Nennius probably wrote about the year 685, according to Sir Charles Oman. He tells of Hengist and Vortigern, and mentions Mount Badon as one of the victories of Arthur, whom he calls Dux Bellorum, not King. Oman suggests that Arthur, a real person, may have been the leader of a band of heavy cavalry, equipped in the fashion of the contemporary east-Roman cataphractarii. The only weakness of Sir Charles as a military historian was that he knew very little about horses, and he did not realize the difficulty of keeping up the breed of large cavalry chargers in a land overrun with raiders, where wild moorland ponies could always get access to the mares. Without incessant selective breeding any race of horses reverts to the pony type, and I suggest that this was the reason why Arthur’s effort failed, when his original stock of big horses were dead.
From the Welsh side, the crux of the matter is this: if Constantine III left Britain in 407, and the land returned to its allegiance to the Emperor Honorius in 410 (though cut off from Italy by barbarians in Gaul), how did Vortigern achieve his hereditary kingship by 450, as all accounts agree that he did? Here again Oman suggests an explanation. Cunedda, hereditary King of the Otadini, a tribe of Britons north of the Wall and therefore outside the Empire, was brought by Stilicho to North Wales, to expel Irish ‘Scots’ who had conquered the local inhabitants. This would introduce the institution of Kingship among the helpless provincials, left without any government at all, since the Diocletian reorganization had abolished the self-governing ‘civitates’of the earlier Empire. But the setting up of these new Kingdoms, which appear about this time in the Welsh genealogies, must have been accompanied by stresses and discontent, as I have described.
On the Saxon side we have the Chronicle, purporting to give an account of the invasion. It was only written down at the instigation of King Alfred, four hundred years after the events it relates; but it is based on tradition, and my own opinion is that it can be trusted for genealogies and the relative order of events, though perhaps some of the dates were sprinkled in much later. Polynesian genealogies, e.g. Hawaii and New Zealand, go back more than four hundred years, by oral tradition only, and then agree with one another in the most gratifying manner. Savages do remember what their ancestors were called, and how long they lived.
I have taken one liberty with the Chronicle. Cymen, Cissa, and Wlencing are named as the sons of King Aella of the South Saxons, but I thought my hero would not follow a leader who had three stalwart heirs, and I made them his captains. This is the only occasion where I have not followed my sources. Otherwise I have stuck to the Chronicle, even in its dates, and attempted to find some plausible explanation for the most unlikely incidents it records. Natan-leod took some explaining away, but he fits in quite neatly.
The Chronicle is rather too busy in explaining why places bear the names which in fact they do; Portsmouth is called after a certain Port, and the Isle of Wight after a certain Wihtgar, though we know they really kept their Roman names, Portus and Vectis. I have devised an explanation for Portsmouth, and the same magical pilgrimage would do for Vectis; this was in the original version of my book, but I cut it out for reasons of space and because it was a reduplication.
The Chronicle is not interested in women; only fathers are named in the genealogies. Cerdic’s love-life is entirely my own invention. So is his connection with Anderida; but the capture of that place made a great impression on the compilers of the Chronicle, who relate that every Briton was slain. They do not tell, of the fall of any other Roman fortress in the early years of the Conquest, which suggests that most of them were evacuated without an assault, as I have described in the cases of Silchester and Chichester.
That brings me to the only other class of evidence I have used: archaeology. The picture given in Collingwood and Myers’Roman Britain is not quite what we would expect if the Chronicle were accurate; early Saxons turn up in very unexpected places, for example on the headwaters of the Thames, and brooch-types show one well-travelled route of invasion, from the Wash through the Fens and by the Icknield Way to Salisbury Plain, which left no tradition at all, possibly because it did not lead to the foundation of a Kingdom. But those Saxons in Oxfordshire had to be fitted in somewhere, so I have made them the mercenaries of Ambrosius, and related how they presently coalesced with Wessex, thus forgetting the story of their own arrival in this country.
Archaeology also gives some vivid details of the decline of the Roman cities; the column from the town hall of Corinium, which fell across the main street and lay there until grooves were worn in the stone, was found on the site; so was the statue of Mars at Silchester. Many cities walled up their gates in the last days, which shows not only fear of raiders, but also that wheeled traffic, and therefore trade, had come to a stop. But most of them did not end by bloody sack and burning; apparently the citizens just could not earn a living where they were, and went away. As villas became self-supporting, and as the arts in general declined, there was no economic justification for city life, which is always a little unnatural in an agricultural country. This agrees with the literary evidence from Gaul, where in the fifth century every gentleman of independent means lived in a country house; two hundred years earlier he would have lived near the forum of the biggest city he could find.
To sum up: I have used all the evidence there is for the Coming of the Saxons, and, with the exception of the sons of Aella, I have used it accurately. But where there is no evidence I have not scrupled to invent. Yet everything I have written could be defended by historical argument, though not all historians would agree with my interpretation.
Copyright
First published in 1962 by Faber & Faber
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Conscience of the King Page 28
