Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  The next scene shows three galloping horses. Mounted are Ascanius, Aeneas and Dido. They are out hunting, all three of them at full pelt, their cloaks streaming behind them. Ascanius gallops out in front, his mount’s hooves pounding. Aeneas comes next, his head turned back towards Dido, who follows on a white horse. The final panel shows the culmination of Venus’s plans. As the hunt continues, a storm breaks. Dido and Aeneas take shelter together in a cave, and there they make love. The mosaic shows them embracing, kissing: he has lifted her bodily from the ground.

  ‘Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum/ causa fuit’ – ‘that was the first day of her death, the first day of her sorrows, the cause of everything’, says the poem. Dido is completely engulfed by her love for Aeneas. And the Trojan is in love, too, up to a point: until Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger of the gods, to remind him of his destiny, which is not here building Dido’s new city (for she too is an exile, a traveller from Phoenicia in the east who must establish a new home for her people). Aeneas must leave her and go on, back to sea, and to Italy, where destiny decrees he will establish the dynasty that will one day found Rome.

  What happens next is not on the mosaic. Aeneas orders his men to prepare the ships in secret: he will find a moment to tell the queen of his departure. But Dido senses what is afoot. She rages through the city, like a furious maenad, and then confronts him. ‘Did you think you would keep this a secret? Did you think you’d steal away from my shores?’ she asks. Aeneas replies that their love was no marriage; that Italy must be his darling desire now. Nothing moves him. He is resolved; the Trojans leave. Dido builds herself a funeral pyre, takes Aeneas’s sword, which he has left behind him, and stabs herself: ‘ensemque cruore spumantem sparsasque manus’ – ‘the sword is spattered with blood, her hands are soaked in it’. It is a cruelly symbolic suicide, penetrated by her lover’s weapon. The pyre burns; the Trojans, as they put out to deep water, see it flaming in the distance. Later, Dido and Aeneas meet again when he makes the perilous journey to the Underworld, the realm of the dead. She turns her back on him. It is then that Aeneas tries, at last, to express his real love for her: too late.

  There is nothing quite like this mosaic elsewhere in Britain. It is, you could argue, the first object in Britain that tells a complete story: a set of images that reveals, and is to be read alongside, a literary text. It has been argued that the owner of the villa at Low Ham might have commissioned the mosaic based on images he himself knew: there is a manuscript of the Aeneid in the Vatican, for example, whose illuminations are similar to the scenes in the Low Ham mosaic. That can be no more than speculation: but what seems clear to me is that someone in what we now call Somerset loved a poem so much that they wished it to be picked out in fragments of stone: a set-piece of learned, literary, utterly Roman taste on the fringe of the empire. And just a few decades later, everything that the mosaic and the poem stood for fell apart.

  12

  Norfolk, again, and Sussex

  But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland …

  Francis Haverfield, 1905

  It was a gloomy June day in Great Yarmouth, beneath the infinite Norfolk sky that sank into the flat and treeless fens. Matthew and I had come to the edge of England, and to the end of a month-long journey in search of the remains of Roman Britain. We drove through the outskirts of the town, past endless rows of static caravans poised for occupation by those with a taste for the bleak. At length we arrived at Burgh Castle, the name of both a village and the Roman ruin that lies at its edge. When we saw it, we were quieted by its sheer force. Even from a distance the fort walls – standing as tall as they were built, and outridden by fat, tubular towers – were daunting.

  New clouds had flooded the sky; it was cooling, and threatening to rain. As we approached the fort on foot, through fields of calf-length grass, we began to get a sense of the landscape beyond. With the sweep of the river Waveney in the foreground, and a windmill in the distance, it resembled a scene, more sky and water than land, by one of the more austere seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters: Jacob van Ruisdael, perhaps. When Burgh Castle was built, probably in the third quarter of the third century, there was none of this land to be seen: it guarded the southern tip of a great estuary, where Great Yarmouth stands now. The northern edge was presided over by another fort, at Caister-on-Sea.

