6
The existence of a King Geraint is attested in four separate sources. The first is a letter addressed to him from Aldhelm, whom we have introduced previously. Aldhelm appears to have been instructed by a gathering of priests from all over Britain to attempt to bring the Dumnonian Church into compliance with what might be called the Roman rites, specifically the calculation of Easter Day and the tonsure worn by priests and monks.
It is notable that the opening tone of Aldhelm’s letter is largely conciliatory and deferent. This does not appear to be the instructions of a conqueror over a cowed people but instead an appeal to a figure that Aldhelm clearly believes possesses the power to make the changes he argues for.
He addresses Geraint as the ‘glorious lord of the Western Kingdom’ and extends fond greetings to him and to all the priests of Dumnonia. It should be made clear at this point that Aldhelm is a famously erudite user of Latin and there is some significance to the fact that all of his stylistic flair is on display here. Not only is it a display of his own education and, tacitly at least, deployed in support of his arguments, but it also shows he clearly believed that Geraint himself or those around him would be able to read and understand the message and complex themes woven into it well enough that there was no need for simpler language.
Additionally this does show that, for all the long-running conflict and the long years since Roman withdrawal, there remains a single powerful elite within Dumnonia around whom the traditional infrastructure of power, including the local Church hierarchy, is gathered.
According to Aldhelm, the variance has occurred because the local priests are following in the traditions of their founders and ancestors rather than accepting the Roman calculation. This could be seen as another expression of identity in the face of a growing and alien status quo in Britain. Aldhelm sees this clinging to tradition as wrong-headed and repeatedly puts forward ideas of Christian unity and brotherhood as being more important than the local traditions, as well as citing the legitimacy of Peter in order to override them. These sections, given the richness of the language used, are open to considerable interpretation. For while Aldhelm seems keen not to offend, often speaking of ‘rumours’ he’d heard rather than specifically blaming Geraint or any particular priest for the failings, there is an underlying thread of warning.
Aldhelm’s repeated references to singular Christian unity, as well as a number of other minor inserts (such as referring to Dumnonia as a ‘Province’ rather than a kingdom), seem to carry with them an element of unspoken threat: correct this error or else be corrected.
In the wake of the defeat in 682, this is likely to have been a message understood even if not directly expressed, and certainly both the letter and Aldhelm’s journey speak to a period in Dumnonia–Wessex relations when there was at least some room for discussion and diplomacy.
Indeed, as Probert [2002] notes in his study of south-west place names, there appears to be a growing influx of English-speaking settlers in eastern Devon around this time. The lack of Brittonic elements in their settlement names seems to suggest they were founding new farms or villages rather than taking over existing ones. These newcomers should perhaps be seen as the latest in a long line of settlers that Dumnonia and its far-spanning trade network welcomed in, the town names perhaps viewed in the same light as the Ogham stones that marked Irish settlement several centuries earlier.
This is supported by another of the sources to mention Geraint (or ‘Gerent’ in this source), an undated charter granting land at Maker (across the Tamar from Plymouth) to the abbey at Sherborne [Probert, 2010]. While the surviving charter is much later, it is widely believed to be legitimate and as such may represent a diplomatic overture by Geraint or the Dumnonian Church towards Aldhelm and, by extension, the West Saxon state.
This would seem to indicate that Aldhelm’s efforts were at least partially successful. While there would remain differences in the practice of the Church for at least a short time longer, Bede notes towards the end of his Ecclesiastical History that Aldhelm’s letter ‘Caused many Britons to accept the proper calculation of Easter’ (Easter being the more urgent matter to both Aldhelm’s and Bede’s minds). However, it is equally possible that the grant was made as a token of goodwill to forestall the implied threat that undercuts much of the flowery language.
Either way, it is perhaps notable that conflict between the two sides did not resume until after Aldhelm’s death in 709. It suggests that Aldhelm may well have been committed to bringing the two sides, both Church and lay, together peacefully in brotherhood as he often notes. As a senior bishop in Wessex, his influence may have been significant enough to forestall further acts of aggression westward.
Of course, Aldhelm’s passing was not the only change to occur in Wessex during the changeover from the seventh to eighth centuries. A long period of political instability, replete with burnings, civil wars and rulers in exile, came to an end in 688 with the ascension of King Ine (or Ina) to the throne of Wessex.
