My only regret is that the need for independence forced me to live among barbarians. Of course, I should have been much happier as the King of a civilized state, but Romans are cleverer than Germans, and I should have had to face more strenuous competition. Now, in my old age, I begin to think more of my comfort and less of the joys of unfettered power. I would give a very large weight of gold to he for a whole day in a real bath, with fine towels and plenty of hot water, or even to eat a well-cooked meal prepared in a clean kitchen. I know that I shall never enjoy these simple pleasures again, no matter how much longer I may live.
Curiously enough, I never missed very much the pleasure of reading and writing, which I dreaded to give up when I cast my lot among the barbarians. I find the excitement of politics is quite enough to keep the mind occupied, and in idle moments I can listen to the endless stories of the poets. Success can only be bought by giving up something, and the exchange is one that I am willing to make. I do not count the unfortunate deaths of my father and my brothers as something that I had to pay, for I was lucky enough to be born without the silly handicap of natural affection. I try to persuade myself that I only like Cynric because he is likeable, and not because he is my son; although here I may be indulging my fancy.
Now it is the autumn of the year 531, and last summer I celebrated the eightieth anniversary of my birth with fitting splendour. The Kingdom is in very good shape, there are no awkward problems outstanding, and the dynasty is as secure as any German dynasty can be. I cannot expect to live much longer, but it is quite certain that Cynric will succeed to my throne, and he has a large family of sturdy sons to come after him. I know he will rule with prudence, and his children have been well brought up; after three generations the Cerdingas will be a habit, and the West Saxons will be used to obeying them. I have hinted to Cynric that perhaps it would be a good idea if his younger sons met with fatal accidents, so that their eldest brother has no rivals of equal blood; I am afraid he did not realize what I was driving at, and I could not bring myself to advise the murder of his children in so many words. These things can be done, but they cannot be said. Cynric has all the more obvious virtues, and his filial piety has enabled me to associate him in the supreme command without any fear that he would try to displace me; but he is not very quick in the uptake. I console myself with the thought that if he had been a keen student of politics I should probably have had to take steps against him years ago.
I see no pressing external dangers to the Kingdom of West Saxony. All Gaul and the West has collapsed into chaos, and the nearest Emperor is at Constantinople. He still has the best army in the world, but if he ever marches west he will want to conquer Italy and Spain before he thinks of our remote island. The barbarians on the Continent are having a splendid time; they live in the half-ruined cities on the labour of great multitudes of well-educated slaves. They also ought to be content with what they hold, and there is no reason why they should cross the sea to lay waste our muddy fields. No man can really foretell the future, but I shall be very surprised if my grandchildren see hostile fleets in the Channel, apart from the pirates who come and sail away again, as they have done since history began.
That leaves only the other Kingdoms of this island as potential dangers, and here my confidence is based on more accurate information. The South Saxons and the Cantwara dwell on our eastern borders, and they show no signs of wishing to extend their power at our expense; in fact, my private opinion is that those states are going downhill. South Saxony is a very small Kingdom, cut off from expansion by the Forest, and lacking good harbours on most of its cliff-bound coast; Aella was a great man, and while he lived he kept round him an excellent war-band, but he has been dead for many years now, his people find it a great bother to hack their way through that enormous Forest every time they want to go raiding, and gradually they have settled down as farmers and shepherds on the open spaces of their chalk hills. They are the most barbarous of all the barbarians in Britain, and I think it is more likely that one day my successors will conquer them than that they should ever menace our independence.
Kent will always be an important state, for it contains the best harbours facing towards Europe, and there is still traffic across the narrow seas. The Cantwara were lucky enough to settle in the country as the friends and allies of King Vortigern, and thus they were able to subdue a large population of civilized coloni without a war of extermination. In consequence, they are moderately civilized people, making good metal-work and dwelling in the remains of Roman cities; although I believe none of them can read, so that their culture is bound to decay with the passage of time. They would be formidable now if Cynric were so foolish as to attack them, but they are not very numerous, their prolific royal house has already started to wage civil war for the throne, and they seem to be content with their present boundaries. If Cynric treats his fellow-Kings with respect, and arranges some method of settling disputes under a treaty, there is no reason why the West Saxons should not live in peace with them for ever.
The Kingdom of the Marchlands is more of a danger. It lies to the north of the Thames, and seems to have no boundaries at all, as indeed its name implies. All the tough scoundrels from the rest of German Britain drift there to win plunder in the never-ceasing wars. The Marchmen have the finest war-band in the island on the rare occasions when it is united, but they lack an undisputed royal house; often their civil wars end in a draw, with different Kings setting up separate thrones. They may one day produce a mighty warrior whom all their fighting-men would follow willingly; and then it would be well if the King of the West Saxons makes an alliance while his help is of some value; but at present it is their habit to win one village from the Romans every spring, and spend the summer fighting among themselves to decide which King it shall belong to.
