In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  VORTIGERN

  When did Britain fall? Several sources indicate that the crucial breach took place in a period ten years on either side of 450. The Gallic Chronicle says the island fell under Saxon domination in 441 or 442. According to the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede the ‘coming of the Saxons’ took place in 448 or 449. This last date was derived from the most important source for the fifth century, the British cleric Gildas. Gildas wrote his book, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, in the 540s and his account is generally interpreted as meaning that in 446, 36 years after they had applied for help to fight the Anglo-Saxon invaders, the British government made an appeal to the Roman consul, Aetius, for military aid against Pictish and Scottish invasions. When this aid was not forthcoming, Anglo-Saxons were introduced as friendly mercenaries, and this was, according to Gildas, the fatal step which led to the collapse of British rule in the east of the island. Most important, it was not self-governing cities or local oligarchies who brought in these troops, but a dictator. According to all later sources, by the 430s a large part of Britain had fallen under the sway of a British leader called Vortigern (‘Great King’), and according to British and Anglo-Saxon tradition it was he who invited increasingly large numbers of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries from Germany and Denmark to fight for him. What little we know of Vortigern shows that for a time he had something approaching absolute power. He was even able to arrange the migration of a whole people, the Votadini under their leader Cunedda, who were forced to leave Lothian and made to settle in North Wales, in order to resist Irish incursions.

  Like many dictatorships, the new order of Vortigern was strong, unscrupulous and efficient. Although Gildas was writing in the 540s he must have spoken to men who remembered Vortigern’s rule. He says that this was a time of prosperity and that the people were successful against the attacks from the Picts and Scots. This view, though, may only reflect the experience of the ruling party, because, as in many periods of decolonisation, there were many rival factions. These came to a head in civil warfare which coincided with two shattering blows. In 443 the whole Roman world was swept by a plague, the severity of which has been compared with the Black Death, and which must have hit Britain around 446. At the same time the Anglo-Saxon mercenaries settled by Vortigern in Kent, led by Hengist and Horsa, revolted.

  THE SAXON REVOLT

  Until recently historians believed that the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in Britain for over fifty years before they departed in 410, and that many of the mercenaries had settled around the cities, were used to Roman life in towns, and had perhaps married Romano-British women. This familiarity with the Roman towns, it was argued, facilitated the changeover to Anglo-Saxon rule in the eastern parts of Britain. Recently, however, the archaeological evidence for this picture, namely the date of Anglo-Saxon military cemeteries which had been assigned to the late fourth century, has been seriously challenged. At present it seems best to follow the traditional scenario for the coming of the Anglo-Saxons as outlined by Gildas and Bede. The wars which precipitated the fall of Britain began as a struggle between various Romano-British parties, some or all of whom may have hired Anglo-Saxon mercenaries. Our sources for instance suggest that Vortigern had opponents who had purely Roman names; one, Ambrosius Aurelianus, is said by Gildas to have been born into a family who had been emperors in Britain; another opponent, Vitalinos, is recorded fighting a battle against Ambrosius. The break-up of Britain in the fifth century, then, reminds us of twentieth-century liberation wars fought, for example, in former Portuguese or Belgian colonies in Africa, with several opposed factions fighting each other, with perhaps Vortigern’s ‘British Patriotic Front’ fighting against Ambrosius’ Roman party which opposed his nationalist dictatorship. Both sides may have employed Anglo-Saxon mercenaries.

