It was twenty years now since the legions had left the island. Each year he had been confident that things would get better, and that they would return. “Have faith,” he told Placidia and his son. He could see them in his mind’s eye – Christian legionaries marching to the aid of the Roman family at Sarum. But they never came.
Constantius Porteus was not only proud of being a Roman gentleman; he was also, like many of the landholding decurion class, a Christian too. For since the conversion of the great Emperor Constantine a hundred years before, the once despised and persecuted Christian sect had become the official religion of the empire and its army. To be sure, there were still in practice many followers of other cults, and of the old pagan deities too, but as far as Constantius was concerned, he and the emperor were Christian and that was what counted.
To be more precise, he was not simply a Christian but, like many others on the island, a follower of the British-born monk Pelagius, who had in recent years made a great stir in the Roman world. The Pelagians proudly distinguished themselves from other believers by declaring that each individual Christian must earn his way to heaven not only by faith but by his actions.
“God gives each man free will,” he explained it to Petrus. “And God watches our actions – for which we must answer. That’s what counts.”
Technically this was a heresy, but in Pelagius’s native land it was a popular one, and Constantius believed in it firmly.
And so when, that day, young Petrus had come out with his outrageous demand that, like some of the local towns, they should employ German heathens to defend this, a Christian villa, from attack, he had been deeply offended. Still more offensive were the taunts with which, in front of Placidia, the boy had accompanied his suggestions.
“You speak of Roman aid: but the legions have gone: the empire has deserted the island and they’ll never come back.” This was something Constantius could never bring himself to accept. “As for your solutions, follower of Pelagius, where is your God-given free will? Gone in drink. And what are your actions? There haven’t been any.” No son should speak to his father in such a way, he thought. Worst of all, in his heart of hearts, he knew the boy was right.
But now, as he made his way despondently through the quiet rooms of the house, Constantius still muttered defiantly:
“I’ll save my villa. My way.”
The villa of Constantius Porteus, though it was built on the same site, was a far more imposing structure than the one built by his ancestor Caius nearly four centuries before. There were eight large day rooms now, arranged around three sides of a square courtyard, with further wings to which a second storey had been added. There were extensive out-buildings behind the house which formed the home farm. Outside, the building was similarly constructed to the original – a stone base, wattled walls daubed with plaster on the upper storey, and a tiled roof; to one side the old walled garden had been kept; now it boasted beds of irises, poppies and sumptuous lilies, and – its greatest glory – a double line of rose trees down the centre. But inside, the building far surpassed the first and would have gratified every wish of old Tosutigus had he been able to see it. All traces of the original rustic farm were gone. Large, light and airy rooms led one into another. The floor of the entrance hall was made of a soft, pink marble imported from Italy two hundred years before and handsome pilasters of the same material with graceful ionic capitals framed each of the doorways leading out of it. All the main rooms had finely painted frescoes on their walls, some depicting Roman men and women in solemn, graceful attitudes, others with lively hunting scenes.
But the finest features of all were the magnificent mosaic floors, of which the family was rightly proud.
Constantius stood in the doorway of the largest room. The villa seemed very quiet. Placidia had retired with her maid to her room, and his son and the steward had disappeared. As he stood there, gazing into the room, his face softened.
On the floor, stretching for thirty feet, lay one of the villa’s two greatest tieasures. It was a mosaic depicting Orpheus in the happy days before his descent into the underworld to find his love Eurydice. He was picked out in brilliant reds, rich browns and seated in a graceful, somewhat wistful attitude, with his lyre resting on his knee. Around the figure of Orpheus, arranged in concentric circles, were panels of animals, trees and birds, especially featuring the handsome pheasants with their trailing feathers for which the first Porteus had made the estate famous.
It had been made by the great mosaic workshop of Corinium which lay some twenty miles north of Aquae Sulis, and it had been installed by Constantius’s great-grandfather just after the year 300. Its classical theme, with its pleasing allusions to the local flora and fauna was typical of the work which, for four, centuries, had adorned provincial homes of families like the Porteuses all over the empire. “It’s a Roman gentleman’s villa,” his father had always told him. “We’ve been here nearly four hundred years and I dare say we shall be here four hundred more.”
As he gazed at it now, a tear ran down his cheek. The thing was so beautiful; it represented all his Roman culture; he would not let it be destroyed.
It was time for him to pray.
For nearly four centuries Britain had been Roman. Only in the far north, beyond the Emperor Hadrian’s great wall, had the Picts and Scots avoided Roman rule. And for most of that time, the Porteus family at Sorviodunum had enjoyed the pleasant peace of the Roman provincial world. Ordinary freemen had become citizens. Local towns – places like Venta Belgarum in the east, Durnovaria to the south west and Calleva to the north – boasted not only forums and temples, but theatres and arenas too. The baths at Aquae Sulis had been rebuilt several times, each more grandiose than the last. And the Porteus family had always assumed that the Roman Empire would go on for ever.
As the centuries passed however, great strains developed in the empire. It had grown unwieldy; and even though it had been subdivided into four parts – two in the east and two in the west – it still proved difficult to govern. Many times there were rival emperors and civil wars, and the northern island of Britain, with its normal complement of three legions, had sometimes found itself drawn into these disputes, and suffered as a result.
But something else was happening to the Roman world. It was being invaded from the east.
The great barbarian invasions of Europe were a gradual process that began in the third century. Sometimes the newcomers arrived as mercenaries, or settlers; sometimes, like Attila and his Huns they descended like a plague, only to withdraw again. They came from the distant plains of Asia, from the Baltic and Scandinavia; they had names which were to become familiar in European history – Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, Thuringians, Vandals, Saxons – and no matter how the empire managed to absorb them, there always seemed to be more.
Slowly, very slowly, the mighty Roman Empire had begun to break up.
They were dangerous times, but through the last century the island of Britannia was still prosperous and defended. The legions were there; its towns had stout walls; its shores were defended from the raids of Saxon pirates by a fleet and by fortified ports.
But for how long?
It was probably inevitable that Britain would be separated from the empire; but it is also certain, and sometimes forgotten, that the islanders took every possible action, around the year 400, to break the bond themselves by a combination of greed and bad judgement.
The first action was a manoeuvre by the British legions. Seeing a new emperor in Italy who was hardly more than a boy, they proclaimed one of their own commanders emperor and marched into Gaul to support him. In Italy, young Honorius was forced, for the time being, to accept this usurper as co-emperor. But the only result of this action for the island of Britannia was to leave it without its normal garrison, undefended.
Next, Burgundian and Saxon hordes crossed the Rhine and invaded Gaul, and the legions there lost control of the province. So now Britannia was isolated too.
It was exactly then that the British made their great mistake. They revolted, declared themselves independent from the empire, and threw out the imperial officials.
Constantius remembered it well. Like many of his class, he had approved of the move.
“Taxes have never been higher,” he told Placidia. “The decurions like me are hardest hit of all – because we have property, they want us to pay for town repairs, roads, defence, everything. And what are we getting in return? An ever increasing army of bureaucrats to be paid, and nothing more than a skeleton force of legionaries to defend us.”
And so the island had organised its own defence, paid no more taxes, and waited on events.
But nothing happened. For the moment the empire had neither time nor resources to concern itself with the island province that had revolted. There was no protest, no returning army, nothing: there was only silence.
And then, in the midst of these troubles, came news of something that for centuries had been unthinkable.
In 410, three months before Petrus was born, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked the imperial city of Rome.
The imperial city, the eternal city, the sacred symbol of Roman rule, had been humiliated by a force of landless barbarians because the city’s proud senators had refused to pay them protection money. Rome had fallen. The shock waves spread instantly to the most distant frontiers of the mighty empire, and it seemed to all men when they heard it, that an age, a world – indeed, civilisation itself – had come to an end.
The empire recovered. In Ravenna, a year later, the boy emperor, Honorius, was glad to hear that his agents had murdered his usurping British co-emperor. The Visigoths meanwhile had been paid and departed. It was time to mend what was left of the western empire again.
But his plans did not include the return of the legions to Britannia. In fact, they did not include the island province at all.
“Let them fend for themselves,” his harassed officials advised. “They stopped their taxes; they threw out the imperial servants. We have enough to do: let the British live beyond the sea.”
The empire’s resources were overstretched. The northern island was too far away. For the first time in four centuries, Rome had to turn her back on the province of Britannia.
Twenty years had passed since then: twenty years of waiting.
At first it had seemed that little had changed. There were occasional raids from Saxon or Irish pirates. A party of
bacaudae
– landless peasants – had appeared in Sarum one day and burned down one of the barns; but Numincus the steward and some of the men had driven them off. It was more what had not happened that gave Constantius concern.
There had been no new coins struck in the province. The trade with Gaul had grown slack. The ports with their warships were short of funds and so the island was poorly defended. The few remaining legionaries had not been paid and so they had turned to other occupations or left; Constantius had even heard of one selling himself into slavery. Finding that money was tight, he himself had been obliged to close the town house in Venta Belgarum which the family had maintained for generations. Others were doing the same and the town was falling into a poor state. It was as though a great wave of lassitude had covered the place, and each year matters grew worse.
Then the rumours had reached him. A large Saxon raiding party, a fleet, was preparing to attack the defenceless island. At first he did not believe it.
But the rumours grew. A merchant from London claimed that he had seen the preparations on a visit to the east; and suddenly the area was in a state of panic. The city of Calleva strengthened its walls and so did Venta Belgarum. More important, Calleva negotiated through the port of Londinium to obtain a contingent of German mercenaries to supplement their own half-trained militia. Venta tried to do the same.
And that was where the quarrel with Petrus had begun.
“Let me go to Venta and hire half a dozen of these mercenaries,” he had demanded. “We can quarter them at Sorviodunum. This place must be defended.”
Constantius had refused. The boy had screamed at him. And now . . .
It was time to pray. God would guide them. After he had prayed, he would be reconciled with his son.
He did not know that it was already too late.
His horse’s flanks were wet with lather. He had been riding hard, but now his destination was within sight.
He had left the villa within minutes of the angry scene with his father and he had not stopped since. He had no doubt about the urgency of his mission, and that in carrying it out he was in the right. But then Petrus Porteus always believed he was in the right: it was his only fault.
Before him, in the afternoon sun of an autumn day, lay the city of Venta Belgarum.
It was a small town, set on a hump of ground, surrounded by a thick wall. A pair of squat, heavy round turrets faced with rough hewn stone flanked the gateway which had recently been narrowed as a safety measure, and frowned towards the western approach road. Behind them he could see the town’s red tiled roofs.