Arthur Britannicus

by Paul Bannister

  This time, however, the British warriors didn’t dismount. They hurled two, three heavy javelins into the faces of the stalled legionaries, then laid about them with heavy swords and axes, hacking and chopping down into necks and heads. More Britons ran up to surround and mount the chariots, fighting down from the platforms, stabbing with long spears over the enemy shields at the cracking Roman ranks. More fiery missiles flew in. The bloodied, burned legionaries backed away through the smoke, stumbling over their tidemark of dead, retreating to the stalled ranks of their comrades.

  The chariots were hauled backwards free of the litter of dead and dying, were wheeled, and then run back into their own lines. Attendants dragged out the worst of the wounded horses and harnessed fresh beasts. In minutes, the chariots that had broken the armoured ranks were moving quickly behind the British lines, swerving towards the shore, to be deployed against the flanking right wing of the oncoming Romans, who again threatened to force the Britons away from the constricting pits and into the open where they would be butchered.

  White-eyed and foaming at the mouth, the half-wild ponies of the charioteers cantered down the rear of the British line to where the tide sucked at the shingle, then they wheeled directly at the rear ranks of the Britons, who gave way, opening for them and allowing them free passage to charge the Romans. Again, the chariots did their grim work. The biting, thrashing horses and the warriors’ vicious whirling blades and spears broke the ordered ranks. The Romans exacted a bitter price in men and horses, but yard by yard they were forced back until the British line was re-formed and the surviving charioteers could withdraw and regroup.

  Constantius was furious. Twice more, he hurled his legionaries against the British, twice more, he was thrown back, halted by the barrage of javelins into the choke points of the constricting death pits. Worse, more and more of his men were cut down from the surviving chariots as they retreated to reform. “We need the fucking cavalry,” he told his emperor. “These bastards may as well be behind stone walls. We have to get around them.”

  Maximian grunted. “The equestrians should be here soon.” He was right. Within the hour, the blue sails of the heavy transports showed. Minutes later, so did the sails of the British fleet. The Roman ground his teeth in impotent fury as he watched the sea battle from the shore. The heavier, shallow-draft vessels of the islanders crunched through his fleet, ramming and burning, only rarely allowing themselves to be boarded. It did not take long before half of the Roman fleet was sent to the sea floor or had fled into the strait.

  The surviving warships, deeper keeled than the troop barges, were running aground on sandbanks, forcing the sailors to offload their cargoes of terrified, kicking horses and mules into chest-deep water. By late afternoon, it was done and the surviving fraction of the cavalry was ashore. Maximian’s dispirited, mauled force was all on the beach, only part of the great army with which he had planned to invade, but still a formidable force if he could deploy them properly. “We have to outflank them, we can’t stay here on this godforsaken shingle and we can’t get through their lines. We simply have to go around them with what we have left of the cavalry,” he instructed Constantius.

  “Send the horsemen through the edge of the marsh and sweep the Brits up from the rear. If we can roll up these bastards behind the pits, we can crush them.” The general gave the orders, the brass trumpets blared and the vengeful troops moved forward for the fourth time. At a hundred paces from the waiting Britons, the Roman cavalry burst out to attack the British right, plunging into the chest-deep waters of the marsh to outflank the infantry. The first line of horses made a fine sight, surging with the water up to their sheepskin breast bands, their armoured riders waving heavy swords, yelling threats at their enemies.

  Deep in the tall reeds of the marshes north of the beach, wading in a water world of swaying head-high grasses, Cragus urged on the cattle drover who was guiding him and his troop. The sounds of the battle, the clashing of metal on metal, the shouts and wails of the wounded were all carried clearly on the wind. “Keep moving, keep going forward,” the officer encouraged the struggling legionaries, holding in his fears that they would be too late or not emerge in the right place. Then he heard the first horse scream, marking the moment that the gods swung the battle’s fortunes to the British and the tide of victory away from the Romans. In seconds, the whole front rank of the invaders’ cavalry was down and thrashing as horse after horse stepped on the crippling caltrops and was lamed. The vicious spikes struck through the horses’ unguarded hoofs deep into the shock-absorbing frog and up into the coffin bone. In moments, the marsh water was red with thick blood, yet more horsemen charged in, saw their mounts crippled and were thrown into the heaving, thrashing melee.

