Serving in Britannia with Count Theodosius was a young Spanish officer who would also lend his name to native dynasties and gain a remarkable enduring fame in Wales. Magnus Maximus led the British field army to victories over the Picts in 381 and, as the empire in the west began to fragment, he was proclaimed emperor by his soldiers in 383.
The Welsh called him Macsen Wledig, ‘the General’, and believed that he was the first to fly the dragon standard. It is certain that he transferred most of the British garrison to support him in Gaul where he established himself as western emperor based at Trier. From there he controlled Britain, Gaul, Spain and Africa. At Aquileia in 388, Macsen was defeated by the forces of his rival, Emperor Theodosius I, the son of Count Theodosius. Although he was summarily executed, his fame amongst the Celtic kindreds of Britain was undying.
Persistent tradition insists that Macsen married a Welsh princess, Elen Lwyddog, and the emerging dynasties of the kingdoms of Powys, Dyfed and Gwent all claimed him as a founding ancestor. Only twenty years after Maximus’ death, Britannia slipped out of the control of the dying empire. In 409 the southern cities and the ruling provincial elite had refused to accept Constantine III as emperor and, a year later, his rival, Honorius, advised the cities of Britannia to look to their own defences.
Conventionally seen as a turning point, the moment when the light of civilisation went out in Britain, 410 is perhaps better understood as an important date in a process. After the with-drawals of troops by Macsen and subsequent usurper-emperors, there were probably few soldiers left to leave. The Roman garrison in Britain may only have consisted of remnant detachments on Hadrian’s Wall and at the legionary fortresses at York, Chester and Caerleon. In any case the Roman army had not been Roman for a very long time. By 410 many of its soldiers were likely to have been natives and there is evidence of families living at Housesteads, a major fort on the Wall, in the third and fourth centuries. In addition, a long tradition of hiring bands of barbarian mercenaries was well established in Britain. Most were Germans, warriors from the kindreds north of the Rhine, and the Roman commanders named in the reports of the Barbarian Conspiracy had German names, Nectaridus and Fullofaudes.
However, the year 410 did see a truly world-shaking event, something which reverberated not only in Britain but all over the empire. King Alaric and his Gothic army besieged Rome and sacked the great city. Occasional enemies and occasional allies of various factions in the struggle for control of the western empire, the Goths became exasperated at the deceits and treacheries of the Emperor Honorius and his refusal to pay subsidies. Even though the imperial capital had been removed to Ravenna, a city protected not by mighty walls but a ring of impenetrable marshes, Alaric decided to attack Rome. Here is the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magisterial The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
The crime and folly of the court of Ravenna was expiated a third time by the calamities of Rome. The king of the Goths, who no longer dissembled his appetite for plunder and revenge, appeared in arms under the walls of the capital; and the trembling senate, without any hopes of relief, prepared by a desperate resistance to delay the ruin of their country. But they were unable to guard against the secret conspiracy of their slaves and domestics, who either from birth or interest were attached to the cause of the enemy. At the hour of midnight the Salarian Gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.
To contemporaries the world appeared to shift suddenly on its axis. In Bethlehem, St Jerome wailed, ‘When the brightest light on the whole earth was extinguished . . . then I was dumb with silence’. A shining symbol had been shattered and a sense of shock rippled around the empire. Even so, Alaric’s ‘licentious fury’ was somewhat muted. By 410, the Goths were Christians and no religious buildings in Rome were to be touched and only a modest three days of plunder were permitted. This half-heart-edness is echoed in a remarkable declaration by Athaulf, the son and heir of Alaric, at Narbonne a year after Rome had fallen:
To begin with, I ardently desired to efface the very name of the Romans and to transform the Roman Empire into the Gothic Empire. Romania, as it is commonly called, would have become Gothia; Athaulf would have replaced Caesar Augustus. But long experience taught me that the unruly barbarism of the Goths was incompatible with the laws.
Now, without laws there is no state. I therefore decided rather to aspire to the glory of restoring the fame of Rome in all its integrity, and increasing it by the means of the Gothic strength. I hope to go down to posterity as the restorer of Rome, since it is not possible that I should be its supplanter.
These surprising sentiments were by no means unique, and in Britain those called barbarians by Rome actively attempted to preserve much of what had been Roman. And closely allied to that cluster of ideas and traditions, such as the rule of law, so admired by Athaulf, was the spread and prestige of Christianity.
After the Emperor Constantine’s endorsement in 312, it had become the state religion, it thrived in that most Roman of institutions, the city, it was mediated in Latin and the leader of the church was the Bishop of Rome. Nevertheless, the earliest glimmers suggest Christianity was one of many faiths. When visitors to the hot springs at Aquae Sulis, at Bath, wanted to ask a favour of the goddess, Minerva, they had messages scratched on small sheets of lead which were then cast into the bubbling waters. One man wanted to recover stolen money from a pickpocket ‘whether they were pagan or Christian’.
Several British bishops attended an early church council at Arles in France in 314 and they probably represented York, London, Lincoln and Cirencester. As the fourth century wore on, each British city almost certainly acquired a bishop and a church. To be a Christian in fifth-century Britain was to maintain more than a spiritual link with the immediate imperial past. Christendom was to be the eventual successor of the empire in the west.