Ine was an energetic and powerful king, though he was unable to match some of the military successes of his predecessors in subjugating other Saxon realms. He did negotiate a significant tribute from Kent in response to the death of Mul, one of his predecessors in the royal family, and consolidated Wessex’s position on the southern bank of the Thames. Bede notes he was also able to control Sussex for a time, though evidently this was not a permanent state of affairs.
In 694, Ine also issued the first set of laws of any Saxon ruler outside of Kent. It is notable that Ine’s laws set out separate rules for his English (the word ‘Englisc’ is used here, indicating the slow start of a shared cultural identity) and Wealas subjects. Notably, the rules are entirely in favour of the former group, often at the expense of the latter. Despite being a fervent Christian, Ine doesn’t appear to have the same vision of a single brotherhood that Aldhelm (at least purported) to espouse.
This clearly shows that, while Wessex had absorbed significant Briton regions and people in the last 100 years or so of expansion, it still thought of them as an ‘other’ even within the kingdom. This contrasts with more modern thinking about the Anglo-Saxon period, which relies on a peaceful take up of Anglo-Saxon culture by the natives.
Interestingly, it also hints that the native Britons were retaining their own culture and identities in the face of the political changes going on around them, something which has been difficult if not impossible to prove through the archaeological record.
In 710, Ine was on the offensive, and we find the third source to mention Geraint in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘Ina and Nun his kinsman fought against Gerent king of the Welsh; and the same year Higbald was slain.’ (‘Nun’ is also translated as Nothelm, King of Sussex and subject of Ine.)
While the term ‘Welsh’ or ‘Wealas’ once again leaves significant ambiguity, we can again be relatively certain, given the political state and borders of the Saxon kingdoms, that Dumnonia is the only sensible opponent in this battle. It is also interesting to note here that Gerent is named as ‘King of the Welsh’, making clear that he was a singular leader west of the Parrett.
While with previous battles we had little else to go on besides the Chronicle, there is another source in this case that can help shed light not just on the battle itself but on the location of it.
The eleventh-century poem Geraint ab Erbin (Geraint, son of Erbin) records a heroic Geraint fighting at a place called Llongborth:
In Llongborth I saw the rage of slaughter,
And biers beyond all number,
And red-stained men from the assault of Geraint.
In Llongborth I saw the edges of blades in contact,
Men in terror and blood on the pate,
Before Geraint, the great son of his father.
The poem is found in the Black Book of Carmarthen, one of the major sources for Early Medieval Welsh literature. While it does not date the battle, it does specify Geraint’s origin as ‘the region of Dyvnaint’ which is the Old Welsh word for Devon (Cornish: Dewnans). This, together with the other historical sources identifying both a real Geraint and his conflict with Wessex, would seem to be a clear indication that the poem is referring to Geraint of Dumnonia.
This seems even more clear-cut when we consider that Langport in Somerset sits right in the Taunton gap we previously identified as the most likely place for conflicts between the two sides. While there is limited evidence of occupation at Langport until the later ninth century, that does not mean the name was not already in use, albeit in an older form.
Certainly this has all been enough to convince some academics like Skene [1988] of the link between Geraint and Geraint ab Erbin. However, there remains significant discussion and controversy around this link.
To understand why, we need to discuss a figure who has been notably, and perhaps surprisingly, absent from consideration until now: King Arthur.
Arthurian mythology casts a long shadow in the West Country, with folk stories having built up over time to cement Cornwall as ‘Arthur’s Homeland’ in the minds of many visitors and students of the tales. In this, Geraint ab Erbin is partially to blame. The poem includes a single line referencing Arthur, using his (by the eleventh century, already growing) mythos as a kenning or allegory for bravery and noble leadership:
In Llongborth I saw Arthur,
And brave men who hewed down with steel,
Emperor, and conductor of the toil.
A single line may not seem like much, but outside the works of Nennius which we’ve already mentioned, this is amongst the earliest mentions of Arthur in a historical source. As such, there is much more focus on it than its contents perhaps deserve.
Over time Geraint was woven into the wider Arthurian mythos, particularly in Geraint and Enid, one of the three Welsh romances of the fourteenth century. It is particularly notable that, despite claims from some scholars that Geraint and Enid comes directly from some lost older source, it is largely identifiable as an adaptation of the French work Erec and Enid by Chrétien de Troyes.
