Carla Nayland Historical Fiction

Peredur

2009-12-04T09:10:00.003Z

Peredur was a Brittonic ruler of the late sixth century, traditionally associated with York and one of the possible sources for the character of Sir Percival in Arthurian romance. What do we know about him?

Evidence

Genealogies

Gurci ha Peretur mepion eleuther cascord maur map letlum map Ceneú map Coylhen.

--Harleian genealogies

Gvrgi a Pheredur meibon Eliffer Gosgorduavr m Arthwys m Mar m Keneu m Coel

--Gwr y Gogledd

Triads

Three Prostrate Chieftains

…. Gwgon Gwron son of Peredur son of Eliffer of the Great Retinue. And this is why those were called 'Prostrate Chieftains': because they would not seek a dominion, which nobody could deny to them

Three Faithless warbands

…. The War-Band of Gwrgi and Peredur, who abandoned their lord at Caer Greu, when they had an appointment to fight the next day with Eda Great-Knee; and there they were both slain

Three Horse Burdens

….. Corvan, horse of the sons of Eliffer, bore the second Horse-Burden: he carried on his back Gwrgi and Peredur and Dunawd the Stout and Cynfelyn the Leprous(?), to look upon the battle-fog of (the host of) Gwenddolau (in) Ar(f)derydd.

--Hergest Triads

Annales Cambriae

573 The battle of Arfderydd ‡between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell; Merlin went mad.
580 Gwrgi and Peredur sons of Elifert died.
--Annales Cambriae

Medieval Welsh romance title, Peredur son of Efrawg

Historia Brittonum lists Caer Ebrauc among the cities of Britain. Ebrauc and Efrawg are the same name, and Ebrauc looks closely related to Eboracum (the Roman name for York). The title of the romance may indicate that the Peredur of the Triads, genealogies and Annales Cambriae was associated with York. The name of a kingdom is sometimes appended to the name of its ruler (e.g. Urien Rheged, Maelgwn Gwynedd), and a name such as this could have been misinterpreted as a patronymic.

However, there could have been several individuals called Peredur, and the Peredur of the romance (assuming the romance is based on a historical figure at all) may not be the same as the Peredur of the Triads and Annales Cambriae. It is notable that Peredur’s brother Gurci or Gwrgi, bracketed with him in the genealogies, Triads and Annales Cambriae, is missing from the romance, which may indicate a different Peredur. It is also possible that the author of the romance could just have picked a romantic-sounding name at random for the hero of the tale and that the name has no especial significance.

Y Gododdin

Stanza A31

Caradawg and Madawg, Pyll and Ieuan
Gwgaun and Gwiawn, Gwyn and Cynwan,
Peredur of the steel armament, Gorddur and Aeddan
conquerors in the uproar of battle with shields disarrayed
and though they were slain, they slew
None returned to their districts

--Text reconstructed and translated by John Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin

Other translations render the phrase “Peredur arueu dur” as “Peredur Steel Arm” or “Peredur Steel Arms”.

Interpretation

The two dates of 573 for Peredur’s battle at Arderydd and 580 for his death in Annales Cambriae are not inconsistent with each other. Eda Great-Knee in the Triads is often considered to be a reference to Ida of Bernicia, whom Bede says reigned for 12 years starting in 547 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Book V ch.24). This would mean that Ida died in 559 or thereabouts, which is inconsistent with his being responsible for killing Peredur in 580.

Where the dates of events in Annales Cambriae can be compared with dates for the same events in Bede’s history, they agree within a few years (see the list in Dating the Battle of Chester for examples). A discrepancy of 20+ years is unusual. It is of course possible that either Bede or Annales Cambriae has got the date wildly wrong, but another possibility may be that Eda Great-Knee is not Ida of Bernicia.

Historia Brittonum mentions a son of Ida called Adda:

Ida had twelve sons, Adda, Belric Theodric, Thelric, Theodhere, Osmer, and one queen Bearnoch

-- Historia Brittonum ch. 57

If Eda Great-Knee of the Triads was Adda son of Ida, rather than Ida, then the discrepancy over the date may be resolved. Historia Brittonum goes on to say:

63. Adda, son of Ida, reigned eight years; Ethelric, son of Adda, reigned four years. Theodoric, son of Ida, reigned seven years. Freothwulf reigned six years. In whose time the kingdom of Kent, by the mission of Gregory, received baptism Hussa reigned seven years. Against him fought four kings, Urien, and Ryderthen, and Gualllauc, and Morcant. Theodoric fought bravely, together with his sons, against that Urien.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 63

It is worth noting that this entry refers to Ethelric son of Adda, and the previous entry referred to Thelric son of Ida. If these are the same individual, then perhaps even the compiler of Historia Brittonum got the names Ida and Adda confused on occasion.

Adda’s reign cannot be dated accurately, though if the order of the text in Historia Brittonum reflects the order of events his reign was presumably some time before 597 when Augustine arrived in Kent. He may be a candidate for Eda Great-Knee in the Triads, or Eda Great-Knee may be someone whose name has been otherwise lost to history. On the whole, I would be inclined to accept the dates in Annales Cambriae for Peredur’s career, and identify Eda Great-Knee as either Adda son of Ida or some other individual with a similar name.

Peredur is listed in Y Gododdin as a battle casualty at Catraeth, which is inconsistent with the Triads unless Catraeth is another name for Caer Greu. As neither place has been definitively identified, this is a possibility. However, the heroic slaughter at Catraeth lauded in Y Gododdin is difficult to square with the Faithless Warband of the Triads. It is possible that there was more than one individual with the name Peredur. The name Gwgaun (Peredur’s son from the Triads) is mentioned in the same stanza, but I can’t see a name that looks obviously like Peredur’s brother Gwrgi or Gurci in the stanza. Gorddur is the nearest, and I don’t think it’s the same name. Given that Peredur and Gwrgi are generally bracketed together in the Triads, Annales Cambriae and the genealogies, this might be a slight indication that the Peredur of Y Gododdin is a different individual. Another possibility may be that the poet who composed Y Gododdin borrowed the names of heroes from other stories.

All the surviving references to Peredur have some connection with the region that is now northern England or southern Scotland. He appears in the genealogy called Gwr y Gogledd “Descent of the Men of the North”, the medieval romance apparently associates him with York, the battle of Arderydd is usually identified with the parish of Arthuret near Longtown in Cumbria, and if Y Gododdin refers to the same Peredur he is in company with a group of heroes from what is now southern Scotland.

It seems reasonable to infer that Peredur was a royal or noble warrior whose territory lay in what is now northern England, and that he lived some time in the later sixth century. Although far from certain, there is nothing to contradict the medieval romance locating him at Caer Ebrauc (modern York), nor is there any compelling reason not to accept the date of his death given in Annales Cambriae in 580. Given that the compiler of Annales Cambriae recorded two entries relating to Peredur, we can infer that he was an important man, or at least one about whom stories were told (which itself may imply that he and/or his family were important and/or rich enough to pay poets).

The genealogies both end at his generation, and the only reference to the next generation is to Peredur’s son Gwgaun, who is noted in the Triads as a son who did not (re)claim his inheritance. This is consistent with Peredur’s family having lost control of their territory after Peredur’s death. If Peredur was the king of a kingdom centred on York, this in turn would be consistent with the Deiran kings under Aelle of Deira taking control of York after Peredur’s death in 580, which could explain how Aelle’s son came to be in control of the city in 627. Whether the Deiran kings attacked and killed Peredur, or had some claim to be legitimate successors, or simply moved into a power vacuum and held onto it, or some combination thereof, is open to interpretation.

References
Annales Cambriae, available online
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Translated by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-044565-X.
Gwr y Gogledd, available online
Harleian genealogy, available online
Historia Brittonum, available online
Koch J. The Gododdin of Aneirin. Text and context from dark-age North Britain. University of Wales Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7083-1374-4
Peredur Son of Efrawg. In: The Mabinogion. Translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones. Everyman Classics, 1989. ISBN 0-460-15097-9
Triads, Red Book of Hergest, available online

Map links
Longtown
York

Autumn colours

2009-11-28T11:22:00.005Z

The trees have mostly lost their leaves now, but the autumn colours were lovely while they lasted.

East of the Sun, by Julia Gregson. Book review

2009-11-25T10:51:00.002Z

Edition reviewed: Touchstone 2008, ISBN 978-1-4391-0112-4. 587 pages. Review copy kindly provided by publisher.

East of the Sun is set in British India in 1928-1930. All the main characters are fictional.

In 1928, three contrasting young women board the Kaisar-i-Hind steamer, travelling from England to Bombay. Rose, aged 19, is going out to marry her fiancee, an army officer she has met only a few times. Her friend Victoria (Tor), about the same age, is ostensibly going as Rose’s bridesmaid but really with the firm intention of finding a husband in India and never, ever going back to her fussy and restrictive mother. Tor is part of the “Fishing Fleet”, the slightly disparaging contemporary slang term for the young upper-class women who go to India to look for a husband after having failed to land one during the London Season. Viva, aged 25, is theoretically chaperoning Rose and Tor, together with a disturbed teenage boy, Guy Glover, who has been expelled from his boarding school in England and is returning to his parents in India. Viva herself lived in India as a child, and is returning for the first time since her parents’ death to collect a trunk of their belongings and – hopefully – to make a new life for herself there after a disastrous love affair in England. All three women will find that India changes their lives for ever, although not always in the ways they expect.

East of the Sun is essentially three interlocking romantic storylines, one for each of the three female leads. Rose already has a husband lined up; Tor is desperately looking for one; Viva thinks she doesn’t want or need one. Their romantic adventures and misadventures, and the developing bond of friendship between them, form the core of the novel. A rather half-hearted political sub-plot pops up out of almost nowhere and vanishes again without being fully resolved, and there are occasional mentions of Gandhi, the independence movement, riots and demonstrations, but the tremendous political and social forces changing India are essentially a backdrop to the girls and their relationships. If you want to understand the political changes that ended the Raj in India, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet is among the best I’ve read. If you want to imagine what it might have been like to be an upper-class girl with a restricted education trying to make a life in an exotic country halfway across the world from home, East of the Sun gives you three to choose from.

Rose, a soldier’s daughter marrying a soldier, shows the British military perspective, struggling to keep the lid on random violence along the wild and dangerous North-West Frontier. Tor, staying with the glamorous and malicious socialite Ci Ci Mallinson, shows us the brittle luxury of Bombay high society. Viva, working in a children’s home in a poor suburb of Bombay to earn money after Guy Glover has cheated her out of her chaperone’s salary, shows the perspective of the independent working woman and gives a glimpse into the poverty of the Bombay slums. All three women have their own challenges to overcome. Rose has to find out if she can build a successful relationship with a man she barely knows. Tor, eager and naïve, is like a hopeful puppy gambolling after new experiences and opportunities, but her openness leaves her vulnerable to hurt. Viva, the opposite of Tor in many ways, is detached and self-contained, emotionally traumatised by the deaths of her parents and sister when she was a child and on the run from an exploitative love affair. She has to find the courage to confront and come to terms with her past before she can build a future. Their contrasting experiences, the interactions between the three girls and the characters around them, and their developing friendship for each other, form the main strengths of the novel.

One interesting feature is the contrast between the three girls’ hopes and ambitions. Viva and some of the secondary characters, such as Daisy Barker, are trying to make independent lives and to earn their own livings within the limited opportunities open to women. Rose and Tor, by contrast, would not be out of place in Jane Austen’s world; their lives will be shaped entirely by the marriages they will make or fail to make.

East of the Sun is lavish on descriptive detail and rather chattery conversations, especially in the first half of the book while the main characters are on the ship to India. As a result, the book is long - very long – and slow-paced. I often felt that it had taken pages and pages to get nowhere very much. Readers who love detailed descriptions of exotic places and customs will find much to enjoy; others may find the novel too slow and drawn-out. The author says in the question-and-answer interview at the back of the book that she found it frustrating to be unable to include the political turmoil of the time because her three heroines wouldn’t have had much knowledge or understanding of it; no doubt this is true, though it could surely have been solved if desired by introducing another viewpoint character who did.

Curiously, despite its length, the novel skips over some major events in the characters’ lives and some of the plot threads are never resolved. Tor’s whirlwind romance (so unlikely that I wonder if it is based on a real event, truth being stranger than fiction) is disposed of in a page or two with hardly anything to show her feelings. We never see the point of view of the handsome and intelligent young doctor Frank, though I found him an interesting character and would have liked to see more of him. Tor’s story and Viva’s are completed by the end of the book, but Rose is left with a lot of rather unsatisfactory unanswered questions. Guy Glover’s role in the novel is the most unsatisfying. He exhibits symptoms that would now be considered suggestive of schizophrenia (a new concept at the time, according to the novel), and pops in and out of the narrative at intervals to wreck Viva’s plans. His malevolent actions do act as a plot catalyst forcing Viva into important decisions, but his story just stops without being properly resolved, which I found disappointing.

An interesting question-and-answer interview at the back of the book discusses some of the influences and sources for the novel, and a helpful map at the front is invaluable for following the geography. A glossary of Hindi terms might have been handy, but they are almost always clear from the context so its absence is no great problem.

Lavish, detailed and very long romantic story about the developing friendship between three young English women in British India.

Appeal for votes by Alistair Forrest

2009-11-24T10:00:00.002Z

My Quaestor2000 colleague Alistair Forrest is appealing for votes for his novel Libertas in the October People's Book Prize.

Libertas is a historical novel set in Spain in the 1st century BC, against the background of Caesar's civil wars.

Voting is open until 30 November, and you can vote here

Thanks from Alistair for your support!

November recipe: Fudge squares

2009-11-22T17:27:00.002Z

There are lots of variations of this tea-time treat, under lots of different names. I have always known it as Fudge Squares, or sometimes Chocolate Caramel Shortbread, but I’ve seen something very similar called Millionaires’ Shortbread or even Billionaires’ Shortbread. Inflation being what it is, I suppose Trillionaires’ Shortbread is only a matter of time. Anyway, here is my recipe. If you want to make the caramel or chocolate layers thicker, just increase the quantity.

Fudge Squares

Biscuit base:
6oz (approx 150 g) plain flour
2 oz (approx 50 g) light brown soft sugar
3 oz (approx 75 g) butter
0.25 teaspoon (0.25 x 5 ml spoon) bicarbonate of soda (if you can’t measure a quarter of a teaspoon, you’re not alone. I treat this as “a smidgeon”)
1 egg, beaten

Fudge topping:
2 oz (approx 50 g) butter
2 oz (approx 50 g) light brown soft sugar. If you like a really rich treacly flavour, use half dark muscovado sugar
6 dessertspoons (approx 60 ml) milk

Chocolate topping:
2 oz (approx 50 g) plain chocolate.

Grease a shallow baking tin about 7” (approx 18 cm) square.

Rub the butter into the flour, sugar and bicarbonate of soda until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Stir in the beaten egg and mix to a stiff dough.

Press the dough evenly into the base of the greased baking tin. This is easier if you lightly dust your hands with flour, as the dough tends to be sticky.

Bake at about 180 – 200 C for about 25-30 minutes until set and light golden brown. Cool in the tin.

Put the ingredients for the fudge topping in a small saucepan, and heat gently, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved.

Increase the heat and boil gently, STIRRING ALL THE TIME, for 6-7 minutes until the mixture thickens and starts to look like fudge.

Remove from the heat and pour evenly over the biscuit base. Spread the fudge using a table knife into a roughly even layer over the top of the biscuit base. Leave to cool.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Pour evenly over the fudge topping, using a table knife to spread the chocolate if necessary. Leave to cool.

When the chocolate has set, loosen the edges of the biscuit base from the tin using a blunt knife. Put a flat board over the tin and invert it so the fudge square falls out of the tin and onto the board chocolate side down. Remove the tin. Cut into 12 pieces. You can cut it up in the baking tin if you like, but I find it easier to cut up if it is turned out chocolate side down.

Keeps in an airtight tin for a week or so.

Aelle of Deira

2009-11-17T18:17:00.002Z

Aelle is the first king of Deira (roughly modern Yorkshire) to be recorded as more than a name in a genealogy. He lived in the late sixth century, and shouldn’t be confused with the later king Aelle of Northumbria, who reigned in the 860s, was defeated by a Norse (Viking) army and featured (loosely) in the Kirk Douglas film The Vikings. Aelle of Deira was a quite separate individual, and as far as I know has never attracted the attention of Hollywood. What do we know about him?

Evidence

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A.D. 560. This year Ceawlin undertook the government of the
West-Saxons; and Ella, on the death of Ida, that of the
Northumbrians; each of whom reigned thirty winters. Ella was the
son of Iff, Iff of Usfrey, Usfrey of Wilgis, Wilgis of
Westerfalcon, Westerfalcon of Seafowl, Seafowl of Sebbald,
Sebbald of Sigeat, Sigeat of Swaddy, Swaddy of Seagirt, Seagar of
Waddy, Waddy of Woden, Woden of Frithowulf.

A.D. 588. This year died King Ella; and Ethelric reigned after
him five years.

--Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Bede

At some date before Pope Gregory the Great was appointed Pope, he apparently saw some Anglian slave boys for sale in the market in Rome, and enquired where they were from:

What is the name," proceeded he, "of the province from which they are brought?" It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. "Truly are they De ira," said he, "withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?" They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, "Hallelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts."

--Bede Ecclesiastical History, Book II Ch. I.

This incident is undated, but presumably occurred after Gregory came back to Rome from a journey to Constantinople in around 585/586 (Catholic Encyclopaedia), and before Gregory was made Pope in 590 AD.

He [Pope Gregory] sent to Britain Augustine, Mellitus and John, and many others, with God-fearing monks with them, to convert the English to Christ. [….] However, the people of the Angles north of the river Humber, under Kings Aelle and Aethelfrith, did not at this time hear the Word of life.

--Bede, On the Reckoning of Time. Translated by Faith Wallis

Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 AD, so Aelle was king of Deira at this date.

Aelle had a brother called Aelfric:

…the kingdom of Deira devolved upon Osric, son of Edwin’s uncle Elfric…

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History Book III Ch. 1

Two of Aelle’s children are known by name, a daughter called Acha who married Aethelferth of Bernicia (see earlier post for more information on Acha), and a son called Edwin (Eadwine) who was exiled by Aethelferth of Bernicia and later regained his kingdom (Bede Book II Ch.12). Eadwine was killed in 633 at the age of forty-eight, according to Bede (Book III Ch. 20), and was therefore born around 585 AD.

Eadwine had a nephew called Hereric, implying the existence of another sibling, but it is not known whether this was a brother or sister, or whether (s)he was a child of Aelle or of Eadwine’s (unknown) mother. Bede describes Hereric’s descent as ‘noble’ (Bede Book IV Ch. 23), which is consistent with royal descent from Aelle, but this is not certain.

Genealogies

Aelle appears in various genealogies:

Eadwine son of Aelle son of Yffe son of Wuscfrea son of Wilgils son of Westerfalca son of Soemil son of Saefugel son of Saebald son of Siggot son of Seubdaeg son of Woden son of Frealaf

--Anglian Collection

61. Woden begat Beldeg, Brond begat Siggar, who begat Sibald, who begat Zegulf, who begat Soemil, who first separated Deur from Berneich (Deira from Bernicia.) Soemil begat Sguerthing, who begat Giulglis, who begat Ulfrea, who begat Iffi, who begat Ulli, Edwin, Osfrid, and Eanfrid

--Historia Brittonum ch. 61

See also his genealogy in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle quoted above.

Reginald of Durham (12th century chronicler)

"Aethelferth not only drove from his kingdom Aella king of the Deirans whose daughter he had married, but after inflicting a series of defeats on him and expelling him from several refuges he deprived him of his life and kingdom together."

-Quoted in John Marsden, Northanhymbre Saga.

Interpretation

The genealogies are remarkably consistent for four or five generations before Aelle, and even the names in the upper reaches are broadly similar, so either the surviving manuscripts all copied from each other or they were all derived from the same tradition.

The date given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for Aelle’s death (588 AD) does not fit with the statement by Bede in On the Reckoning of Time that Aelle was still king in Deira, reigning at the same time as Aethelferth in Bernicia, in 597 AD when Augustine arrived in Kent. I’ve argued elsewhere that the date in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may be mistaken, perhaps arising from a confusion between two kings named Aethelric, and that a date of 605 AD for Aelle’s death and Aethelferth’s takeover is a better fit with more of the sources. (You can make up your own mind whether you agree with me).

However, the reign length for Aelle given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t contradict Bede, and there seems no particular reason to challenge it. It’s possible that “thirty years” was just an approximation meaning “a long time”, or that it meant what it said. AD dating was popularised by Bede, and prior to its widespread adoption the standard method of reckoning dates was by regnal years (“in the Xth year of the reign of King Y”), as can be seen from the records of some of the Church synods given in Bede’s history. A system of reckoning time by regnal years requires keeping records of kings and their reign lengths. Reign length is thus the sort of information we might expect a scribe to have access to from early sources, perhaps king-lists from Northumbria and its component parts of Deira and Bernicia and/or stories handed down in oral tradition.

Thirty years (approximately) is a long time to hold down the most dangerous job in early medieval Britain, but reigns of that sort of length are not unknown. Oswy of Northumbria ruled for about 28 years (“with much trouble”) according to Bede (Book III Ch 14), Aethelferth ruled for 24 years in total according to Historia Brittonum, and Alfred the Great ruled Wessex for 28 years between 871 and 899. Perhaps Aelle of Deira was similarly long-serving. If he was, he would presumably have been at least middle-aged and perhaps approaching old age by the end of his reign. This may indicate the context in which Aethelferth successfully annexed Deira. If Aelle did rule for thirty years or so, it’s a reasonable inference that he was an effective ruler (or possibly a very, very lucky one), but no-one remains at the height of their powers for ever. If he was ageing and/or in poor health he may have been an easy target for the aggressive and militarily able Aethelferth.

If Aelle ruled in Deira for 30 years, and his reign ended in 605 when Aethelferth began his 12 years of rule in Deira, then Aelle would have begun his rule in Deira somewhere around 575 AD (give or take a few years if the 30-year reign length is taken as an approximation). If we disregard Reginald of Durham’s late account and say that Aelle’s reign ended five years before Aethelferth’s annexation of Deira, that would place Aelle’s reign from 570 to 600 or thereabouts. Interestingly, either scenario would make him roughly contemporary with Peredur, killed in 580 AD according to Annales Cambriae and traditionally associated with York. Given that Aelle’s son Eadwine controlled York in the next generation (by 627 AD), this raises interesting questions about the relationship between Aelle and Peredur and the political territories they controlled. More about Peredur in a later post.

References

Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-85323-693-3.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Translated by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-044565-X.
Marsden J. Northanhymbre Saga. Kyle Cathie, 1992, ISBN 1856260550
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, available online
Anglian Collection, available online
Historia Brittonum, available online
Catholic Encyclopaedia, Pope St Gregory I (“the Great”), available online

Book Giveaway from Nan Hawthorne

2009-11-15T16:32:00.002Z

Nan Hawthorne is giving away free e-book copies of her novel An Involuntary King to readers outside North America. Here is what she says:

"I recently checked the price that Amazon.co.uk charges for my novel, An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. I was appalled. Of course, it's a combination of the fact that the book costs too much anyway and that postage to ship from my printer to your green and sceptered-isle is likewise.

So I am making this offer to those to live in the land where my novel takes place, namely England. If you purchase the ebook version on Smashwords, I will give you a coupon for 100% off the cover price there. That is, I am giving you the book.

You will need to contact me to get the coupon code first. Email: hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com

You can check out the book's page on Smashwords for more information on the book itself.

To qualify you just have to tell me the name of the town and county you live in and the name of your favorite king or queen of England. That part is just to humour me.

Don't dilly dally... there's an expiration date for the coupon. It's not for a while, but still..."

-Nan Hawthorne

So there you go - to get a free e-book copy of Nan's book, all you have to do is email her on hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com, with the name of your town and county and the name of your favourite king or queen of England, and Nan will send you a coupon code.

I checked with Nan, and the offer is open to anyone outside North America.

The Silver Pigs, by Lindsey Davis. Book review

2009-11-10T13:00:00.002Z

Edition reviewed: Arrow, 2000. ISBN: 0099414732, 315 pages.

Set in Rome and Britain in 70 AD, immediately after the political turmoil of the Year of Four Emperors, this historical mystery launched the immensely (and deservedly) popular Falco series. Emperor Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian are secondary characters. All the main characters are fictional.

Hard-bitten and not very successful private informer Marcus Didius Falco is short of funds, as ever. When he has the opportunity to rescue a pretty aristocratic girl from the thugs who are chasing her through the Forum, he naturally hopes for a reward from her wealthy family. Instead, he finds himself commissioned to investigate a murky financial scam, which soon turns out to have even murkier political overtones. When the trail turns murderous, Falco finds himself travelling to the godforsaken wilds of Britain, where he encounters two perils - working as a slave in the silver mines, and the beautiful, classy senator’s daughter Helena Justina.

I’ve read The Silver Pigs many times since it first appeared, and listened to the BBC radio adaptation starring Anton Lesser at least twice, and it’s just as fresh on an umpteenth encounter as on the first. The plot races along even faster than Helena Justina’s carriage driving, with plenty of unlikely twists and turns. I always lose track of who is double-crossing who among all the nefarious dealings – involving stolen silver, smuggling, attempts to bribe the Praetorian Guard, and a conspiracy against the Emperor – but for me that never matters. I read The Silver Pigs not for the whodunnit (although the murder is ingeniously resolved), but for the fun and energy of Falco’s world, the strong cast of characters and the sharpness of the writing.

Rome in The Silver Pigs is a city teeming with people from all walks of life, all of them busy making a living, raising their families, trying to get rich quick, arguing, gossiping, fighting, joking and trying to put one over on each other. Its richness and vitality remind me in some ways of Dickens’ London, or Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork. Never mind the Great Men and the marble monuments, Falco’s Rome is a city of jerry-built apartment buildings, dodgy fast-food joints, street markets, brothels, unsavoury taverns, labourers, craftsmen, debt collectors and muggers. There is a wealth of historical detail, but it’s there to create a world and never simply slathered on for exotic background.

Falco is a marvellous character, streetwise gumshoe and hopeless romantic by turns. An ex-legionary who served in Britain during the trauma of the Boudican revolt, he is as tough as an old Army boot and a casual womaniser (or he would like you to believe he is – I’m never sure how many of the Tripolitanian acrobat girls are wishful thinking), but his little niece shows him up to be a big softy at heart and he writes sentimental love poetry that nobody reads. His cynical, witty narrative, in a slangy style reminiscent of Marlowe, is nothing less than a delight. Helena Justina, cool, intelligent and self-possessed, makes a worthy match for him as their relationship develops (in this and subsequent books).

The secondary characters are no less colourful. Falco’s gimcrack apartment building is owned by a retired gladiator called Smaractus who employs a team of heavies to collect unpaid rent, and the ground floor is occupied by a laundry run by the kindly but no less formidable Lenia, who has her eye on marrying Smaractus at a profit. Falco’s old friend and ex-Army colleague Petronius is a world-weary watchman, ever ready to drown his sorrows in a flagon of cheap wine, usually only to find that they can swim. Falco’s domineering mother and tribe of sisters have very little truck with the idea that Falco is supposed to be the head of the family. Emperor Vespasian, the tough provincial army general who came from nowhere and made himself Emperor, has a splendid cameo role (in the radio adaptation Michael Tudor Barnes plays him as a bluff Yorkshireman, and now it’s his voice I always hear for Vespasian when reading the books).

But the great strength of the Falco novels, for me, is the racy, humorous writing style. Some examples:

A Praetorian guard officer on investigating smugglers: “…. tracking the weevils back to their biscuit….”

On Britain: “If you simply cannot avoid it, you will find the province of Britain out beyond civilisation in the realms of the North Wind. If your mapskin has grown ragged at the edges you will have lost it, in which case so much the better is all I can say.”

On Bath: “Hot springs gushed out of the rock at a shrine where puzzled Celts still came to dedicate coinage to Sul, gazing tolerantly at the brisk new plaque which announced that Roman Minerva had assumed management. […] I could not believe that anything could ever be made of this place.”

On a shady dealer in metals: “…..a loud British wideboy, all twisty electrum necklets and narrow, pointed shoes …..”.

On a brawl in a brothel: “The table toppled over, pulling down a curtain to reveal some citizen’s white backside rising like the Moon Goddess as he did his anxious duty by a maiden of the house; the poor rabbit froze in mid-thrust, then went into eclipse.”

On Helena Justina, when Falco first meets her as an enemy: “…burnt caramel eyes in a bitter almond face….”, and later, when he realises she is far from an enemy, “….warm caramel eyes in a creamy almond face….”

Warm, humane, funny and unsentimental, The Silver Pigs is lighthearted but not lightweight, ranging from the tragic to the absurd with a cast of colourful characters and a vivid recreation of ancient Rome in all its grubby glory.

Attacotti

2009-11-03T13:49:00.003Z

The Attacotti are mentioned in a small number of sources as a tribe who attacked Late Roman Britain in the second half of the fourth century. Who were they, and where did they come from?

Evidence

Ammianus Marcellinus

The major source for the Attacotti’s existence is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote a history of Rome in the late fourth century. In Book 27 of his history, he writes:

It will, however, be in place to say, that at that time the Picts, divided into two tribes, called Dicalydones and Verturiones, as well as the Attacotti, a warlike race of men, and the Scots, were ranging widely and causing great devastation; while the Gallic regions, wherever anyone could break in by land or by sea, were harassed by the Franks and their neighbours, the Saxons, with cruel robbery, fire, and the murder of all who were taken prisoners.

--Ammianus Marcellinus

“At that time” refers to 364 AD, so his account is roughly contemporary with the events described.

St Jerome

St Jerome was a Christian priest who lived between about 350 and about 420 AD, and who travelled to Gaul some time around 365–370 AD. In one of his writings, he mentions the Attacotti as a British tribe and describes them as cannibals:

Why should I speak of other nations when I, a youth, in Gaul beheld the Attacotti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and when they find herds of swine, cattle, and sheep in the woods, they are accustomed to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds, and the paps of the shepherdesses, and to consider them as the only delicacies of food.

--Quoted in the Wikipedia entry

The Wikipedia entry says the Latin is capable of a less dramatic interpretation, if the word “humanis” (human flesh) is a mistake for “inhumanis” (animal flesh”, in which case the Attacotti’s dietary preferences would be “haunches of fatted animals” and “sow belly or cow’s udder”. I’m not qualified to comment on the Latin, but I have to say I find this a much more plausible scenario. Cow udder is a traditional dish, along with things like pig’s head brawn, tripe and chitterlings. Animal haunches – otherwise known as hams – need no comment.

Notitia Dignitatum

The Notitia Dignitatum (List of Offices) is an official list of late Roman administrative and military posts from about 400 AD. Some of the military units listed have names that could be variant spellings of Attacotti:

Section VII:
In Italy:
Atecotti Honoriani iuniores

In the Gauls with the illustrious master of horse in Gauls:
Atecotti Honoriani seniores
Atecotti iuniores Gallicani.

--English translation, omitting the lists of units, Latin text, including the lists of units

If these refer to the same tribe as the Attacotti of Ammianus Marcellinus and St Jerome, this suggests that the Late Roman Army had recruited some troops from the rebellious British tribe and sent them off to serve elsewhere in the Empire. Whether the service was voluntary (for the promise of pay and the chance to see the world), or compulsory as part of the price of defeat, or a bit of both, is open to question.

Where were the Attacotti from?

St Jerome, a contemporary who could have met some of the Atecotti soldiers stationed in Gaul, is clear that they were a British tribe. Ammianus, also contemporary, considers them to be distinct from both the Picts and the Scots (Irish). Since they attacked Roman Britain and since Ammianus brackets them with other tribes from outside the Empire, it’s a reasonable inference that they did not live within the Roman province of Britannia.

I can think of two plausible locations for the Attacotti:

One of the tribes living in what is now southern Scotland/north-east England, north of Hadrian’s Wall but outside the area associated with the Picts

A tribe living in the area associated with the Picts, but sufficiently culturally distinct to be considered a separate group by Roman observers.

Southern Scotland/north-east England

Ptolemy’s Geography, compiled in the second century AD, lists four tribes living in what is now southern Scotland/north-east England, roughly in the area north of Hadrian’s Wall and south of the Forth–Clyde line. This area was outside the Roman province in 360. In later sources the Picts are usually associated with the area north of the Forth–Clyde line. I suspect that the term “Picts” was applied rather vaguely, and perhaps meant different things at different times to different people, but if Ammianus applied the same regional association the tribes of southern Scotland would not have counted as Picts. The tribes listed by Ptolemy are:

The Novantae dwell on the side toward the north below the peninsula of this name
Below are the Selgovae
From these toward the east, but more northerly, are the Damnoni
Further south are the Otalini

--Ptolemy, Geography, Book 2

None of these names looks obviously related to “Attacotti”, but the name “Picts” doesn’t appear in Ptolemy’s Geography either. It is entirely possible that one (or more) of the tribes acquired a new name between the second century and the fourth, or that “Attacotti” was invented as a new umbrella term to group them together. This possible location, combined with St Jerome’s lurid description, may underlie the legend that a race of cannibals once lived in the region of Glasgow.

Culturally distinct group among the “Picts”

Since St Jerome says the Attacotti were a British tribe, I’ll take that as an indication that they came from mainland Britain, not Ireland, and consider where they might be found amongst the “Picts”, but the same line of argument could be applied equally well to an Irish tribe.

“The Picts” was clearly a sort of umbrella term for a multiplicity of different tribes. Ammianus Marcellinus recognises two subdivisions, and there may well have been many more. The Pictish origin legend refers to seven regions, and Ptolemy’s Geography lists many tribes in what is now Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde. I touched on the likelihood of multiple regional groupings among the “Picts” in my earlier post about the name, and Jonathan Jarrett has discussed the issue in more detail. Similarly, Ptolemy reports a large number of separate tribes in Ireland. One would not necessarily expect Latin writers based in the Mediterranean lands to be experts in the detailed nomenclature or comparative anthropology of hostile “barbarian” tribes from beyond the fringes of the known world. The terms “Picts” and “Scots” may have been rather vague catch-all labels, perhaps (probably?) no more precise than modern labels like “Asian”.

If the Atecotti army units in the Notitia Dignitatum were indeed recruited from the Attacotti tribe, there is the possibility that they, or records about their recruitment, were the source of Ammianus’ and St Jerome’s information about the Attacotti. In which case, “Attacotti” may have been their own name for themselves. Presumably the Roman army bureaucracy would have wanted to know what to call the new recruits, and the simplest way to find out would have been to ask them. If the Attacotti thought of themselves as a distinct tribe, and either didn’t accept or had never heard of the Roman label of Pict, they would naturally give their tribal name and the scribe would naturally write it down as best he could.

A related possibility is that the Attacotti were somehow sufficiently distinct from the Roman idea of a “Pict” for Roman observers to conclude that they must be a separate tribe. This could have been due to a difference in any cultural marker - customs, religion, language, appearance, etc. For example, if the Romans assumed all “Picts” were “painted people”, maybe the Attacotti didn’t use body paint or tattoos? Material culture certainly varied widely across the territory associated with the “Picts” (see Jonathan Jarrett’s article for some examples). I’ll focus on one: the brochs.

The broch-builders

Brochs are impressive and sophisticated drystone towers, found only in what is now Scotland. Many have a double-skinned wall with a passageway and steps in the space between the inner and outer walls, and appear to have been two- or three-storey buildings. The double-skinned wall would act as a barrier to stop rain seeping in to the dwelling areas, and would also have helped circulate heat through the structure (see explanation and a reconstruction drawing here). If the cattle lived on the ground floor in the winter they would have contributed to the central heating – you get a lot of heat off a cow – without too much in the way of smells or mess in the dwelling area. As usual, there’s a debate about the purpose of brochs – defensive castle, farmhouse or stately home? – and there’s no reason why they couldn’t have fulfilled more than one role at different times and places.

Not only are brochs confined to what is now Scotland, they are concentrated in defined areas, mainly Caithness (the north-east corner of the mainland), the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland), and the Western Isles (see distribution map on the Wikipedia page). This restricted distribution is consistent with (though does not prove) the possibility that brochs were mainly built and used by one or a few tribes.

As an interesting straw in the wind, it’s worth noting that Norse place names in Scotland are also heavily concentrated in the Northern and Western Isles and to a lesser extent in Caithness (Graham-Campbell and Batey 1998). I should stress that I am not suggesting a direct association between Norse place names and brochs. For a start, they are separated by a thousand years or so, as brochs are mostly considered to have been built in the century or so either side of 0 AD, and Norse place names are mostly considered to date from around the ninth to twelfth centuries. However, the one thing that never changes about history is geography, as the saying goes. The Northern Isles and Caithness are the areas most obviously open to seaborne contact with Norway. Maybe there was cultural contact between these regions long before the historical Norse (Viking, if you prefer) settlements in Scotland, leading to the development of a distinctive cultural identity among the people living in the Northern and Western Isles and Caithness, expressed in the building of brochs (and possibly also in other ways that haven’t left evidence).

Place name

The Pictish origin legend says that their land was divided between the seven sons of Cruithne. In the Pictish Chronicle their names are given as:

Fib, Fidach, Floclaid, Fortrenn, Got, Ce, Circinn

--Pictish Chronicle

In the Irish translation of Historia Brittonum their names are given as:

Moirfeisear do Cruithne claind
Roindsed Albain a seacht raind
Cait, Ce, Cireach cetach cland,
Fib, Fidach, Fotla, Foirtreand.

--Historia Brittonum, Irish

“Got” or “Cait” is the origin of the modern name Caithness. Clutching at straws, how about a connection between “Cait” and the “-cott-” element in Attacotti? This is no more than dictionary fishing on my part, and I am not qualified to say whether there is any possible basis for a connection on linguistic grounds, so it may well just be a superficial resemblance. But possibly an interesting one.

Speculative interpretation

How about the broch-builders or their successors, living in what is now Caithness and the Northern and/or Western Isles, as a candidate for a culturally distinct tribe who in the 360s AD were called the Attacotti by Ammianus Marcellinus and St Jerome?

If other aspects of their culture were as distinctive as their architecture, such a tribe may well have seemed sufficiently culturally distinct from the other tribes the Romans called “Picts” to warrant a separate name.

Contact with Norway across the North Sea may have stimulated the development of a distinctive culture in Caithness and the Northern and/or Western Isles, as happened with the Norse (Viking) influence in similar areas in later centuries.

An echo of the name Attacotti may – and I stress ‘may’ – possibly be traceable in the name of Caithness.

Needless to say, other interpretations are possible.

References
Ammianus Marcellinus, available online
Graham-Campbell J, Batey CE. Vikings in Scotland: an archaeological survey. Edinburgh University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0748606412. Searchable at Google Books.
Historia Brittonum, Irish, available online
Notitia Dignitatum, available online, English translation, omitting the lists of units, Latin text, including the lists of units
Pictish Chronicle, available online
Ptolemy, Geography, Book 2, available online

Map links
Location map showing Shetland and Orkney (The Northern isles) in relation to Scotland and Norway

Sword Song, by Bernard Cornwell. Book review

2009-10-27T12:33:00.006Z

Edition reviewed: Harper, 2008. ISBN 978-0-00-721973-5. 360 pages.

Fourth in Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred series, Sword Song is set in 885. Alfred of Wessex (later known as Alfred the Great), Aethelred of Mercia, Alfred’s daughter Aethelflaed and the Danish leader Haesten are based on historical figures. All the main characters are fictional.

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is now 28, married to his beloved Gisela, sister of the Danish king of Northumbria (told in Book 3, The Lords of the North). Still reluctantly oath-bound to serve King Alfred of Wessex, he is lord of the burh of Coccham (modern Cookham) on Wessex’s eastern border. Alfred and the Danes have signed a treaty, ceding north and east England to Danish rule (the Danelaw), and the land is more or less at peace. When a new group of Norse adventurers come to Lundene (modern London) bent on conquering Wessex, they offer to recognise Uhtred as King of Mercia if he will join them. Uhtred has to choose between allying with the Danes, whom he likes but does not entirely trust, and remaining loyal to Alfred, whom he neither likes nor trusts but to whom he is bound by a sworn oath. When Aethelflaed, Alfred’s lovely and spirited daughter, enters the frame, Uhtred’s uncertain loyalties shape the fate of kingdoms.

Years ago, I once persuaded a gentleman in my local bookstore who said he loved the Sharpe series but had got fed up with Bernard Cornwell’s medieval novels to try The Last Kingdom, on the grounds that it was essentially Sharpe with Vikings and battleaxes instead of rifles and Frenchmen. Well, it seems that early assessment was not too far off the mark. The Uhtred series seems to get more like Sharpe with each succeeding book. Sword Song has all the trademark ingredients: the detailed blood-splattered battle scenes; the resentful hero from the wrong side of the tracks with an unrivalled talent for violence and war; the incompetent/vicious/deceitful/hypocritical enemies in high places on his own side; a plot constructed around one or two set-piece battles. In Finan, the capable Irish warrior introduced in Book 3 (Lords of the North) and now Uhtred’s loyal friend and comrade-in-arms, there may even be an echo of Sergeant Harper. Sword Song is located firmly in the south along the River Thames, so Ragnar and the likeable Guthred of Northumbria don’t make an appearance, but Finan and the ebullient Welsh warrior-turned priest Father Pyrlig inject a cheerful note into the proceedings.

All the usual features of the Uhtred series are present too: Vikings are cool; whenever Uhtred kills someone he quite likes he makes sure to put a weapon in the man’s hand so they can drink together in the corpse-hall after death; Christianity is “…a religion that sucks joy from this world like dusk swallowing daylight…” and its senior clergy are cruel woman-oppressing hypocrites; Uhtred miraculously overcomes impossible odds. Fans of the series so far will know pretty much what to expect.

Sword Song is a quick, easy and undemanding read. The plot is somewhat average, and in places it feels almost as if it has been padded out to fill in the space between the battles (e.g. a dozen pages devoted to an obscure Old Testament ceremony with no evidence of it ever having been used by the relevant characters). As one would expect, the set-piece battle scenes are suitably bloodstained, brutal and graphic. For me the highlight was the assault on Lundene in the middle of the book, with its attack and counter-attack and its bitter fighting among the gates and ramparts of the old Roman fortifications.

Poor Aethelred of Mercia gets a very unflattering portrayal, and probably has grounds for joining the Support Group for People Unfairly Maligned in Historical Fiction. Not that much is known about Aethelred, and he may well not have been the greatest ruler ever, but there’s no evidence that he was a stupid wife-beating snake. It’s his misfortune to be in the right historical place at the right time to be cast as a fictional hero’s antagonist, and I suspect he also has to be cast as a loathsome creep so that the reader won’t mind when Aethelflaed cuckolds him. Bernard Cornwell, to his credit, acknowledges in his Historical Note that he has probably been extremely unfair to the real Aethelred.

The Historical Note also acknowledges that there is more fiction in Sword Song than in the previous Uhtred novels. In particular, the major plot strand involving Aethelflaed is completely fictional, as acknowledged in the Note. I can see its attraction; it has the same obvious dramatic appeal as a meeting between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. I can’t help wishing, however, that something more interesting had been made of it. The historical Aethelflaed was a remarkable woman, a highly effective ruler of Mercia whose death was respectfully noted in the Annals of Ulster (“U918.5. Ethelfled, a very famous queen of the Saxons, dies”) and Annales Cambriae (“917. Queen Aethelflaed died”). In Sword Song, however, she is merely beautiful and haughty and spends most of the novel being taken here and taken there, willingly or otherwise, by the various men in her life. Perhaps this is because she is still only about fourteen or fifteen, and maybe she will come into her own in the later novels in the series. I hope so.

Entertaining adventure yarn with Cornwell’s trademark battle scenes carrying a rather slight plot. Not his best, but still an enjoyable read.

October recipe: Lamb with tomatoes and aubergines

2009-10-25T10:32:00.005Z

October is towards the end of the season for plum tomatoes, but there were still a few left on our plants last weekend, and glasshouse-grown aubergines* are still around.

This lamb casserole is good on a fine autumn day, warming but not too heavy. Serves 2.

Lamb with tomatoes and aubergines

8 oz (approx 250 g) lamb (I usually use leg or shoulder, and sometimes use leftover cooked lamb from a roast)
12 oz (approx 350 g) aubergines
12 oz (approx 350 g) tomatoes
Half an onion
1 Tablespoon (approx 1 x 15 ml spoon) plain flour
1 Tablespoon (approx 1 x 15 ml spoon) red wine or cooking sherry
1 Tablespoon (approx 1 x 15 ml spoon) chopped fresh basil (or half the amount of dried basil)
1 Tablespoon (approx 1 x 15 ml spoon) chopped fresh sage or rosemary (or half the amount of dried)
0.25 pint (approx 150 ml) water or stock

Cut the aubergines into slices approx 0.5 inch (approx 1 cm) thick. Sprinkle with salt and leave for 30 minutes or so.

Remove any bones from the lamb and cut into pieces about 0.5 inch (approx 1 cm) square.

Peel and chop the onion.

Slice the plum tomatoes into slices about as thick as the aubergine.

Fry the lamb and onion in cooking oil in a heatproof casserole dish until browned.

Stir in the flour and mix well so the flour coats the meat and onion. Pour in the stock or water. Bring to the boil and stir until thickened. Stir in the red wine or sherry and the chopped sage or rosemary, and season to taste with salt and black pepper. Remove from the heat.

Arrange the tomato slices in a layer on top of the lamb and onion mixture, and sprinkle with chopped basil.

Rinse the aubergine slices in cold water and pat dry using kitchen towel. Arrange the aubergine slices in an overlapping layer on top of the tomatoes.

Cover the casserole and cook in the oven at approx 170 C for about 1 hour if using leftover cooked lamb or about 1.5 – 2 hours if using fresh lamb. Baste the aubergine slices with the cooking juices (or turn them over if that’s easier) about halfway through cooking so the top surface of the aubergine doesn’t dry out.

Serve with rice or potatoes.

*Aubergines are also called eggplants

Brittonic names in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ genealogies, and vice versa

2009-10-21T17:16:00.004+01:00

In an earlier post, I discussed some examples of marriages between Brittonic and early English (‘Anglo-Saxon’) royalty. The presence of Brittonic names in Anglo-Saxon genealogies, and a possible Brittonic warrior whose father had an Old English name, may be further supporting evidence for intermarriage.

Caedbaed of Lindsey

The genealogy of the kings of Lindsey (roughly modern Lincolnshire, see map for approximate location) is given in the Anglian Collection:

Woden; Winta; Cretta; Cwedgils; Caedbaed; Bubba; Beda; Biscop; Eanferth; Eata; Aldfrith

--Anglian Collection (scroll down)

None of the individuals can be securely dated. Bede mentions a man called Blaecca, who was the reeve of the city of Lincoln in around 628 (Book II ch.16). If this Blaecca was some sort of relative of the three kings beginning with B- in the genealogy, as might be consistent with the habit of alliterative naming and his possession of a position of responsibility, then those kings might be tentatively dated to somewhere around the early to mid seventh century, but this really is clutching at straws.

For the purposes of the current discussion, the name of most interest is the one immediately preceding the three B- kings, Caedbaed. This name contains the common Brittonic name element Caed- (also spelled Cat- or Cad-), which derives from the word for ‘battle’ and occurs in the names of numerous documented Brittonic kings and princes in the seventh century, including Cadfan, Cadwallon and Cadwallader of Gwynedd (see earlier post on the Kings of Gwynedd) and Cadafael Catguommed (see earlier post on Cadafael). Does its presence in the genealogy of the kings of the Anglian kingdom of Lindsey indicate a coincidence, a fashion in names, a scribe who mistakenly copied the name in from somewhere else, or a dynastic connection with Brittonic royalty?

Cerdic of Wessex

Bishop Asser, writing in the late ninth century, gives the genealogy of Alfred the Great as follows:

King Alfred was the son of king Ethelwulf, who was the son of Egbert, who was the son of Elmund, was the son of Eafa, who was the son of Eoppa, who the son of Ingild. Ingild, and Ina, the famous king of the West-Saxons, were two brothers. Ina went to Rome, and there ending this life honourably, entered the heavenly kingdom, to reign there for ever with Christ. Ingild and Ina were the sons of Coenred, who was the son of Ceolwald, who was the son of Cudam, who was the son of Cuthwin, who was the son of Ceawlin, who was the son of Cynric, who was the son of Creoda, who was the son of Cerdic, who was the son of Elesa, who was the son of Gewis, from whom the Britons name all that nation Gegwis

--Asser, Life of Alfred

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says:

A.D. 495. This year came two leaders into Britain, Cerdic and
Cynric his son, with five ships, at a place that is called
Cerdic's-ore. And they fought with the Welsh the same day. Then
he died, and his son Cynric succeeded to the government, and held
it six and twenty winters

A.D. 519. This year Cerdic and Cynric undertook the government
of the West-Saxons; the same year they fought with the Britons at
a place now called Charford. From that day have reigned the
children of the West-Saxon kings.

A.D. 534. This year died Cerdic, the first king of the West-
Saxons. Cynric his son succeeded to the government, and reigned
afterwards twenty-six winters.

--Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Never mind the contradictory dates for now; there is clearly a tradition that an important early king of the West Saxons was a man called Cerdic. This is the same name as the Brittonic name Ceretic or Ceredig. Bede mentions a Brittonic king Cerdic (Book IV ch. 23), at whose court St Hild of Whitby was born in around 614 (probably the same Ceredig whose death is recorded in Annales Cambriae in 616).

616 Ceredig died.

-- Annales Cambriae

Cadwalla of Wessex

At least one later king of the West Saxons also had a Brittonic name. Bede describes a king called Cadwalla (the same as the Brittonic name Cadwallon, see above under Caedbaed of Lindsey) who made himself king of the West Saxons by military force in around 686 and died on a pilgrimage to Rome in 689 (Book IV ch. 16; Book V ch. 7). Bede explicitly says that he was a member of the West Saxon royal dynasty (Book IV ch. 5).

So the West Saxon dynasty was founded by a man with a Brittonic name, and a member of the same dynasty also had a Brittonic name in the late seventh century. This could be coincidence, fashion or may indicate a dynastic connection with Brittonic royalty.

Possible Anglian name in Y Gododdin

Y Gododdin is a Brittonic epic poem describing a disastrous attack by a warband from Gododdin (roughly the area of modern Lothian and Edinburgh) on ‘Catraeth’ (location unknown, possibly the Roman fort at Catterick in North Yorkshire). The date is unknown, but usually placed in the late sixth or early seventh century, although the poem survives only in a much later (around 13th century) manuscript. It mainly comprises elegies for fallen warriors. One of them, Yrfai or Uruei, had a father whose name was Golistan or Uolstan:

It was usual for Uolstan’s son – though his father was no sovereign lord –
that what he said was heeded
It was usual for the sake of the mountain court that shields be broken through
reddened before Yrfai Lord of Eidyn

--Translation and reconstructed text by John Koch (stanza B2.28)

John Koch interprets Golistan or Uolstan as a form of the common Old English name Wulfstan (Koch 1997). (John Koch's interpretation of the historical context of the poem and the battle is controversial, but the name Golistan/Uolstan doesn't depend on his theory about the historical context). If correct, perhaps this Wulfstan was a mercenary or exile in Gododdin (“no sovereign lord”) who married his employer’s daughter and whose son held a high rank in Gododdin’s warband.

Conclusion

There are two reasonably well-documented inter-ethnic royal marriages from Northumbria in the early seventh century, with possibly a third from the same region in the late sixth century (see earlier post).

Recognisably Brittonic names appear in the genealogies of the Anglian kings of Lindsey (Caedbaed, undated, possibly early seventh century) and the West Saxon royal house (Cerdic, possibly legendary founder, late fifth century; Cadwalla, late seventh century). There may be a hint of an Old English name in the patrimony of a Brittonic hero in Y Gododdin (late sixth or early seventh century). Cross-ethnic naming may be merely a matter of fashion, or could indicate inter-ethnic dynastic connections.

I would interpret the documented marriages and the presence of cross-ethnic names to indicate that inter-ethnic aristocratic marriage could occur in early medieval Britain. There is insufficient evidence to say whether it was rare or widespread, or how its occurrence may have varied by region or over time.

Map links
Catterick
Edinburgh

References
Koch JT. The Gododdin of Aneirin. Text and context from Dark-Age North Britain. University of Wales Press, 1997, ISBN 0-7083-1374-4.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price. Penguin Classics, 1990, ISBN 0-14-044565-X.
Anglian Collection, available online
Asser, Life of Alfred, available online
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, available online
Annales Cambriae, available online

Spectacular dragonfly

2009-10-17T16:45:00.006+01:00

Dragonflies and damselflies* abound in late summer and early autumn. Although they like water and you're most likely to see them hunting over ponds and streams, you'll also see them flying ahead of you down a sunny path or quartering a meadow. One even turned up briefly to investigate the temporary puddles on our drive after washing the car.

They come in all shapes and sizes, from the tiny svelte damselflies not much bigger than a flying pencil lead to big chunky dragonflies whose wings rattle when they do a mid-air handbrake turn, and in a variety of colours from electric blue to bronze to metallic emerald. Normally they zip about so fast doing aerobatics that all I see of them is a flash of colour and a swirl of gossamer wings.

This one, however, as well as being just about the biggest dragonfly I have ever seen (something like 4-5 inches long from nose to tail), was also obliging enough to sit still on a blackberry bush long enough to be photographed. What a completely amazing creature. I think it might be a female Southern Hawker, but don't quote me on that.

Slightly wider shot showing more of the wings.

Close-up of the head and thorax. Just look at those eyes.

Pictures taken in late September.

*Dragonflies hold their wings outstretched perpendicular to the body when at rest, damselflies fold their wings parallel to the body when at rest

Pendragon’s Banner, by Helen Hollick. Book review

2009-10-13T15:11:00.007+01:00

Edition reviewed: Sourcebooks 2009. ISBN 978-1-4022-1889-7. 458 pages.

Pendragon’s Banner is the second in Helen Hollick’s King Arthur trilogy (the first is The Kingmaking, reviewed earlier). I read and enjoyed the trilogy when it was first published, and am pleased to see it back in print. Many thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy and organising the blog tour (details of the other stops on the blog tour at the foot of the post).

Arthur, the illegitimate son of Uthr Pendragon, is now Pendragon and High King of Britain, after the political and military struggles recounted in The Kingmaking. But Arthur is still young, aged only 24, and his position is not secure. Other lords, such as Amlawdd in the south-west and Lot and Hueil in the north of Britain, fancy themselves as High King. The Council of Britain and Arthur’s uncle Ambrosius hanker after a return to the Roman Empire. Winifred, Arthur’s ex-wife, is scheming to get the kingship for the son she had with Arthur, Cerdic. Morgause, Uthr’s cruel mistress who has hated Arthur since his childhood, is plotting his destruction and has laid a curse on Arthur – that if he pursues her, none of his sons will live. Arthur, his beloved wife Gwenhwyfar and their young children are beset with dangers, and defending Arthur’s position as High King demands a heavy price. Will it be too high for their relationship to bear?

As with the previous book in the trilogy, Pendragon’s Banner is free of supernatural powers. No Merlin, no enchanted sword, no magic, no sorcery, no Round Table, no knights in shining armour. This is a good thing in my view, but readers looking for the fantasy aspects of the King Arthur legends will not find them here.

Pendragon’s Banner is a story of human love and conflict, centred on the two main characters, Arthur and his wife Gwenhwyfar. Gwenhwyfar, a princess from Gwynedd (modern north-west Wales), is the descendant of a long line of warriors and something of a warrior herself. She is beautiful, clever, hot-tempered, passionate and as strong-willed as Arthur, leading to frequent quarrels as their opinions and desires clash. Arthur is a military genius, but his skill on the battlefield is not matched in the council chamber. He makes no secret of despising his councillors as a bunch of irrelevant old fools, he antagonises his uncle Ambrosius, he provokes and belittles his loyal but strait-laced cousin Cei, and his jealousy over other men’s attentions to Gwenhwyfar (real or imagined) gets him into more than one fight. The stormy marriage between Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, their private family tragedies, and the intolerable stresses resulting from the conflict between Arthur’s position as High King and his role as husband and father, form the core of the narrative.

The novel spans a period of about seven years, giving ample opportunity for a lot of warfare and political scheming as well as the personal relationships. It also incorporates numerous legends attached to the King Arthur story, such as the tale of Ider fighting a giant on Brent Knoll near Glastonbury and a quarrel between Arthur and Gwenhwyfar at the Queen’s Crags on Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps as a result of including so many legends, the book is a lengthy read and I found the plot rather sprawling. Arthur has to face not one but two rebellions in the north, Morgause and Winifred are constantly hatching schemes, Arthur and Gwenhwyfar quarrel and make up, become estranged and reconciled and quarrel again. Some plot threads, such as Arthur’s alliance with the Saxon leader Winta, are introduced in detail and then disappear, perhaps because this is the middle part of a trilogy and they may be setting up for something in the third book.

Detailed descriptions of landscape and weather, among other aspects, make for a leisurely pace. This is accentuated by the elaborate prose style (e.g. “had the wanting of” instead of “wanted”), which sets a consciously archaic tone and sometimes requires more than one reading to disentangle the meaning. Keeping track of everything takes concentration, and readers may like to take note that typos in some of the dates in the chapter headings can be confusing (e.g. Chapter 43 in Part 1 is headed “April 456”, but is a continuation of the battle in the previous few chapters headed “December 462”). Although the backstory from Book One is explained where necessary, the trilogy works best if read back to back as a single long story.

A helpful Author’s Note explains some of the background, and a family tree at the front of the book helps in keeping track of the family relationships between the large cast of characters. There’s also a very useful list of place names with their modern equivalents (but note that Wroxeter and Winteringham have been mistakenly reversed in the list), and a list of questions for reading groups to consider.

Book Two of a trilogy retelling the King Arthur legends without fantasy trappings.

The other stops on the Pendragon’s Banner blog tour are as follows:

The Tome Travellers Weblog (10/12)
A Reader’s Respite (10/12)
Enchanted by Josephine (10/14)
Fumbling with Fiction (10/14)
Found Not Lost (10/15)
Nan Hawthorne’s Booking the Middle Ages(10/15)
Jenny Loves to Read(10/16)
The Review From Here(10/17)
The Courtier’s Book(10/18)
Chick Loves Lit(10/19)
Love Romance Passion (10/20)
He Followed Me Home… Can I Keep Him?(10/20)
The Impasse Strikes Back (10/21)
S. Krishna’s Books (10/22)
Books Like Breathing (10/23)
Passages to the Past(10/24)
Virginie Says(10/25)
Readaholic(10/25)
Reading with Monie (10/26)
Rundpinne(10/26)
Books & Needlepoint(10/27)
Capricious Reader (10/27)
Books are my Only Friends (10/27)
A Sea of Books (10/28)
Bloody Bad (10/28)
Revenge of the Book Nerds! (10/28)
Booksie’s Blog (10/28)
Devourer of Books (10/29)
Peeking Between the Pages (10/29)
Starting Fresh (10/29)
Historical Tapestry (10/30)
Medieval Bookworm (10/30)
Book Soulmates (10/30)
Susan’s Art & Words (10/30)
Steven Till(10/31)
Café of Dreams (10/31)

Intermarriage in early medieval Britain

2009-10-07T13:33:00.004+01:00

Dynastic marriage to secure or strengthen a political alliance was standard practice throughout medieval Europe, as a cursory glance at royal marriages will show. For example, looking at the post-Conquest kings of England, Henry I married Edith (also called Matilda), a descendant of the English royal family displaced by Henry’s father William the Conqueror. Their daughter Maud (or Matilda) married the German Holy Roman Emperor. Her son Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to great tracts of what is now southern France. Their son John married Isabella of Angouleme. John’s daughter Joan married Llewellyn of Gwynedd and John’s son Henry III married Eleanor of Provence. Their son Edward I married Eleanor of Castile. Their son Edward II married Isabella of France. And so on; practically every generation involved an international marriage. The reasons are obvious, including:

Pedigree. In an age when birth counted for everything, having royalty on both sides of the pedigree was an obvious plus;

Inheritance. A royal wife would be well dowered, and if you were really lucky she might inherit her father’s kingdom and bring an unexpected windfall (the Hapsburgs inherited Spain in the 16th century when biological accident left Juana, wife of Philip the Fair, as the only surviving child of Ferdinand and Isabella);

Political alliance. Two powerful royal families could aid each other in their respective wars, increasing the chance of success for both. And it was not the done thing to attack a family one was married into (although practice had an unfortunate habit of diverging from theory).

What about early medieval Britain? The same reasons apply, so one would expect dynastic intermarriage to occur. Is there any evidence?

Documented inter-ethnic marriages

It’s rare for the names of queens to be recorded, let alone their descent, but there are two reasonably solid examples of marriages between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kings and Brittonic queens, plus another that is rather less secure.

Aethelferth of Bernicia and Bebba

Eadfered Flesaurs reigned twelve years in Bernicia, and twelve others in Deira, and gave to his wife Bebba, the town of Dynguoaroy, which from her is called Bebbanburg.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 63

Bede, writing in 731, confirms the story:

…the royal city, which is called after a former queen named Bebba

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Book 3 ch. 6

Bebbanburg is modern Bamburgh. Bebba is not an English name. Nothing is known of Bebba’s ancestry, but there may be a clue in the fate of Aethelferth’s eldest son Eanferth (Eanfrid, Enfret). Eanferth was exiled on his father’s death in 617 AD, and inherited Bernicia in 633 AD:

During the whole of Edwin’s reign the sons of Aethelferth lived in exile among the Irish or the Picts
[…]
…Eanfrid, as eldest son, inherited the crown of Bernicia

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History Book III ch. 1

Elsewhere in the Ecclesiastical History Bede tells us that Aethelferth’s other sons Oswald and Oswy lived in exile among the Irish (Book III ch. 3 and ch. 25), so it is a reasonable deduction that the other son Bede mentions, Eanferth, was the one who lived among the Picts. While there, he presumably married a Pictish princess, because he fathered a king of the Picts:

Tallorcen filius Enfret iiij. annis regnavit
[Translation : Talorcan son of Eanferth reigned 4 years]

--Pictish Chronicle

Eanferth’s career would be consistent with his mother Bebba having belonged to either the Pictish aristocracy, or to the aristocracy of a Brittonic kingdom with Pictish connections, such as the kingdom of Gododdin in what is now southern Scotland (roughly the area of modern Lothian and/or around Edinburgh; see map).

Eanferth’s nephew Ecgfrith son of Oswy is described as cousin to Bridei king of the Picts in 685:

Egrid is he who made war against his cousin Brudei, king of the Picts, and he fell therein with all the strength of his army and the Picts with their king gained the victory

--Historia Brittonum ch. 57

The date is from Bede (Book IV ch. 26). Bridei may have been a cousin to Ecgfrith through Eanferth’s Pictish marriage in the previous generation, or their relationship may indicate another Pictish–Northumbrian royal marriage.

Oswy of Northumbria and Rhianmellt of Rheged

Oswy was the son of Aethelferth. It is not known whether he was the son of Bebba, or of Aethelferth’s wife Acha of Deira. I have argued elsewhere that he was probably the son of Acha because he has the same Os- prefix to his name as Acha’s son Oswald, but this is not proven. Oswy was born in around 612 and died in 670.

Oswy had two wives, Riemmelth, the daughter of Royth, son of Rum; and Eanfled, the daughter of Edwin, son of Alla.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 57

Oswy’s marriage to Eadwine’s daughter Eanflaed is confirmed by Bede (Book III ch. 15). Bede doesn’t mention Rhianmellt, but she does appear in the correct place, immediately before Eanflaed, in the list of queens in the Durham Liber Vitae:

Raegumaeld
Eanfled

-- Durham Liber Vitae, searchable on Google Books

I think we can therefore consider her existence confirmed. Rhianmellt is a Brittonic name. Her father Royth son of Rum is not otherwise mentioned, but her grandfather Rum is usually considered to be the Rum map Urbgen mentioned elsewhere in HB:

If any one wishes to know who baptized them, it was Rum Map Urbgen

--Historia Brittonum ch. 63

Urbgen or Urien was a famous king of Rheged (somewhere in what is now north-west England and/or south-west Scotland, location uncertain) in the late sixth century. He features in the poetry attributed to Taliesin and in several royal genealogies:

U]rbgen map Cinmarc map Merchianum map Gurgust map Coilhen

--Harleian Genealogy

Vryen uab Kynuarch m Meirchavn m Gorust Letlvm m Keneu m Coel

--Bonedd Gwyr y Gogledd

Putting the pieces together, and assuming that Rum father of Royth was also Rum son of Urbgen, this would make Rhianmellt a descendant of the royal dynasty of Rheged in north-west England, a logical dynastic marriage partner for a king of Northumbria in north-east England.

Ida of Bernicia and Bearnoch

….Ida reigned, who was son of Eobba. He was the first king in Bernicia, i.e., in Berneich.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 56

Ida had twelve sons, Adda, Belric Theodric, Thelric, Theodhere, Osmer, and one queen Bearnoch, Ealric. Ethelric begat Ethelfrid: the same is AEdlfred Flesaur.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 57

Bede confirms Ida as the founding figure of Bernicia, “In the year 547, Ida began his reign, which lasted twelve years. From him the royal family of the Northumbrians derives its origin” (Book V, ch. 24).

Bearnoch is not mentioned elsewhere and so her ancestry is not known, but her name is very similar to the Brittonic name of the kingdom, Berneich. Her name may be genuine (in the same sort of way as the name of a region, Gwynedd, is now also a modern female name, Gwyneth), or it may be a vague memory that Ida gained or consolidated his position as king by marrying a woman of the local royal or noble dynasty. However, it may also be possible that a reference to the region has been misinterpreted as referring to a person, or even that Bearnoch was invented as a mythical ancestor to shore up a dodgy pedigree (although this in itself may be an indication that dynastic marriage was considered a valuable thing to have in one’s pedigree).

Legendary (?) marriages

Vortigern and Rowena daughter of Hengest

Possibly the most famous example of inter-ethnic intermarriage between early English (‘Anglo-Saxon’) and Brittonic royalty is the (legendary?) marriage between Vortigern and the daughter of Hengest:

[…] bringing with them the beautiful daughter of Hengist.
[…] Vortigern, at the instigation of the devil, and enamoured with the beauty of the damsel, demanded her, through the medium of his interpreter, of the father, promising to give for her whatever he should ask. Then Hengist, who had already consulted with the elders who attended him of the Oghgul race, demanded for his daughter the province, called in English Centland, in British, Ceint, (Kent.).
[….] Thus the maid was delivered up to the king, who slept with her, and loved her exceedingly.

--Historia Brittonum ch. 37

Historia Brittonum was written down in the early ninth century according to its prologue. I’ll happily take it as a source for events within a couple of centuries of its composition (i.e. back to about the turn of the sixth and seventh century), especially as quite a few of its statements can be corroborated from other sources such as Bede (insert the usual caveat that some of the sources might have copied from each other and may not be independent). But in the case of Vortigern and Hengest it is around 400 years after the event, and caution is in order. However, even if the story of Vortigern’s marriage to the daughter of Hengest has been misinterpreted, embellished or even invented over time, it does indicate that inter-ethnic dynastic marriage was considered a reasonable component of power politics when Historia Brittonum was in circulation and being written down.

Cadwallon of Gwynedd and the sister of Penda of Mercia

His [Cadwaladr’s] mother was Penda’s sister
[…]
For Cadwallon, after his reconciliation with her brother, made her the partner of his bed and had Cadwaladr by her.

--Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, Book XII Ch. 14

The source for this is Geoffrey of Monmouth, and if Geoffrey said the sun rose in the east I would still want to check it. So I’m inclined to consider this a legend. I mention it here because Cadwallon’s military alliance with Penda is confirmed by Bede (Book II Ch. 20). A dynastic marriage to seal a military alliance is not at all unreasonable, so that could be taken as partial support for Geoffrey’s statement, though I wouldn’t take a bet on it. However, the same comment applies as above; even if the marriage itself is legendary, it may indicate that Geoffrey – and his intended audience – considered it plausible.

There are also some examples of Brittonic names in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ genealogies, and a possible instance of a Brittonic warrior whose father had an Old English name, which may indicate intermarriage. I’ll discuss these in another post.

References
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price. Penguin Classics, 1990, ISBN 0-14-044565-X.
Durham Liber Vitae, searchable on Google Books.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, available online
Historia Brittonum, available online
Pictish Chronicle, available online

Map links
Bamburgh

The Silver Eagle, by Ben Kane. Book review

2009-10-02T17:52:00.002+01:00

Edition reviewed: Preface Random House, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84809-011-8. 402 pages.

Sequel to The Forgotten Legion, The Silver Eagle is set across most of the Roman known world in 55 BC to 48 BC. Julius Caesar, Decimus Brutus*, and some of the senior Roman officers and politicians are secondary characters. All the main characters are fictional.

Fabiola, sold into prostitution as a child slave, has been bought and freed by her lover, senior army officer Decimus Brutus. Her twin brother Romulus and his friends the Etruscan soothsayer Tarquinius and the mighty Gaulish warrior Brennus were captured by the Parthians after Crassus’ disastrous defeat at Carrhae (told in The Forgotten Legion), and are now serving the Parthians as border guards in the distant province of Margiana (modern Turkmenistan). Fabiola wants to find out if her brother is still alive and to take revenge on the unidentified Roman aristocrat who raped her mother. Romulus wants to return to Rome and find his sister – but he, Tarquinius and Brennus must first face an epic battle in India and a dangerous journey from the ends of the known world. And Fabiola faces her own challenges in the no less perilous world of Roman high politics.

The four leads are the same as in The Forgotten Legion, virtuosos in every respect. The all-action cinematic style of The Forgotten Legion is continued in the sequel, and if anything the pace is even faster. Rapid intercutting between Fabiola’s adventures in Rome and Romulus, Brennus and Tarquinius in the east, always switching scene at a crucial moment with one or more of the leads on the brink of death, adds to the sense of breakneck speed. Fans of graphic battle scenes will find much to enjoy in the description of the Battle of Pharsalus and the 30-page epic (fictional) battle between the Forgotten Legion and the armies of the Indian kings, which takes place by the River Hydaspes in what is now the Punjab, literally on the edge of the Roman known world**.

Paradoxically, as I noted with the previous book, the technique of always leaving at least one character in mortal peril started to pall after a while, at least for me. I find it difficult to maintain a constant peak of dramatic tension when there are no quieter interludes to provide contrast, and after a while I got rather blasé and found myself thinking not “are they going to get out of that?” but “I wonder how they’re going to get out of that?”, which is not quite the same thing. This feeling was accentuated by the frequent use of prophecy.

Mysticism and supernatural visions featured in The Forgotten Legion, and this theme is continued and developed further in The Silver Eagle. In the earlier book, Tarquinius was established as a soothsayer with real supernatural powers to predict the future. In The Silver Eagle, I felt the mysticism tipped over the balance into historical fantasy. Romulus now also has prophetic visions, and Fabiola not only has visions but undergoes some sort of shape-shifting experience. This is not belief or illusion, as many other characters (an entire army) see her for real in her shape-changed form. Events are so heavily prophesied and foreshadowed that although the plot twists and turns there are few surprises. For example, the jacket copy says that of the three heroes “only two will survive”, but the prophecies in the first book, heavily repeated in The Silver Eagle, make it obvious from the beginning who has the short straw. This has the effect of reducing the suspense, and for me it gave the book a curious feel of waiting for the inevitable to happen.

The worship of Mithras, a soldier’s god, is widespread among the Parthians (as one would expect, given the eastern origin of the cult), and also runs through the Roman Army like a sort of first-century Freemasonry. This gives an interesting slant, as Tarquinius and Romulus in Parthia and Fabiola in Rome all encounter the Mithraic religion at about the same time, despite being thousands of miles apart.

Roman high politics and the civil war between Caesar and Pompey form a dramatic backdrop to Fabiola’s escapades in Rome, and her adventures provide a neat way of keeping the reader in touch with the Roman world while also following the three heroes in the distant east. The identity of the rapist who fathered Fabiola and Romulus is made clear in this book, just in case anyone hadn’t worked it out from the clues in The Forgotten Legion (yes, it is who I thought it was, and no, I’m not going to give it away here. Email me if you want to know). I suspect I can hazard a guess at the centrepiece of the third book in the trilogy, and possibly some of the roles the three remaining leads are going to play. Fabiola has already sown a seed that looks as if it might bear dramatic fruit in the Senate in 44 BC.

The geographical spread of The Silver Eagle is if anything even wider than that of The Forgotten Legion, which is saying something. The plot ranges from Gaul in the north all the way to India in the east and the coast of Africa in the south. The scene on the Ethiopian coast where the characters encounter Africa’s iconic wildlife – elephants, giraffes, antelopes – is one of the most memorable in the book. And the cast of subsidiary characters is equally exotic, including nomadic steppe tribesmen, pirates in the Indian Ocean and a wild beast hunter in Africa.

Greatly to the author’s credit, the lengthy civil war between Pompey and Caesar isn't compressed for plot purposes, the book simply makes use of the “Two years later” technique in chapter headings to skip over events that would be too complicated to tell in detail. As with The Forgotten Legion, a helpful Author’s Note summarises some of the underlying history and an invaluable map helps in locating all the exotic places and following the characters on their extensive travels.

Frenetic all-action historical fantasy spanning the limits of the Roman known world.

* The Brutus everyone has heard of, of “Et tu Brute” fame in Shakespeare, is Marcus Junius Brutus. Decimus Brutus was a contemporary who served as an officer in Caesar’s army in Gaul. I guess they were probably related, but they were different individuals.
**The river marked the limit of Alexander the Great’s campaign in 325 BC, so it was the furthest limit of the Mediterranean world’s knowledge of Asia.

September recipe: Blackberry clafoutis

2009-09-30T15:57:00.005+01:00

Clafoutis is a French pudding of fruit baked in batter. I first encountered it on a walking holiday in the volcanic Auvergne mountains in Central France, where every village restaurant seemed to have a variation of cherry clafoutis on the dessert menu.

Cherries in Britain are something of a luxury, so I never have any spare for cooking. But what we do have is an abundance of juicy blackberries in August and September most years. So I adapted the dish to use blackberries. Here it is. If you’ve been clambering up extinct volcanoes all day, it serves two. Otherwise, four.

Blackberry clafoutis

7 oz (approx 200 g) blackberries
2 oz (approx 50 g) plain flour
2 oz (approx 50 g) sugar
1 egg
0.25 pint (approx 140 ml) milk
1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) sherry

Wash the blackberries. If you picked them wild out of a hedge, evict the spiders, beetles and other startled wildlife.

Grease a shallow heatproof dish and put the blackberries in the bottom. They should form a single layer, more or less. If you have to stack them several deep, you need a bigger dish.

Mix the flour, sugar and egg to a smooth paste.

Gradually blend in the milk. Remember to keep scraping the paste off the back of the spoon and mixing it in. You should end up with a smooth batter about the consistency of thin cream.

Stir in the sherry.

Pour over the blackberries.

Bake in a hot oven at around 180 C for 30-40 minutes until the batter is puffed up, set and golden.

Serve with pouring cream.
If there is any left over, it is also good eaten cold the following day.

Staffordshire Hoard

2009-09-24T15:22:00.008+01:00

Some of the sword hilt fittings, image courtesy of the Staffordshire Hoard website photograph set on Flickr.

A hoard of over 1500 gold and silver artefacts of extremely high quality, many decorated with precious stones, has been discovered in Staffordshire. It has been declared as treasure trove. The date of the hoard is uncertain, but according to the summary report on the official website, the objects analysed so far can be dated on stylistic grounds to the period between the late sixth and early eighth century. A Biblical inscription on a gold strip and two, possibly three, gold crosses may indicate that at least some of the objects may have originally had Christian owners. The date of the inscription is uncertain, with late seventh/early eighth century and eighth/ninth century both suggested. (It should be noted that different objects within a hoard can be of different ages, and that the date of the latest object in the assemblage gives the earliest date at which the hoard could have been buried).

The exact location of the find has not been released. A press report said the site was somewhere near Lichfield. The official website says “in the heartland of the Kingdom of Mercia”, which would be consistent with a location near Lichfield.

Most of the objects are associated with weapons and war gear, e.g. 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt fittings from swords or seaxes (a seax was a long fighting knife or short sword) have been identified so far. Some of the items may be helmet fittings, although it is not yet known how many helmets they represent. There are no dress fittings, brooches or jewellery normally associated with women, and there are no buckles, baldric fittings or strap-ends.

Whatever its origin and whoever buried it, the hoard so far looks like a large collection of very high-status military equipment.

The importance of the hoard can hardly be overstated. It will be fascinating to see what further information emerges from research on the hoard over the next few years.

Much more information, including pictures, on the official website. It was a bit slow to load this morning, and now appears to be down altogether (no doubt due to pressure of traffic following this morning’s announcement!), but I daresay it will come back to life in a few days once the fuss has died down. So far the press reports I’ve read mostly seem to be rephrasing the official press release.
More photos on the Staffordshire Hoard set on Flickr.

Speculation
Okay, so where might the hoard have come from and who might have buried it? This is essentially speculation, but hey, speculation is fun.

The enormous wealth represented, both by the sheer quantity of precious metal and the very high quality of the craftsmanship, is indicative that the original objects belonged to people of very high status. A reasonably logical inference is that the hoard itself also belonged to a person or group of very high status. (I suppose it could be the results of the greatest ever early medieval jewel heist, but let’s apply Occam’s Razor for the time being.) The amount of precious metal is several times greater than in the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and the craftsmanship appears to be as high, as far as I can tell from the photographs, so we can reasonably infer that the hoard also belonged to someone right at the top of society, i.e. a king.

The hoard was found in Staffordshire, possibly near Lichfield. The area that is now Staffordshire was the heart of the early medieval 'Anglo-Saxon' Kingdom of Mercia. The kings of Mercia had a royal centre at Tamworth, and the Mercian bishopric (later, temporarily, an archbishopric) was based at Lichfield. The most likely people to have owned a vast amount of wealth that ended up buried near the royal centres of the Kingdom of Mercia are, logically, the kings of Mercia.

One of the Christian crosses in the hoard had been folded up as if to squash it into a small space, and it has been suggested that this may indicate that the hoard was buried by pagans. However, I wouldn’t myself put too much weight on that. It seems to me quite possible that the cross could have been squashed when the hoard was buried, especially if it was buried in a hurry in times of trouble, and the folding may represent haste rather than disrespect as such. Unless there's more evidence, I’m not convinced that the folded cross tells us much, if anything, about the religion of the people who buried the hoard, as distinct from the circumstances of the deposition.

The overwhelming predominance of military objects in the hoard suggests that it represents the result of a specific selection process rather than a random collection of valuable objects. It may be that the royal treasury of Mercia was carefully sorted, with military gear kept in one place, jewellery in another, coins in another, precious tableware in another etc, and we just happen to have found the military component. Another possibility is that the hoard represents a sort of “trophy cabinet”, a collection of weapons and armour taken from defeated enemies or tributary kings and displayed prominently in the royal hall or royal church to demonstrate the king’s power and military success.

So far, the date range of the objects covers the late sixth to early eighth century, possibly into the eighth/ninth century if the later date for the inscription is confirmed. Mercia was not short of highly successful and aggressive kings pursuing military expansion at the expense of their neighbours during this period, starting with Penda (c. 633 to 655) and going through to Aethelbald (716-757) and Offa, of Offa’s Dyke fame (757-796). It would not be at all surprising if one or several of these kings (or indeed others whose names have not come down to us) had accumulated a large collection of military trophies taken as booty from defeated enemies, tribute from subordinate rulers and/or gifts from allies. The hoard could have been acquired all of a piece by one of the later kings, or successively added to by several generations. Detailed research might generate sufficient evidence to tell which.

So far, no object in the hoard needs to be dated to later than the early eighth century (although this may change depending on the dating of the inscription). However, that doesn’t mean the hoard was buried then. It may have been buried later, perhaps considerably later, than the latest object within it.

Why might the hoard have been buried? Ritual deposit is one possibility, but a common reason for burying a treasure hoard is to keep it safe from real or perceived enemies in times of trouble. Early medieval Mercia wasn’t short of trouble. Its militarily aggressive kings didn’t always win their wars against other kingdoms, and domestic politics could be violent. For example, Aethelbald, Offa’s predecessor, was assassinated in 757 and Offa had to fight his way to the throne. In the early ninth century Mercia was defeated by the kings of Wessex, and in the mid ninth century the Danes (Vikings if you prefer) arrived and took control. Incidents such as these – and no doubt many others – could provide a context in which a king’s hoard could be buried for safekeeping and the location subsequently lost.

If detailed research confirms the dating as early eighth century, I’d probably look to the political turmoil surrounding Aethelbald’s death and Offa’s accession in 757-758 as a plausible context for the deposition of the hoard. If the dating moves into the ninth century, then the Danish invasion begins to come to the fore as a possibility.

The Staffordshire Hoard looks like one of the most significant finds since Sutton Hoo, and it will be interesting to see what further research can tell us about the hoard and the society from which it came.

Edit: Coverage of the find on BBC Radio 4's PM news programme is available on the BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days. It's the lead item on the news sumamry at the beginning, then fast forward to 5 minutes in for the start of the report and interviews. The interview with historian Michael Wood is especially interesting, He draws the same possible connection with the royal Mercian bishopric at Lichfield, founded by St Chad, as I mention in the post.

Edit: Interesting discussion of the find by Jonathan Jarrett on Cliopatria.

Map links
Lichfield
Tamworth

Kreativ Blogger Award

2009-09-22T10:40:00.004+01:00

My thanks to Jen Black who kindly nominated me as one of her recipients for the Kreativ Blogger Award. To play, one is supposed to:

List 7 of your favourite things

List 7 of your favourite activities

List 7 things no-one knows about you

Pass the award on to 7 others

Favourite things:

Books

Early medieval Britain

The Venerable Bede, without whom we would know even less about early medieval Britain than we do

Libraries

The commenters on this blog, including the ones who comment by email

Full-text primary sources made available online, including but not limited to: Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Mary Jones’s Celtic Literature Collective, Keith Matthews’s history pages, Bill Thayer’s Lacus Curtius, Online Medieval and Classical Library, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts. Thanks to the wonderful people who maintain these sites and others like them, these invaluable historical documents are available for anyone to read and study. A big thank-you to everyone concerned.

Bright spring and autumn days

Favourite activities:

Reading

Writing (as someone famously said, writing is the most fun you can have on your own)

Cycling on quiet country lanes

Hillwalking

Dressmaking

Embroidery

Cookery

Seven things no-one knows about me. I am going to adapt this, as I have with similar lists in the past, and list seven things about someone much more interesting than me. In this case, seven things you probably didn’t know about Bede:

He was born on the lands of the monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow, went into the monastery for his education at the age of seven, and lived there all his life;

He died on Ascension Day 735, aged about 62. (Age deduced from his autobiographical note at the end of his Ecclesiastical History, written in 731, where he refers to “…my fifty-ninth year….”, implying he was 58 at the time of writing);

His scribe was called Wilbur;

He liked pepper;

His relics were wrapped in “a robe of fine silk” given to Abbott Cuthbert of Wearmouth Jarrow by the Archbishop of Mainz;

He applied logic and observation to deduce that the prevailing explanation for the rise and fall of the tides was wrong (It was thought that the tide rose when extra water was added to the oceans from some unknown source, and fell when water drained out of the oceans. Bede reasoned that if this were the case high tide should occur at the same time in all locations. As he knew that high tide actually occurs at different times in the different harbours along the Northumbrian coast, he deduced that tidal rise and fall was something to do with the water in the oceans moving from one place to another, not to alterations in the total volume. He even figured out that tides were associated with the Moon. So much for the “Dark Ages” being an age of ignorance and superstition);

He is the only Englishman ever to be recognised as a Doctor of the Church.

Seven recipients of the Kreativ Blogger Award:

Steven Till

Tanzanite

Amy at Passages to the Past

Constance

Alianore

Meghan

Gabriele

Over to you!

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

2009-09-20T12:58:00.007+01:00

This week was Book Blogger Appreciation Week (BBAW) 2009. Read all about it here. I'm late to the party because I hadn't really heard about it until it was already under way, but better late than never. The shortlisted blogs in each category are listed here, and exploring them all should keep you happy for a long time.

If that isn't enough to occupy you, Online College has compiled a list of 100 Best Blogs for Book Reviews.

May I take this opportunity to thank whoever it was who nominated me for BBAW Best History/Historical Fiction Blog. I have no idea who you are, but I am guessing that you must be a reader here, so thank you, whoever you are!

I'd like to mention some of my favourite blogs that weren't shortlisted in the BBAW category. Tanzanite (Daphne) has already posted her shortlist (I told you I was late), and I heartily concur with her choices. Here are some of my favourites that aren't already on her list:

Living the History. By Elizabeth Chadwick, author of many medieval historical novels, including The Greatest Knight and The Time of Singing. Includes re-enactment events and discussions of her writing process

Greyhounds and Fetterlocks. By Brian Wainwright, author of The Adventures of Alianore Audley and Within the Fetterlock.

Historical Novels Info. Historical fiction news, reviews and interviews by Margaret Donsbach.

That's All She Read. Nan Hawthorne's candid opinions on historical fiction from all periods.

Tanzanite's Shelf and Stuff. Reviews and new releases.

And if Book Blogger Appreciation Week wasn't enough, Amy at Passages to the Past and a group of other historical fiction bloggers organised a Historical Fiction Round Table, with giveaways, interviews, reviews and special guest posts. The round-up is here.

The Time of Singing, by Elizabeth Chadwick. Book review

2009-09-15T11:19:00.001+01:00

Sphere, 2008, ISBN 978-1-84744-097-6, 506 pages

Set in 1173–1199, The Time of Singing covers the later years of the reign of Henry II, all of the reign of Richard I (Lionheart) and the beginning of King John’s. It centres on Roger Bigod, heir to the earldom of Norfolk, and his wife Ida de Tosney. William Marshal (hero of the author’s earlier books The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion), is an important secondary character. All the main characters are historical figures.*

Roger Bigod, eldest son of the earl of Norfolk, has been at odds with his boorish father, his stepmother and his two younger half-brothers for years, and when his father rebels against Henry II Roger defies his father and joins the king. Victory in battle sees Roger’s father forfeit the earldom, and although Roger has won Henry’s cautious regard, Henry is afraid of the Bigod earls’ power and uses the inheritance dispute between Roger and his half-brothers as a convenient excuse to withhold the earldom from either. Now Roger has a protracted struggle ahead of him to regain his inheritance. When he encounters Ida de Tosney, Henry’s young ward and reluctant mistress, Roger is immediately attracted to her and is happy to accept her as his wife. But Ida has to pay the price of giving up her young son for Henry to rear at court, and Roger has his own insecurities to deal with. As Roger’s work in the King’s service takes him ever more from Ida’s side, the emotional scars they both bear threaten to destroy their marriage.

As with the other Elizabeth Chadwick novels I’ve read, The Time of Singing is especially strong on human relationships. I felt it had a more domestic focus than the Marshal novels. Roger is embroiled in a protracted legal battle for his forfeited earldom and inheritance, there are some murky political shenanigans to negotiate while Richard I is away on crusade, and there are a couple of short battlefield action scenes, but the heart of the novel is in Roger and Ida’s relationship with each other and the people around them. Their marriage forms the centrepiece, but it is only the central one among the many other relationships that form the warp and weft of their lives. Ida’s relationship with her illegitimate son by Henry, who is taken from her to be raised at court when she marries Roger, is perhaps the most poignant. Roger’s family ties, including the difficult relationships with his thoroughly unpleasant father, his stepmother and his two contrasting half-brothers, and his growing friendship with William Marshal, shape his life choices and influence his relationship with Ida and their children. The novel illustrates how medieval society was held together by a complex web of kinship, lordship and friendship ties.

The main characters are well rounded and believable. Roger makes an attractive contrast to the charming and self-assured William Marshal. He is practical, patient, level-headed and reliable, but painfully shy around women and his self-containment can be all too easily mistaken for emotional coldness. Ida is sweet, caring, almost as innocent at the end of the novel as she is at the beginning, and traumatised by having to leave her eldest child behind at court. Left alone at Framlingham with her other children for increasingly long periods while Roger is engaged on legal and administrative duties, Ida’s loneliness and growing resentment are easy to understand. Roger is jealous of her previous affair with the king, and resentful of her pining for her missing son. The growing distance between them, and their struggles to find a compromise that will sustain their marriage (aided by some informal marriage guidance from William Marshal!) is convincingly drawn.

The novel shows an unglamorous side to Henry II, as something of a dirty old man not above exploiting a young girl placed in his care. The secondary character I found most intriguing was Ida’s illegitimate son by Henry, William (later known as Longespee, “Long Sword”). Brought up in the lap of luxury as the king’s son but insecure about his illegitimate status and anxious about his unknown mother’s identity, William develops an obsession with status and show that makes him behave like an arrogant snob as he reaches adolescence. It would be easy to dismiss him as a jerk, but Roger’s cool compassion is able to recognise the genuine worth underneath and build a wary acceptance between them.

Readers who enjoy the minutiae of life (at least among the aristocracy) in years gone by will love the details of domestic life, including Roger’s (fictional) love of extravagant hats and the detail of food, clothing and life in a great house (complete with aggressive geese in the bailey). As the novel covers over twenty years, the narrative often skips forward several years at one jump, and I had to remember to pay attention to the dates given in the chapter headings. A helpful Author’s Note summarises the history underlying the novel and the gaps filled in by fiction.

Warm-hearted exploration of romantic, family and social relationships in twelfth-century England.

*I should note that I’m familiar with Roger Bigod’s castle at Framlingham and the castle Henry II built at Orford to clip the Bigod earls’ wings, so it was particularly appealing for me to read about the men who built them.

Vote for Paths of Exile in The People's Book Prize

2009-09-06T17:54:00.004+01:00

I am pleased to announce that Paths of Exile is on the September nominations list for The People's Book Prize. This is a national competition for books by new authors, voted on by members of the public, i.e. by you.

Anyone can vote, all you need is an email address. There doesn’t seem to be any geographical restriction. It should only take a few minutes of your time.

You can vote now on The People’s Book Prize website: >>Vote here<<

Thank you for your support!

Thatched barns and stave churches: the possibilities of Anglo-Saxon timber architecture

2009-09-02T09:42:00.004+01:00

“What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs?”

--JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; The Two Towers (Book III, Chapter 10).

Thus spoke Saruman the wizard, after King Theoden had seen through his lies and told him to take a running jump, neatly articulating some of the more snobbish views of early English (‘Anglo-Saxon’)* culture in general and architecture in particular. Does timber architecture deserve this image?

Small buildings

There are no surviving drawings of early English buildings, and the written descriptions in sources such as Beowulf are stronger on poetic mood than on architectural detail, so the main evidence comes from archaeology. Herein lies an immediate problem; wood is a perishable material and rarely survives well in the ground. Usually all that is left of a timber building for archaeology to find is the ground plan, identified by post-holes and/or foundation trenches. Occasionally waterlogging has preserved some of the timber foundations, or if the building was destroyed by fire some of the charred timbers may have survived (charcoal being less prone to decay than wood), but even these favourable conditions usually preserve only the lower levels of the building.

Experimental archaeology, in which buildings are reconstructed using estimates of the techniques and materials available in the past, is invaluable for testing hypotheses about construction design and methods. It has provided a wealth of information about early English timber construction, especially for comparatively small buildings, such as the sort of houses and outbuildings that might have been occupied by a freeman farming family. Examples can be seen at West Stow near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and Saxon House, Lincolnshire (pictures available on the links).

Large high-status buildings

There is a tendency to assume that bigger buildings, such as the large high-status halls identified at sites such as Yeavering in Northumberland, were a sort of giant version of the smaller houses reconstructed at sites like West Stow. In the absence of evidence for their superstructure, this is indeed the simplest explanation. Brian Hope-Taylor’s suggested reconstruction of the great hall at Yeavering follows this model (various other reconstructions, together with lots of useful information, available on the same site – it’s well worth clicking round the links). But Occam’s Razor isn’t always correct.

Norwegian stave churches

The stave churches of Norway beautifully illustrate both the problem and the possibilities that can be achieved with timber architecture.

This is the ground plan of Borgund stave church in Norway (north-east of Bergen), built in or shortly after 1180 and not substantially modified since.

Borgund stave church ground plan. From Wikimedia, public domain image.

Doesn’t look very complicated, does it? It’s not very difficult to imagine a thatched barn of some sort on top of this, maybe a sort of central square hall with a few annexe-y bits added on round the sides.

Here is what it really looks like.

Borgund stave church. From Wikimedia under Creative Commons rules

For all that one is supposed to be able to see the universe in a grain of sand, I think most of us would have real difficulty deducing this sophisticated structure from its ground plan. More pictures on the official website.

This is not to argue that high-status Anglo-Saxon halls such as Yeavering resembled stave churches, although if I were going to imagine Heorot** I can think of worse places to start. Absence of evidence is just that. It’s more a reminder that timber architecture can be just as sophisticated and just as spectacular as masonry, and that we shouldn’t be blind to the possibilities.

Map links
West Stow
Yeavering
Borgund, Norway

*Although Tolkien’s Rohirrim clearly have features in common with the early English ('Anglo-Saxons'), not least their language and their names, they should not be taken as a direct counterpart. Tolkien famously disliked allegory.

**Heorot is the great king Hrothgar’s magnificent feasting hall in Beowulf, although I expect that if you found your way here you knew that already.

August recipe: Courgette tian

2009-08-29T16:32:00.003+01:00

A friend gave us this recipe with the recommendation, “It uses loads of courgettes!”. Anyone who has ever grown courgettes will recognise the sentiment. Given some warm weather and a bit of sunshine, two or three healthy plants can produce more courgettes than you would think possible. Even if you don’t grow your own, if you wander down country lanes in many parts of rural England you’re very likely to come across impromptu roadside stalls where people sell their surplus garden produce on the honesty box system, and in August they will most likely feature sparkling fresh courgettes at absurdly low prices.

This is a very good way to use them. We grow yellow courgettes, but it works just as well with the green variety.

Courgette* tian

1.25 lb (approx 550 g) courgettes
2 oz (approx 50 g) spinach or chard
Half an onion, or two or three shallots
1 Tablespoon (approx 15 ml) olive oil
1 clove garlic
1-2 oz (approx 25-50 g) smoked bacon
2 oz (approx 50 g) long-grain rice
1 oz (approx 25 g) Parmesan cheese
1 egg, beaten
Fresh basil and/or parsley, lots of (probably about 2 tablespoons or so when chopped)

Cut the ends off the courgettes and boil whole (or halved if they won’t fit in the pan whole) in salted water until soft. This usually takes about 15 minutes. Drain, then mash the courgettes with a potato masher. Beware the jets of hot water they try to spit up your arm. Put the mashed courgette in a sieve and leave to drain for a few minutes.

Cook the rice in boiling salted water until tender. How long this takes depends on the rice (follow the instructions on the packet). Brown rice usually takes about 30 minutes, white rice around 15 minutes.

Peel and chop the onion or shallots. Peel and crush the garlic. Chop the bacon. Fry the onion, bacon and garlic in the olive oil over a medium heat for 5-10 minutes until starting to brown. Remove from the heat.

Shred the spinach or chard leaves. Grate the cheese.

Mix the mashed and drained courgette, the shredded spinach, the cooked rice and the grated cheese into the bacon, onions and garlic. Stir in the chopped basil and/or parsley and the beaten egg. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Grease a shallow ovenproof dish. I use a round heatproof glass baking dish about 8” (approx 20 cm) in diameter. Press the mixture evenly into the dish and level the surface.

Bake at approx 170 C for approx 35 minutes until set and starting to go golden-brown on top.

Serve hot with a green vegetable or salad of your choice. This quantity serves 2. You can double it up and use a bigger dish to feed more people. I have no idea if it keeps, because there are never any leftovers. I don’t think it would freeze, but I’ve never tried it.

*I believe the American for courgette is zucchini

The Forgotten Legion, by Ben Kane. Book review

2009-08-25T12:16:00.002+01:00

Preface Random House, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84809-010-1. 603 pages.

The Forgotten Legion is set in 70 BC – 53 BC, in Rome, Gaul, Parthia (roughly modern Iran and Iraq) and Margiana (in modern Turkmenistan). The Roman politicians of the First Triumvirate, Crassus, Pompey and Julius Caesar, play secondary roles, as does the military officer Decimus Brutus*. All the main characters are fictional.

In the hills near Rome in 70 BC, Tarquinius, a slave proud of his Etruscan heritage and trained as the last Etruscan haruspex (soothsayer), leaves the estate when his mentor is killed on the orders of a Roman noble. In Rome at the same time, a slave girl is raped in the street by a Roman nobleman, identified only as “the lean man” and later gives birth to twins, a boy and girl named Romulus and Fabiola. In 61 BC, in Gaul, the mighty warrior Brennus witnesses the destruction of his tribe the Allobroges by Roman armies and is himself captured and sold into slavery as a gladiator. All four slaves are, in their different ways, determined to gain their freedom and exact revenge on Rome. Fabiola, sold into prostitution in a brothel that caters for the rich and powerful, has to learn to navigate the turbulent world of high politics and street violence in Rome. Tarquinius, Brennus and Romulus face a journey to the ends of the known world, as Crassus launches his invasion of Parthia. Can the four survive against overwhelming odds?

All the time I was reading The Forgotten Legion, I had the theme tune Nobody Does It Better from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me running in my head. All four lead characters are gifted with innate, exceptional talents. Fabiola, a household slave sold to a brothel aged 13, quickly becomes the establishment’s star attraction and highest earner, and a mean street fighter into the bargain. Her twin brother Romulus, sold to a gladiator school also aged 13, is a champion gladiator within months. Brennus, who mows down legionaries despite being outnumbered a dozen to one, must be the mightiest Gaulish warrior since Asterix and Obelix (no, magic potion isn’t involved). Tarquinius has a supernatural ability that means he really can read the future in a chicken’s entrails and is an expert military strategist who invents in months a technique to withstand horse archery that the Parthians have never thought of, despite having been fighting enemy horse archer cultures from the steppes for years and having a ready supply of the requisite raw materials. Nothing wrong with this; it establishes The Forgotten Legion as a Romance in the old sense of the word, full of exceptional characters doing extraordinary things in exotic locations.

And are the locations exotic. One of the things I enjoyed most about The Forgotten Legion was its enormous geographical canvas. Most of the Roman-set fiction I’ve read tends to be set in Europe (the Roman invasion/occupation of Britain seems to be especially popular) or in Rome itself, so seeing the world beyond the eastern frontiers of the Empire makes an interesting change. Crassus’ soldiers march through Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to the vast deserts of Parthia, then over mountains to the green hills and valleys of Margiana, giving the reader a sort of whistle-stop tour of Central Asia. The sketch map provided at the beginning of the paperback is invaluable here, especially if used in conjunction with a modern atlas. The Parthian Empire occupied approximately the area of modern Iraq and Iran, and at the time of the Late Republic it was Rome’s chief rival for power in the region. Crassus really did invade Parthia, and anyone who doesn’t already know the historical outcome can find out by Googling for the Battle of Carrhae (insert modern parallel of your choice).

The Forgotten Legion features lots of action. As well as the Battle of Carrhae itself, which is one set-piece among several battles in the Parthian campaign, we also have gladiator contests in the arena and bar-room brawls, street fights and murder attempts in Rome itself. The narrative cuts back and forth between the different characters, always stopping on a cliffhanger (although there is not actually that much suspense, because Tarquinius predicts practically everything before it happens). Paradoxically, the sheer amount of action both speeds and slows the pace. On the one hand there’s hardly a chance to draw breath as the tale ricochets from one mortal peril to another. On the other, it gives the narrative a rather rambling quality; for example, it takes 350 pages before our three heroes finally come together in the legion of the title. This is perhaps because the novel is clearly only the first part of a much longer tale, and the “end” isn’t really an ending at all but more of a brief pause between volumes.

Tarquinius has magical powers to foretell the future that really work. It’s made quite plain that this isn’t just belief or coincidence; he really can predict the future accurately from clouds and animal innards. This makes the foreshadowing a bit heavy-handed for my taste, but conversely it does mean that the book is an easy read. If I had to stop reading for a lengthy period I never had to back-track to remind myself what was going on because so much is effectively told twice, once in prophecies and once in the action.

The aristocratic rapist who fathered Romulus and Fabiola seemed oddly contradictory to me. He is apparently so overcome with drink and lust that he rapes a random slave girl in a back alley, oblivious to dirt or the possibility of disease, yet so cool-headed that as soon as he has finished he mentally reviews a potted history of his entire political career to date. Although he is at this point identified only as “the lean man”, his identity could hardly be more obvious; and I suspect that I don’t need Tarquinius’ powers of soothsaying to predict where the story is eventually going to end up.

A preface and author’s note explain the history behind the Forgotten Legion’s remarkable journey, and a glossary explains the numerous Latin terms scattered through the text. I rarely referred to it because I found I could work them out from context, but it is helpful to know it’s there if needed.

Entertaining all-action blockbuster in book form.

*The Brutus everyone has heard of, of “Et tu Brute” fame in Shakespeare, is Marcus Junius Brutus. Decimus Brutus was a contemporary, who served as an officer in Caesar’s army in Gaul, and he is the Brutus who appears in The Forgotten Legion. I guess they were probably related, but I don’t know how closely.