I had almost forgotten to mention the Kingdom of the East Saxons, north of the estuary of the Thames; that is because they hardly come into this story at all. Most of their land is flooded by the tide twice a day, and the Romans were always too sensible to live in such a country; these barbarians settled there without fighting, and they have lived obscurely ever since, though they sometimes dispute with the Cantwara about the ownership of the ruins of Londinium. I cannot imagine they will become an important Kingdom.
Farther north are a number of little pirate settlements, right up to the Great Wall and beyond it. Most of them consist of no more than a fortified harbour, with a few cultivated fields immediately outside; they will probably coalesce into a powerful Kingdom one day, after a lot of warfare between their different Woden-born war chiefs, for there is no real Roman state to face them on the west. Loidis is a miserable group of villages, surrounded by forests and desolate moors, that only remains Roman because it is not worth conquering. But all that is far in the future, and West Saxony should be strong and established long before a threat arises in the north of Britain. By the way, these northern states are not composed of true Saxons; the pirates there call themselves Angles, after a tribe that used to dwell in the northern Angle of Germany. Actually they are of mixed race, as all pirates must be, and I do not think there is any racial antagonism between them and the Saxons.
I know that mighty warriors sometimes arise in the most out-of-the-way places, and it is always possible that a great conqueror might be born in the Island of Vectis, for example; but it is no use laying plans to meet that sort of contingency. By all the laws of probability West Saxony will be independent for the next hundred years, and no one can plan further ahead than that.
You will notice that I do not take into account the possibility that the Romans will recover the lands they have lost. In my opinion the Roman power in Britain has sunk so low that the decay cannot be arrested; sixty years ago they had all the prestige of unbroken success; if they had been worthy of their ancestors they would also have had the advantage of drill, discipline, and sound equipment. I wonder what would have happened if a single Emperor had taken control of the whole island, and preserved th
e wholesome division of society into honestiores to fight and administer the laws, and humiliores to provide them with food and money. But my generation was brought up to hate the very name of an Emperor of Britain, since Constantine III abandoned the defence of the Wall to lead his troops on a wild-goose chase in Gaul. Then every city set up its King, with all the absolute military power and dislike of alliances with his equals that the office implies. When the great wars came the Romans had worse weapons and less training than the shaggy barbarians from across the sea.
The curse of the Roman Kingdoms is a disputed succession. In the old days the Emperor Septimus Severus had made it a rule, with few exceptions, that military commands should be given to ‘new men’ without ancestors, and the honestiores lived on their rents or took employment in the civil service. The idea was that great nobles with troops under their command might be dangerous competitors for the throne, but it had another result; when Britain was thrown on her own resources by the barbarian invasion that swept through Gaul the nobles who took command had no military training, and there was no tradition of obedience to their families. The Saxons have their useful division into Woden-born, common freemen, and laets who are not quite free; this means that in any Saxon Kingdom there are only a few possible competitors for the throne, and a civil war usually ends when all the Woden-born, except one, have been killed or driven into exile. But among the Romans, now that the division into honestiores and humiliores has broken down, every able-bodied man is a possible King, and every petty captain is tempted to fight for his own hand.
The result is that no Roman ruler can trust his army, and they dare not set up even civil judges to look after things in separate districts. Everything has to be done by the King in person, and only too often the King is the most bloodthirsty and unlettered savage in the realm; civilization decays at the top. Count Ambrosius, the last man who tried to revive the old Roman discipline, has been dead for many years; and Artorius has not been heard of since he fought that battle against his rebellious comitatus.
So I expect that the Kingdom of the West Saxons will prosper in peace, until my descendents feel strong enough to enlarge their boundaries. We are well placed for that; as I have often pointed out to Cynric, we have only to make a push as far as the river Sabrina to drive a wedge between the Dumnonians and the Demetians; but perhaps the Marchmen, who expand every year, will save us the trouble. As soon as the Dumnonians are isolated we must march west with all our force, for it would be fatal if a warlike German state were established to the west of us. Once we rule from Vectis to the Ocean we shall be as strong as any state in Britain, and may one day bring the whole island under our rule. But who is ‘we’? I am writing as though I were immortal; why should I concern myself with the fortunes of my remote descendants?
The odd thing is that I do, in spite of all the arguments of common sense. When I was a boy my greatest wish was to live as an independent ruler, and to fulfil that desire I have committed every crime that is hateful to gods of men. Now I find myself planning for the future like the abbot of a monastery. I hope that my grandchildren will bear sway in Britain for countless ages, as the old prophetess said; and I even like my own family, as persons. Cynric is good and law-abiding, and he is bringing up his sons to stand together against the outside world; if they follow his advice, there is nothing they may not aspire to. A united family of brothers and cousins would be something unique in both worlds, Roman and barbarian.
It is a far cry from the tough young man plotting in Anderida how to supplant his elder brother, to the benevolent old King making wise plans for his beloved grandchildren. But if I have travelled a long way, on an unexpected road, there have also been great changes in my surroundings. I was born into a world where the Roman order seemed destined to endure for ever, all the more because we had got rid of the drain in money and troops caused by the efforts of our previous rulers to succour or overthrow the central government in Italy. We seemed to have taken the best things in European civilization, and rejected the tyrannous central organization of the Empire.