Geraint’s newfound fame also saw him edited into several genealogies during the High Medieval period as a figure of the fifth or sixth centuries. This has led to modern interpretations of Gerain ab Erbin as relating to a much earlier battle in order to tie the historical Geraint into the mythology built around his fictional shadow.
This offers a snapshot of the wider problem that the Arthurian mythos presents when attempting to study the Early Medieval period in the West Country. Because the shadow of Arthur is so all-encompassing, it can, and has for many years, bury a fascinating historical truth beneath layers of obscuring myth and storytelling which have, by dint of many years’ retelling, taken on the sheen of validity.
Having spent time looking at the relation between the Western Kingdom and the expanding spheres of Anglo-Saxon influence, it should be extremely clear that, if we accept that there was at some point a historical Arthur leading Briton resistance to the incoming Saxons in the fifth century, then he would have been considerably further east or north than Dumnonia, let alone Cornwall.
Indeed, the use of his name as a kenning in a poem commemorating a battle at the edge of Devon in the eighth century if we assume the 11th century written version worked from an earlier oral source, strongly suggests he was already enshrined in the shared cultural mythos of the Britons long before Devon and Cornwall saw a hint of Anglo-Saxon rule.
So we can dismiss any claims of a significantly earlier battle, as most of these rely heavily on mythological sources for their basis. There has been some suggestion that the battle described may relate to a separate battle in northern England, near the Briton kingdom of Strathclyde where a tribal group known as the Damnonii dwelt. This placement, however, relies on several assumptions that don’t string together well.
To begin with, although the obvious similarity between Damnonii and Dumnonii seems straightforward, the poem never actually uses Dumnonia in its identification of Geraint or of the battle site, only the Old Welsh word for Devon. Additionally, although there had previously been kings of Strathclyde named Geraint and the Welsh Annals note in 722 that Beli son of Elfin dies, which could, potentially, be a mutation of Erbin, there is nothing to suggest that this is the case or that he has a brother called Geraint.
All of this returns us not only to the eighth century and the historical Geraint we have identified, but also to Langport in Somerset as the most likely location for the battle commemorated in the Chronicle and in Geraint ab Erbin. It is the only site that fits both the site named within the poem and the geographic region we have identified the continuing conflict to be centred around.
Unfortunately for Geraint, this also means (per the poem) that Langport is the place he met his end:
In Llongborth Geraint was slain,
A brave man from the region of Dyvnaint,
And before they were overpowered, they committed slaughter.
As a final consideration, it is shortly after the battle that Taunton is constructed, straddling this gap in the natural barriers of West Somerset. The Chronicle notes for 722: ‘This year queen Ethelburga razed Taunton, which Ina had previously built; and Ealdbert the exile departed into Surrey and Sussex, and Ina fought against the South-Saxons.’
This is the earliest mention of Taunton, indicating its construction (by Ine) was relatively recent. Taunton is recognised later as a ‘burh’ or fortified settlement so it seems likely this was its original purpose too. The fact that the rebellious Ealdbert starts at Taunton and then flees east is interesting – perhaps he had hoped to drum up support from the Britons but the destruction of Taunton robbed him of the chance. This would actually make some sense of the action, as it would deny the fortress to any Briton forces that may have come to his aid and thus made them easier to push back.
As for why a burh would be built here, that too should be obvious, and reinforces that victory at Llongborth is the moment when the West Saxons were able to push through Somerset and into eastern Devon. By securing the gap at Taunton behind him, Ine was in effect entirely in control of the main routes in and out of the south-west peninsula, and also had a fortified site to retreat to should anything go wrong.
The Saxon victory at Llongborth is a hugely significant turning point in the history of the south-west generally and Cornwall in particular. With the intimidating natural barriers of western Somerset now gone, it would not have taken long for the victorious West Saxons to stream into eastern Devon. The fact that Llongborth was the latest in a short series of military defeats would have also severely taxed the ability of local forces to resist the expansion.
In short, Dumnonia more or less dies with Geraint at Llongborth, at least as a unified entity. With the Saxons now moving freely into Devon there was also a not insignificant chance that Cornwall would also be overwhelmed.
