Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  Claudius stayed in Britain for just over a fortnight, then returned to Rome, where he insisted the senate proclaim an official ‘victory’ and commission the building of a triumphal arch. From then on he insisted on being called ‘Britannicus’. It did the trick. Claudius had gone from despised idiot to military hero in only six years. Even though the Emperor had returned to Rome, the invasion continued on and off for another forty years. As far as possible, actual fighting was restricted to tribes who did not submit voluntarily. In fact, this was easier than it seemed. The defeat by the Romans of the expansionist Catuvellauni was a cause for celebration among rival tribes and many of them viewed the Romans as liberators rather than conquerors. The Atrebates of Hampshire, the Iceni of Norfolk and the Brigantes of Yorkshire were happy to submit and pay their taxes rather than fight. After four years, Plautius had enlarged the frontier to the Fosse Way. The only real resistance came in the Isle of Wight and Dorset, where the II Augusta, under the command of the future Emperor Vespasian, was forced to storm and capture some twenty hill forts from the Dumnonii before Vespasian could build his own legionary fortress at Exeter.

  The first phase of the invasion was finished and, were it not for the perennial difficulty of establishing a stable frontier, it may have settled at that. To celebrate the orderly incorporation of Britannia into the Empire, an enormous monumental arch, 26 metres high, was built at Richborough where the Romans had landed. It was dressed in white Carrara marble and decorated with statues and inscriptions. Richborough stood on a promontory, so the arch must have been visible for miles out to sea. Its purpose was to emphasize that the Romans had tamed Britannia and every official visitor to the province entered through this arch before making his way inland along Watling Street.

  However, further west things did not go so smoothly. The repeated attacks by the Silures, inspired by the fugitive Caratacus, persuaded the Romans that they must invade Wales. The first attempt was stalled when Suetonius Paulinus, who had routed the Druids on Anglesey, was forced to divert his troops to put down the far more serious revolt of the Iceni under Queen Boudicca. The Iceni had been a relatively quiet client kingdom under Boudicca’s husband, Prasutagus. As a willing ally of Rome, it was his expectation that his kingdom would remain intact after his death. This did not happen. His property was seized, the aristocracy expelled from their estates and crippling taxes enforced. When she protested, Boudicca was flogged and her daughters raped. Her vengeance was swift and terrible. Rallying her own tribe, the Iceni, and the neighbouring Trinovantes in revolt, she swept through southern Britain, sacking and burning Colchester, London and St Albans. She tortured and killed every Roman and every Roman sympathizer that she could capture. The IXth legion, which tried to halt her advance, was cut to ribbons.

  At the time of Boudicca’s uprising, the south-east was considered to be well on the way to submission, so the bulk of the Roman army had been moved to the western front, from where Suetonius Paulinus was forced to abandon his invasion of Wales and return to deal with the revolt with the three remaining legions. If the uprising had been bloody, the retribution of Suetonius was even more so. Tacitus reckons 70,000 were killed on both sides during the revolt itself, and 80,000 during its suppression. Nero, who had succeeded Claudius as Emperor, seriously considered abandoning Britannia as a colony altogether.

  After Boudicca’s revolt had been put down, Roman control recovered. The crippling taxation was relaxed a little and those parts of Britain that had been conquered began the long process of assimilation into the Empire. But the stability of the northern frontier was beginning to crumble. Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes and the woman who had handed over the fugitive Caratacus, lost control of the loose federation of northern tribes. Agricola responded to this instability by pushing the frontier back to the very edge of the Scottish Highlands. He took his army even further north in his campaign against the Picts, inflicting a crushing defeat at the battle of Mons Graupius in AD 83. The location of Mons Graupius has eluded historians and archaeologists alike. The best guess is at Bennachie, near Inverurie on the banks of the River Don, 15 miles north-west of Aberdeen.