  As the dismounted, labouring cavalrymen in their heavy armour waded out of the clinging mud, they were cut down by the waiting British. Those horses not lamed were turned back shivering to safety behind the shocked ranks of infantry, who involuntarily halted. Constantius, his face purple with rage, was bellowing at his officers to move the ranks forward, but they stayed motionless, transfixed by the thrashing agonies of the men and horses who were supposed to swing the battle for them.

  And, as the Romans stood stock still, Cragus and his force emerged behind them, out from the marshes they had traversed blindly to arrive miraculously on time and at the right place. Not one of Maximian’s force spotted the outflanking Britons behind them as they stepped from the bulrushes and reeds, but the British tribune Quirinus did, and he alerted his emperor. Carausius, blood-streaked in the front rank of legionaries, flanked by his Eagles and the remnants of his elite, told his trumpeter to sound the command. At the blasting notes, the reserve infantry emerged from behind the dunes, and the front ranks with their warrior emperor stepped into the gaps between the death pits, which were now filled with Roman casualties.

  On the right wing, the Britons shuffled sideways to their left, creating a gap between themselves and the marker stones at the edge of the marshes. Everything happened at once. The British chariots swept forward through the gap between the marker stones and their own infantry, heading at full stretch for the cowed, waiting Romans.

  Awed spearmen later claimed that a mysterious, spectral shape galloped with them in a chariot drawn by white horses with blazing fire eyes. Some said they had seen it clearly, and it was the long-haired ghost of Queen Boadicea come again to cut the Romans into bloody ruin. The clatter of their wheels on the shingle was swamped by the roar of the troops of the centre, who under their warlord emperor, trotted forward in a classic shield wall, supporting the sacred Eagle that had been returned by the gods. A scant ten yards before the emperor’s force clashed head on with the bristling Roman line, Cragus and his troops hit a hammer blow into Maximian’s rear guard that confused and then shattered the ranks as easily as a fist closes and crushes an egg.

  “We ground them into bloody offal,” Carausius recalled later. He had only dim memories of his own crazed bloodlust, of his willing surrender to the mindless joy and fighting madness of violence. He’d been there at the front of the carnage with his beloved soldiers, shield-less under his eagle-crested war helm, swinging his long sword Exalter two-handed. He remembered it crashing through the cheek pieces of a Roman’s helmet, spraying blood and teeth and tearing away the man’s entire lower jaw so he died with a ghastly mockery of a half-grin.

  There was, too, the spearman he’d gutted with an upswing that cut from the crotch, spilled the entrails and split the rib cage so it shone whitely like a woman’s splayed fingers. He’d been singing, keening a battle noise to himself as he laboured like a blacksmith, beating, chopping, and swinging Exalter into blood-spurting flesh and bone, hammer blow after hammer blow tirelessly without stopping, for an hour.

  It was a magical thing, to know the strength of your arms, he thought, to be an invincible lord of war surrendered to the overwhelming red bloodlust that was pounding in your ears. Time was trickling by so slowly you could see an enemy’s mov
ements almost before he made them. When their blows came they seemed to your lightning mind so laboured and deliberate you could step inside them, or deflect them while you were looking to see what was happening at your sides and could choose at leisure, step by steady step, how you’d move to parry and counter. They were good memories, he mused, as he grunted at the aches in his body, but it had been too close a contest. Only small things had won the day, but the gods had willed it.

