Chaos is Come Again

There's a problem with history.  It's like quantum physics, in that the results you get tend to depend on where you happen to be standing.

In other words, history is all about perspective.

The historian Michael Wood wrote an interesting piece for the BBC News Magazine to accompany his new series about the history of Britain.  Like many historians, Wood starts his history with the Romans.

There is something of a perception among historians that the ancient Britons were useless.  They just sat around in the mud, scratching their backsides and waiting for the Romans to come along and show them how to do things.

Of course, the Britons rejected the advances of Julius Caesar in 55 BC.  But ninety years later, there were a fair few British chieftains - mostly in the south and east of Britain - who were familiar with life on the Continent and who saw the potential of being clients of Rome.  For the chieftains, this could mean new, undreamt-of levels of luxury, just as long as they consented to Roman domination.  So when Claudius mounted his invasion, there were some tribes who effectively welcomed them in and no doubt stood in awe as a squadron of elephants entered the country.

The Romans were less welcome in the west and the north, and they failed to subdue the Scottish Highlands.  The Roman soldiers coined a name for the tattooed tribesmen of the far north: they called them pictii - the Painted Ones.  In fact, the native Britons as a whole seem to have had a preference for tattoos, and for two or three centuries it is probable that the native population was divided into those who shaved (in the Roman style) and those who decorated their bodies.

In his piece for the BBC, Michael Wood compared the collapse of Roman rule, and the withdrawal of the legions - a process that was more or less completed by 409 AD - with the current economic crisis in Europe.  He made some salient points, one of them being about social inequality: 'in the 300s the big land-owning aristocrats who often had fantastic wealth, contributed much less than they had in the past to defence and government.'

There is indeed evidence that the wealthier members of Romano-British society resented paying for the privileges which their ancestors had sought.  A phenomenon we have seen much of in more recent times.

The Roman Empire collapsed - but rumours of Britain's demise were a tad premature.  Yes: hard times lay ahead.  As Wood points out, the population of Britain shrank from a high of about four million to just one million in the 500s, as a result of climate crises, famines, plague and warfare.  But Britain would remain Britain until many years after the Romans left.

Even in the south, which fell first to the waves of Germanic immigrants known, collectively, as the Saxons, the decisive blow didn't fall until the Battle of Dyrham in 577, when the Saxons fought their way through to the River Severn, cutting off the Britons of the south-west from those of the Midlands.  That was nearly 170 years after the last Roman legion withdrew from British shores.  It was also right in the middle of the lifetime of Arthur.

However, Arthur was not in the south (no matter how hard many scholars want him to have been).  He was in the North.  And the Men of the North were fighting back against the Anglian settlers of what is now Northumberland.

When the Saxons were breaking through to the Severn in the south, Arthur was battling against the Ulaid warriors of Ulster in central Scotland.  Three years later, he won a major victory over the southern Picts.  And by 590, his alliance of British and Irish warrior-princes had driven the encroaching Angles back to the sea.  A British army had the Germanic warriors pinned down at Lindisfarne while, a little further down the coast, an Irish contingent was besieging the Anglian stronghold of Bamburgh.

That was when treachery struck from within Arthur's own ranks.

Four years later, in 594, Arthur fought his last battle and was betrayed by those he trusted.  By the following year, the resurgent Angles had overrun much of the North.  Britain was finished.

This happened almost 200 years after the Romans departed - and so we should be wary of any claims that Britain descended into absolute chaos the moment the well-organised, militarised and bureaucratic Romans left us to our own devices.

One point Wood makes in his BBC piece is of enormous interest.  He refers to Edward Gibbon, the Victorian author of the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and notes that Gibbon - rather unusually, given the age he lived in - blamed the collapse of British society, not only on the barbaric invaders from across the North Sea, but on Christianity.  In Gibbon's view, by focussing on a better world, a future paradise, Christianity undermined the Britons' attempts to deal with the crisis they were actually caught up in.

There is something in that.  You will still hear those who - speaking from a rather imperialistic perspective - praise the Roman occupation and imagine that Christianity was thoroughly settled as the one and only religion in Britain by the time the Romans left.  This is the simplistic view of history: the Romans came, dragged us up out of the filth, and then Christianity finished off the job by making us civilised.  But it wasn't really like that.

At least where Arthur was concerned, the belligerence, intransigence and ambition of the early Church caused his downfall.  There is evidence that the early Church destroyed anything it could find relating to the Celtic intelligentsia - the 'Druids' - and rewrote history to make its own triumph seem inevitable.