Near the western terminal of Hadrian’s Wall and the location of an important fortress, Carlisle would have seen the ordination of its bishop and the consecration of its first church, almost certainly little more than a room, a modest meeting place. It was certainly a substantial Roman city and, far from the wealthy and much preyed-upon south, continued as a viable community for a very long time, at least two centuries after the collapse of the western empire. And its survival was of great importance to the emerging kingdoms of southern Scotland.
When Count Theodosius had pacified the frontier in 369 he:
put in hand many necessary reforms. He restored cities and garrison towns, as I have said, and protected the borders with guard posts and defence works. The recovery of a province which had fallen into the hands of the enemy was so complete that, to use his own words, it now had a lawful governor, and the emperor, treating the matter as a triumph, decreed that henceforth it should be called Valentia.
Since Carlisle was already the principal town in the civitas of the Carvetii, the long established territory of the kindred at the west end of the Wall, it is likely that it also became the capital of the new province of Valentia. Its boundaries are far from clear but, if indeed Theodosius attempted the Romanisation of the four kingdoms between the two walls, then it made every sort of sense to bring them within the empire and confer on them the prestige of an enhanced status, perhaps even citizenship. Carlisle may have become the principal city of a remnant of the Roman province.
Two saints supply some concrete sense of its survival. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede wrote of St Cuthbert’s visit in 685. The Queen of the Northumbrians, whose war bands had taken control of the Eden Valley and Carlisle, was there:
Cuthbert, leaning on his staff, was listening to Wagga the Reeve of Carlisle explaining to the Queen the Roman wall of the city, and the citizens conducted him aroun
d the city walls to see a remarkable Roman fountain that was built into them.
If what was remarkable about the fountain was the water pouring out of it, then the Roman aqueduct supplying Carlisle was clearly still working and had been maintained over the two centuries by ‘the citizens’ since the fall of Britannia.
When a church in the city was dedicated to Cuthbert some time after 698, its orientation was dictated by the position of the Roman streets and the angles at which the grid plan ran. And the building does not stand in the conventional east to west axis but square on to a road which has now disappeared. If the city had declined and was deserted then this sacred imperative might have been ignored but there were other occupied buildings around it and a community still living inside the walls Wagga thought so exceptional as to be worthy of both saintly and royal attention in 685.
In fact, civic buildings were still standing well into the Middle Ages and the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury noted a large vaulted stone building, perhaps the market place or ‘basilica’, which carried an inscription to Mars and Venus. Paved Roman streets were still in use at that time and the excellent repair of Carlisle’s west walls and the stonework of the cathedral owe a great deal to Roman masons.
The second saintly informant on the early life of the city is more surprising. After a brilliant analysis by Professor Charles Thomas, it is now clear that the family of St Patrick originated in late Roman Carlisle. Unusually, Patrick, or Patricius, left two surviving texts by his own hand. His Letter to Coroticus described a singular but important incident but his Confessio is a memoir, and very revealing.
Broadly, the story opens with Patrick being abducted by Irish pirates and sold into slavery in Ulster at around the age of sixteen. After six years as a shepherd boy in the 420s, he escaped and probably made his way to Gaul. On his return to Britain, Patrick underwent religious training of some kind and was ordained as a deacon. Then, traditionally in 432 but probably later, he returned to Ireland as a bishop and began his famous mission of conversion.
But it is Patrick’s often overlooked origins which shed a fascinating light on the history of northern Britain. In the Confessio he wrote that he had been captured at a place called Vicus Banna Venta Berniae, which lay near his father’s estate. Since Patrick was certainly a Roman Briton, his home will have almost certainly been in the north-west. That part of the old province faces Ulster, where the pirates sold him into slavery and where he returned to preach the gospel. And there was also a place called ‘Banna’ – it was the name of the Roman fort on the Wall now known as Birdoswald. While vicus and venta denote a village and a market, berniae stood for a pass or ravine. All of these elements fit the location of the modern village of Greenhead where the Tipalt Burn tumbles down a rocky defile on its way to join the South Tyne.
Patrick’s father, Calpurnius, and one of his grandfathers offer more insights. Calpurnius was not only an estate owner but also a decurion, a member of an ordo or town council. The only possible town was Roman Carlisle, where Patrick’s father had also been a Christian deacon. Potitus, his grandfather, had been ordained a priest and his church almost certainly stood somewhere within the walls of the city. What is very striking in all this is the sense of a cultural atmosphere. If Patrick flourished in the mid fifth century, then his father’s town council was still functioning after the end of Britannia and his grandfather was involved with a very early and flourishing church in the late fourth century. In the far north-west of the empire, far from the trouble engulfing the south-east and Gaul, apart from the raids of Irish slavers, life seems to have been conducted within a framework of law, order, Latin, urban life and the growing Christian church – and, after 369, perhaps conducted in the new province of Valentia.
