THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE
So far we have considered the province of Britain as it was while it
still remained in real fact a province. Let us now turn to the sequel
and ask how it fits in with its antecedents. The Romanization, we find,
held its own for a while. The sense of belonging to the Empire had not
quite died out even in sixth-century Britain. Roman names continued to
be used, not exclusively but freely enough, by Britons. Roman 'culture
words' seem to occur in the later British language, and some at least of
these may be traceable to the Roman occupation of the island. Roman
military terms appear, if scantily. Roman inscriptions are occasionally
set up. The Romanization of Britain was plainly no mere interlude, which
passed without leaving a mark behind.[1] But it was crossed by two
hostile forges, a Celtic revival and an English invasion.
[Footnote 1: Much of the ornamentation used by post-Roman Celtic art
comes from Roman sources, in particular the interlaced or plaitwork,
which has been well studied by Mr. Romilly Allen. But how far it was
borrowed from Romano-British originals and how far from similar
Roman-provincial work on the Continent, is not very clear. (See p. 36.)]
The Celtic revival was due to many influences. We may find one cause for
it in the Celtic environment of the province. After 407 the Romanized
area was cut off from Rome. Its nearest neighbours were now the
less-Romanized Britons of districts like Cornwall and the foreign Celts
of Ireland and the north. These were weighty influences in favour of a
Celtic revival. And they were all the more potent because, in or even
before the period under discussion, the opening of the fifth century, a
Celtic migration seems to have set in from the Irish coasts. The details
of this migration are unknown, and the few traces which survive of it
are faint and not altogether intelligible. The principal movement was
that of the Scotti from North Ireland into Caledonia, with the result
that, once settled there, or perhaps rather in the course of settling
there, they went on to pillage Roman Britain. There were also movements
in the south, but apparently on a smaller scale and a more peaceful
plan.[1] At a date given commonly as A.D. 265-70--though there does not
seem to be any very good reason for it--the Dessi or Déisi were expelled
from Meath and a part of them settled in the south-west of Wales, in the
land then called Demetia. This was a region which was both thinly
inhabited and imperfectly Romanized. In it fugitives from Ireland might
easily find room. The settlement may have been formed, as Professor Bury
suggests, with the consent of the Imperial Government and under
conditions of service. But we are entirely ignorant whether these exiles
from Ireland numbered tens or scores or hundreds, and this uncertainty
renders speculation dangerous. If the newcomers were few and their new
homes were in the remote west beyond Carmarthen (Maridunum), formal
consent would hardly have been required. Other Irish immigrants probably
followed. Their settlements were apparently confined to Cornwall and the
south-west coast of Wales, and their influence may easily be overrated.
Some, indeed, came as enemies, though perhaps rather as enemies to the
Roman than to the Celtic elements in the province. Such must have been
Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was killed--according to the traditional
chronology--about A.D. 405 on the British coast and perhaps in the
Channel itself.
[Footnote 1: Professor Rhys, _Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc. Kerry Meeting_,
1891, and _Celtic Britain_ (ed. 3, 1904, p. 247), is inclined to
minimize the invasions of southern Britain (Cornwall and Wales).
Professor Bury (_Life of St. Patrick_, p. 288) tends to emphasize them;
see also Zimmer, _Nennius Vindicatus_, pp. 84 foll., and Kuno Meyer,
_Cymmrodorion Transactions_, 1895-6, pp. 55 foll. The decision of the
question seems to depend upon whether we should regard the Goidelic
elements visible in western Britain as due in part to an original
Goidelic population or ascribe them wholly to Irish immigrants. At
present philologists do not seem able to speak with certainty on this
point. But the evidence for some amount of invasion seems adequate.]
All this must have contributed to the reintroduction of Celtic national
feeling and culture. A Celtic immigrant, it may be, was the man who set
up the Ogam pillar at Silchester (Fig. 21), which was discovered in the
excavations of 1893.[1] The circumstances of the discovery show that
this pillar belongs to the very latest period in the history of Calleva.
Its inscription is Goidelic: that is, it does not belong to the ordinary
Callevan population, which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best
explained as the work of some western Celt who reached Silchester before
its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We do not know the date of
that event, though we may conjecturally put it before, and perhaps a
good many years before, A.D. 500. In any case, an Ogam monument had been
set up before it occurred, and the presence of such an object would seem
to prove that Celtic things had made their way even into this eastern
Romanized town.
[Footnote 1: _Archaeologia_, liv. 233, 441; Rhys and Brynmor Jones,
_Welsh People_, pp. 45, 65; _Victoria Hist. of Hampshire_, i. 279;
_English Hist. Review_, xix. 628. Whether the man who wrote was Irish or
British depends on the answer to the question set forth in the preceding
note. Unfortunately, we do not know when the Ogam script came first into
use. Professor Rhys tells me that the Silchester example may quite
conceivably belong to the fifth century.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21. OGAM INSCRIPTION FROM SILCHESTER.]
But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found in another
fact--that is the destruction of the Romanized part of Britain by the
invading Saxons. War, and especially defensive war against invaders,
must always weaken the higher forms of any country's civilization. Here
the agony was long, and the assailants cruel and powerful, and the
country itself was somewhat weak. Its wealth was easily exhausted. Its
towns were small. Its fortresses were not impregnable. Its leaders were
divided and disloyal. Moreover, the assault fell on the very parts of
Britain which were the seats of Roman culture. Even in the early years
of the fourth century it had been found necessary to defend the coasts
of East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly populated
and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates by a series
of forts which extended from the Wash to Spithead, and were known as the
forts of the Saxon Shore. Fifty or seventy years later the raiders,
whether English seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland,
devastated the coasts of the province and perhaps reached even the
midlands.[1] When, seventy years later still, the English came, no
longer to plunder but to settle, they occupied first the Romanized area
of the island. As the Romano-Britons retired from the south and east, as
Silchester was evacuated in despair[2] and Bath and Wroxeter were
stormed and left desolate, the very centres of Romanized life were
extinguished. Not a single one remained an inhabited town. Destruction
fell even on Canterbury, where the legends tell of intercourse between
Briton or Saxon, and on London, where ecclesiastical writers fondly
place fifth- and sixth-century bishops. Both sites lay empty and
untenanted for many years. Only in the far west, at Exeter or at
Caerwent, does our evidence allow us to guess at a continuing
Romano-British life.
[Footnote 1: About A.D. 405 Patrick was carried off from Bannavem
Taberniae. If this represents the Romano-British village on Watling
Street called Bannaventa, near Daventry in Northants (_Victoria Hist._
i. 186), the raids must have covered all the midlands: see _Engl. Hist.
Review_, 1895, p. 711; Zimmer, _Realenc. für protestantische Theol._ x.
(1901), Art. 'Keltische Kirche'; Bury, _Life of St. Patrick_, p. 322.
There are, however, too many uncertainties surrounding this question to
let us derive much help from it.]
[Footnote 2: _Engl. Hist. Review_, xix. 625; Fox, _Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire_, i. 371-2.]
The same destruction came also on the population. During the long series
of disasters, many of the Romanized inhabitants of the lowland regions
must have perished. Many must have fallen into slavery, and may have
been sold into foreign lands. The remnant, such as it was, doubtless
retired to the west. But, in doing so, it exchanged the region of walled
cities and civilized houses, of city life and Roman culture, for a
Celtic land. No doubt it attempted to keep up its Roman fashions. The
writers may well be correct who speak of two conflicting parties, Roman
and Celtic, among the Britons of the sixth century. But the Celtic
element triumphed. Gildas, about A.D. 540, describes a Britain confined
to the west of our island, which is very largely Celtic and not
Roman.[1] Had the English invaded the island from the Atlantic, we might
have seen a different spectacle. The Celtic element would have perished
utterly: the Roman would have survived. As it was, the attack fell on
the east and south of the island--that is, on the lowlands of Britain.
Safe in its western hills, the Celtic revival had full course.
[Footnote 1: How much of Britain was still British when Gildas wrote, he
does not tell us. But he mentions only the extreme west (Damnonii,
Demetae); his general atmosphere is Celtic, and his rhetoric contains no
references to a flourishing civilization. We may conclude that the
Romanized part of Britain had been lost by his time, or that, if some
part was still held by the British, long war had destroyed its
civilization. Unfortunately we cannot trust the traditional English
chronology of the period. As to the date of Gildas, cf. W.H. Stevenson,
_Academy_, October 26, 1895, &c.; I see no reason to put either Gildas
or any part of the _Epistula_ later than about 540.]
It is this Celtic revival which can best explain the history of
Britannia minor, Brittany across the seas in the western extremity of
Gaul. How far this region had been Romanized during the first four
centuries seems uncertain. Towns were scarce in it, and country-houses,
though not altogether infrequent or insignificant, were unevenly
distributed. At some period not precisely known, perhaps in the first
half or the middle of the third century, it was in open rebellion, and
the commander of the Sixth Legion (at York), one Artorius Justus, was
sent with a part of the British garrison to reduce it to obedience.[1]
It may therefore have been, as Mommsen suggests, one of the least
Romanized corners of Gaul, and in it the native idiom may have retained
unusual vitality. Yet that native speech was not strong enough to live
on permanently. The Celtic which is spoken to-day in Brittany is not a
Gaulish but a British Celtic; it is the result of British influences.
Brittany would have sooner or later become assimilated to the general
Romano-Gaulish civilization, had not its Celtic elements won fresh
strength from immigrant Britons. This immigration is usually described
as an influx of refugees fleeing from Britain before the English
advance. That, no doubt, was one side of it. But the principal
immigrants, so far as we know their names, came from Devon and
Cornwall,[2] and some certainly did not come as fugitives. The King
Riotamus who (as Jordanes tells us) brought 12,000 Britons in A.D. 470
to aid the Roman cause in Gaul, was plainly not seeking shelter from
the English.[3] We must connect him, and indeed the whole fifth-century
movement of Britons into Gaul, with the Celtic revival and with the same
causes that produced for instance, the Scotic invasion of Caledonia.
[Footnote 1: C. iii. 1919=Dessau 2770. The inscription must be later
than (about) A.D. 200, and it somewhat resembles another inscription (C.
iii. 3228) of the reign of Gallienus, which mentions _milites vexill.
leg. Germanicar. et Britannicin. cum auxiliis earum_. Presumably it is
either earlier than the Gallic Empire of 258-73, or falls between that
and the revolt of Carausius in 287. The notion of O. Fiebiger (_De
classium Italicarum historia_, in _Leipziger Studien_, xv. 304) that it
belongs to the Aremoric revolts of the fifth century is, I think, wrong.
Such an expedition from Britain at such a date is incredible.]
[Footnote 2: The attempt to find eastern British names in Brittany seems
a failure. M. de la Borderie, for instance, thinks that Corisopitum (or
whatever the exact form of the name is) was colonized from Corstopitum
(Corbridge on the Tyne, near Hadrian's Wall). But the latter, always to
some extent a military site, can hardly have sent out ordinary
_émigrés_, while the former has hardly an historical existence at all,
and may be an ancient error for _civitas Coriosolitum_ (C. xiii (I), i.
p. 491).]
[Footnote 3: Freeman (_Western Europe in the Fifth Century_, p. 164)
suggests that a migration of Britons into Gaul had been in progress,
perhaps since the days of Magnus Maximus, and that by 470 there was a
regular British state on the Loire, from which Riotamus led his 12,000
men. Hodgkin (_Cornwall and Brittany_, Penryn, 1911) suggests that the
soldiers of Maximus settled on the Loire about 388, and that Riotamus
was one of their descendants. He quotes Gildas as saying that the
British troops of Maximus went abroad with him and never returned. That,
however, is an entirely different thing from saying that they settled in
a definite part of Gaul. For this latter statement I can find no
evidence, and the Celtic revival in our island seems to provide a better
setting for the whole incident of Riotamus.
If Professor Bury is right (_Life of Patrick_, p. 354), Riotamus had a
predecessor in Dathi, who is said to have gone from Ireland to Gaul
about A.D. 428 to help the Romans and Aetius. Zimmer (_Nennius Vind._,
p. 85) rejects the tale. But it fits in well with the Celtic revival.]
This destruction of Romano-British life produced a curious result which
would be difficult to explain if we could not assign it to this cause.
There is a marked and unmistakable gap between the Romano-British and
the Later Celtic periods. However numerous may be the Latin personal
names and 'culture words' in Welsh, it is beyond question that the
tradition of Roman days was lost in Britain during the fifth or early
sixth century. That is seen plainly in the scanty literature of the age.
Gildas wrote about A.D. 540, three generations after the Saxon
settlements had begun. He was a priest, well educated, and well
acquainted with Latin, which he once calls _nostra lingua_. He was also
not unfriendly to the Roman party among the Britons, and not unaware of
the relation of Britain to the Empire.[1] Yet he knew substantially
nothing of the history of Britain as a Roman province. He drew
from some source now lost to us--possibly an ecclesiastical or
semi-ecclesiastical writer--some details of the persecution of
Diocletian and of the career of Magnus Maximus.[2] For the rest, his
ideas of Roman history may be judged by his statement that the two Walls
which defended the north of the province--the Walls of Hadrian and
Pius--were built somewhere between A.D. 388 and 440. He had some
tradition of the coming of the English about 450, and of the reason why
they came. But his knowledge of anything previous to that event was
plainly most imperfect.
[Footnote 1: Mommsen, Preface to _Gildas_ (Mon. Germ. Hist.), pp. 9-10.
Gildas is, however, rather more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to
allow. Such a phrase as _ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur_
implies a consciousness of contrast between Briton and Roman. Freeman
(_Western Europe_, p. 155) puts the case too strongly the other way.]
[Footnote 2: Magnus Maximus, as the opponent of Theodosius, seems to
have been damned by the Church writers. Compare the phrases of Orosius,
vii. 35 (Theodosius) _posuit in Deo spem suam seseque adversus Maximum
tyrannum sola fide maior proripuit_ and _ineffabili iudicio Dei_ and
_Theodosius victoriam Deo procurante suscipit_.]
The _Historia Brittonum_, compiled a century or two later, preserves
even less memory of things Roman. There is some hint of a _vetus
traditio seniorum_. But the narrative which professes to be based on it
bears little relation to the actual facts; the growth of legend is
perceptible, and even those details that are borrowed from literary
sources like Gildas, Jerome, Prosper, betray great ignorance on the part
of the borrower.[1] On the other hand, the native Celtic instinct is
more definitely alive and comes into sharper contrast with the idea of
Rome. Throughout, no detail occurs which enlarges our knowledge of Roman
or of early post-Roman Britain. The same features recur in later writers
who might be or have been supposed to have had access to British
sources. Geoffrey of Monmouth--to take only the most famous--asserts
that he used a Breton book which told him all manner of facts otherwise
unknown. The statement is by no means improbable. But, for all that, the
pages of Geoffrey contain no new fact about the first five centuries
which is also true.[2] From first to last, the Celtic tradition
preserves no real remnant of recollections dating from the
Romano-British age. Those who might have handed down such memories had
either perished in wars with the English or sunk back into the native
environment of the west.[3]
[Footnote 1: The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is
obvious tradition or legend. A prince with a Celtic name may have ruled
Kent in 450. There were, indeed, plenty of rulers with barbaric names in
the fourth and fifth centuries of the Empire. But the tale cannot be
called certain history.]
[Footnote 2: Thus, he refers to Silchester, and so good a judge as
Stubbs once suggested that for this he had some authority now lost to
us. Yet the mere fact that Geoffrey knows only the English name
Silchester disproves this idea. Had he used a genuinely ancient
authority, he would have (as elsewhere) employed the Roman name. Another
explanation may be given. Geoffrey wrote in an antiquarian age, when the
ruins of Roman towns were being noted. Both he and Henry of Huntingdon
seem to have heard of the Silchester ruins, and both accordingly
inserted the place into their pages.]
[Footnote 3: The English mediaeval chronicles have sometimes been
supposed to preserve facts otherwise forgotten about Roman times. So far
as I can judge, this is not the case, even with Henry of Huntingdon.
Henry, in the later editions of his work, borrowed a few facts from
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which are wanting in his first edition (see the
All Souls MS.; the truth is obscured in the Rolls Series text). He also
preserves one local tradition from Colchester: otherwise he contains
nothing which need puzzle any inquirer. Giraldus Cambrensis, when at
Rome, saw some manuscript which contained a list of the five provinces
of fourth-century Britain--otherwise unknown throughout the Middle Ages
(_Archaeol. Oxoniensis_, 1894, p. 224).]
But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders
here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at
one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to
prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and its explorers need to
know something of the regions on both sides of the frontier. I make no
claim to that double knowledge. I have merely tried, using such evidence
as I can, to sketch the character of one region, that of the
Romano-British civilization.
INDEX
Aldborough (_Isurium_), 56.
Arretine pottery, 15.
_Avot_, 27.
_Bannavem Taberniae_, 63.
Bath, 42, 56.
Brittany, migration to, 65.
Bury, Prof., 66.
Caerwent, 50, 56.
Canterbury, deserted after the Roman period, 64.
Cantonal system in Roman Britain, 50.
Carausius, birthplace, 58.
Castor pottery, 40.
Celtic language in Gaul and Britain, 14, 26.
Celto-Roman temples, 30;
houses, 31.
Christianity as affecting language, 15.
Cloth, British, 57.
Corbridge Lion, 43.
Corn, exported from Britain, 57.
Cornwall, Roman remains in, 22.
Demetrius of Tarsus in Britain, 28.
Devonshire, Roman remains in, 22.
Din Lligwy, village at, 37.
Frilford, Romano-British house at, 32.
Gaulish kingdom of A.D. 258, 17.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 68.
Gildas, 64, 66.
Glastonbury village, 45.
Gorgon at Bath, 41.
Henry of Huntingdon, All Souls MS. of, 68 _note_.
Hesione and Hercules, 41.
_Historia Brittonum_, 67.
Houses in Roman Britain, their relation to houses in Gaul and Italy,
31, 34.
_Icinos_, 51.
Imperial domains in Britain, 49
Kent, origin of name, 29.
Late Celtic art, 39.
Latin, used in the provinces, 11, 14;
in Britain, 24.
London, deserted after the Roman period, 64.
Magnus Maximus, army of, 66.
New Forest pottery, 39.
Northleigh, Romano-British house at, 33.
Ogam at Silchester, 62.
Pergamene style in Roman Gaul, 44.
Pitt-Rivers, 45.
Plaxtol, inscribed tile from, 27.
Punic language in Africa, 14.
Ravenna geographer, 52.
Riotamus, 65.
Samian pottery, 16, 44 _note_.
Seebohm, 53.
Silchester--
Ancient names of, 53, 68.
Date of development, 56.
Dyeing works, 57.
Houses of, 34.
Imperial domains at, 49.
Inscribed tiles from, 25.
Latin used in, 24.
Ogam, 62.
Street plan of, 34, 56.
Temples of, 31.
Abandoned, 63.
Temples in Britain and north Gaul, 30.
Towns in Roman Britain, 48 foll.
Villages in Roman Britain, 37, 45.
Vinogradoff, Prof., 36, 46.
Warwickshire, Roman, 22.
York, Roman remains at, 48.