  We walked to the south wall of the fort, which rose an imposing four and a half metres tall. Five neat courses of terracotta tiles, in the usual Roman style, ran at regular intervals through the flint-and-mortar walls. Some of the smartly squared-off flints used to face the wall were still in place, though many had been plundered over the years, revealing its rubbly innards. I ran my hand over the unforgiving sharp grittiness of it – the familiar texture of East Anglian buildings of almost any age. A large chunk of wall, in all its massy two-metre width, leaned out at a disconcerting angle from the main run, like a slice of cake ready to be levered on to a plate. We were the only people here, except for a dog-walker and two joggers who ploughed determinedly round and round the walls.

  Burgh Castle is one of the Roman forts, dating from the third century, that dot the east coast of England from the Wash to the Solent. The Notitia Dignitatum, a Roman document outlining all the military commands held in the empire in the late fourth century, notes the existence of a post called the Count of the Saxon Shore. It is because of the existence of this post that the great coastal remains of the east have come to be known as the ‘Saxon shore forts’. In fact, the forts – including those at Brancaster, Reculver, Lympne, Dover and Pevensey – cannot be ascribed confidently to a single, coherent building plan. They seem to have been built at different dates and fallen out of use at different times. But they point clearly to a threat from the sea: pirates from the east; Saxon raiders. Burgh Castle is not a romantic or picturesque remain: it is the remnant of a vast and glowering military installation.

  It was here, in 1962, that some of the latest objects that can be associated with Roman Britain were discovered: a set of exquisite glass vessels – drinking cups, beakers, jugs and bowls – in milkily aqueous shades of green. They had been set inside a bronze dish and buried. Some of them had survived intact; others were restored from fragments. They can now be seen in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum. On stylistic grounds, they have been dated to the early fifth century, the very end of the age of Roman Britain; they are the newest things on display in the gallery. But they are, otherwise, deeply mysterious objects. Were the glass vessels set here for safe keeping against a better time? If so, by whom? And why were they placed here, in Norfolk, in a pit beneath a rampart in a century-old fort?

  No one can give secure answers to such questions. There are many theories, speculations and fantasies about the end of Roman Britain, but few certainties, and no consensus. It is not clear precisely why Roman rule ceased in about AD 408 and was never resumed. Or to what extent, and in what parts of Britain, and for how long, vestiges of Roman-ness persisted: some have argued that in the west of Britain, a Roman way of life continued even into the seventh century, while others have claimed that most Roman towns were already derelict by AD 408. Nor is it clear precisely when, and in what numbers, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes came to Britain, and whether as peaceful settlers or violent aggressors. Nor is it known to what extent myths of British resistance to the Saxons – such as the legend of King Arthur – are tinged with truth. The written evidence, bar a handful of problematic texts, quickly dries up. Britain fades out of the historical record, slipping into a literary darkness almost as complete as that which obtained before the Romans began to write about it – a darkness only to be lifted with the composition, in AD 731, of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

  The archaeology draws a similar blank. Inscriptions vi
rtually ceased to be produced; the few new coins that circulated were poor, reduced specimens, some manufactured from the clippings of old ones. Pottery factories were stilled. The sturdy stone buildings of Roman Britain were no longer built. Londinium itself was virtually deserted, the walled city not to be fully reoccupied until the reign of Alfred the Great nearly half a millennium later. This silence and absence is itself eloquent: it points towards the collapse of civic life, of the money economy, of the secure and busy world of Roman things. It is hard not to stare into the deep white blankness of Roman Britain’s end and to see a calamity that was swift and complete; a limb destroyed as it was sundered from the blood supply of the imperial body.

