In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Fifteen hundred years ago Dinas Emrys would have paraded its power and wealth with banner, rampart and glittering spear; smoke would have curled lazily from the fires of a kingly hall; the sound of guards and lookouts would have barked, echoing across the valley; perhaps a bard might have been heard distantly, praising his lord in poetry and strumming his harp. Ambrosius and Vortigern are as ephemeral as Arthur, their names woven into countless legends of civil wars among the British chieftains of the fifth century, and of the defence against invading Saes or Saxons. While all three men appear in the semi-historical sections of the Historia Brittonum, Ambrosius is one of the very few ‘real’ people (the five tyrants aside) to be named by Gildas. Gildas says that he was the military leader who emerged among the Britons in the wake of the first wave of Germanic attacks, after the ‘cruel plunderers’ had gone home. He is described as a Roman gentleman, whose parents had ‘worn the purple’ (that is to say, they had held imperial rank) and who had been killed in the conflict. He won great victories against ‘the enemy’. It is never entirely clear whether the most serious conflicts of the fifth century were internecine or as a result of federate armies under Germanic warlords turning against their British sponsors. They had, we are told in the Kentish Chronicle section of the Historia Brittonum, been brought to Britain to protect the island from Picts or Scots. But they were evidently first stationed to guard cross-Channel trade with Gaul. The Britons’ ‘proud tyrant’—often equated with the Vortigern of the Historia Brittonum, struck a fatal deal with the leaders, Hengest and Horsa, who first conned him into giving them Kent as their own and then, after internal disputes, ravaged the island and brought thousands more Saxon pirates from their homeland across the North Sea.

  No one takes these stories at face value any more; but that is not to say they can’t tell us anything useful. Legendary battles may be allegories of more nuanced conflict and tensions played out over generations. The reality is that Germanic immigration to these islands—now thought to have involved relatively small numbers (but see Postscript: Who are the British?—pages 423–6)—was a complex process, probably lasting as long as a whole century, and perhaps more. It may have been more evolution than revolution. There does seem to have been an overall reduction in the population of the British Isles in the fifth or sixth century, brought about by a combination of famine and plague, by the collapse of the imperial command economy and by the depredations of pirate slavers and small-scale but intense conflict among emerging polities trying to defend their territories. It is quite likely, however, that this reduction was not catastrophic in scale. Many of these territories may initially have been centred on the civitates, the ancient tribal regions recognised by the Romans; elsewhere they splintered into smaller units of power, less regional than local and more kin-based. The spheres of activity of characters remembered by legend as national heroes and villains might, in reality, have been local or regional, as was the case with many of the saints of the next century. Arthur may have been an exception—his recorded geography spans the west of Britain from Somerset to Dumfriesshire. Ambrosius belongs, if anywhere, to Eryri, to Snowdonia, whose southern approach Dinas Emrys watches.

  The site of his fortress is now cloaked in sweating, lichenencrusted jungle, the ramparts and walls almost impossible to make out. The modern approach from the north-east is an easy scramble; the original entrance to the south-west is steep. The topography, intimate and intimidating, is reminiscent of Dunadd and of Dumbarton. The narrative preserved in the Historia Brittonum56 tells how Vortigern, whose people had turned against him, was advised by his magi, his druids, to construct a fort in this natural fastness. Three times his masons and carpenters built their ramparts, and three times they fell down in the night; then when he asked them the cause of this evil, the magi told Vortigern that he must find a child without a father (that is, he must be born of a virgin mother), kill the boy in the fort and sprinkle his blood there, so that the fort would be safe from attack (in a Christian context this has the sharp reek of pagan blood-sacrifice). The boy, according to the legend, was Ambrosius, but he turned out to be an unwilling sacrifice. He told Vortigern that the collapse of the ramparts was caused by a lake beneath the foundations whose existence neither magi nor masons were aware of. Ambrosius predicted that in this lake they would find two vessels; that the vessels contained a cloth in which two worms, one red, one white, were asleep. The magi duly found the vessels containing the cloth, and unfolded it; the worms woke, began to fight and after a long conflict the red worm was victorious. The boy revealed that it was a dragon representing the Britons and the white worm a dragon representing the invaders; but that the Britons could only achieve victory if he, Ambrosius, was given the fortress, representing the kingdom, and Vortigern departed to exile. So Ambrosius was recognised prophetically as overlord of the Britons. It’s all good stuff, full of potent omen, divination and metaphysical storytelling. When Geoffrey of Monmouth borrowed this tale for his Historia Regum Britanniae, he gave the fatherless boy the name Merlin, whose early childhood he based on material from the Historia Brittonum.

