Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors
Page 5
The Mandubert who sought Cæsar’s help is thought by some to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King Brown), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brut of Troy.
The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban’s; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline)—a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it—had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.
Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated.
The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river which it controlled, on the north by fens, and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depot and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.
Hitherto, the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city.
The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigor and so sharp in outline that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though not, indeed, dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic.
In the year 62, London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban’s).
When the Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back still “bleeding from the Roman rods,” she slew in London and Verulamium alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome, impaling many beautiful and well-born women, amid reveling sacrifices in the grove of Andate, the British Goddess of Victory.
It is supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice lying scattered like flower leaves, and above that a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the débris of charred wooden buildings.
This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King’s Cross (otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage and despair, took poison and perished.
London probably soon sprang, phœnix-like, from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years.
FenMaric, one of the main characters in my historic fantasy novel, Shadows in a Timeless Myth, was a member of the Ninth Legion who fought and died attempting to stop Boadicea. He still exists to appear in Shadows because he was battle-cursed by a Druid Priest to the same fate that the Druid Priests believed themselves fated for, soul transmigration...but with a vengefully punishing twist!
The First Word in English
by Richard Denning
In 1929 an RAF crew took aerial shots of the site of the old Roman town of Venta Icenorum around the church of Caistor St. Edmund near Norwich. The photographs revealed an extensive road network and soon the archaeologists moved in. During their excavations they came across a large early Anglo-Saxon cemetery with burials dating from the 5th century.
In the cemetery, they found some cremation urns as well as pots with possessions inside. One of these was full of bones—but they were not human remains. Most were sheep knuckle bones and probably dice or other game pieces. But amongst them was a bone that was and still is of historical importance.
It was a bone from a Roe deer and upon it there were runic inscriptions. The runes were Old German/Old English runes and spelt this word: RHIHFt
Which means Raihan.
What is Raihan? Well the “an” in old German meant “belonging to or from,” and the “Raih” is believed to be a very early version of the word “roe”. So this inscription which has been dated to circa 420 A.D. means “from a roe”.
It is not uncommon in the Saxon period to find similar bones from other animals with writing telling us which beast it is from.
So what we have here are the possessions of a man or woman from the very first years of Anglo-Saxon settlement of East Anglia buried in a cemetery that would have been very new, within or close to a decaying Roman town. What we also have is the very first word written in the country that would one day become England in the language which would one day be called English.
What we see here are the scrapings of one of the first of the mercenaries who crossed the North Sea on hearing the call from the Britons for fighters to help protect Britannia from the Picts and Irish. He and thousands like him stayed on to carve out a nation.
There is more on this word and 99 other ones that form part of our history in The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal. It’s a fascinating book and I very much recommend it.
I find this evidence of the first written word in English fascinating and quite romantic really. I write novels about the early Anglo-Saxon period, always striving to bring back to life people who died fourteen centuries ago. This to me is a tangible relic of one of those people.
Degsastan: A Lost Battlefield
by Richard Denning
Ethelfrid, king of the Northumbrians, having vanquished the nations of the Scots, expels them from the territories of the English, [a.d. 603.] At this time, Ethelfrid, a most worthy king, with ambitions of glory, governed the kingdom of the Northumbrians, and ravaged the Britons more than all the great men of the English...whereupon, Aedan, king of the Scots that inhabit Britain, being concerned at his success, came against him with an immense and mighty army, but was beaten by an inferior force, and put to flight; for almost all his army was slain at a famous place, called Degsastan. In which battle also Theodbald, brother to Ethelfrid, was killed, with almost all the forces he commanded.... From that time, no king of the Scots durst come into Britain to make war on the English to this day.
—from the chronicler Bede
In the year 603 an important battle was fought somewhere in the Scottish borders. It probably brought together several nations and races—Scots, Picts, Romano-British and English—in a showdown that determined the future of the region for a hundred years and propelled the Northumbrian Kingdom into a dominance that led to its golden age as recorded by Bede in the 8th century.
It was so well known a location that Bede even says it was “a famous place, called Degsastan.” Yet today we do not know with any certainty where it may lie. So what do we really know?
The nations of Deira, Bernicia, Rheged, Strathclyde, Manau Godddin, Dál-Riata, Mercia, and the lands of the Picts are the players in this drama and frequently entered into conflicts and alliances with each other.