  The reign of Constantine the Great, from his acclamation in York in AD 306 to his death in 337, saw a generation of stability in Britain, and perhaps its high-water mark of prosperity. After his death, a familiar pattern of warring sons vying for power asserted itself. By 343, one of them was dead and the empire was divided between the remaining two: Constans in the west and Constantius II in the east. But Constans – who made an unusual winter Channel crossing to Britain that year, perhaps to deal with some stirring trouble – was ousted, and the pagan Magnentius raised in his stead. By 353, Magnentius’s forces had in turn been defeated by Constantius II in Illyricum in the Balkans, and in Gaul. Now, as sole emperor, Constantius II sent his representative, Paul ‘the Chain’ Catena, to Britain to quash Magnentius’s remaining sympathisers – apparently so brutally that Martinus, the vicar of Britain (the civil administrator who oversaw the four provinces of the island), attempted to attack him with a sword, before committing suicide. In 355, Constantius appointed his obscure young cousin, the brilliant pagan Julian, to rule the western empire. He appears to have used the rich agricultural land of Britain, perhaps the chief cause of its prosperity, to supply the Roman troops who were slugging it out against the Germanic insurgents on the Rhine. In 367 came the so-called Barbarian Conspiracy, an unusual instance of various interest groups co-operating for an all-out assault on Roman territory. Picts from Caledonia and Scots and Attacotti from Hibernia raged in Britain, while Saxons and Franks assaulted Gaul. The leader of the Roman troops in Britain, Fullofaudes, was put out of action; the comes maritimi tractus – the ‘count of the maritime region’ – was killed. The revolt seems to have been completely put down by Theodosius, the father of the emperor Theodosius the Great, who is also said to have restored the otherwise undocumented province of Valentia, perhaps in northern England.

  But any respite from instability was temporary. On two subsequent occasions over the next few decades, troops in Britain elevated pretenders to the purple – Magnus Maximus and Constantine III, the latter apparently chosen by the soldiers at least partly on the basis of his name, perfumed as it was with the glory of the old emperor (to whom he was not related). According to the sixth-century cleric Gildas – whose sermonising work On the Destruction of Britain is the only near-contemporary source describing the end of Roman rule – Maximus depleted the island of troops, who were never to return.

  The empire in the north-west was now embroiled in wars with foreign insurgents, riven by civil war, and locked, by reason of military and diplomatic necessity, into endlessly complex and often mutually duplicitous relationships with ‘barbarian’ allies such as the Goth Alaric, who, when relations turned sour, was to sack Rome itself in 410. At length, while Constantine III was campaigning in Spain in around 408, a serious barbarian invasion racked Britain. According to the Byzantine historian Zosimus, writing at the turn of the sixth century, ‘the barbarians beyond the Rhine made such unbounded incursions over every province, as to reduce not only the Britons, but some of the Celtic nations also to the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws but as they themselves pleased. 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 is not at all clear that the Britons regarded this move as a final break from Rome. There are hints that on subsequent occasions they appealed to the empire for help: in his narrative, Zosimus noted that the emperor Honorius ‘sent letters to the cities of Britain urging them to take measures to defend themselves’. This, known as the ‘rescript of Honorius’, usually dated to 408, has traditionally been regarded as the moment at which Britain was permanently cast adrift from the empire. In fact, as with so much about the last days of Roman Britain, its status is unstable: the manuscript is now thought by most scholars to be corrupt, referring to Brittium, in modern Calabria, rather than Britannia.

  It is impossible to know what the aftermath of all this felt like from the inside, except by way of the merest chinks illuminating the darkness. The Confession of St Patrick, believed to date from the mid fifth century, begins with Patricius, the son of a deacon (elsewhere he describes his father as a decurion, a Roman magistrate), being taken captive from his small villa near the settlement of Bannavem Taberniae, the location of which is unknown. ‘Hyberione in captivitate adductus sum, cum tot milia hominum, secundum merita nostra, quia a Deo recessimus’ – ‘I was abducted in captivity to Ireland, like so many thousands of men, as we deserved, because we had turned away from God,’ he wrote. He served as a slave, he added, for six years.