  The experience of the visitor is to wish that, somehow, one could be transported back in time to meet the protagonists and witness the dynamics of an Early Medieval royal fortress at first hand. Archaeological evidence suggests that the fortification here is of the right sort of date to fit Vortigern’s and Ambrosius’s fifth-​century time frame: in excavations during the 1950s it produced sherds of Mediterranean pottery (table wares and amphorae) and a sherd from an oil lamp bearing the Christian chi-rho symbol, all of which must belong to a period before the middle of the sixth century. The absence of priests from the Vortigern /Ambrosius tale suggests that the story may originate in pagan tradition, although elsewhere in the Historia Vortigern is reproved by the British clergy and by St Germanus for marrying his own daughter.

  The day after Snowdon and Dinas Emrys was one of discomfort and slog. I was as stiff as a board after the descent from the mountains; I still had another pass to cross as I headed due west against the glacial grain of the valleys; it rained most of the day; and to make matters worse a mistake on the Ordnance Survey map took me way off the trail and up to my waist in bog and bracken. I was not a happy walker. But the memory of Dinas Emrys and of that sticker on a lamp post on Anglesey kept me busy thinking about navigation, especially since my indispensable modern tool, the walking map, had got me lost. The ‘Uninvited traders are not welcome’ notice had set me on a train of thought which now, trudging soaked through wet lanes and across muddy fields, came to fruition.

  There is a story, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, of a Wessex king’s reeve, who, on hearing of the arrival of three ships in the year 785, went to bring their captains to the villa regia, the royal manor, but was killed by raiders. The reeve had reasoned, fatally, that foreign ships must contain traders hoping for an introduction to the regional chief, which rather says something about the period between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the late eighth century. In confirmation of that sense of order, these were times when royal palaces and local settlements were undefended. Great lords, who wished to control access to markets, to keep for themselves the perquisites of high-value exotic goods and to harvest news and information from travellers, kept a close eye on foreign trade. By the middle of the eighth century, kings such as Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia had begun to encourage the construction of coastal settlements like Hamwic (modern Southampton), Gipeswic (Ipswich) and Lundenwic and Eoforwic (York)—well inland but on navigable rivers—where they could take a cut of the profits. This trend was accelerated by the transfer of royal land to the church, reducing the stream of goods supplied by renders. Now kings needed cash; and as early as the late seventh century they began to revive coinage as a means of solidifying the value of goods and converting organic, perishable renders to more portable and tradeable wealth. The Early Medieval core value of gift-giving, an unending cycle of obligation and response, was becoming systematised.

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bsp; Key to the success of the trader was the introduction: uninvited traders—door-to-door salesmen, cold-callers and so on—were as unwelcome to the Dark Age lord as they were to the officious sticker-posters of Anglesey’s twenty-first-century County Council. In the Early Medieval period, famously, groups of people travelling through the land were classified according to the size of the party. King Ine’s Laws of the late seventh century accounted ‘seven men thieves; from seven to thirty-five a “band”, above that it is an army’. That is to say, men abroad, hence not under the protection of a lord, must consider themselves liable to be viewed with hostility unless they had legitimate business and carried bona fides. What guaranteed safe entry to, or passage through, the king’s land was the right introduction. Business has always worked that way. When we need a builder or plumber, before we open the phone directory or search on the Internet, we ask our trusted friends if they know of a reliable one. Reputation matters. These days it is called ‘networking’.

