Royal Mysteries of the Anglo-Saxons and Early Britain

Timothy Venning

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526783578
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A thought-provoking exploration of British history and intrigue about royal and political society.

Royal mysteries never fail to intrigue people. The "mysteries", unraveled and analyzed, are of enduring fascination and full of tragedy, suffering and pathos but also heroism and romance.

Royal Mysteries of the Anglo-Saxons and Early Britain is based on deep research in original sources including rare documents, archaeological and DNA evidence, latest historiography and academic research but is essentially accessible history. These are the "Dark Ages" but Anglo-Saxon enlightenment is emphasized. The Heptarchy, with seven Anglo-Saxon states is examined and Alfred's victory over the Vikings and emergence of the English kingdom.

But mystery surrounds all aspects of dynastic, political and military history. The story includes the surviving British and Welsh kingdoms when "Welsh" meant "foreigner", the Gaelic kingdoms in what became Scotland, the survival of lowland "Britons" under the Germanic Anglo-Saxon radar—a new interpretation of early English society in its shadowy forms with the half-mythical founders of the early English kingdoms like Hengist of Kent or Cerdic of Wessex, up to William duke of Normandy—did he have any legitimate claim to justify his "power-grab"? Some episodes have dropped out of history like the murder the teenage King Edward the "Martyr", but here is a retelling of early mysteries based on close analysis of the myriad sources while stimulating romantic fascination.

Timothy Venning's Royal Mysteries Royal Mysteries: The Medieval PeriodRoyal Mysteries of the Anglo-Saxons and Early Britain

Chapter One

British/Welsh Kings

More Real than Arthur or Uther Pendragon? Ambrosius and Other Over-Kings of Britain

The background

As with so much of early Britain, there are basic questions to answer about how accurate is the traditional picture of the islands’ rulers after the end of Roman rule. The alleged dynasty that ruled a state of ‘Britain’ (i.e. the former Roman lands South of Hadrian’s Wall) after the ‘Roman withdrawal’ of AD 410 were first described in detail in literature by the Anglo-Norman/Welsh writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 1130s in his largely fictional History of the Kings of Britain. This was seen as defining the post-Roman ‘British’ governance of Britain in one over-kingdom, as superseded around the early seventh century by Germanic ‘incomers’, the (Anglo-) Saxons. There was a sharp break in continuity and in culture at this point, defined by ‘alien’ conquest – a ‘given’ which was duly incorporated into the narrative of Britain’s history thereafter. But at the time of Geoffrey ‘historians’, in the sense of writers of literary epics set in the past rather than chroniclers noting events by date, were not what would nowadays be seen as objective analysts. Rather they were writing for their audience among the literate upper classes, and often for contemporary ‘political’ objectives too – which has raised serious doubts in recent decades about their reliability. Did they care about ‘accuracy’, or even see it as their business to use reliable sources verbatim and not invent missing details? This is especially true of Geoffrey, the first great publiciser in England of the legends of ‘King Arthur’ and ‘Merlin’ (both known to earlier writers and oral poets in Wales, where the post-Roman Brittanic kingdoms had survived). He was also our only known source of much material about other rulers of ancient Britain – the historically dubious pre-Roman ‘kings of Britain’ in particular, though that concept was present in Welsh myth by the ninth century. His concept of an over-kingdom and ‘empire’ of the British Isles owed a lot to the contemporary claims and military successes of his patron earl Robert of Gloucester’s father, King Henry I (d. 1135), and he used contemporary terminology and titles for his characters not plausibly ‘ancient’ ones. He did not however invent the notion that there was a distinct dynasty that ruled over the ex-Roman regions of Britain in the fifth century, though his accuracy concerning the survival and national roles of pre-Roman tribal kingdoms’ dynasties under Roman rule (for example the enigmatic AD 60s king ‘Arviragus’, allegedly Emperor Claudius’ son-in-law) is more doubtful.

Geoffrey’s is the first full literary account of the post-Roman era to survive, though some of his names occur in earlier Welsh literature. The end of the production of coinage with the end of Roman rule means that no coins of any of his fifth-century ‘kings’ (which would prove their reality) have survived, and what information we do have on the period is mostly from archaeology – which as we shall see casts doubt on the notion of widespread and genocidal ‘Germanic’ settlement. Indeed, as there are no surviving contemporary accounts of Britain and the historians operating within the shrinking Western Roman Empire after 410 did not mention British events it is a complete blank as to who ruled the region or what form (or number) their states took. This is in sharp contrast to the lands remaining within the Empire at the same time, and shows an ‘atomisation’ of society and a sharp drop in literacy or written as opposed to oral memory – at the same time as the end of Roman institutions. The physical structure of Roman towns (in steep decline during this time but not all abandoned) and the multitude of ordinary rural farms survived across Britain through the earlier fifth century, but the structure of governance and its records did not and Continental historians within the Empire (e.g. Orosius) did not bother about British events. Did any or all of the senior administrators – civil governors, ‘praeses’, and military governors, ‘duces’ – of the five late Roman provinces take over command as Roman troops left? Or did the governors and their administrators back their bags and leave too, or retreat to rural estates? And what of the personnel of the Roman Catholic Church in lowland Britain, which was presumably run by bishops based in the principal towns as elsewhere in the Empire? (Three bishops had attended the Empire-wide Church Council in 359.) The elite were probably all nominally Christian by this date, as seen by the Christian mosaics in great rural villas (e.g. Lullingstone and Hinton St Mary) and the Christian faith of the former commander in Britain who became Emperor in 383, Magnus Maximus. It is unclear, indeed, if all the troops stationed in Britain left – though it is probable that when rebel Emperor Constantine III took the army off to Gaul to fight invading Germanic tribes in 407 most troops went with him and did not return on his overthrow and capture by the legitimate government in 411.

Emperor Magnus Maximus, aka ‘Macsen Wledig’.

Notably, as far as the 540s ‘historian’ (more accurately polemicist) Gildas, probably a monk given his ultra-Biblical tone of writing and our only surviving near-contemporary British source, was concerned the last Roman leader to rule in Britain had been Maximus, who was also the man who took the last Roman troops there off to the Continent. Gildas and our next source, the early ninth-century Gwynedd cleric ‘Nennius’ in his Historia Brittonum, both give this role to Maximus not to the actual rebel Western Roman ruler who took the final local army off to Gaul, Constantine III. Neither of them mentions his existence or his expedition, and Maximus’ expedition two decades earlier becomes the ‘cut-off point’ for Roman rule instead. It is Maximus, as ‘Macsen Wledig’ (the latter Welsh term probably meaning ‘over-ruler’ or a sort of ‘High King’), who is played up in later Welsh literature as the final Roman ruler in Britain and the ancestor of many of its post-410 British dynasties. He also starred in the collection of early medieval Welsh stories of the ‘Mabinogi’ (‘Young Men’?) which has been known in recent times as the Mabinogion from the title chosen for its early Victorian translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, a cultural revivalist married into a major Gwent ironworks dynasty. This presents us with an opening ‘Royal Mystery’ for the post-Roman era – why it was Maximus not Constantine who was the ‘last of the Romans’ and the leader of the final Roman military expedition to the Continent in Welsh historical memory? Why was this ruler so important and chosen as the subject for myths? And why choose Maximus for the alleged ancestor of later dynasties, as with Morgannwg/Glamorgan and Dumnonia/Devon and Cornwall? In fact we have no proof that the latter claim was accurate, as the Roman sources (contemporary histories plus the writings of Gallic bishop St Martin of Tours who tangled with him in Gaul post-383) only refer to one son of his, Victor, either a boy or a youth at the time, who was made Maximus’ nominal co-emperor as his father took over the westernmost provinces of the Empire (Britain, Gaul, Spain and the Rhineland) in 383–8. When Maximus tried to take over Italy too in 387, his foe Emperor Valentinian II, teenage half-brother of the Emperor he had overthrown and murdered in 383 (Gratian), fled to the East and enlisted the help of its emperor, Theodosius ‘the Great’. Ironically, Theodosius was the son of Maximus’ old commander in Britain, Count Theodosius. The Eastern Emperor then invaded Italy in 388, captured and executed Maximus, had Victor killed too, but spared Maximus’ wife and younger children (who are not named in the sources). Maximus’ wife was a pious and orthodox Christian on good terms with St Martin so she might well be the person named as his wife in Welsh legend, Helen ‘of the Hosts’, the alleged daughter of a Welsh ruler or nobleman called Eudaf/Octavius. Their younger children might have included the son named in medieval Welsh legend (and by Geoffrey of Monmouth) as the first major post-410 ruler of Britain, Constantine aka ‘Custennin the Blessed’. But this is still unclear, and the various other descendants of Maximus named in medieval Welsh genealogies as ruling Welsh kingdoms are not mentioned in any other, more contemporary sources so many modern historians regard them as the inventions of medieval courtly ‘spin-doctors’ seeking to give their kings a famous lineage linked to a major Roman Emperor.

More mystery surrounds Helen, assuming her to have been Maximus’ wife in reality as in legend. By medieval Welsh legend she was known as the woman who had commissioned a chain of Roman roads across Wales, some of which were known as ‘Sarn Helen’ (‘The Road of Helen’), but as these seem in reality to have been built when the area was conquered by Rome in the first century how did this story come about? She was evidently seen in retrospective ‘memory’ – or bardic invention? – as a formidable woman linked to the military, but did this reflect reality? And was she mixed up with the identically-named mother of earlier fourth-century Emperor Constantine ‘the Great’ (ruled 306–37), St Helena the discoverer of the ‘True Cross’ from the Crucifixion, who was erroneously called a Briton?

The reasons for the literary choice of Maximus as the ‘last Emperor ruling in Britain’ and ‘dynastic founder for much of Wales’ are unclear. Arguably if he had a British wife, had led troops in Wales to defeat Irish pirates, and had commanded in Britain since the late 360s (as some suggest) he made more impact on Britain than the obscure Constantine III did. Maximus seems to have been a Spaniard by birth, and came to Britain with Count Theodosius, the Spanish-born commander of a Roman army sent to drive out a major raid or invasion by Saxons, Picts (i.e. the Brittonic peoples north of Hadrian’s Wall), and Irish in 367–8. He is associated in Welsh legend with the major Roman fortress of Segontium, later site of King Edward I’s Caernarfon Castle, where he may have commanded a garrison. In the Mabinogion story, he comes to Wales to marry a fair princess who he has seen in a dream at a location that turns out to be Caernarfon; however he is a Roman Emperor who comes to Wales and enlists his wife’s kin’s help to restore himself to Rome after a rebellion, not a British commander who goes to the Continent to overthrow a legitimate ruler. His role and Constantine’s as challenger to the extant Western Emperor in a campaign in Gaul were identical, but only one of them made it into Welsh legend and dynastic propaganda. Both he and Constantine III ended up defeated and executed by the legitimate Western Roman government, Maximus in 388 and Constantine in 411–12, but Maximus ruled more lands for longer and had a definitive British/Welsh link via his wife so he may have had a better reputation. He was also said by Welsh and Breton legends to have taken a large force of British troops to the Continent and settled them in lands in Armorica, the new ‘Brittany’ (i.e. ‘Little Britain’), which fits Roman military pratice and may well be accurate if exaggerated.

After 410: the reality.

The significance of ‘410’ as ‘the end of Roman rule’ with a neat withdrawal of Roman troops and officials to shore up the crumbling Empire on the Continent was thus not remembered in post-fifth-century British/Welsh history and legend. For that matter, the only survival of Constantine III’s story into the medieval period appears to be the fact that his son Constans left his Gallic monastery to aid his invasion in 407–8 and ended up executed too – in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s garbled story his post-Roman ruler ‘Constantine son of Emperor Maximus’ is succeeded by his son Constans, an ex-monk, who is then murdered by his chief minister and brother-in-law ‘Vortigern’. The actual ‘break’ in Roman political control in 410 was not a withdrawal as the British ‘took back control’ from a European super-state but an abandonment. The senior civic authorities in the leading British towns wrote to Constantine’s foe Emperor Honorius (ruled 395–423), son and successor of Maximus’ foe Theodosius, to resume allegiance to him and were told to look to their own defences.1 With the rampaging Goths sacking Rome and roaming around Italy looting at will in 410 Honorius, a timid ruler hiding from the ‘barbarians’ in his new capital in the marshes of Ravenna, had other priorities – and once his general Constantius had defeated and captured Constantine III and forced a treaty on the Goths in 411–17 he did not bother to reclaim Britain either. Its rulers remain unknown, nor if the five extant Roman provinces temporarily survived as the basis for administration – possibly with a regional military command for the whole island, the ‘Count of Britain’, as listed in the ?410s administrative lists of the Notitia Dignitatum. All that is clear from archaeology is that production of coinage ceased – no coins have survived for any rulers of Britain after Honorius and Constantine III, so clearly the pre-410 mints gave up their role as they lacked either government orders or a supply of metals. As seen from the drop in the locations of widely-traded British goods (e.g. pottery) within Britain, trade soon declined steeply too and the economy reverted to a small-scale local interchange of goods, presumably based on barter. Whether the increased amounts of ‘Germanic’ goods and Germanic burial-practices in scattered settlements in eastern England (especially East Anglia and Kent) reflect the arrival of new Continental traders from outside the Empire, and/or existing settlers importing goods from their homeland and passing them on to Romano-Britons, is still debated. But it is clear that the main stimulus to the prosperous fourth-century British ‘export economy’, the Roman government and army, had collapsed.

The difficulties of timing over when and how residence in towns and the use of ‘high-status’ residential rural villas ended is similar to the lack of information about politics in post-Roman Britain. In fact the lurid stories in the account of Britain’s ‘fall’ by the mid-sixth-century monk Gildas of invading Germans a generation or so after 410 sacking all the major towns and burning their way from sea to sea2 are inaccurate as there is little archaeological evidence for fire except at a few places near the east coast. Even there, piles of bodies do not necessarily mean attacks by Saxons as opposed to internal political strife or brigands. Fourth-century Roman towns in the prosperous Fenland, e.g. Castor, do not appear to have been sacked, and nor do those contemporary farms which have been excavated (e.g. around Peterborough). As will be seen, the notion of Gildas (our only contemporary source) as a ‘historian’ in the modern sense of the word is problematic given his Old Testament-style polemics, and since the 1970s historians have reassessed his intentions in writing his book De Excidio Britanniae/On the Ruin of Britain. The only archaeological evidence of damage probably caused by violence (i.e. both fire and piles of bodies) comes from Colchester/‘Camulodunum’, the first Roman capital of Britain, and Caistor-by-Norwich/Venta Icenorum, both in East Anglia, and possibly Lincoln/Lindum. Fires in the sprawling residential houses, ‘villas’, on the great rural estates could well be due to accident not arson and are proof of nothing; modern experts reckon that most of these economic units were abandoned as the demand for their products (e.g. corn for the Roman army) collapsed around 400. Some major towns survived in the west albeit on a smaller scale, as at Wroxeter/‘Viroconium’ into the sixth century, with work in wood not stone and for small-scale local crafts and trade not for Romanised civic institutions. They may have survived in the east too, as former regional administrative capitals such as Venta Belgarum/Winchester, Noviomagus/Chichester, and Lindum/Lincoln re-emerged as the capitals of new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms, though proof of continued occupation through the period is patchy. Significantly the major centre of Londinium/London seems to have had its main inhabited administrative/residential/trading zone within the walls moved by c.600 to a new Germanic settlement higher up the Thames at the ‘old wick’ i.e. ‘old settlement’ (the Aldwych), centred on traders’ wharfs along the riverside.

Recent detailed investigation of how the post-410 ‘Romano-Britons’ lived in rural areas even makes it unclear if all the fifth-century wooden farm buildings that were once attributed to incoming Anglo-Saxons from a different ethnicity and culture were indeed ‘German’. Is the new longhouse-style ‘grubenhaus’ building exclusively ‘Germanic’? The rural Britons’ building-styles may have been identical to that of ‘incomers’ and largely based on wood rather than the elite urban and villa ‘Roman’ reliance on stone, and a distinct break in continuity between ‘Romano-British’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ residents at some well-studied estates (e.g. Mucking in Essex) is far from obvious.3 The boundaries of some pre-‘invasion’ estates survived as if they were taken over seamlessly rather than being abandoned in an invasion and subsequently re-created, and there is no evidence in the record of local plant-life of the usual plants that grow up in abandoned fields suddenly replacing those of ‘settled and regularly used’ Roman farms before ‘incomers’ re-settled the land.4 This does not rule out a transfer of ownership at some point, but it does rule out widespread chaos and abandonment of estates in one major disaster for the Britons. Indeed, it has even been suggested that the continuity in useage of land and evidence of increased pastoral farming as the ‘corn-market’ for Roman military purposes ended could imply a ‘boom’ in fifth-century British lowland farming – aided by the end of Roman taxes? (This would have been negated by insecurity from wars, but we have no evidence of the latter bar Gildas’ generalisations on 410–11 and the 440s.) And was the change of burial-customs to ‘Germanic’ cremations attended by new ‘Germanic’ cultural artefacts in firstly south-east coastal Britain and then inland really a sign of total ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the newcomers? This and the ‘DNA’ evidence of the survival of over 50 per cent pre-‘Anglo-Saxon’ (and some pre-Roman ‘Iron Age’ and Neolithic) ‘British’ genetic material to a large extent in post-410 Britain has resulted in modern arguments over how extensive the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon takeover’ of lowland Britain was. Expert archaeologists of the period such as Francis Pryor have doubts over the extent of ‘invasions’ with such little evidence of upheaval or a break in residential continuity. But the predominant language used certainly altered between c.400 and c.600 to a new one of Germanic cultural affiliation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 British/Welsh Kings
• Chapter 2 Hengest, ‘King Stallion/Gelding’: Founder Of Kent. Did He Ever Exist?
• Chapter 3 Cerdic of Wessex: Man of Mystery
• Chapter 4 Early Mercia – An ‘Anglian’ Kingdom? Partly British, and a Welsh Not An English Ally?
• Chapter 5 Bernicia, Deira And Early Northumbria: Another Kingdom Of Mixed Heritage?
• Chapter 6 Known Unknowns? Some Missing Or Garbled Royal Details
• Chapter 7 The Odd Ones Out?
• Chapter 8 Was the Creation of One Kingdom of England a Dynastic Accident?
• Chapter 9 Three Major Royal Murders – And Cover-Ups?
• Chapter 10 The Succession In 1066: Were The Claims Of William Of Normandy Invented Or Irrelevant?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates section