The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  Most clearly, Gildas could see the fate of his homeland reflected in the fate of the Kingdom of Israel. When the Israelites turned from God and fell into disobedience and civil strife, God gave forewarning through the prophets and then the destruction of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians. In spite of this, the southern kingdom, Judah, persisted in its old ways. The result was the conquest of the Holy Land by the Babylonians and the exile of the Jews. This story is told in the historical and prophetic books of the Bible. The analogy was quite clear for Gildas – his own homeland was poised between two calamities and only a wholesale repentance by the leaders of Britain could avert its final destruction.

  It is most unfair to say, as many modern writers do, that Gildas was not a historian. Historical analysis was a crucial part of his work and he was considered a historian by later generations. He analysed the past for clues about the present, examining trends and patterns rather than individual episodes. As such, he has rather more in common with modern historians, particularly those studying the early Dark Ages, than writers like Bede and Nennius. Unlike Gildas, the historians of the eighth and ninth centuries were happy to string together historical anecdotes and details from royal family trees, with little critical evaluation of their material. For Gildas, the analysis was everything. This makes his work very different from theirs. We should not expect to find exact dates, regnal lists or genealogies, any more than those elements figure in modern social or economic histories. It is historical trends which are important to Gildas, and the model he uses to analyse them is a religious one.

  That is not to say that we do not see many deficiencies and errors in his analysis. Gildas himself confirms that he cannot rely on any British literary sources, these having been burnt by the invaders or carried overseas by exiles. This lack of sources is literally true. We can only, for instance, correct Gildas’s impression that Hadrian’s Wall was built after 388 (actually c. AD 120) by reference to continental sources. We can check this with archaeology, another resource unavailable to Gildas, although he did speculate about the various Roman remains visible in the island, their origins and fate.

  In the earlier part of de Excidio Britanniae, especially up to the arrival of the Saxons, facts are distorted for didactic effect. Things which Gildas knew, but were not part of a repeating pattern, are ignored as incidental to his message.

  As the narrative approaches Gildas’s time, our confidence in it increases. He assumed a great deal of prior knowledge on the part of his readers which we unfortunately do not possess. There was no need for him to repeat common knowledge. His job was to present a reasoned analysis of the immediate situation and a remedy to improve it.

  The climax of the work is a denunciation of his contemporary rulers and priests, some of whom are addressed directly by name. The Saxon revolt and its attendant calamities were only a few generations in the past. As Gildas intended to convince his readers to turn from their wicked ways by his interpretation of recent history, every error they could pick up would weaken his argument. Bearing this in mind, let us look at what Gildas says about his time and the events immediately preceding it.

  The Complaining Book

  The story which Gildas tells of the 150 years leading up to his own time is this:

  The destruction of Britain as a civilised and Christian community began when Roman usurper Maximus took the troops from the island to set up a ‘Kingdom of Wickedness’ on the continent. This left the country open to attacks by the barbarian Picts and Scots. Rescue missions by the Romans helped in the short term, but ultimately the Britons would have to rely on their own resources.

  When a renewed attack by the old enemies coincided with a manpower shortage caused by a memorable plague, the government, a council and the Proud Tyrant (our Vortigern) decided to let the Saxons settle in the country in return for military service.

  The Saxons fell out with their employer over supplies and broke into revolt. The fire burned from sea to sea, devastating cities and fields and almost the whole surface of the island to the shores of the western sea. All the Coloniae – York, Lincoln, Colchester and Gloucester – were laid low by battering-rams and their inhabitants slaughtered. Once their campaign of destruction had achieved its desired effect, ‘the cruel plunderers subsequently returned home, that is to their settlements in the Eastern part of the Island’.

