The Men of the North E-Book

Tim Clarkson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 528

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The North Britons are the least-known among the inhabitants of early medieval Scotland. Like the Picts and Vikings they played an important role in the shaping of Scottish history during the first millennium AD but their part is often neglected or ignored. This book aims to redress the balance by tracing the history of this native Celtic people through the troubled centuries from the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans. The fortunes of Strathclyde, the last-surviving kingdom of the North Britons, are studied from its emergence at Dumbarton in the fifth century to its eventual demise in the eleventh. Other kingdoms, such as the Edinburgh-based realm of Gododdin and the mysterious Rheged, are examined alongside fragments of heroic poetry celebrating the valour of their warriors. Behind the recurrent themes of warfare and political rivalry runs a parallel thread dealing with the growth of Christianity and the influence of the Church in the affairs of kings. Important ecclesiastical figures such as Ninian of Whithorn and Kentigern of Glasgow are discussed, partly in the hope of unearthing their true identities among a tangled web of sources. The closing chapters of the book look at how and why the North Britons lost their distinct identity to join their old enemies the Picts as one of Scotland's vanished nations.

Leseprobe

THE MEN OF THE NORTH

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Tim Clarkson 2010

First published in 2010 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

The moral right of Tim Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-906566-18-0 eBook ISBN: 978-1-907909-02-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Genealogical Tables

Introduction

1 Origins

2 Forth and Clyde

3 Early Christianity

4 Four Kings

5 Two Battles

6 Northumbria

7 Victors and Vanquished

8 Friends and Foes

9 Strathclyde

10 Identities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing this book I have benefited from advice and assistance given generously by a number of people. To them I express my gratitude for helpful comments and suggestions on specific points, or for providing me with useful information. I wish to particularly thank Hugh Andrew, Stephen Driscoll, Kevin Halloran, Alex Woolf and Michelle Ziegler. Any errors and idiosyncracies in the book are, of course, entirely of my own devising. On the editorial side I am grateful to Mairi Sutherland for her unwavering patience and attentiveness, and to Jackie Henrie for ironing out the crinkles in the narrative. Mark Brennand at Cumbria Historic Environment Service kindly gave permission to reproduce the aerial photographs of Liddel Strength. Other photography is the work of my wife Barbara who took on the additional role of chauffeuse along the highways and byways of Scotland.

TC

Kings of Alt Clut, fifth to ninth centuries, based on the Harleian pedigree of Rhun ab Arthgal. Names in bold are attested as kings in sources outside the pedigree.

Bernician kings of the sixth and seventh centuries (dates derived from Bede). Some siblings omitted in each generation.

The family of Urien Rheged

Kings of Strathclyde, c.870 to c.1060, shown in bold. Based on a table produced by Dauvit Broun (Broun 2004, 135).

INTRODUCTION

Gwŷr y Gogledd

The medieval kingdom of Scotland began as a fusion of different peoples, each with their own language and culture, who were brought together during a period of change spanning the ninth to twelfth centuries. Two groups in particular – the Scots and the Picts – are generally viewed as the most important players in the process, their ‘unification’ in the mid-ninth century being seen as the beginning of a recognisable Scottish identity. The other main groups were the Scandinavians, the English and the Britons, the latter two inhabiting what are now the Lowlands south of the River Forth. By c.1100 most people living north of the Forth spoke Gaelic, the language of the Scots, even if the speech of their forebears had been Pictish. Their neighbours to the south-east, in Lothian, had become subjects of the Scottish kingdom but many were English-speakers whose ancestors had been ruled by English kings. From the speech of these Lowlanders came the tongue we now call Scots or Scottis, essentially a northern English dialect. The lands west of Lothian were inhabited by a people who spoke neither Gaelic nor English. These were the last remnant of the North Britons, a group whose role in the shaping of Scotland is frequently ignored, forgotten, or overshadowed by the roles played by their neighbours. To their English-speaking contemporaries they were known as wealas, ‘Welsh’, and in Latin documents of the time they appear as Cumbrenses, ‘Cumbrians’. Their language no longer survives but it was descended from an indigenous tongue, commonly termed Brittonic or Brythonic, that had once been spoken in almost every part of Britain. Brittonic survives today in several evolved forms as the living languages of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany but it ceased to be heard in Scotland 800 or 900 years ago. Its disappearance became inevitable in an age when those who used it faced strong pressure to adopt alternative tongues such as Gaelic and English.

Few traces of the North Britons have survived, hence their often minor presence in our history books. In terms of a general picture of Scottish medieval history they are far less well-known than the Scots, Picts and Vikings. Much of what we know about them comes not from Scotland but from Wales, from a body of literature in which their kings were praised as mighty warlords in a remote heroic age. To a thirteenth-century Welshman these kings of old were his fellow countrymen, members of an ancient British nation to which he himself belonged. In his own language he knew them as Gwŷr y Gogledd, the Men of the North.

Sources

This book represents one attempt to construct a narrative history of the North Britons. The sources involved in such a construction (or reconstruction) are not especially suited to the task, nor do they sit comfortably under the kind of close academic scrutiny to which they have been justifiably exposed in recent years. In many cases this scrutiny was long overdue. Some sources have indeed failed the strict reliability tests demanded by today’s scholarship, usually because they have turned out to be far removed in time and place from the historical events they claim to report. Others pass the tests with certain caveats which mean that they can be used only with caution or in circumstances where no alternative source exists. Casual acceptance of information provided by these texts is no longer an option. All of them invite scepticism and none can be accepted at face value. In the chapters that follow some of the most important sources are discussed individually or in genre-groups. Space considerations and the needs of the narrative mean that no individual source is examined in great detail, although references point to further reading on particular issues. In this introductory section a brief and selective survey is offered as a preliminary overview of the literature.

The main time-period covered by this book falls between c.400 and c.1150. The first half of this span corresponds roughly to an era now termed Early Historic, a time when an indigenous tradition of historical writing began to appear in the British Isles. The foremost ambassador of this tradition was Bede, an English monk who lived in the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow during the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Bede is usually regarded as a fairly reliable historian, and in certain respects this is probably true, but he was not really a historian by any modern definition. His vision of the world perceived human history as the gradual unfolding of God’s Will with regard to mankind in general and to the English in particular. This perception runs through his best-known work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in which he presented a view of events in his homeland from Roman times through the ensuing centuries to the twilight of his own life in 731. He has much to say of northern Britain, including the parts later to become Scotland, but in the Britons themselves he had little interest. In fact, he frequently regarded them with disdain.

