Under Another Sky (33 page)

It was here, in 1962, that some of the latest objects that can be associated with Roman Britain were discovered: a set of exquisite glass vessels – drinking cups, beakers, jugs and bowls – in milkily aqueous shades of green. They had been set inside a bronze dish and buried. Some of them had survived intact; others were restored from fragments. They can now be seen in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum. On stylistic grounds, they have been dated to the early fifth century, the very end of the age of Roman Britain; they are the newest things on display in the gallery. But they are, otherwise, deeply mysterious objects. Were the glass vessels set here for safe keeping against a better time? If so, by whom? And why were they placed here, in Norfolk, in a pit beneath a rampart in a century-old fort?

No one can give secure answers to such questions. There are many theories, speculations and fantasies about the end of Roman Britain, but few certainties, and no consensus. It is not clear precisely why Roman rule ceased in about
AD
408 and was never resumed. Or to what extent, and in what parts of Britain, and for how long, vestiges of Roman-ness persisted: some have argued that in the west of Britain, a Roman way of life continued even into the seventh century, while others have claimed that most Roman towns were already derelict by
AD
408. Nor is it clear precisely when, and in what numbers, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes came to Britain, and whether as peaceful settlers or violent aggressors. Nor is it known to what extent myths of British resistance to the Saxons – such as the legend of King Arthur – are tinged with truth. The written evidence, bar a handful of problematic texts, quickly dries up. Britain fades out of the historical record, slipping into a literary darkness almost as complete as that which obtained before the Romans began to write about it – a darkness only to be lifted with the composition, in
AD
731, of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
.

The archaeology draws a similar blank. Inscriptions virtually ceased to be produced; the few new coins that circulated were poor, reduced specimens, some manufactured from the clippings of old ones. Pottery factories were stilled. The sturdy stone buildings of Roman Britain
were no longer built. Londinium itself was virtually deserted, the walled city not to be fully reoccupied until the reign of Alfred the Great nearly half a millennium later. This silence and absence is itself eloquent: it points towards the collapse of civic life, of the money economy, of the secure and busy world of Roman
things
. It is hard not to stare into the deep white blankness of Roman Britain’s end and to see a calamity that was swift and complete; a limb destroyed as it was sundered from the blood supply of the imperial body.

The reign of Constantine the Great, from his acclamation in York in
AD
306 to his death in 337, saw a generation of stability in Britain, and perhaps its high-water mark of prosperity. After his death, a familiar pattern of warring sons vying for power asserted itself. By 343, one of them was dead and the empire was divided between the remaining two: Constans in the west and Constantius II in the east. But Constans – who made an unusual winter Channel crossing to Britain that year, perhaps to deal with some stirring trouble – was ousted, and the pagan Magnentius raised in his stead. By 353, Magnentius’s forces had in turn been defeated by Constantius II in Illyricum in the Balkans, and in Gaul. Now, as sole emperor, Constantius II sent his representative, Paul ‘the Chain’ Catena, to Britain to quash Magnentius’s remaining sympathisers – apparently so brutally that Martinus, the vicar of Britain (the civil administrator who oversaw the four provinces of the island), attempted to attack him with a sword, before committing suicide. In 355, Constantius appointed his obscure young cousin, the brilliant pagan Julian, to rule the western empire. He appears to have used the rich agricultural land of Britain, perhaps the chief cause of its prosperity, to supply the Roman troops who were slugging it out against the Germanic insurgents on the Rhine. In 367 came the so-called Barbarian Conspiracy, an unusual instance of various interest groups co-operating for an all-out assault on Roman territory. Picts from Caledonia and Scots and Attacotti from Hibernia raged in Britain, while Saxons and Franks assaulted Gaul. The leader of the Roman troops in Britain, Fullofaudes, was put out of action; the
comes maritimi tractus
– the ‘count of the maritime region’ – was killed. The revolt seems to have been completely put down by Theodosius, the father of the emperor Theodosius the Great, who is also said to have restored the otherwise undocumented province of Valentia, perhaps in northern England.

But any respite from instability was temporary. On two subsequent occasions over the next few decades, troops in Britain elevated pretenders to the purple – Magnus Maximus and Constantine III, the latter apparently chosen by the soldiers at least partly on the basis of his name, perfumed as it was with the glory of the old emperor (to whom he was not related). According to the sixth-century cleric Gildas – whose sermonising work
On the Destruction of Britain
is the only near-contemporary source describing the end of Roman rule – Maximus depleted the island of troops, who were never to return.