  Those Britons who survived the general massacre and did not flee abroad or surrender themselves to slavery held out in high fortified hills, dense forests and sea cliffs. God gave them strength and people fled to them from all directions. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus. Gildas describes him as ‘vir modestus’, an ordinary man, who ‘perhaps alone of the Roman race’ had survived the disaster. ‘Surely,’ says Gildas, ‘his parents had worn the purple.’ The ‘citizens’, as Ambrosius’s followers are called (although they have abandoned their cities), sallied forth from their refuges and challenged the Saxons to battle. The war raged with victory going now to the Britons, now to the Saxons ‘so that . . . the Lord could make trial of his latter-day Israel. This lasted right up to the siege of “Mons Badonicus”, almost the most recent and certainly not the smallest defeat of the villains.’

  This sets the scene for the denunciation of Gildas’s contemporary kings and priests. Five of the tyrants are named: Constantine, Aurelius Caninus, Vortiporius, Cuneglassus and Maglocunus. Maglocunus is Mailcunus of the Historia. Gildas would therefore be living in the time of Outigirn and the famous poets. He says he was born in the year of the siege of Mount Badon, 43–4 years earlier. He would therefore have lived at least some of his life in ‘the reign of Arthur’.

  If Gildas really lived at the same time as Outigirn, and after Arthur and Vortimer, would we not expect him to refer to them by name? This argument is the one most frequently advanced by those sceptical about Arthur. It completely ignores the nature of de Excidio Britanniae. Proper names from Gildas’s own era are kept to a minimum, irrelevant as they are to analysing and predicting trends. This allows the biblical parallels to stand out more clearly. Modern sceptical historians are happy to write Dark Age history without naming kings and warleaders of the period, and it seems quite unjustified to take Gildas to task for doing the same thing. When Gildas does single out individuals, his job is primarily to castigate the wicked, not to praise the good.

  There is no special pleading here. Arthur is not the only unnamed person in a book otherwise teeming with Dark Age characters; Gildas names only one person in the hundred years or so between the appeal to Agitius and the denunciation of Maglocunus and the other tyrants. Only four Britons are named in the whole of history before Gildas’s time, three of them saints martyred in the Great Persecution! In fact, only one person in Britain is named after Maximus left at the end of the fourth century, although Gildas was aware, from the work of the historian Orosius, of the names of the other Roman usurpers, for example. Although they are not named, many characters are referred to in the century preceding Gildas’s own time. These include the Proud Tyrant and his councillors, Maglocunus’s royal uncle and nephew, a good king who was the father of Vortiporius, the fathers (sic) and brothers of Aurelius Caninus, who died young as a result of their participation in civil wars, and two royal youths, who handled weapons more bravely than anyone else, treacherously murdered by Constantine. The list of these nameless but important characters could go on. Not being named by Gildas is hardly proof of non-existence.

  We should not expect to find the name of Arthur in de Excidio Britanniae. We are looking for the reign of Arthur, its characteristics and events. For some of this, Gildas is a first-hand witness and on his testimony will the story we have deduced so far stand or fall.

  The End of Roman Britain

  A flurry of tyrants and heretics had left the Island ‘still Roman in name, but not by law or custom’, Gildas wrote. For him, the watershed, when Britain lost its Roman name as well, came when the Roman usurper Maximus left to invade Gaul, despoiling Britain of ‘her whole army, her m
ilitary resources, her governors . . . and her sturdy youth’. From continental sources, we can date this to the period 383–8.

  Here Gildas enters the most defective part of his analysis. He is hampered by a lack of sources, as he acknowledges, and some incorrect assumptions on the nature of Roman power and the origins of the barbarian threats. Gildas deduces that all the barbarian invasions of Britain, and the impressive military works built to defend against them, must be subsequent to Maximus’s withdrawal of the troops. He cannot conceive of Picts and Scots successfully confronting the Romans, who have ‘won the rule of the world and subjugated all the neighbouring regions’. He is further hampered in establishing an accurate chronology by imagining that the Picts are an overseas race like the Scots and the Saxons, who have only recently taken over the northern part of an island hitherto completely under Roman rule. Fortifications such as Hadrian’s Wall therefore cannot date from the pre-388 undivided island.

