by Mike Ashley
Kings were anointed not in God’s name, but as being crueller than the rest; before long, they would be killed, with no enquiry into the truth, by those who had anointed them, and others still crueller chosen to replace them. Any king who seemed gentler and rather more inclined to the truth was regarded as the downfall of Britain: everyone directed their hatred and their weapons at him, with no respect.
Amidst this political strife Gildas tells us that rumours reached the British of “the imminent approach of the old enemy, bent on total destruction and (as was their wont) on settlement from one end of the country to the other.” Yet the British did nothing and, as if by way of punishment:
§22 [. . .] . . . a deadly plague swooped brutally on the stupid people and in a short period laid low so many, with no sword, that the living could not bury all the dead. But not even this taught them their lesson . . .
Gildas emphasises how hopeless the British were and how that sealed their fate. Now he comes to the crucial part:
§22 [. . .] And they convened a Council to decide the best and soundest way to counter the brutal and repeated invasions and plunderings by the people I have mentioned.
§23. Then all the members of the Council, together with the superbo tyranno “proud tyrant”, were struck blind. As protection for our country, they sealed its doom by inviting in among them, like wolves into a sheep-fold, the ferocious Saxons, hated by man and God, to beat back the peoples of the North. Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land. How utter the blindness of their minds. How desperate and crass the stupidity. Of their own free will they invited under the same roof a people whom they feared worse than death even in their absence.
Then a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in three keels, as they call warships in their language. The winds were favourable; favourable too the omens and auguries which prophesied, according to a sure portent among them, that they would live for three hundred years in the land towards which their prows were directed and that for half that time, a hundred and fifty years, they would repeatedly lay it waste. On the orders of the ill-fated tyrant they first of all fixed their dreadful claws on the east side of the island, ostensibly to fight for our country, in fact to fight against it. The mother lioness learned that her first contingent had prospered and she sent a second and larger troop of satellite dogs. It arrived by ship and joined up with the false units. [. . .] The barbarians who had been admitted to the island asked to be given supplies, falsely representing themselves as soldiers ready to undergo extreme dangers for their excellent hosts. The supplies were granted and, for a long time, “shut the dog’s mouth.” Then they again complained that their monthly allowance was insufficient, purposely giving a false colour to individual incidents, and swore that they would break their agreement and plunder the whole island unless more lavish payment was heaped upon them. There was no delay: they put their threats into immediate effect.
§24. In just punishment for the crimes that had gone before, a fire heaped up and, nurtured by the hand of the impious easterners, spread from sea to sea. It devastated town and country round about and, once it was alight, it did not die down until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue. [. . .] All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams, laid low too all the inhabitants – church leaders, priests and people alike – as the swords glinted all around and the flames crackled. It was a sad sight. In the middle of the squares the foundation-stones of high walls and towers that had been torn from their lofty base, holy altars, fragments of corpses covered with a purple crust of congealed blood, looked as though they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine press. There was no burial to be had except in the ruins of houses or the bellies of beasts and birds – [. . .].
§25. So a number of the wretched survivors were caught in the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others, their spirit broken by hunger, went to surrender to the enemy; they were fated to be slaves forever, if indeed they were not killed straight away, the highest boon. Others made for lands beyond the sea [. . .]. Others held out, though not without fear, in their own land, trusting their lives with constant foreboding to the high hills, [. . .] to the densest forests and to the cliffs of the sea coast.
After a time, when the cruel plunderers had gone home, God gave strength to the survivors. Wretched people fled to them from all directions, as eagerly as bees to the beehive when a storm threatens, and begged whole-heartedly that they should not be altogether destroyed. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm: his parents, who had certainly worn the purple, were slain in it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather’s excellence. Under him our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented and the battle went their way.
§26. From then on, victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies, so that in this people the Lord could make trial of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loved him or not. This lasted right up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then has already passed.
But the cities of our land are not populated even now as they once were; right to the present they are deserted, in ruins and unkempt. External wars may have stopped, but not civil ones. For the remembrance of so desperate a blow to the island and of such unlooked for recovery stuck in the minds of those who witnessed both wonders. That was why kings, public and private persons, priests and churchmen, kept to their own stations. But they died; and an age succeeded them that is ignorant of that storm and has experience only of the calm of the present.
At this point Gildas launches into his tirade against the present-day kings, but before considering that, let us consider what Gildas has told us so far. It’s wrapped up in hyperbole, but tucked away in these nine sections is a history, and most of it we can match to the chronicles already noted.
The start of §20 is a rare moment when Gildas gives us the opportunity to verify a date. He refers to a letter written to the Roman commander Agitius, referring to him as “thrice consul.” Although Agitius would more accurately translate as Aegidius, most historians believe that Gildas meant Aëtius, who did indeed hold the consulship three times. In fact, he was the only Roman (excluding emperors) to have done so for over three hundred years. Aegidius (d. 464), on the other hand, was never consul. He was a Roman general, who was appointed the magister militum of northern Gaul by the Western Roman emperor Avitus in 457, and later became king of the Franks, establishing a small kingdom around Soissons.
Aëtius became consul for the third and fourth times in 446 and 453, so the letter, if Gildas remembered it correctly, had to be written between 446 and 452. The ASC records this as happening in 443, and notes that the Romans were coping with Attila the Hun and thus could not help the British. In fact the first major confrontation between Aëtius and Attila was in 451, which could be the date the letter was sent.
As Gildas quotes from the letter, it is possible that a copy may have survived to his day, although of course it’s easy to reconstruct an apparent text from hearsay. This means that the previous section, concerning the conflict with the Picts and Scots, covers a period of over thirty years, from 410 to at least 446AD.
Even when we get to the letter to Aëtius, an apparent moment of certainty instantly becomes uncertain. Gildas tells us that no help came from the Romans and that a famine descended upon Britain until at last the British fought back and achieved a major victory. At this stage, Gildas is still referring to the Picts and Scots, not the Saxons.
The period 446 to 454 seems a bit short for the British to weaken, lapse into famine, fight back against the Picts and Scots and, as we learn in §21, become “flooded with abundance.”
Evidently Gildas has become confused again. The British may well have written to Aëtius in 446 or soon after, but that was almost certainly in relation to the Saxon incursions. The victory over the Picts and Scots is more likely to be the Alleluia victory of Germanus. Gildas, bewailing the wretchedness of the British in §19, is recalling the decline into Pelagianism, and the appeal he refers to in §20 was probably the one to the church leaders in Gaul that resulted in Germanus’s visit to Britain. It is noticeable that when Constantius referred to Germanus’s second visit, he described Britain as a “wealthy island”, precisely as Gildas recalls it here. What probably happened was that Gildas knew of the appeal to Aëtius, but confused it with the earlier appeal, so that the events in §19 really relate to 410–429, a far more probable period, whilst §20 and §21 relate to 429–446, or perhaps 441. The Gallic Chronicle had referred to Britain “yielding to the power of the Saxons” in 441. This is close enough to 446 (though one might hope it could have been closer) to suggest that from the late 430s the Germanic incursions had grown stronger, and that by 441, insofar as was apparent to the chronicler in southern Gaul, the Saxons had taken hold of Britain.
This would also explain why the British should write to Aëtius. After all, if they had been independent of Rome for 30 years, why should they suddenly write to a Roman commander and expect help? Admittedly they got none, perhaps a sign that Rome had no further hold on Britain. It seems to confirm what I suggested earlier, that Britain was not really “expelled” in 410, but that Honorius and the empire simply had rather too much to contend with. Technically Britain remained in the Empire, appointing their own officials, but by 441–446 those final slender threads were cut. Aëtius sent no help, the Saxons were overrunning Britain, and Britain now regarded itself as independent. This would explain why, in §21, Britain anoints “kings”. Evidently the turnover was rapid as “before long they would be killed”.
Once again, Gildas is probably recording a tradition of a great number of petty rulers, suggesting that by the 440s the old provincial boundaries had broken down. The British, fleeing from the Saxons, had taken refuge in the mountains. The archaeology shows a resettling of a number of ancient hill-forts, mostly in the west and south.
In Gildas’s eyes all kings were usurpers, hence his term “tyrants”. There was a particular outbreak of them from the 440s onwards, once the first generation of leftover Romans, like Ambrosius, had died out.
In §21, therefore, Gildas records his account of the rise of a series of lawless usurper kings, whose successors are to become the subject of his later condemnation. This is the central point of De Excidio, namely that this lawlessness was to be punished by God and the form of that punishment is shown in §22 with the return of the “old enemy”, the Picts and Scots. Gildas tells us that the British did not learn from the return of these enemies but continued to sink into further corruption until laid low by a plague. Europe was regularly devastated by plagues during the fifth and sixth centuries, and although there is not a specific record of one in Britain around this time, it is known that in 452 the Huns were struck by plague, one which could have spread to Britain.
In §23 Gildas refers to the most crass decision the British could have made. The Council, “together with the superbo tyranno”, chose to invite the Saxons into Britain to fight the Picts. This is recorded in the ASC as happening sometime between 449 and 455, which ties in with 451–452 suggested above. Gildas does not name his “proud tyrant,” but the ASC tells us it was Vortigern, so it’s likely that’s who he meant. The name Vortigern means “supreme king”, and Gildas’s superbo tyranno is a pun on that. Nennius (see Chapter 6) has much more to say about Vortigern, so I shall save my comments about him until then.
Gildas reports that the Saxons soon turned upon the British, and those Britons who were not enslaved retreated into the mountains or fled abroad. There was another wave of refugees from Britain to Armorica about this time. Around this time, too, emerges the mysterious character of Riothamus, a “king of the Britons” fighting in Gaul, who has been suggested as another candidate for Arthur (see Chapter 6). Gildas paints a desolate picture of abandoned Roman towns and the British hiding in their hill forts, cut down wherever they met the Saxons. The archaeological record also shows that many Romano-British cities were deserted by this time. Only St Albans, Wroxeter, Silchester, Chester, Gloucester, London and Caernarvon show signs not only of continued occupation, but also of new development. It also shows that several pre-Roman hill forts were reoccupied, the major ones being South Cadbury, Cadbury-Congresbury, Glastonbury, Tintagel, Deganwy, Dinas Emrys, Dinas Powys, Dumbarton and the Mote of Mark.