  The emperor, still stained with smoke and smeared with blood spatters, was sitting in the commander’s quarters at Lympne, where a stack of reports and orders were waiting for his attention. He sighed as he recalled himself to the demands of the day. The prisoners, among them the general and emperor in waiting, Constantius Chlorus needed to be properly secured and fed. The dead had to be buried, the salvage teams must be sent out to collect war gear. Winning a battle led to more work, but it was the better option than losing, he felt. Some news was not so positive. Maximian and a medium-sized force had escaped by sea while his personal bodyguard died on the beach almost to the last man, fighting desperately to buy him time. The defeated emperor would likely come again, the Briton was sure. And a messenger brought news that made the emperor frown. Two Roman vessels blown west had survived the maelstrom of the narrows and had landed near Fishbourne, and in vengeance had sacked and burned Carausius’ palace there.

  A defence of the palace had been mounted by the Greek woman, the mosaic artist Claria, but it was against hopeless odds. Desperate to save the masterwork she had so painstakingly created, she had mustered a dozen household servants, including the muralist Celvinius, who had fought like a wild thing, said several slaves who’d escaped the raid. “Claria was in the courtyard at first, and we saw her shoot down three invaders with a hunting bow,” they reported. The mural painter turned out to be a fighter, too.

  “He had such skill with a spear that it took five Romans to finish him off,” the emperor heard. “We don’t know what happened to Claria, but the Romans looted the palace and burned it down. We watched from the woodlands and it was still aflame the next morning.”

  A pity, thought Carausius. That mosaic of the god Cupid on a dolphin was a masterpiece. Now it would never be seen again, for the magnificent palace and its contents were all gone. He had no time for regrets about the lost opulence, though it would have been a part of his legacy. Still, he thought, he could always have other memorials erected, and they’d last for hundreds of years.

  For now, he had more pressing matters to concern him. He would announce that, in token of his role as British emperor, he would in future be known, not as Carausius, but in the way the sorcerer Myrddin had once named him: ‘Arthur of Britain.’ Something had resonated in his soul at the title, and with the triumph, it seemed oddly right. “Now,” he thought, “I am no longer a Roman vassal. I am an emperor, and my son will be an emperor.”

  As a practical matter, he thought he should underscore the victory. He would continue the principle of harshness he’d long ago absorbed from the old crucifixioner. He’d take the defeated Caesar, Constantius Chlorus in chains to Londinium and have him publicly executed. That would send shock waves through Milan, Nicomedia, Antioch and the other seats of imperial power, but he had a fleet to keep the Romans and those threatening Saxons out of Britain for ever and a newly-united country to back it.

  The legions could use a victory parade behind their proud Eagles. Allectus should mint some special donatives and it might be a good idea to erect a statue in Londinium, to commemorate the rebel queen Boadicea. He’d heard stories from his soldiers of fighting alongside a ghost chariot driven by a long-haired woman that had led the right wing’s shattering strike on the Romans. Maybe there had been much magic working for the Britons that day.

  Carausius fingered the large silver and amber brooch of his rank as a British jarl and smoothed the drape of his purple-banded imperial robe; Emperor of Britain. It was good to have the gods with you. In a corner of the room, a white rat preened its whiskers, curled comfortably and slept.

  For now.

  Post script: The Legend of Arthur

  Britain’s forgotten emperor Carausius and his triumphs may well be the true foundation of the legend of King Arthur, the mythic warrior who became a symbol of courage, chivalry and Christianity.

  Late in the third century of the Common Era, the Belgic-born Mauseus Carausius was commander of Rome’s English Channel fleet and was quietly building both his treasury and his military forces. Ordered to report for court martial by superiors nervous of his power, the burly, bear-like soldier instead declared himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul, suborned several legions and the flotilla that controlled the Narrow Sea between the two countries and began a decade of defiance against the might of Rome.

  In that time, the rebel emperor quieted the quarrelsome British tribes, unified the country and, as its first ruler (286 – 293 CE) used his navy to create and sustain the nation’s independence. However, Carausius’ significance in history was forgotten for centuries despite his achievements in driving off the Romans and quieting the Picts. He may also have defeated Germanic invaders, as his Saxon Shore fortifications prove that he was more than prepared to meet them. Today, his known and acclaimed triumphs are closely echoed in the stories of King Arthur.