The supporters of the early Church were, in many ways, the same people who had so admired the Roman Empire.  The antagonists of the early Church were, by and large, those who preferred the native traditions and saw Britain's future, not as a far-flung province of the reborn Empire (the Church of Rome) but as an independent nation in its own right.  As we know, the Church won.  It certainly played dirty, and then did everything it could to cover its tracks.

Hence, the Dark Ages - a period in British history when nobody really knows what was going on, because the Church controlled the information.  But the problem goes much further back than that.  The Roman occupation distorts our view of ancient Britain, and the rise of the Church distorts our view of post-Roman Britain.  Both have a tendency to silence the voices of the Britons.  And so we still have historians who believe that Britain was nothing until the Romans came, and then collapsed into nothingness again until the Church got a grip in the sixth and seventh centuries. What the average Briton actually thought, felt and believed is irrelevant - all that matters is that we celebrate the triumph of institutions (the Roman Empire, the Church of Rome) at the expense of the people.

So where does that leave us today?  Is Michael Wood right to see the Fall of the Roman Empire echoed in Europe's contemporary crises?

Let us first of all remember that trade existed between Britain and Continental Europe before the Romans marched into the land and imposed their own ideas on the Britons.  Maybe Julius Caesar had been right when he argued that Druidism - not so much a 'religion' as an intellectual system and a repository of knowledge - originated in Britain.  There are those who like to believe that the Romans stamped out Druidism when they destroyed a major college on Anglesey in AD 60, but that view is profoundly unrealistic.  Why should a centuries-old system of learning and wisdom vanish just because it was told to?

If there is a contemporary European parallel with the post-Roman Britain of Arthur's time, it is perhaps the appalling effect of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics, a kind of slash-and-burn policy which benefits the greedy.  This proved as attractive to certain individuals, mostly in the south and east of Britain, as the advent of Roman rule did nearly 2,000 years ago.  It offered a get-rich-quick opportunity, and the price we're paying is the destruction of local services (a phenomenon which, according to Michael Wood, matches the situation in post-Roman Britain).

The emergence of Scottish independence as a political issue in recent times is another reminder of the original Arthur, the son of the King of the Scots.  Arthur son of Aedan was born exactly 150 years after the departure of the last Roman legion, and at the very moment when the Germanic settlers were launching their conquest of North Britain.  By his example, he showed how the Britons could unite with their Celtic allies to mount a counterattack that, until it was brought down by treachery, proved remarkably successful.

The south had fallen, first of all to the attractions of Roman luxury, and then to the consequences of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics.  But the North held out, true to its traditions.  The problem, when it came, took the form of religious fundamentalism.

If we want to prevent the complete collapse of Britain - as happened in the immediate aftermath of Artuir mac Aedain's death in 594 - then we have to guard against the rise of religious intolerance and its attendant right-wing politics.  That was what destroyed Britain the first time around.  The apparent collapse of the European dream - symbolised by the Treaty of Rome - is not what will cause Britain's demise.  It is the (southern) love affair with easy money, and the consequent imposition of Germanic austerity, that has caused the problem which we now face.  Hard times lead to strange beliefs, and all it will take is the appearance of an ambitious and unscrupulous 'prophet' to plunge Britain back into the Dark Ages.

That's what happened in Arthur's day, and it could happen again.  But now, as then, the Scots (whose land includes much of what was British territory in Arthur's day) might be able to show us the way.

By remaining true to themselves, the Scots have been able to grow their economy (they currently contribute almost twice as much to the British Treasury as they get back in services), while England's economy is contracting, thanks to the southern fondness for Roman-style luxury and, latterly, the Germanic obsession with austerity.  There is, then, a Light in the North, very much as there was in Arthur's day.  What might snuff it out is religious fanaticism, selfishness, paranoia and intolerance.  Maybe even a figure like Donald Trump.

Divided, We Fell

According to Gildas the Wise, writing in the first half of the sixth century AD, the Britons were a stubborn and stiff-necked people.  Even when their "foreign wars" (against Saxon invaders) had come to a temporary end, they continued to be plagued by "civil troubles".

Gildas did not elaborate on the causes or nature of those "civil troubles", but there has been a tacit assumption among many historians ever since that the Britons were simply too chaotic, too petty-minded and too disorganised to mount a proper defence of their island.

Which brings us to Arthur.  Under his military leadership, the Britons, along with their Irish allies, did join forces successfully, and came close to wiping out the Germanic settlers in North Britain.  Was Arthur, then, the exception that proved the rule?  Was he remembered as a great British hero because he unified the fractious tribes against a common enemy?