The empire in the north-west was now embroiled in wars with foreign insurgents, riven by civil war, and locked, by reason of military and diplomatic necessity, into endlessly complex and often mutually duplicitous relationships with ‘barbarian’ allies such as the Goth Alaric, who, when relations turned sour, was to sack Rome itself in 410. At length, while Constantine III was campaigning in Spain in around 408, a serious barbarian invasion racked Britain. According to the Byzantine historian Zosimus, writing at the turn of the sixth century, ‘the barbarians beyond the Rhine made such unbounded incursions over every province, as to reduce not only the Britons, but some of the Celtic nations also to the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws but as they themselves pleased. The Britons therefore took up arms, and incurred many dangerous enterprises for their own protection, until they had freed their cities from the barbarians who besieged them. In a similar manner, the whole of Armorica, with other provinces of Gaul, delivered themselves by the same means; expelling the Roman magistrates or officers, and erecting a government, such as they pleased, of their own.’

It is not at all clear that the Britons regarded this move as a final break from Rome. There are hints that on subsequent occasions they appealed to the empire for help: in his narrative, Zosimus noted that the emperor Honorius ‘sent letters to the cities of Britain urging them to take measures to defend themselves’. This, known as the ‘rescript of Honorius’, usually dated to 408, has traditionally been regarded as the moment at which Britain was permanently cast adrift from the empire. In fact, as with so much about the last days of Roman Britain, its status is unstable: the manuscript is now thought by most scholars to be corrupt, referring to Brittium, in modern Calabria, rather than Britannia.

It is impossible to know what the aftermath of all this felt like from the inside, except by way of the merest chinks illuminating the darkness. The
Confession
of St Patrick, believed to date from the mid fifth century, begins with Patricius, the son of a deacon (elsewhere he describes his father as a
decurion
, a Roman magistrate), being taken captive from his small villa near the settlement of Bannavem Taberniae, the location of which is unknown. ‘
Hyberione in captivitate adductus sum, cum tot milia hominum, secundum merita nostra, quia a Deo recessimus
’ – ‘I was abducted in captivity to Ireland, like so many thousands of men, as we deserved, because we had turned away from God,’ he wrote. He served as a slave, he added, for six years.

Gildas – whose tone is fire and brimstone rather than one of scholarly detachment – painted a grim picture. As the Romans left, he wrote, the Scots and the Picts arrived in their coracles like ‘
fusci vermiculorum cunei
’, ‘dark swarms of worms’. The people were torn apart ‘
sicut agni a lanionibus
’, ‘like lambs by butchers’. Later, after a period in which the Britons gave way to decadence and luxury, the Saxons came, he wrote, in three warships. They were paid off, but in time their demands for land and provisions became heavier and heavier.

In the later, even more insecure source traditionally ascribed to the monk Nennius, perhaps writing in the ninth century, the story is that the British king Vortigern granted the island of Thanet to the Saxon mercenaries Hengist and Horsa, who eventually grabbed more and more territory in the south-east. At any rate, according to Gildas, violence erupted. Fire blazed from sea to sea; settlements were destroyed, bishops, priests and people lay dead in the streets. Some fled to the mountains, some gave themselves up to slavery. The Britons finally rallied under Ambrosius Aurelianus – ‘a modest man, who alone of the Romans had by chance survived the shock of such a storm, a storm in which his parents had evidently perished’, according to Gildas. They took on the Saxons at Mount Badon – the whereabouts of which is unknown – and won a great victory.

In Nennius, it is Arthur who leads the troops at Badon; his text is the wellspring for the great medieval elaborations of the Arthurian legends. R. G. Collingwood, for one, was a believer: not in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tales of magic and knights and chivalry, to be sure, but in Arturius as a likely historical reality, a figure who, against the backdrop of ‘a country sinking into barbarism’, was likely to have
been the last remnant of ‘Roman ideas’. However that may be, Collingwood was surely right when he wrote that it was in the figure of Arthur in which ‘the British people has embalmed its memory of Roman Britain’. It was the historiographical void left by the end of Roman rule that created the conditions for the weaving of Britain’s most powerful and wonderful myths: the knights of the Round Table, Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere. As if this terrifying lacuna, this great Dark Age of nothingness, needed to be filled with stories in which good fought against evil, in which magic vibrated through the forests of the island, in which heroes valiantly strove. Perhaps the Arthurian legends also reflect the wonderment of the English at the grand, decaying Roman towns and buildings, which must have been built by supernatural means. The melancholic Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Ruin’ begins:

Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.