Interestingly, in §25 Gildas comments, “after a time, when the cruel plunderers had gone home . . .”, the implication being that this wave of Saxon invaders was out for plunder and not for settlement. The ASC makes no reference to the Saxons returning home, but does state that they sent for reinforcements, after which successive waves of Saxons invaded Britain over the next sixty years. But then perhaps the ASC would not want to record a retreat. There are sufficient gaps in the years to allow a return, such as between 456 and 465. There is something a little suspicious about the ASC’s record of events from 449 to 477. It drags on too long. For a period of twenty-eight years we only learn about Hengist and his son fighting the Britons, or the Welsh. In fact the change in terminology from Britons (456) to Welsh (465) itself gives pause for thought. The Saxons began to call them the Welsh, or Welisc (later Wealhas), meaning “foreigners”, which is rather audacious for an invader. (The British, incidentally, called the Saxons the Sais, which in Gaelic became Sasunnach, or Sassenach.)
It is as if the records after 465 come from a genuine Saxon source whereas the earlier entries were derived from a British, or at least non-Saxon, source. Could it be that the later chroniclers were embarrassed by a gap in the record from, say, 456 to 477, and so pushed back some events to fill the gap? They could not push back entries relating to Aelle or Cerdic, but they could add extra events for Hengist, or extend the time during which he really was in Britain. The events recorded against 465 and 473 may have taken place in the late 450s, after which the majority of the “plunderers” returned to Saxony and Angeln. The British were able to regroup under a new leader and drive the Saxons back to their settlements along the east. For a time, until around 477, the British could breathe again.
Gildas is discussing a period that would have been remembered clearly by his parents, certainly his grandparents, and be well known amongst the older churchmen with whom Gildas associated. Although his history may be weak on the events and chronology of a century earlier, there is no reason for him to get more recent history wrong. We therefore have to accept that perhaps during the early 460s most of the Saxons marauders returned home (presumably to Germany, though by “home” Gildas may mean the few Saxon settlements along the east coast), allowing the British to regain control. This was when Britain rallied under a new leader.
And who was the new leader who rallied the British? For once Gildas names him, and it isn’t Arthur. It’s a man whom Gildas clearly reveres, Ambrosius Aurelianus. Gildas calls him a “gentleman” and refers to him as a “duce”, a senior official. What’s more, his parents, who had been slain during the hostilities, had “worn the purple”. Gildas really does mean “parents”, not forebears, as he refers to their deaths during the recent hostilities. Ambrosius’s father may not have literally worn the purple, in terms of the rank denoted by his toga, but the phrase itself would certainly have meant that he had held a very senior position. In the later Roman Empire consuls were also allowed to wear the purple, usually a purple-fringed toga. In the previous chapter I referred to the Notitia Dignitatum, a catalogue of official posts which was still valid at the time of Britain’s “departure” from the Empire. This listed the four or five provinces of Britain, two of which had governors of consular rank, Maxima Caesariensis, based on London, and the mysterious Valentia. We do not know the name of the consular governors
in Britain at the start of the fifth century, so it is entirely possible that one might have been Ambrosius’s father.
Incidentally, it is worth noting here that the venerable Ambrose (339–397), Bishop of Milan, later beatified as St Ambrose, was himself a consular governor in Italy, based at Milan. His father, who was the Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, at Arles, and to whom the vicarius of Britain reported, was also called Ambrosius Aurelianus. He was descended from a notable senatorial family possibly related to the emperor Aurelian (215–275), one of the more successful emperors of his day, who earned the title Restitutor Orbis (“Restorer of the World”) for reuniting the Empire in 274AD. If Gildas’s Ambrosius Aurelianus could count these amongst his antecedents and be the son of a consular governor, no wonder Gildas emphasised his name, and regarded him as special.
§25 of Gildas would seem to take place during the 470s when Ambrosius led the British in a series of battles against the Saxons, which eventually led to the momentous victory at Badon. This was the battle recorded in the Welsh Annals as the “victory of Arthur” in 518. It does seem a little surprising that, having named Ambrosius and sung his praises, Gildas chooses not to name Arthur, whose victory over the Saxons he describes as “pretty well the last defeat of the villains and certainly not the least.” Gildas does not mention Arthur anywhere in De Excidio. Why not?
There are at least six possible reasons:
(1) Arthur didn’t exist. We have to consider that the reference in the Welsh Annals might have been added by a later chronicler, based on the growing Arthurian legend, and that the victor was someone else, possibly Ambrosius himself.
(2) Gildas had no need to mention Arthur. As we have seen, Gildas does not mention many names at all, not even Vortigern’s. He mentions Ambrosius Aurelianus because he was clearly one of Gildas’s heroes, the man who turned the tide against the Saxons during Britain’s darkest days.