Coming from the east, the tribes of Anglo-Saxons were expanding their holdings in Northumbria and moving west. They came into conflict first with the Romano-British or Welsh. The Battle of Catraeth—fought around 597 A.D. between the fledgling English Kingdoms and the Romano-British natives of Rheged (Cumbria), Strathclyde (Dumbarton area) and Manau Goddodin (around Edinburgh)—weakened the British to the extent that Aethelfrith’s Bernici
ans were able to move on into the lands “between the walls,” that is, to threaten that area between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.
This seems to have provoked the Scots under Aedann Mac Gabrhrain into becoming interested in Bernicia. The Scots were actually an Irish tribe from Ulster who in about 500 to 600 settled the west coast of Scotland. They came into conflict with the Picts and the British too. But in c. A.D. 601 a diplomatic mission from the Scots to the Angles appears to have occurred.
All we know is that the Scots princes Bran and Domanghast died at that meeting, or shortly afterwards, and that Aethelfrith was held to blame. The Scots’ response was not immediate however—not, in fact, for two years. There are references to a plague in the Annals Cambriae about the same time which might explain why the Scots took two years to respond to the loss of two princes. Eventually, they gathered an alliance and marched under King Aedann to Degsastan where, as Bede describes, the Scots were beaten by the much smaller forces of Aethelfrith and his brother Theobald, the one who perished in the battle.
The actual location of the battle is not known. Historians have suggested that it occurred at Dawstone in Liddesdale. But others have criticized this, saying the only reason for believing it is Dawstone is because of similar sounding words. Degsastan might come from Degga’s stone—perhaps corrupting to Dawstone in time. Equally, there has been a lot of discussion about stones and monoliths—of which there are hundreds in the region including the Lochmaben stone not far away in the Solway Firth and itself a location often used for mustering armies and militia in later centuries.
As a writer of historical fiction, a moment comes when you have to decide which way to jump. I was content to go with Dawstone when researching Child of Loki. I visited this place with my family when writing the novel. It is a remote location and, at first glance, seems an unlikely place for a great battle. It does, however, have some supporting evidence. Geographically, it occupies the watershed where rivers and streams flow away west and east and gives access to routes through the hills of the Scottish borders and Northern Pennines. Thus an army heading for Carlisle might just go that way.
Furthermore, archeological digs on the site in the early 20th century found evidence of iron weaponry and arrowheads in the area. There is even today in the southern valley the outlines of a circular fort, a settlement as well as a shallow ditch cutting across Dawstone Rig (the plateau). The top of the rig is littered with the vague remnants of stone cairns—possibly raised over the bodies of the fallen.
In the very old papers of a local archaeological society there is a record of a rather interesting monument which is now lost. There is a photo—of poor quality—of a black tombstone. It was supposed to be found in the south valley near the remains of old fortifications and a settlement. Could this indeed be the place where Theobald died as recorded by Bede?
The Battle of Degsastan features in Child of Loki which is the second in my Northern Crown Series which follows the history of the late 6th and early 7th centuries.
Anno Domini and the Venerable Bede
by Rosanne E. Lortz
In the year of our Lord
ANNO DOMINI
Over twenty centuries of history have this phrase appended to them, but it has only been fifteen centuries since the system of dating was first devised, and only twelve centuries since the work of the Venerable Bede made it common usage in the Western world.
The Romans used the founding of Rome by the legendary figure Romulus, the year we now know as 753 B.C., as year one of their dating system. As the Roman Empire spread, this system of ordering time spread with it.
If Rome still ruled the world, the date on this essay would be the year 2765 ab urbe condita (and these paragraphs would probably be written in Latin). But Rome went the way of the tyrannosaurus rex, and somewhere in that muddle we know as the Middle Ages, someone decided that time needed to be re-ordered. Someone decided that the founding of a little city on the banks of the Tiber would no longer be the focal point of history.
In A.D. 525, an abbot named Dionysus Exiguus, which translates as Dionysus the Humble, began transferring dates from the Roman system into a new system centered around “the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Dionysus originated in Scythia (modern day Bulgaria or Romania), but had come to Rome to translate works of theology and compile collections of canon law.
