Rome and Arthur
Wales was the furthest land westwards that the Romans conquered; it was almost the last country to be conquered by Roman arms, it was among the first to be left.…
Images from text.
“Rome and Arthur” from Wales by Owen M. Edwards, 1912.
Rome rose right in the path of the migration of nations westwards. Its empire extended from the Mediterranean almost to the Baltic. The path which had been taken by Iberian and Celt was closed for four hundred years It is true that new wanderers were gathering in the east and the north, but Roman legions and Roman walls were to protect the west against the new invasions for centuries.
Wales was the furthest land westwards that the Romans conquered; it was almost the last country to be conquered by Roman arms, it was among the first to be left. But the influence of the Roman domination was lasting even here, it profoundly affected the later development of Wales.
In the year 43, in the reign of the Emperor Claudius, a powerful Roman army, consisting of four legions of about five thousand men each and of as many auxiliaries, landed in South Britain. It was under the command of Aulus Plautius, and under him served Vespasian and Titus, the father and son who, before ascending the imperial throne, won fame in the conquest of the Briton and the Jew—the one in the extreme west and the other in the extreme east of the empire of Rome. The upland plain south of the Thames was soon conquered, and the victors descended into the valley of the Severn. Their onward march brought them into contact with the Catuvelauni, a powerful tribe inhabiting the midland plains, and whose sway extended to the mountains of the west The radiant Cymbeline, king of this great conquering Brythonic tribe, was dead, and the army of the tnbe was led by his son Caratacus. After fighting thirty battles, Caratacus left the Romans masters of the plain, and retired to the mountains of the west, where he found refuge among the Silures.
Ostorius Scapula followed Aulus Plautius, and soon Glevum and Uriconium—the one an important city still and the other a lonely, gigantic ruin—were built to overawe the conquered plain and to threaten the still unconquered mountains. The first advance was made against the Decangi of the north, and Ostorius came in sight of the western sea without meeting with any determined opposition. He had to turn back to quell a rebellion on the plains, and then to attempt the most difficult part of the Roman conquest—the crushing of the power of the Silures, now led by the experienced Caratacus. The final battle was fought in the country of the Ordovices, probably on one of the slopes of the Berwyn Caratacus led a confederation of tribes, and his final position was skilfully chosen.
The Roman army found itself before a river of varying depth. Beyond the river rose a rampart, behind which the Britons occupied a rising ground in dense masses, well protected on their flanks, and their retreat secure to the frowning hill-tops behind them. The Roman army crossed the river and rushed the wall with great loss, but in the desperate hand-to-hand fight which ensued they won a decisive victory. Caratacus and the Britons fled, and, soon afterwards, the famous leader was betrayed into the hands of the Romans by the queen of the Brigantes. Heir of the idea of a Brythonic unity of Britain, he struggled against the might of Rome for nine years, and in his last great battle, which was to be the beginning of the recovery of freedom to his people or the seal of everlasting bondage, it was decided that the Roman, and not the Brython, was to rule the isle of Britain.
The name of Caratacus lived in Celtic song and story, and one legend—too beautiful to be true—makes the captivity of Caratacus the cause of the introduction of the gospel into Britain.
The captive Caratacus was a striking figure in a triumphal procession at Rome, but the spirit of the hill tribes was not broken. A fierce guerilla warfare was carried on in the woods and by the rapacity of the Roman officers and by the fierce hatred of the Silures against their conquerors. The victor Ostorius died, worn out by the anxiety connected with the prolonged and successful resistance of the Silures. His successor Aulus Didius was more wary—burdened with years and honours—and was content with keeping the Silures in check. Veranius was sent to succeed Didius and to resume a policy of conquest, but he died before he was able to do more than plan a few petty raids.
Nero sent the ambitious Suetonius Paulinus to finish the conquest of Britain. He imitated Ostorius by first crushing the tribes of the north. Ostorius had seen the western sea, Suetonius reached it, and determined to conquer the island of Man, the refuge of fugitives and the home of a mysterious religion. Flat-bottomed boats were built to carry the infantry through the treacherous, shifting sandbanks of the Menai, the cavalry forded the shallows and swam the deep stream.
The enemy that met them was very unlike the enemy that had faced the army of Ostorius. On the flat shore stood an army in dense array—no unusual sight But between its ranks dashed women clad in black, with dishevelled hair, and carrying flaming torches. Around stood priests, with uplifted hands, pouring imprecations against the invaders of the sacred groves of their dark island. The weird sight struck terror into the Roman soldiers, but their generals aroused them out of their temporary panic, the standards were borne steadily on, and soon warriors and druids and women were enveloped in flames.
As if their gods had heard the curses of the druids, the statue of Victory at the colony of Camalodunum fell prostrate, and the flame of revolt sped with destructive rapidity over the plains Camalodunum was stormed; a Roman army was cut to pieces; London, already the meeting-place of ships and merchants, was left to its fate. Suetonius crushed the insurrection, but the Britons saw him cringing to. a freedman, and finally resigning his post to one who was content with inaction, which he called peace.
“The Roman Steps” in Ardudwy. From a photograph by H. Owen, Barmouth.
In the year 69 Vespasian became emperor, and the conquest of Britain was pushed on with renewed energy. The long and bitter resistance of the Silures was crushed by Julius Frontinus, and by the year 78 the Roman conquest of the mountains of Wales was assured. It had seemed as if the Welsh mountains were to be the barrier to the furthest flight of the Roman eagle; but, owing to the military skill of Frontinus and the administrative genius of Agricola, Carnarvon and Carmarthen took the place of Chester and Caerleon as the furthest limits of the Roman empire in the west.
The last battle was fought by the Ordovices. Their power once broken, it was easy to advance again to Mon; the Menai was crossed a second time, and the conquest completed.
When, in the picturesque pages of Tacitus, we come to the description of the policy of his father-in-law, Cnaeus Julius Agricola, we see the Roman conquest advanced more rapidly and more permanently by the victories of peace than by the victories of war. If the filial reverence of Tacitus has not warped his judgment as a historian, it is clear that, while winning their victories, Ostorius and Suetonius thought of the land whose eagles they were carrying westwards, Agricola thought of the land he was subjecting to the might and the civilisation of Rome.
Agricola, in 84, left a country that was rapidly assimilating the new civilisation For nearly four hundred years the Roman ruled it. Its great groups of kindreds, with their subject population, were still under kinglets, who wished to exchange their patriarchal chieftainship for the more absolute rule of a Roman official Great camps occupied places of strategic value, Roman stone houses rose on sunny hillsides, and a system of roads, begun for military purposes, was gradually completed for the convenience of the trader who introduced new commodities, new terms to express developed arts, and a new religion On each side of the line of mountains a great road ran. On the land side a road ran from Caerleon in the valley of the Usk to Caer in the valley of the Dee. On the sea side a road ran from Carmarthen at the mouth of the Towy to Carnarvon on the Menai Connecting these were many cross-roads, which can still be traced as they run their straight course in spite of morass or steep hillside, and along which tradition has dim visions of ‘‘Elen of the Legions’’—the form that the power of Rome has taken in Welsh legend—as she led her veterans to victory.
Agriculture flourished, for the Roman taught while he ruled. The veil was drawn for a moment from the mineral wealth of the country—from the copper of Môn, the gold of Merioneth, the lead of Powys, and the iron of Gwent. Christianity took the place of heathenism, except in the corners to which the roads did not run. It seemed as if a new people, united and regenerated, speaking a new language, was to be created by Rome.
The persistence of Rome in Wales—in its political thought, in its language, and in its literature—is explained partly by the fact that it bought a new civilisation to art impressionable people, but chiefly because it had to defend that civilisation against the growing aggression of heathen invaders. The heathens of the north sent wild birds, carrying fire on their wings, to alight in the fields of ripe corn; the long, flat-bottomed boats of hardy pirates infested the coast. The migration of nations was beginning anew, walls and legions could no further resist the pressure of the great hordes that had been gathering for so long in the east and in the north.
Britain fell naturally into two provinces for the purpose of defence. The lower province of the southeastern plains was defended against Teutonic pirates by the Count of the Saxon Shore; the upper province of the mountains was chiefly associated with the Dux Britanniarum, whose political supremacy reasserted itself after the fall of Rome in the Bretwalda of the one province and the Gwledig of the other—the two terms being the English and Welsh translations of the Latin title. The eastern province was conquered, between 450 and 520, by two great families of Teutonic invaders, the Angles and the Saxons, who shattered the Roman power in the south-east of the island The Angles came to the mouth of the Humber, and extended their conquests northwards and southwards along the coast. The Saxons came to the mouth of the Thames, and likewise took possession of the coast north and south of the river.
Roman unity, now associated with British independence of the barbarians, died far harder in the west. The two tasks associated with Roman rule were the command of the sea and the defence of the great wall of the north. One of the rulers of the sea, Carausius, had established a temporary independence during the period of Roman rule; one of the defenders of the wall was to win a more lasting sovereignty. When Rome had become too weak to interfere with the distant mountains of Wales, the family of Cunedda rose to greatness as a family of officials, chiefly concerned with the defence of the wall. The Pictish attacks on the valley of the Clyde, and the Angle advance along the Humber, drove them southwards, and Deganwy became the chief seat of their power. Deganwy is now a desolate and insignificant ruin, overlooking the thriving sea-side resort of Llandudno, but still commanding views of seas and islands over which the heirs of the Romans once held sway.
While the invaders were conquering the plains of England, Maelgwn was vigorously restoring the unity of the western province. Mon and the seas were watched by the fleet of the “island dragon.'' From Deganwy he advanced southwards, and forced the semi-independent kinglets to recognise in him the heir of Roman rule. The unwilling chiefs came to Aber-dovey, and tradition says that they all sat in their chairs on the sea-shore, to decide in solemn conclave who was to be king of the isle of Britain, They came to a strange decision—the who could sit longest in his chair in spite of the rising tide was to rule over all. Now Maeldav the Old had prepared for Maelgwn a chair made of waxed wings, and it floated when all the other chairs had been thrown down. The rule of Maelgwn meant the political subjection of all races in the western province to a British king, and the final triumph of Christianity in its long struggle with the heathenism which still held sway over the Goidelic people of the western coast-line.
The vigorous working out of Maelgwn's unscrupulous policy is described by Gildas, who condemns his ambition and his renunciation of monastic vows in no measured terms. The crow had once turned dove when Maelgwn gave up the thorny cares of empire for the calm solitude of the monastery; but, recalled by worldly ambition, his rule was arbitrary and his might irresistible, and Gildas hurls against the mighty victor words that were afterwards thrown in anger at the last despairing prince of Wales—‘‘Woe to thee that spoilest, shalt thou not be spoiled?”
About 550, when Maeigwn ruled over the mountains and seas of the west, two new barbarian powers were forming in the east. Ida, the Flamebearer, the Angle who had established his power on the rock fortress of Bamborough, threatened the northern part of Maelgwn's realm, the Saxons, though London barred the Thames estuary, were advancing over Salisbury Plain towards the lower valley of the Severn. Popular imagination was deeply affected by the death of Maelgwn of the yellow plague. Soon the western province he had united was to bear the full force of Teutonic attack. The Saxons came first Ceawlin appeared in the Severn valley in 577. The victory of Deorham extended West Saxon power to the sea, and Cornwall fell away finally from Wales The great cities of the Severn, from Gloucester to Uriconium, were sacked and devastated, and it was not until he was advancing on the valley of the Dee that the conqueror was hurled back in the battle of Fethanlea in 584.
As soon as the Saxon had recoiled from the attack on the western province, the Angle came About 613 the Angle king Ethelfnth defeated the Britons at the battle of Chester The Angle dominions now included parts of the vale of Maelor, and reached the western sea, and the great fortress of Chester no longer united the mountains of the west and of the north under one rule. The victory of Chester, an account of which Bede might have got in his childhood from one who had been there, cut Strathclyde and the whole of the north from Wales The whole that now remained of the Roman province was the mass of mountains between the plains and the sea—modern Wales.
One great attempt was made by Cadwallon to recover the north, and to wear the crown of Britain. For one year alone he succeeded in holding it, when he died fighting for it near the Great Wall in 635, he bequeathed to his son Cadwaladr a vanishing crown, powerful enemies, a distracted and a plague-stricken country.
The Cymric attempt at continuing the political unity bequeathed by Rome to the west, found expression in the romances of Arthur, whose dim and majestic presence gradually dominates Welsh political thought. A Welsh poet wandered from grave to grave, asking the same simple question over each grave on which the rain fell: “Whose grave is this?” One slept under the mighty oak, another where the surf beat on the shore, one on the crest of the hill, another in the lowly dale. One grave was long and narrow; another was covered with dead grass and sere leaves. It was not known who lay in one grave, in another it was well known that Cynddylan slept—he of the ruddy sword and the white steeds. Among the graves on hill and dale and sea-shore there was no grave for Arthur. He had become the spirit of unity, of independence, of stately wisdom; ‘‘folly it would be to think that Arthur has a grave.”
The period which bequeathed to Wales the mythical champion of its traditional unity, also gave it a patron saint. St David represents the final victory of Christ over a host of deities—Lud of the Silver Hand, patron of flocks and ships; Merlin, imprisoned in an enchanted palace; Lear, and old King Cole, Gwydion ap Don, who created the maiden Flower-aspect from rose and broom and anemony, Elen, goddess of marching armies, and Ceridwen, goddess of wisdom and knowledge; and a host of others, some mighty and some maimed, some possessed of wonderful power, others known from the good they did. The disappearance of the motley throng was not final, many of them, especially well deities, reappeared disguised as the saints of the new religion—some have remained in popular superstition to this day.
Edwards, Owen M. Wales. T. Fisher Unwin, 1912.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