  The history of the generations that follow exactly parallels that of Gildas’s immediate past: barbarian invasions, Britons timidly fleeing to remote locations, then trusting in God to secure a great victory. Then ‘as it is now’, the victorious Britons turned to debauchery, sin and civil war. They were, of course, heading for a worse disaster, the Saxon invasion. Now the cycle has been re-established and unless Gildas’s contemporaries learn the lesson of the past and repent, surely an even worse calamity is in the offing.

  The rhetorical purpose of this ‘historical’ account is obvious and its plausibility for us destroyed by its huge and demonstrable errors. Roman rule continued for a generation after Maximus, the northern walls and southern coast fortifications pre-date him, the Picts are probably natives under a new by-name. The description of the subsequent peace, begun by a British victory and dominated by sin and civil war, is almost identical to that of Gildas’s own time, for obvious rhetorical reasons. Some writers have even considered that it is Gildas’s present, that the Pictish and Saxon sections somehow overlap (Miller 1975a). However it is clearly set in the past and its similarity to the present pointed out specifically by the writer: ‘sicut et nunc est’ – ‘just as it is now’.

  The point is that the events of the post-Maximus, pre-Saxon era have been forced into an incorrect framework to parallel modern, post-Saxon, history. Post-Saxon history has not been forced into an erroneous framework based on the past. Gildas has no reliable framework for past history, due to the loss of historical documents. All he can do is deduce what this period must have been like from his knowledge of recent history and a cyclical concept of time derived from the Bible. His understanding of the past is entirely shaped by his understanding of the present.

  The Coming of the Saxons

  During the period between the 380s and the mid-fifth century, Gildas tells us that ‘Kings were anointed’ according to a principle of survival of the fittest – ‘in as much as they were crueller than the rest’. Gildas probably knows that two slightly different processes were at work. Until 408, these ‘kings’ are pretenders to the Roman Empire. The last of them, Constantine III, led the remnants of the Roman Army across to Gaul, following which the Emperor Honorius told the British civitates, local administrative units, to fend for themselves in 410. After this, the kings would be competing British rulers of whatever type (Snyder 1998). It is of this period that Zosimus writes: ‘[The Britons] revolted against the Roman Empire, no longer submitted to Roman law and reverted to their native customs.’

  It is in the period of these ‘sub-Roman’ rulers that the next act unfolds. The dominating event was what has been known as ‘The Coming of the Saxons’. The idea is traceable to the historiography of Bede, Nennius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. All convey the idea that there was a particular date on one side of which there were no Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and on the other side there were. Gildas does not give such a date or even a rough estimate for the time when Saxon people first set foot in Britain. He never says that there were no Saxons, as invaders or settlers, in Britain before the arrival of the three shiploads of mercenaries. He knows that the Roman fortifications on the south coast (the Saxon Shore, as Notitia Dignitatum, the official record of imperial offices, calls it) had been built to defend against ‘wild barbarian beasts’. He knows that the mercenary Saxon settlers are not the only people involved in the revolt which overthrew British rule – they ‘heaped up and nurtured’ the fire of revolt.

  Once we accept that Gildas does not necessarily mean that there were no Saxons in Britain before the three keels, then we free the text from shaky chronological frameworks shoe-horning it into the evidence of the Gallic Chronicle of 452 and the Life of St Germanus, of Saxon activity in Britain in the early fifth century.

  The focus of chronological attention is on the appeal to Agitius. This is the only incident with any chance of being dated by external sources between Maximus and Gildas’s own time. Gildas is explicit that he does not have access to any historical documents. In spite of this, many historians continue to treat the appeal to Agitius as if it were an actual quotation from a ‘file copy’, somehow preserved without any other supporting material, in sixth-century Britain. Gildas makes it clear that he is not quoting the appeal to Agitius, but paraphrasing it when he writes ‘hoc modo loquentes’ (speaking in this way) ‘et post pauca querentes’ (and shortly after complaining). It is the obsequious and increasingly desperate style of the complaint, not its exact words, which he is trying to convey.

