The Long War for Britannia 367–664: Arthur and the History of Post-Roman Britain

By Edwin Pace

This history of early medieval Britain sheds light on the real King Arthur and settles longstanding historical misconceptions about the period.

The Long War for Britannia examines some two centuries of ‘lost’ British history, while providing decisive proof that the early records of the time are far more reliable than many scholars believe. Historian Edwin Pace also demonstrates that King Arthur and Uther Pendragon are the very opposite of medieval fantasy—even if different British regions had very different memories of these post-Roman British rulers.

Some remembered Arthur as the ‘Proud Tyrant’, a monarch who plunged the island into civil war. Others recalled him as the British general who saved Britain when all seemed lost. The deeds of Uther Pendragon replicate the victories of the dread Mercian king Penda. Pace demonstrates how these authentic—yet radically different—narratives have distorted the historical record in way that persist today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781399013765

Book preview

Part I

The Last of the Romans

Chapter 1

Island of Tyrants

367 – The Consulship of Lupicinus and Jovinus

On a cold autumn morning in 367, a Roman armada set sail for the island of Britain. Dozens of transports dotted the waters, their sterns rising like the tails of great leviathans. Roman legionaries crowded the decks. On one vessel, men carried the red shield of the Batavians, an elite unit in the Roman Army. Blue shields on another ship identified the troopers as Jovians. More vessels lumbered nearby. But none of these legionaries expected riches from this campaign. They were not sailing to conquer some new territory for the empire. This was instead a rescue mission. The Roman diocese of Britanniae was in peril, and only a massive amphibious force could save it.

The commander of this fleet was a man called Flavius Julius Theodosius. On that morning in 367, he wore the regulation dress of a high-ranking Roman officer. His red woollen cloak was held in place by a gilded crossbow brooch, while his chest and back were protected with heavy scaled armour. Finely tooled leather boots protected his feet from the chill breezes of the sea. Even the design on his shield proclaimed him as a Comes – a senior rank in the imperial army.

After many hours, the coast of Britanniae appeared through the mist like a dark, threatening wave. As Theodosius gazed at the distant shore, he doubtless had many thoughts. Most were practical ideas on how he would carry out his mission. But in the back of his mind was a question, a question he still could not answer: just how had barbarians overrun an entire Roman diocese? Why had Rome’s forces simply melted away? The reports made no sense. Nectaridus, the Commander of the Coast, was dead; Fullofaudus, the General of Land Forces, was missing in action. Bands of Irish and Pictish pirates roamed the countryside. Still worse, Rome’s army in Britain had put up no resistance. Some soldiers had even joined the invaders.

It all seemed very strange. If Theodosius was asked what sort of trouble he might expect from Britanniae, he would have replied, ‘an army mutiny’, as the Roman soldiers of the island diocese had a reputation for rebellion. Indeed, they gloried in it. Half a century before, the great Christian emperor Constantine had put down one such mutiny – only to begin another against the emperor in Rome.

Theodosius knew that Irish and Pictish pirates had ravaged the coasts of Britanniae many times in the past, capturing thousands of Roman citizens to sell into slavery. But these had been pin-prick raids, not an invasion. That so many barbarians might conspire to take over an imperial diocese was unthinkable. The Picts and Irish spoke different languages, they were divided into many feuding tribes and most of these were separated by hundreds of leagues of sea. Yet somehow these varied peoples had put together an effective coalition. Their Saxon and Frankish allies were raiding even farther afield – all the way to the coast of Gaul. Romans were already calling it ‘the Barbarian Conspiracy’.

Something else worried Theodosius on that day, but it had nothing to do with Britanniae. Theodosius hailed from Hispania, and had brought officers from that province on the expedition. Two were his own kinsmen. The first was a distant relation, Magnus Maximus. Intelligent and forceful, Maximus was already a high-ranking officer. The second was Theodosius’ own son, called Theodosius the younger. The boy had chosen to emulate his father and follow a military career – a dangerous profession in itself. But the elder Theodosius knew that danger came not just from fierce barbarians. The emperor Valentinian might prove a far worse threat. Rome’s supreme ruler was a tough soldier who had fought his way to power over the bodies of all who stood in his path. A ruthless disciplinarian, he expected results and would tolerate no failures. If Theodosius’ expedition did not succeed, it meant certain disgrace – even execution. Valentinian had burned men alive for less.

Neither was success any guarantee of safety. Emperors feared victorious generals even more than failures. Success might be proof of ambition – ambition to be much more than just a general. So Theodosius must succeed in this mission, but he must do so in a way that did not alarm the emperor.

Already Theodosius was teaching these harsh lessons to his son. He could only pray to his God, the Risen Christ, that there would be enough time to teach the boy all he needed to know.

Earlier that year, Roman Britain’s defences collapsed almost overnight. This was deeply unsettling – and not just to Comes Theodosius.¹ The island’s two military leaders, Nectaridus and Fullofaudus, had failed. This was obvious. But the disaster was in no way due to the shortcomings of two high-ranking officers. Rather, it was the failure of something more basic: Rome’s strategy. The bitter truth was that the empire faced foes far different from the Gauls and Germans of Julius Caesar’s day. The barbarians had learned much over recent centuries, and they now threatened Rome’s very existence.

Downsizing

The roots of the debacle went deep. Indeed, they extended to the beginning of the empire. Rome had begun like all ancient empires, as a kind of military–financial pyramid scheme. Brilliant generals like Scipio and Marius had first conquered lands around the Mediterranean. Pompey and Julius Caesar then extended Rome’s borders to the dark forests along the Rhine and the Danube. Success led to further success as countless captured slaves and unprecedented amounts of booty flowed into the empire. By the dawn of the Christian era, Rome was entering its golden age. It was a vast, multi-ethnic imperium – an empire.

In

AD

43, Britain was added to the hit-list. The emperor Claudius conquered the island. But significantly, Britain was one of Rome’s last major acquisitions. This had important results, as with no new conquests, the flow of slaves and booty ceased. Rome now had to live within its borders, and thus within its means. Over the following centuries, some thirty legions held the line on the Rhine and the Danube. Safe behind its defences, the empire tried to ignore the unconquered ‘barbarians’ to the north. But the barbarians did not ignore Rome. They watched from across the great rivers and schemed how they might obtain the empire’s wealth for themselves. By the third century, barbarian attacks were a serious threat, with large armies sometimes penetrating deep into the imperial hinterland.

This forced a change in strategy. Rome could no longer afford to defend every mile of its frontier. By the reign of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, Rome had adopted a new strategy. Major cities were encircled with strong walls, while a thin line of ‘trip-wire’ units was left to guard the frontiers. The key to the strategy was the creation of a few powerful formations made up of the empire’s best troops. These mobile field armies deployed fast-moving cadres of cavalry and infantry. The concept was simple: the ‘trip-wire’ units destroyed small raiding parties at the frontier, but when larger groups broke through, the mobile field armies lured them into Rome’s hinterland. While Roman citizens waited out the crisis inside fortified cities, Rome’s elite troops destroyed the barbarians, often by simply denying them food. It was sensible, even clever. But most of all, it was cheap.²

For both the imperial government and Roman landowners, this last advantage was critical. Over two-thirds of the imperial budget was spent on the army. But this revenue first had to be collected by the municipal councils in every Roman district, or civitas. The emperor might command the army, but it was the decurion on the councils who collected the taxes to pay his soldiers. This left these local officials in an ambiguous position. Unscrupulous decurions might line their pockets once they fulfilled their quota, but if they failed to deliver, they were also legally bound to make up the difference. Unsurprisingly, decurions welcomed any measure that eased their heavy burden.

For the first half of the fourth century, this cheaper defensive strategy worked well. Indeed, we see the results in Britain’s archaeology. A small number of elite families began to construct an unprecedented number of opulent villas – the stately homes of their day. Other levels of society did not share in this new-found wealth, with the life of the great majority of Britons, the peasantry, going on much as before. They continued to dwell in their wattle and daub roundhouses, tilling the soil and tending to their livestock. But the nouveau riche were different. They surrounded themselves with beautiful furniture and statues. They installed hypocausts – centrally heated floors that kept them warm in the coldest winters – painted their walls with brightly-coloured murals of birds and animals, and strolled across tiled floors crowded with scenes from Roman mythology.

Life was far more than just outward show, however. Many used their leisure to study the great literature of the past. Vergil seems to have been a favourite among educated Romano-Britons. But even a century after the end of Rome, we find Britons referring to a much wider range of writers.³

Significantly, these villas were not fortified. In Gaul, repeated barbarian raids had taught Gallo-Romans that their villas needed strong defences. Indeed, looking across the Channel at a relatively peaceful Britain, more than a few had packed their bags and headed there. As so often in Britain’s history, the island became a magnet for refugees.

Another venerable British tradition also prevailed at this time: country life was seen as superior to town life. Roman authors contrasted the otium (leisure) of country life with the negotium (business) of town life. Leisure was invariably portrayed as the desired option, but there was a health aspect to this as well. In an age when any large human settlement was the habitat of a fantastic assortment of deadly microbes, life on a country estate was healthier.⁴

Just where much of this wealth came from is also clear. The largest customer on the island was the Roman Army. Any local landowner who could get on the good side of Fullofaudus or Nectaridus had an excellent chance of obtaining a lucrative army contract. Archaeology testifies that a fourth-century ‘military–industrial complex’ was alive and well in Britain.⁵

While little besides the names of the two unfortunate Roman commanders of 367 has survived, we do know something about their class. By now, few military officers came from the old senatorial class, or even from Italy. The typical officer was more likely a citizen from one of the frontier provinces, or even a barbarian. Fullofaudus is a Germanic name, and Nectaridus may be also.⁶ Both had probably served a long apprenticeship in various field commands. There, they had shown promise. More importantly, however, they had made themselves useful to the right senior officers. These were the sort of men who led Rome’s armies in the fourth century.

Nectaridus was ‘Count of the Coast’. Like Theodosius, he held the exalted rank of Comes. This suggests that he commanded a centralized system designed to repel seaborne attacks by both the Picts and the Irish. His defensive system deployed watchtowers on land and swift galleys at sea, both of which could give early warning of the approach of enemy vessels. Nectaridus’ other assets included strong forts stationed at the mouths of Britain’s major rivers. These had several functions: they discouraged barbarians from sailing into the interior of the island; they served as secure command and control centres; and they acted as collection points for the grain that fed the army, both in Britain and elsewhere.

If Nectaridus’ ‘trip-wire’ units failed, Fullofaudus’ ground forces came into play. Stationed farther back, they performed a mission analogous to the mobile field armies on the continent. If they arrived in time, they destroyed the barbarians in pitched battle; but their very existence meant that most raiders dared not tarry long on land. Together, Nectaridus and Fullofaudus employed a cost-effective, carefully thought-out doctrine. It might not halt all barbarian sea raids, but it made the situation manageable.

Fullofaudus used new tactics to contain the land threat in the North. Infantry cohorts and cavalry alae had stood guard at Hadrian’s Wall for more than two centuries. Most were now locally recruited. Traditionally, they had patrolled beyond the wall and repelled attacks by non-Roman tribes to the north. But carrots had been added to the Roman stick. We find high-status Roman objects far beyond the wall. These might have come from raiding, but given the relative peace on this frontier in the fourth century, they seem more plausible as gifts to friendly barbarian rulers.⁷ At the time, it seemed cheaper than another legion. We know that Rome also used special units on the frontier called areani to gather intelligence and keep the peace.

All of this was effective against pirate raids from dozens of small, mutually hostile tribes. However, a change was taking place among Rome’s foes. It was a change that was occurring across the northern barbarian world – and within a century it would bring the western half of the empire crashing down.

Counterattack

From the nineteenth century to our own time, we have seen how western military doctrine has spread far beyond the borders of Europe and America. Peoples with very different traditions have used the Western toolkit to first challenge and then defeat Western armies. ISIS and North Korea are only the latest in a series of actors who have taken Western technology and used it to confront the West. In the fourth century

AD

, a similar process was taking place in Germany, Ireland and Scotland. In previous centuries, barbarian armies had consisted of masses of poorly trained and armed tribesmen. Their day jobs consisting of farming and stock-rearing. Few possessed either the arms or the armour of a Roman legionary, while fewer still had time to train in rigid tactical formations. Barbarians thus rarely defeated experienced Roman legionaries in head-on battle.

The fourth century, however, saw a revolution in the structure of the Northern tribes. Their rulers now deployed smaller, more professional warbands, often with equipment just as good as that of Roman troops.⁸ Crucially, these barbarians served full-time, which enabled them to devote all their energies to sword-play and tactical manoeuvres. The qualitative difference between the Roman and barbarian began to blur.⁹

Why this was so again has everything to do with the Romans. For centuries, the empire had been hiring barbarians as soldiers. While very few ever betrayed Rome, many veterans did return to their native lands – and bragged about how well their old unit had been trained and organized. Moreover, while gifts to ‘friendly’ chiefs might keep the peace, they also enabled them to hire elite warbands made up of full-time professionals. The fact that the areani in Britain switched sides when the fighting began suggests that these were local British tribesmen co-opted en masse into the empire’s forces. In future, such forces would be known as federates. It was Rome’s recruitment of these well-trained warbands that proved the fatal flaw in its strategy.

Another weakness, ironically, was the success of Hadrian’s Wall. Although it did prevent Pictish and British tribes from expanding into lands further south, the barbarians subsequently learned that these defences could be outflanked by sea. A naval defence force in the Malton area and signal stations along the Yorkshire coast testify to a growing maritime threat.¹⁰

No single chieftain could take on the Roman Empire, but a temporary confederation was another matter. Some doubt whether Scots, Picts and Saxons could have pulled off such a feat, given the language barrier. But even here, the Romans had unwittingly smoothed the way. Latin was becoming a lingua franca in lands around the German Sea (what we now call the North Sea). Indeed, given the number of Roman captives taken, there was always someone in a barbarian village who knew Latin.¹¹

Rome’s strategy had been carefully developed over centuries. Nevertheless, as with any strategy, changed circumstances could undermine it, and in 367, the barbarians obliterated Rome’s defences in Britain. Irish and Pictish vessels sailed up the major rivers, while warbands marched unopposed down well-built Roman roads. The barbarians’ progress was only slowed by the irksome task of torturing decurions to reveal their hidden wealth. In 367, imperial citizens hiding in forests or starving behind high walls were asking one question: where was the Roman Army?

The barbarians had destroyed the Roman forces in Britain. However, they had also forgotten something: the empire was larger and richer than they could possibly imagine. It could draw on vast resources from other provinces. Theodosius quickly assembled four crack units for his fight-back: the Batavians, the Herulians, the Jovians and the Victores. He then gathered enough ships to transport them across the Channel. By the autumn of 367, his force was barrelling toward Britain.

When Theodosius landed, he soon discovered that the barbarians had split into small groups. To them, this was eminently sensible, as it enabled the raiders to comb more of the countryside and thus winkle out more loot and captives. But Theodosius knew that this was also their vulnerability. Small groups of barbarians might be harder to catch, but they were easier to destroy. Consequently, he divided his own force into small, swift units. The Roman detachments scoured the countryside, surprising one barbarian band after another. His soldiers rarely lost an encounter.

Surprisingly, Theodosius then offered amnesty to the Roman deserters. This was a common practice in the Late Roman period, a product once again born of reduced revenue. New recruits required long and expensive training. Misguided though the black sheep might be, it made better sense to take back a trained deserter than to crucify him. Indeed, this applied to barbarians as well. Roman military leaders often spared defeated barbarians, provided they agreed to become soldiers for the empire.

Theodosius’ forces eventually killed or expelled all the barbarians. Humble peasants sleeping in the fields returned to their thatched round houses, and decurions cowering in walled towns returned to their heated villas. Theodosius had saved Roman Britain.

All the same, the Barbarian Conspiracy was a watershed in the island’s history. We find this reflected in the archaeology. In London, the city fathers dismantled statues and public buildings to create a wall along the Thames – a sign that the quay-side was now vulnerable to sea raiders.¹² Decurions began to abandon their fine villas. By the century’s end, most of these stately homes were in disrepair, and the reason is clear: too many aristocrats had heard horrific tales of barbarian cruelty, or seen it with their own eyes. Suddenly, the bucolic otium celebrated by Roman poets seemed dangerous, even alien. The towns of Britain were squalid and disease-ridden. They possessed few of the comforts of a first-class villa. Their cramped streets offered little to delight the eye. But they had walls.

Chapter 2

Empire and Diocese

Bonus the Good

379 – The consulship of Ausonius and Olybrius

Year 1 of Gratian as Augustus

One Briton who survived the Barbarian Conspiracy was Silvius Bonus. He later fancied himself a man of letters, and while nothing that he wrote has survived, his penchant for literary criticism won him a curious kind of immortality. Bonus just happened to antagonize one of the most famous poets of the day: Decimus Magnus Ausonius. The spat between Ausonius and Silvius may seem comical, but it actually tells us much about how Britain fitted into the imperial order.

As Roman aristocrats, both Silvius and Ausonius were by definition well-educated. A grammarian had seen to their primary and secondary education, and a rhetorician had provided them with something like a university degree. Along the way they had picked up a vast amount of Roman literary, legal and historical lore. This was no accident: such information was the indispensable tool-kit for any high-born Roman. Knowledge of the law protected his possessions. Knowledge of Roman history enabled him to navigate Roman public life in both peace and war. Knowledge of rhetoric taught him how to sway his fellow nobles – or a sceptical judge in a court case. Even knowledge of the complex web of Roman literature and mythology was important. Clever references to pagan gods and nymphs marked him out as a cultivated man, and thus an insider.

Unlike Bonus, Ausonius was born in what is now Bordeaux. His chosen profession was that of a rhetorician, roughly equivalent to a university professor. But this job catapulted him into a much higher social plane. As we have seen, Emperor Valentinian was … difficult to get on with. But he was also a devout Christian, while Ausonius was a pagan. This might have seemed enough to preclude any relationship between them. But whatever Valentinian’s religion, most Roman culture was still based on pagan mythology. Nearly all rhetoricians were therefore pagans. Indeed, even Christian writers of the time composed poems populated with nymphs and Roman heroes. So when it came time to choose a tutor for Gratian, Valentinian’s son and heir, Ausonius got the job. A bond soon developed between master and pupil.

Valentinian died in 375. This made Gratian emperor in the West, while his uncle Valens ruled in the East. The young emperor remembered his old tutor. He chose Ausonius for a prestigious post: Pretorian Prefect of Gaul. The life-long academic suddenly became one of the most powerful men of his day, ruling a quarter of the empire. His title, Vir Eminentissimus (Most Eminent Man), placed him at the pinnacle of the imperial hierarchy.

This did not halt Ausonius’ literary career, however. Combining a life of public service with literary productions was the mark of a cultivated Roman. Still, Ausonius was no typical Roman poet – either pagan or Christian. One work, ‘A Nuptial Cento’, takes quotations from Vergil and applies them to a bride’s wedding night. It ends with a bizarre comparison between a certain portion of the male anatomy and a Cyclops. Another effort, ‘Cupid Crucified’, introduces a group of famous women from myth who died for love; they then proceed to torture Cupid for leading them astray. Still another work describes the charms of a German woman captured in a military campaign in which Ausonius took part: ‘Bissula’ was her name, ‘Blue of eyes and fair of hair’, who ‘queens it as the pet of him whose spoil of war she was’.¹

Even his most famous work, ‘The Moselle’, is not quite what it seems. It is a lyrical poem describing the beauties of a river on the empire’s frontier, but Ausonius fails to mention that it had just been the seat of war between Valentinian I and the Alamanni barbarians – the campaign in which Bissula was captured. The poem is really the work of a good spin-doctor, downplaying the barbarian threat by emphasizing that even the borders of Valentinian’s empire are peaceful.

Unsurprisingly, Ausonius was also rumoured to have possessed an extensive collection of pornographic literature. Whether this was what Silvius Bonus objected to, we will never know; but Silvius did criticize him severely, and Ausonius was not amused. In one work he asked rhetorically, ‘How can any Briton be good [bonus]?’, with Silvius Bonus clearly in mind.

Ausonius’ words imply that a great gulf separated the two men, and his grand title of Vir Eminentissimus best demonstrates this. Indeed, the ‘Power Vertical’ of late fourth-century Gaul tells us much about both Silvius and the empire:

Pretorian Prefect of Gaul – Vir Eminentissimus (Most Eminent Man) Vicarius of the diocese of Britanniae – Vir Spectabilis (Admirable Man) Governor of a British province – Vir Perfectissimus (Most Perfect Man)²

Britannniae was only one of several dioceses that Ausonius ruled as Praetorian Prefect. The Prefecture of Gaul included Spain, France and parts of Germany. His subordinate, the Vicarius (Viceroy) of Britanniae, in turn ruled five provinces. This curious name Britanniae also needs explanation. It is actually a plural. The diocese contained four or five smaller ‘Britains’, to include the provinces of Britannia Prima and Britannia Secunda. Each of these provinces was in turn ruled by either a Praeses or a Consular – what we might call governors. These various titles give an idea of the ladder of honours that every ambitious Roman aristocrat had to climb. A Vir Spectabilis need cast no more than a supercilious glance at a Vir Perfectissimus, while looking up with barely disguised envy on a Vir Eminentissimus.

As a Briton, Silvius was largely excluded from this contest. His provincial governor was a man likely brought over from the continent. Our literary Briton could never hope to acquire the title of Vir Perfectissimus, or even the less lofty Vir Egregius (outstanding man). At best he was probably one of the decurions of his civitas. On the other hand, Ausonius was a cultivated aristocrat who moved in the very highest circles of Roman society. He saw Silvius as little more than a yokel from a backwater of the empire. Since Rome was developing different regional Latin dialects (the ancestors of French, Italian and Spanish), even Silvius’ speech made him sound ridiculous.³

Ausonius used the ‘bonus’ joke on several occasions – and in several ways. This suggests that the Briton had struck a nerve. The spat turned into a real feud. Silvius was forcing Ausonius to confront a harsh reality: for all his bizarre originality, he would never be more than a mediocre poet in an age of tin.

Still, in 379, Ausonius seemed to have the last laugh on all Britons, good or bad. That year, the Senate voted to make him one of Rome’s two imperial consuls. Although consuls had little real power by the fourth century, it was still a rare honour. In a sense, Ausonius had become the year 379. All consular lists afterward would call this ‘the year of the consuls Ausonius and Olybrius’.

His good fortune did not last, however. Four years later, Ausonius was not making jokes about Britons: he was on the run. Emperor Gratian had just been killed during a rebellion, and Ausonius feared that he was next on the hit list. What Silvius Bonus’ fellow Britons had done was not ‘good’. But it certainly was astonishing.

Insurrection

Like most important events, the British revolt of 383 seemed most unlikely – until it happened. But its roots actually lay in the Barbarian Conspiracy.

By the late fourth century, most Roman Britons were not happy with the empire. Indeed, just being in Britain was often seen as a punishment: a Roman called Valentinus happened to offend the emperor Valentinian I, and his punishment was exile to Britain. Shortly after the Barbarian Conspiracy, he began plotting with some of the natives to start an insurrection. Although the coup was thwarted, these events suggest that British grievances were all too real. The inhabitants on this ‘island beyond the Ocean’ had good reason to envy the rest of the empire: the Gauls ruled over them, the barbarian threat was as bad as ever and they were mocked as ‘provincials’. Britons may also have been taxed more, simply because more military units had to be stationed there than elsewhere. As in our own day, there were many reasons why people in out-of-the-way ‘flyover country’ might resent elites.

That so many soldiers were stationed in an out of-the-way corner of the empire was also a big problem for Rome. Recruits increasingly came either from indigenous Britons or from barbarians. Neither had any real loyalty to Rome, and when soldierly grievances melded with civilian discontent, there was trouble.

This was of little concern to Theodosius or his protégé Maximus in 373. They were on a new mission: to put down an uprising in North Africa. It turned into a long, brutal guerrilla war. Theodosius eventually triumphed, but punished the rebels with a brutality that the Islamic State might envy: the wayward common soldiers lost their hands and the ringleaders were burned alive.⁴ This victory should have made Theodosius a hero. However, the Emperor Valentinian died in 375, to be succeeded by his son, Gratian. A popular, victorious general suddenly became very inconvenient to the new regime. ‘Dark forces’ at Gratian’s court ordered Theodosius to be recalled to Carthage. There he was tried, and there he was executed.

Maximus and the younger Theodosius survived the purge. This could have meant the end of their military careers – save for one unforeseen disaster. In 378, Gratian’s uncle, the Eastern emperor Valens, died with almost his entire army at the Battle of Adrianople. The victorious Goths were now rampaging in the Balkans. A crisis far more grave than the Barbarian Conspiracy gripped the Eastern empire. Competent military officers were in short supply, so Theodosius and Maximus were recalled to service. Arriving in Constantinople, Theodosius took command of what remained of the army. Maximus was made a general and sent west. To his delight, it was to a familiar posting – ‘the Britains’.

With his new title of ‘most perfect man and general’, Maximus received a warm reception. Britons still remembered him as one of the island’s saviours, and he quickly made himself even more popular. A chronicle in 381 mentions a victory over Pictish and Irish sea raiders.⁵ This was probably not some grand sea battle, however. More likely, it was the culmination of a series of carefully planned land and sea operations that gradually choked off the raids. But Maximus had shown that he was a winner. The despised Britons had a new hero.

Maximus’ next move is easy to criticize. But he had scores to settle, above all the death of his relative Theodosius. The fact that the latter had been executed after a victory may have also played a part. Now Maximus was successful – embarrassingly so. Someone at court might helpfully point this out to the young and impressionable Gratian. In 383, Maximus made his decision: he raised the standard of rebellion. Gathering elements of the Roman army in Britain, he sailed to Gaul. Once there, Maximus won support from other units dissatisfied with Gratian’s regime. The hapless young emperor attempted to flee, but was caught and killed by his own soldiers. Germany, Gaul and Spain quickly fell to Maximus’ legions.

Maximus’ cousin, Theodosius the Younger, had not been idle either. After pacifying the marauding Goths, he was raised to the dignity of emperor in the East. But now Maximus’ usurpation presented him with a dilemma: the usurper had killed Theodosius’ imperial colleague Gratian – an act of high treason. Yet Maximus was also ‘kin’, and a former comrade-in-arms. So at first Theodosius did nothing. Maximus took this as a sign that they would reign together as co-emperors. This seemed reasonable. Two or more emperors had often controlled various parts of the empire, the brothers Valens and Valentinian being the most recent examples. More than a few of them had also killed their predecessors. That a cousin would overlook how Maximus became emperor seemed eminently reasonable. Theodosius sent mixed signals that he ‘might’ accept his new imperial comrade. Delighted, Maximus struck coins with both their profiles to commemorate their dual reign.

But Theodosius’ father had taught him well in the art of imperial survival. In 388, he made a surprise move. He declared Maximus a ‘tyrant’, a usurper. In a lightning campaign, he attacked Maximus’ army near Siscia, on the Save River in what is now Yugoslavia. The insurgent army collapsed. Maximus fled. He was eventually tracked down and beheaded near the Italian city of Aquilea. What became of the Britons in his army is unknown.

Maximus belongs to a long tradition of what Romans called ‘tyrants’. This did not mean that he was necessarily a cruel or unjust ruler, merely that he had come to power illegally. He was a usurper. Contemporaries often called Britain a place ‘fertile in tyrants’, since it produced more than its fair share of usurpers. Constantine the Great, the emperor who had set the empire on the path to full Christianization in the early fourth century, would have been called a ‘tyrant’ – had he lost the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Maximus became a tyrant simply because he failed.

This also highlights the fact that most Britons still considered themselves Romans. None of these failed insurrections were a Late Antique version of an anti-colonialist uprising. Britons were wise enough to see that they were better off inside the empire than outside of it. Rome protected them from the barbarians: it provided them with the same rights as citizens in Egypt or Greece. Britons just wanted a larger share of the pie. As we shall see, it was the empire that abandoned Britain, not the other way around.

As a failed usurper, Maximus might seem of little consequence. But he was remembered. Moreover, he was remembered in very different ways. Later British sources speak of a ‘Maximus’, a ‘Maximian’ and a ‘Macsen’, all variations on the same ruler’s name. Indeed, Welsh tales portray Macsen as a Briton who conquered Rome. A number of Welsh dynasties even claimed him as an ancestor. But the major British literary monument of the sixth century portrays him as an unmitigated villain, the man who led young Britons to their deaths on a foreign field. The work even implies that this led to Britain’s eventual fall to Saxon invaders. The question becomes: why would Maximus have left such an ambiguous legacy?

If we understand the dynamics of Britain’s society, we begin to see why there might be a split in opinion. The Roman army was largely stationed in the north and west, what is often called ‘highland Britain’, yet the cities and the villas were in the south and east, in what is sometimes named ‘lowland Britain’. For Maximus to even contemplate rebellion required support from the army of the highland areas. Indeed, they expected lavish bonuses in cash for their part in the rebellion. But opinions in lowland regions may have been quite different. The lowlanders provided most of the taxes used to pay these bonuses. Significantly, legitimist supporters of Theodosius portray Maximus as a man obsessed with stealing valuables – valuables most likely to belong to rich villa owners.⁶ The shrinking Roman pie was creating conflict between a number of different groups.

Now, in 388, Theodosius’ triumphant forces were coming to restore imperial order, and it is doubtful that they showed much leniency. Officers in highland Britain who had supported Maximus were cashiered or executed: whole units were publically disgraced. But villa aristocrats could only welcome the return to legitimacy. Once again Britain was part of the empire – an empire expressly designed to protect their property. For them, Theodosius’ son was a second saviour – a restituter. There was a split in Romano-British society, and not for the last time.

Ausonius (and probably Silvius as well) survived the insurrection. The Gaul laid low in his villa near Bordeaux until things blew over, but he died a few years later, in 395. Remarkably, this sybaritic pagan was baptized before his death. Whether he rated this higher than his beloved slave girl Bissula is uncertain. What became of his collection of pornography is not recorded.

Spiritual Technology

Ausonius’ conversion emphasizes one salient fact: Rome was becoming irrevocably Christian. Indeed, for Theodosius it was not just the empire’s chief religion; he soon made it the empire’s only religion. The emperor forbade pagan fortune-telling. He proscribed all forms of public pagan worship. In 391, he put down the last pagan attempt to reinstate the old religion. Most significant, Theodosius made Trinitarian doctrine the state ideology – a belief followed by the majority of Christian confessions to this day. Officially, God had three equal manifestations: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In a largely secular world, the arguments about whether or not the Father is equal to the Son, and if the Holy Spirit proceeds from one or both, may seem tedious and irrelevant to ‘real’ history. But to think this way would be a profound mistake. By the beginning of the fifth century, Christianity was reality for many Romans. Whether or not man obtained salvation from God’s grace, or from good works, were burning questions. In theory, they determined the ultimate fate of every citizen in the empire. Most significant, these were very difficult intellectual questions.

We deal with questions today that seem just as difficult. How can an electron be both a particle and a wave? How can equality and femininity be resolved? Do megaverses exist? We address these questions using logic and evidence – and so did the ancients. The difference is that in the modern world, our evidence comes from close observation of nature – the basis of scientific progress for the last 500 years. But no one in Late Antiquity, whether pagan or Christian, could have accepted progress as an intellectually meaningful line of enquiry. In a society where resources were finite and most land was already under intense cultivation, the idea of progress was an alien concept. The Christian idea of the Apocalypse made man more future-orientated. But this had nothing to do with progress. Any improvement in mankind’s lot only came after the world’s end. For the ancients, the only valid evidence came from the past. Christians venerated the Bible, while pagans idealized the works of Plato and Aristotle. Any new idea not supported by some sort of tradition was suspect.

Paradoxically, this veneration of past wisdom also required Christians to address issues not previously encountered. Christian holy days were laid down in accordance with the Hebrew lunar calendar, but these events also had to be celebrated within the framework of the Roman annual calendar. To resolve the two systems required Christians to make complex calculations about time that had never concerned Greeks or Romans. Moreover, Christians were not unanimous as to exactly when Easter should be celebrated. This last matter was a particularly important issue: celebrating Christ’s resurrection on the wrong day was an affront to God, and perhaps a sin. In the end, investigations into the relationship between solar and lunar timekeeping would provide new ways of looking at the world. They would create several new systems of timekeeping, to include the one we use today.

Christian thinkers were also beginning to see history in genuinely universal terms. Classical historians only investigated the Greco-Roman world. Barbarians outside of it were of little significance. But Christianity emphasized that God was the ruler of all peoples. In the previous century, Eusebius had melded the entirety of the known past into one great chronological framework. He synchronized important Greek and Roman dates with those of Persia, Israel and Egypt. While far from accurate by modern standards, his was one of the first genuine essays into modern comparative history.

Eusebius also created an elaborate model of the beginning and end of time itself. He saw all of human history as divided into seven ages, each of a thousand years. Mankind was now in the Sixth Age, and the Seventh Age would herald the Second Coming of Christ. This was a template that would persist through the Middle Ages into the modern period. Indeed, Tolkien’s Third Age in The Lord of the Rings is an echo of Eusebius’ idea.⁷

This obsession with time also affects how we see this era. Chronicles are in part a Christian invention, an attempt to fix human activity within the framework of God’s plan.⁸ Most of the chronicles we will investigate calculate their dates from some important event in Christian history, be it the Creation, Christ’s conception or His passion. Just how well later chroniclers accomplished this is an important part of our story.

A later thinker, Orosius, saw all of human history in a different way. He argued that there had been four empires: the Assyrian, Macedonian, Carthaginian and Roman. According to Orosius’ calculations, the Macedonian and Carthaginian empires had each lasted 700 years. He further believed that the Assyrian Empire had lasted exactly 1,064 years. As we shall see, he saw the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 as directly connected with this, since Rome was supposedly founded exactly 1,064 years earlier. The hallmark of his thinking was the idea of precision in the universe: because it was created by God, it must be ruled by a divine exactitude. Moreover, this was an exactitude that humans could understand. It was cutting-edge thinking – but the edge cut backwards, not forwards.

As for Church doctrine, much of the relevant ‘evidence’ came from the Bible, which was seen as a compendium of wisdom obtained directly from God. St Jerome had translated the original Hebrew and Greek texts into Latin, in a work that is still used today in the Catholic Church. This enabled educated Romans to read and dispute the Bible.

This intellectual ferment was having an effect, even in faraway Britanniae. Like Theodosius, Maximus was a sincere Christian. Indeed, he was the first Christian ruler to execute another Christian for heresy, over the strong objections of St Martin. The new ideology was being taken very seriously. All agreed that there was only one truth: God’s. But just what that truth signified was being hotly disputed in every corner of the empire.

One of the men engaged in this spiritual controversy was a Briton called Pelagius. Born in the mid-fourth century, he lived into the fifth century. He was thus a much younger contemporary of Ausonius and Silvius Bonus. Although born in the western empire, Pelagius was fluent in Greek. This facilitated his study of the Bible. But much of his viewpoint was heavily influenced by the Hebrew Old Testament, particularly the writings of the later prophets. Their denunciations of the rich and powerful seemed to speak directly to the inequalities within the empire. For Pelagius the call of the prophets to repent meant that man must strive to make himself righteous. Salvation did not simply fall into one’s lap.

This might seem unexceptional. But one contemporary took great exception to Pelagius: a North African called Augustine. Greatly influenced by Neo-Platonist thought, Augustine argued that God was, and must always remain, omnipotent. To assert that man had some say-so in his own salvation diminished the unbounded power of the Deity. To Augustine this was, quite simply, illogical. Pelagius countered that God must grant man some measure of freedom, so that he might strive for his salvation. The intellectual battle lines were drawn. Both men claimed that they were simply repeating ancient wisdom; both cited scripture to support their positions; both sincerely believed that the other was a heretic. It was the equivalent of the tension between quantum physics and relativity theory, with no unified field theory anywhere in sight. It did not help that Pelagius had a better command of Greek than Augustine.

In the end, Pelagius lost. Variations of Augustine’s ideas are the basis of most modern Christian faiths. But Pelagius is still important for our story. Just as Britain was a land fertile in tyrants, so many continental Romans viewed Britain as a land fertile in heretics. Britons saw things rather differently. Many believed that Pelagius had been arguing for an earlier, more pristine form of Christianity.⁹ Even a century later, British intellectuals were still resisting the more extreme aspects of Augustine’s doctrine. The island’s clergy would have differences with mainstream Christianity for the next 300 years.

Pelagius moved first to Rome, then to Palestine. Wherever he went, his emphasis on good