Read The Mammoth Book of King Arthur Online
Authors: Mike Ashley
At the end of §19 Gildas tells us:
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Our citizens abandoned the towns and the high wall. Once again they had to flee; once again they were scattered, more irretrievably than usual; once again there were enemy
assaults and massacres more cruel. The pitiable citizens
were torn apart by their foe like lambs by the butcher; their life became like that of beasts of the field. For
they resorted to looting each other, there being only a tiny amount of food to give brief sustenance to the wretched people; and the disasters from abroad were increased by internal
disorders, for as a result of constant devastations of this kind the whole region came to lack the staff of food, apart from any such comfort as the art of the huntsman could procure for
them.
§ 20. So the miserable remnants sent off a letter again, this time to the Roman commander Agitius, in the following terms: “To Agitius, thrice consul: the
groans of the British.” Later came this complaint: “The barbarians push us back to the sea, the sea pushes us back to the barbarians; between these two kinds of death we are
either drowned or slaughtered.” But they got no help in return. Meanwhile, as the British feebly wandered, a dreadful and notorious famine gripped them, forcing many of them to give
in without delay to their bloody plunderers, merely to get a scrap of food to revive them. Not so others: they kept fighting back, basing themselves on the mountains, in caves, heaths and
thorny thickets. Their enemies had been plundering their land for many years: now for the first time they inflicted a massacre on
them
, trusting not in man but in God, for, as Philo
says, “when human help fails, we need the help of God.” For a little while their enemies’ audacity ceased, but not our people’s wickedness. The enemy retreated from
the people, but the people did not retreat from their own sins.
§ 21. It was always true of this people that it was weak in beating off the weapons of the enemy but strong in putting up with civil war and the burden of sin:
weak, I repeat, in following the banners of peace and truth, but strong for crime and falsehood. So the impudent Irish pirates returned home (though they were shortly to return); and for
the first time the Picts in the far end of the island kept quiet from now on, though they occasionally carried out devastating raids or plunder. So, in this period of truce the desolate
people found their cruel scars healing over. But a new and more virulent famine was quietly sprouting. In the respite from devastation the island was so flooded with
abundance of goods that no previous age had known the like of it. Alongside there grew luxury. It grew with a vigorous growth, so that to that time were fitly applied the words:
“There are actually reports of such fornication as is not known even among the Gentiles.”
Up until now Gildas has only been telling us about the onslaught of the Picts and Scots, and that after an appeal to Rome, which brought no help, some of the British fought
back. They inflicted such a “massacre” that there was a respite. The Picts and Irish went “home”. Now Britain prospered, and there was an abundance of wealth, as Germanus
witnessed. But with it came civil war:
Kings were anointed not in God’s name, but as being crueller than the rest; before long, they would be killed, with no enquiry into the truth, by those who had
anointed them, and others still crueller chosen to replace them. Any king who seemed gentler and rather more inclined to the truth was regarded as the downfall of Britain: everyone directed
their hatred and their weapons at him, with no respect.
Amidst this political strife Gildas tells us that rumours reached the British of “the imminent approach of the old enemy, bent on total destruction and (as was their wont)
on settlement from one end of the country to the other.” Yet the British did nothing and, as if by way of punishment:
§22 [. . .] . . . a deadly plague swooped brutally on the stupid people and in a short period laid low so many, with no sword, that the living could not bury all the
dead. But not even this taught them their lesson . . .
Gildas emphasises how hopeless the British were and how that sealed their fate. Now he comes to the crucial part:
§22 [. . .] And they convened a Council to decide the best and soundest way to counter the brutal and repeated invasions and plunderings by the
people I have mentioned.
§23. Then all the members of the Council, together with the
superbo tyranno
“proud tyrant”, were struck blind. As protection for our country,
they sealed its doom by inviting in among them, like wolves into a sheep-fold, the ferocious Saxons, hated by man and God, to beat back the peoples of the North. Nothing more destructive,
nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land. How utter the blindness of their minds. How desperate and crass the stupidity. Of their own free will they invited under the same roof a
people whom they feared worse than death even in their absence.
Then a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in three keels, as they call warships in their language. The winds were favourable; favourable too the omens
and auguries which prophesied, according to a sure portent among them, that they would live for three hundred years in the land towards which their prows were directed and that for half that
time, a hundred and fifty years, they would repeatedly lay it waste. On the orders of the ill-fated tyrant they first of all fixed their dreadful claws on the east side of the island,
ostensibly to fight for our country, in fact to fight against it. The mother lioness learned that her first contingent had prospered and she sent a second and larger troop of satellite dogs.
It arrived by ship and joined up with the false units. [. . .] The barbarians who had been admitted to the island asked to be given supplies, falsely representing themselves as soldiers ready
to undergo extreme dangers for their excellent hosts. The supplies were granted and, for a long time, “shut the dog’s mouth.” Then they again complained that their monthly
allowance was insufficient, purposely giving a false colour to individual incidents, and swore that they would break their agreement and plunder the whole island unless more lavish payment
was heaped upon them. There was no delay: they put their threats into immediate effect.
§24. In just punishment for the crimes that had gone before, a fire heaped up and, nurtured by the hand of the impious easterners, spread from
sea to sea. It devastated town and country round about and, once it was alight, it did not die down until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western
ocean with its fierce red tongue. [. . .] All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams, laid low too all the inhabitants – church leaders, priests and
people alike – as the swords glinted all around and the flames crackled. It was a sad sight. In the middle of the squares the foundation-stones of high walls and towers that had been
torn from their lofty base, holy altars, fragments of corpses covered with a purple crust of congealed blood, looked as though they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine press. There was
no burial to be had except in the ruins of houses or the bellies of beasts and birds – [. . .].
§25. So a number of the wretched survivors were caught in the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others, their spirit broken by hunger, went to surrender to the
enemy; they were fated to be slaves forever, if indeed they were not killed straight away, the highest boon. Others made for lands beyond the sea [. . .]. Others held out, though not
without fear, in their own land, trusting their lives with constant foreboding to the high hills, [. . .] to the densest forests and to the cliffs of the sea coast.
After a time, when the cruel plunderers had gone home, God gave strength to the survivors. Wretched people fled to them from all directions, as eagerly as bees to the beehive when a storm
threatens, and begged whole-heartedly that they should not be altogether destroyed. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock
of this notable storm: his parents, who had certainly worn the purple, were slain in it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather’s excellence. Under
him our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented and the battle went their way.
§26. From then on, victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies, so that in this people the Lord could make trial of his latter-day
Israel to see whether it loved him or not. This lasted right up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was
the year of my birth; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then has already passed.
But the cities of our land are not populated even now as they once were; right to the present they are deserted, in ruins and unkempt. External wars may have stopped, but not civil ones.
For the remembrance of so desperate a blow to the island and of such unlooked for recovery stuck in the minds of those who witnessed both wonders. That was why kings, public and private
persons, priests and churchmen, kept to their own stations. But they died; and an age succeeded them that is ignorant of that storm and has experience only of the calm of the present.
At this point Gildas launches into his tirade against the present-day kings, but before considering that, let us consider what Gildas has told us so far. It’s wrapped up
in hyperbole, but tucked away in these nine sections is a history, and most of it we can match to the chronicles already noted.
The start of §20 is a rare moment when Gildas gives us the opportunity to verify a date. He refers to a letter written to the Roman commander Agitius, referring to him as “thrice
consul.” Although Agitius would more accurately translate as Aegidius, most historians believe that Gildas meant Aëtius, who did indeed hold the consulship three times. In fact, he was
the only Roman (excluding emperors) to have done so for over three hundred years. Aegidius (d. 464), on the other hand, was never consul. He was a Roman general, who was appointed the
magister
militum
of northern Gaul by the Western Roman emperor Avitus in 457, and later became king of the Franks, establishing a small kingdom around Soissons.
Aëtius became consul for the third and fourth times in 446 and 453, so the letter, if Gildas remembered it correctly, had to be written between 446 and 452. The
ASC
records this as
happening
in 443, and notes that the Romans were coping with Attila the Hun and thus could not help the British. In fact the first major confrontation between Aëtius and
Attila was in 451, which could be the date the letter was sent.
As Gildas quotes from the letter, it is possible that a copy may have survived to his day, although of course it’s easy to reconstruct an apparent text from hearsay. This means that the
previous section, concerning the conflict with the Picts and Scots, covers a period of over thirty years, from 410 to at least 446AD.
Even when we get to the letter to Aëtius, an apparent moment of certainty instantly becomes uncertain. Gildas tells us that no help came from the Romans and that a famine descended upon
Britain until at last the British fought back and achieved a major victory. At this stage, Gildas is still referring to the Picts and Scots, not the Saxons.
The period 446 to 454 seems a bit short for the British to weaken, lapse into famine, fight back against the Picts and Scots and, as we learn in §21, become “flooded with
abundance.” Evidently Gildas has become confused again. The British may well have written to Aëtius in 446 or soon after, but that was almost certainly in relation to the Saxon
incursions. The victory over the Picts and Scots is more likely to be the Alleluia victory of Germanus. Gildas, bewailing the wretchedness of the British in §19, is recalling the decline into
Pelagianism, and the appeal he refers to in §20 was probably the one to the church leaders in Gaul that resulted in Germanus’s visit to Britain. It is noticeable that when Constantius
referred to Germanus’s second visit, he described Britain as a “wealthy island”, precisely as Gildas recalls it here. What probably happened was that Gildas knew of the appeal to
Aëtius, but confused it with the earlier appeal, so that the events in §19 really relate to 410–429, a far more probable period, whilst §20 and §21 relate to
429–446, or perhaps 441. The
Gallic Chronicle
had referred to Britain “yielding to the power of the Saxons” in 441. This is close enough to 446 (though one might hope it
could have been closer) to suggest that from the late 430s the Germanic incursions had grown stronger, and that by 441, insofar as was apparent to the chronicler in southern Gaul, the Saxons had
taken hold of Britain.
This would also explain why the British should write to Aëtius.
After all, if they had been independent of Rome for 30 years, why should they suddenly write to a Roman
commander and expect help? Admittedly they got none, perhaps a sign that Rome had no further hold on Britain. It seems to confirm what I suggested earlier, that Britain was not really
“expelled” in 410, but that Honorius and the empire simply had rather too much to contend with. Technically Britain remained in the Empire, appointing their own officials, but by
441–446 those final slender threads were cut. Aëtius sent no help, the Saxons were overrunning Britain, and Britain now regarded itself as independent. This would explain why, in
§21, Britain anoints “kings”. Evidently the turnover was rapid as “before long they would be killed”.
Once again, Gildas is probably recording a tradition of a great number of petty rulers, suggesting that by the 440s the old provincial boundaries had broken down. The British, fleeing from the
Saxons, had taken refuge in the mountains. The archaeology shows a resettling of a number of ancient hill-forts, mostly in the west and south.