One early spring day I visited the British Museum to look at an object that, like the Burgh Castle glass, stands at the very end of the Romano-British period. Curator Richard Hobbs had offered to show me the Great Dish of the Mildenhall Treasure, an elaborately decorated late Roman platter made from eight kilograms of silver. Unusually, the Great Dish had been removed from its display case in the Roman Britain gallery so that Hobbs could study it in detail. It is the most impressive item in a spectacular trove of thirty-four silver objects – platters, dishes, ladles, spoons – that was found buried on the outskirts of West Row, a fenland village near the town of Mildenhall in Suffolk.

The Mildenhall Treasure is one of a number of buried hoards that date from the last years of Roman Britain. Among them is the Hoxne Treasure, also found in Suffolk: it was discovered in 1992 by a man searching for his lost hammer using a metal detector. He found the hammer, too: it is now part of the British Museum’s collection, along with the cache of coins, jewellery and precious tableware, including a silver pepperpot in the shape of a grand Roman lady, her eyes and lips picked out in gold. The richness and beauty of these hoards is startling. ‘It turns out that the place to go for fourth-century precious
metal is Britain,’ said Hobbs. Such finds vastly outnumber those from neighbouring Gaul: attesting, it seems, to the wealth of the province in the dying decades of Roman rule – and perhaps also to unusual levels of trouble. For no one knows for sure why such hoards were buried. They may have been the hastily concealed wealth of families on the run from Saxon raiders, or the breakdown in civil society. They may have been ritually buried, offerings to the gods (though some of the hoards seem to have been buried by Christians).

We were in a book-lined study room in the British Museum, behind one of those mysterious locked doors in the galleries through which curators are occasionally glimpsed emerging or disappearing as they go about their business. Hobbs took the Great Dish out of a drawer, unwrapping it from layers of tissue paper, and placed it on a table. It caught the light from the window behind us, and seemed to illuminate the whole room. It appeared larger, a more hefty physical presence, than when I had seen it in its glass case. Hobbs explained how its intricate decoration had been made by a craftsman pushing the metal into shape with chasing tools. Wearing cotton gloves, we traced the scenes with our fingers.

At the centre was the face of a sea god, with dolphins sprouting from his hair and beard. Around him circled a playful, erotic scene of sea creatures cavorting with naked nymphs, all edged with a row of scallop shells. Here were fishtailed tritons; a hippocamp, a creature that was half fish, half stag; a merman with a snapping lobster claw protruding from his groin instead of a penis. The decoration was exquisitely detailed: the scales on the fishtails were individually rendered, even the hair on the aureoles of the men’s nipples carefully suggested. The largest scene ran around the edge of the dish. Here Bacchus, with his emblematic panther, leaned on his thyrsus, while deep-browed Silenus, the satyr, held out his bowl to the god. Hercules – his lionskin and club lying next to his feet – staggered drunkenly. A naked youth played the double pipes while a maenad threw her head back as she danced, the fine fabric of her dress swirling behind her and catching against the flesh of her thigh. All was movement and clamour and the wild, abandoned worship of the god.

The discovery of the Mildenhall Treasure is one of the most notorious sagas in twentieth-century British archaeological history, trailing unsolved puzzles and igniting conspiracy theories. Hobbs has
researched its history, sifting through documents and correspondence and interviewing the protagonists’ surviving relatives. It was Dr Hugh Fawcett, an amateur antiquary from Buckinghamshire, who first alerted the British Museum to the existence of a number of ancient objects that he had seen at Easter 1946 in the home of a fellow enthusiast, Sydney Ford, who ran a small but successful contract ploughing firm in Suffolk. Fawcett, aware of the law of treasure trove, which obliged finders to declare precious-metal finds to the authorities, had urged Ford to report his discovery. This, with enormous reluctance, Ford eventually did – not before claiming that ‘I don’t feel I have committed a crime by picking up something of value off my land.’ This apparently simple statement was not the least of a number of obfuscations perpetuated by Ford. In actual fact, he had not himself discovered the hoard: that had been done by one Gordon Butcher, who had struck the silver with his plough one January afternoon in 1942 and had immediately summoned Ford. Nor was it ‘my land’: the field in question, at least according to the location that Ford finally pinpointed, belonged to one Sophia Aves, whose tenant was one Fred Rolfe, who contracted Ford to do the ploughing, who had employed, on this occasion, Butcher to drive the tractor.