  In order to gain entry to an exploitable market—a manor or the lord’s hall, the villages that belonged to him—or to gain the confidence and hospitality of the abbot of a monastery, the Early Medieval traveller needed guarantees, and these came with either familiarity or an introduction from a trusted intermediary. The same rules applied to the intrepid explorers and missionaries of later centuries. If you wanted to travel to the fabled city of Gondar in Abyssinia or the court of Kublai Khan in Xanadu, you needed an introduction; and a guide. To avoid being hunted down and killed by the native warriors of indigenous tribes, the pioneering trappers and traders of colonial-era North America secured guides to lead them to their destination and introduce them to the chief who could guarantee them safe passage. That extraordinary, shocking scene in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, when Sherif Ali (the equivalent rank to the shire reeve of Anglo-Saxon England) of the Harith shoots Lawrence’s guide because ‘the Hasimi may not drink at our wells’, shows what happens when the protocols are breached, inadvertently or by design (that film has been like an earworm on my recent journeys). For the medieval monk the risk might be obviated by a shared knowledge of Latin and the scriptures; by the humble clothing, lack of weaponry and bare feet of the pilgrim. The wrong brooch or accent, an inappropriate greeting, might prove fatal to the unwary. For the uninvited traveller in an antique land, there were many perils. Augustine had fatally misread the protocols when he met a convocation of British bishops in 601/2; he cannot have been the only foreigner to tread on native toes.

  So I have become relaxed about journeying in the Dark Ages. I only ever once hired a guide, in northern Mali, on my way to see the fabled Dogon people of the Bandiagara escarpment. It didn’t work out: I got sick, was laid up in a brothel in Mopti on the banks of the Niger, and had to pay him off. You sometimes hear awful stories of travellers trapped at airports without the right papers or sufficient money to buy them, caught in an endless cycle as outcasts. I imagine the same thing to have happened in the Dark Age court on occasion; a traveller without local language or sponsor, with insufficient status, credentials or wealth, suspected and detained indefinitely. Now I feel I could get around that world, through shire and manor, pagus57 and civitas, without worrying about maps or trying to navigate by the stars or sun. I would hire a reliable guide—say, the oldest son of a chæpman58 at an inn. I would pay him well to ensure he transported me to the royal manor on a good horse, that he instructed me in the correct protocols of the court (dress, greetings, arms and so on); that he provided me with access to the right people (the reeve; the lady of the court) and smoothed the path of my business (with the right gifts: marten furs, a garnet, a curious trinket like a shrunken head, an ivory plaque, an oil lamp carrying a chi-rho symbol or a small piece of the true cross). The value of dress and manner, of such niceties as the style and quality of a brooch on a cloak, could not be overestimated.

  From the royal manor another guide, familiar with the orbit of this lord’s influence and with his own local knowledge, might take me on the next stage in my journey. The account of the visit of Ohthere of Hålogaland—a Norwegian seafarer—to King Alfred’s court shows that the best sort of guest came with lavish gifts, extraordinary stories and a few mates who looked like they could handle themselves. Ohthere provided the king with a detailed geography of the Northern seas, of its peoples and kings, with accounts of fabled trading centres like Hedeby in Denmark and of the goods that were traded throughout Scandinavia. In return for such fascinating and useful information—so useful that it was incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon edition of Orosius’s history of the world—Alfred could give the trader invaluable access to new markets and royal contacts.

  If I did not travel with a guide, if I stumbled blindly through the land and arrived unannounced at the gates of a fortress like Dinas Emrys, I could hardly be surprised if the gate closed in my face and someone shouted ‘Gadewch a pheidiwch â dod yn ôl!’ (‘Please leave and do not return’) or stuck a spear in my retreating back. The traveller needs a good guide.

