Although the King at once set out for his dominions in the far west, ostensibly to raise reinforcements from the mountaineers of Valentia, there was, as I have said, much more real fighting than in most of the wars of my manhood. Young Vortimer and his brother Categirn led the royal comitatus and the local militia in three pitched battles that summer, and in the first they were fairly successful; Categirn was killed in it, but so was Horsa, the brother of Hengist. Then more and more Saxons came to join the army in Kent, some from other settlements they had on the east coast of Britain, some across the sea from Germany; while Vortimer’s forces dwindled. The King, though he raised an army in the west, kept it about him for his own protection; and the petty rulers of the southeast, such as my father, were reluctant to send their men to serve under a rival. Nevertheless the second battle was fought right on the coast near Regulbium, and at the end of the day the Romans held the battlefield. But Hengist was a most persistent man and so well known among the Germans that he could always gather fresh recruits; he tried again, and in the third battle Vortimer was slain and his army scattered.
We had been camping out in Anderida all that summer, expecting to go home to the villa when the war was over; but the news that the Roman army in Kent had been destroyed meant that the open country would be unsafe for a long time, and my father decided to live permanently in the fortress. He set about building a town house; it was only timber-framed wattle and plaster, and it contained no bath, because a hypocaust is such a tricky thing to make; but it was roomy and gaily painted, and it looked quite smart when it was new.
No one could tell how long we would have to stay behind walls, and we settled down to live as we thought townsmen should. All the gentry for miles had come in to take refuge, and there were plenty of children of my own age and class; my mother thought it a splendid chance to start a school that would give us a really good education, but the difficulty was to get hold of a competent teacher. My father offered a large salary, and Gaul is always full of unemployed rhetoricians, but though a fishing-boat made the daring voyage across the Channel with an invitation, none of them would face the danger of the journey or the uncertain life in such a frontier town. In the end my mother had to fall back on a Dumnonian named Peter, who had been trained for the Church, but had never been allowed to take even deacon’s orders because he was accused of being a Pelagian heretic; I don’t think Master Peter had the strength of character to be different from his neighbours, and if he had ever been a Pelagian it must only have been because he found himself among heretics. Like most Dumnonians he had been brought up to speak nothing but Celtic in the home, and this was an advantage; a man who has acquired Latin only as a learned language usually speaks it more correctly than a Gaul who has picked up slang and bad constructions in his cradle. He was very firm with us if we used barbarian words or dropped our case-endings, and I learned from him to write elegantly.
The poor man was always telling us that it is the duty of the rich and well-born to serve the state; that is an excellent piece of morality, handed down to us from pagan Greeks, but when I was a boy it was rather difficult to apply. In fact, you might say that no state of any kind existed in Britain, and certainly none that had any claim to my allegiance. There was no Emperor nearer than Constantinople, and our fathers had given up the farce of proclaiming a local Emperor for Britain; if they did, he always took all the troops and treasure he could collect, and went overseas to enlarge his dominions. We had to obey King Vortigern if he really insisted on anything, but no one could love or honour that tough old intriguer from the western mountains. I grew up without any loyalty to anything outside the family.
That winter the condition of things in Britain got very much worse. King Vortigern had stayed in the west while Vortimer was alive, for he knew that his heir would dethrone and imprison him if he stayed within reach. Now Vortimer was dead he came back with a small comitatus, but found his only course was to fix up some arrangement with Hengist. He ostentatiously gave his Saxon concubine the position of a queen, and kept the rest of his playmates out of sight in a remote castle of the west; then he opened negotiations by recognizing Hengist as King of Kent. At Christmas in the year 458 there was a great feast to celebrate the new alliance, but unfortunately fighting broke out when everyone was drunk. All were supposed to have come to the dinner unarmed, but the Saxons had brought the little seax-knives which they use for eating, and for other purposes as well; these are sharp iron knives, pointed and with a cutting blade on one side, though the other is thick and quite capable of parrying a sword-cut. The Saxons say that their tribal name comes from these knives, which are sacred objects that they must always carry. Anyway, these sacred objects came in very useful at the party, and though Vortigern’s comitatus put up enough resistance with benches and cutlery for the King to get safely away, for the rest of his life he was nothing more than the petty ruler of a castle beyond the Sabrina. Naturally, the official story that all Romans still believe was of a treacherous Saxon plot, but I heard from Ursula that it was a spontaneous and unpremeditated quarrel; King Vortigern had begun to make advances to a handsome Saxon youth, who presently struck him. It is very easy to anger Germans in this way.
No one succeeded immediately to Vortigern’s position, and southeast Britain found itself without a leader. The Saxons began to raid far and wide, though they had neither the engines nor the patience to besiege walled towns. Nobody nowadays likes living in a stinking and crowded town, where there is no sport, and the presence of the clergy makes most people lead a far more Christian life than they are naturally inclined to; in consequence, those who had large sums of gold in their possession crossed the sea to Armorica, and the craftsmen who can earn a good living anywhere did the same if they could escape from their masters; but my father, whose property was in immovable land, stayed as near it as he could with safety.
