The Northern Memorandum

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Anglo-Saxons, Arthur, Arthurian, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, post-Roman Britain, sub-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain, Urien

The discussion about Arthur’s existence has been active since Geoffrey of Monmouth made him a European sensation in the mid-eleventh century. For many, it revolves around his mention in Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae, which is now generally believed to have come from the Northern Memorandum. Personally, I’ve approached the question from several angles no one had ever thought to so it’s not necessary for me to believe that the hypothetical source is early to know Arthur existed. That also means I’m less likely to be biased toward making it any earlier than it has to be. To business; the veracity of both sources depends on the Northern Memorandum written within the lifetime of an individual.

I say this because it has been suggested that people during this period might have lived a hundred years or more, as long as they were able to avoid wars and disease. Between 526 and 547, Britain suffered three major plagues or famines. Between 410 and the time of Gildas’ De Excidio Britanniae, the Germanic migrants expanded west to control what in later times would be Northumbria, Essex, a good portion of Wessex, Sussex, East Anglia, and Kent. And the Germanic peoples were not Christian at that time so that they saw monasteries as storehouses of wealth only. By 632, when Cadwallon would run roughshod over Northumbria, northern Britain was cut off from Wales, suggesting Mercia had expanded to the western coast. Safe to say that nowhere on the island was there a region that could have avoided disease, poor crops, or war for more than a decade. And of course the very young and the very old would have been the most likely to die during plagues, famines, or conquests.

Statistical fact, the average male lived to be 32 and the average female 28 in the first couple centuries of post-Roman Britain.

All that out of the way, we know that the rare churchman could live to be as old as 80. Unlikely as that seems, it means he could have been witness to an event he saw at 5 and wrote it down at about 80. More likely, a person would remember an event from 15 on, but we’ll stick to the extremes. That way whatever dates we come up with won’t be edited for a wider range.

The first dated historical event in either Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae is the Battle of Arfderydd, dated to 573. A boy aware of the event at the time might have recorded it as late as 648. The last northern British dated event is the death of Dunod in 595, and therefore the earliest possible date would be 595. Thus Run, or a monastery associated with him, likely scribed the original Northern Memorandum in 595×648.

Professor Koch long ago suggested a means by which a British history could have been brought into Germanic hands and made use of without bending it to a strictly Germanic bias. At some time after 664, Alhfrith revolted against his father. He was dead by 671. Alfrith was possibly a descendant of Urien according to the Historia Brittonum, which means he might have had access to British records. Modernizing the history for the purpose of showing his ancestry and winning the support of British nobility would have been an excellent motivator for a Northumbrian to put in the details about Rieinmellth marrying a Northumbrian.

However, as he died in 671, the Germanic genealogies end during Ecgfrith’s reign, and the last event of Germanic concern is 685, it’s also a safe bet that the history was rewritten in 685 or later.

There is also one curiosity in the history of the theoretical Northern Memorandum; Patrick is one of three religious figures mentioned in prominent roles (Rhun as the author and Germanus as the nemesis of Vortigern being the other two). But Patrick serves no known purpose for any British history written between 595 and 648. Nor would Alhfrith or Ecgfrith have had any political motivations. In fact, one might argue the British would have had more reason to mention other British saints, while the Northumbrians would have been more likely to name Columba or Aedan. Add to this that Arthur’s presence seems to be interwoven with the Arthurian entries and we are given the suggestion that these two may have been part of a still earlier recension. Is there any evidence as to its date-range, or even that there was an earlier recension? Nope! Just a thought.

For now.

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The New Economic System

Tags

Ambrosius, Arthur, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain

As has been seen, Roman Empire’s administration had been exemplary. Rome’s founders had erected a stable bureaucracy that possessed an intelligent set of checks and balances which adapted over time and changing circumstances. As it had transitioned into an empire another group of far-sighted lawmakers had adapted the government so that it could integrate new provinces and cultures. By 400, every local government from Britain to India had a variation of the Roman model.

Through foreign and domestic wars, its income had also been stable. Taxes had been individually assessed based on personal holdings and then collected in the form of coins. Tradition had made the wealthy elite responsible for local administration as well as local project funding; forums, baths, public buildings, and roads had all been a part of their normal responsibility.

At the provincial level, money had been used to pay for the hospices along the highways that were used by official travelers as well as craftsmen, artists, and traders. Reserves were left alone in case of emergency. The empire paid the military and the officials who had been publically educated, but the senators came from wealthy families and had been given nothing for their public service by tradition.

Then Constantine had displaced the Roman governor and his bureaucracy and installed his own. When the Romano-British citizens revolted and overthrew Constantine’s government, the provincial government collapsed. Severing the connection with Rome meant no more income, no military support, and only limited contact with the empire. Dismantling the provincial government meant no local military or political order.

The local governments had remained intact and functioning through all that. However, throughout the last half-century of Roman rule the wealthy had been either immigrating to the continent or their country villas in Britannia where they had stopped performing public service. By 410, most of them were no longer contributing their resources to the villages and towns.

The departure of the wealthy from public life was just as catastrophic as the loss of provincial government. The wealthy had maintained local buildings and roads throughout Britain. Without them, all of these things fell into disrepair. Their business relations had kept them connected to other settlements and to the greater empire. Without them, villages were suddenly isolated.

As we have seen, the core of Roman civilization was education. Teaching a single language and mythology united the upper class in a common culture that spanned across the empire while educating the most talented among the poor at the public’s expense and then pushing them toward government positions had ensured a high level of competency at all levels of government. It had also made government employees unusually loyal to Rome.

However, the grammatici and the rhetorici that had done the teaching had been funded by the education of the rich, so without them the teachers would have had no patrons in Britain. Probably, some of them remained behind and found work where they could (Gildas’ education is proof of that), but those who insisted on their traditional income were forced to leave for the continent.

Along with the political changes came economic adaptations. Coins had been coming to Britain for centuries as pay to government officials and soldiers. They had then spent their money on the island and dispersed the new money. But as of 410 Britain was no longer part of the empire and received no more shipments of coin.

Judging by the wear of later Roman coins, money was used for a long time after the last shipments – we think it was still in circulation until maybe 430 or 440. They were used until no one could read them any more. After that, the Britons drifted into a bartering system as it was practiced among the Irish and had been among the pre-Roman British – with a female slave, a milk-producing cow, and an ounce of silver as equal standards of exchange.[i] Bartering meant that trade would be more limited from that point on; artwork, specialists, and weapons were still easily transportable, but cattle were the most convenient unit of exchange and they were more difficult.

For centuries Britannia had been protected by the Roman military, but the military had been paid by Roman coins and those were no longer free flowing after about 407, which means that whatever official military forces Constantine had left behind had probably dispersed long before 420.

During the last few decades of Roman Britain, the foederati had been protecting the eastern and southern coast from pirating and raids. They had been paid by food and supplies as well as coins, and probably by more and more trade items after 407. As we have seen, even these protectors would eventually revolt and conquer the very lands they had been protecting. That would leave the Britons on their own to protect themselves with homemade spears, bows designed and used for hunting, and any sharp household objects they could find.

The new economic system was local in the extreme – with a bartering system in place it had to be. It also ensured that the social, military, and even political aspects of post-Roman Britain were also local. Public buildings and roads crumbled from no maintenance. Local governments went from a well-educated bureaucracy to an informal group of town elders. The effect was as significant to them as the sudden loss of internet would be to us in the modern world.

[i] The exact equivalencies seem to have varied by region and time but the basic exchange, the bartering dollar, was the female slave/milking cow/ounce of silver.

Growing Pains of British Kingship

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Arthur, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain

British kingship seems to have been a reaction to Germanic migration and settlement – the timing is right and the motivation makes sense. The historical fact is that the British had developed primitive kingships by the end of the century. If they had not, they might have all been speaking Anglo-Saxon in another hundred years.

There was much more to Celtic kingship than just a military leader who lived in a hall. A king not only had to be a good warrior and leader, he had to come from a long line of strong kings; which is why lineages often consisted of famous heroes of the area as well as the actual royal ancestors of a dynasty. The Irish law texts say he had to make consistently correct judgments in legal matters for his people. He could never turn his back in battle. He could not lie or tolerate bardic satire. His body could have no blemishes.

Kings had to be all these things because of their connections to the supernatural. A Celtic king did not just rule his kingdom; during his inauguration he literally married the land in the form of a woman, and legend had it that for the rest of his reign she would reflect his rule by her appearance. He married a young and beautiful woman because he had demonstrated to his clan and the people that he was the best candidate for the position. As long as he behaved like a king she would remain youthful and attractive, but if he ever lost his kingly virtue she would become an old hag until he was replaced with a worthy king.

This connection to the land as symbolized by a woman gave the king an authority beyond the question of normal humans, putting their kingship and by extension their clan above question as rulers in the eyes of peasants. When Celtic kingship developed, though, it had taken time to develop. Bards had gradually added people and stories, of actual ancestors and adopted ones, to each kingdom’s official history along the way. The mystical elements probably developed after dynasties were long established. As Vansina has demonstrated, anything beyond living memory can be easily changed and rechanged as local politics and events occur.

The Britons of the Post-Roman era did not have the luxury of time as they reestablished their original culture, though. The Germanic tribes began migrating onto and controlling villages from around 441. The result was that the British kingships that did emerge did not have the solid foundations necessary. It would not have mattered how good their bards were at creating impressive genealogies and personal histories for their first generation kings or reinvigorating the mystique behind kingship. The simple fact was that in the late fifth century people still remembered a time without kings.

And because kingship was such a new establishment for the Romano-Britons, fifth-century kingships would have been based almost solely on the personal chemistry between the chieftain and his men. When he died, or even when he lost too many battles, that chemistry could dissolve and any person who was able to generate a new bond might succeed him. A son, brother, or cousin might have succeeded him but that was only one of several possibilities. A nearby king might absorb the teulu or a former champion might assert himself. It may never be possible to list all the petty chieftainships that arose in the late fifth century, or the ways in which most of them disappeared from history.

On the other hand, the fact that none of the early kingships were stable is probably one of the main reasons why the early British kingdoms grew so quickly; without a strong tradition there would have been no kingdom identity among villages and therefore no resistance to changing kings. The unique situation of the fifth century would have allowed a ruler to simply absorb a chieftainless teulu just as easily as a victorious king could absorb his dead enemy’s villages.

1 Corpus Iuris Hibernici, ed. David A. Binchy, (Dublin, 1978), 219.17-18.
2 Ibid, 15.2-3.
3 O’Rahilly, “On the Origin of the Names Érain and Ériu”, Ériu 35 (Dublin, 1946b), 11-13.
4 Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, (Madison, 1985).

Heroic Age Politico-Economic Politics

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Ambrosius, Anglo-Saxons, Arthur, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain

In 1912, Hector Chadwick dubbed the period between Alaric’s sack of Rome and the Cadwallon’s campaign of 632 the “British Heroic Age”.[i] He then compared it and the Anglo-Saxon Heroic Age to the Greek Heroic Age. When a scholar studies the literature of both insular cultures of the time it is hard to deny that many of their values and attitudes are identical to those found in the Iliad and other Greek literature from the same era.

