Early Britain-Roman Britain Part 10

B. 4.--Under him we first find our island mentioned as one of the great corn-growing districts of the Empire, on which Gaul was able to draw to a very large extent for the supply of her garrisons. No fewer than eight hundred wheat-ships sailed from our sh.o.r.es on this errand; a number which shows how large an area of the island must have been brought under cultivation, and how much the country had prospered during the sixty years of unbroken internal peace which had followed on the suppression of Allectus.

B. 5.--That peace was now to be broken up. The northern tribes had by this recovered from the awful chastis.e.m.e.nt inflicted upon them by Severus,[339] and, after an interval of 150 years, once more (A.D.

362) appeared south of Hadrian's Wall. Whether as yet they _burst through_ it is uncertain; for now we find a new confederacy of barbarians. It is no longer that of Caledonians and Meatae, but of Picts and Scots. And these last were seafarers. Their home was not in Britain at all, but in the north of Ireland. In their "skiffs"[340]

they were able to turn the flank of the Roman defences, and may well have thus introduced their allies from beyond Solway also. Anyhow, penetrate the united hordes did into the quiet cornfields of Roman Britain, repeating their raids ever more frequently and extending them ever more widely, till their spearmen were cut [Errata: to] pieces in 450 at Stamford by the swords of the newly-arrived English.[341]

B. 6.--For the moment they were driven back without much difficulty, by Lupicinus, Julian's Legate (the first Legate we hear of in Britain since Lollius Urbicus), who, when the death of Constantius II. (in 361) had extinguished that royal line, aided his master to become "_Dominus totius...o...b..s_"--as he is called in an inscription[342]

describing his triumphant campaigns "_ex oceano Britannico_." And after "the victory of the Galilaean" (363) had ended Julian's brief and futile attempt to restore the Higher Paganism (to which several British inscriptions testify),[343] it was again to an Emperor from Britain that there fell the Lordship of the World--Valentinian, son of Gratian, whose dynasty lasted out the remaining century of Romano-British history.

B. 7.--His reign was marked in our land by a life-and-death struggle with the inrushing barbarians. The Picts and Scots were now joined by yet another tribe, the cannibal[344] Attacotti[345] of Valentia, and their invasions were facilitated by the simultaneous raids of the Saxon pirates (with whom they may perhaps have been actually in concert) along the coast. The whole land had been wasted, and more than one Roman general defeated, when Theodosius, father of the Great Emperor, was sent, in 368, to the rescue. Crossing from Boulogne to Richborough in a lucky calm,[346] and fixing his head-quarters at London, or Augusta, as it was now called [_Londinium vetus oppidum, quod Augustam posteritas apellavit_], he first, by a skilful combination of flying columns, cut to pieces the scattered hordes of the savages as they were making off with their booty, and finally not only drove them back beyond the Wall, which he repaired and re-garrisoned,[347] but actually recovered the district right up to Agricola's rampart, which had been barbarian soil ever since the days of Severus.[348] It was now (369) formed into a fifth British province, and named Valentia in honour of Valens, the brother and colleague of the Emperor.

B. 8.--The Twentieth Legion, whose head-quarters had so long been at Chester, seems to have been moved to guard this new province. Forty years later Claudian speaks of it as holding the furthest outposts in Britain, in his well-known description of the dying Pict:

"Venit et extremis legio praetenta Britannis, Quae Scoto dat frena truci, ferroque notatas Perlegit exsangues Picto moriente figuras."

["From Britain's bound the outpost legion came, Which curbs the savage Scot, and fading sees The steel-wrought figures on the dying Pict."]

The same poet makes Theodosius fight and conquer even in the Orkneys and in Ireland;

"--maduerunt Saxone fuso Orcades; incaluit Pictorum sanguine Thule; Scotorum c.u.mulos flevit glacialis Ierne."[349]

["With Saxon slaughter flowed the Orkney strand, With Pictish blood cold Thule warmer grew; And icy Erin wept her Scotchmen slain."]

The relief, however, was but momentary. Five years later (374) another great Saxon raid is recorded; yet eight years more and the Picts and Scots have again to be driven from the land; and in the next decade their attacks became incessant.

SECTION C.

Roman evacuation of Britain begun--Maximus--Settlement of Brittany--Stilicho restores the Wall--Radagaisus invades Italy--Twentieth Legion leaves Britain--Britain in the 'Not.i.tia'--Final effort of British Army--The last Constantine--Last Imperial Rescript to Britain--Sack of Rome by Alaric--Collapse of Roman rule in Britain.

C. 1.--By this time the evacuation of Britain by the Roman soldiery had fairly begun. Maximus, the last victor over the Scots, the "Pirate of Richborough," as Ausonius calls him, set up as Emperor (A.D. 383); and the Army of Britain again marched on Rome, and again, as under Constantine, brought its leader in triumph to the Capitol (A.D. 387).

But this time it did not return. When Maximus was defeated and slain (A.D. 388) at Aquileia by the Imperial brothers-in-law Valentinian II.

and Theodosius the Great[350] (sons of the so-named leaders connected with Britain), his soldiers, as they retreated homewards, straggled on the march; settling, amid the general confusion, here and there, mostly in Armorica, which now first began to be called Brittany.[351]

This tale rests only on the authority of Nennius, but it is far from improbable, especially as his sequel--that a fresh legion dispatched to Britain by Stilicho (in 396) once more repelled the Picts and Scots, and re-secured the Wall--is confirmed by Claudian, who makes Britain (in a sea-coloured cloak and bearskin head-gear) hail Stilicho as her deliverer:

Inde Caledonio velata Britannia monstro, Ferro picta genas, cujus vestigia verrit Coerulus, Oceanique aestum ment.i.tur, amictus: "Me quoque vicinis perc.u.n.tem gentibus," inquit, "Munivit Stilichon, totam quum Scotus Iernen Movit, et infesto spumavit remige Tethys. Illius effectum curis, ne tela timerem Scotica, ne Pictum tremerem, ne litore toto Prospicerem dubiis venturum Saxona ventis."[352]

[Then next, with Caledonian bearskin cowled, Her cheek steel-tinctured, and her trailing robe Of green-shot blue, like her own Ocean's tide, Britannia spake: "Me too," she cried, "in act To perish 'mid the shock of neighbouring hordes, Did Stilicho defend, when the wild Scot All Erin raised against me, and the wave Foamed 'neath the stroke of many a foeman's oar. So wrought his pains that now I fear no more Those Scottish darts, nor tremble at the Pict, Nor mark, where'er to sea mine eyes I turn, The Saxon coming on each shifting wind."]

C. 2.--Which legion it was which Stilicho sent to Britain is much more questionable. The Roman legions were seldom moved from province to province, and it is perhaps more probable that he filled up the three quartered in the island to something like their proper strength. But a crisis was now at hand which broke down all ordinary rules. Rome was threatened with such a danger as she had not known since Marius, five hundred years before, had destroyed the Cimbri and Teutones (B.C.

101). A like horde of Teutonic invaders, nearly half a million strong, came pouring over the Alps, under "Radagaisus the Goth," as contemporary historians call him, though his claim, to Gothic lineage is not undisputed. And these were not, like Alaric and his Visigoths, who were to reap the fruits of this effort, semi-civilized Christians, but heathen savages of the most ferocious type. Every nerve had to be strained to crush them; and Stilicho did crush them. But it was at a fearful cost. Every Roman soldier within reach had to be swept to the rescue, and thus the Rhine frontier was left defenceless against the barbarian hordes pressing upon it. Vandals, Sueves, Alans, Franks, Burgundians, rushed tumultuously over the peaceful and fertile fields of Gaul, never to be driven forth again.

C. 3.--Of the three British legions one only seems to have been thus withdrawn,--the Twentieth, whose head-quarters had been so long at Chester, and whose more recent duty had been to garrison the outlying province of Valentia, which may now perhaps have been again abandoned.

It seems to have been actually on the march towards Italy[353] when there was drawn up that wonderful doc.u.ment which gives us our last and completest glimpse of Roman Britain--the _Not.i.tia Dignitatum Utriusque Imperii_.

C. 4.--This invaluable work sets forth in detail the whole machinery of the Imperial Government, its official hierarchy, both civil and military, in every land, and a summary of the forces under the authority of each commander. A reference in Claudian would seem to show that it was compiled by the industry of Celerinus, the _Primicerius Notariorum_ or Head Clerk of the Treasury. The poet tells us how this indefatigable statistician--

"Cunctorum tabulas a.s.signat honorum, Regnorum tractat numeros, constringit in unum Sparsas Imperii vires, cuneosque recenset Dispositos; quae Sarmaticis custodia ripis, Quae saevis objecta Getis, quae Saxona frenat Vel Scotum legio; quantae cinxere cohortes Oceanum, quanto pacatur milite Rhenus."[354]

["Each rank, each office in his lists he shows, Tells every subject realm, together draws The Empire's scattered force, recounts the hosts In order meet;--which Legion is on guard By Danube's banks, which fronts the savage Goth, Which curbs the Saxon, which the Scot; what bands Begird the Ocean, what keep watch on Rhine."]

To us the 'Not.i.tia' is only known by the 16th-century copies of a 10th-century MS. which has now disappeared.[355] But these were made with exceptional care, and are as nearly as may be facsimiles of the original, even preserving its illuminated ill.u.s.trations, including the distinctive insignia of every corps in the Roman Army.

C. 5.--The number of these corps had, we find, grown erormously since the days of Hadrian, when, as Dion Ca.s.sius tells us, there were 19 "Civic Legions" (of which three were quartered in Britain). No fewer than 132 are now enumerated, together with 108 auxiliary bodies. But we may be sure that each of these "legions" was not the complete Army Corps of old,[356] though possibly the 25 of the First Cla.s.s, the _Legiones Palatinae_, may have kept something of their ancient effectiveness. Indeed it is not wholly improbable that these alone represent the old "civil" army; the Second and Third Cla.s.s "legions," with their extraordinary names ("Comitatenses" and "Pseudo-Comitatenses"), being indeed merely so called by "courtesy,"

or even "sham courtesy."

C. 6.--In Britain we find the two remaining legions of the old garrison, the Second, now quartered not at Caerleon but at Richborough, under the Count of the Saxon Sh.o.r.e, and the Sixth under the "Duke of the Britains," holding the north (with its head-quarters doubtless, as of yore, at York, though this is not mentioned). Along with each legion are named ten "squads" [_numeri_], which may perhaps represent the ten cohorts into which legions were of old divided. The word cohort seems to have changed its meaning, and now to signify an independent military unit under a "Tribune." Eighteen of these, together with six squadrons [_alae_] of cavalry, each commanded by a "Praefect," form the garrison of the Wall;--a separate organization, though, like the rest of the northern forces, under the Duke of the Britains. The ten squads belonging to the Sixth Legion (each under a Prefect) are distributed in garrison throughout Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Westmoreland. Those of the Second (each commanded by a "Praepositus") are partly under the Count of the Saxon Sh.o.r.e, holding the coast from the Wash to Arundel,[357] partly under the "Count of Britain," who was probably the senior officer in the island[358]

and responsible for its defence in general. Besides these bodies of infantry the British Army comprised eighteen cavalry units; three, besides the six on the Wall, being in the north, three on the Saxon Sh.o.r.e, and the remaining six under the immediate command of the Count of Britain, to whose troops no special quarters are a.s.signed. Not a single station is mentioned beyond the Wall, which supports the theory that the withdrawal of the Twentieth Legion had involved the practical abandonment of Valentia.[359]

C. 7.--The two Counts and the Duke were the military leaders of Britain. The chief civil officer was the "respectable" Vicar of the Diocese of Britain, one of the six Vicars under the "ill.u.s.trious"

Pro-consul of Africa. Under him were the Governors of the five Provinces, two of these being "Consulars" of "Right Renowned" rank [_clarissimi_,] the other three "Right Perfect" [_perfectissimi_]

"Presidents." The Vicar was a.s.sisted by a staff of Civil Servants, nine heads of departments being enumerated. Their names, however, have become so wholly obsolete as to tell us nothing of their respective functions.

C. 8.--Whatever these may have been they did not include the financial administration of the Diocese, the general management of which was in the hands of two officers, the "Accountant of Britain" [_Rationalis Summarum Britanniarum_] and the "Provost of the London Treasury"

[_Praepositus thesaurorum Augustensium_].[360] Both these were subordinates of the "Count of the Sacred Largesses" [_Comes Sacrarum Largitionum_], one of the greatest officers of State, corresponding to our First Lord of the Treasury, whose name reminds us that all public expenditure was supposed to be the personal benevolence of His Sacred Majesty the Emperor, and all sources of public revenue his personal property. The Emperor, however, had actually in every province domains of his own, managed by the Count of the Privy Purse [_Comes Rei Privatae_], whose subordinate in Britain was ent.i.tled the "Accountant of the Privy Purse for Britain" [_Rationalis Rei Privatae per Britanniam_]. Both these Counts were "Ill.u.s.trious" [_ill.u.s.tres_]; that is, of the highest order of the Imperial peerage below the "Right n.o.ble" [_n.o.bilissimi_] members of the Imperial Family.

C. 9.--Such and so complete was the system of civil and military government in Roman Britain up to the very point of its sudden and utter collapse. When the 'Not.i.tia' was compiled, neither Celerinus, as he wrote, nor the officials whose functions and ranks he noted, could have dreamt that within ten short years the whole elaborate fabric would, so far as Britain was concerned, be swept away utterly and for ever. Yet so it was.

C. 10.--For what was left of the British Army now made a last effort to save the West for Rome, and once more set up Imperial Pretenders of its own.[361] The first two of these, Marcus and Gratian, were speedily found unequal to the post, and paid the usual penalty of such incompetence; but the third, a private soldier named Constantine, all but succeeded in emulating the triumph of his great namesake. For four years (407-411) he was able to hold not only Britain, but Gaul and Spain also under his sceptre; and the wretched Honorius, the unworthy son and successor of Theodosius, who was cowering amid the marshes of Ravenna, and had murdered his champion Stilicho, was fain to recognize the usurper as a legitimate Augustus. Only by treachery was he put down at last, the traitor being the commander of his British forces, Gerontius. Both names continued for many an age favourites in British nomenclature, and both have been swept into the cycle of Arturian romance, the latter as "Geraint."

C. 11.--Neither Gerontius nor his soldiers ever got back to their old homes in Britain. What became of them we do not know. But Zosimus[362]

tells us that Honorius now sent a formal rescript to the British cities abrogating the Lex Julia, which forbade civilians to carry arms, and bidding them look to their own safety. For now the end had really come, and the Eternal City itself had been sacked by barbarian hands. Never before and never since does history record a sacked city so mildly treated by the conquerors. Heretics as the Visi-goths were, they never forgot that the vanquished Catholics were their fellow-Christians, and, barbarians as they were, they left an example of mercy in victory which puts to the blush much more recent Christian and civilized warfare.

C. 12.--But, for all that, the moral effect of Alaric's capture of Rome was portentous, and shook the very foundations of civilization throughout the world. To Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem, the tidings came like the shock of an earthquake. Augustine, as he penned his 'De Civitate Dei,' felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole elaborate system of Imperial civil and military government seems to have crumbled to the ground almost at once. It is noticeable that the rescript of Honorius is addressed simply to "the cities" of Britain, the local munic.i.p.al officers of each several place. No higher authority remained. The Vicar of Britain, with his staff, the Count and Duke of the Britains with their soldiery, the Count of the Saxon Sh.o.r.e with his coastguard,--all were gone. It is possible that, as the deserted provincials learnt to combine for defence, the Dictators they chose from time to time to lead the national forces may have derived some of their authority from the remembrance of these old dignities. "The dragon of the great Pendragonship,"[363] the tufa of Caswallon (633), and the purple of Cunedda[364] may well have been derived (as Professor Rhys suggests) from this source. But practically the history of Roman Britain ends with a crash at the Fall of Rome.

SECTION D.

Beginning of English Conquest--Vortigern--Jutes in Thanet--Battle of Stamford--Ma.s.sacre of Britons--Valentinian III.--Latest Roman coin found in Britain--Progress of Conquest--The Cymry--Survival of Romano-British t.i.tles--Arturian Romances--Procopius--Belisarius--Roman claims revived by Charlemagne--The British Empire.

D. 1.--Little remains to be told, and that little rests upon no contemporary authority known to us. In Gildas, the nearest, writing in the next century, we find little more than a monotonous threnody over the awful visitation of the English Conquest, the wholesale and utter destruction of cities, the desecration of churches, the ma.s.sacre of clergy and people. Nennius (as, for the sake of convenience, modern writers mostly agree to call the unknown author of the 'Historia Britonum') gives us legends of British incompetence and Saxon treachery which doubtless represent the substantial features of the break-up, and preserve, quite possibly, even some of the details. Bede and the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' a.s.sign actual dates to the various events, but we have no means of testing their accuracy.

D. 2.--Broadly we know that the unhappy civilians, who were not only without military experience, but had up to this moment been actually forbidden to carry arms, naturally proved unable to face the ferocious enemies who swarmed in upon them. They could neither hold the Wall against the Picts nor the coast against the Saxons. It may well be true that they chose a _Dux Britannorum_,[365] and that his name may have been something like Vortigern, and that he (when a final appeal for Roman aid proved vain)[366] may have taken into his pay (as Carausius did) the crews of certain pirate "keels" [_chiulae_],[367]

and settled them in Thanet. The very names of their English captains, "Hengist and Horsa," may not be so mythical as critics commonly a.s.sume.[368] And the tale of the victory at Stamford, when the spears of the Scottish invaders were cut to pieces by the swords of the English mercenaries,[369] has a very true ring about it. So has also the sequel, which tells how, when the inevitable quarrel arose between employers and employed, the Saxon leader gave the signal for the fray by suddenly shouting to his men, _Nimed eure saxes_[370] (_i.e._ "Draw your knives!"), and ma.s.sacred the hapless Britons of Kent almost without resistance.

D. 3.--The date of this first English settlement is doubtful. Bede fixes it as 449, which agrees with the order of events in Gildas, and with the notice in Nennius that it was forty years after the end of Roman rule in Britain [_transacto Romanorum in Britannia imperio_].

But Nennius also declares that this was in the fourth year of Vortigern, and that his accession coincided with that of the nephew and successor of Honorius, Valentinian III., son of Galla Placidia, which would bring in the Saxons 428. It may perhaps be some very slight confirmation of the later date, that Valentinian is the last Emperor whose coins have been found in Britain.[371]

D. 4.--Anyhow, the arrival of the successive swarms of Anglo-Saxons from the mouth of the Elbe, and their hard-won conquest of Eastern Britain during the 5th century, is certain. The western half of the island, from Clydesdale southwards, resisted much longer, and, in spite of its long and straggling frontier, held together for more than a century. Not till the decisive victory of the Northumbrians at Chester (A.D. 607), and that of the West Saxons at Beandune (A.D. 614) was this Cymrian federation finally broken into three fragments, each destined shortly to disintegrate into an ever-shifting medley of petty princ.i.p.alities. Yet in each the ideal of national and racial unity embodied in the word Cymry[372] long survived; and t.i.tles borne to this day by our Royal House, "Duke of Cornwall," "Prince of Wales,"

"Duke of Albany," are the far-off echoes, lingering in each, of the Roman "Comes Britanniae" and "Dux Britanniarum." The three feathers of the Princ.i.p.ality may in like manner be traced to the _tufa_, or plume, borne before the supreme authority amongst the Romans of old, as the like are borne before the Supreme Head of the Roman Church to this day. And age after age the Cymric harpers sang of the days when British armies had marched in triumph to Rome, and the Empire had been won by British princes, till the exploits of their mystical "Arthur"[373] became the nucleus of a whole cycle of mediaeval romance, and even, for a while, a real force in practical politics.[374]

D. 5.--And as the Britons never quite forgot their claims on the Empire, so the Empire never quite forgot its claims on Britain. How entirely the island was cut off from Rome we can best appreciate by the references to it in Procopius. This learned author, writing under Justinian, scarcely 150 years since the day when the land was fully Roman, conceives of Britannia and Brittia as two widely distant islands--the one off the coast of Spain, the other off the mouth of the Rhine.[375] The latter is shared between the Angili, Phrissones,[376] and Britons, and is divided _from North to South_[377] by a mighty Wall, beyond which no mortal man can breathe. Hither are ferried over from Gaul by night the souls of the departed;[378] the fishermen, whom a mysterious voice summons to the work, seeing no one, but perceiving their barks to be heavily sunk in the water, yet accomplishing the voyage with supernatural celerity.

D. 6.--About the same date Belisarius offered to the Goths,[379] in exchange for their claim to Sicily, which his victories had already rendered practically nugatory, the Roman claims to Britain, "a much larger island," which were equally outside the scope of practical politics for the moment, but might at any favourable opportunity be once more brought forward. And, when the Western Empire was revived under Charlemagne, they were in fact brought forward, and actually submitted to by half the island. The Celtic princes of Scotland, the Anglians of Northumbria, and the Jutes of Kent alike owned the new Caesar as their Suzerain. And the claim was only abrogated by the triumph of the counter-claim first made by Egbert, emphasized by Edward the Elder, and repeated again and again by our monarchs their descendants, that the British Crown owes no allegiance to any potentate on earth, being itself not only Royal, but in the fullest sense Imperial.[380]

SECTION E.

Survivals of Romano-British civilization--Romano-British Church--Legends of its origin--St. Paul--St. Peter--Joseph of Arimathaea--Glas...o...b..ry--Historical notices--Claudia and Pudens--Pomponia--Church of St. Pudentiana--Patristic references to Britain--Tertullian--Origen--Legend of Lucius--Native Christianity--British Bishops at Councils--Testimony of Chrysostom and Jerome.