  The life purpose and the legend of Arthur, the battle leader of the British, came together when he led his nation successfully to repel invaders. That victorious ‘lord of battles’ was described by the monk Gildas, (circa 500 - 570 CE) who created the island’s earliest written history when he penned an admonition of usurper kings, corrupt judges and foolish priests. In his sermon, Gildas described the siege of Mount Badon as the great conflict in which Anglo-Saxon invaders were routed decisively to bring peace after a long period of strife.

  The north British monk’s ‘De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae’ (‘On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain’) speaks of an unnamed ‘outstanding ruler’ (‘superbus tyrannus’) who brought the British a series of victories that culminated at Badon. That event was so celebrated that Gildas did not bother to identify the location of Badon or even to name the victor, noting only that ‘Arth’ – Celtic for ‘The Bear’ – was such a great overlord that the king of Powys, Cuneglasus The Red, humbly acted as his master’s charioteer. After that triumph, the very name ‘Arthur’ became a powerful symbol and was adopted by later rulers who wished to assume some of the glory of the legendary British champion.

  Gildas’ writings are valued as the earliest known recorded history of Britain, although his calendar was muddled. He wrongly dates the construction of the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus to the late fourth century, when they actually were created two centuries earlier. By his account, the ramparts were built in the years before invaders from the west and north devastated the island. In turn, the incomers were defeated in a series of battles, of which the siege at Mount Badon was among the last, and the victor of that siege united Britain.

  Gildas, who was writing a century or two after the events, might have confused the dates, but he likely got the sequence right: the walls were built, the invaders came, a leader arose to drive them away. It means that Arthur may have lived considerably earlier than generally believed, at a date contemporaneous with the late third century reign of Carausius.

  The vast poverty of evidence from the time means that the other histories we have are not contemporary, some being written as long as 800 years after the events they report, but they agree to the general theme: that an ‘Arthur’ or ‘Caros’ led his country against invaders in the earliest days of the nation, bringing peace. Some accounts are not written, but come from folklore, like the strong Celtic tradition which holds that the Pict Oscar, son of Ossian, was killed when he attacked the emperor Caros while he was rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall.

  The Welsh storyteller Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing his ‘Historia Regum Britanniae’ (‘The History of the Kings of Britain’) circa 1136 CE, also relayed a good deal of long-establi
shed folklore and described Arthur as a Briton, although some suggest the king was actually a Celt.

  Carausius, the historical ruler at the heart of the legend, may well have been Celtic. Roman panegyrists who denigrated the man who seized a throne from their patrons sneeringly described him as a ‘Menapian of the lowest birth,’ but their views were coloured. Menapia was the River Meuse region of modern Belgium, an area settled by Celts. Some sources suggest that Carausius was recorded as the son of a ranking official from the region.

  What we do know is that his rise through the Roman military to become admiral of the Channel fleet attests to his abilities, and the evidence of the literary slogans on his coinage suggests he was well-educated.

  His image on those coins shows a bearded, bear-like, bull-necked soldier, and all the evidence points to his being a bold and outstanding leader of men with great personal courage and charisma. Another clue to his standing is that at his life’s end he was buried in the heart of Britain as a king, and his headstone shows he was a Christian. The Carausius grave marker in Wales with its looped Chi-Ro cross is especially rare, and it and a tall milestone found in 1894 not far from Hadrian’s Wall carry the only two known inscriptions to him in the nation he once ruled, because the Romans expurgated his memorials after they recaptured Britain.

  The milestone, which was found on Gallows Hill, Carlisle, was saved only by chance as it was re-used, reversed in the ground. The buried portion preserved for us the glory of the redacted emperor’s full name and title: ‘Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius, Dutiful, Fortunate, the Unconquered Augustus.’ It was recorded thus: