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This thread replicates the discussion that started on the Currently Reading thread over King Arthur's Wars. I've copied the relevant posts into separate posts here and given the names of the posters (I don't think one can selectively excise posts to create a new thread).

Justin

Just finished King Arthur's Wars by Jim Storr. A fascinating book. As far as I know, he is the first to do a systematic analysis of the English dykes (he spent months travelling over the countryside and studying them in situ. From them he established a pattern of Romano-British defences against the Germanic invaders that is truly staggering in scale. The Wansdyke, for example, stretched from the Thames to the Severn and defended south Britain for over 60 years. Their size is also impressive - some dykes were 30 feet high. After establishing the defensive lines the Romano-British set up against the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, he deduced an approximate timeline for their gradual retreat westwards.

His study of the dykes goes with a careful use of toponomy (he is always cautious about how much (in)certitude he gives to his conclusions) which indicates where the Germanics arrivals settled and the nature of the landscape they settled in. For example, place names ending in '-ly', '-ley' and '-leigh' meant a clearing in a wood which in turn means the area of settlement was originally heavily forested. This ties in neatly with where the dykes start and end, usually against impassible forested or marshy terrain.

He also makes the point that the Rescript of Honorius rests on no firm primary source evidence and in fact the Roman army never entirely left Britain, although much of it did during the insurrection of Constantine. The dykes, at least in the earlier period up to the end of of the 6th century, are constructed with a mathematical precision possible only to trained military engineers - they run in straight lines and their dimensions are uniform.

He points out that Camelot can only be Camelodunum (Colchester) and dykes in the area plus the siting of settlements show the existence of a large fortified clearing that is too big to be a purely human habitation but is the right size for horses. In other words, he proposes that Camelodunum, situated between the Angles to the north and the Jutes to the south, was Arthur's operational headquarters.

All this goes along with a study of the primary sources that is also cautious, IMHO a little too cautious, but that does lend weight to the conclusions he reaches. The overall picture then is a Roman-British military establishment that was initially superior to the Germanic invaders in pitched battles, especially with the use of cavalry, but then gradually lost its edge and eventually could not win battles especially against the West Saxons, relying thereafter on the dykes to keep them at bay. Ultimately a losing strategy but one which bought the Romano-British a two centuries' fighting retreat.

Mark G

Does he mention anything of the fighting style?

I never really understood why the romano brits always seemed to be LHI hit and run hillmen types in mist lists,?when all their opponents seem to be shieldwall or warband types.

And all those dykes fit with defensive heavy infantry.

Justin

Quote from: Mark G on December 25, 2019, 09:00:04 AM
Does he mention anything of the fighting style?

I never really understood why the romano brits always seemed to be LHI hit and run hillmen types in mist lists,?when all their opponents seem to be shieldwall or warband types.

And all those dykes fit with defensive heavy infantry.

Not in any detail. His point is that Romano-British fought the Saxons et al. toe to toe when necessary, but once they lost their cavalry their infantry alone in a pitched battle were not quite up to the task. They would have needed fairly well organised heavy infantry to defend the dykes and could have done (and did do) so successfully with few troops. Perhaps the main problem of the Romano-British was a lack of numbers. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from a tribal warrior culture, where every able-bodied male was expected to fight, whereas the Roman-British had lived peacefully for centuries under the protection of a professional army and did not have the same across-the-board obligation to military service. So you have a small professional military in the 5th century that never expands into a tribal levy until it is too late.

Andreas Johansson

Quote from: Mark G on December 25, 2019, 09:00:04 AM
I never really understood why the romano brits always seemed to be LHI hit and run hillmen types in mist lists,?when all their opponents seem to be shieldwall or warband types.

FWIW, the DBMM list has them as mostly shieldwall types, with some regular Roman(-style) troops early on.

Anthony Clipsom

Is there an explanation of how the dykes were manned?  The Roman way with limes seems to have been garrisons and patrols.  Has he therefore identified where the garrison stations were?

As to Romano-British armies, aren't they usually depicted as low grade shieldwalls these days?  Aren't the "hill tribe" types reserved for early Welsh, who were a bit more prone to living in wild places?

One final point directly to Justin about the book.  If Jim Storr identifies Camelot as Camelodunum, does he explain why the place is first mentioned in a 12th century French source?  How does he explain the 600 year gap in the evidence?

Dave Hollin

Its worth a read but I found that the author eventually falls into the trap of restating opinions until it becomes 'fact' although not as badly as some authors on the subject. The theories are niche and very interesting and the book manages to devote a lot of time to this aspect of the landscape where others have only observed and commented on the presence of dykes but not explored the reasons for etc. Definitely worth a read

Stephen Brennan

Quote from: Holly on December 26, 2019, 11:40:01 AM
Its worth a read but I found that the author eventually falls into the trap of restating opinions until it becomes 'fact' although not as badly as some authors on the subject. The theories are niche and very interesting and the book manages to devote a lot of time to this aspect of the landscape where others have only observed and commented on the presence of dykes but not explored the reasons for etc. Definitely worth a read

His stuff on dykes is really interesting and the book is certainly worth reading. 

Like many a professional soldier turned author before he likes to find evidence for regular soldiers wherever he looks.  For example he sees the cavalry of Gododdin as a Roman cavalry unit acting in the Persian cavalry tradition.  That fails to convince me because there is nothing to support such a conclusion. The Gododdin had never been part of the Roman regular army and from what we can glean their cavalry tactics were of the native tradition.  I mostly found his other historical conclusions unlikely too. 

All that said I still think Jim Storr has given us a very useful book.

Justin

QuoteIs there an explanation of how the dykes were manned?  The Roman way with limes seems to have been garrisons and patrols.  Has he therefore identified where the garrison stations were?

With a couple of possible exceptions (cavalry bases), there is zero archaeological evidence for where units of the Romano-British army were stationed and how they functioned, so Storr hypothesizes. Scouts stationed ahead of the dykes give ample warning of the approach of a Saxon army. This allows the local British unit to man the dyke and perhaps prepare a counterattack - say a flanking ambush to be sprung whilst the Saxons were attempting to storm the dyke. But it's a case of not knowing for sure. I find that Storr pushes speculation a bit far sometimes (whilst admitting it is speculation), but three hard facts stand out: a) there was an enormous dyke system that could only have been used as lines of defence; b) these dykes were post-Roman, from the fact that they crossed Roman roads (the easiest routes of access) with monotonous regularity, and c) the earlier dykes at least were built with an engineering precision possible only to Roman-trained military engineers.

Quote from: Erpingham on December 26, 2019, 11:16:28 AM

QuoteOne final point directly to Justin about the book.  If Jim Storr identifies Camelot as Camelodunum, does he explain why the place is first mentioned in a 12th century French source?  How does he explain the 600 year gap in the evidence?

He does say that the first mention of Camelot is from Cretien de Troyes. Cretien spells other cities' names Arthur visited and which were known to have been Roman either in their original Latin or, more often, their contemporary English versions. Camelot was Camulodunum, and Cretien would not have known that it had changed to Colchester. He suggests that since 'Camelot' was spelled with a 'K' it came to Cretien from Breton sources.

Why the 600 year gap? Storr suggests that Arthur might have been expunged from British sources, a kind of damnatio memoriae, without going into the reasons why it was expunged.

Stephen Brennan

"c) the earlier dykes at least were built with an engineering precision possible only to Roman-trained military engineers."

Yes, so he opines, and yet the natives had been building defensive dykes forever.  I imagine they had worked out how to do it properly themselves long before the post Roman period.

The 600 year Damnatio of Arthur theory doesn't work for me.  Arthur pops up in An Gododdin and elsewhere so there was no damnatio of his name from our sources. If anything his warrior career was celebrated as an exemplar.

Anthony Clipsom

Quotebut three hard facts stand out:

These seem actually to be a mix of fact and speculation.  The facts appear to be there are a number of dykes and that they are post Roman.  But I leave it to the Arthurian specials like Holly and Anton to comment.

QuoteWhy the 600 year gap? Storr suggests that Arthur might have been expunged from British sources, a kind of damnatio memoriae, without going into the reasons why it was expunged

How convenient if you wish to speculate wildly :)  You might suggest a damnatio for a couple of centuries on the basis of absence of evidence (e.g. not in Gildas) but Arthuriana is alive and well in Welsh terms long before the 12th century and they don't mention Arthur's capital as Colchester.  Chretien may have picked up a genuine tradition connecting Arthur to Colchester or he may have used names of Roman towns he found elsewhere.  Not a sound basis to build a thesis on, I fear.

Patrick Waterson

QuoteYes, so he opines, and yet the natives had been building defensive dykes forever.  I imagine they had worked out how to do it properly themselves long before the post Roman period.

The one thing they would not have worked out long before the post-Roman period would be how to build them across Roman roads ...

QuoteIf Jim Storr identifies Camelot as Camelodunum, does he explain why the place is first mentioned in a 12th century French source?  How does he explain the 600 year gap in the evidence?

Camelot as Camulodunum (i.e. Colchester) does not have to rely on erratic bardic nomenclature, but rather on role (a capital), location (horse country) and finally a coincidence or confluence of appellation.  Its designation is known to have have varied over time: the Historia Brittonum refers to it as 'Cair Colun'; its Saxon name was 'Colneceastre' (from which we get Colchester).  Its original (pre-Roman) name appears to have derived from 'Camulos' (war deity) plus 'dun' (fort or town).  No special wisdom here: just Wikipedia.

There is one possible, even likely, influence behind the change of name: Camulos, a Celtic deity, might have sat ill with the overtly Christian priests of later post-Roman Britain.  Arthur's less doctrinal contemporaries with their tribal traditions still flourishing would have had no such reservations.

Anthony Clipsom

If we are going to mention the changes in Colchester's name, we ought to explain it is on the River Colne.  Changes tend to look rather workaday rather than mystical then.

We could of course collect a selection of random facts; Colchester was a Roman capital, Camelot sounds like Camulodunum, the Romans raised horses in that part of Essex (I presume the evidence exists for this?) and create an Arthurian connection.   But, given an absence of corroboration and earlier references to Arthur being based in Caerleon or Chester, I don't know if we can put any special weight on it.  If I might speculate wildly, it is possible that Chretien has picked up the Welsh tradition of placing Arthurs capital in a legionary city but, not knowing Caerleon or Chester, he has plucked out Colchester as a possible candidate from his limited knowledge of Roman Britain.

Andreas Johansson

QuoteAs to Romano-British armies, aren't they usually depicted as low grade shieldwalls these days?  Aren't the "hill tribe" types reserved for early Welsh, who were a bit more prone to living in wild places?

Army lists from the WRG mould don't have a separate Welsh list until AD 580, so Welsh of the Romano-British period are presumably assumed to be more-or-less indistinguishible from their British brethren in what became England.

(Perhaps surprisingly, Phil has the Dumnonians remain shieldwall types when the Welsh switch to warband. Do we, anyway, know anything about Dumnonian armies?)

I dunno if I've read enough lists to comment on "usually", but it may be noted that ADLG has a free choice of Heavy Spearmen and Medium Spearmen for the bulk of Romano-British foot, where the latter is a "hillman" sort of classification, who, if I understand, would probably be LHI or LMI in old WRG currency. They're supposed to use looser formations than proper heavy infantry, move rapidly through terrain, yet be able to bunch up to resist cavalry. Heavy Spearmen are not necessarily shieldwall types - the class includes Classical hoplites - but definitely not hit-and-run anything.

Triumph! has them as Heavy Foot, which is the class for HI who aren't good enough to be Elite Foot, bad enough to be Horde, angry enough to be Warriors, or pointy enough to be Spears or Pikes.

Jim Webster

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on December 26, 2019, 06:32:30 PM

Quote from: Anton on December 26, 2019, 05:07:00 PM
Yes, so he opines, and yet the natives had been building defensive dykes forever.  I imagine they had worked out how to do it properly themselves long before the post Roman period.

The one thing they would not have worked out long before the post-Roman period would be how to build them across Roman roads ...

But cutting through a Roman road isn't high technology, it just needs a little more time, and ideally a crowbar

Anthony Clipsom

Quote from: Jim Webster on December 27, 2019, 07:03:30 AM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on December 26, 2019, 06:32:30 PM

Quote from: Anton on December 26, 2019, 05:07:00 PM
Yes, so he opines, and yet the natives had been building defensive dykes forever.  I imagine they had worked out how to do it properly themselves long before the post Roman period.

The one thing they would not have worked out long before the post-Roman period would be how to build them across Roman roads ...

But cutting through a Roman road isn't high technology, it just needs a little more time, and ideally a crowbar

The obvious significance of cutting Roman roads is dating - the road was there first.  Also, that the community could afford to lose the road for whatever purpose the dyke provided.

Dave Hollin

The roads were a blessing and a curse. Obviously the roads were used to connect with established settlements but once specific ones were 'lost' then the need to prevent any advances were paramount. The book goes into great detail about the lack of mobility outside of the road system due to prevailing conditions (some assumed) of wood, marsh and fen especially in the east and south east of 'England' 

Patrick Waterson

Quote from: Jim Webster on December 27, 2019, 07:03:30 AM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on December 26, 2019, 06:32:30 PM
The one thing they would not have worked out long before the post-Roman period would be how to build them across Roman roads ...

But cutting through a Roman road isn't high technology, it just needs a little more time, and ideally a crowbar

Quite.  However a dyke which cuts a Roman road before the Roman road has been built would be rather a challenge to construct. :)  Hence I think Jim Storr has the timing right on this one.

Quote from: Erpingham on December 26, 2019, 07:22:49 PM
If we are going to mention the changes in Colchester's name, we ought to explain it is on the River Colne.  Changes tend to look rather workaday rather than mystical then.

Once we have established when the Colne started being called the Colne ...

QuoteWe could of course collect a selection of random facts; Colchester was a Roman capital, Camelot sounds like Camulodunum, the Romans raised horses in that part of Essex (I presume the evidence exists for this?) and create an Arthurian connection.   But, given an absence of corroboration and earlier references to Arthur being based in Caerleon or Chester, I don't know if we can put any special weight on it.

Except these are not random, but relevant and connected, facts.  That makes a huge difference.  Identifying Camulodunum as the capital also helps to unlock the location of Camlann, the final battle.

Horse raising seems to have been integral to Camulodunum even before the Romans came given that the Trinovantes put a horse on the reverse of their coins and Camulodunum contains Roman Britain's only known circus.

QuoteIf I might speculate wildly, it is possible that Chretien has picked up the Welsh tradition of placing Arthurs capital in a legionary city but, not knowing Caerleon or Chester, he has plucked out Colchester as a possible candidate from his limited knowledge of Roman Britain.

Colchester and York would be the obvious possibilities, and he has avoided York (unlike some more recent authors). To my mind, it would be the Welsh rather than Chretien who are most likely to have the wrong end of the geographical stick, given their somewhat regional sentimental and geographical outlook.  However it may be possible to reconcile everyone by surmising that Arthur's military operations and concomitant national and/or regional administration were undertaken from whichever of these camp-cities was most convenient for a particular campaign, but his capital was at only one of them: Camelot/Camulodunum.  There is the further possibility that Arthur changed base (and temporary capital) until he managed to finish liberating the country: tradition has him establish Camelot part-way through his reign rather than right at the outset.

Anthony Clipsom

QuoteExcept these are not random, but relevant and connected, facts. 

They still look pretty random to me :)

QuoteTo my mind, it would be the Welsh rather than Chretien who are most likely to have the wrong end of the geographical stick, given their somewhat regional sentimental and geographical outlook.

Chretien, of course, is more objective, writing as he is a fictional tale, jumping on a literary bandwagon with no obvious connection to historic sources at all.    However, I don't think this is getting anywhere, any more than it did last time.

