It is therefore not surprising that Constantius does not mention the Vortigern in the account of Germanus and Lupus’s visit of 429. However there is one nugget of information in the account which downplays the Vortigern’s power by convincing implication. Constantius knew Bishop Lupus personally and he got from him the only first-hand account of a battle in fifth-century Britain. While he and Germanus were in Britain, the Saxons and Picts had formed an alliance and their army needed to be confronted. Before he became a priest, Germanus had had military experience. Therefore when he heard of the approaching danger, he
offered himself as commander. His light troops thoroughly explored the country through which the enemy’s advance was expected; choosing a valley set among high hills, he drew up his army … in ambush. As the enemy approached, he ordered the whole force to respond with a great shout when he cried out. The bishops cried out thrice together ‘Alleluia’; the whole army replied with a single voice, and the great cry rebounded, shut in by the surrounding hills. The enemy column was terrified; the very frame of heaven and the rocks around seemed to threaten them … They fled in all directions … many drowning in the river they had to cross … The bishops won a bloodless victory, gained by faith, not by the might of men.
Although it contains strong doses of myth and propaganda, that is an account of a real battle. In his Historia Ecclesiastica Bede repeats the story in an embellished form which has the bishops set up a baptism centre in the camp of the British army to equip the soldiers spiritually, and in general he awards more credit for the victory to the Almighty than Constantius does.¹⁰⁷
A number of important points need to be drawn from this. First and most obvious, there was little military organization in the south in 429, certainly no central or national authority based on London. Even if the Vortigern did rule from there, he was powerless to prevent a visiting Gaulish bishop from leading a British army. Even if the reason for the non-involvement of central authority was the Pelagian/Catholic divide, no military clout existed to prevent Germanus from taking charge. It sounds as though individual districts and towns, perhaps with some local organization still intact, took what responsibility they could for their own security. Since the evacuation of the last of the provincial garrison in 407 there had been no regular troops to speak of except the Vortigern’s Saxon mercenaries. And by 429 some of them or some of their kinsmen had combined with the Picts to raid in the south.
In order to inflate the magnitude of the military miracle, Bede’s account emphasizes how demoralized the southern British were in the face of Pictish aggression and before Germanus buckled a sword-belt around his surplice. The most striking thing about the description of what became known as the Alleluia Victory is how much tactical information it contains. Germanus clearly knew what he was doing. Like a professional soldier he first sent out mounted scouts to locate the enemy and then conjecture their line of advance. Then, according to Bede, he set his ‘untried troops’ to face the enemy on the floor of a steep-sided valley across whose mouth flowed a river of some size. Drawn in by the sight of inexperienced and possibly ill-armed troops, no doubt quaking in their boots, the Pictish/Saxon column marched into the trap set by Germanus. Ambushed, the enemy fled and many were drowned attempting to cross the river behind them.
Now, if all that British forces did was to shout ‘Alleluia’, then it is unlikely that such a rout would have ensued. But the mention of light troops, or auxiliaries, implies at least some cavalry and they probably turned the Picts and Saxons and drove them into the water. This is the first incidence of what would become a familiar British tactic towards the end of the fifth century.
The location of the Alleluia Victory is important since it would offer a sense of where the south was vulnerable and how far inland the Picts would penetrate. The logic of the prelude to the battle is that Germanus found himself at a town where he was engaged in the business of conversion or diplomacy. And since raiders targeted towns as the most concentrated source of plunder, that would make sense from both sides. Germanus landed on the south coast of England and several large Roman towns lay in that area: Winchester, Silchester, Cirencester or Bath. However in the case of the first three the geography does not fit; the landscape is too flat. But if the Picts and Saxons were moving from the east to the west and using the old Roman roads, then Bath would have been a likely target. The town is still approached from the west through a relatively steep-sided valley and the River Avon is close at hand.
Whatever the precise location of the Alleluia Victory, it shows that there was little more than local organization in the south. Any combination of Pict and Saxon was highly dangerous and memories of the Barbarian Conspiracy of 367 would not have faded. Therefore if a central authority had existed then it would most certainly have engaged with this threat. And the fact that a visiting cleric, on another mission altogether, had to take command of such forces as there were does not say much for British organization of any sort. In that context it is significant that nineteen years previously the Emperor Honorius had written to the cities of Britain telling them to look to their own defence. He had no one else to write to. And when the historian Zosimus writes of the end of Roman power in the West: ‘The Britons took up arms and … freed their cities from the barbarians threatening them,’ he again mentions only the local authorities. Finally, the incident shows how casually vulnerable the south was in the early 400s. Its conquest was only a matter of time.
