The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (16 page)

Knife and Spear People

In contemporary sources there is a fleeting sense of the Saxons being thought of as more savage than the angelic Angles. Perhaps it is because they took their name from a weapon, the
seax
knife. A long blade, sometimes half a metre, it seems to have been the Saxons’ favoured weapon. Its unlikely fame endures in the arms of the modern counties of Essex, the East Saxons, and Middlesex, the Middle Saxons. Both carry the device of three
seax
knives, although they look more like scimitars. Franks also invaded the declining Roman Empire in the west and they took their name from the
franca,
a throwing spear or javelin. When the first crusaders reached the east in 1099, the horrified Greeks and Muslims called them all Franks, no matter where they originated. That name has also been persistent and the Egyptian word for any westerner is
firengi.

I have presumed to deliver these things in the Latin tongue, not trusting to my own learning, which is little or none at all, but partly from traditions of our ancestors, partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans, and the chronicles of the sacred fathers . . . and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons, although our enemies, not following my own inclinations, but, to the best of my ability, obeying the commands of my seniors; I have lispingly put together this history from various sources . . .

Disarming, possibly alarming, this history is nevertheless occasionally very enlightening. In common with ranting Gildas and sober Bede, it agrees upon a picture of Britannia at bay in the early fifth century. Without the support of the empire and its soldiers, however illusory or sketchy, the old province had become vulnerable to attack.

They came in their ships – the Irish, the Saxons and, most destructive and persistent, the Picts. Gildas wrote of the Saxons’
cyulis
or ‘keels’, ‘as they call their ships of war’, and these were almost certainly plank-built wooden boats. The Irish and probably the Picts sailed in seagoing curraghs, what Gildas called ‘canoes’, but, whatever craft were used, they must have come in small fleets. No ship sailing in northern waters in that period was large. There exists a fascinating document which offers some sense of what might have sailed out of nowhere to attack the vulnerable coasts of Britannia.

Some time in the seventh century, the kindreds of the Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Argyll were counted in a census known as the
Senchus Fer na h’Alban
, the ‘History of the Men of Scotland’. It is an accidental survival illustrating a process of some antiquity. The numbers were compiled to assess military obligations and, given the geography of the Atlantic coastline, it is scarcely surprising to see these expressed in naval terms. Seven-benched
seagoing curraghs seem to have been standard and these needed fourteen men to row them and a steersman in the stern and a lookout in the bow. Some will have been larger but sixteen marines to one ship is a reasonable approximation and it prompts the notion of a Pictish or Irish raiding party consisting of several boats and ones with a shallow draught able to penetrate far inland up the wider rivers.

The sharpest weapon in the armoury of seaborne raiders was surprise. There was no warning until their ships came within sight of land and, even when a Pictish fleet was seen hugging the coastline, they could arrive at their target faster than news could reach it overland. But a pattern of landings must have emerged. Estuaries and riverbanks were preferred to coasts open to the sea and bad weather and gently shelving beaches allowed vessels to be dragged well above the high-tide line if a coastal landing was unavoidable.

By the late fourth century, Pictish raiding parties had been seen in the Thames and Gildas spoke of them as ‘
transmarini
’. Defences had been built along the North Sea coast by the Roman provincial administration – what was known as the Saxon Shore. Forts guarding landing areas in East Anglia, Kent and Sussex hoped to contain incursion from across the North Sea while a line of watchtowers down the North Yorkshire coastline waited for the threat of Pictish attack.

When government in Britain reverted to native control after 409–410, all of the sources give the impression of continuity. Cities had almost certainly been self-governing for some time and a council and a figure in overall authority are mentioned. Perhaps Bede’s and Gildas’ use of ‘
superbus tyrannus
’ or ‘proud usurper’ speaks of imperial pretention. Like Magnus Maximus, there had been several ambitious men who had made their bid for the throne from Britain. In any case, ‘Vortigern’ is not itself a name but a title. In its various versions, it means something like ‘High Lord’ or perhaps ‘Overlord’.

