PART 1
1
The Early Medieval period, still commonly (and erroneously) referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’, has often been painted in the harshest possible tones. It appears in the minds of many people as a time when civilisation faltered; a dark slide into barbarism and chaos that only the glories of the Enlightenment halted and eventually reversed.
For the British Isles, this story goes, the Roman legions left and chaos descended. The rich villas and cities the Romans had built were abandoned, warlords appeared everywhere, and then marauding bands of Germanic invaders arrived and swept all before them in a terrible tide of violence and flame. Within a generation or two the Romano-Britons were driven to the west and over the sea, seeking refuge in Brittany, while the new Saxon kingdoms sat dominant over what would become England.
This picture has, thankfully, been slowly disproved thanks to the efforts of archaeologists and historians over recent decades. However, while academic discourse has moved away from marauding hordes of invaders into more detailed debates about exactly how and why the material and linguistic culture of the Romano-Britons was replaced, at least in England, by the Germanic culture of the people we now call Anglo-Saxons, this is still the popular view of the period.
We will discuss some of the current debate further on in the chapter. For now, it is worth understanding some of the key points of what we’ll call the ‘traditional’ view of the Adventus Saxonum, or coming of the Saxons, as the Venerable Bede named it, as well as the sources that helped formulate it.
Before we get into that, though, it may be helpful to state what we do know about this, the beginning of the Early Medieval period (or Late Antiquity, as Ken Dark [Dark, 1994] and others have referred to this early portion).
In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the remaining imperial Roman forces in Britain, already weakened by a series of ill-advised expeditions by would-be British emperors, were withdrawn. This process may have begun earlier in the west of Britain than in the east and south-east, as suggested by Frere [1987] and others, but regardless by around a decade into the fifth century there were no longer any significant Roman forces in Britain. More than that, the bureaucracy and logistical innovations that helped the empire run were also absent and, in the power vacuum they left, the power of local elites experienced rapid growth.
As the fifth century continued, there were increasing numbers of raiders and settlers entering Britain from both ‘Germanic’ regions (mainly Southern Denmark and Northern Germany) as well as from Ireland. There may also have been increasing conflict with the Picts, who had always dwelt beyond the empire’s borders in modern-day Scotland.
I say that we know the above because these, the most bare-bones descriptions of events that would have been momentous and life-changing for those in the midst of them, are attested in multiple sources or have archaeology to support them. For the detail – the how, why and who that flesh out this timeline – we have to look to sources, and unfortunately for a long time these sources have been both limited and poorly utilised.
From this relatively sparse base came the idea of invasion and replacement, aided by the few finds of archaeology that can be definitively described as ‘Romano-British’ rather than ‘Saxon’. Of course, part of the problem with this is that the Saxons, at least when they first arrived, were a pagan people practising furnished burial customs. This means we have more of their goods to discover in the first place. Secondly, the crossover between goods traditionally described as Roman and those described as Saxon is now thought to be much broader than previously considered, meaning someone buried with a ‘Saxon’ brooch may in fact be a fashion-conscious Briton.
In terms of first-hand sources, as in contemporary accounts of events in Britain at the end of Roman rule, we have none. The closest source, and thus considered the primary account for many years, is that of the Briton priest Gildas. Sometime between the end of the fifth and the mid-sixth century (Guy Halsall places it around 540 [Halsall, 2013]) he wrote De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) a sermon intended to shame and condemn the rulers of Britain at the time he lived, as well as including a history of events leading up to his own time.
Gildas’ account contains much of the meat behind which the traditional narrative is formed. He describes a Britain beset by Anglo-Saxon invaders whose rulers have lost God’s favour and, as such, brought down all the many woes upon themselves.
It is, of course, also notable as one of the bedrocks of Arthurian myth, providing the earliest mention of a possible ‘King Arthur’ in the form of Ambrosius Aurelianus and describing a Briton victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon, as well as other touchstones such as Vortigern and the invitation of the Saxons to Britain.