However, an heroic age is more than simply a consistent philosophy about life and death, it is a complete political and economic system. At the center of the heroic age is the king. It is his personality and personal charisma that bonds the warriors together in the first place. His reputation and the confidence inspires villages to pay tribute. His successes in battle and the loot he acquires raids are what attract new warriors to him and allow for his fame and his band of warriors to grow from a handful of warriors to dozens.

The cult of a specific individual is what allows for kingship to develop initially, but a king who rules solely by the force of his personality can only survive for so long. In the modern world many leaders have had personal charisma, but many have not. Leaders are able to lead because of two key elements – tradition and the moral authority to rule.

The British chieftains that emerged after Roman rule had neither a tradition nor a moral authority over the people. They had authority over villages only because they had an army and the villages needed protection. They controlled their army because they had the money pay them and the warriors’ respect. When any element in that chain faltered, their ability to rule disintegrated.

Which is why bards among the Britons, Irish, and Picts and skops among the Germanic tribes were an invaluable element of society for kingship – they gave the illusion of moral authority and tradition to the early kingships.

We have no direct knowledge of what both groups were taught as part of their educations but they were probably similar. They were probably taught all of the essential myths and legends of their people as well as hundreds of lesser stories. They probably also picked up as many current events as they could – battles, raids, generous and stingy kings, silver-tongued and ugly warriors, anything that might prove useful in the king’s hall. We can be confident that both groups were also taught how to create extemporaneous poetry quickly using hundreds of motifs and pneumonic devices. They were shown techniques that helped them adjust to different audiences, time limits, and even values.

Any person who completed their formal education would have had all the tools to become an excellent entertainer. He, or she, could tell myths and legends in many different ways, keeping the old stories fresh by stressing different themes and perspectives. They could create new stories and poems to praise their patrons as events occurred.[ii]

We have to keep in mind, though, that the bard and the skop were much more than just entertainers. Their ability to innovate gave them an almost mystical reputation among their people – what they said was the truth and the power of their words made what they predicted inevitable.[iii] The education also made them natural historians; ancient peoples who kept no written records made little or no distinction between mythology, legend, and history.

In the late fifth century among the Britons and the mid-sixth century among the Germanic peoples, their significance was magnified. Both culture groups had not needed kings for at least three generations and were only just beginning to reintroduce them. In that context, the historians infuse the new group of chieftains with a respectable lineage several generations deep. This was possible because of the relatively short life-span of the average person at the time,[iv] and the fact that any history beyond the lifetime of the oldest member of society was extremely flexible.[v]

Asked to construct a lineage for his king, a bard would begin with the information that was widely known – probably all of the current king’s accomplishments and his father’s name. Beyond that, a bard was free to insert famous local kings into his king’s geneology. This gave the king’s warriors and the villages under his protection a sense of consistency by reinforcing the belief that their leader was not only an excellent war-leader but that he came from a long and rich tradition of legendary ancestors.

Bards and skops were also responsible for creating the illusion of a kingship’s sanctity. Family history was part of that role because it demonstrated a king’s right to rule. However, the office of king itself was sacred. The two cultures did this in different ways, but the common denominators were that the clan from which kings were chosen had divine favor and the man chosen as king was believed to be the most favored.[vi] Secondly, part of the inauguration ritual included marriage to the land. Among the British the land was symbolized by an old hag who transformed into a beautiful young woman when married to the right king.[vii] For the English the king married a deity, Freyja, and so there was no transformation.[viii]

Among the Celts legend had it that the wife, and the land she symbolized, would remain youthful and beautiful for as long as the king ruled well. Knowing that, a peasant only needed to look at his own fields to be reassured his king had divine grace.

Marriage to the land made for an effective image. However, daily reminders like praise poems were also useful because they could approach the same subjects from different angles and served many different purposes: To reinforce the king’s stature as a generous and successful leader, to point out the unique talents of his men, to support the bond between a king and his warriors.

Warriors were an essential part of the equation. While a king’s personality might attract warriors and win tribute it was the warriors’ willingness to stand beside their leader and often die in battle that made kingship successful. Achilles was once offered the choice of living a long life and being forgotten when his children died or dying young but enjoying eternal fame; he made the same choice as every other heroic age warrior. Their numbers made it possible for the king to defend villages from raiders and eventually to make their own raids. The warriors’ presence helped to enforce the agreement between king and villages for food and supplies. Without them, the king had nothing.

These villages, and the villagers who populated them, were the foundation of every kingdom. Each year they produced the grains, honey, bragawt, livestock, labor, and smiths that kept the king, his warriors, and his servants fed, sheltered, and armed. Without their support British kingship could not exist. The mutual need of all four groups – king, bards, warriors, and villages – is what made the system work.

One other element was absolutely necessary for British kingship to survive – an enemy. The original reason for kingships was the raiding and settling of the Germanic tribes and Irish princes. Both groups were real threats in the middle and late fifth century. But, as has been seen, the Irish had lost interest in Britain by 500 and evidence will be produced that Germanic tribes had stopped migrating into Britain by then. Both groups probably still conducted raids into the sixth century, but by then they had likely settled into a pattern of stealing livestock and defending their own cattle from other villages.

As has been seen, the British chieftains also took part in raiding British as well as Irish, Germanic, and probably Pictish targets. Raiding helped a king develop a reputation as a battle leader and a man who was able to take booty. What is normally overlooked is that the act of raiding also served the raided kingdom. If foreign kings could be beaten off it would enhance the defender’s reputation, but whether he was successful or not, raiding parties could be portrayed as the new enemy; without the king to defend the peasants those raiding parties would have attacked the villages themselves.