A rather less partisan approach to the Britons appears in a group of texts known collectively as the Irish annals. Unlike Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, of which two early copies survive in manuscripts written between 737 and 747, the Irish annals are preserved only in manuscripts of much later date. Current opinion nevertheless regards their core as a set of annals compiled at the monastery of Iona from the seventh century to the eighth, with material thereafter being added in Ireland. Many entries are not, however, contemporary with the events they describe and were added retrospectively by scribes of a later period. The two major collections – the annals of Ulster and of Tigernach – both incorporate the earlier Iona material, and it is to Iona that we owe much of our knowledge of the early history of Scotland. For information on later times we are obliged to turn to less reliable sources of Irish, Scottish and English origin. Among the Scottish material is a text sometimes known as the Scottish Chronicle or, in more recent usage, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, a text found in a fourteenth-century compilation of materials relating to Scotland. The Chronicle deals with events from the ninth to eleventh centuries and, although much of its data is of uncertain provenance, it is generally regarded as an important documentary source. It provides useful information for the period covered in the final three chapters of this book. Other sources of Scottish or Irish origin include the enigmatic Berchan’s Prophecy, the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland and various king-lists.

From England in addition to Bede we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, king-lists, a brief chronology known as the ‘Continuation’ of Bede and several twelfth-century chronicles, including the History of the Kings attributed to Symeon of Durham. Sources from Wales include poetry, genealogical tracts, the Annales Cambriae, ‘Welsh Annals’, and a narrative chronicle called Historia Brittonum, ‘History of the Britons’. Some of these Welsh texts are discussed individually in the early chapters of this book where their uses and limitations are noted. Finally, the genre of hagiography – writings about the careers of saints – provides a wealth of fact, fiction and folklore assembled in the guise of authentic history. The usual hagiographical format is a vita or ‘life’ of an individual figure, often written many centuries after his or her death. Hagiographical works of Scottish, Irish, English and Continental origin have been consulted during the writing of this book and are cited in the narrative where appropriate. As a convenient shorthand these and other primary sources are often abbreviated in the bibliographical notes at the end of the book. The abbreviations cited most frequently are:

AC

Annales Cambriae

ASC

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

AT

Annals of Tigernach

AU

Annals of Ulster

HB

Historia Brittonum

HE

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History

HRA

Historia Regum Anglorum attributed to Symeon of Durham

Scot Chron

Scottish Chronicle

VSK

Vita Sancti Kentigerni, ‘Life of Saint Kentigern’, by Jocelin of Furness

Terminology

The term Early Historic is used here in relation to c.400 to c.800, an era loosely defined as ‘between the Romans and the Vikings’. Events of the longer period spanned by the fifth to eleventh centuries are described in this book as ‘early medieval’, although in a wider European context this term encompasses an era stretching from c.300 to c.1100. The boundaries between these chronological blocks are in any case fairly loose. A rather tighter precision is applied here to terminology descriptive of places and peoples. Thus, the term ‘Scotland’ is not used in the sense of a political entity until the later chapters, although throughout the book it occasionally appears in contexts relating to landscape and geography. In political contexts the more neutral term ‘northern Britain’ is generally preferred, primarily because the book makes frequent reference not only to Scotland but also to territories in what is now northern England. ‘Britain’ means here the island of Britain with its associated isles, excluding Ireland, but ‘Britons’ and ‘British’ are used in a much narrower sense to denote the native population at the time of the Roman invasion. Other ethnic terms such as ‘Picts’ and ‘Irish’ need no explanation, but ‘Scots’ is another term used here without its modern connotations. In this book the Scots are not the people of the country we now call Scotland but a Gaelic-speaking group based originally in Argyll. Occasionally their territory is referred to here as Dalriada, although without any implication of cohesion or unity among their separate kin-groups. The English of the early medieval period, from their first appearance in Britain during Late Roman times to their conquest by the Normans in 1066, are commonly known as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, a term used also in this book.

A final point of explanation relates to the book’s title, The Men of the North, a term interpreted by some historians as defining a group of sixth-century kings who appear in Welsh heroic poems and genealogical ‘pedigrees’.1 In this book the term is used less restrictively to include any North British king whose ancestry was recorded in the Welsh genealogical tracts or whose existence was noted in other records. Since the genealogies include the pedigree of a king called Rhun who ruled on the Clyde in the late ninth century, this individual is regarded here as one of the Men of the North. Rhun’s immediate successor is absent from the pedigree, but the death of Owain, a later representative of the dynasty, is briefly noted in the Welsh Annals at 1015. One historian regarded the first North British entry in these annals at 573 as the beginning of a ‘historical horizon’ for Latin records of the Men of the North.2 By projecting this same literary horizon forward in time we eventually come to Owain’s obit, the last Latin entry made by the Welsh annalists in relation to a North British king. This book duly assigns the era of the Gwŷr y Gogledd, the Men of the North, to the four and a half centuries between the years 573 and 1015.

Patronyms appear in this book in a style appropriate to the cultural group concerned. Those of Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) origin are shown with mac, ‘son of’, while Welsh and British ones have the equivalent term ap(from an earlier form map). Respective examples are Cináed mac Ailpín and Owain ab Urien (ap becomes ab when it precedes a name starting with a vowel). Spellings of some personal names are here given in forms that might now be considered ‘old-fashioned’, such as Constantine rather than the Gaelic or Pictish equivalents Causantin or Custantin, Malcolm rather than Máel Coluim and Olaf rather than Gaelic Amlaib or Old Norse Anlaf. There currently seems to be no consensus on Welsh and British names so ‘traditional’ forms such as Owain are used in this book, despite a recent trend towards older variants as found in the sources (e.g. Eugein for Owain, Urbgen for Urien). To modern Anglophones (English-speakers) some Welsh and Gaelic names look difficult to pronounce, but a useful starting-point is the ‘hard C’ rule whereby C is always pronounced K and never has the sound of S. Space forbids a lengthy pronunciation guide, but the following names are shown here with their approximate ‘sounds’:

A very useful ‘quick reference’ guide to pronunciation of Gaelic, Welsh and Old English names can be found in Alex Woolf’s recent book From Pictland to Alba.

Structure and Format

The primary theme of this book is political history. In an early medieval context this normally means the deeds of kings and the relationships between kingdoms. Other topics, such as social history and archaeology, are also encountered where the narrative requires reference to them. Detailed analysis of the literary sources is absent, as mentioned above, although some texts receive a lengthier summary than others.

In the first chapter we meet the North Britons on the eve of their conquest by Rome. A synopsis of the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain then brings us to the troubled years around AD 400 and to the period of transition from the Late Roman to Early Historic periods. We examine what happened to the Britons living on either side of Hadrian’s Wall during the collapse of Roman rule and discuss their differing experiences during the great upheavals of the fifth century. Chapter 2 looks at the North British kingdoms that began to emerge into the historical record after c.500, taking the form of a political survey of the region between Hadrian’s Wall and the Forth–Clyde isthmus. It is followed by a chapter dealing with the arrival of Christianity in the same region. The narrative then returns to political history with a look at four North British kings who appear in a controversial passage in the Historia Brittonum. One of these kings is Urien Rheged, the most famous of the Gwŷr y Gogledd, and here the conventional view of his kingdom’s location is challenged. A similar challenge forms the second part of the next chapter (Chapter 5) where, after a study of the Battle of Arfderydd, the traditional identification of the place known in Welsh sources as Catraeth is brought under scrutiny. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 take the narrative onward through the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries to c.900. At this point in the chronology only one North British kingdom still flourished, its fate in the following two centuries forming the main focus of Chapter 9. The final chapter examines the disappearance of the North Britons and looks at traces of their former presence in place-names and folklore.

The North Britons and their neighbours in Late Roman times.

1

ORIGINS

Britain and Rome

The historical record first takes note of the peoples of northern Britain in the first century AD, when they encountered the military might of the Roman Empire. Rome’s conquest of the island began with an invasion in the year 43 and many southern parts were rapidly subjugated. The region north of the Humber and Mersey remained unconquered for a time, largely due to a negotiated agreement with the Brigantes, a tribal confederacy holding power on both sides of the Pennines.1 With the appearance of the Brigantes in Roman records we encounter an identifiable group of North British people, even if we are not told much about who they were or how they lived. What we do learn is that their confederacy of tribes or septs was ruled by a paramount monarch whose core domain lay in Yorkshire. In the years following the Roman invasion this was the formidable Queen Cartimandua, a shrewd politician who entered into a treaty with Rome. Brutal suppression of the southern British tribes by Roman forces eventually turned the Brigantes against their queen and she was deposed in a coup d’état. Rome responded by invading Brigantia in great force. The initial war lasted from 71 to 74, breaking the backbone of the native resistance. It was followed at the end of the same decade by a campaign of conquest led by Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a talented commander whose achievements in Britain were described by his son-in-law Cornelius Tacitus. Through the writings of Tacitus we meet not only the Brigantes but also other tribes further north, all of whom were subjugated in a series of campaigns lasting from 79 to 82. Roman forts were established in Brigantian territory east and west of the Pennines and in lands northward as far as the Forth–Clyde isthmus. Few native groups dared to risk a military confrontation and most surrendered to Agricola without a fight. Some, such as the Votadini of Lothian, may already have made treaties with Rome before Agricola’s arrival on their borders. Others gave up their independence less willingly, preferring to risk defeat and death and the ravaging of their lands. The distribution of first-century Roman forts in the Tweed Valley and adjacent areas suggests that the Selgovae, the people of this central region, required putting down by force. Further west, in Dumfriesshire and Galloway, a confederacy of peoples called Novantae was brought to heel during the campaigning season of 82. The northern neighbours of the Novantae were the Damnonii of the Clyde whose territory encompassed Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire and parts of Lanarkshire. Like the Votadini of Lothian the Damnonii may have voluntarily submitted to Rome, trading their independence for clientship and so avoiding the devastation threatened by Agricola’s army.

In 83 the first Roman attempt to conquer the Highlands was launched by Agricola from military bases south of the Forth–Clyde isthmus.2 A major northward push brought Roman troops across the River Tay and face-to-face with another tribal confederacy, the Caledonii of Perthshire, whose stubborn defiance was barely subdued by a crushing defeat at the battle of Mons Graupius. Not even this victory achieved sufficient gains to provide a springboard for permanent conquest and Agricola eventually withdrew. A frontier of watchtowers was established along the Gask Ridge on the southern fringe of Caledonian lands, but this was abandoned before the end of the century. By c.105 the north-west frontier of the Roman Empire had withdrawn to a line drawn between Tyne and Solway. Behind this boundary the Brigantes and other tribes remained in subjection to Rome, their freedom curtailed by a heavy military presence. North of the line, as far as the Forth and Clyde, the Agricolan forts were abandoned and the natives reasserted their independence.