  For the Romans it was a long way from home – ‘the place where the world and nature end’, according to Tacitus. But even with this defeat, the Highland Picts avoided being forced to submit to Rome in the way the Welsh did not, although the intention to complete the invasion of Scotland was there. At Inchtuthil, near Blairgowrie, a huge legionary fortress began to take shape, the equal of Chester or of Caerleon on the Welsh frontier. But reverses on the continent forced the Emperor Domitian to withdraw his troops from Scotland. The fortress was carefully dismantled and the materials taken south. It had been a lucky escape for the Picts.

  By AD 120 the frontier had moved south to the line between the Solway Firth in the west and the mouth of the Tyne in the east. At first only a turf rampart, the frontier was turned into the impenetrable stone barrier of Hadrian’s Wall, on the orders of the Emperor. Under Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, the frontier moved north again. This time it was defined by the eponymous Antonine Wall, a barrier of rock and turf 20 feet high running between the Firths of Clyde and Forth. This was a much shorter boundary and many military historians think Hadrian should have built his wall here in the first place. But more trouble with the Picts convinced the next Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to bring the frontier back down to Hadrian’s Wall in 163. Even that great barrier was not impermeable and there were repeated raids across the wall as far as York.

  Further south the fighting was less intense and the native population became drawn into the seductive and deliberate process of civilization. Towns were planned and built. Urban life, unknown in the whole history of the Isles, was born. People began to learn Latin and Roman dress became popular. As Tacitus shrewdly observed, ‘Little by little there was a slide towards the allurements of degeneracy; assembly rooms, bathing establishments and smart dinner parties. In their inexperience the Britons called it civilisation when it was really all part of their servitude.’

  In the south, cities like Lincoln, Colchester and Gloucester grew up explicitly to accommodate army veterans on their retirement. Britons joined the army as auxiliaries and retired as citizens. In the towns, administrators mixed with craftsmen and artisans. Slaves were freed and were set up in business by their former masters. In the countryside, undefended villas of sumptuous magnificence sprang up, complete with wood- or coal-fired central heating, windows and glazed tile flooring. But even as these outward signs of affluence amused their owners, the seeds of destruction had been sown. The traumas of the Empire, its division into eastern and western sectors, the movement of the centre of the western Empire from Rome, first to Milan, then to Trier in eastern France, the deadly rivalries and murderous conspiracies all spelled the eventual end of the Roman occupation of Britain.

  The surprise is that the Empire in the west lasted as long as it did. Even after extremely serious reverses – such as in AD 367 when a concerted assault by Picts, Saxons and Franks attacked the Roman provinces of Britain and Gaul, ranging at will, burning, killing and looting as they went – still the Romans managed to stage a comeback, this time under the Emperor Valentinian. By then the Roman army had changed its composition, no longer relying on Italian legionnaires or auxiliaries from the east. A quarter of the regular army was Germanic. By the beginning of the fifth century, the signs of weakening central direction were growing. There were no more bulk imports of coins, a sure sign that the army was not being paid as it once had been. The thriving pottery industry suddenly ceased. By AD 430 coins were no longer in regular use – another indicator of an ossifying economy. Even though there is evidence of one last attempt to reclaim Britain around 425, it came to nothing. By 450 Britain was well and truly on its own.

  What lasting genetic legacy of the Roman occupation should we look out for? Whatever it is, we must expect it to be more pronounced in England, which was far more integrated into the Empire than Wales or Scotland ever w
ere. And in Ireland we should not expect any significant traces at all. If Tacitus and other historians are to be believed, tens of thousands of Britons were slaughtered in the early years of the occupation – at least 80,000 as a result of Boudicca’s revolt, 30,000 at Mons Graupius. These are large numbers for a relatively small population. The genetic legacy of wholesale military slaughter will be found, one imagines, mainly among men. The effect will be to reduce the diversity among Y-chromosomes. Population numbers can recover quickly if the women are spared, with men taking advantage of the surplus of women to bear their multiple children. But, with a smaller number of fathers, the Y-chromosomes that are passed down to future generations will not be as varied as if there were equal numbers of men and women.