Every element in the heroic age system was a necessary one. The king’s charisma and leadership ability bonded the warriors to him and made the villages believe he could protect them. Bards lived on kings’ largesse but provided them with a geneology of famous local kings and tapped the divine nature of their position while using their skills to entertain. The warriors were attracted to kings because of their abilities and their wealth. In return they went into battle with them, putting their lords’ lives before their own.

All three groups were fed, clothed, and paid by the villages. In return for a small portion of their annual crops as well as some livestock and labor they had a king who was sworn to protect them. That protection might not have been as secure as it had been under the Romans but it gave them more safety than they had enjoyed since the Romans while demanding fewer resources than raiders took.

Despite the interdependence of the different groups the system was still fragile. It might have been based on ancient traditions, but it was new. Bards were invaluable in making the political shifts an accepted part of British culture. But changing attitudes took time.

That may have been one of the reasons for the witch hunts of around 500.[ix] We know that they existed because we know that “witches” existed. Samson killed one in the Vita Samsoni.[x] Arthur killed a great one in Culhwch ac Olwen,[xi] and he and his men attack nine in “Preiddeu Annwn”.[xii] St. Martin initiated the movement in the old empire during the fourth century with attacks on pagan temples and groups of non-Christians.[xiii] Later on bishops, priests, and occasionally secular rulers led campaigns against them for their own reasons.

[i] Chadwick, The Heroic Age, (Cambridge, 1912), 105-9.

[ii] West, Indo-European poetry and myth, (Oxford, 2007), 30.

[iii] The bard’s power was considered so potent they could predict the manner and time of death. This made a displeased bard one of the most fearsome things in the Celtic world; Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, (Dublin, 1988), 49-51.

[iv] Wells, Bones, Bodies and Disease, (London, 1964), 179.

[v] Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, (Madison, 1985).

[vi] Binchy, “Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship”, (Oxford, 1970); Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity, (Manchester, 1970), 174-220.

[vii] Bugge, “Fertility myth and female sovereignty in the weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell”, CR 39.2 (University Park, 2004), 198-218.

[viii] Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity, (Manchester, 1970), 27; Chadwick, Origins of the English Nation, (Cambridge, 1907), 237-8.

[ix] Johnson, Origins of Arthurian Romances, (Madison, 2012), 100-36.

[x] The Life of St. Samson of Dol, trans. Thomas Taylor, (Llanerch, rep. 1991), books 26 and 27.

[xi] Culhwch ac Olwen: An edition and study of the oldest Arthurian tale, ed. Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, (Cardiff, 1992), 1206-1227.

[xii] “ ‘Preiddeu Annwn’ and the figure of Taliesin”, ed. and trans. Marged Haycock, SC 14/15 (Cardiff, 1984), ln. 14.

[xiii] Stancliffe, Clare, St. Martin and his Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus, (Oxford, 1983); Vitae Martini, 13.9, 14.1, 14.3-7, 15.1, and 15.4.

The Irish in the Fifth Century

Tags

Ambrosius, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, post-Roman Britain, Sub-Roman Britain

At the western edge of inhabited Europe Ireland was in a unique position; all of its trade and any outside information had to first go through Britain. Throughout Ireland’s history that had caused no real hardship – the Britons and the Irish were distant cousins after all. They had traded, raided, and swapped stories and myths with each other.

However, during the Roman occupation the Irish’s perspective of Britain had changed. Trade had still occurred, but Irish raiding parties had no chance against a single Roman ship. Roman legionnaires moved too efficiently and fought too intelligently to make good targets, and Roman cities were always well guarded.

The Picts had enjoyed similar relations with the Britons during the pre-Roman period, but unlike Pictland, the Irish had never been threatened with invasion. This meant that the Irish were never forced to band together into a loose confederation so that they could remain independent. Instead, the lesser threat implied by Rome stimulated a slow and stable centralization of Irish power into four major kingdoms – Ulster, Connaught, Leinster, and Munster. These kingdoms would remain stable and intact throughout the medieval period.

As the author mentioned above, when the security of Britannia began to weaken during the fourth century the Irish, Germanic tribes, and Picts united to make attacks on it. The dramatic change from difficult to easy and profitable target might have been all the incentive the Irish needed to elect or fight among themselves for the position of over-king. Muiredach Tírech and his father Fiacha Sroiptine are the most likely rulers during the raids of 367 and 383. Legend and tradition say very little about what they actually did, though. Nor do they give us much about Eochaid Mugmedon and Crimthann mac Fidaig, who followed them. We can guess at their power, though. They might have had the respect of every king in Ireland. They might have even collected tribute from all the kingdoms sporadically. However, high-kings could not have actually ruled all the Irish kingdoms in any sense we would understand. Instead, it is probably better to see the position as more of of first among kings than the political equivalent of an emperor, if it even existed. The simple fact that Patrick had non-Irish colleagues in Ireland demonstrates that political fact.

Niall, son of Eochaid Mugmedon and known to history by his epithet “of the Nine Hostages”, followed Crimthann. Active in the second quarter of the fifth century, Niall was probably the most powerful Irish king of the post-Roman period. Legend says he made raids into Gaul, but that is impossible; Gaul was still a part of the Roman Empire at that time and there is no mention of him on the continent. Other historical evidence indicates that he attacked Pictland.

Niall was not the only Irishman leading raids into Britain during the fifth century. In fact, as we will see below Irish raids and occupations occurred all over the western coast of the island during the fifth century. These were each led by different people coming from different kingdoms with no clear strategy, making it clear there was no true over-king controlling the attacks.

