin, a traditional history of Britain from
native legends; but that was three centuries
after Nennius.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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