Due to its near-contemporary date and the dearth of other sources, Gildas was, for many years, read and quoted with confidence as a true account of the events he is describing without receiving the scepticism some of his writings perhaps deserved. This has, of course, not been the case with more recent scholarly analysis, but as he is fundamental to the traditional narrative it is important to understand how he was used and (less frequently) is still used. His opening remarks set the tone for the wider work:
Whatever in this my epistle I may write in my humble but well meaning manner, rather by way of lamentation than for display, let no one suppose that it springs from contempt of others or that I foolishly esteem myself as better than they; for alas! the subject of my complaint is the general destruction of everything that is good, and the general growth of evil throughout the land; – but that I rejoice to see her revive therefrom: for it is my present purpose to relate the deeds of an indolent and slothful race.
While this quote is undoubtedly among the most severe, it is not overly exceptional in its tone from the rest of the De Excidio. Gildas was, after all, not interested in writing a dispassionate history but rather in condemning what he perceived as the moral failings of his contemporary kings.
A sometimes underappreciated reason Gildas forms such an essential bedrock for students of this period and why he was clung to so strongly is that his chosen narrative, a great empire being undermined and punished for failing to meet a perceived moral standard, could hardly have been better formed to appeal to the sensibilities of the Victorian historians. As Vance [1997] noted, history was, to the mind of these Victorians, a place to mine for allegory in order to extol the chosen virtues of the historian even if it required a selective or even ahistorical reading of the sources. In Gildas’ case, his fiery almost Old Testament-inspired rhetoric could not have hoped for a more receptive audience.
It is these historians who are responsible for forming the picture of British history that was taught in schools for generations. This is particularly true of the Early Medieval period as the Victorians found much to admire in stories of doughty Germanic invaders restoring order and civilisation to a chaotic land. This has had numerous impacts on the field, not least of which is the enduring tendency for studies of this period to focus firmly on the English or Anglo-Saxon experience.
So if we cannot take what Gildas has written at face value, is there anything we can gain from his writings?
Yes, but ironically much of what can be divined from his work would run counter to the narrative he, and many of his early interpreters, wish to put forward.
To begin with, and perhaps most crucially, the De Excidio is a written work. Not merely written, but written in a form and style of Latin which makes clear that Gildas had access to a full education in both the language and the tropes and mores of its classical use. This means that, as late as the closing years of the fifth century, there were still places of education within Britain, likely monasteries and other Christian establishments, capable of providing such an education. Indeed, we can see from other sources, such as the recent find of a seventh-century windowsill from Tintagel [‘Second inscribed stone found at Tintagel’, Current Archaeology, 2021] bearing the remains of some practice writing evidently done casually, almost as though doodling, that literacy remained present in post-Roman Britain for centuries after the end of the empire. This runs directly counter to the picture Gildas himself is trying to put forward, as well as that of the traditional viewpoint which postulates that all signs of civilisation are swept aside with literacy amongst them.
Gildas can also be a useful source to give some insight into the political landscape of Britain in his day. As mentioned, the real purpose of De Excidio isn’t to give a dispassionate historical account but rather to rail against the native elites of his time. To this end Gildas lists several rulers of Britain to single out for condemnation. He also paints a picture of a Britain fractured into a number of smaller polities, rather than a single unified Romano-British state. As Gildas puts it:
Kings Britain has, but they are as her tyrants: she has judges, but they are ungodly men: engaged in frequent plunder and disturbance, but of harmless men: avenging and defending, yea for the benefit of criminals and robbers. They have numerous wives, though harlots and adulterous women: they swear but by way of forswearing, making vows yet almost immediately use falsehood. They make wars, but the wars they undertake are civil and unjust ones.
Again his penchant for fiery rhetoric is likely painting a worse picture than may have existed but at its heart he appears to be describing an Early Medieval society such as we may recognise from the Continent or from the Mid-Saxon period of the Heptarchy. This is a world dominated by lords and kings of smaller polities and their bands of warriors. For the native Britons these bands were the Teulu (pronounced Tay-Lee) or ‘family’, a group of likely noble warriors gathered around a senior lord who followed him into battle and enacted his will. We will return to these bands and their role in warfare in a later chapter.
Returning to Gildas, his defamation of the kings is also notable because it gives us one of our first post-Roman mentions of Dumnonia, the Western Kingdom that emerges in the south-west of Britain following Roman withdrawal, with lands stretching from Land’s End to the Somerset levels and perhaps beyond. There is some debate about the periods occupied by, in the first instance, the Durotriges, and then by Dumnonia and Wessex. Specifically, Gildas states:
Of this so execrable a wickedness Constantine, the tyrannical whelp of the unclean lioness of Damnonia, is not ignorant. In this year, after a dreadful form of oath, by which he bound himself that he would use no deceit against his subjects, making his oath first to God, and secondly to the choirs of saints and those who follow them, in reliance upon the mother (the church), he nevertheless, in the garb of a holy abbot, cruelly tore the tender sides of two royal children, while in the bosoms of two revered mothers – viz., the church and the mother after the flesh – together with their two guardians.
And their arms, stretched forth, in no way to armour, which no man was in the habit of using more bravely than they at this time, but towards God and His altar, will hang in the day of judgment at thy gates, Oh Christ, as revered trophies of their patience and faith. He did this among the holy altars, as I said, with accursed sword and spear instead of teeth, so that the cloaks, red as if with clotted blood, touched the place of the heavenly sacrifice.
A number of items are of interest in this passage when examining the history of the Western Kingdom. In the first instance, it’s intriguing that Constantine appears first among the kings that Gildas wishes to chide. It may be that the above incident – which we have to assume, given the extremely specific nature of it, was better known in Gildas’ day – was so heinous that it moved him to strike there first. However, it may also reflect a degree of importance or power attributed to Dumnonia that has not previously been appreciated. We should consider that Maelgwn, another of the kings, is recorded as being ‘Last in my Writings, First in Wickedness’ and introduced with a considerable description of both his power and military success.
Also interesting to note is how Constantine is introduced: as ‘the whelp of the unclean lioness’. The implication of a powerful and influential mother behind the Dumnonian king is a tantalising prospect. However, Gildas uses lions and lionesses liberally in his work, and while sometimes he seems to intend to reference specific people (the ‘Lioness’ Revolt’ in his history is usually interpreted as a reference to Boudicca’s revolt) he also used it to refer to regions, specifically calling the Saxon homelands ‘the lair of the savage lionness’. On balance there is not enough information to argue definitively for either option; however, even the prospect of a lost Cornish Athelflaed-type character is exciting to imagine.
The actual symbolism Gildas uses here is also of note. Many of the kings are referred to using biblical animals such as lions, bears and dragons, and these come heaped with specific symbols in Christian iconography [Durandus, 1906], both for what they represent and for their eventual fates. The lion, at least in the Early Medieval period, is often a symbol of martyrdom and the Devil (for example: ‘Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk: and thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon’, Psalms 90(91):13). This can be seen most clearly in the use of lions in Early Christian writing to exaggerate their persecution in the Colosseum; events which modern scholarship largely denies ever took place. As such, associating Constantine with lions was effectively accusing him of being in league with the Devil or, more broadly, being ‘the enemy’ to God and the Christian Church.
Again, we are left without enough context to be sure, but given the strident accusations being levied it is possible Gildas is identifying both Constantine and Dumnonia as an ‘other’ even compared to his other targets.
As for the incident itself, there seem to be some contradictions in the account. For example, where Gildas describes the victims as children but states that ‘none were in the habit of [wearing armour] more bravely than they at this time’.
He also seems to deliberately conflate the idea of children being torn from their mothers’ arms with his long-running symbolism of the Church as a mother. One is left with the impression that this incident, which so enraged Gildas, may have been the ending of a dynastic power struggle. Perhaps Constantine’s victims were younger siblings with a better claim to the throne (given the potential insult to his mother, and bearing in mind similar incidents in the Anglo-Saxon period, it’s not inconceivable that he could have been an illegitimate child) who had retreated into the church for sanctuary only to be torn out and killed. There are some similarities between this interpretation and the story of the Saints Dredenau, commemorated in a chapel to Saint Geraint in Brittany, who were supposedly Dumnonian nobles murdered by an ambitious uncle. It’s worth noting that this chapel is only a few miles away from a church Gildas himself is supposed to have founded, so it’s entirely possible he would be aware of the story.
Still a brutal tale, yes. But not entirely out of the ordinary for the power struggles of both the Early and Later Medieval period.
Moving on from Gildas, there are only a handful of other sources close to the events of the early fifth century that are available to us. Perhaps the most famous, or certainly the most commonly taught, is the ‘Rescript of Honorius’. Commonly understood as the Emperor Honorius telling the Britons to ‘Look to your own defences’ in 411, this is often cited as a potential end point for Roman Britain. The simple statement, and the implied abandonment of the Romano-Britons to their fate at the hands of incoming Germanic, Irish and Pictish barbarians (those never subject to Roman rule), is often cited as further evidence for the collapse of society after Roman rule.
However, there are problems with this simplistic narrative, starting with the source itself. The Rescript comes to us through the Greek historian Zosimus, a functionary in the Eastern or Byzantine Roman Empire in the sixth century. His History is a work trying to capture the reigns of the Roman emperors from Augustine until the early fifth century.
Zosimus’ writing is far drier than Gildas’, striving to be something of a more scholarly history rather than a moral polemic. However, he was translating other sources, many from Latin, into Greek and there are reasons to believe some errors may have slipped in during this process.
For one thing, the section of his History which includes the Rescript is by far the most chaotic of the six books, leading some to question whether he perhaps died before he had a chance to edit his early draft. Additionally, the copy we have of Zosimus is not complete, missing several pages and perhaps the majority of the final book, wherein much of the detail regarding Britain is found.
Putting these items to one side, even Zosimus seems unsure about the fate of Britain. He notes several revolts by the legions in Britain putting various pretenders forward for the imperial throne and then murdering them just as rapidly, until Constantine III is proclaimed emperor and then leads a successful overtaking of Gaul, bringing most of his troops with him. From this event Zosimus ascribes a great deal of woe not directly relevant to our discussions.
Of more interest to us is that in 409, Zosimus describes the Britons, in response to the chaos on the Continent and under pressure from Picts and other raiders, throwing off their imperial allegiance and acting in their own defence:
The Britons therefore took up arms, and incurred many dangerous enterprises for their own protection, until they had freed their cities from the barbarians who besieged them. In a similar manner, the whole of Armorica, with other provinces of Gaul, delivered themselves by the same means; expelling the Roman magistrates or officers, and erecting a government, such as they pleased, of their own.
It’s interesting to note here that Armorica is mentioned along with the Britons, the region essentially relating to Brittany. We will return to this later in the book.
Certainly this description seems to fit within the wider context of Zosimus’ work. The Western Roman Empire of the late fourth and early fifth centuries was a chaotic place, besieged with competing forces trying to claim imperial titles and facing multiple large-scale barbarian incursions from beyond the Rhine. In such a context, and with the prospect of invaders on their own doorstep, it follows that the Britons may have decided that the costs of their four-centuries-old Roman identity – chiefly taxes in goods and manpower lost to hopeless expeditions beyond the Channel – were far outweighing the benefits that were becoming sporadic at best (such as coinage) or non-existent at worst (protection from external threats).
However, it seems strange if we consider the Rescript in its traditional role, as the response of Honorius to a desperate plea from the Britons. What could have happened in two years that took them from victorious and independent from Rome to suddenly desiring a return to the imperial fold?
With this in mind, the Rescript itself is perhaps worth revisiting, and this has been the subject of much academic discussion in recent years. It is extremely telling, for example, that the section of the History that the Rescript appears in is, for the most part, dealing with events on the Italian peninsula and is separated by several paragraphs from the earlier descriptions of events in Gaul and Britain.
Additionally, it is far less a clear statement (‘Look to your own defences’) than it is just one section of a longer description of Honorius’ actions:
Honorius, having sent letters to the cities of Britain, counselling them to be watchful of their own security, and having rewarded his soldiers with the money sent by Heraclianus, lived with all imaginable ease, since he had acquired the attachment of the soldiers in all places.
Given the context of the whole statement (it’s preceded by actions of the invading barbarians in Italy), and its less strident tone, it is reasonable to argue, as others have, that here we are seeing a mistranslation or mistake on the part of Zosimus, with the region in question actually being Bruttium in Italy. If true, and it certainly seems extremely likely, this robs the traditional view of one of its bedrocks.
The final source we will look at is the tales of Saint Germanus of Auxerre. Germanus was a one-time Roman governor who became the Bishop of Auxerre and then, at the urging of the Pope, undertook a mission to Britain in the late 420s to combat the Pelagian Heresy. The story of this mission, and a potential second trip of uncertain date, are recorded in two main sources. The first, the Vita Germanus, is a hagiography of the saint’s life produced by his disciple Constantius around 480, so well within living memory of the events described. The second is the Historia Brittonum, often credited to Nennius but potentially of unknown author, written in the ninth century. Both of these sources are not strictly histories; the Vita is written expressly with the goal of honouring the saint and describing his many miracles and works, while the Historia is practically a mythology in itself, containing many wild tales from start to finish.
With that said, the story of Germanus can still inform our view of Britain in the fifth century and as such should not be discarded out of hand. The heresy he was sent to combat is not, in itself, of great interest to us today, it being largely a dispute regarding the nature of human morality and the importance of original sin. What is of interest to us is that the Church felt secure enough to send two prominent bishops (Germanus and Lupus, Bishop of Troyes) into Britain after the collapse of the Western Empire in order to counter the growth of undesirable doctrine. This visit is confirmed by another near-contemporary source, Prosper of Aquitaine.
The fact of the visit not only tells us something about the relative stability (at least for churchmen) in Britain, but also that goings on amongst the islands were still relatively common knowledge on the Continent, thus suggesting that trade and communication had not been completely disrupted, although they must have been impacted, by the retreat of Roman power from Britain.
Indeed the Vita, which is by far the more sober of the two sources (though it is jam-packed full of miracles, as is the nature of such saints’ lives in the period) is full of receptive crowds of people and journeys to many towns. The impression in general is of a country not unduly different from the one they had left, albeit in the grip of a dire threat to its spiritual health.
At a debate with the Pelagian bishops, again a fairly cultured pastime for a country we have been told was awash with troubles, Germanus is able to win the day with his rhetorical skill (and another miracle), thus proving the superiority of the Catholic Orthodoxy. Following this, he undertakes more fantastical journeys around the island, including driving off a marauding army of Picts and Saxons by rousing his men to shout ‘Alleluia’ and as such not having to strike a single blow.
The battle, while clearly ahistorical, does provide another useful snippet for our purposes. It makes clear that there were at least some military confrontations between Britons and these groups, and that the situation was common knowledge by the 480s. While doubt can be sown around the specific event described, or about whether Constantius had any first-hand knowledge of such events in the first place, it is clear he expected his audience to at least know these basic details in order to lend his story credibility.
After this event, the Historia goes even further, containing many tales of Germanus sparring with Vortigern until holy fire descends from heaven, further cementing the account as more mythology than history.
A second visit is mentioned in both sources; however, this visit has proven controversial amongst historians [Barrett 2009, Thompson 1984] with the obvious parallels to the first visit making it seem like a ‘doublet’ to the first rather than a completely separate event. As such, we won’t go into it here.
We can see from these sources that the old view of chaos, cultural loss and barbarian hordes has many problems, even in its more modern incarnations, and the events of the fifth and sixth centuries are often grossly oversimplified in order to smooth the narrative. That being said, there are commonalities in the sources which also cast doubt on the opposite side of this debate. It seems clear that there were invasions of some kind, marked by military confrontation, in both Germanus’ and Gildas’ time, and it formed a central issue for the Britons in both these ages.
In the absence of the traditional narrative, we now need to look at what we can establish to replace it, and specifically how these momentous events impacted the people of south-western Britain and the kingdom they formed in the absence of Rome.