However, in 722, the same year Taunton is being destroyed, the Annales Cambriae or Welsh Annals record the following event:
Et bellum Hehil apud Cornuenses, Gueith Gartmailauc, Cat Pencon, apud dexterales Brittones, et Brittones victores fuerunt in istis tribus bellis.
And the battle of Hehil among the Cornish, the battle of Garth Maelog, the battle of Pencon among the south Britons, and the Britons were the victors in those three battles.
Just a single line, but a hugely significant moment for Cornish history. Not only is this one of the first sources to identify Cornwall and the Cornish not just as a region or sub-division of Dumnonia, but it also reverses the momentum Wessex had built up in its westward march.
It is perhaps significant to note here that the way Geraint is described in Geraint ab Erbin as ‘from the region of Dynvaint’ potentially links him specifically to a royal family ruling from Isca Dumnorum, and with his death the power base in the region decisively shifted to the west, which, as we have seen, had more significant infrastructure in place.
Given that Cornwall is already identifiable as a separate regional identity, as evidenced in Aldhelm’s writings and here in the Annals, it is perhaps notable that the battle is ‘among the Cornish’ rather than ‘within Cornwall’ or similar. This may support the idea that the battle was geographically located not in modern-day Cornwall but rather in territory that was now controlled by the Cornish branch of the formerly unified Dumnonia.
Certainly, the Britons would have been extremely keen to keep hold of much of Devon, in particular Dartmoor and the tin deposits there. These were, in fact, undergoing something of a rapid expansion, as evidenced by increased isotope production noted in recent studies [Meharg et al., 2012]. Additionally, much of the good grazing and pasture land for horses (again, including Dartmoor) was also in Devon, and given the importance of the horse to the way the warrior elite not only conducted war but also to how they saw themselves as warriors, this would have been a serious loss.
While some commentators have pointed to the lack of a named opponent, and the absence of these battles from the Chronicle, as reasons to either doubt their existence or else suggest they were potentially civil in nature (‘among the Cornish’), it would seem a much more sensible suggestion that the opponent is not named because, for the Welsh writers, there was only a single enemy it could be – the expanding Anglo-Saxon states.
As for why the three battles are missing from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we have already seen that the writers of the Chronicle are often coy with details of battles where the outcomes may not be beneficial to their own narratives (such as Feathenleag), so omitting a series of military defeats would seem entirely in keeping with this approach.
Siting this battle is extremely difficult given the lack of information. It is equally hard to say what truly occurred, although many have tried. In general, these efforts have been hampered by a literal interpretation of the single source. The phrase ‘among the Cornish’ has too often been used to move the site of the battle deep into modern-day Cornwall, particularly around Hayle in West Cornwall and at various sites around the River Camel and its estuary [Hoskins and Finberg, 1970].
However, all of these sites assume that the defeat at Llongborth delivered all of Devon to West Saxon hands at the same time. This does not seem likely given the pattern of relatively slow expansion that came before it, as well as the importance of the territory to the Cornish. Certainly we should not sugar coat the loss at Llongborth – as noted, the defeat effectively spelled the end of Dumnonia as a unified kingdom and almost certainly was swiftly followed by the seizure of Exeter, thus leading to the city’s English designation in the Vitae Boniface as discussed earlier.
However, we equally shouldn’t accept a narrative of acquiescence, of the Cornish now fading into the background after all the long years of resistance that have come before. Given all they had to lose, it seems much more likely they would have dug in and resisted as much as they could.
Other commentators like Malcolm Todd [1987] suggest instead that we should seek the battlefield further east, suggesting either Hele, near Jacobstow in north-east Cornwall, or Hele in the Culm Valley, Devon. While neither of these sites seems entirely convincing on their own, it is interesting to note that Hele is a fairly common place name in the south-west, even in the later period.
The Exon Book – the collection of documents which fed information about south-west Britain to the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror – lists four Heles at the time of its compilation in the 1080s. This includes both the Cornish and Culm Valley example, although the latter is included in the hundred of Taunton rather than Devon proper. Of particular interest for us is an entry for the hundred of Merton, in central Devon: ‘The count of Mortain holds 1 estate which is called Hele, which 2 thegns held jointly on the day that King Eadweard was alive and dead, and they could go to any lord they wished with that land.’