The end began slowly. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is precisely that, a propagandizing account of the gradual takeover and eventual triumph of the Angles, Saxons and others. It only represents their point of view and says little about the British. But occasionally the record is clear-eyed:
Vortigern invited the Angle race here and they then came here to Britain in three ships at the place Ebba’s Creek. The king Vortigern gave them land in the south-east of this land on condition that they fought against the Picts. They then fought against the Picts and had victory wheresoever they came. Then they sent to Angeln, ordered [them] to send more help and ordered them to tell of the worthlessness of the Britons and of the excellence of the land. They then at once sent here a larger troop to help the other. These men came from three tribes of Germany: from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, from the Jutes.¹⁰⁸
Early events are concentrated in the south-east, mainly Kent, and it may be that the Vortigern exerted his authority in that area. Perhaps he was King of London and Kent. However the picture of increasing Anglo-Saxon settlement and their realization that southern Britain was theirs for the taking is difficult to mistake. It is also significant that in the south of England for the first four decades of the fifth century the principal problem is unequivocally Pictish raiding. In 442 that changed for ever. The leader of the Saxons was a man called Hengist, a nickname meaning ‘the Stallion’, and he began to make demands for goods and food which he knew were unlikely to be met. Writing around 540 the British priest Gildas paints a vivid picture of What happened:
The barbarians … were not slow to put their threats into action. The fire of righteous vengeance, kindled by the sins of the past, blazed from sea to sea, its fuel prepared by the arms of the impious in the east. Once lit, it did not die down. When it had wasted town and country in that area, it burned up almost the whole surface of the island, until its red and savage tongue licked the western ocean …
All the greater towns fell to the enemy’s battering rams; all their inhabitants, bishops, priests and people, were mown down together, while swords flashed and flames crackled. Horrible it was to see the foundation stones of towers and high walls thrown down bottom upward in the squares, mixing with holy altars and fragments of human bodies, as though they were covered with a purple crust of clotted blood, as in some fantastic wine-press. There was no burial save in the ruins of the houses, or in the bellies of the beasts and birds.¹⁰⁹
Hengist’s warriors tore through the south with appalling ferocity and even though they suffered reverses, the
revolt of 442 began a process that turned southern Britannia into England. Resistance was patchy and leadership lacking.
Both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle record an effect of the revolt. In 443, after a year of destruction and slaughter, the cities of Britain sent an appeal to ‘Aetius, thrice Consul’.¹¹⁰ Addressing him formally by his Roman title, they begged him to send help – but not against the Saxons. The Chronicle states bluntly that they requested help against the Picts and Bede implies the same thing.
Aetius was the military ruler of a large part of Gaul. After the barbarian crossing of the frozen Rhine in 406, and the chaos their incursions caused, he carried on the work of Constantine III in maintaining a robust central authority. Here is part of the text of the letter: ‘To Aetius, thrice Consul, come the groans of the Britons … the barbarians driveus into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.’
Aetius could send no help, but the letter shows how powerful and persistent the sense of empire was, and how great the desperation of the beleaguered Britons. In addition they may have thought Honorius’s letter of 410 no more than a temporary measure. Why should the emperor abandon the valuable province of Britannia for ever?
Natural disasters compounded the situation. Plague swept through southern Britain in 446 and around the same time there is evidence that sea levels rose and coastal towns experienced tremendous flooding.¹¹¹ It is little wonder that by 460 there were reports of mass migration across the channel to Armorica (now Brittany), where in the 380s the British troops of the defeated Macsen had settled. Whole communities left in what sounds like an organized manner. A bishop ‘of the British in Armorica’ was recorded in the 460s. In addition 12,000 able-bodied men of military service age took ship, abandoning Britannia for the place that became known as Little Britain.
This mass migration does not seem so dramatic if it is understood in an imperial context. Because Britannia and Gaul were still reckoned to be part of the same Roman state, it was no more unlikely than moving from Leeds to Southampton might be now. Communities of Britons also sailed to settle in northern Spain where the episcopal see of Bretona was founded. In 527 a Bishop Mahiloc, a P-Celtic name, attended a church council. By the ninth century the Spanish British had become part of P-Celtic Galicia.
But this haemorrhage of the Cymry and so many of their young men signalled the loss of south-eastern Britain. Kent, Sussex, Middlesex and Essex are old county names that record the Saxon victory. By 461 the war in the south-east was over.
Gildas takes up the story again and his text contains an uncharacteristic note of hope:
After a time, when the cruel raiders returned to their home, God strengthened the survivors. Distraught citizens fled to them from different locations, as avidly as bees to the beehive when a storm is overhanging, and with all their hearts implored, ‘burdening heaven with unnumbered prayers’ [Aeneid ix, 24] that they might not be destroyed to the point of extermination. Their leader was a gentleman, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who perhaps alone of the Romans had survived the impact of such a tempest; truly his parents, who had worn the purple, were overcome in it. In our times his stock have degenerated greatly from their excellent grandfather. With him our people regained their, strength, challenged the victors to battle and with the lord acceding the victory fell to us. From then on now our citizens, and then the enemies conquered; so on this people, as the Lord is accustomed, he could make trial of his latter day Israel to see whether it loves him or not.¹¹²
Ambrosius Aurelianus was obviously a man who saw himself as a Roman and his pedigree, according to Gildas, was imperial. He may have been a descendant of Macsen but more likely it simply meant that he was a well-connected aristocrat, and one of the few who had survived the Saxon revolt and the migrations to Brittany. Again Welsh sources attached the title Guledig and changed his nomen to Emrys, a name which has survived into modern Welsh usage. Although Gildas was clear that the fortunes of the Britons revived under Ambrosius Aurelianus, he gave no details of his victories or his campaigns. Of his military prowess all Gildas had to say was that he was a skilled cavalry commander, ‘brave afoot, he was braver on horseback’. There is some ingenious place-name evidence which links towns and villages containing the element Ambros, such as Amesbury in Wiltshire, with places where he raised native army units.¹¹³ If that attractive conjecture is correct then the distribution of sites surrounds the Saxon gains in Kent, Sussex, Middlesex and Essex. It is very convincing.
Ambrosius’s status as a Roman-British aristocrat leading the resistance to the Saxon invaders symbolizes a tradition noted by Gildas that only the upper classes fled westwards. Ordinary people stayed on the land, hoping to continue farming a living from it. But towns began gradually to go out of existence, particularly in the areas that fell first to the rebels.
The historical near-silence about Ambrosius Aurelianus and the beginning of British resistance is frustrating, but not puzzling. As the winners of the war the Anglo-Saxons were unlikely to report the loss of a few battles. And as the barbarian armies overran Gaul, Spain and Italy in the second half of the fifth century, there were few on the continent who could or would record events in Britain. Communication was closing down and in the west the idea of the empire was dying. Only in Britain did its memory live on into the following century, kept alive by the exploits of a brilliant general. Successor as Guledig to Macsen, Cunedda and Ambrosius Aurelianus, Arthur stemmed the barbarian tide, made a peace that lasted fifty years, and allowed Britannia to shape itself into a Britain we recognize now.
11
FINDING ARTHUR
In the shadow-lands that lie between the brilliant lights of unarguable historical fact and the fleeting shapes of myth-history, which is only part seen and part imagined, we need to stare hard to make out the mighty form of Arthur. Properly concerned as we are between what is true and what is untrue, we sometimes miss the value of the half-truth. In this way historians have put to one side the legends and their power and given all their trust to the scraps and sketches of dependable literary and archaeological sources. And inevitably the results do not satisfy. The fifth and sixth centuries in Britain are not a good period to choose to study if certainty is what you seek.
It is better to look again at the stories we have told ourselves about Arthur, to try to sift out the utterly fanciful from the authentic, to lean but not to rely on the bits that ring of the common truths of folk memory. For that is what lies at the heart of the legends and myths of Arthur – a memory of a hero, a man whose battles, campaigns and adventures warmed the winter firesides of the Celts of Britain. They were the first underclass. Deprived of their history and thirsty for heroes, they kept alive the story of Arthur, adding, embellishing, outrageously exaggerating, but forgetting nothing. Some of the truth of the man and what he did is embedded among the flighted finery of this fancy.
Geoffrey of Monmouth was a Welsh-speaking priest who lived in Oxford in the first half of the twelfth century. Without question he was a man of remarkable insight, imagination and enterprise. And yet because it is widely believed that all he did was to invent and decorate existing oral stories about Arthur, literary historians do not treat him as the serious and seminal figure he undoubtedly was. In order to create the first genuinely popular and widely influential publishing success before the invention of the portable printed book, Geoffrey drew widely on the P-Celtic tradition.¹¹⁴ From poems such as ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ and collections of stories such as the Mabinogion, he took the basic elements of the Arthur story and welded them into a coherent and gloriously overblown narrative which he grandly titled Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain). Britain, mind, not England.
But before going on to deal with the Historia, it is worth remembering, and for this narrative vital to note, that it was not Geoffrey’s first publication. Some years before he had collated an edition of The Prophecies of Merlin. P-Celtic stori
es about Merlin had survived into the twelfth century in Wales and although his retelling of these in print does bear unmistakable traces of Merlin’s Scottish origins, Geoffrey locates him emphatically in the south. In fact he makes him King of Powys and insists that he came from Carmarthen. The geographical relocation of the Great Enchanter is a good precursor for what happened, much less obviously, to the story of Arthur.
As his source for the Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey claimed that he used an old book given to him by a fellow ecclesiastic at Oxford, Walter the Archdeacon. This man was a genuine historical figure who died in 1151 and who possessed some academic reputation. Allegedly he gave Geoffrey a book in ‘the British tongue’ which then formed the basis for the Historia.
Broadly the book deals with the history of Britain from the arrival of Brutus the Trojan, a sort of respectable, classical founding figure, up to and including the reign of Arthur. This was the story that Geoffrey really wanted to tell and he devotes the burden of the book to it. Merlin the Mage, he wrote, first appeared during the reign of Vortigern who was dethroned in favour of the rightful king Ambrosius Aurelianus. In turn he was succeeded by his brother Uther who became Arthur’s father. On the latter’s accession, the glorious passages of the Historia begin to flow. Arthur first rides into battle against the savage Picts and destroys them, before dealing similarly with the Saxons, and then in a curious episode, defeating Lucius, a procurator of the Roman Empire.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 18