  It is clear that, as with the rest of the section, Gildas is relying on traditions and analogy, not source documents. Here he may be drawing a parallel between Agitius and Ambrosius, contrasting a successful appeal to Roman Ambrosius with an earlier unsuccessful one to Agitius, a similar ‘man of Roman power’.

  All we can say for sure is that Gildas understood that the appeal, dated to 425 at the earliest and 462 at the latest (most plausibly 446–54), came from before the period of the Saxon revolt. Arguments resting on a mistaken placing of the document in the historical sequence, or a misunderstanding of which barbarians are involved, miss Gildas’s purpose. He is no ‘Nennius’, sifting through various documents trying to make sense of them. He knows what sense they make already, based on the analogy with the present and with the Bible. Here, he intends his readers to understand that every remedy was tried before the Saxons were employed. With the appeal to Agitius, the last chance of any Roman leader coming back to help the Britons evaporated. He may have thought of this being the Roman warlord Aetius or the ‘sub-Roman’ King Aegidius, but either way, he is the last of his kind. The Britons now had two stark choices; to trust in God or to turn to the devil. The same two choices faced Gildas’s contemporaries.

  The appeal was made during ‘many years’ (DEB 20.3) of conflict between the Britons and the Picts and Scots. When it failed, the Britons, turning to God, were victorious. This British victory ushered in peace ‘for a little while’.

  This came to an abrupt end when Britain was struck by a ‘deadly plague’, ‘a memorable plague’ which sapped its manpower. At the same time, rumours of a new invasion by the Picts and Scots prompted ‘everyone’ to convene a council. For Gildas, the council, the embodiment of the culpable stupidity of the whole people, is the crucial feature. In his preface, he promises to write about ‘a memorable plague, a council, an enemy more savage than the first’. Later historians saw the council as an incidental part of the drama. The ‘Proud Tyrant’ who, together with the councillors, invited the Saxons to settle in Britain, has been the focus of attention. It is now usually considered that he is a single major ruler, perhaps the Tyrant of Britain, and that the council is composed of ‘his’ councillors. This is not what Gildas says. The council is convened by everyone in response to a particular crisis. The councillors, like the foolish Princes of Zoan, give advice to the Tyrant to take a particular course of action (Gildas quotes Isaiah 19.11). The Tyrant is responsible for settling the Saxons in the eastern part of the island. He may, therefore, be one of several rulers, importa
nt because part of his territory borders the Saxon sea. The council may have persuaded him to do his part for the combined war effort. He may, alternatively, be a tyrant with wide-ranging authority, responsible for both beating back ‘the peoples of the north’ and for settlement in the eastern seaboard, as all subsequent writers assumed. Either of these concepts, at least, can be supported by what Gildas wrote.

  Whether the Proud Tyrant was really called Vortigern is unimportant. The only name we have for him is Vortigern and there is no reason to think this is not his name. Too much may have been made of the possible pun on Vortigern’s name Proud Tyrant = Foremost Prince. Later Gildas writes to ‘superbis . . . principibus’ – the proud princes, without any suggestion that this is a pun (they all have different names after all). Nor is it an indication of supreme power; there are five of them named and some ‘like them’.

  It is worth noting that the Latin can be read as ‘[the council] devised that ferocious Saxons . . . should be let into the island’, rather than implying that these are the first or only Saxons to set foot here. That this is not the first contact the Britons have with the Saxons is clear, as they already fear them worse than death.

  The Saxons settle as a reward for fighting the northern barbarians. Their success inspires them to invite more of their compatriots over from Germany. These newcomers fall out with their employer over supplies, and revolt. Gildas never actually states that these are the first German troops to settle in Britain and we know from archaeology that some had been settled here from Roman times. The fire burned from sea to sea. All the Coloniae (the veterans’ settlement towns) were laid low by battering-rams and their inhabitants slaughtered. Western Britain was neither conquered nor settled, but simply invaded and devastated. Gildas goes on to say that the ‘cruel plunderers subsequently returned home, that is to their settlements in the eastern part of the island’.