The early second century saw the progressive Romanisation of Britain south of the Tyne–Solway frontier. This was part of Rome’s standard package for newly conquered peoples and involved a restructuring of indigenous society. In Gaul and Spain the same process saw the total replacement of native languages by Latin and the dismantling of native cultures. In Britain these changes were never fully completed. Brittonic, the Celtic language of the Britons, maintained a strong presence among the subject population and continued to be the preferred medium of everyday discourse in many northern areas. In southern Britain below the estuaries of Humber and Mersey the natives were reorganised by Rome into tribal civitates administered from newly built towns and cities. In these centres of trade and administration an urban elite of wealthy, Latin-speaking Britons arose as an upper class whose members were probably descended – in many cases – from the old warrior-aristocracies of pre-Roman times. A few civitates were established further north, perhaps in an attempt to control the Brigantian heartlands. One of these was the civitas Brigantiarum centred on the eastern edge of the Pennines, while another was established for a people called Parisii who lived near the North Sea coastlands. Much of the former Brigantia lay under direct military rule. Forts garrisoned by units of auxiliaries from all parts of the Empire gave the Roman authorities tight control over the native population in this area, while a network of roads enabled troops to be deployed quickly to deal with outbreaks of unrest. There appears to have been no significant attempt to Romanise the people of this military zone, but every effort was made to police them intensively and to deter any rebellious elements still lurking among them. Justification for such heavy-handed monitoring was demonstrated between 110 and 120 when a major revolt caused upheaval on the frontier. The insurgents were probably the Brigantes, possibly with aid or encouragement from fellow Britons dwelling north of the Tyne–Solway frontier. By c.119 the uprising had been suppressed and a measure of stability returned. To consolidate the frontier a massive stone rampart was erected on the orders of the emperor Hadrian who visited Britain in 122. Whether its primary purpose was to deter attacks from the north or disrupt communication between the Brigantes and their neighbours is unknown. It may have been built as an imposing display of Rome’s prestige, or perhaps of Hadrian’s. If it had any military or defensive purpose as a physical barrier, this was negated around the time of completion in c.140. In that year the new emperor Antoninus launched a second invasion northward, his campaign achieving a reconquest as far as the Forth–Clyde isthmus. Forts abandoned after the withdrawal at the beginning of the century were now re-garrisoned and the isthmus became the new imperial frontier. Antoninus fought and defeated one or more tribes – perhaps the Selgovae of Tweeddale – and compelled the rest to renew their submission to Rome. He then constructed a wall of his own, a rampart of turf rather than of stone, and placed a chain of forts along its length. The Antonine Wall ran from Kinneil in the east to Old Kilpatrick in the west and was evidently intended as a bulwark against raids from the Highlands. If defence rather than propaganda was indeed its primary purpose, the group it was most likely meant to deter were Agricola’s old adversaries the Caledonii.

Another revolt in the 150s, probably by Britons living on either side of Hadrian’s Wall, necessitated a major redeployment of troops and a withdrawal from the Antonine frontier. The isthmus was briefly re-garrisoned after the defeat of the rebels, but military requirements elsewhere in the Empire led to a second and permanent abandonment in c.160. Final withdrawal to the Tyne–Solway line did not happen immediately and, for a time, a handful of forts north of Hadrian’s Wall were still manned. The political situation implied by these military outposts is that the Britons dwelling between the two walls – the Damnonii, Novantae, Selgovae and Votadini – remained tied to the Empire through treaties and therefore required monitoring. Similar relationships between Romans and natives existed on other frontiers, often taking the form of mutual promises of protection in the event of attack by a common foe. In the case of northern Britain in the late second century the chief menace lay beyond the abandoned Antonine Wall where two aggressive groups now posed an imminent threat. One was the Caledonian confederacy of Perthshire, the other a people known to the Romans as Maeatae who dwelt immediately north of the Antonine line. The Maeatae inhabited Stirlingshire and were independent of the Caledonii but apparently in league with them. Both groups attacked Roman Britain at the end of the second century, wreaking havoc as far south as Hadrian’s Wall. They were eventually bought off with cash from the imperial treasury but could not be kept quiet for long and, as the third century dawned, they resumed their raids. In 208 the emperor Severus personally took charge of the situation, arriving in Britain with the intention of conquering the troublesome northerners. A brutal war against the Maeatae drove them to the brink of extinction and they were only saved by the death of Severus, whose son Caracalla negotiated a peace treaty. Caracalla promptly abandoned the campaign and returned to Rome, his departure signalling a final withdrawal from the Forth–Clyde isthmus and consolidation of the imperial frontier along the Hadrianic line. A reduced military presence was retained in the region between the walls: units still manned outpost forts at High Rochester and Risingham on the major road known today as Dere Street, and at Bewcastle and Netherby further west. The Britons of this area remained outside the Empire but benefited from guarantees of protection offered by Rome. In return they served as a buffer against raids from the North, their obligations as clients being periodically renewed at formal gatherings overseen by Roman officials. Throughout their lands imperial agents known as arcani undertook intelligence-gathering missions, seeking news of barbarian movements further north as well as keeping an eye on unruly elements closer to home. At Netherby a unit of exploratores, ‘scouts’ or ‘rangers’, undertook similar functions to the arcani or were perhaps identical with them. The new defensive system, based on a symbiotic relationship between the Roman garrison of Hadrian’s Wall and autonomous Britons in the lands beyond, seems to have worked effectively for a number of years. Roman writers refer to no wars or incursions during much of the third century, although their perceptions of the population north of the Forth evidently changed. A new people, the Picti or Picts, emerge into the historical record in 297. The Picts included the Caledonii of former times together with other groups, all of whom were now collectively regarded as ‘Pictish’ by their neighbours further south. The new name may have originated as a pejorative label bestowed by external foes rather than as a reflection of social or political changes among the peoples of the far north. Whatever its origin or meaning the term passed into common usage along the imperial frontier and was soon adopted by contemporary chroniclers. By c.300 Pictish and Irish pirates were mounting seaborne raids on the exposed coasts of Roman Britain, a trend that steadily escalated as the new century progressed.

No more revolts by the Brigantes were recorded in the third century. By c.300 the native population south of Hadrian’s Wall had seemingly accepted the presence of an occupying force. Nonetheless, a continuing threat from external foes compelled Rome to maintain a large garrison on both sides of the Pennines, and thus the entire region remained a militarised zone. In the third century Roman Britain consisted of two provinces which together constituted a diocese of the Empire. The old Brigantian lands north of the Humber and Mersey were part of a northern province, Britannia Inferior or ‘Lower Britain’, while the southern or ‘Upper’ province was designated Britannia Superior. In the fourth century the diocese was further subdivided to form a quartet of provinces, the most northerly being designated Britannia Secunda, ‘Britain II’, broadly coterminous with ancient Brigantia. Britannia Secunda lay under direct military rule, its administration operating from the fortress of the Sixth Legion at York. This province was a militarised zone in the sense of being tightly controlled by the Roman army. By contrast, the Britons of this area were a thoroughly demilitarised population. Even their elite class – the descendants of the Brigantian aristocracy – were weaponless and politically impotent. All civilians who lived under the army’s jurisdiction were answerable to fort-commanders in their local area. All of them were part of an economy designed to serve the demands of the troops. There were few structures of local government and only a handful of urban settlements. Towns were established at York, Aldborough, Carlisle and Corbridge, but the urbanisation and Romanisation seen in the tribal civitates of the South were never more than a thin veneer in the North. Rome gave the southern Britons a measure of local self-government but there was little scope for such delegation in the northern military zone. A few ‘local councils’ were established here and there in Britannia Secunda, but their powers were limited to whatever scraps of authority the army saw fit to offload. Outside the walls of some northern forts civilian settlements sprang up to serve and exploit the needs of the soldiers. These settlements were called vici and their inhabitants were vicani or ‘vicus dwellers’. Most vicani were Britons, often the wives and families of soldiers, or local entrepreneurs providing goods and services. The typical vicus was essentially a boom-town tolerated by the imperial authorities as an inevitable consequence of a prolonged military occupation. In economic terms all vici were utterly dependent on the forts and had no raison d’être without the army. The same comment applies to the entire native population of the military zone, for civilians and soldiers alike lived within an artificial economy generated by the presence of large numbers of troops. Every stakeholder in the system, from the peasant farmer producing barley for the local garrison to the fort-commander ordering wine for a banquet, knew that a major socio-economic catastrophe would befall the region if ever the army departed. The remainder of this chapter looks at the varied responses of the Britons, both north and south of Hadrian’s Wall, when this fragile superstructure eventually collapsed.

The End of Roman Britain

Britannia Secunda, the northern province of the British diocese, was a region under military rule. Its centre of administration lay at York, the headquarters of the Dux Britanniarum or ‘Duke of the Britains’. The rank of this senior officer implies command of imperial troops in all four provinces of the British diocese, but his primary responsibilities were Hadrian’s Wall and the adjacent coasts. Further north, between the Wall and the Forth–Clyde isthmus, lay lands no longer formally governed by Rome but still important to the interests of the Empire. Since the abandonment of the Antonine frontier the people of this intervallate (‘between the walls’) region had regained a substantial measure of independence. They were Britons, like their neighbours in the Roman province to the south, but their society was more ‘barbarian’. This term carries no implication of savagery and is merely used to indicate their separation from the Empire. It is possible that their fourth-century political divisions still corresponded to the four major groupings or tribal confederacies of earlier times, namely the Damnonii around the Clyde, the Votadini of Lothian, the Selgovae of Tweeddale and the Novantae of Galloway. In the case of the Damnonii and Votadini substantial continuity throughout the entire Roman period is implied by the evolution of their respective heartlands into later kingdoms. It seems likely that the relationship between the intervallate Britons and the Empire was based on treaty, imperial subsidy and reciprocal military obligations.

Beyond the Forth–Clyde isthmus lay vast tracts of territory that had never owed allegiance to Rome. This was a region where Agricola and Severus had tried and failed to subjugate the natives, an area whose harsh terrain would continue to challenge invaders for centuries to come. Here dwelt the Picts, a people whose language was closely related to that of the Britons but whose culture displayed sufficient differences to define them as a separate group. Their heartlands lay north of the Firth of Forth in what are now Perthshire, Fife and Aberdeenshire, but the Orkney and Shetland Isles were also Pictish and so were many parts of the central and western Highlands. South of the Picts, in an area broadly coterminous with what is now Stirlingshire, lurked the Maeatae, a people described by Roman writers as living immediately north of the Antonine Wall. Although the Maeatae were associated by Rome with the worst excesses of the Picts, they are nevertheless identifiable as Britons or, to put it another way, there is no evidence that their cultural affiliation was Pictish. Their status vis-à-vis the Roman authorities was, however, quite distinct from that of their fellow Britons south of the Forth–Clyde isthmus: they were regarded as enemies of the Empire and thus as a truly ‘barbarian’ people. West of the Maeatae and somewhat north and west of the Damnonii of Clydesdale lay the shorelands and islands of Argyll. This was the home of a people known to the Romans as Scotti, ‘Scots’. Until fairly recently, a long-established conventional wisdom believed that the Scots of Argyll had come from northern Ireland as immigrants to Britain sometime around AD 500. This has now been challenged by an alternative view which sees them as an indigenous, Gaelic-speaking group whose ancestors simply adopted the language of the Irish as a result of social and economic contacts. More will be said of the Scots, Picts and Maeatae in subsequent chapters, but for the moment our focus switches back to the intervallate Britons and to their dealings with Rome in the fourth century.

The outpost forts in the region between the walls were gradually abandoned as the fourth century progressed. Since c.250 only four had been garrisoned and these were located not far north of Hadrian’s Wall. With so few forward bases no intensive monitoring was possible, although the arcani and exploratores still patrolled this region. The Dux Britanniarum and his subordinates relied on accurate intelligence on what was happening in the lands beyond the frontier to enable them to anticipate raids across the Forth–Clyde isthmus. The main threat, as in previous centuries, came from the Picts. Other dangerous marauders were the Gaelic-speaking peoples of northern Ireland and Argyll – collectively the Scotti– and a mysterious group called Attacotti who perhaps came from the Hebrides. An additional threat came from Continental Europe, from barbarian nations living beyond the imperial frontier along the Rhine. Pirates from northern Germany were increasingly raiding the eastern and southern coasts of Roman Britain, from the mouth of the Tyne to the Thames estuary. In an effort to deal with these ‘Saxons’ a specific military command was created, headed by the Comes Litoris Saxonici, the Count of the Saxon Shore. His base lay in one of the massive fortresses that ran in a wide arc along the south-eastern coastlands facing the Continent. Neither he, nor the Dux Britanniarum at York, nor indeed any loyal commander in the Roman administration, was able to anticipate or prevent the catastrophe that suddenly engulfed them in 367. In that year, according to the historian and soldier Ammianus Marcellinus, the various raiders joined together to launch a combined onslaught, a ‘barbarian conspiracy’.3 Its objective was to paralyse the imperial forces by hurling them into disarray, thus allowing bands of pirates to penetrate far inland in search of plunder. The assault was successful: vast amounts of loot were taken, forts were destroyed, Hadrian’s Wall was overwhelmed and the imperial infrastructure collapsed. Both the Duke of the Britains and the Count of the Saxon Shore were slain, together with countless soldiers and civilians. Barbarian warbands roamed freely, wreaking havoc across the countryside, while gangs of Roman deserters inflicted further misery on the defenceless population. Eventually a force of elite troops led by the renowned Count Theodosius arrived from Gaul to restore order. Theodosius duly repelled the raiders and regained control before undertaking a major overhaul of military and administrative structures. But the Roman world was changing and neither Britain nor any other diocese could turn back the clock. Manpower and resources were no longer available for a complete reconstruction. So it was that in the military zone behind Hadrian’s Wall some forts were repaired or rebuilt while others were abandoned. Some troops were redeployed within Britain, but others were needed more urgently elsewhere and departed with Theodosius when he returned to Gaul. By the end of the century, after further troop withdrawals had depleted the garrison still further, the defences of Roman Britain were left perilously vulnerable. The role played by the intervallate Britons in these events is uncertain. They were perhaps overwhelmed by Pictish raids on their own lands while attempting to meet their obligations as clients or ‘buffer states’ of the Empire. We cannot even be sure that their relationship with Rome had not already broken down before 367, perhaps becoming an uneasy truce which left them less inclined to assist in her defence.

By 400, when the pirate raids were once again reaching critical levels, the imperial garrison in Britain could no longer cope. It was severely undermanned. Troops had been withdrawn to Gaul in 383 by the imperial usurper Magnus Maximus and were not replaced. More departed in 407 under the ambitious general Constantine III who, like Maximus, sought to make himself emperor of the West. With serious crises erupting even at the heart of Empire, the troubles of Britain became a lesser priority than those of Gaul or Italy. There was no real prospect of reinforcements, nor of any respite from barbarian assault. The soldiers still serving in Britain became increasingly demoralised, especially when their wages stopped arriving from the imperial treasury. These fifth-century troops were those of Hadrian’s Wall and the Pennine forts, together with the surviving garrisons of the Saxon Shore fortresses in the South.4 The northern frontier army, still nominally under the command of a dux or some other senior officer at York, was already so embedded in the landscape that it had become fossilised and immovable. Some units had continuously garrisoned their forts for 300 years, their personnel retiring to farm the local countryside while being replaced in the ranks by native-born sons. Intermarriage with British women had forged close bonds between fort-garrisons and local communities and had led to a system of hereditary recruitment from fathers to sons through many generations. Magnus Maximus and Constantine III left many of these garrisons in situ, withdrawing instead less-entrenched forces for their respective Continental expeditions. In some of the older forts in the Pennines and on the Wall the soldiers were barely distinguishable from the local Britons. When Rome at last relinquished her authority in the early fifth century, the frontier army had already begun to merge with the local civilian population.

Gildas

There is much debate and uncertainty about the end of Roman Britain. Most commentators focus on the year 410 when the Emperor Honorius sent a letter to the Britons in which he told them he could no longer protect them from the barbarians. He instructed them to defend themselves against raiders without further help from Rome. Historians have traditionally viewed this as heralding a new era of native independence. However, neither Honorius nor the recipients of his letter could have foreseen that no help would ever be sent, nor that the Western Roman Empire would collapse within the next 60 years. The Britons to whom Honorius wrote were the civilian authorities in the southern towns: the magistrates of the civitates and other key members of the urban aristocracy. A hundred years later an account by the Greek writer Zosimus described these elites seizing power in 409 after expelling officials appointed by Constantine III.

What happened next is unclear. According to Gildas, a British cleric of the sixth century whose writings provide a bleak retrospective commentary on the end of Roman rule, the newly independent Britons tried with varying success to fight off the Picts and Scots.5 Gildas refers to the abandonment of towns and to the ineffectiveness of the northern frontier army before presenting a picture of social meltdown and economic collapse. This scenario is broadly consistent with the statements of Roman writers and with archaeological data showing large-scale desertion of urban centres and the end of a coin-based economy. Without Rome there was no centralised system of taxation and no bureaucratic structure. In the ensuing chaos taxes were paid as gifts or food-renders to local magnates who set themselves up in positions of authority. Gildas speaks of a ‘council’ of native leaders making decisions on a national scale but, if such a body even existed, its members may have held power only in southern Britain. Before the end of the fifth century their successors were ruling as kings of small kingdoms.6

In the North the garrison of Hadrian’s Wall faded away. The end of the coin-based economy left no means of paying the soldiers and made their position untenable. There can be no doubt that the majority of regiments disbanded in the early 400s. Gildas speaks of troops manning the Wall forts at a time when Britain was independent, but his chronology is jumbled and his knowledge of both Roman walls extremely inaccurate. He believed, for instance, that the Antonine Wall was constructed before Hadrian’s Wall and that the latter dated from c.400. His description of a military force, apparently composed of Britons, stepping forward to defend the post-Roman frontier owes more to sixth-century folklore than to fifth-century history. It is not supported by archaeological evidence for continuity of occupation or for later reoccupation. Slight evidence of fifth-century habitation has been unearthed at several Wall forts, but the data is too sparse to support the Gildasian picture. Only at Birdoswald, 16 miles east of Carlisle, is the evidence for continuity very strong, but this site appears to be exceptional and seems to have been the abode of a local warlord rather than part of a larger post-Roman defensive scheme. Gildas in fact sheds little light on what was happening in northern Britain after the end of Roman rule. He described the lands beyond the Hadrianic frontier being overwhelmed in the early fifth century by Picts and Scots who ‘seized the whole of the extreme north of the island from its inhabitants, right up to the Wall’. This assault is probably fictional. We can infer that Gildas envisaged its victims as the intervallate Britons, a group to whom his narrative alludes so vaguely that he barely seems to acknowledge them as his compatriots.

Gildas envisaged the national council as still functioning as late as c.450, although it was now supposedly headed by a superbus tyrannus, a ‘proud tyrant’.7 Later tradition called this figure Vortigern, ‘Overlord’, and turned him into the fictional ancestor of a royal dynasty in Wales. Upon the tyrannus and his associates Gildas heaped much of the blame for the evils of the sixth century, blaming them especially for hiring ‘Saxons’ to defend Britain against the Picts. ‘Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter, has ever befallen the land’, he complained, adding that the council had foolishly ‘invited under the same roof a people whom they feared worse than death’. In the eighth century Bede understood these hirelings as springing from three peoples of northern Germany: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. He used the writings of Gildas to construct his own version of what had happened, but both writers tell a broadly similar story: groups of German warriors arrived in Britain and settled with their families in areas vulnerable to Pictish attack. Eventually they began to arrive in greater numbers, settling mostly in eastern areas and demanding higher pay for their services. When their demands were refused, they rose in revolt, seizing the lands around their settlements. This was the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, a long process of conflict and assimilation through which a large part of Britain ultimately became England.

The North Britons after c.450

So much for the picture presented by Gildas. How much of it is history rather than folklore or guesswork is a matter of debate. Large parts of his account are obviously fictional. He clearly had major gaps in his knowledge and either lacked or ignored the additional information provided by Continental texts. We should remember that he did not call himself a historian, nor did his audience expect him to present authentic ‘history’. His chief purpose was to remind his sixth-century contemporaries that they were in danger of repeating the mistakes of their ancestors. Lax morals and religious failings, he believed, were leading the Britons of his own time to disaster. In the final analysis his gloomy predictions bore fruit and much of his homeland fell permanently under Anglo-Saxon control.

His view of the fifth century divides the North Britons into two parts: those living between the Roman walls and their neighbours in the former province of Britannia Secunda. The latter he portrayed as a feckless rabble who made a half-hearted attempt to defend Hadrian’s Wall after c.410. Archaeology, as we have already noted, does not support this notion of a post-Roman frontier army. A better interpretation of the evidence at places such as Birdoswald imagines widespread abandonment of the frontier before c.420 and the appearance of small political units centred on individual forts.8 This kind of fragmentation, leading to a dispersal of authority and the rise of ambitious local elites, was an inevitable consequence of the end of Roman rule. The descendants of the Brigantes divided their allegiances among an unknown number of rulers. After being dominated for 300 years by an imperial commander at York they found themselves answering once again to a home-grown leadership. Whether or not this new elite had any hope of prosperity in a region where social and political disintegration was particularly acute is debatable. Some leaders may have managed to kickstart economic recovery in districts where agricultural production had been less dependent on the needs of the Roman army. Other communities undoubtedly failed, or remained impoverished and feeble. The vicani, for example, lost their reason for existence after the northern forts were abandoned. Urban living on a larger scale likewise ceased to be a viable option and the towns quickly fell into dereliction as their populations dwindled. The decline of large urban centres was chiefly a feature of the South where such settlements were common, but a small number of communities in the northern military zone were affected too. At York and Carlisle, for instance, the Romans had established sizable settlements, both of which were severely denuded of inhabitants by c.500.

The most successful post-Roman communities, those with well-organised elites and sustainable local economies, eventually evolved into the nuclei of viable kingdoms. In some cases ‘royal’ status may have been supported by claims of descent from the kings of old, a scenario which might explain how the Yorkshire-based kingdom of Elmet came into being in the ancient Brigantian heartlands. Once established and flourishing these embryonic realms in the former province of Britannia Secunda probably differed little from the older kingdoms of the Damnonii and Votadini north of the Wall. In the intervallate region the Britons had been ruled by their own kings for many generations, perhaps continuously since pre-Roman times. These lands probably experienced minimal economic disruption in the fifth century. They had never been permanently annexed to the Empire and therefore had strong, deep-rooted traditions of group identity and social stability. Such notions may have been more difficult to establish south of the Wall where the collapse of the Roman economy, coupled with total withdrawal of the imperial administration, had destroyed any real prospect of continuity between old and new. After languishing for so long under the heel of a Roman military boot the native upper class of Britannia Secunda faced the enormous challenge of transforming itself into a weapon-bearing aristocracy headed by kings. North of the Wall the kings and warbands had never disappeared, even if their activities had been periodically curtailed by imperial interference and intervention.

Coel Hen and the Illusion of Continuity

With the exception of Birdoswald, where occupation continued throughout the fifth century, the forts along Hadrian’s Wall ceased to be inhabited in any significant sense in the early 400s. The archaeological evidence for abandonment is so persuasive that any hypothesis supporting the idea of continuity seems unsustainable. This has not, however, prevented such theories from being proposed, often on very flimsy foundations. Of these the only one with any real merit was Ken Dark’s suggestion that the Britons may have re-garrisoned the Wall in the period after 410, an idea conforming to the picture painted by Gildas.9 Dr Dark based his theory on evidence from Birdoswald and on a scatter of archaeological finds at other forts such as Vindolanda and Housesteads. His ideas were well-argued and thought-provoking but failed to achieve widespread support, chiefly because the evidence is simply too meagre. Of far less scholarly worth is an older theory proposing a similar scenario but based on little more than unfounded speculation. Its supporters envisaged large-scale continuity of the northern frontier army and of the Roman military bureaucracy. According to this hypothesis there was little or no abandonment of Hadrian’s Wall and the Pennine forts. Instead, the last Dux Britanniarum at York proclaimed himself king of Britannia Secunda and established a hereditary monarchy. His name, we are told, was Coel Hen, ‘Coel the Old’, a figure sometimes equated with the cheery ‘Old King Cole’ of the well-known nursery rhyme. The vision of continuity saw portions of Coel’s kingdom being partitioned by his sons and grandsons to create a patchwork of smaller realms whose rulers competed with each other for wealth and territory, while the core domain of the Dux survived at York until it fell to the Anglo-Saxons in c.580. Surprisingly, this imaginative reconstruction of fifth-century events proved to be quite popular and has appeared in a number of scholarly studies of post-Roman Britain. Because of this popularity it may be worthwhile to explore its origins.

Coel Hen appears in a group of medieval Welsh genealogical tracts purporting to show the ancestries of North British kings. He stands at the head of several royal ‘pedigrees’ as a forefather of figures who lived in the second half of the sixth century. A rough calculation of the generations listed in the pedigrees assigns Coel to the decades around c.400. Because his alleged descendants are shown in the pedigrees as a group of northern kings it was only a small leap for some historians to identify him as the first post-Roman ruler of the North. Coel was duly perceived as an ancestral figure who once held the entire frontier zone under his control. This in turn led to his identification as the last Dux Britanniarum. In the decades after World War II a number of respected scholars expressed varying degrees of support for this scenario, culminating in 1973 with the publication of a book entitled The Age of Arthur. This was written by John Morris and represented an ambitious attempt to synthesise fragments of literary and archaeological evidence into a coherent narrative history of post-Roman Britain. Other writers had already seen Coel’s name as a derivation from Latin Coelius or Caelius and this formed a key plank of the continuity argument in The Age of Arthur.10 The apparent link between Latinity and continuity was neatly summarised by Morris when he first introduced his readers to Coel: ‘The lands ruled by his heirs comprise the whole of the region garrisoned in Roman times by the troops of the Dux Britanniarum; and it is possible that Coel was the last regularly appointed dux’11. Among the North British pedigrees Morris found the obscure figure Garbaniaun, a son of Coel, whose name does in fact seem to derive from Latin Germanianus. However, personal names of Latin origin were not uncommon in fifth-century Britain and merely reflected native pretensions to imperial prestige or Romanitas. There is thus nothing particularly remarkable about Garbaniaun, nor do we know anything about him. In The Age of Arthur, however, he became a fifth-century Roman soldier, ‘an officer commanding a force permanently detached by Coel or his successor to hold the north-west coast’.12 Fundamental to the entire hypothesis was the notion that the territories of the Dux Britanniarum remained intact until the end of the fifth century. This in turn rested on a belief that the North British royal genealogies, especially those linking back to Coel, provide an accurate picture of the political situation between c.400 and c.600. A more realistic approach to the pedigrees treats them not as genuine records of post-Roman history but as literary products of a much later era. Far from showing a remarkable longevity for the Roman frontier command, the pedigrees instead reflect the ‘antiquarian’ interests of medieval Wales.13 The ancestry of the so-called ‘Coeling’ kings of the sixth century was important to Welshmen of later times because those same kings were regarded as heroic figures. They were Britons, like the people of Wales, and their deeds were celebrated in poems and stories recited at the courts of medieval Welsh kings. Since the genealogical texts are examined in detail in Chapter 3 all that will be said here is that it is wiser to adopt a minimalist view of the historical value of the pedigrees, at least in their upper generations around c.400. Such a stance is consistent with the scant archaeological evidence for continuity. Large-scale collapse of the Roman garrison in northern Britain, rather than large-scale survival of its command structure, is a more likely scenario for the fifth century. In a time of crisis and upheaval, when the economic system that had formerly sustained the imperial garrison ceased to function, it is unlikely that any senior officer at York or elsewhere was capable of propping up the military hierarchy. If any such attempt had been made, it would surely appear in the archaeological record as a post-Roman occupation phase at numerous forts and would make Birdoswald the rule rather than the exception.

Padarn ‘Red Tunic’ and the Northern Foederati

The idea of a fifth-century Dux Britanniarum ruling a kingdom based at York is mirrored by similarly speculative theories relating to lands further north. As with Coel Hen the alleged evidence is found in the North British genealogical tracts, in a royal pedigree naming a certain Cunedda as the ancestor of later Welsh kings. Cunedda’s pedigree seems to place him in the fifth century, in the lands of the Votadini of Lothian, and it is in this context that we will meet him again in Chapter 2. Here we focus instead on his immediate ancestors who bear names of Roman origin. His father Aetern, grandfather Padarn and great-grandfather Tacit respectively carry the Latin names Eternus, Paternus and Tacitus.14 The pedigree gives Padarn the epithet Pesrut, a Brittonic nickname meaning ‘Red Tunic’. It has been suggested that he may have received this garment from the Roman army in recognition of a formal military relationship.15 This in turn has led to Cunedda’s family being seen as foederati, ‘federates’, entrusted with the task of protecting the imperial diocese against Pictish raids. Granting federate status to one group of barbarians and paying them to fight another was a feature of Roman policy and may have been tried in Britain. Less feasible is the notion that a barbarian in a red tunic was necessarily an imperial foederatus rather than simply a man whose favourite colour was red. Padarn’s pesrut in fact tells us nothing about political relations between the Votadini and the Empire, nor does his name necessarily mean that he or his kin were friendly to Rome. The bestowing of Latin names may have been a fashion among some sections of the Votadinian elite, especially among those to whom an air of Romanitas conveyed special value. Latinity undoubtedly had important social and cultural connotations among the Votadini, as among other peoples living outside the Empire, but it says little about their relationship with Rome. Padarn may have been no more pro-Roman than his Pictish neighbours across the Firth of Forth.

One group of barbarians who do seem to have held federate status in Late Roman Britain were the German warbands hired by the imperial administration. These were the forerunners of the ‘Saxons’ whom Gildas identified as mercenaries recruited by native leaders of the fifth century. In Roman times the German hirelings, accompanied by their wives and children, were placed in areas regarded as vulnerable to attack by other barbarians. Their first colonies were established as early as the fourth century when raids by Picts, Scotti and ‘Saxons’ demanded a military response by Rome. Manpower shortages made the recruitment of barbarian foederati a convenient solution, but, being little more than a quick fix, it healed a short-term problem with a long-term one whose effects – according to Gildas – could only prove disastrous. In the military zone of Britannia Secunda the German warbands were mostly settled east of the Pennines, especially in the fertile Vale of York or on the exposed North Sea coast. This region included the civitas of the Parisi, one of the few northern civitates, and the military headquarters at York itself. In the early fifth century the end of Roman rule heralded the collapse of the foederati system and deprived the hirelings of their pay. The scenario offered by Gildas saw the newly independent Britons inviting more mercenaries to sail over from Germany. Eventually these warriors rose in rebellion. In so far as the revolt affected northern areas we may imagine Anglo-Saxons in the Vale of York attacking their British employers and seizing control. If this is an accurate reconstruction of events, a major casualty must have been the civitas of the Parisi or whatever political entity had succeeded it. Native elites in the affected districts, unless they had already thrown in their lot with the mercenaries, would have been driven from their lands. Similar scenarios of violent insurrection and dispossession would have erupted all over the eastern parts of Britain, from the Thames to the Tyne. So began a long era of conflict and assimilation, a process that would eventually bring large tracts of territory under permanent Anglo-Saxon control. The fifth-century revolts reported by Gildas signalled to the Britons that the Anglo-Saxons or ‘English’ were no longer content to remain as hirelings. Tales of the uprising appear in later English legends where prominent rebel leaders are identified by name. In the South, for instance, we meet the brothers Hengist and Horsa fighting in Kent against their former paymaster Vortigern.16 Similar traditions identify the northern foederati as Angles and name their leader as Soemil, a figure roughly datable to the mid-fifth century. The Welsh Historia Brittonum