Up to a point, yes.  But he fell victim to the "civil troubles" referred to by St Gildas.  And because of those civil troubles, we have been denied a clear view of Arthur for hundreds of years.

There are those in the Arthurian community who seem to think of Arthur as, essentially, a sort of prototype "Englishman".  Peter Ackroyd was quoted in the Radio Times earlier this year, saying that Sir Thomas Malory's epic Le Morte d'Arthur (published in 1485) is a "tale of Englishness".  Now, that's a bit odd, really, because Arthur fought against the people who came to be known as the English.  Indeed, it was the Angles of North Britain who gave their name to England, and it was those very Angles who Arthur and his confederates came very close to driving back into the sea.

There's something decidedly imperialistic about the claim that Arthur represents a kind of English ideal.  Those who were his enemies have adopted him as their national hero - not because he fought so bravely against them, but because they want to think of him as one of their own.  Hence the enduring myths of Tintagel, Glastonbury, and other supposedly "Arthurian" places in the south.  Those myths help to bolster the image of Arthur as someone who, whether he realised it or not, was to all intents and purposes English.

Of course, most students of the Arthurian legends know deep down in their hearts of hearts that Arthur was not English at all.  So they plump for Plan B.  If he wasn't English (shame!) then he must have been Roman.

After all, what did the Britons ever do for us?  They just sat around contemplating their own navels and quarrelling so much that pretty much anybody - Roman, Saxon - could steal their country from them.

The notion that Arthur must have had a Roman pedigree, and was no doubt a Romanised Briton of sorts, maintains a kind of continuity of mindset which goes all the way back to St Gildas.  Christianity had been introduced in Britain under the Roman occupation.  Pretty soon, Christianity came to be identified with Rome, so that, even with the Roman Empire crumbling in the West, the Eternal City remained as a symbol of order and discipline.

What St Gildas found so disgusting was that, left to their own devices, the Britons tended to go back to their old gods.  It was this that led to the "civil troubles" which ultimately ruined Britain.  Gildas the Wise spoke on behalf of the Romanised Britons, who looked to Rome as the source of power and Christianity as the Empire reborn.  Because of that, he simply did not have a good word to say about those Britons who preferred their native traditions and felt, rightly or wrongly, that Britain should be responsible for her own destiny.

Under Arthur, the latter faction - the "Ourselves Alone" side of Britain, true to its native ways - might have prevailed against those Anglian invaders who became the English.  But their efforts were undermined by the Romanised faction, spearheaded by the so-called saints of the early Church.  It was not so much the case that the Britons were just too useless as a people to withstand the English onslaught, but that the Britons were destroyed by their own enemies within: the admirers of Rome, the preachers of the Word.

The fiction that Arthur must have been of Roman stock ties in with the affectation that Arthur was quintessentially an Englishman.  It shows a patronising - one might even say "racist" - attitude towards the native Britons.  It also perpetuates a profound injustice.  Arthur was betrayed by the Christians who were closest to him.  He stood in the way of their plans for a uniform Church.  He and his family represented a kind of tolerant, inclusive spirituality - not Christians themselves, they were prepared to accept Christians in their midst, just as long as those Christians weren't actively plotting against them.  Sadly, though, some of those Christians just wouldn't stop plotting, and the outcome was the death of Arthur and the loss of Britain to her enemies.

Those same enemies now claim Arthur as their own.  That is, they try to make him "English".  But, realising that they'd never get away with that, they go to the next best thing: he was Roman.  From there, it is a short step to making him a Christian king, which is what happened to his legends in the Middle Ages.

The idea that only the Romans were capable of doing anything constructive - at least until the English were properly settled - is in keeping with the prejudices expressed by St Gildas shortly before Arthur was born.  It is prejudice, pure and simple, which tries to make out that Arthur was sort of English, probably Roman, and dominated southern Britain at a time when there are no traces whatsoever of an Arthur.

The same prejudice refuses to acknowledge the historical Arthur of the North.  That Arthur wasn't Roman.  Which means he wasn't English.  Which means he can't have been Arthur.  QED.

The old divisions which were created and exploited by the early Church continue to this day.  They are what caused Britain to fall in the first place.  The same treachery which betrayed Arthur and his warriors still keeps him resolutely hidden from view and promotes a myth of an English, Roman, southern, Christian Arthur.

The Arthur, that is, who was invented by his enemies - not the Arthur who was so fondly remembered by his own beleagured people.