Whatever his precise status, the Vortigern appears to have taken decisive action. Archaeologists have excavated a series of
early Germanic cemeteries near the estuaries of the Humber, the Wash and the Thames. The earliest burials date to well before the 440s and the Saxon rebellions described by Gildas and Bede and they suggest that bands of Germanic mercenaries were placed at these strategic locations to defend against Pictish – or incoming Saxon – attack. In Latin, such groups were known as
foederati
or ‘federates’ and they were used all over the empire to guard its frontiers. More early cemeteries have been found around south London and near Oxford, again suggesting a defensive deployment of
foederati
by the Vortigern and his council.

The overall strategy appears to have worked for there are no more reports of Pictish raids in the south after 410. Another, more radical redeployment also had beneficial effects. The kingdoms of southern Scotland seem to have been sufficiently well organised to force Pictish raiders to sail around their territory. They were also able to produce two talented military leaders and enough well-trained soldiers to achieve something unique in the disintegrating western Roman Empire.

Some time around 430, probably on the orders of the Vortigern, an expeditionary force set out from the kingdom of Manau-Gododdin. In Old Welsh, Votadini had transmuted into ‘Gododdin’. Probably a large cavalry troop, it was led down the Roman roads to the old legionary fortress at Chester. Almost 20 per cent larger than any other fort in Britain and with an amphitheatre with seating for more than 8,000, Roman Deva or Chester was a substantial base. At the head of the riders from Manau-Gododdin rode a remarkable figure, another man with a Celtic military title. This was the Cunedda, the Good Leader. It has come down to us as the popular Christian name of Kenneth and the Welsh genealogies name him tautologically as Cunedda Wledig, the General. In the fifth-century lists, the Cunedda is also described as the grandson of Paternus Pesrut and the son of Aeternus. It is a signal of a culture in transition when a Celtic epithet was preferred to a Roman name.

The Cunedda’s mission was to remove the Irish settlers who had taken over the Lleyn Peninsula of North Wales. It seems
likely that their war bands had been raiding as far west as Viroconium, modern Wroxeter, and the civitas of the Cornovii. The Irish raiders had originated in Leinster and Lleyn is a cognate name. The peninsula was left undefended when Magnus Maximus took the garrison at the Roman fort at Segontium, Caernarfon, with him to Gaul in his bid for the empire. No details of the Cunedda’s campaign have survived, only notice of its success. Deserted farms and shielings in that part of North Wales were long known as
cytian yr Gwyddelod
, ‘the huts of the Irish’. Tradition holds that the Vortigern was from the
civitas
of the Cornovii and his wish to see the Irish expelled might have had personal as well as political motives behind it.

The cavalry warriors from the northern kindreds did not ride home after their victories. Under the Cunedda’s leadership, they established themselves in Wales. The old kingdom of Gwynedd is named after the Cunedda and, according to modern Welsh scholars, it retained an atmosphere of Romanitas for the following two centuries. Early Welsh literary sources seem almost obsessed with a need to explain the origin of place-names but the traditions that the Cunedda’s sons, Meirion and Ceredig, founded the kingdoms of Meirionydd and Ceredigion are unlikely.

What is remarkable about the expedition to Wales from Manau-Gododdin was that it was the only occasion when invading barbarians were permanently expelled from inside the frontiers of the old empire. And, just as importantly, it showed the central authority of the Vortigern as far-reaching, extending to the northern and western edges of Britannia. Given that and the successful use of well-placed Saxon colonies of mercenaries against the Picts, it seems that the first thirty years of post-Roman Britain were a time of increased security and administrative continuity, and the old province was a safer place to live than it had been in the previous forty years.