The Great Forest saved the country round Anderida. It is not an impassable barrier, but the roads through it are few, and so rough and narrow that pirates find it difficult to get their plunder back to Kent. The sea was open to Saxon ships, and they sometimes went down Channel, but our coast had been fortified by Stilicho; these forts were less than a hundred years old, and still quite defensible; in any case our land is rather a backwater. We heard terrible stories of the destruction in the midlands and the west, but only a few Saxon foragers and scouts occasionally found their way south from Kent. In the spring of 459 we expected to hear of the gathering of a Roman army, and of more hard-fought battles, but nothing of the kind happened, and the stupid wasteful raiding continued unchecked.
I was learning to like town-life. Of course we were not cooped up inside the walls all the time; the ironworkers of the Forest sent us word if there were raiders about, and usually it was safe to go riding among the marshes near the town. Apart from my schooling, which I enjoyed because I was a quick learner, I was also being taught how to handle my weapons. My grandfather Coroticus undertook to teach me warfare; he was now living with us permanently, since Roman and Saxon were not on the sort of terms that needed an interpreter at treaty makings. Constans was at the age when he thought he knew it all already, and Paul intended to be a man of peace, but I liked my grandfather, I enjoyed learning, and I had the patience, unusual in a child, to practise as much as he told me. He had been a good fighting-man in his youth, and he had thought out his own views on the best method of self-defence. In the first place, he favoured the Saxon equipment. These barbarians use no body-armour, except a helmet and a round shield, and their swords are of the pattern called scramaseax, a heavy single-edged sabre with a sharp point; in fact, a bigger edition of the sacred seax-knife. It would seem as though warriors armed like this would not be a match for loricated Roman infantry, but you must remember two things: competent smiths were becoming very rare, so that many Romans had in fact no cuirasses, and though our men were trained to fight shoulder to shoulder, they were very badly trained. The Saxon method of fighting was quite different; they did not try
to keep in ordered ranks, but charged independently as fast as they could run, knocked an opponent off his feet with a blow of the sword, and then jumped on him and cut his throat with the seax-knife. Half-trained men do not trust the comrades beside them well enough to stand firm against this charge. No wonder the barbarians usually beat us in pitched battles.
My grandfather took great trouble with my training in single combat, though he did not try to teach me tactics; for he said that anyone but a fool could slink into a safe place in a set battle, but no one could prevent a treacherous assault when he was alone, and the important thing was to grow up to be a difficult man to murder. He taught me to go in hard, using the sword not to pierce but to knock the other man off his balance, and to strike with my shield at his face. I grew strong and active, for we had good food and plenty of exercise, and thanks to my town life I escaped the shambling clumsiness that so often mars the muscles of country-bred youths.
Meanwhile I was doing quite well at school, though this was more because I had a quick brain and managed to get on the right side of Master Peter than because I worked hard at my lessons. I learnt to speak and write good Latin with ease and fluency, and history also interested me, since it has a bearing on present politics; but theology left me cold, though we had to study a great deal of it. I should also have liked to learn something of geography and where the different tribes of barbarians lived, but what was taught seemed to be out of date and unconvincing. I did not see much of my father, who was now governing the fortress; my mother had taken to her bed as a permanent invalid, and when I was not at school or military exercise I was talking to Ursula about the Saxons. She made them out to be a very fine people, and the best of them were the Jutes, who were her own ancestors and also Hengist’s. If I sometimes wished I had been born a barbarian who didn’t have to go to school she would remind me that I was Woden-born, and as good a German as any of them. I owe a great deal to Ursula.
All this time we were living as though on an island, for no one friendly ever came to us through the Great Forest. The Saxons were plundering all the open country as far as the banks of the Sabrina. In 463, when I was twelve, we heard one piece of really shocking news: the townsmen of Calleva, a strong town among the forests south of the upper Thames, had grown tired of living permanently inside walls with Saxons watching them from behind every bush; they had decided to emigrate, and when their ruler tried to stop them they murdered him and went off to Dumnonia all the same. Their town was left empty, a standing invitation to any band of robbers who wanted a fortified base; they might at least have broken down the walls before they left. I remember hearing my father discuss it with my grandfather, for he feared our citizens might follow their example; but my grandfather pointed out that our men could not march anywhere safely by land, and we could stop them emigrating by sea if we kept a guard on the fishing-boats.
Children accept the world as they find it; I took it for granted that all civilized men hid behind walls, and that the open country belonged to barbarians; but I also took it for granted that barbarians could never get inside the walls. Master Peter taught us that everything would come right soon, and then holy men would travel safely to Rome and back; but Ursula told me differently, and I secretly thought that she had more sense than the schoolmaster. In any case, things suited me very well as they were, and my father would not be such a great man if a Vicarius of Britain came back.