  The genetic origin of the Roman army itself is also something to be aware of when we examine the genetics. It was certainly not 100 per cent Roman, in the Italian sense, and drew its recruits from many different parts of the Empire, particularly from the lower Rhine. But nothing from the Roman occupation, save perhaps the import, and export, of female slaves, seems likely to have had a big impact on the maternal genealogy of England.

  16

  SAXONS, DANES, VIKINGS AND

  NORMANS

  The end of the Roman occupation of Britain was quite unlike our own recent colonial goodbyes. There was no lowering of the flag, no salute from a member of the imperial family, no tear brushed away from the eyes of the last governor and no dignified departure on a warship. That was Hong Kong in 1997, not Britain in the fifth century AD. The Romans left a country already accustomed to the intermittent attention of raiding war parties from across the porous land borders to the west and north. In the great attack of 367, Picts from Scotland had joined Saxons from across the North Sea in rampaging through the countryside, killing and looting at will. The final withdrawal of the Roman army, some fifty years later, left England completely undefended and the population unprotected. Four centuries of occupation, during which citizens and slaves alike were forbidden even to carry arms and all weapons and military equipment were in the hands of the army, had left a population unaccustomed to warfare. That is not to say that the population was necessarily completely defenceless. Everyone must have seen this coming, and there were unknown numbers of retired veterans living in the towns and countryside. There may even have been remnants of a command structure at York and around Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was not breached by the Picts, who must, therefore, have taken to the sea to attack the North Sea coasts in the great rising of 367. There were already Germanic settlements in eastern England based on former auxiliary units of the Roman army.

  It takes only a little imagination to see these men using even their small advantages to establish themselves as minor kings in the confusion. But what actually happened is shrouded in mystery for one very good reason. There are simply no contemporary records. Even allowing for their exaggerations and creative imagination, the histories of Tacitus and others were some sort of record. After AD 410 there is nothing. We have to wait over 100 years for the next account – and that makes Tacitus sound as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Ruin of Britain, written by the monk Gildas in about 540, which we encountered in an earlier chapter, is little more than an indignant rant against the corruption and godlessness of his own time. This is how he describes the incursions of the early fifth century:

  As the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried them across the sea valleys the foul hordes of Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rock.

  As to their appearance, Gildas writes, ‘They were readier to cover their villainous faces with hair than their private parts with clothes.’

  Here he describes the emergence of Vortigern from the chaos as a leader of the British and his invitation to the Saxon Hengist to protect him against Pictish attacks:

  To hold back the northern peoples, they introduced into the island the vile unspeakable Saxons, hated of God and man alike . . . of their own free will, they invited in under the same roof the enemy they feared worse than death.

  The Ruin of Britain is certainly colourful stuff – and totally unreliable. But what a great title. It is largely through the writings of Gildas that the central enigma of the Saxon age and its genetic effect on the British has been formed. Were they all killed or driven to the hills? This is what Gildas has to say about the effect of Saxon attacks in Norfolk:

  Swords flashed and flames crackled. Horrible was it to see the foundation stones and high walls thrown down . . . mixing with holy altars and fragments of human bodies, and covered with a purple crust of clotted blood . . . There was no burial save in the ruin of houses or in the bellies of the beasts and birds.

  However, the archaeological evidence for immediate and wholesale destruction is conspicuously absent. London was not sacked, York and Lincoln were evacuated, then quickly recovered. In the far west the former legionary town of Wroxeter near Oswestry in Shropshire was completely untouched.

  The far more dependable Bede, writing from the monastery at Jarrow, completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is thanks to him that we are able to differentiate between the three tribes of ‘barbarians’, namely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. According to Bede, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula of northern Denmark occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons from Saxony in north-west Germany settled in southern England. They eventually differentiated into the East Saxons, in Essex, the Mid-Saxons farther west (and remembered in the now vanished county of Middlesex) and the West Saxons of Wessex, which was much later divided into Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. The Angles, originally located in Angeln in southern Denmark, between Saxony and Jutland, took over East Anglia, as well as the Midlands, which became Mercia, and Northumbria in the northeast.

  In very broad terms, archaeology confirms Bede’s account of the origins of the invaders, as far as the general area goes, with objects found in English graves of the period very similar to the styles of northern Germany and southern Denmark. But the neat division between Saxons, Angles and Jutes and their various destinations in England almost certainly applies only to the leaders, not the mass of settlers.

  Unlike the ‘barbarians’ who finally defeated the Roman Empire within Europe, the Saxons, if I may use that term to embrace the three ‘tribes’ of Bede, came from well outside the frontiers of the Empire. They had completely different customs, and social organizations which emphasized kinship and loyalty to the chieftains. Honour was to be found in avenging the death of relatives, or accepting a payment, the wergild, in its place. The Gods were Norse – Tiw, Woden, Thor, Freya, and are remembered in the days of the week – Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – and also in English place-names like Tuesley in Surrey and Wednesbury in Staffordshire.

  There was stiff resistance to the Saxons, culminating in the British victory around AD 500 at Mons Badonicus, an unknown location in the West Country where Geoffrey of Monmouth has King Arthur lead the victorious Britons. In the century that followed, the Saxons advanced only very slowly into territory still held by the Britons. By 600 the Saxons had moved north from Northumbria to defeat the Britons of southern Scotland. The Saxon victory at the battle of Chester in 616 severed the land link between the Britons of Wales and the Britons of the north, preventing them from helping each other. The British kingdoms of Rheged on the Solway Firth and Elmet around Leeds were extinguished, while Strathclyde, with its base in Dumbarton on the Clyde, survived. At the other end of the country, Cornwall resisted until the beginning of the ninth century. Saxon lands coalesced into larger kingdoms – East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, Wessex, Mercia, and Bernicia and Deria, both in Northumbria. Gradually, through conquest and alliance, kings of one region claimed sovereignty over one or more of the others. Raedwald of East Anglia, whose treasures were found at the burial site at Sutton Hoo, was one of these, claiming supremacy over Mercia and Northumbria.

  Life
in the court of Raedwald and other Saxon kings centred around the Great Hall and Bede gives a captivating account of what it was like: ‘the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging.’ The king, his earls and household listen to the songs and poems of their bards. This is the world of Beowulf – heroic, courageous and at the same time sensitive to literature and beauty, as even a brief glimpse at the Sutton Hoo treasure confirms.

  One enduring question is why it was that the Britons did not simply absorb the invaders. This is what happened in France, where the Germanic invaders were quickly assimilated into the culture of Roman Gaul. Their language was almost entirely lost as Gaul slowly moved from Latin to French. But in England the reverse happened. English owes very little to Celtic, but almost everything to its Germanic roots. The abrupt change of language, the reason indeed that I am writing this book in English rather than a form of Welsh, is a major reason among historians and archaeologists for supporting the extermination scenario. Reading the bloodthirsty accounts from Gildas and faced with the extinction of the Celtic language and its replacement by English, it is tempting to explain them as variations on the theme of genocide. The English Celts were simply wiped out, or driven to the hills. Whether this is true or not is certainly something I hoped genetics would be able to discover, but is it really very likely?

  There certainly were civilian massacres, on the eve of the battle of Chester in 616 for example, but there is also plenty of evidence that the British were living peacefully in Saxon kingdoms. A set of laws promulgated by a seventh-century king of Wessex specifically provides for Britons living in his territory. There is also the question of numbers. Is it realistic to think that there were enough invaders coming across the sea completely to supplant the native population? The genetics should provide a big clue towards resolving the perennial Saxon/Celt debate, and it is the main question to be answered about England. Or is it?