There seems to have been a single mindset to most of the attacks though; they were not initially interested in conquest and settlement from the outset. If they had been, the entire western seaboard south of Hadrian’s Wall would have been open to them as the British kingdoms would not develop kingdoms for decades after 410.

More likely, the attacks were initially for prestige and money. The author mentioned above that succession worked through ithagenic inheritance; all male descendants of a previous king were eligible for the kingship up to three generations. Within that group of candidates, kings were chosen based on popularity, war-band size, wealth, and success in battle. Given that set of priorities, the Britain of the late fourth century and the early fifth century would have been a bonanza, the easiest way for a prince to gain a battle reputation and earn enough wealth to become an attractive candidate.

However, soon there were raiding camps in Britain; bases from which to launch a series of attacks and collect their loot before the voyage home. Dind Traduí in Cornwall may have been one of them; it was close enough to Tintagel that it could have raided the tin, oil, and wine going to and from it. Likely the Dyfed and Gwynedd kingdoms started off as convenient places to stage attacks on Roman trading vessels heading up the western coast of Britain. Brycheiniog originated as an inland Irish kingdom. The Vita Columba suggests that Dal Riata, in modern Argyll, began as a pirate haven for several clans or clanless groups.

Niall was succeeded at about mid-century by his son Lóegaire. Tradition has it that he was the high-king that Patrick converted, so it only makes sense that we know more about his activities than those of any predecessors. Strangely, the records of Lóegaire’s era contain not a single raid into Britain. This suggests two possibilities; either Ireland became an easier place to gain a reputation or Britain became a more difficult target in his time. Lóegaire’s several known insular battles on the one hand and the rise of kingships (see below) on the other suggests that both options might be accurate appraisals of the situation.

Lóegaire probably died about a decade later. From that time, his brothers appear in several battle references. The picture their notices create is of Niall’s clan fighting to retain its position as the most powerful family in Ireland. The annals say Coirpre the son of Niall succeeded Lóegaire, but was followed by Aillil Molt of the Uí Fiachrach only a few years later. The outsider high-king is connected with many battles against Niall’s grandsons according to the Irish annals before finally dying at Faughan Hill over two decades later.

The details of the Irish struggles are beyond the purview of this book. What is important here is that during the last half of the fifth century Ireland went from politically stable to unstable. For Irish princes that would have meant that their home had plenty of opportunities to win the fame and warriors necessary to become a king and Britain was no longer necessary. The Cornish site was abandoned before 500 and Anglesey was conquered from the Irish by the Gwynedd dynasty around then as well. Presumably the reason that a fledgling king was able to do so was because the Irish were no longer committed to keeping it.

The dynasties in Dyfed and Brycheiniog managed to remain on the island permanently. Our limited records indicate that by 500 they had both intermarried with native dynasties at that point and assimilated to the British culture before the sixth century. That possibility will be explored more fully below.

The cause and effect of the Irish in Britain is only speculation of course, we don’t have any personal memoirs or even enough official records to really know what was happening in the British Isles, let along why. What the theory above does have going for it is that it meets with the facts as they are currently understood. In the latter half of the fifth century the Irish were fighting amongst themselves and by about 500 the Irish had lost enough interest in their British holdings for them to be abandoned or easily conquered. Apart from a branch of the Connaught family migrating to Dal Riata in the mid-sixth century, Britain would be relatively safe from the Irish for the rest of the early Middle Ages.

Dal Riata itself would be a different story. As a scattered grouping of islands, peninsulas, and shallows the region was a perfect home for pirates because it was a difficult area to navigate. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, Dal Riatan raiders probably attacked Pictish, Irish, and British targets without any serious reprisal. Dal Riata’s geography simply made an invasion too hazardous. Even the Pictish kings, intent as they had been on attacking all areas to the south during the fifth century, seem to have left the neighboring region of Dal Riata alone.

On the other hand, the very same geography that made Dal Riata a difficult target and therefore an excellent base for pirates would also make it a problematic region to bring under one king. It would take nearly another century and a strong-willed Irish abbot to manage that feat. Until then, Dalriada’s pirates would remain an economic thorn but a political nonentity in Britain.

1 All along the Roman Empire’s borders, her simple presence seems to have inspired political turmoil and eventual unity as cultures struggled to present a united front against it in hopes of better resisting conquest. Ireland was simply longer lived in its unity because it was never touched by the Germanic migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries.
2 Byrne argues that the position of high-king did not become a political reality until the ninth century; Byrne, The Irish Kings and High-Kings, (Dublin, 2001), 70.
3 Patrick is traditionally given four ecclesiastical colleagues in Ireland – Auxilius, Iserninus, Secundinus, and Benignus – and they were already operating in Ireland when he arrived. However, there is also no question that Patrick converted the “high-king” Lóegaire. If the high-king had actually ruled all the Irish kingdoms then any Christian missionary coming to Ireland would first need to convince him that Christianity was the superior religion. As that clearly had not happened, Lóegaire at least could not have been the over-king he claimed to be.
4 Byrne, The Irish Kings and High-Kings, (Dublin, 2001), 78-9; Hughes, “The Church in Irish society, 400-800”, A New History of Ireland Vol I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, (Oxford, 2005), 306-8.
5 Byrne, The Irish Kings and High-Kings, (Dublin, 2001), 76-8; O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, (Dublin, 1946), 220.
6 Johnson, Hengest, Gwrtheyrn, and the Chronology of Post-Roman Britain, (Madison, 2014), 36-8 and 132-5.
7 Hughes, “The Church in Irish society, 400-800”, A New History of Ireland Vol I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, (Oxford, 2005), 306-8; Byrne, The Irish Kings and High-Kings, (Dublin, 2001), 81.
8 It was traditionally believed that Einion Yrth, son of Cunedda, had completed the conquest of Anglesey from the Irish at about this time. Professor Koch’s work on Marwnad Cunedda has demonstrated that Cunedda was a figure specifically from Berneich, leaving his traditional son Einion Yrth as the founder of the Gwynedd dynasty as well as the man who forced the Irish out of Anglesey; Isaac, “Cunedag”, BBCS 38 (Cardiff, 1991), 100-1; The Gododdin of Aneirin, trans. and ed. John T. Koch, (Cardiff, 1997), cxxi-cxxiii; Cunedda, Cynan, Cadwallon, Cynddylan: Four Welsh Poems and Britain 383-655, ed. and trans. John T. Koch, (Cardiff, 2013), 72-3.
9 Johnson, Hengest, Gwrtheyrn, and the Chronology of Post-Roman Britain, (Madison, 2014), 122-3, 127-8, and 134-5.

The Germanic Foederati of the Fifth Century

Tags

Ambrosius, Anglo-Saxons, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain

Beginning in the fourth century the Roman Empire had been settling Saxon tribes along the southern and eastern coastline to keep the shipping lanes in the English Channel open and stop other Germanic tribes from pirating. In exchange for food, supplies, and their own land within the empire they functioned as Rome’s navy there. The foederati installations worked well, too. They worked hard and forced the raiders to work harder and each new tribe that was settled made the system more effective.

The Romans had hired the Saxons because they were the best seamen of the time. That is not why the arrangement worked so well though. For the Saxons, the attraction was not the easy food and supplies or the fighting. The big appeal was the empire itself. Decades ago, people thought that the Germanic tribes had overrun and destroyed the Roman Empire. The truth is that the empire collapsed internally. Some tribes, like Attila’s Huns, did despise everything Roman.

Not most of them though. Most tribes held the Roman Empire in awe and served it till the end. Many of its best and most loyal generals, Stilicho and Aetius among them, were of Germanic descent. For the Saxons who settled on the British coast, being a foederati was more than income. It was a chance to live within the empire. They realized that they would never become Roman themselves but they could hope that their children might.

However, the sequence of events that would lead to the end of Rome was already in motion when the first foederati settled in Britain. As we have seen, Saxon raiding did affect trade and the attacks by Picts, Germanic tribesmen, and Irish – both individually and together – did make living conditions less appealing. The fourth century would see many of the richest Romans moving back to the continent. When they left, the public structures they were responsible for stopped being maintained. With them went a level of romanitas as well. The arrival of Saxon foederati also coincided with the first generals being elected as emperor. Each time a new man was declared emperor he took as many Roman troops as he could in order to go to the continent and pursue his claim.

What that meant for the foederati and their families was that they saw less of what was Roman, what impressed them. They saw fewer regular soldiers and were supervised less because there fewer around. When they traveled they did it on roads that were no longer pristine, and when they arrived they saw public structures that were slowly falling apart

No contemporaries mentioned the foederati during the coups of 383 and 406-7. They probably stayed at their posts patrolling the English Channel and keeping a look out for raiding parties in the best Roman tradition as their Roman and more civilized employees selected new emperors, installed new governments, stole garrison troops, and left for the continent. It strikes this particular historian as ironic that even while every successful Roman general was ripping the empire apart while he tried to become the next emperor, the outsiders were doing what they could to protect the empire’s borders.

Their devotion to duty did not matter in the end though. The barbarian attacks came again around 410. The Roman citizens still overthrew Constantine’s government and invited Honorius to send a new bureaucracy. Honorius still told the civitates of Rome that they were on their own, leaving local villages to keep the foederati supplied with food, clothing, and tools.

At first the events of 410 would have had little effect on the Saxons. Their employers still spoke Latin, were a part of Roman culture, and acted Roman. Local villages probably could not support the foederati, but the Roman Empire would have set up storehouses to store surplus grain and other supplies in case of a drought. The locals could have used them and replenished as they could while they waited for the Roman Empire to return in force and reestablish order.

However, the Roman Empire never did come back. It struggled along for six more decades, but never had the strength to bring send soldiers and another governor to Britain. The surplus foederati materials were exhausted within a few years. Local villages and civitates may have been able to work something out for a few years after that, but it was nothing permanent. By 441, they would have been tapped. It was not, as Gildas would have us believe, the incompetence of a single man that allowed the Germanic peoples to invade Britain. Nor was Bede correct, that the brilliant manipulations of another man created the opportunity.

Britain fell to the Germanic tribes because the British people made a series of intelligent decisions based on an incomplete knowledge of their situation. They also had no foreknowledge of how their decisions would play out. Their only serious mistake was their inability to find a way out of the situation they had put themselves in.

1 Goffart, Barbarians and Romans 418-584. The Techniques of Accomodation, (Princeton, 1980).
2 Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons: 350-1064, (Oxford, 2013), 44-5. He sees three phases of the Germanic presence in Britain: Within the structure of the Roman Empire, alongside Romano-British materials, and new sites ancestral to Anglo-Saxon settlements.

Back to the Britons

Tags

Bede, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, Hywel Dda, Kentish Source, Merfyn Frych

In 825, Merfyn Frych (Marvin the Freckled) assumed the Gwynedd throne and started a new dynasty there.  By 829 he had patronized the Historia Brittonum.  Merfyn’s writers made use of a northern chronicle probably written down by Rhun the son of Urien, but as far as the first few decades after Rome left his historians were left with Gildas, and Bede.