  I emerged from the misty, rain-lashed hills, and from my contemplation, into a land of slate and woollen mills, of small walled pastures and broad, meandering streams. At Dolbenmaen I hoped for a hot plate and warm fireside for lunch, but the pub was shut and all I managed to find was a cold pasty and a bar of chocolate from the Post Office cum village store. But at least the rain had nearly stopped. The land here is still sufficiently marginal for the remains of cairns and hut circles—all of which could date from anywhere between the late Bronze Age and the Early Medieval period—to be dotted, like scabs, among rough pastures. On one green lane across a small plateau I passed the entrance to what must have been a Neolithic long barrow or chambered tomb, unmarked on the map and evidently never excavated. I found a circuitous route to a small farm called Llystyn Gwyn, just off the road between Porthmadog and Caernarvon and close to the site of a Roman camp. The farm seemed deserted. The roofs of the byres were holed, slates misplaced and doors swinging on squeaky hinges. I crept through its yards and gardens, feeling as though I were being watched. A white caravan was parked in a yard with half its aluminium side panel torn off; no curtains hung in the dark windows of the house; nettles grew uncontrolled in the garth. An old wrecked car stood there. It is one of the creepiest places I have ever been; and I am not easily spooked. It was as if the inhabitants had vanished minutes before, never to return. Beneath a slate lintel covered by turf and incorporated into a wall made of tumbled stone and old rubber car tyres, a slab of undistinguished sandstone must, I supposed, have been what I had come to see: Gwynedd’s only in situ ogham stone. Had I been able to read anything in this flat, dingy light, the bilingual inscription, in the strange slashed alphabet of Irish ogham59 and in Latin capitals, would have read ICORI FILIUS POTENTINI (‘Icorix son of Potentinus’). The site is doubly special, for the element Llys—court, manor—in the name Llystyn Gwyn betrays the former presence of a noble hall there in the Dark Ages. Perhaps I should have waited for the sun to come out, as it eventually did that day; but I couldn’t get out of there quick enough. Close to a small village just west of Criccieth I camped for the night and was sufficiently tired not to bother looking for a meal.

  The next morning, still hellish tight in the muscles, hungry and longing for a hot bath, but at least well-showered and rested, I made my way north-west along switchback lanes and reflected that trying to navigate through a settled landscape with proprietorial rights on all sides would have been a mug’s game. At the foot of Garn Bentyrch, one of those conical hills that dot the landscape of the Llŷn peninsula, I came to Llangybi, a church of that same St Cybi who founded the royal monastery at Holyhead. The present building, like almost all village churches in north Wales, is an unprepossessing Victorian thing with neo-Perpendicular windows. The entrance to the churchyard is a narrow covered gateway with a wrought-iron gate—the latter a ubiquitous feature of farms, fields and churches here. Just inside the gate an early simple cross-incised stone, the right shape and size to slot
into what in Ireland would be called a leacht or table-tomb, suggested that Cybi’s church had not lost all its early associations. In the cemetery I noticed that the gravestone inscriptions were about fifty-fifty English and Welsh.

  A small stone stile in the farther wall of the churchyard led down a bank to the edge of a stream and a pair of low, ruined buildings: cottages, but not just any old cottages; that on the left housed Ffynnon Gybi, a dressed stone cistern from whose dark, clear depths a natural spring welled up. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of wells and springs across Britain that have holy associations, often with a very local hermit or martyr, sometimes with some great patron-saint like Colmcille or Patrick. Generally, archaeologists assume that such springs must have been sacred in pre-Christian, animist cultures. The magic of pure water emerging from the rock, especially if it isn’t contaminated by the pathogens associated with livestock and human habitation, is worthy of veneration. That such waters were believed to heal ailments and could sanctify the liturgy of a local priest or the baptism of an infant is not so hard to understand. At any rate, it was a rather lovely spot, green and quiet and perfect for a mid-morning break; and I drank the water.