Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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After the Pax Romana

My fellow author and twin-brudda-from-anudda-mudda Andrew Butters is one of several people who are always the lookout for cool developments in science and history to throw my way, and this time he's found one that is right square in my wheelhouse.

I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

The people who lived on the fringes of the once-great Roman Empire -- the Celts in the west, the Germanic tribes and Scandinavians in the north, the Slavs in the east -- took advantage of the chaos to reestablish some degree of autonomy, although they left little in the way of written records either, so what we know of their customs, politics, and beliefs is only from what's left of their buildings, monuments, and other durable artifacts.

But that doesn't mean there isn't more out there to find.  The link Andrew sent me, from the site LiveScience, describes a site from the province of Galicia in northern Spain, an area that even today owes much of its culture and music to its Celtic heritage.  Castro Valente, originally thought to be from the Iron Age and therefore pre-Roman, has turned out to be from that awkward blank spot in history I'm so fascinated with -- the fifth century C.E., shortly after the Romans wrote finis on the Pax Romana and hightailed it back to Italy to defend the home country against the Visigoths and Vandals.

Using lidar (light detection and ranging -- a relatively new technique using lasers to map out underground archaeological sites), researchers from University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela found that the site is the remains of a fortress that had been built on the remains of an Iron Age settlement, but the main structure is of early fifth century construction.  It's huge, covering an area of twenty-five acres, comprised of thirty towers and a defensive wall a little over a kilometer long.

Part of the wall at Castro Valente

The people of the region had never been "pacified" (using that term from the Roman perspective) for long.  The northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by three Celtic groups, the Callaeci in the far northwest, the Lusitani in what is now northern Portugal, and the Astures a little to the east (you might surmise, correctly, that the last-mentioned gave their name to Asturia, the modern name for the north-central province of Spain).  All three were perpetual thorns in the side to the would-be rulers of the region.  The northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula was only under nominal Roman control even at the height of the Empire, and when a long spate of unfortunately-timed inept rulers kept the central government of Rome in continuous upheaval, followed by repeated invasions from the east by Germanic and Slavic armies, the subjugated people in the west thought that'd be a fine time for them to assert their own independence.  (In fact, right around the same time that Castro Valente was being built, Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric -- a blow from which the Roman Empire never really recovered.)

The hilltop fort could only do so much, though.  Most of that region eventually fell to the Suebi, a Germanic people originally from the Elbe River valley.  The Kingdom of the Suebi lasted for 170 years, at which point they, too, were conquered by the Visigoths, which lasted until 720 C.E. when the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate pretty much overran the entire Iberian Peninsula.

When you think of the history of Spain, chances are you don't think of the Celts and the Germans -- but they had a major role in shaping the language and culture of the region.  This influence is strongest in the northern and western parts of the region; in fact, in modern Galicia there's a significant link still to the Celtic nations.  They even share a musical tradition -- I own a set of Galician bagpipes (a beautiful instrument called a gaita).  Check out this incredible performance by Susana Seivane -- whose father designed my pipes!

It's fascinating to see ancient history still present around us -- not only in the artifacts and archaeological sites, but in the culture we enjoy in the modern world.  These traditions have their roots in the distant past -- in this case, stretching back to a tumultuous period when it looked like the entire established order was collapsing permanently.  That it didn't is a tribute to human resilience and perseverance through a time where day-to-day life was fraught with danger, something we can read in the remnants of stone walls and foundations still standing in the now-peaceful Spanish woodlands.

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