  Gildas – whose tone is fire and brimstone rather than one of scholarly detachment – painted a grim picture. As the Romans left, he wrote, the Scots and the Picts arrived in their coracles like ‘fusci vermiculorum cunei’, ‘dark swarms of worms’. The people were torn apart ‘sicut agni a lanionibus’, ‘like lambs by butchers’. Later, after a period in which the Britons gave way to decadence and luxury, the Saxons came, he wrote, in three warships. They were paid off, but in time their demands for land and provisions became heavier and heavier.

  In the later, even more insecure source traditionally ascribed to the monk Nennius, perhaps writing in the ninth century, the story is that the British king Vortigern granted the island of Thanet to the Saxon mercenaries Hengist and Horsa, who eventually grabbed more and more territory in the south-east. At any rate, according to Gildas, violence erupted. Fire blazed from sea to sea; settlements were destroyed, bishops, priests and people lay dead in the streets. Some fled to the mountains, some gave themselves up to slavery. The Britons finally rallied under Ambrosius Aurelianus – ‘a modest man, who alone of the Romans had by chance survived the shock of such a storm, a storm in which his parents had evidently perished’, according to Gildas. They took on the Saxons at Mount Badon – the whereabouts of which is unknown – and won a great victory.

  In Nennius, it is Arthur who leads the troops at Badon; his text is the wellspring for the great medieval elaborations of the Arthurian legends. R. G. Collingwood, for one, was a believer: not in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tales of magic and knights and chivalry, to be sure, but in Arturius as a likely historical reality, a figure who, against the backdrop of ‘a country sinking into barbarism’, was likely to have been the last remnant of ‘Roman ideas’. However that may be, Collingwood was surely right when he wrote that it was in the figure of Arthur in which ‘the British people has embalmed its memory of Roman Britain’. It was the historiographical void left by the end of Roman rule that created the conditions for the weaving of Britain’s most powerful and wonderful myths: the knights of the Round Table, Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere. As if this terrifying lacuna, this great Dark Age of nothingness, needed to be filled with stories in which good fought against evil, in which magic vibrated through the forests of the island, in which heroes valiantly strove. Perhaps the Arthurian legends also reflect the wonderment of the English at the grand, decaying Roman towns and buildings, which must have been built by supernatural means. The melancholic Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Ruin’
begins:

  Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,

  the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,

  mouldereth.

  One early spring day I visited the British Museum to look at an object that, like the Burgh Castle glass, stands at the very end of the Romano-British period. Curator Richard Hobbs had offered to show me the Great Dish of the Mildenhall Treasure, an elaborately decorated late Roman platter made from eight kilograms of silver. Unusually, the Great Dish had been removed from its display case in the Roman Britain gallery so that Hobbs could study it in detail. It is the most impressive item in a spectacular trove of thirty-four silver objects – platters, dishes, ladles, spoons – that was found buried on the outskirts of West Row, a fenland village near the town of Mildenhall in Suffolk.

  The Mildenhall Treasure is one of a number of buried hoards that date from the last years of Roman Britain. Among them is the Hoxne Treasure, also found in Suffolk: it was discovered in 1992 by a man searching for his lost hammer using a metal detector. He found the hammer, too: it is now part of the British Museum’s collection, along with the cache of coins, jewellery and precious tableware, including a silver pepperpot in the shape of a grand Roman lady, her eyes and lips picked out in gold. The richness and beauty of these hoards is startling. ‘It turns out that the place to go for fourth-century precious metal is Britain,’ said Hobbs. Such finds vastly outnumber those from neighbouring Gaul: attesting, it seems, to the wealth of the province in the dying decades of Roman rule – and perhaps also to unusual levels of trouble. For no one knows for sure why such hoards were buried. They may have been the hastily concealed wealth of families on the run from Saxon raiders, or the breakdown in civil society. They may have been ritually buried, offerings to the gods (though some of the hoards seem to have been buried by Christians).