Bede had used the Kentish Source to flesh out the character of Vortigern.  Kent had used him to justify her primacy, while he had broadened that to the legitimacy of the Germanic peoples.  Merfyn had different goals though.  He probably didn’t know that Gildas had been guessing with the superbus tyrannus, but he did know that Vortigern, the name Bede had used, was the name of an important king in the Powys dynasty.  That was important for him because his alliance with Powys was so close that he had married a Powysian princess.  It wasn’t in his best interests to harm Vortigern’s reputation.  In fact, he would have wanted to protect it.  We can’t know what Merfyn put in his Historia Brittonum, no version of the original has survived.  It was probably pretty positive though, with a good spin on the escapades of Hengest and Vortigern – Vortigern’s son might have been introduced just to keep the negative away from him.  Who knows, maybe Arthur’s twelve battles were originally assigned to Vortigern.

 

 A couple hundred years later, his descendent Hywel Dda was the most powerful man in Wales.  He ruled from Dyfed instead of Gwynedd.  He also had designs on Powys, not an alliance with it.  When he got ahold of the Historia Brittonum he probably cut most of what Merfyn had and replaced it with Gildas and Bede’s stuff.  Then he added a few more things to make it clear that Powys’ progenitor had been morally weak and religiously worse than a pagan.

Alfred also had access to the Kentish Source when he wrote The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but he accepted everything he found without editing it for his own designs.  He also accepted any information he could find on Wessex and Sussex’s history, which is why we have such early dates for some their rulers.  Some of the information is even very accurate, like the battles of the late sixth century.  Of course Alfred didn’t really care what Sussex and Kent’s histories were or how true they happened to be.  In his time, the Danes had conquered most of England and he was the only Anglo-Saxon king left.  His Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was written as a sort of communal history for the Germanic people.  All he cared about was showing them that they were united by a common history and culture so that he could united them under his banner and beat back the Danes.  That was why he faithfully presented the people of Kent as the first leaders.

The fact is that Gwrtheyrn (his Welsh name) was a ruler of mid-sixth century Dubonnia – that’s around the Wye river in Wales.  He was a powerful man in his own time, maybe even powerful enough to control England south of the Thames all the way to Kent.  When Powys developed a dynasty it absorbed his names into their king’s lineage to make it sound more prestigious.  It’s funny how one of Gildas’ broad titles blossomed into the pathetic figure we know today as the man who gave away England to the Anglo-Saxons.

A Short Unhistory of Fifth Century Britain

Tags

Gildas, Hengest, Historia Brittonum, Horsa, Post-Roman, Vortigern

So, the traditional history of Post-Roman Britain:  The Romans left, somehow a tyrant took control of the island within a decade or so, and between 449 and 456 he decided he needed help keeping the Anglo-Saxon pirates, Pictish raiders, and Irish settlers.  So, he hired two brothers (Hengest and Horsa) to do some of the work for him.  They did well, beat back everyone he threw them up against, and asked if he (Horsa died early on) could send for more men (At this point our tyrant must have been at least 60, but moving on).  The tyrant oked things, so more Anglo-Saxons came over.  Within years the elderly tyrant had married Hengest’s daughter, gave away Kent as a dowry, lost a son to fighting against the now-rebellious Hengest, and was fighting a defensive war against an overwhelming enemy.  Later legends accuse him of Pelagianism (believing in Free Will) and a number of other moral, religious, and ethical crimes.  When he finally does die, it’s considered a turning point in the British war against the Anglo-Saxons.

Wow!  A guy strong enough to unite a broken province being attacked on all sides was too weak-willed to keep mercenaries under his thumb and too stupid to see he was being manipulated.  That’s quite a biography!

You’ll remember I spoke a few weeks ago about how all the sources of the period had their own biases, and how when each source added in their own knowledge they manipulated the previous knowledge to their own purposes?  The tyrant, commonly known as Vortigern now, is a perfect example of that.

Gildas wrote probably in about 530×545 by most approximations.  Now, in a world where few things were written down and no one lived over 80, he couldn’t possibly have known anything much before the introduction of Aetius in his story.  In fact, Vortigern’s story doesn’t even show up before then.  It also makes sense that he wouldn’t have known much about Britain too long before he was born.  That means that Gildas was making the best use of what he knew and thought he knew to make sense of the world before then.

Gildas knew that the Germanic peoples living in Britain had started out as foederati.  It had been common policy in the Late Roman Empire to do that, and he gives several instances of knowing exactly how foederati worked.

What he didn’t know was when the foederati had come.  Gildas was a part of the Latin tradition.  He wrote in Latin and had been trained to write like a Roman.  Even Christianity was a Roman religion for him.  He might have mentioned issues with Rome in his letter, but in his time the Germanic tribes were threatening to overrun Britain.  It was inconceivable to him that the Romans could have created the situation Gildas was a part of.  So he took what he knew and what he thought he knew and made a history out of it.

Foederati could not exist without a strong central authority to supervise the food and supplies getting to them.  Therefore there had to be a central authority.  As Gildas didn’t know his name he just called his ruler superbus tyrannus, Great Tyrant.  He didn’t know the names of the tribal leaders either, but then again they were barbarians so he didn’t care.

Hengest and Horsa, AEsc and Oisc

Tags

Anglo-Saxons, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain

Who was Hengest?  A legend fragment that seems to be related to Beowulf suggests he was a banished chieftain.  The Gildas-Bede-Historia Brittonum–The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tradition would seem to confirm the latter.  And that seems plausible; there is no point in moving across a sea unless there is a reason to leave home.