When St Patrick wrote his letter to Coroticus, he was furious, raging at the king for capturing Irish converts and selling them into slavery. No doubt personal experience added extra vehemence. But two details are intriguing. Coroticus was almost certainly a king of the Damnonii, with his citadel on the Rock of the Clyde, and he was himself a Christian. The king lists also call him grandson of Quintilius Clemens. In excommunicating Coroticus and his war band, Patrick called them his ‘fellow citizens’ and ‘fellow citizens of the Holy Romans’. Just as it began to die in the west, did the Roman Empire once again stretch as far north as the Clyde? Another fascinating but shadowy passage of post-Roman politics supports the sense of a lingering but powerful memory of Britannia in the north.
The context for events in the fifth century in Britain is notoriously difficult to set, so little evidence has survived. There are three principal literary sources and all are highly problematic. The one closest to contemporary events is also the least informative and most frustrating. ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ is a glorious rant written by Gildas, a sixth-century monk who lived either in the Old Welsh-speaking west or in the kingdom of the Damnonii on the Clyde. He supplies few names and only one certain date but the gist of Gildas’ account has become widely adopted as authentic.
After the end of Roman Britannia, he writes, ‘the councillors together with a proud usurper’ made the catastrophic mistake of inviting ‘the fierce and impious Saxons’ to settle in Britain. When the money to pay them as mercenaries (against the marauding Picts) ran out, the Saxons rebelled and began to take control. More and more came across the North Sea and eventually most of Britain was lost to them or, in Gildas’ view, ‘ruined’.
The second literary source for the fifth century used ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ as its basic text. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the name of the ‘proud usurper’ was mentioned. Bede called him Vortigern and added a date, now widely accepted, for the beginning of the end of Britain and the birth of England. In 446, he reckoned, the ships of the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes first made landfall.
As the title of the third text implies, the History of the Britons saw events from a native point of view and saw them somewhat differently. Compiled by Nennius, another monk, this fragmentary text mixes myth with what sounds like history and it was compiled later than both Gildas and Bede, probably dating to the early ninth century. Engagingly, the introduction freely confesses confusion, surprising eclecticism and the shortcomings of the chronicler:
* * *
Knife and Spear People
In contemporary sources there is a fleeting sense of the Saxons being thought of as more savage than the angelic Angles. Perhaps it is because they took their name from a weapon, the seax knife. A long blade, sometimes half a metre, it seems to have been the Saxons’ favoured weapon. Its unlikely fame endures in the arms of the modern counties of Essex, the East Saxons, and Middlesex, the Middle Saxons. Both carry the device of three seax knives, although they look more like scimitars. Franks also invaded the declining Roman Empire in the west and they took their name from the franca, a throwing spear or javelin. When the first crusaders reached the east in 1099, the horrified Greeks and Muslims called them all Franks, no matter where they originated. That name has also been persistent and the Egyptian word for any westerner is firengi.
* * *
I have presumed to deliver these things in the Latin tongue, not trusting to my own learning, which is little or none at all, but partly from traditions of our ancestors, partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans, and the chronicles of the sacred fathers . . . and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons, although our enemies, not following my own inclinations, but, to the best of my ability, obeying the commands of my seniors; I have lispingly put together this history from various sources . . .
Disarming, possibly alarming, this history is nevertheless occasionally very enlightening. In common with ranting Gildas and sober Bede, it agrees upon a picture of Britannia at bay in the early fifth century. Without the support of the empire and its soldiers, however illusory or sketchy, the old province had become vulnerable to attack.
They came in th
eir ships – the Irish, the Saxons and, most destructive and persistent, the Picts. Gildas wrote of the Saxons’ cyulis or ‘keels’, ‘as they call their ships of war’, and these were almost certainly plank-built wooden boats. The Irish and probably the Picts sailed in seagoing curraghs, what Gildas called ‘canoes’, but, whatever craft were used, they must have come in small fleets. No ship sailing in northern waters in that period was large. There exists a fascinating document which offers some sense of what might have sailed out of nowhere to attack the vulnerable coasts of Britannia.
Some time in the seventh century, the kindreds of the Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Argyll were counted in a census known as the Senchus Fer na h’Alban, the ‘History of the Men of Scotland’. It is an accidental survival illustrating a process of some antiquity. The numbers were compiled to assess military obligations and, given the geography of the Atlantic coastline, it is scarcely surprising to see these expressed in naval terms. Seven-benched seagoing curraghs seem to have been standard and these needed fourteen men to row them and a steersman in the stern and a lookout in the bow. Some will have been larger but sixteen marines to one ship is a reasonable approximation and it prompts the notion of a Pictish or Irish raiding party consisting of several boats and ones with a shallow draught able to penetrate far inland up the wider rivers.
The sharpest weapon in the armoury of seaborne raiders was surprise. There was no warning until their ships came within sight of land and, even when a Pictish fleet was seen hugging the coastline, they could arrive at their target faster than news could reach it overland. But a pattern of landings must have emerged. Estuaries and riverbanks were preferred to coasts open to the sea and bad weather and gently shelving beaches allowed vessels to be dragged well above the high-tide line if a coastal landing was unavoidable.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 11