Economically, however, there was decline. As part of the Roman imperial trade network, Britannia had exported both agricultural and manufactured products and imported a wide
variety of goods on some scale. But, after 410, the use of coinage began to fade when the remnants of the army and the administration ceased to be paid. If new coins were minted anywhere in Britain after 410, none have survived. The industrial manufacture of pottery declined sharply and quickly disappeared. This was not simply a matter of a lack of good tableware – pottery of every sort was used in the transport of food and drink. And, if agricultural surpluses could not easily be moved, they could no longer be traded over any distance. This, in turn, removed the motivation for farmers to produce surpluses and pushed communities towards subsistence. Roads on which goods might be carted were left unrepaired in many places and, by the close of the fifth century, towns were certainly in decline in the south. Once again, this inhibited trade tremendously as concentrations of population thinned and dispersed and markets ceased to be held.

Dark Ages Recession

For about 300 years, in the period immediately following the fall of Britannia around 410, the economy in Britain operated without coin. Currency production ceased and barter took its place. Core manufacturing also ceased abruptly with wheel-turned pottery absent from the archaeological record until the seventh century after having been abundantly available in the Roman period. Urban life shrank dramatically. The British economy took almost 600 years to return to the levels of production and activity in Britannia – a very long recession. In 2010, the
Financial Times
ran an article on the post-Roman economic collapse because ‘it put recent crises in the shade’. Possibly.

Both Gildas and Bede ignore the containment efforts of Vortigern (who need not have been the same man between 410 and the early 440s) and they focus exclusively on his great epoch-changing blunder. Having brought the Saxons and, no doubt, other Germanic kindreds to Britain and having failed to meet their demands, he had invited the wolf into the fold. From their strategically placed strongholds, the rebel mercenaries rose
up and were quickly able to establish themselves in the south and east. This view takes no account of the undoubted fact that there were already many Germanic groups in Britain. At all events, in the 440s, battles were fought and lost in Kent, the Vortigern was killed at the beginning of the war and, from their bases, it seems that the Saxons raided towns and villas in the west and probably along the Thames Valley. Gildas takes up the tale:

[S]ome of the wretched survivors were caught in the hills and slaughtered in heaps; others surrendered themselves to perpetual slavery in enemy hands . . . others emigrated overseas . . . others entrusted their lives . . . to the rugged hills, the thick forests and the cliffs of the sea, staying in their homeland afraid, until, after some time, the savage plunderers went home again.

Roman authority still held across the Channel in Gaul. In 433, Aetius, a nobleman originally from Moesia, modern Bulgaria, was appointed Consul and General-in-Chief on behalf of the young Emperor Valentinian III. Effectively emperor in all but name, Aetius maintained the rule of Rome in the west for thirty years. His greatest achievement was the defeat of Attila and his ferocious Hunnic army in Gaul in 451. When the Saxons rose up against the Vortigern in the 440s and killed him, Gildas wrote that a letter was sent across the Channel:

‘To Aetius, thrice Consul, come the groans of the Britons . . . the barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.’ The Romans however, could not assist them.

Plague had visited Britain in the 440s and there is also some evidence of catastrophic climate change with the rise of sea levels and widespread flooding. As people fled westwards from the Saxon raids, many decided to go further. Emigrations across the Channel to Gaul began and so many went to the district of
Armorica that it became known as Brittany, Little Britain. Gildas takes up the story:

After a time, when the cruel raiders returned to their home, God strengthened the survivors . . . 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 . . .

Ambrosius Aurelianus is one of the few names noted by Gildas and it sheds a flicker of light on the society of post-Roman Britain. With the formal nomen and cognomen (the praenomen was often written as an initial or even dropped), it signifies a family known as Ambrosius with the Aurelianus element saying something about their origins. The name may have been famous and powerful for it has survived in Welsh as Emrys, and in the earliest sources Ambrosius is hailed as Emrys Wledig, the General. Sometimes the cognomen refers to an emperor or a dynasty under which the family came to prominence and between 270 and 275 Aurelian ruled. Although his reign was short, it was very effective, pulling the empire together, building new walls around Rome, defeating rivals in the east (including the exotic Queen Zenobia of Palmyra) and restoring the discipline of the army. Aurelian’s name conferred prestige and it may be that Ambrosius’ family adopted it towards the end of the third century.