Merton is today a small village to the north of Okehampton and close to the River Torridge. Its position in the centre of Devon, as well as a close proximity to the important Anglo-Saxon town of Crediton, gives it potentially excellent credentials as the site for the historic Hehil. This would both match a slow and contested invasion of Devon and also make sense in the context of the time.
While today we would probably assume the south coast of Devon is the obvious choice, as this is where our roads travel – from Exeter to Plymouth and then onwards – most of the large coastal towns were built in the early modern period, and Devon’s agricultural heartland would have had much more value to a largely agrarian society such as existed in the eighth century. Even Bantham, the former trading port, seems to be abandoned around this time, suggesting that the fighting had grown close enough to make trade less profitable than it would be at the smaller coastal sites around the Cornish coast such as Gwithian.
A victory here would have kept the fighting in Devon, preserving the Cornish heartland from an invasion as well as directly impeding the West Saxons. Certainly it seems that conflict remained constant in the following years, as the Chronicle records:
753. This year Cuthred, king of the West-Saxons, fought against the Welsh
755. …And Cynewulf fought very many hard battles against the Welsh.
If we place the majority of this fighting around western and central Devon, then the importance of Hehil is even more clear: what had been a continuous expansion has now been mired down and once again slowed.
Interestingly, this narrative of a slower Saxon expansion recently received a boost from researchers looking at the genetic makeup of the modern UK as part of the People of the British Isles project run by the University of Oxford. Early analysis of the samples in the data set has shown significant clustering of what might be called ‘English’ genetics roughly where they would be expected – that is, in south and eastern England though to Somerset.
However, samples taken from people in Cornwall and Devon/West Somerset both present with genetic signatures that are separate to the baseline ‘English’ sample. More than that, they are different from one another, suggesting that there was either a pre-existing difference between the groups, or that one group (Devon/West Somerset) was subjected to an injection of people with different genetic markers at some point in the past [Leslie et al., 2015]. While we must be careful with genetic studies of this type – they certainly are not the foolproof science of origins often touted by companies offering to share with people their ‘genetic heritage’ – they can be useful in identifying very broad-stroke population trends, such as the marker differences noted here.
Also of note is a charter issued by Cynewulf to Wells Monastery in 776 [Sawyer, S262] which mentions ‘harassment of our enemies of the Cornish nation’, although whether Cynewulf was fighting the Cornish at the time he issued the charter or else giving thanks for a victory is not immediately clear. This does, however, show that the conflict was continuing even late in the eighth century.
The close of the eighth century can be seen as the end of this first era of relationships between Wessex and the Western Kingdom – what was Dumnonia and now was the Kingdom of Cerniu, the old Cornish term that will one day evolve into the better-known Kernow.
We have seen that, while many historians would seek to push the story to the modern borders of the Tamar as fast as possible, it is a story of conflict and resistance that is worthy of retelling, not just for the spirited resistance the Britons were able to put up, but also for the achievements of the West Saxons. For all that they were the invaders, they were also the weaker party when they began to move west. Thanks to some key victories, and perhaps some luck, they were able to change this position so that by the start of the ninth century they had the stronger hand – though the Cornish were by no means beaten just yet.
As for the nature of the Cornish kingdom itself, we have only the vaguest of ideas. We do know that the royal court, previously based at large fortresses like Tintagel, probably took on at least some measure of mobility. The place-name element ‘Lys’, such as is found today in Liskeard, donates a ‘court’ or law-site that the king would attend with his nobles to hear pleas and dispense judgement. This model of mobile kingship has strong parallels in Early Medieval Wales, where ideas of kingship and rule were based much more individually on rulers and the Teylu they commanded than on specific geographic areas.
While Cornwall overall is a more settled, and less volatile, kingdom by this point at the dawn of the ninth century, it is also undoubtedly still a Brythonic one, and as such would be expected to share these elements with its cousins in Brittany and Wales. Still, it is perhaps worth noting that the landscape which surrounds Liskeard is one of multiple ancient monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It is also a crossroads in Cornwall, a place where travel from the east tends to naturally flow. As such, it marks a natural spot to find the royal household. This suggests the possibility that, while the king may well have moved from site to site, this was a more settled pattern or routine than in other kingdoms.