4
We have now set the scene and introduced both Dumnonia and the emerging power of Wessex that would eventually challenge it. In the next section we will, by the nature of events, be discussing military confrontations between both sides. As such, it seems an opportune moment to discuss some of what is known about weapons and warfare in this period.
This is particularly important when it comes to the Britons of Dumnonia, as there are many misconceptions about the way in which the Brythonic peoples fought which are worth discussing and dismissing before we discuss the battles themselves.
To begin with, we should acknowledge that it is difficult to discuss Early Medieval warfare as a single unified whole. After all, the period runs from 500 until 1066 and this is a very long time for anything to remain stagnant [Underwood, 1999]. For the Saxons, the period marks a change from small warbands gathered around Lords, Chieftains and Kings, to a more professionalised military elite and their retainers, spanning not just the top 1 per cent of society but also those in the Thegnly class (that is, landholders who owe military service) who might be considered to be the upper middle classes by our modern terminology.
However, there are some consistent themes that bridge both time and cultures which we should bear in mind while considering military confrontations between Wessex and Dumnonia.
The most basic building block of any Early Medieval army starts with the retainers or companions of the army leader. Kings and wealthy lords would gather around themselves groups of elite warriors whom they would outfit, feed and provide shelter to in return for service in battle (as well as the collection of taxes and other services best conducted by armed men). When the king called he would further expect his lords or chieftains to bring their own retainers with them, thus building up a core of experienced and well-equipped fighters for the army.
For the Saxons, these were the Hearth-Guard (eventually Huscarls or House-Carls following Danish influence), while Dumnonian lords would refer to the Teylu or ‘Family’. In either society the role was the same.
Military service, as well as the bonds of companionship it helped form, was one of the basic building blocks of Early Medieval society. Failing to do your duty to the king or your lord was seen as an incredibly serious failing. So much so that the Laws of King Ine (who we’ll meet later) set out the penalties as follows:
If a nobleman who holds land neglects military service, he shall pay 120 shillings and forfeit his land; a nobleman who holds no land shall pay 60 shillings; a commoner shall pay a fine of 30 shillings for neglecting military service.
The loss of land in particular would have been an enormous blow for a lord in a society as heavily dependent on agriculture as Early Medieval Britain was.
Further, the reciprocal bonds of lordship meant that military service didn’t stop at providing and equipping armed men (certainly in the early period) – you were also expected to lead from the front, in the shield wall and often in the thickest of the fighting. To do less while asking your companions to take the risks on your behalf would be seen as a failing by the lord.
Beyond the professional warriors, Early Medieval rulers could also call upon freemen to bear arms as part of an army. Perhaps the best known of these is the Saxon fyrd, but equally the Brythonic lords could call upon the Llu or army. In either case the service was only temporary, usually lasting no more than a matter of weeks in order not to disrupt the cycles of agricultural life.
While the popular image of these armies is a mass of poorly equipped peasants, this owes more to fantasy than it does reality. Given the importance of warfare to elite status in the Early Medieval world, it is perhaps unsurprising that war was treated as a serious business. Commoners called to serve in the Fyrd or Lluwere often doing so not just out of obligation but for the chance to better their own positions, either through glory, renown or plunder. They were also expected to arrive fully armed at their own expense, usually meaning bearing a shield with a metal boss and at least a spear to fight with although this varied widely within the period. By the end of Anglo-Saxon Britain the armaments of a Fyrdman included horses, armour and weapons. As such, while not at the same level as the professional warriors, a king could expect these fighters to at least have put some time into training in the use of their own weapons and, in the case of long campaigns or wars, they may have some experience of fighting already.
Most fighting at the start of the period was likely quite open, taking the form of small-scale raiding and clashes between smaller bands of warriors, but eventually larger-scale conflicts often resolved in the clash of shield walls – lines of men whose shields overlapped one another in order to make a solid defensive wall to fight behind. This is a nasty and extremely brutal form of warfare as you are pressed forward until you are face to face with your foe. It is perhaps little wonder that many conflicts and battles ended not with a stand-up fight but with one side breaking and fleeing.
In comparison to their Saxon neighbours, and even the foreign Vikings who arrived on the British Isles during our period, the Brythonic people of Wales, Cumbria and Cornwall are poorly represented in academic works and discussion of military history. While finding a list of battles, and even some of their locations, can be relatively straightforward, the details of how the Britons fought are much harder to piece together.
This means that for a long time historians and re-enactors have had to rely on sources from outside the Early Medieval period in an attempt to glean an insight into the workings of Brythonic armies between 500 and 1066. Unfortunately, this means that some sources have been accepted uncritically when perhaps they deserved more interrogation.