The easy connections end there, however.  As vague as Gildas is about the dates when the first Germanic foederati arrived, he makes it perfectly clear that Hengest and his cohorts do come after the Romans leave (while Gwrtheyrn is overlord of Britain in fact, but that particular anachronism has been otherwise discussed).  Gildas is here wrong.  We know from the archeological and Rome’s historical evidence that there were foederati in Britain as early as 300.  We also know that the last recorded chieftains were Fraomar and one Ansehis, a name easily miswritten as Anschis and from there possibly corrupted to Hengest.  But I’ll get back to that.

Gildas wasn’t real big on names, so it should come as no surprise that he mentioned no additional Anglo-Saxons in his history.  It’s disappointing, however, and makes for a difficult reconstruction of early post-Roman Britain.  Added to that, the Germanic foundation legends were necessarily oral (Christianity in 616 would introduce writing for the first time), and oral legends about the history of a dynasty tend to follow a consistent pattern that makes for good reading but poor history.

The pattern works as follows.  First the founder of the line is named and his traditional accomplishments recounted.  Then history is really bent and twisted.  Very little is usually known about a founder’s ancestors as anarchy tends to precede the foundation of a family, so the hole in the past is exploited.  In order to add strength and prestige to a dynasty, any and all famous warriors and kings of the past might be added to the beginning of a lineage.  So for instance if the U.S. had gained its independence in an oral climate and had decided on a monarchy we might have recorded that Miles Standish had been Washington’s father and Daniel Boone his grandfather.  Pocahantas would have been named as his divinely inspired mother.

The Kentish royal line was known as the Oiscingas.  Oisc was therefore the founder, and most likely was an historical figure.  Nothing before that can be believed, however.  That point must be clear.  Hengest, Horsa, and AEsc could possibly have been Oisc’s ancestors, but only if they had been noteworthy leaders in their own right who had been remembered for one or two accomplishments.  That any of those men were ancestors to Oisc is about as likely as Standish being a real ancestor of George Washington.

What do we know of the Germanic people in Kent before Oisc?  If they are otherwise identifiable (which is unlikely), Hengest was likely the fourth century figure Ansehis:  It seems reasonable that there was a prominent chieftain in Kent during the mid-fifth century rebellion, and AEsc is the most likely candidate.  If Oisc was the grandfather of AEthelberht (another assumption), he was active in the middle of the sixth century.  Reasonably he could have been contemporary to Gwrtheyrn.

The Written History of the ‘Historia Brittonum’

Tags

Ambrosius, Anglo-Saxons, Arthur, Arthurian, Gildas, Historia Brittonum, King Arthur, Post-Roman, Sub-Roman Britain, Urien

One of my first big lessons in graduate school was that sources, no matter how much useful information they have and despite how early they were written, can never be taken at face value.  Take the Historia Brittonum, for instance.  Written in about 829, probably by a monk named Ninnius (as Professor Dumville has educated us, he was not named Nennius), in Gwynedd.  In the preface he says that he has simply compiled everything he could find into a history.  It is an attractive confession.  The history provides a complete history of the British people from their first immigration and through the Roman withdrawal.  It then goes into great detail about Vortigern, Hengest and Horsa, St. Germanus, and several other individuals and kingdoms of the post-Roman period, providing a wonderful background for the British of the period.

The problem is, people in the ninth century didn’t write histories just to write them.  Generally speaking, histories were politically motivated.  In 829, King Rhodri Mawr was in his fourth year as the ruler of Gwynedd.  His accession had marked the foundation of a new dynasty, and the history served to solidify his position by strengthening the kingdom’s history.

Further than that, the Gwynedd of the ninth century was the most powerful British polity.  In the wake of continuing Anglo-Saxon incursions, Rhodri saw it as Gwynedd’s responsibility to unite the British kingdoms against them.  Seen from that perspective, the history’s choice of entries makes consistent sense with a sensible goal; when united the British were unstoppable, when divided they were vulnerable.  To that end there is an entire chapter devoted to Urien, who is credited with leading an alliance of prominent British kings against the Anglo-Saxons much like Rhodri hoped to.  Cadwallon, too, is mentioned as uniting many of the British kingdoms and allying with Mercia in attaining supremacy in the north.  A descendant of Urien is recorded there as attempting to usurp the Northumbrian crown.

It showed support of its own kingdom with a chapter devoted to the original foundation of Gwynedd, demonstrating a connection with Rome, a legitimate conquest of a foreign power, and the actions of strong early kings.  The history showed support for Powys in the St. Germanus chapter, where the saint himself was credited with legitimizing the foundation of the Powysian dynasty.

Just from the above background it’s clear that Ninnius lied; he didn’t just throw together anything he could find.  Even the original entries about Vortigern were put there for a reason; Rhodri Mawr married into his dynasty.

But the original history was not the final draft.  The Historia Brittonum was rewritten in the tenth century, again for political reasons.  At that time Dyfed was the dominant British power and her king wasn’t as much interested in a British alliance as a Dyfedian empire.  Dyfed wasn’t interested in conquering one, either.  It’s rulers instead used political tools to attain their ends.  They were clever to, never attacking Gwynedd directly as their dynasty was descended from it.  They also didn’t have a new history written, they edited the old one to their advantage.  

The new version began by attacking Powys, whose territories they coveted.  It was in the Dyfed version where Vortigern was first attacked.  Following Bede he was blamed for the Anglo-Saxon invasion.  Here, though, he was additionally accused of allowing his lust for a woman to lead him into giving away Kent, slept with his daughter, allowed his son to fight off the Anglo-Saxons as he cowered, and finally called for the death of a fatherless child before the great hero Ambrosius showed up and defeated him.

http://medievalbex.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/the-arthurian-tradition-historia-brittonum/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum