For your Amusement (Twisting tails! - and Twisting Tales...)

Check out this blog for top-quality pseudo-historical Arthurian craziness, and a bit of an obsession with Worlds of Arthur, the point of which the blogger, a Mr Adam Ardrey, seems to miss entirely (as he similarly fails to understand any of the basic rules of how to construct a historical argument).  Mr Ardrey (who has established a reputation for pursuing academic historians of medieval Scotland with his 'interesting' ideas...) claims to have written a polite letter to me, but I have no recollection of receiving one.  I have kept all the e-mails and letters from crazies that I have received since WoA appeared because they are pretty entertaining so I don't know what happened here.

The tone is set - in a way - by the claim that

'The legendary Arthur is commonly presented as a Christian English King...' 

Hmmm... the one thing Arthur is *never* presented as is English.

But it gets much, much better:

"... in reality [says the author of this blog], he was an historical figure, a man of the old way of the druids, a Scot and a warlord. Merlin too lived in history: he was the preeminent druid of the 6th century."

There is - needless to say - absolutely no historically-acceptable evidence for any of that.  (See also, for especial amusement, the claim to know where Merlin's house was; the 'grave' of Merlin which Mr Ardrey claims to have found in fact has been excavated; it was Bronze Age...)  Elsewhere he claims to have identified and dated all twelve of Arthur's battles.  Anyone can have a guess at where Arthur's battles are, but no one will ever know.  That's why so many mutually incompatible locations have been suggested.  It's fun.  It's not history.  The one thing we can say with at least a small amount of certainty is that, with the exception of the battle of the Caledonian Forest, the author of the HB, who after all is the only early medieval person to mention 'Arthur's battles', and who may, for all we know, have made them all up anyway, thought (rightly or wrongly, if he didn't invent them, that is) that the battles were fought in the southern half of Great Britain.  Badon is the only battle in the HB's list of 'Arthur's Battles' that is definitely historical and recorded by a near-contemporary author (Gildas).  On the basis of Gildas' account it cannot be reasonably located other than in southern Britain.  Where in southern Britain, we'll never know.  I have my ideas but I'd never sell them to anyone as 'proven' or even as 'more plausible than anyone else's ideas.

But there's more: read on...

"For 1,500 years the Christian Church and its temporal partners-in-power deleted historical evidence and fabricated a legend that, literally, suited their book."

But if the evidence was deleted... ...  Maybe they got rid of his letter to me too.  This is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind when I wrote Worlds and in particular the opening page, which says of pseudo-historians:

"Each author fanatically believes his version (and the author is usually a he) to be the true story, hushed up by horrid academics or by political conspiracies (usually by the English) or sometimes his rivals."

Which is possibly why the author of Finding Arthur seems to have developed such an unhealthy obsession with me (he likes to refer to me as 'Guy', though we've never met) - five of his last twelve blog posts being concerned with me.  Check out the section of the home page called 'Arthuriana and the Jesuit touch'.  Says it all.  You might reasonably suppose I was paying people to write these things to illustrate my point!  But I'm not.

Anyway, there has been a glut of attempts to 'prove' that Arthur was Scottish, of late.  Here is another, which argues (again, without a shred of evidence):

 "Arthur was born in the latter half of the 5th century. He became the commander of a rapid reaction force of British cavalry, originally created by the Romans but which had continued after their withdrawal."Arthur's career started in Strathclyde, where struggles between rival rulers had allowed the Southern Picts to occupy the Lennox. Arthur seems to have settled the succession, taken back the lost territory and probably then advanced to overrun the Pictish forward positions, forcing a peace."This was something the Romans had never achieved and it was a feat which made his reputation."He fought as a crusader and in his wake followed Christian missionaries bringing moral authority to hold the peace."

And here is a third, which also conjures up a conspiracy.

"Arthur led the Britons to the brink of victory but was cut down by treachery and betrayal. Arthurian legends have since been corrupted, leading to popular but false assumptions about the king and the belief that his grave could never be found. Drawing on a vast range of sources and new translations of early British and Gaelic poetry, Arthur explodes these myths and exposes the shocking truth. In this, the first full biography of Arthur, Simon Andrew Stirling provides a range of proofs that Artuir mac Aedain was the original King Arthur; he identifies the original Camelot, the site of Arthur's last battle and his precise burial location. For the first time ever, the role played by the early Church in Arthur's downfall and the fall of North Britain is also revealed. This includes the Church's contribution to fabricated Arthurian history, the unusual circumstances of his burial and the extraordinary history of the sacred isle on which he was buried."

All of which leads me to quote what I say in Worlds of Arthur (pp.152-3) under the sub-heading "King Arthur was Scottish":

There certainly was a historical, Scottish Arthur. He was Artuir, son of King Áedán mac Gabráin of Dalriada. We know nothing about him beyond what Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba tells us, written almost a hundred years after Artuir’s death. The information could, however, come from an earlier Life written by Adomnán’s predecessor in the 630s or 640s, of which Adomnán includes an excerpt. Artuir, says Adomnán, was killed, alongside his brother Eochaid Find, in a battle won by his father against the Miathi. The Miathi are presumably the Maetae recorded in early Roman geographies and thus another of the groups subsumed within the Pictish confederacies reasserting their identity in the post-imperial centuries (see Chapter 11). Artuir’s death must have occurred before Áedán’s in c.608 because Columba’s prediction was that he would not succeed his father as king. Thus he was never a king in his own right, though that need not matter, given the HB’s description of Arthur. Artuir mac Áedáin might be the historical figure behind Arthurian legend but, even if he was, there is nothing else we can say about him. Attempts to do so involve joining the dots from all sorts of snippets, inconsistently cherry-picked from later (second-millennium) sources, whether later Celtic hagiography and folklore or Arthurian romance (French or otherwise), mostly with no relationship to each other, and breaking just about every rule in the book of sound historical methodology. 

As to the pagan Arthur, this (from p.153) seems relevant:

These aren’t the druids you’re looking for: the pagan King Arthur

That King Arthur was a pagan is commonly stated in novels, pseudohistory, and other New Age Arthurian material. There is no reason to suppose that any historical fifth- or sixth-century Arthur was anything other than a Christian. Two of the three first-millennium sources that mention Arthur explicitly describe him as Christian. The other, Y Gododdin, contains precious little by way of religious elements of any sort. Its Christian elements, according to Koch, are later additions. Some of Koch’s argument turns on how you understand an ambiguous phrase that might refer to communion, though. Whichever way you read it, as ‘communion’ or ‘a victor’s share’, the argument easily becomes circular. In any case, Koch rightly states that this has no necessary bearing on the poet’s religion or that of his subjects. The western Roman Empire, including Britain, had been heavily Christianized (see Chapter 11) and Gildas did not see paganism, unlike heresy, as a problem with the British rulers of his day. Even Artuir mac Áedáin is mentioned in a Christian context, being part of an army prayed for by St Columba and his monks.

That really is all that a careful historian (an actual historian, you might say) can say on those subjects.  Pottering about with Chrétien de Troyes (as if that were a reliable source in any case) and cherry-picking and relocating to Scotland everything that he says about the legendary Arthur (ignoring everywhere when he locates Arthur somewhere else) is doubtless a great laugh.  History it isn't.  Caveat emptor.  Were people not likely to lose good, hard-earned money on the misleading claims of Messrs Ardrey, Crichton and Stirling, we could see it all as harmless fun.  This was largely why I wrote Worlds of Arthur and I am delighted that the likes of Ardrey, Edwin Pace and Dan Hunt see it as a threat.  I'm even glad that Amazon is offering Worlds... as part of a 'buy them together' offer with Crichton's book!

Ah, sod it. (In which I live up to my grumpy moniker)

So I'm not going to make myself look good - I'll probably make myself look worse.  My friend Steve says 'maintain a dignified silence' and he's right of course, but I don't really do dignified ... or silent.  I have to get this off my chest.  It'll look like the intellectual equivalent of the beefiest sixth-former picking on the weediest  first-year, and that ain't good, I admit.  But sometimes there are things (in Churchill's words) 'up with which one should not put' and Amazon haven't got back to me about the abuse of their reviewing T&Cs

Let's go through Edwin Pace's (Elafius') review of WoA, sentence by sentence.  Remember, Edwin Pace is the author of the pseudo-history Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain..

This book claims to be the definitive argument against any historical Arthur. 

No it doesn't.  It nowhere claims that.  On the second page of text (p.vii) I say that 'I also concede that it is impossible to prove for sure that he [Arthur] didn't exist'.

Halsall correctly notes that most Arthurian enthusiasts `cherry pick' data, while flouting inconvenient hard evidence. Indeed, many past arguments for Arthur ("Arthur used heavy cavalry", "Lucius Artorius Castus was `really' Arthur", "Ambrosius was `really' Arthur", etc.) are based on no evidence at all. He blames much of this on John Morris, who often took liberties with his evidence, and cherry-picked his data. 

That's fair enough.  I do (mostly) say that, although I think I rather said that all of that ilk do that.  The reason Edwin  Pace changes it to 'most' is that he wants to use the word 'correctly' and thus simultaneously claim that his own work (Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain) somehow differs from the other pseudo-histories (see p.vi of WoA for the fact that this is what all the pseudo-historians do).

Most significant, Halsall argues that all written sources, whether they mention Arthur or not, are useless as evidence for post-Roman Britain.

No I don't.  One example: 'Gildas tells us much about society, Church and rulership in the Britain in which he lived and wrote.' (p.57)  I also say there are things here and there to be learned from some other sources (cp. p.85).  What I do say is that they are useless for the construction of detailed political narrative.  That is not the same thing at all.

This book, however, is in no sense a simple guide on how to refute Arthurian enthusiasts. Halsall's very peculiar view of how Roman Britain became England and Wales requires him to invalidate every written source--as well as ignore pertinent archaeological data. 

Ok it might be peculiar - I say that it is a personal view on p.x of the book that not many people would agree with (unlike Edwin Pace, who falsely claims to be revealing the truth in Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain).  This does not 'require' me to invalidate every written source (see above); the theory is an attempt to propose some ideas in the light of the fact that over the past 30-40 years serious scholars have invalidated every written source as a sound basis for political narrative.  Nor do I ignore any pertinent archaeological data (see next comment).

We thus find that Saxon federates were serving in Britain in 383, a full two generations before the archaeology tells us they were (a `heavy-cavalry' assertion if there ever was one). 

I don't know what a 'heavy cavalry assertion' is, and nor, I expect, do you.  The archaeology does not tell us that Saxon federates were in Britain two generations after 383.  It tells us that people from northern Germany were making their presence visible in the archaeological record from about 430, in East Anglia.  It tells us (it can tell us) nothing about their politico-military status.  Besides which, I spend pp.185-7 explaining why the archaeological record cannot be read simply as passively showing the date of the arrival of migrants.  Pace is deliberately misrepresenting me; I do not 'ignore' this evidence.

More worrying, on the basis of a single `cherry picked' word in Gildas, `meanwhile' (interea), we find that the DEB is not talking about things in the fifth century, but the fourth. 

Edwin Pace doesn't understand the meaning of the word cherry-picked.  The word interea is crucial because it comes at the very beginning of the break in Gildas' narrative, where he turns from the north to the east (as Molly Miller pointed out 30-odd years ago) and, whether or not you accept my thesis, it is absolutely commonplace that it must mean a break (it technically means 'meanwhile' but its other meanings also mark a shift in the direction of the story). If I'd plucked it out of context from the middle of some paragraph in the middle of the account of the Saxons or the Picts, that would be cherry-picking (of the sort Edwin Pace does throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain, although given that he can't read Latin he normally does this from translations, compounding his error).  Nor is my thesis constructed only on this basis.  It is put forward - whether you agree or not - on the basis of an account of the structure of Gildas' work, of other phrases that come around the break in the narrative (e.g. sicut et nunc est), a comparative discussion of Gildas' account of Maximus and those of other fourth- and fifth-century authors, and so on.  That discussion takes seven pages (pp.187-94); even I, prolix as I am, would have difficulty spinning a single cherry-picked word into seven pages of exegesis.  You don't have to agree with the thesis, but it's not cherry-picked.

This allows Halsall to conclude that Vortigern was `really' the usurper Maximus, that the general Ambrosius Aurelianus was `really' St Ambrose, and that the general Vitalinus was `really'...the corpse of St Vitalis.

This is the most egregious of Edwin Pace's misrepresentations (or lies if you prefer).  Nowhere do I say that Vortigern was really Maximus.  I do argue that Gildas' unnamed tyrannus is Maximus, and I argue that by the eighth century traditions about Maximus had become fused with traditions about Vortigern (that fact is made concrete by the evidence of the Pillar of Eliseg, regardless of what else you think of my hypotheses).  Vortigern, I argue at some length, is a figure whose historicity is at least as dubious as (personally I think it is more so than) Arthur's.  That is nothing even close to the argument Edwin Pace accuses me of and yet it is the closest he comes to an accurate representation of the book in this passage.  I nowhere claim that the general Ambrosius Aurelianus 'was really St Ambrose', I nowhere claim that 'the general' (the general?  where does Pace get that from?) Vitalinus 'was really' the corpse of St Vitalis.  This is just scurrilous.  As throughout, Edwin Pace simply chooses to mock arguments he doesn't follow or understand.

Halsall then refutes the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's testimony with a reference to a single study by Barbara Yorke, which he fails to footnote. Indeed, unlike John Morris, he dispenses with all documentation.  

More untruths.  I do not refute the ASC's testimony 'with a reference to a single study by Barbara Yorke'.  The text itself name-checks at least two studies and the further reading essay refers to a further three.  Yorke's article is - technically - unfoot-noted but it is clearly cited on p.312 ('The studies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to in the text are ... and Yorke (1990)'. It is entirely - and deliberately - misleading to say that I dispense with all documentation.  References to chapter and verse of primary sources used are given in the text itself; allusion to particular ideas is given in text by citing the name of the historian with whom they originate and the bibliographical essay and 19-page bibliography expand on this.  I did dispense with foot-notes for particular reasons (p.xi).  This may have been a mistake but it was done for particular reasons to enhance accessibility, as this isn't primarily a book aimed at academics, and not out of arrogance, laziness or hypocrisy as various reviewers have claimed.  I concede it might look that way.  I will explain further anon.

But his investigation of the Historia Brittonum is most puzzling.  
Here Edwin Pace starts to lose his already slender grip on reality and uses the opportunity to go off into his own world (or rather parallel universe) of Arthur (the one set out at length in Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain).

He correctly notes the grave weaknesses in David Dumville's `founding' sceptical article of 1972-4. It requires us to accept four unevidenced assumptions to explain a single 69-year interval in chapter 66 of the HB (i.e. `coming of the Saxons'--69 years--consul Valerius, 521). 

How do you 'evidence' an argument, when the argument is an attempt to make sense of a sentence that no one has understood by positing four entirely reasonable scribal errors.  Put another way, how do you evidence absence? This point is absurd.  And hypocritical since Edwin Pace's own Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain is one long a catalogue of unevidenced assumptions.  Most bizarrely, he takes Dumville's argument and then adds extra (in this case entirely unevidenced) hypotheses to it before then working backwards from an end point based upon the hypothesis he's just rejected...

But Halsall's alternative is that the consuls mentioned as the end-points of the said interval...are actually the two earlier pagan emperors Valerian and Decius, whom some nameless British scribe thought were coming back as the Anti-Christ--arguably in the form of the pantomime horse of the Apocalypse.
This is another point where Pace uses his strategy of mocking things he doesn't follow.  He misrepresents the argument in any case.  Nowhere do I say that a British scribe thought this.

Halsall then dismisses the other passages in chapter 66 as scribal errors, although, unlike Dumville, he gives no evidence for this. 

Not true.  There is a long, ten-page discussion of the HB's computations, citing them all in detail and showing - with full explanation and in-text referencing - how it is demonstrable that the HB frequently got its numbers and systems confused.  Nowhere do I describe any of the dates in chapter 66 as 'scribal errors' other than the figure of 400 years between the incarnation and the coming of the Saxons which is clearly - by the HB's own other calculations - a mistake.  An error, yes.  An error by a scribe, I suppose, but a scribal error means something else (I suspect Edwin Pace doesn't know this), and that is NOT what I claim it is.

This in turn proves that the HB is not a British annal. In this at least he is correct. The full HB Prologue states that it is using `Irish and Saxon annals'.

Here we get to the nub of the issue as this graphically illustrates Edwin Pace's own deficiencies.  What he calls 'the full HB prologue' (misleading; its textual status as part of the original is at best insecure) says nothing of the sort - even in translation.  It says it used 'the writings' of the Scots [Irish] and Saxons, which it clearly did in any case, since it includes a version of a Life of St Patrick and an Irish chronology, and the works of Bede.

Moreover, if one subtracts 69 from the end-point Dumville gives (Valerius' consulship of 521), it is in perfect accord with the date for the coming of the Saxons given in both Bede and a `Saxon annal'--the ASC (521 - 69 = 452). Moreover, Halsall's use of AP dates fully explains the HB citation that the Romans `came and went' for 348 years (Ch. 30). The result is within a year of 418 AD, the ASC's date for the Roman withdrawal (43 + 348 = 391 AP, 391 + 28 = 419 AD; 43 being the Claudian conquest). 

Well, what to say?  This is a brilliant illustration of Edwin Pace's "scholarship" as found throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain.  Having dismissed Dumville, he then subtracts 69 from the date Dumville used to get a date 'in perfect accord' with a date given by Bede and the ASC ... except that Bede doesn't give that date, he gives a 6-year bracket which, since Patrick Sims-Williams work in the early '80s, we've been able to see as Bede's own best guess, and nor does the ASC (which gives 449).  That, by Pace's standards of scholarship, is 'perfect accord'.  Now think of another number...  This is Edwin Pace's historical version of Numberwang.

The next section, if anything, is even better.  If you take an AD date (43: the date of Claudius invasion - remember that this is not a date in the HB or its available sources, which didn't use AD dates), right, and add 348 you get 391.  [Actually you don't.  By the way the HB counted - illustrated with references in WoA, p.198, n.3 - it is 390, but let that pass.]  Now - and this is where things get crazy - you add, for no good reason - 28 to 391, to arrive at 418 as an AP date.  [Actually 417 by antique counting; cumulatively we're in fact at 416...] Now - get this - 418 is the year the ASC gives for the departure of the Romans.  So it's all true!  That's the truth, ladies and gentlemen.  The TRUTH!  Except that the ASC's date (unreliable in any case)  is an AD date, not an AP date.  By AD dates and Edwin Pace's strange pseudo-methodology we've only got to 391...  For the two to harmonise we'd have to have started at the AP date for Claudius' invasion and ended at the AP equivalent of 418 (AP 445).  Also, in any case, 348 isn't the amount of time of the Roman occupation, as we would know it (43 to, let's say, 410 is 367 years, 368 by late antique counting; the HB's 348 could be a scribal error for 368 but let's not go there) so why do we give the figure any credence as a measure of accuracy?  Even if (as they don't) all the sources converged on this figure they'd still be wrong.  And finally, why focus on 418 as the date of Roman withdrawal, a date attested only in a demonstrably artificial ninth-century Anglo-Saxon chronology and referred to nowhere in any surviving contemporary sources (fifth- or even, for the sake of argument, sixth-century) from the Mainland?  This is how Edwin Pace works throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain.  By any even vaguely scholarly standards, it's absolute gibberish and any decent second-year undergraduate could pull it apart.  

Overall, the HB and the ASC share seven such dates.
Wow.  So, by taking two equally, demonstrably, late and unreliable chronologies and messing about with them, according to what you decided in advance you wanted to prove and according to no sound historical methodology, seven whole dates can be hammered into converging to within a decade. Astonishing.  

Ronald Hutton argued a few years back that this discipline's main problem is that both Arthur enthusiasts and Arthur sceptics are equally guilty of using the same bad methodologies. 

Untrue again.  The closest Hutton came to saying that was where he said that Arthur-sceptics were refusing to try and explain why someone who never existed had come, within 300 years of his supposed existence, to be the national hero of an entire nation, and thus that they too weren't facing up to certain facts.  Hutton's is a very good piece but (and to be fair remember he's a 17th-century specialist) he overstates the case.  One of the aspects of WoA that I am proudest of is that I point out (though I'm hardly the first to do so) that there is no evidence at all that the legend of Arthur was even remotely well-known before the mid-eleventh century, even in Wales.  The issue is not how historical stories about Arthur could have been transmitted over centuries but why there are only five mentions of him in three sources from before 1000, out of the dozens of sources we have; why after the three Arthurs alive c.600 there is not one (of the hundreds of other people known to us in Britain) person called Arthur (and no Arthur place-names in any of the hundreds of charters); why, in the obvious place to deploy 'the national hero of an entire people' there is no allusion (even) to Arthur in the Armes Prydein.  And so on.  It doesn't prove Arthur didn't exist.  It is a pretty serious argument that, if he did, his story wasn't well known.

It is thus no surprise that the present volume replicates all the sins Halsall attributes to Arthurian enthusiasts.
That - as I hope I have shown - is nonsense.

And in rejecting Dumville's 1972-4 solution, Halsall inadvertently demolishes the very foundations of his own scepticism.

And so obviously is that.  Indeed it makes no sense at all.  The argument - if you can call it that - seems to be that if Dumville's piece on the HB was the foundational text of Arthur-scepticism, and you don't necessarily buy one minor element of Dumville's argument therein (and Dumville must have been only a PhD student or junior post-doc when he wrote that, which is salutary!), then you have somehow demolished all the grounds for rejecting the testimony of late and dubious sources.  This is rubbish.

In fairness, many of Halsall's past insights are of great interest. It is therefore doubly sad when he brands anyone who argues for Arthur's historicity as `dishonest'. Is this open scholarly debate?
Once again (and I know this is getting tedious) I do not say this.  I do not brand anyone who argues for Arthur's historicity as dishonest (see, e.g., my reference to Christopher Gidlow on WoA p.310).  What I do say is this (p.307):

'The old quest for King Arthur is fruitless.  The documentary evidence cannot respond to those sorts of questions.  More seriously, to pretend to have provided the answers sought by that romantic quest from the surviving written sources is downright dishonest.' [emphasis added]

That is a rather different claim, and it is one I stand by absolutely.  There are words for people who try to make money out of people by selling them books (like Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain) that claim to have revealed 'the truth' when they do not, for people who describe things as true which have been established as anything but true, for people who describe other people as doing and writing things that they don't, for people who pretend disinterest, who disguise their identities, and then tell untruths (in reviews and comments on other reviews) in order to defend their own financial interests in partisan fashion.  Dishonest is about the most polite word I can think of for such people.

By the way, dear readers, feel free to post a link to this under his 'review'.  This will stay up as long as the scurrilous review remains on Amazon.

Ah, but what to do? (Updated)

[Stop Press: Amazon have told me that they have removed the offending review by Pace, so I have taken down the analysis of his efforts to mislead people.  Though he's still writing nonsense in the comments section of other reviews...  I've been accused of being a Stalinist for this, which does not amuse me.  This isn't about stifling alternative views or bad reviews; it's about taking action against the author of a competing work attempting to put people off buying your book by telling untruths about it.  Quite different.  My accuser is a believer in the free market, but a free market needs to be - well - free.]

Hoist by my own petard, am I.  A week or two back I was tempted, after reading a reply to a review (not to one of my books, or to one of my reviews - not even to a review of a book about history, actually) which began 'we would like to thank X for their review of our book (yeah, 'course you would...), to write my wise words about not replying to reviews.  All of which leaves me in a sort of pickle.  I had a nice review by T.A. Shippey in The Literary Review, to which I did feel like posting some thoughts here by way of a reply.  Some of his disagreements with me were fair enough but I didn't buy the counter-argument.  A response would have been meant simply in a spirit of conversation but it would have looked like I was just being uppity.  Hence the advice.  The most important reason I wanted to reply to Shippey, though, was just to say 'yeah, you're spot on about the excellent Duggan novels; I recommended The Little Emperors myself in a foot-note to Barbarian Migrations', so I guess I've done that now.  Anyway, the point I was making a couple of weeks back is that even bad print reviews soon get forgotten and replying to them never makes you look good (no matter how insulting etc they were) and only draws attention to the bad review.  Books stay on shelves and don't come with the review attached.

Ah, but what of the on-line review?  I guess my advice is the same, even though someone searching for your book on Google might find the review so the two are not as separated as in print media.  Indeed I drew your attention to a couple of (I think) slightly harsh reviews when I updated my piece on reviews of Worlds of Arthur.  People diss me and my work all over the interwebs.  I don't like it (who would?) but I'm used to it.

Here, though, is the pickle.  There are now two reviews on Amazon.co.uk to which I take quite serious exception.  Not for being bad reviews per se; there are other negatives on there - and criticisms in the more broadly positive reviews - to which my response is 'well, fair enough.'  The two to which I take exception are the (currently, touch wood, only) 1-star review, by one Mr Nicholas W. Le Huquet (UK: Real Name), whom I've never met but who sees fit to refer to me as 'Guy' (like he knows me), because it claims I make a couple of errors:

... he states that British and Sarmatian heavy horse were the same. It's a small point, but they were not. British cavalry, even when armoured, are almost always attested as skirmishing, whether as Britons fighting J Caesar, Britons fighting Saxons as per Y Gododdin or as Bretons fighting Franks. He also says Sarmatians were never in Britain which certainly needs to be referenced, because history appears to record differently.

Nowhere in the book do I make either of these (and I quote) 'schoolboy errors'.  An interested potential reader might be misled by this (see below for Amazon reviewing T&Cs regarding accurate representation).    Now, you might wonder what position anyone is in to review a book who can't actually read what it says, especially when Mr Nicholas W. Le Huquet (UK: Real Name) goes on to dismiss - from the lofty height of his own scholarship and standing as a historian of the period - my interpretation as 'probably wrong'.  He then proceeds to pontificate on what probably happened (regardless of the fact that, since we don't know for sure where the different provinces of late Roman Britain were, his thesis cannot even be tested).  In fact his theory lacks any supporting evidence and, to be fair, he cites none.  That makes me a little less inclined to tolerate the personal abuse he chooses to throw at me (arrogance, laziness, hypocrisy -  a word he has difficulty spelling).  

The other is one of the (currently) two 2-star reviews.  There is a more serious issue here and that is that this review is written by the author of a rival volume.  It is Edwin Pace, author of Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain, the dismal pseudo-history alluded to on p.vii of Worlds of Arthur.  That book is a catalogue of ill-informed non-arguments based on an utter misunderstanding of early medieval evidence and how to use it, all consulted in translation alone, wrapped up, as is the wont of the pseudo-historians, in claims that X or Y is the 'true' date, the 'true' identity.    (To tell you the truth, I initially only made it through about half of the main text as there were so many errors and silly arguments that it was making me angry.)  Pace is the author of the claim that source criticism is 'bias' and that we should adopt a 'forensic' approach, a claim dismantled on pp.142-3 of WoA.  So of course he wasn't going to like my book; of course it was going to piss him off.  I admitted as much on p.10 of WoA.  That doesn't bother me and he has every right to be annoyed.  He has his own website devoted to his pseudo-historical theories, on which he's free to trash me to his heart's delight.

What bothers me (and what he doesn't have every right to do) is that he has posted a 'review' on Amazon which makes a series of completely inaccurate comments about the book (alleging that I say things I don't say, take approaches I don't take) and so on, misleading, like the other reviewer, a potential reader/buyer.  Not only that, but he doesn't have the honesty to own up to his parti pris and vested interest but cowers behind a nom-de-plume ('Elafius'; I know it is him because he has written a bizarre letter of complaint to my publisher making the exact same - wrong - point as he makes in the review*).    It's against Amazon T&C's to post a review if you are the author of a competing volume (I have some problems with this as a policy); whatever you think of Amazon's T&Cs it is entirely dishonest to do so while posing as a disinterested party.  Some of you may remember the hot water that the academic modern historian Orlando Figes got into by doing precisely that.  It's also against Amazon reviewing T&Cs to make misleading or erroneous statements about the book under review, and just about every sentence of Pace's review is erroneous.

So what to do, gentle readers?  What to do?

* Note too that Elafius responds in hostile fashion to every negative review of Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain, a book that even the knuckle-headed E.L. Wisty didn't like.

P.s. Historian on the Edge: A Man with a Plan (and the academics are NOT happy)

This you might find more amusing.

My Amazon-abuser, Pace/Elafius, pens a comment congratulating the author of the 1-star review (the one that accuses me of saying that Sarmatian cavalry were the same as British cavalry and that there were no Sarmatians in Britain: a small prize to any reader who can point out where I say either) in which he claims that the people who have written positive reviews either do not know what good scholarship is (...) or - and this is the good bit - subscribe to my agenda.  Pace/Elafius himself naturally has no agenda at all.  

So, a second prize for anyone who can tell me what my real 'agenda' is.  I confess that I thought I had made it quite clear that it was: a: to provide a guide to recent scholarship on 5th- and 6th-century Britain, b: to thus provide tool kit for those interested in Arthur to help them see through the fraudulent claims of pseudo-historians (like Pace/Elafius) to have revealed 'the truth', and c: to propose some ideas for rethinking the framework in which we see Britain in that period ('It doesn't claim to represent the truth; it is up-front about being a personal view, not currently held by many people and frequently controversial.  It contains precious few 'facts', being about frameworks and interpretations.': WoA, p.x).  But clearly I am up to something more sinister.  I wonder what it could be.

I'd certainly like to know.  No one is worse at effective politics than I am.  I often say that Peter Heather and I make our Goths in our own image.  Heather's Goths have a clear idea idea of what they want and set about achieving those aims in decisive and effective fashion; my Goths bumble along from one crisis to another, sometimes perhaps with some sort of idea of what they want but frequently having to make do with what they get instead.  So I am interested to find out about my 'agenda'.

***

I'm also amused to read Pace/Elafius' claim (in the same comment) that 'the academics' (I wonder which ones) are (I quote) 'NOT happy' [his capitals] with my book.  This, I have to admit, came as a surprise given the response I've had, including from the Chichele professor of medieval history at Oxford, the academic readers of the manuscript, the reviews by James Palmer, T.A. Shippey, Ryan Lavelle, the message from a leading scholar of the period saying he would set the book as a required purchase for students on his special subject, and quite a few others.  Indeed Chris Gidlow (author of the only reputable 'pro-Arthur' studies) wrote to me congratulating me on (I hope he'll forgive me for quoting his e-mail) 'a superb book and an excellent read'.

"At last a book written by an established academic with up to date awareness of modern approaches to the history and archaeology and a willingness to engage with the fact that many readers will have been informed by what appear to be reputable books that the 5^th /6^th centuries were a period dominated by an Arthur who might have been a Sarmatian or called Riothamus. This is exactly the sort of book which I waited so long for someone to write I finally had to get up and write my own!"

I wish I could have used that on the book cover!*  Gidlow disagrees with some of my ideas and puts some cogent reasons against.  In a couple of cases I suspect he might be right.  But that's for another time.

Incidentally, Pace's book claims Riothamus and Arthur are the same...  

I know that some academics worried a little about some of my off-hand references to some academic debates but none have said anything about my treatment of pseudo-history; most I have spoken to think (like Gidlow) that that was overdue.  So I suspect this is another (at best) half-truth which might, again, mislead anyone interested in my book.

* Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain actually does have a generous quote from Chris Gidlow on the cover, describing it as a 'thought-provoking contribution'.  To quote The Princess Bride, though, 'I don't think that means what you think it means'...

Worlds of Arthur reviews (updated)

Some nice words from James Palmer (of the University of St Andrews) on the subject of my book can be found here.  I think he's very satisfyingly got the point of what I was trying to do and why it matters.  There are some nice reviews, too on Amazon and US Amazon (although, since they don't pay their taxes and do employ thugs, I feel I should urge you to look elsewhere for your copy - best of all support your local bookshop) and one by Dan Jones in the Sunday Times (but that, being a Murdoch paper, operates a pay-per-view system so I can't link to it).  There's also a positive review in the new BBC History magazine by Ryan Lavelle (Univ of Winchester), who opens with the thought that the cover may head the list for the 2013 prize for the most misleading book-cover of the year. Ha!

For an alternative view, as they say (usually before citing something I've written), Google Books has two reviews that give it a bit of a caning.  Tedious indeed...

Worlds of Arthur latest

I received my advance copies today and I have to say that the folks at OUP have made a lovely job of it.  Publication date: 14 Feb.  Anglo-Saxonists: you still have have five weeks to teach the old narrative of post-imperial Britain and the Anglo-Saxon migrations with impunity! 

Book Cover

Here's the cover of my book.  I hope you like it.  I think it'll work to draw in the audience I'm trying to reach, even if, yes, it's a tad hackneyed and yes, a bit 'ooh does it come with a free CD of 'Arthurian Moods'?*).

You can pre-order it direct from Oxford University Press here, and from Amazon here.

*(C) Steve Jones

Worlds of Arthur

I heard today that Oxford University Press will publish my next book - Worlds of Arthur: The History and Archaeology of Britain After the Romans.  I am (needless to say) delighted about this and look forward to working with them on the project.

Nennius’ Numbers

[I am working on a book on post-imperial Britain (Worlds of Arthur), more or less finished - aimed at a wide audience.  It's essentially a book of three parts: 'old worlds' (the old historical narrative, based on a face-value reading of the written sources, and the old use of archaeology to 'prove' this narrative); 'present worlds' (the scholarly analysis that has taken apart the written record, more modern use of the archaeological record) and 'new worlds?' (my own ideas).  Anyway, I've been working on the Historia Brittonum (sometimes referred to as by 'Nennius', probably incorrectly) and where he got his dates from.  Here are my conclusions (this is from Part 3 of the book, by the way). 

Essentially I'm supporting the argument that most of what we read in the HB ("Nennius") is to be understood as a composition of 828-9, usually on the basis of sources we still have, occasionally on the basis of possible sources which are lost but which weren't contemporary or other than legendary - rather than a patchwork of fragments of 'accurate' lost historical sources. Not a new line, I admit; just a development of what I consider to be the most plausible approach. 

I'm grateful to Richard Burgess (Ottawa), who knows more about late antique chronica minora than anyone, for discussion of some of this but all the below is still very much a draft and he shouldn't be associated with any imbecilities that it contains.  Anyway, see what you think.

Note: that I keep tinkering with this, because I keep finding stupid mistakes in it, so if you are interested I'd keep checking!)


A page of the HB

To pursue this argument we need to examine the account of the Historia Brittonum, which has various things to say about Maximus and Vortigern, as well as giving us no fewer than two dates for the arrival of the Saxons (adventus Saxonum), one in 428 and the other in the reign of Gratian, in 374. The latter comes close to the date in Maximus’ reign that I am suggesting. We’ve seen how Bede calculated his date for the Adventus to the period 450-55. How did the author of the HB (“Nennius”) come up with his dates and are they accurate? Any answer to this question requires us to think first about what his sources were and whether they might have been reliable. It has not uncommonly been suggested that the HB’s author had access to a now lost set of British annals or other historical material closer in date to the fifth and sixth centuries.


The writer of the HB clearly had access to the works of Gildas and Bede, whose reliability for our period we have already discussed. We examined the passage about Arthur’s battles and its sources in the last chapter and concluded that it was the HB-author’s own work. He (assuming it was a he) also made use of a series of royal genealogies, both English and Welsh. This is an important point as it shows how written sources and other traditions travelled across the cultural ‘frontier’, regardless of how some of our sources wanted us to view this period as a constant war between ‘the’ English and ‘the’ Welsh. For the period from the end of the sixth century onwards, the HB may have drawn upon poetic sources, given his mention of the names of some bards and possibly some other Welsh historical texts. These may have been of reasonable reliability given that this is a period from which adequate records of various types do survive, but they are unverifiable and often do not coincide with other records, like Bede’s. Given Bede’s own agendas, we should not assume that this makes them untrustworthy; it simply makes it difficult to decide whose version to follow. It is certainly the case that the HB’s author has worked them into the overall scheme of his work, employing phrases that are paralleled elsewhere in his account to make the story of the north mirror that of the south (as we saw in chapter 7). Nevertheless these do not bear upon the precise enquiry that concerns us here.

In addition to these sources, the author used a life of Saint Patrick, based upon the saint’s own Confession but infused with the legends that had accrued about the Apostle of Ireland by the ninth century, and he drew upon strange miraculous material about Saint Germanus of Auxerre. This is quite unlike anything we can see in the Life of the saint by Constantius of Lyon and it is clear from the HB’s own account that there were various versions of this story in circulation in ninth-century Wales. It has been suggested that the Saint in question is a different Germanus, a Welsh Saint Garmon, but this seems unlikely. About forty years after the HB’s composition a British bishop Marcus was telling Heiric of Auxerre, a devoted publicist of Germanus’ cult, about the saint’s British miracles, which he either drew from the HB itself or from the same sources (it is just about possible that it was Marcus himself – described as an old man in the 870s – who wrote the HB). To this list we can add a series of other sources which have not otherwise been preserved: the story of Ambrosius/Emrys and Vortigern, the materials employed for the account of Vortigern, Hengest and Vortimer in Kent, the list of the ‘wonders of Britain’ and a curious history of the nine (or seven, according to the ‘elders of the Britons’) Roman Emperors who ruled in Britain.

This last is more than oral tradition as it clearly made use of classical histories, but the main conclusion that we can draw is that, aside from Gildas and Bede, the sources listed above are almost entirely legendary in nature. Wherever we can check them against earlier and more trustworthy materials they can be shown to be wholly unreliable. This immediately raises a huge obstacle for anyone arguing that the HB’s account of the fifth century and the arrival of the Saxons was based on lost histories. Even were this the case, what reason would we have to suppose that such histories were any more reliable than those of Emrys, Vortigern and Germanus? What grounds would we have for supposing that, beyond the invocation of historically-existing characters, they presented anything like an accurate portrayal of fifth-century events? Again, we must return to the point made at the start of chapter 4, that medieval histories were written for quite different purposes than modern ones. It is interesting that the composer of the HB tended to leave his sources discrete and allow them to say their piece (as in his different accounts of Magnus Maximus and his different versions of the death of Vortigern), but this does not add to their inherent reliability.

The catalogue above nevertheless omits one important group of sources, those drawn upon for the HB’s chronography, the measurements of time since the beginning of the world and between particular events. This is principally to be found in chapter 66 of the HB but other comments are scattered throughout the work. Here we can identify other sources, which still survive and are contemporary with the fifth century. In these passages are also included dates referring to Vortigern and other British fifth-century events. So, even if, for now, we leave to one side the rest of his narrative, can the dates that the HB gives for the adventus saxonum be relied upon? Do they represent contemporary fifth-century annalistic record ‘fossilised’ in this ninth-century history or are they, like Bede’s dates, the more or less educated guesses of a later scholar, based on evidence which we still have? Answering this question requires not merely mental arithmetic but awareness of two or three chronological systems and two different ways of counting, as well as every effort not to slide from one to another (something the HB-author did not manage)! So, with a strong coffee to hand, let us take a deep breath and enter the world of ‘Nennius’ numbers’.

The HB gives us a number of chronographical measurements expressed as the number of years between X and Y. Those of relevance to our enquiry can be listed in rough chronological order as follows (with their HB chapter number in brackets):

He gives us some other chronological indices:

To all this we can add his statement that from Magnus Maximus’ time the rulers of the Romans were called consuls.  Absolute dates in AD form can be pinned to these as follows:

From this, some valuable conclusions can be drawn. The first is the remarkable degree of error and inconsistency. From his writings the author could variously calculate the present year as AP 796, AD 825, AD 831 and AD 857! For the difference between AP and AD dates, see below.  The fourth year of King Merfyn Frych (‘the Freckled’) was 828-29, which equates with none of his calculations! We can nevertheless establish that this was, for him, the current year. Furthermore, AD 831 ought, as we'll see in a moment, to equate with AP 804, not AP 796 and, conversely, AP 796 should be AD 823 rather than AD 831. Another conclusion would be the fact that our author clearly did not cross-check his sources for consistency, but took each on its own terms and let it stand.

This confusion is not surprising. The author was familiar with at least two chronological systems. He knew the common anno passionis (AP: the Year of the Passion) system and the more ‘new-fangled’ anno domini calculation (counted from the Incarnation).  Given that Christ's Passion was held to have occurred in the consulate of the twins Fufius and Rubellius in AD 29  there ought to have been, by antique reckoning, twenty-nine years between AP and AD dates (we would see the difference as twenty-eight*). However, the difference between the AP year, according to the calculations generally-accepted in late antiquity, and the AD year, as we would reckon it, is twenty-seven (or to contemporaries twenty-eight), so that AP 401 is the year we think of as AD 428. Note, though, that at HB 4 our author seems to think there were (by his counting) thirty-six years between AP and AD dates…!

Our author was also aware of a system of Easter cycles and Ogdoads (octads) – eight-year cycles. An Octad was half of an Indiction, the Imperial Roman fifteen-year tax-cycle which was still employed as a dating mechanism in the early Middle Ages (by late antique methods of ‘inclusive’ counting, there were two eight-year Octads in a fifteen-year Indiction). Some Easter tables were organised in groups of four years, according to bissextile (leap) years, so an Octad might be seen as two of these. As if this were not enough, though, there were actually two ways of establishing the date of Christ’s passion circulating in late antiquity; one thought the crucifixion took place in Tiberius’ fifteenth year, the other believed it occurred in his eighteenth. This produced dates that were (by antique counting) four years apart. It is not uncommon in fifth-century history to find an event, dated to a particular year in one source, placed four years later in another.

We can, however, also note that the author’s use of the consulates is fairly correct and consistent, provided you assume that the consulate of Stilicho referred to is always his first, in 400 (as it clearly is in one instance), and that the author always means the first consulate of Theodosius II and Valentinian III, in 425 (they also shared the consulate in 426, 430 and 435). There seems to be a slight error in the years from Fufius and Rubellius (29) to Stilicho (400), which the HB gives as 373, rather than 371 as one would calculate it in the twenty-first century. In fact this is not a mathematical error. The consulate of Stilicho is indeed numbered as AP 373 in late antique chronicles and Easter Tables. A real error, or inconsistency, is where the author counts twenty-eight years from Stilicho’s consulate to that of Theodosius and Valentinian. By modern standards the difference is twenty-five and by late antique reckoning it is twenty-six. He is two years out.

We can reasonably deduce from all this that one of the HB’s sources was a consularium (consular list) or a chronicle or Easter Table based upon one such. Numerous such sources existed in late antiquity. We can further deduce that that his list counted its years by the AP system. In HB 66 the author dates the adventus saxonum to AP 347 (AD 374). Counting Stilicho’s consulate as 373 years from that of Fufius and Rubellius, as we’ve seen, also implies the use of an AP system. Then we have his statement that the consulate of Felix and Taurus was in the 400th year since the incarnation of Christ. This is wrong but this consulate was (as usually counted) in the 401st year since the passion of Christ. This is itself important because it shows that the author could slip from one chronographical system to the other without realising.

We can now establish some of our author’s sources. His odd statement that from the time of Magnus Maximus the Romans’ rulers were called consuls, suggests his consularium/chronicle source began with Magnus Maximus. The calculation of the number of years from Creation to the consulate of Constantine and Rufus further suggests that this source ended in 457. If this work were a continuation of Jerome’s Chronicle then it would have started, or had a break in the text, after 378, making Magnus Maximus’ usurpation one of the earliest events it recorded and certainly the first to mention Britain. Prosper’s Chronicle, written in fifth-century Aquitaine and dated according to the AP system, would fit the bill and a closer examination shows that chapter 29 of the HB is indeed a jumbled sequence of quotes from Prosper. Bede also used this source. However, Prosper’s Chronicle ended in 455 with Valentinian III’s death. As it happens there were continuations of Prosper, one in a now lost eighth-century or earlier manuscript from the Reichenau (Germany) – preserved in two later copies – which take the story on to 457. Perhaps it was a version like this that the HB-author used.

However, a source starting in 378 or thereabouts would not tally with the HB’s use of the date AP 347 (374) for the adventus. Thus, following earlier analyses, I suggest that he was also using Victorius of Aquitaine’s Cursus Paschalis (loosely, Easter Sequence), which also counted in AP dates and stopped in 457. Victorius started with the consulate of the twins Fufius and Rubellius (in which the first ‘Easter’ had occurred), so the difference between that and the consulate of Stilicho could be worked out from that source. It must be said, though, that both works could well have had interpolated comments introduced into them during the 350 or so years between their composition and that of the HB, and we can repeat the possibility that the version of Prosper was itself one that continued the account down to 457 to harmonise with Victorius. None of this implies that any of the possible interpolations were made very much closer in time to the events described or even that they were made in the British Isles. Both sources were Aquitanian and could have arrived in Britain with additions already included.

Another text used was, it seems, a different Easter Table, set out (unlike Victorius’) according to a nineteen-year Easter Cycle. As we can see from his calculations, this source, in spite of being an Easter Table, seems to have counted in AD dates. It was from here that the HB-author derived his Irish chronology.

As mentioned, there are (by antique counting) twenty-eight years between AP and AD dates and twenty-eight is a number that crops up several times in computations using the HB’s dates. We’ve also seen how the author slips from one chronological system to another. He says there were twenty-eight years between Stilicho’s consulate and Theodosius and Valentinian’s. The year 428 recurs, and twice seems to indicate twenty-eight as a margin of error. Once is where the author says that the adventus took place in AD 400, when he seems to have meant AD 428 (= AP 401). His mention of the consulate of Felix and Taurus, his statement that this was four years from the consulate of Theodosius and Valentinian, and his mention of a forty-year period of fear after the death of Maximus suggest that it was 428 that he meant. The other indication of confusion comes when the author says that the adventus was 429 years before the fourth year of king Merfyn. This would also work out at AD 400/401. Our author, or his sources, seems to have stressed the 400th year since Christ’s birth or Passion, using Stilicho’s first consulate (400) as a fixed point. If, when he was trying to calculate the number of years between the present and past dates, the author aligned his Irish source and his copy of Victorius or Prosper along the year 400, he would then have had to count twenty-eight years forward (down the page) from the AP source to read off the AD date. Sometimes, evidently, he either forgot to do this or forgot which system the number referred to, and on one occasion he counted backwards (or up the page) instead! Arguments based upon internal consistency and numerical logic within the HB start on shaky ground indeed.

Sometimes the appearance of the number twenty-eight is fortuitous. That between Stilicho’s consulate and the first joint consulate of the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III is an error. As the HB-author would have counted it, there were twenty-six. By late antique reckoning there were also twenty-six years between Stilicho’s second consulate (405) and Theodosius and Valentinian’s third (430), but twenty-seven years between Stilicho’s first consulate (which on balance is probably the one the HB-author means) and Theodosius and Valentinian’s second joint consulate (426). By modern reckoning there were twenty-eight years between Stilicho’s consulate and that of Felix and Taurus, which the HB-author also uses, but he would have counted that as twenty-nine years. Overall the statement that there were twenty-eight years between Stilicho’s consulate and 425 seems more likely to result from a simple error in counting the years in a single source than a confusion between two sources’ different dating of the same event.

If we accept that the HB-author had these sources available to him, where does that leave his comments about the adventus saxonum and the other British events mentioned? Possibly he, simply enough, found the entries to do with Vortigern, the Saxons and the strife between Ambrosius and Vitalis in these sources. We will return to the implications of this. I think, however, that the problem is solved quite simply. Saint Germanus clearly mattered to the HB-author and to early medieval Welsh politics generally. I have already noted how the HB’s hagiography hushes up the Britons’ heresy and presents Germanus’ visit instead as a moral ‘crusade’ against the corrupt Vortigern. Yet, on the ‘Pillar of Eliseg’, a stone column erected in neighbouring Powys a generation or so after the HB’s composition, we can see the kings of Powys claiming Vortigern (there a son-in-law of Magnus Maximus) as their founder and saying that his son Britu was blessed by Saint Germanus. Obviously their version of fifth-century events was rather different from that presented in Gwynedd! That there were various versions of the stories about Vortigern in circulation in the ninth century is clear enough from the HB itself, which gives three different versions of Vortigern’s death, although it claims authority for the version it presents first by saying it was to be found in ‘the book of Saint Germanus’. One might assume that in Powys a version closer to the Life by Constantius of Lyon was preferred, with Vortigern written in as one of the local leaders blessed by the saint. Germanus had (literally) become a political touchstone.

Now, in Prosper’s Chronicle, the HB’s author would read that Germanus came to Britain in the consulate of Florentius and Dionysius (429) in response to appeals from the island. He knew that Germanus was associated with Vortigern, for good or ill, that when he arrived in Britain Vortigern and the Saxons were already up to no good and that when he was in Britain Germanus took part in a campaign against the Saxons. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why he simply put the arrival of the Saxons in the year before Germanus’ arrival. Even if this entry was to be found as an interpolation in the chronicle sources the author was working from, they could well have got there as a result of the same calculations. There are other reasons why his sources might have stressed the year 400/401 (AP) as a fateful year, and this might have helped convince the author that this was when the Saxons arrived in Britain.

There are other possibilities of course. One can read the HB-author’s calculations to see that the year of composition (828-9) was the 401st year since the arrival of the Saxons (428) and that the arrival of the Saxons took place in the 401st year since the Passion of Christ. This would be a good year to present a case for militant opposition to the English, perhaps suggesting that this would be the year of their expulsion. 400 years before their arrival; 400 years before their being driven out: a neat symmetry. This might suggest that the author of the HB already had reason to think that the adventus occurred in 428, although he could just as easily have placed it in that year for rhetorical purposes. This would be a very attractive idea were it not for one thing. On the one occasion when he makes a calculation of the number of years between the adventus and the present day the author gets his chronological systems confused, deducts the AP date from the current AD date and gets 429, suggesting that the 401st year since the coming of the Saxons cannot have been uppermost in his mind at that point at least! This highlights the inherent difficulties in any argument based upon assertions about what the HB author ‘would have’ known or what inconsistencies he ‘would have’ appreciated.

All that, however, leaves unexplained the HB’s other date for the adventus saxonum, in the reign of Gratian, and why he thought that the adventus took place in Vortigern’s fourth regnal year. The ‘Gratianic’ date results from another error. We have seen how he could slip from one dating system to the other. If he counted back 229 years from the current year he would end up in 400 AD. He seems to have then confused his dating systems and deducted twenty-seven (twenty-eight as he saw it) from this date (or counted twenty-eight years up the page of his copy of Prosper or Victorius) instead of adding twenty-eight to it (and counting down the page), to arrive, as he thought, at the AP date and find the consuls for the year. This would bring him back to AD 373. The date he gives is 374, AP 346 in his source, with the consuls correctly listed as Gratian and Equitius (the author wrongly thought that this was Gratian’s second consulate; it was actually his third). This is probably within an acceptable margin of error, especially if we remember that the fourth year of king Merfyn spanned AD 828-9, and that the author’s own calculations of the ‘present year’ were inconsistent! The late fourth-century date for the adventus saxonum is therefore a simple error in calculation.

The statement that the Saxons arrived in Vortigern’s fourth regnal year is, I propose, included to introduce a resonance with the present day. The author was writing in the fourth year of king Merfyn of Gwynedd. The early ninth century was a period of Mercian and West Saxon aggression against the Welsh. According to the Welsh Annals, the Saxons burnt the Gwynedd stronghold of Degannwy in 822 and took the kingdom of Powys (the realm that claimed to be founded by Vortigern) under its control. In chapter 7 we saw that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes the admittedly unverifiable claim that in 830, the year after the HB’s composition, all the Welsh kings submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex. This seems like a very appropriate context for a North Welsh writer to present his king with a history showing just what came of making deals with the English. No surrender! In chapter 7 I argued that this also explains his composition of an elaborate passage about Arthur, smiting the Saxons left, right and centre. The HB was a highly political response to a very specific set of circumstances. Its author cannot have been very pleased with the outcome!

We can therefore conclude pretty safely that each of the HB’s two dates for the adventus can be explained as a calculation dating to 828-29, made by its author from the different sources available to him – Prosper and Victorius and the hagiography of St Germanus – and by simple human error. No significance can be attached to the fact that the HB records two very different dates. Its author clearly envisaged a single event. The HB’s dating of the Adventus Saxonum to 374 is not significant. This is a shame – not least because, if the author used the thirty-six year difference between AP and AD that he employed in HB 4, rather than the usual twenty-eight years, this year would work out as just before Maximus’ usurpation!

Other Traces of the ‘Lost Annals’?

This nevertheless leaves to one side the conflict between Ambrosius and Vitalinus and the sixty-nine years from the coming of the Saxons to the consulate of Valerian and Decius. Do these features indicate a lost set of fifth- or sixth-century British annals? These are conundrums to be sure. The strife of Ambrosius and Vitalinus, the battle of ‘Guoloph’ and its distance of twelve years from the reign of Vortigern (thus c.436 by the author’s reckoning) are very difficult to account for except by assuming that this was something that the HB’s author found in the sources he was using. One can suggest various ways in which the author (or his source) might have been confused with other events and people under those years in Prosper’s Chronicle (such as the fighting between Aëtius and Litorius and the Goths) and corrupted the names but it is difficult to make such propositions carry conviction. Given that Ambrosius is mentioned by Gildas, the safest and simplest solution might be that a British event had indeed been entered into the chronicle around 435. What the strife was about, who Vitalinus was, where Guoloph was (Wallop in Hampshire is usually proposed) and who won are all things we can no longer know. There is, however, another faint possibility, to which we will return.

That leaves the sixty-nine years from the imperium of Vortigern to the consulate of Valerian and Decius. There is no simple solution here. Working forward sixty-nine years from 428 brings us by antique reckoning, to 496. No Decius or Valerian held the consulate in that year. Indeed no one did. One can scurry about in the annals looking for people with similar names. Various members of the Decii, one of the great senatorial Roman families, held the consulate in the late fifth century: Flavius Caecina Decius Maximus Basilius in 480, Decius Marius Venantius Basilius in 484, Caecina Mavortius Basilius Decius in 486, and Decius Iunior in 529 (not to mention their relatives Basilius Venantius Iunior in 508, Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius in 527, and Paulinus Iunior in 534!). None of these is very close to the right year, though, and none had a colleague called Valerian or anything similar. More to the point, even those called Decius are usually called by one of their other names in the consular annals (e.g. Basilius in 480; Venantius in 484). If one looks for consular names that might have been corrupted into Decius and Valerian at about the right time, the closest one can get are the Volusianus and Dexicrates who held the office in 503. However, Dexicrates does not appear in western sources so the HB-author would not have known about him. None of this looks very convincing. Nor can one go back instead of forward from 428 to solve the riddle with any interesting results.

Various even less plausible alternatives have been proposed such as a later editing out of what the HB-author really mentioned. One candidate for the latter has been suggested as the battle of Mount Badon – the date of which happens to come out at 496, if you assume Gildas was writing in 540 exactly and if you assume that he meant that the battle occurred forty-four years before his writing; neither assumption is secure.

The most scholarly solution advanced to date, presented by David Dumville in 1976, was to assume that the manuscript was corrupt and that the scribe had made an error in jumping from one bit of text to another. He suggested that Decius was an error for Aecius, a variant spelling of Aëtius. He then proposed this ingenious reconstruction, which I have translated (the bit of text skipped over by the scribe is italicised): ‘From the year when the English came to Britain and were received by Vortigern to [A]ecius and Valer[ius four years and from Aecius to Valer]ian are lx[xx]ix.’ Aëtius did hold the consulate with Valerius in 432 and another Valerius, sometimes Valerianus, held the consulate in 521, 89 years after Aëtius and Valerius. A corruption of lxxxix (89) to lxix (69) is easy enough to envisage. It is a very clever solution but there are problems. Why did the consulate of Aëtius and Valerius in 432 matter to the HB-author or his source? Actually there are, by the author’s calculations, five years between 428 and 432, but that can easily be incorporated in Dumville’s reconstruction. A bigger problem is that in fact there are ninety (xc) years between 432 and 521 by his method of counting. One can assume that the author counted incorrectly (as he demonstrably did elsewhere) but then the explanation starts to look a bit too clever.

I have only this conjecture to offer, which may be no more satisfactory than the others. There was no consul in 496, but in a source called the Campanum Paschale (an Easter Table from Campania in Italy) you will read that in this year many people feared that Antichrist would appear. This was because they worked it out as 6000 years since Creation. Decius and Valerian were two of the great persecuting emperors in the mid-third century. The HB’s chronicle source, which I suggested might have been a version of Prosper continued to 457, might have prophesied or, with more likelihood, reported the prophecy that in 496 would come (or return) Decius and Valerian, as Antichrist. This calculation of the date of Antichrist, and this fear, were not uncommon in the later fifth century. In the ninth century, the HB simply read this reference to a prophecy as the record of a past consulate.

There are problems for this idea. Why should the HB have calculated this date from 428 rather than 457? One reason might be the stress he lays on that year as a turning point. But if that were the case then he must have known that Decius and Valerian were prophesied as Antichrist and that, obviously, they hadn’t turned up. However, it might be that, rather than being under its last year (457) the prophecy was mentioned under Felix and Taurus’s consulate in the HB’s source. This was reckoned as AP 401, the first year of the fifth century since the crucifixion. As we have seen, the year 400/401, whether expressed as Stilicho’s consulate (AP 400) or as Felix and Taurus’ (AP 401), seems to have been stressed in the HB-author’s sources. This might have been a further reason for the author to place the arrival of the Saxons in that crucial year.

What might seem to be another problem is the fact that his computation of the years of the world comes nowhere near 6000. However, most of the HB’s numbers for the years since Creation are taken from Victorius and Prosper. They were, then, current even in the fifth century when this belief in the imminent appearance of Antichrist was common. Furthermore, if his source simply reported the prophecy rather than subscribing to it, the discrepancy between the present year’s date, worked out since Creation, and its proximity to a ‘Year 6000’ apocalypse in 496 would not matter. A more serious problem would be that, since this prophecy is not entered under 428 in any surviving manuscript of Prosper or Victorius, it would have to have been entered into the manuscript (whether under 428 or 457, or under 496 in a manuscript of Victorius) very early on, between 457 and 496. This is not a fatal objection as plenty of other people were adding entries to both sources across the fifth-century West. This solution might now seem, like Dumville’s, to be a little over-elaborated. Nevertheless it retains the important advantage over all those suggested to date that it requires no change at all to the text, whether in the vocabulary, orthography or syntax, or in the names or numbers mentioned, and presumes no later censorship or missing phrases. The HB’s statement remains puzzling.

We need not, and probably should not, assume that the HB had access to a now lost set of British annals, whence came the references to Ambrosius, Vortigern, Vitalinus and ‘Guoloph’, even if there is a reasonable likelihood that the author came across these in the source he was using. That these entries and the other information I have postulated do not appear in any extant text of Prosper’s Chronicle or Victorius’ Cursus does not compel us to envisage another source. We should not think of late antique and early medieval texts as having a ‘correct’ or canonical form. Prosper’s and Victorius’ work circulated in numerous manuscripts, many of which contained additions and insertions relating to local events, sometimes drawn from other surviving sources such as Rufinus of Aquileia’s Ecclesiastical History. Between their composition and the HB-author’s use of them, there were 350 years for scribes to add events and other entries to these texts in a way that was absolutely typical for writers in this period. This is also ample time for a manuscript to enter Britain with various additions made, to be copied and for the copyist to misunderstand the insertions, as well as for that process to be repeated more than once.

We can, therefore, as a result of these perambulations, draw some important conclusions. Where we can identify sources for the HB that are otherwise lost for the period before about 600 these are almost entirely legendary. If the HB’s statements about fifth-century chronology came from one of these sources there would be no reason at all to assume that they were any more trustworthy. There is, however, no need to assume that they came from a separate lost source as they could derive from comments in the manuscript of his identifiable, surviving sources. If this is the case there is, again, no compelling reason to suppose that these entries were more reliable by modern historical standards than the legends about Maximus, Vortigern, Emrys, Germanus or Patrick. The entry about Decius and Valerian might be a fifth-century entry but need by no means be British (indeed, however one understands it, it need not be British) and the entry about Ambrosius, Vitalinus and ‘Guoloph’ had over three hundred years in which to be written into the manuscript of Prosper or Victorius. The dates assigned to Vortigern and to the adventus saxonum are calculations by the HB’s author. In the next section we will look at possible confusions contained in these and other entries. Overall, then there is no reason why we should place any trust in, or weight upon, the HB’s British chronology for the fifth century.

* The Romans and their heirs counted the numerical difference between days and years differently from modern westerners.  They counted the first and the last numbers inclusively, rather than simply deducting the start date from the end date.  The day after the Kalends of March (2 March) was counted as the sixth day before the Nones of March (7 March) rather than the fifth as one might expect.  Thus the HB counts the difference between the consulate of Valentinian and Theodosius (425) and that of Felix and Taurus (428) as four years rather than three.  It is also why he calculates twenty-three nineteen-year cycles as 438 rather than 437 years.  When looking at Nennius’ calculations it is important to remember this and not to slip back and forth between modern arithmetic and antique ‘inclusive’ counting to suit one’s argument.