  In the middle of this internecine strife, Britain was further disabled by far-reaching Germanic raids described by Gildas in graphic terms. When supplies and money for payment ran out, Vortigern’s federates devastated with fire ‘all the neighbouring cities and lands … until it burnt nearly the whole surface of the island, and licked the western Ocean with its red and savage tongue’. Some Britons were enslaved by the Anglo-Saxons, others fled overseas, others retreated to forests, offshore islands, and most of all ‘to the high hills, steep and fortified’, the old Iron Age hillforts. This was not an organised campaign of conquest, but a violent raid, for Gildas describes the Anglo-Saxon mercenary armies retiring to the lands they had been given by Vortigern in the east, presumably Kent and East Anglia. Gildas’ impression of continuous, destructive raids may be exaggerated. Rather, the atmosphere may have been like a Dark Age gold rush of impoverished immigrants from the then ‘third world’, the underdeveloped lands of the Germanic north, into the rich agricultural provinces of the Western Empire. These new ‘barbarian’ settlers – though initially invited – found themselves militarily strong and politically and socially unabsorbable. Despite Gildas’ dramatic tale of devastation, they may not have been the only, or even the chief threat to internal security in late fifth-century Britain. But for thirty years between the 460s and the 490s they provided the ideal enemy in a prolonged war organised by the surviving senatorial aristocracy of Roman Britain. Nothing provides a better stimulus to preserving one’s identity as a ruling class than an external foe, especially one comprising ‘uncivilised’ immigrants. According to later traditions about this ‘patriotic war’, the army leader at the climax of the struggle was Arthur.

  Gildas, however, is our only reliable source for these events. With Vortigern dead, the British organised resistance against the invaders. Under the leadership of Ambrosius they fought a number of successful battles culminating in a great victory in the 490s, at a place called Badon Hill. This battle, says Gildas, gave forty years of peace to Britain, though, as he wrote in the 530s or 540s, ‘not even at the present day are the cities of our country inhabited as formerly; deserted and dismantled they lie neglected until now, because although wars with foreigners have ceased, domestic wars continue’. Gildas does not name the British leader at Badon; as we shall see, it is considerably later traditions which insist that he was Arthur.

  WROXETER: ‘THIS IS HOW IT ENDS: NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER’

  Archaeologists have been able to corroborate Gildas’ picture. Although the Roman cities were not deserted everywhere, some were abandoned at this time, or their populations shrank dramatically. In Cirencester, for example, the second city of Roman Britain, archaeologists have established that civic life continued into the 440s; the defences were repaired, flood prevention work carried out at one of the gates, and the piazza of the forum kept clean. But soon after that time, whether caused by the great plague or by the Saxon revolt, unburied bodies were found in the streets and the town seems to have contracted to a few wooden huts inside the amphitheatre.

  The most vivid picture we yet possess of declining late Roman city life comes from Wroxeter near Shrewsbury. Unlike most Roman towns, Wroxeter did not become a modern city; it still lies under farmland, and is now being painstakingly uncovered. The present excavation is around the basilica of the baths complex, formerly a great brick hall the size of a cathedral nave. This centrepiece of Roman civic pride fell into disuse around 350, and was demolished to be succeeded by shanties.

  To the great surprise of the excavators, however, a later phase has been discovered which shows that the area was rebuilt. The basilica area was levelled, covered with thousands of tons of carefully laid rubble, and on this base a large number of timber buildings were erected including a massive wooden hall laid on beams, 125 feet long and 52 feet wide with a narrow extension 80 feet long. This hall, with its porticoed façade, wings and steps, was the central structure of a complex of related timber buildings. South of it were rows of timber booths separated by a finely sifted gravel street roofed like a pedestrian precinct. At the upper end of the street was a series of large wooden buildings with classical façades, ‘perhaps the last classically insp
ired buildings in Britain until Wren and the eighteenth-century revival’, as the excavator has called them.

  Who can have been the initiator of this drastic reorganisation of a whole city centre? It needed wealth, a high degree of organisation, and strong motivation. It was certainly not the work of demoralised peasant villagers, nor was it effected by Irish or Anglo-Saxon invaders. It has the hallmarks of Roman public works, only constructed with timber: we must surely be looking here at a complex of religious or public buildings or the private domain of some great man.

  The end of this phase, the last occupation of the main area of the city, is equally intriguing. These halls were not sacked or hurriedly abandoned. They were deliberately dismantled and all useful materials taken away. When? The excavators are not sure, though a date towards the end of the fifth century is the present thinking. Why? This may be easier. Wroxeter is a large town, 200 acres with two miles of walls, and thus difficult to defend without a large fighting force. The likelihood is that the city was abandoned for a more defensible site. And if the princes of Powys had Wroxeter as their main centre up till around 500, could the city have been the base of Vortigern, who appears in the genealogies of Powys? Or could it possibly have been Arthur’s base? We shall probably never know, but this massive injection of energy, capital and manpower into what was evidently a declining town suggests the influence of one of the powerful leaders struggling for control in sub-Roman Britain, a man who wished to restore something of the grandeur of Rome, albeit in timber.

  ‘TRUSTING THEIR LIVES TO THE HILLS … PRECIPITOUS AND FORTIFIED’

  As the cities declined, many of the warlords went back to the hills, renovating the Celtic Iron Age hillforts which had been abandoned when the Romans first conquered Britain. These citadels were easier to defend than long and badly maintained city walls. They suggest an atmosphere of retreat and fear, such as Gildas describes (‘terrified by the wolfish villains’). Stand inside them and images are evoked of refugee compounds, robber barons, warlords surrounded by their armed followings, private armies. This is the background modern historians have seen as Arthur’s, in the period when Anglo-Saxon mercenaries settled in Kent, Sussex, East Anglia and the Thames valley and spread their incursions deeper into southern and western Britain.

  A late local tradition connected Arthur with one of these hillforts, South Cadbury in Somerset, ‘that is Camelotte’, and when the Camelot Research Committee dug there between 1966 and 1972, they caused a sensation. On top of the fort they found the 18-acre area had been refortified with a drystone wall, inside which had been timber buildings including the feasting hall of a Dark Age warlord. Elements of the refortification strongly recalled Roman military architecture; imported pottery from the Mediterranean gave a hint of aristocratic luxury and showed the buildings were occupied in the last quarter of the fifth century – precisely the time at which Arthur is supposed to have flourished.

  Although the name Cadbury-Camelot has stuck, the excavators did not, in fact, find Camelot, for that name is the invention of a French poet who wrote in the twelfth century and is therefore of no value to the historian save as a symbol. Nor was anything turned up to connect the place specifically with King Arthur. What the dig did prove was that in the later fifth century (c. 470–500) someone was powerful enough to wall this hillfort, erect buildings and build gates; someone whose retinue was large enough to need such an extensive site; someone who built in a hybrid Roman-British style.

  At the time it was thought Cadbury was exceptional and must have been the fortress of a particularly great leader. Now archaeologists know it was not unique, for many other Iron Age hillforts were refortified at this time in the south-west and elsewhere. Indeed such reoccupation seems to have been the rule rather than the exception: over a dozen instances have been found in Somerset alone, and forty in the south-west as a whole. Many others await investigation, such as the fort hidden under woods at Amesbury in Wiltshire, a particularly interesting early Christian site which etymologists connect with Ambrosius Aurelianus and which was taken from the Britons by the West-Saxon kings relatively early in Anglo-Saxon times.

  The significance of these hillforts is not yet clear. For instance, do they represent centralised control of a dictator like Vortigern, a generalissimo like Ambrosius, or are they local defences as Gildas implies? Tempting as it is to associate such impressive works with tyrants and their military élites, we cannot be certain that the men who rebuilt them commanded more than local allegiance; we do not even know whether such men were rulers at all (the forts could have been organised by confederacies of local peasants, farmers or aristocrats). But dating at a number of sites now seems to link them with the specific situation of the war with the Anglo-Saxons in the period c. 470–500, which is exactly the period when Arthur is thought to have lived. Evidence from one site examined in detail, Cadbury-Congresbury in Somerset, shows that it was reoccupied in the mid to late fifth century, but within half a century the timber and stone ramparts had begun to collapse and the ditch had filled up with silt and stones almost to the top. Only then was the imported pottery arriving at the site: a hint that the temporary crisis had passed, the new phase defences were no longer needed, and imported goods were now coming in: calm after the storm?