Interestingly, Dionysus was no historian. His purpose for this new method of dating was to correctly calculate the date of Easter for the Christian calendar. Easter, unlike Christmas, is a moveable feast day and, according the First Council of Nicaea, was supposed to be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.
Dionysus’ goal was to write out yearly tables so that churches all around the world would know which Sunday to celebrate the holy day. To do this, he re-ordered time to begin year one with the birth of Christ—or what he thought was the birth of Christ, since we now know that Jesus of Nazareth was born in 3 or 4 B.C.
The Roman church adopted the tables but did not yet see how useful Dionysus’ system of dating could be for other things. Historians continued to use the regnal dates of Roman emperors to measure time and still counted up the years since the founding of the city of Rome.
Two hundred years later, a Northumbrian monk known as the Venerable Bede also became preoccupied with the question of when to celebrate Easter. It had been a subject of great dispute in Britain. The adherents of the Celtic church (those who had been evangelized by Columba and the monks from Ireland) often observed the holy day at a different time than the adherents of the Roman church (those who had been evangelized by the Roman missionary Augustine of Kent).
This might seem like a minor point of religious practice to us today, but imagine what it could mean for a kingdom when the king and his courtiers were celebrating the highest holy day of the church year while the queen and her followers were still fasting for Lent. It was a troubling mark of disunity, both religiously and politically.
The Synod of Whitby in 664, which occurred ten years before Bede’s birth, had ruled in favor of the Roman practice (the tables and method of calculation devised by Dionysus Exiguus). By Bede’s death in 735, almost the entire British church had accepted this method. But the controversy was still current enough in his lifetime for him to devote extensive portions of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People to it.
Somewhere in his historical studies on the Easter controversy, Bede developed a keen interest in Dionysus Exiguus’ method of ordering time. He decided to use the new Anno Domini dating system for his Ecclesiastical History, and with this decision, he created a precedent for historians everywhere in the Western world.
It is a difficult matter to convert an entire society from one dating system to another. The numbers we have assigned to the past don’t like to pack up their tents and leave.
Several years ago, when I taught history to high school students, I asked them to pick the most important date in American history and make it year one. Most chose the Declaration of Independence, and with that as the focal point, they had to use their math skills to draw up a timeline of other important dates B.D.o.I and A.D.o.I (Before the Declaration of Independence and After the Declaration of Independence). It is a little mind boggling to realize that the numbers that were drilled into your head all your life (1066, 1215, 1776, 1914) don’t actually mean anything except in relation to the chosen focal point of history.
Despite the difficulty, Bede did a marvelous job of moving the Anglo-Saxon society from the old system of dating to the new one. In the Ecclesiastical History he initially used both systems side by side until his readers become acclimated to the change. In the second chapter of his book, Bede wrote:
Now Britain had never been visited by the Romans and was unknown to them until the time of Gaius Julius Caesar who, in the year of Rome 693, that is, in the year 60 before
our Lord, was consul with Lucius Bibulus...
In the third chapter, Bede once again cited the Roman system and then followed it up with a time marker from the new system.
In the year of Rome 798 the Emperor Claudius, fourth after Augustus, wishing to prove that he was a benefactor to the State, sought to make war everywhere and to gain victories on every hand...He brought the war to an end in the fourth year of his reign, that is in the year of our Lord 46.
But by the fourth chapter, Bede had fully implemented the new system of Anno Domini and expected the reader to catch on accordingly.
In the year of our Lord 156 Marcus Antoninus Verus was made emperor...In the year of our Lord 189 Severus...became emperor...In the year of our Lord 286 Diocletian, the thirty-third after Augustus, was elected emperor...
Bede’s new use of the Anno Domini dating system spread gradually throughout Europe. By the beginning of the 800s, Alcuin had introduced it to Charlemagne’s court, and in 1422, Portugal became the last Roman Catholic country to adopt this system of reckoning time.
In 1700, Russia discovered that adopting the Anno Domini system was a requirement for westernization. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China jettisoned the old Chinese calendar in favor of the Western and international system.
To accommodate people from other religions, some recent historians have tried to alter the nomenclature of the Anno Domini system to B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era). I suspect that Dionysus Exiguus would have been amused by this effort since even if the names change, the focal point still remains the same.