The clearest example of this can be found in the popular view of Welsh, and by extension Brythonic, warfare. There is a very strong and persistent image of the British warrior as a lightly armed skirmisher; a fighter relying on hit-and-run or guerrilla tactics in the face of stronger or better-armed opponents. This image is strongly ingrained in many circles and is sometimes embraced as a source of pride.
Whatever truth there may be to this view, much of the evidence comes not from our period but from the years following 1066 when the Normans, leading a unified ‘English’ army, invaded Wales and attempted to subdue it to the English crown.
While in this instance the Welsh princes were very much outnumbered by their Norman opponents, and in some ways outmatched, even here we should wonder aloud about the view of almost ‘primitive’ Welshmen fighting a more powerful foe. Much of it can be traced back to the writings of Gerald of Wales, a twelfth-century chronicler. As Gerald wrote: ‘This people is light and active, hardy rather than strong.’
He spoke of Welsh courage, of unarmed men fighting against cavalry but, in the same text, he wrote:
In war this nation is very severe in the first attack, terrible by their clamour and looks, filling the air with horrid shouts and the deep-toned clangour of very long trumpets; swift and rapid in their advances and frequent throwing of darts. Bold in the first onset, they cannot bear a repulse, being easily thrown into confusion as soon as they turn their backs; and they trust to flight for safety, without attempting to rally, which the poet thought reprehensible in martial conflicts.
As Gerald is one of the few sources talking about Anglo-Norman and Welsh relations, his descriptions are often used as a primary source and then applied uncritically across history.
However, it’s worth remembering that Gerald (despite his name) was as much English as he was Welsh, even serving in the court of Henry II. He was also writing primarily for an Anglo-Norman audience and took pains in his prose to paint the Welsh as exotic outsiders at best, and downright primitive savages at worst.
This is particularly egregious in situations, as Davies [2014] points out, where Gerald describes the same set of ambush or feigned retreat tactics used by a Norman lord as ‘ingenious’ or sound tactics, while simultaneously condemning the Welsh for their use.
So if this image may not be the most accurate, is there anything we can pull from the sources about Brythonic warfare in the Early Medieval period?
While cattle-raiding and other ‘irregular warfare’ was common to all the people of the British Isles, when it came to actual warfare between bands of trained fighters then shield walls and other unit tactics were fairly ubiquitous.
This is perhaps most clearly illustrated at the start of the period, when the memories of professional Roman armies would still be fresh amongst the elite. In the late fifth or early sixth century an illustrated copy of Virgil’s Aeneid was produced. While the copy we have now rests in the Vatican library (Catalogue Number Vat.Lat.3867) the site of its production has been argued by Ken Dark and others to be somewhere in western Britain, potentially in Somerset. This obviously puts it potentially right at the borderlands of Dumnonia.
Among the many images in the manuscript there is a full battle scene between two armies; each of them has lined up in shieldwall to face the other and, while there are some fantastical touches such as the plumed helmets of the combatants, it seems otherwise a fairly grounded illustration as though this was something the artist was intimately familiar with.
Nor is this the only hint that shieldwall combat was relatively commonplace among the Britons. In Y Gododdin, a Welsh poem commemorating a battle with the Saxons of Deira, the following stanza commemorates one of the fighters:
A man went to Catraeth with the dawn,
About him a fort, a fence of shields.
Harshly they attacked, gathered booty,
Loud like thunder the noise of the shields.
A proud man, a wise man, a strong man,
He fought and pierced with spears,
Above the blood, he slew with swords.
In the strife, with hard weapons on heads.
In the court the warrior was humble,
Before Erthgi great armies would groan.
A clear reference to fighting in a shieldwall.
It may be that the Welsh and Cornish made more use of horses in battle than the Saxons or Vikings did, although all three did in fact use cavalry in some way (just not the heavy cavalry of the later Norman knight).
In both Y Gododdin and Geraint ab Erbin (Geraint, son of Erbin) (a poem potentially commemorating King Geraint of Dummonia’s death at Llongborth) the references to horses are frequent:
Before Geraint, the unflinching foe,
I saw horses jaded and gory from the battle,
And after the shout, a terrible impulsion.
In Anglo-Saxon sources, such as the Battle of Maldon, on the other hand, the mentions of horses tend to be briefer, usually involving riding to the location of the battle and then sending them away:
Then he ordered each of his warriors his horse to loose
Far off to send it and forth to go,
To be mindful of his hands and of his high heart.
Then did Offa’s Kinsman first know
That the earl would not brook cowardice.
It also was not unusual for raiding Vikings to seek tribute in horses in order to improve their speed and mobility away from their ships. Both Saxons and Vikings would use cavalry when appropriate, such as when hunting for a broken foe.
Where the difference becomes clear is in the treatment of the horse and cavalry in heroic poetry, where it forms a much more central platform in Old Welsh sources than in any comparable Saxon tale or Viking saga.
Returning to Y Goddodin, the warriors it commemorates are most often mounted and all are described as riding to the site of the battle itself:
Three hundred gold-torqued,
warlike, wonderful […]
Three hundred proud ones,
Together, armed;
Three hundred fierce horses
Carried them forward,
Three hounds and three hundred,
Sad, they did not return.
And Geraint ab Erbin, the elegy for King Geraint of Dumnonia, uses horses in each of its refrains.
Similar themes are common in Welsh heroic literature, whether it is the riders pursuing the mythic boar Twrch Twyth or Culhwch riding upon his war steed to see his cousin Arthur.
These themes build an image of the high status the Britons attached to mounted combat. It seems clear that, to Brythonic people, the horse was as essential a part of the warrior’s gear as his mail shirt or the fast-flashing sword.
But, given what we have briefly outlined of Early Medieval warfare, what would such mounted combat look like?
It would be very different from the heavily armoured Norman knights of 1066 and later. Not only were native horses comparatively small (most likely something akin to a Welsh mountain pony of modern breeds) but stirrups, necessary for the great lance-led charge of the knight, only became common towards the end of the Early Medieval period.
Rather than try to break an enemy line with sheer brute force, in the way the Norman charge was designed, it would seem Brythonic warriors were more likely to harass their opponents with feints and false charges, peppering their lines with thrown javelins as they did so. When the enemy formation was overextended or run ragged it would be the time to press an attack, either with infantry or with the cavalry turning around and charging.
Such tactics were common in the Roman era, where auxiliary cavalry and mounted archers would perform those tasks, and it’s likely this had at least some influence on the descendants of the Romano-Britons in Dumnonia. However, it’s interesting that there are also similarities to the tactics that Caesar found when he first ventured into Britain nearly 1,000 years before, albeit with chariots rather than cavalry:
Their mode of fighting with their chariots is this: firstly, they drive about in all directions and throw their weapons and generally break the ranks of the enemy with the very dread of their horses and the noise of their wheels; and when they have worked themselves in between the troops of horse, leap from their chariots and engage on foot.
Of course, the final charge could be dangerous. Most horses will not eagerly run into a press of men brandishing weapons, and it’s perhaps worth noting that both the men of Goddodin and Geraint lost their battles.
However, when it worked well it could be a very effective tactic. Perhaps the best example of this is in the wars of the Bretons, Dumnonia’s cousins across the Channel, as first Nominoe and then his son, Erispoe, asserted their independence from the Carolingian Franks.
At the Battle of Jengland (851), Erispoe’s forces first harassed the Saxons whom Charles the Bald had arranged to screen his forces until they retreated behind the Franks, and then continued to harass and disrupt the Frankish forces for two days, inflicting heavy losses. Eventually the situation grew so dire that Charles himself withdrew in the dead of night, his flight caused panic to grip his forces, and with their cohesion gone the Bretons were able to slaughter many before they could retreat from the field.
It seems likely that the Bretons may have carried over their style of warfare from their once-native Dumnonia.
Whatever the specifics of the tactics, it is clear throughout the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that native British forces are in fact able to meet Saxon armies in battle and, at times, defeat them.
Even as late as 1055 the Welsh were able to inflict defeat upon a united England as the sacking of Hereford showed, here recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
And they gathered a great force with the Irishmen and the Welsh: and Earl Ralph collected a great army against them at the town of Hereford; where they met; but ere there was a spear thrown the English people fled, because they were on horses.
The enemy then made a great slaughter there – about four hundred or five hundred men; they on the other side none. They went then to the town, and burned it utterly; and the large minster also which the worthy Bishop Athelstan had caused to be built, that they plundered and bereft of relic and of reef, and of all things whatever; and the people they slew, and led some away.
As we stated earlier, sources and finds for Wales, Cornwall and the Old North are harder to come by than for the Saxon and Viking worlds around them, but as we get to grips with the subject more and more, it seems clear that some older assumptions about Brythonic warfare should be abandoned.
With this in mind, we can now return to the looming clashes between Dumnonia and Wessex with a clearer picture of just how determined and desperate these battles may have been.