But you cannot choose the best out of two worlds in that way. We light-heartedly broke with the Emperor, thinking that all the honestiores of Britain would then become little Emperors on their own. Too late, we discovered that Rome really gave us something in return for the gold that left the province, and that it was something we could not replace from our own resources. It is hard to say when we first realized the barbarians were too strong to be withstood; at first everyone blamed the incompetence of King Vortigern, and only waited for a wiser King to arise, who would drive the Saxons into the sea. As late as the campaign of Count Ambrosius that hope did not seem absurd, and nobody dreamt that even the plains of the midlands would follow Kent in a few years. Artorius is the only Roman who made a single-minded attempt to fight the barbarians, because they were heathen barbarians and for no other reason; he found, if the stories are true, that his men would not follow him on this holy enterprise, but insisted, to the point of mutiny, on fighting for their own profit. All the other Roman Kings fought each to defend his territory, always looking over his shoulder to profit by the difficulties of his neighbour. They wasted their strength in the unceasing civil wars that were caused by the absence of a recognized royal line, and attacked their fellow-Christians in the rear. They deserved to lose their land, and they have lost it.
But I must admit that I am rather sorry; I would have preferred to be a Roman ruler. I have a tidy mind, and the endless boasting and circular arguments without which barbarians cannot decide the simplest matter drive my nerves to frenzy, though I try to conceal it. I often think with regret of Anderida, now a desolate ruin; and even that comfortable spot was not a real city, but only a fort built to withstand barbarians. What must Londinium or Eboracum have been like in their prime! Yet I realize that I am as foolish as Vortigern; you cannot combine civilization and independence. If I had lived under the full sway of Rome I should have been a rich landowner, constantly harassed by the tax-collector, spied on by informers if I played any part in local politics, and yapped at by bishops if I amused myself on my estates at home. Certainly I should not have been my own master, as now.
One can get used to filth, and I no longer mind very much when I see a louse swimming in the stew on my table (most of my followers eat on the floor). I am resigned to hearing every night the raucous songs of drunken warriors, and to listening patiently to long and badly-expressed speeches before taking the simplest decision. I sleep on straw, and when it rains I get wet. But I would like to talk to a well-educated and intelligent man before I die, and I know that is quite impossible.
There is one other thing that worries me, especially when I lie awake at night. Suppose all that nonsense that my brother Paul used to preach is really true after all? In that case I shall certainly
burn in Hell for ever and ever. But it was fun while it lasted.
Note Cerdic died in his bed in the year 534, and was succeeded by his only son, Cynric. From him sprang all the Kings of Wessex, who later became Kings of England. Through Matilda, the Queen of Henry the First, the present royal family of Great Britain are Woden-born Cerdingas.
Note on Authorities
The theme of this book is that Cerdic Elesing, founder of Wessex, was really a Roman of Britain, bearing the Celtic name of Coroticus. I did not discover this theory for myself; it is to be found in Sir Charles Oman’s standard History, and other historians have played with the idea. There is one strong argument against it: the Saxons took their pedigrees very seriously, and had great reverence for chiefs who were descended from Woden (there must have been some way of checking a claim to this descent, perhaps by the recitation of a metrical pedigree in archaic poetical language, as I have described in this book). How could a Roman of Britain be descended from a Nordic god? Oman can only suggest that Cerdic’s mother was a Roman captive, with sufficient influence to name her son, who would, however, like all Germans, trace his descent from the father only. I claim cred
it for spotting Fraomar King of the Buccinobantes, who was actually brought to Britain as I have described; he and his tribe were absorbed into the population, but most gentlemen remember the names of their ancestors a century ago, and if he left descendants they would not forget the distinguished stock from which they sprang.
In art there was certainly a Celtic revival in the fifth century, and probably in names also; although Gildas, a hundred years later, always calls himself and his fellow-countrymen ‘citizens’, and it was a long time before the Welsh admitted that their connection with the Roman Empire had been broken. St Patrick, also a ‘citizen’, addressed a letter of remonstrance to a certain Coroticus, a Christian who was ruling Christian ‘citizens’ in the neigh-bourhood of Dumbarton about the year 450. This is confirmed by the Irish annals, which say the tyrant was turned into a fox by the prayers of the saint. It shows that the name, which is the same as the first-century Caractacus, was current in the fifth century. Celtic philologists deny that Coroticus could become Cerdic, but Ceredigion, the land of Ceredig, became the County of Cardigan.
The story of the Coming of the Saxons is told only in three very unsatisfactory documents: Gildas, Nennius, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. About the year 540 Gildas wrote an incoherent sermon, addressed to contemporary Welsh Kings, in which he refers to certain historical events; he mentions Ambrosius Aurelianus, whose grandsons were ruling when he wrote, and tells of a great defeat of the Saxons at the Siege of Mount Badon, ‘near the mouth of the Severn’, though he does not say who was besieging whom. The site of Mount Badon is unknown, and I have put it on White Horse Hill for my own amusement.
Conscience of the King Page 27