Our followers now liked living in a town, and the coloni at the villa had grown used to their hazardous life; they ran into the woods so fast that the Saxons did not often catch one. Of course, every time they rebuilt their miserable huts these were more squalid and poorly furnished; but I suppose they were used to that also, and in any case there was nothing they could do about it. If things had stayed as they were I would have lived a prosperous and uneventful life in Anderida. But the world changes a great deal every year.
In 465, when I was fourteen, my grandfather died. Luckily he had already taught me single combat and the German language, and I don’t think he knew anything else that was at all useful. I suppose he had led a fairly successful life; but I don’t think he had made the most of his opportunities. A man who was the go-between in all the negotiations of Vortigern and Hengist ought to have been able to grab something substantial out of the mess that they made. There was a splendid funeral, and the Bishop of Noviomagus made the dangerous journey by sea to conduct it. That was only decent, in spite of the old man’s descent from Woden, and my mother was very angry when she caught Ursula trying to smuggle his best sword into the coffin. She threatened to have her exorcised by the Bishop if she practised any more of this heathen nonsense. Ursula subsided at once. The poor woman was always terrified of anything that looked like Christian magic; most Saxons are, for though they have a lot of spells of their own, they always think other people’s are more powerful. Otherwise the funeral was a great success.
My brother Constans was now nineteen, and he had finished his education. My father made him second-in-command of our armed forces, and he led a raid through the Forest and took some pigs from the Saxons of Kent without losing a single man. He knew a lot about the drill and tactics of our Roman ancestors, though that knowledge did not help him to lead our undrilled levies, and he was not particularly handy with his weapons in single combat. My second brother, Paul, at sixteen was nearly ready to begin his career in the Church; the Bishop took the opportunity of my grandfather’s funeral to ordain him deacon, although he was still under age according to the Canons. It was understood that he would be the next Bishop of Noviomagus, so that he had no desire to enter the priesthood just yet; it is much smarter to go straight from deacon to Bishop, without having the care of a parish. I never understood Paul; no one could be so unselfish and law-abiding as he appeared to be, certainly no member of my family; yet I could never catch him out in hypocrisy, and he really seemed to enjoy distributing alms to talkative and smelly old women. I could only suppose that he was far-seeing and had himself very well disciplined, with the intention of eventually becoming a Bishop of great temporal power; such Bishops rule many cities in Gaul, but I could see no opening for them in the present state of Britain.
As for myself, at the age of fourteen my mind was as active and mature as it is now, and I had already decided on my future; I would become a ruler, with no superior at all, free to give my wishes the force of law. This was an ambitious goal for the third son of a petty tyrant, master of a single little town, and it needed very careful planning. I would have to get hold of some trustworthy followers from somewhere, but the fighting-men of Anderida were all attached to Constans and my father; I should have tried to win them over, but I was still too young to impress them by feats of arms; also a boy of that age has not got his desires under proper control. At about that time I seduced the daughter of one of my father’s best soldiers, and the man took offence; he was only a colonus by origin, but he had carried a sword for so long that he felt himself free, and complained to my father in open court. It was all very embarrassing, and the family were very nasty about it. Only Ursula admired my spirit, for the Saxons always blame the girl in these cases. She was quickly married off to an ironworker of the Forest, where women are scarce, and now I have even forgotten her name; but the whole episode showed me that I must practise self-control. After all, my ambition was not overweening and inordinate; I did not want a wide Kingdom, only an absolute one.
Meanwhile the Saxon raids continued, all over Britain north of the Forest and east of the Sabrina; Hengist’s men in Kent had begun to plough the land and build wooden huts, as though they intended to stay for the rest of their lives, but everywhere else the barbarians wandered about the open country, laying waste the villages and spoiling much more than they consumed. They would have done better for themselves if they had come to some arrangement with the terrified villagers, and drawn a regular tribute, but then they would have lost the reputation for savagery which made them invincible, so perhaps they acted wisely.
After a short stay my father came back safely, and summoned his three sons to decide on the way he should proclaim his new dignity. It was the first time I had been asked to attend such a council, and I was delighted with this new sign that I was to be taken seriously in future. There were only six of us in my father’s office, the four members of the family, the commander of the comitatus, and the steward, who knew all about money and food supplies. I remember it vividly. The room was partitioned off from the sleeping apartments, under the gable farthest from the street; it was autumn, and there were some bits of charcoal in a bronze pan on the table, which was much more pleasant than the open fire in the middle of the floor which filled the big living-room with smoke; charcoal was rather a rarity, since it was made in the dangerous Forest; we felt very civilized with it glowing there wastefully in the middle of the room. When we were settled, and Maximus, the captain of the comitatus, had barred the inner door, my father began to speak:
Conscience of the King Page 2