  THE SIEGE OF BADON HILL

  The storm in question was the series of battles between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons mentioned by Gildas which took place in the last quarter of the fifth century. The war culminated in the siege of Badon Hill – Mons Badonicus – which took place perhaps a little before 500. According to Gildas, who wrote his account 43 years after the battle, this was the ‘last great victory of the fatherland’. As we have seen he tells how, nearly a century after the Roman departure, Romano-British armies led by Ambrosius Aurelianus beat back the Anglo-Saxons and won a peace which lasted up to the time that Gildas was writing. His story is confirmed by archaeology: the British recovery after Badon is recognised in the lack of sixth-century Anglo-Saxon pottery in such areas as Sussex, Essex and Hertfordshire which have all yielded fifth-century material; similarly, judging by modern finds of their grave goods, the Anglo-Saxon expansion in the Upper Thames ceased for fifty years after Badon. Badon is surrounded by controversy. Gildas names no leader of the Britons for this battle, nor do we know the leader of the Saxons, though modern writers conjecture a joint force from Kent, Sussex and Wessex under the South Saxon Aelle, who Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle say was overking of the settlers at this time.

  The story would be clearer if we knew where Badon Hill was. Gildas implies that the battle was in the south-west and the fact that it was a siege of a hill – a mons – strongly suggests that this was another reoccupied hillfort. Several sixth-century battles took place at hillforts: Old Sarum and Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, Dyrham Camp in Gloucestershire. We do not even know whether the Britons were the defenders or the besiegers at Badon. There are several possibilities for the battle site, but the best would seem to be Liddington Castle, a prominent Iron Age hillfort near Swindon in Wiltshire. Next to it is a village called Badbury which philologists say could have come from a Celtic Badon. It lies in a central position between the main Anglo-Saxon settlements as they stood in the year 500, the Romano-British areas controlled by the cities of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath and the zone of reoccupied Iron Age forts which stretches through Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset. On a good day Liddington can be seen from Cirencester, fifteen miles away, its scarped western side standing out clearly: a separate, isolated hill. Most important, Liddington marks one of the great Dark Age road junctions, at the intersection of Ermine Street, another Roman road going due south, and the Great Ridgeway, which cuts across central England and which runs right underneath the ramparts of the castle. In the early medieval period these roads were still in use, and therefore Liddington was a key site. Also, an excavation on the fort has revealed reoccupation and refortification, and pottery which was imported at the time the battle took place. It seems likely th
at this was the site of the battle which saved Romano-British life in the Cotswolds and the south-west for fifty years, but our knowledge may be increased and it would be unwise to build too much on a conjectural identification.

  There is no disputing the historicity of Badon. Gildas places it securely at this time. But what justification is there for accepting the accounts of Arthur’s leadership at the battle?

  THE TWELFTH BATTLE WAS ON BADON HILL WHERE 960 MEN FELL IN ONE DAY AT A SINGLE ONSET OF ARTHUR; AND NO ONE KILLED THEM BUT HE ALONE, AND IN ALL THE BATTLES HE CAME OUT VICTORIOUS.

  That quotation appears in one of the most famous passages in British historiography, the tale of the twelve battles of Arthur and his leadership at Badon, and it is found in Nennius’ History of the Britons.

  We must now examine the sources of the Arthurian myth, sources which many historians believe to contain a hard core of truth which proves the existence of Arthur. There are two key texts: the Annals of Wales, and Nennius’ History of the Britons, and both are thought to contain authentic survivals from fifth- and sixth-century history. On these two books the evidence for a historical Arthur rests, and because they are so important we must look at them as they appear in the composite Welsh historical manuscript, Harleian 3859 in the British Library. The book is a miscellaneous collection which includes the Annals of Wales and the History of the Britons. Though now in the same book, these are two quite distinct items. The book was written in Britain in the early 1100s, that is 600 years after the events it describes.