Stephen Brennan

It's the nature of these discussions. Here are two things we do know.

Horse breeding seems to have been popular among the British nobility.  Everybody who could did it.  Then they could ride about including to war and give presents of horses to other nobles.  The poets evidence these things and giving away horses got you noticed.

Celtic place names tend to be descriptive. If we are talking about Camlann we are talking about a crooked glen or a crooked enclosure.  There must have been quite a few crooked places sharing this name in Britain below the Wall.  Camboglanna in Cumbria and the river Camblana in Cornwall are considered in Koch's notes on Camlann.

Jim Webster

Quote from: Erpingham on December 27, 2019, 08:56:37 AM
The obvious significance of cutting Roman roads is dating - the road was there first.  Also, that the community could afford to lose the road for whatever purpose the dyke provided.

The dating, yes
The the loss of the road is perhaps more complicated. I think it is agreed, from the archaeology, that a lot of long distance trade had dried up. Indeed much or indeed most of it was coastal. I've chosen Byzantine finds as a marker for trade generally, which is probably not unreasonable. As you can see, road transport seems rarely to have figured.
I would suggest that given the cost of haulage by land, sea and river would be preferred. The main advantage of roads would be military and for trade between market towns etc.

If the other side is hostile and you're not going to attack, then the road becomes an advantage you wish to deny the enemy. Similarly if you've nothing to trade with 'the other lot' (because they are also subsistence peasantry) then why bother keeping the road open

Jim

(https://i.imgur.com/VHkdgEo.jpg)

Chris Hahn

Seen in the "Briefly Noted" section of the 16 December of The New Yorker and transcribed here in full for those who might be interested:

Medieval Bodies - by Jack Hartnell (Norton). Elegantly combining strands from the histories of medicine, art, and religion, this study explores how the medieval world understood and treated the human body. In the late Middle Ages, medicine sought natural as well as mystical causes for all manner of afflictions, making diagnosis a complex affair (stringy hair, for instance, might indicate an unscrupulous character, while baldness resulted from an excess of heat.) Focussing on Byzantium, the Islamic world, and the patchwork of kingdoms constituting western and central Europe, Hartnell deftly shows how these societies' visual cultures were, like their medical theories, profoundly influenced by a symbolic understanding of humanity's relationship to realms seen and unseen.

I shall be looking for this on the shelves of libraries near me.

Update: Found it on the shelf of a local library. Borrowed it and am enjoying it very much.

From the back jacket:

"A thick, spicy plum pudding of a book". - Barbara Newman, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Jack Hartnell tells an extraordinary story in his wonderfully rich study of the Middle Ages . . . His idea of approaching the medieval worldview through the body is inspired. . . . This beautifully illustrated book succeeds brilliantly in bringing this much maligned period to life . . . A triumph of scholarship". - PD Smith, GUARDIAN

Roy Boss

I too liked the Jim Storr book. Its big step forward is in trying to incorporate tge evidence for the dykes into the Anglo-Saxon conquest . He goes through the likely sites of dense woodland and marsh to show w that the dykes end impassable terrain and places where there are say three dykes in succession show the builders  improving the effectiveness of the defence from experience. I don't thing there is evidence of systematic garrisons or mile castles , though he believes that there would be some farms beyond the dykes and they would be placed to send  back a message if braiders passed by. It id possible that a garrison was never needed  because the purpose of the military activity was cattle raiding and as you could not get 150 steers through woodland, across marsh or over  a steep  earth barrier. Thus they had no garrison, permanent or temporary. Their military use was to push forward, squeezing a British settlement until it looks st its farmland and could not be supported.  One presumes that this advance might have been preceded by a battle in which the Britons lost  the ability to intervene  . Longer dykes such as the Wansdyke   sit better as state  boundaries when the size of the Saxon polities had increased. As a footnote to the nature of tge conquest would like to point to Swaffham in Norfolk. This has been glossed as village of the Sueves ( I think there are two) . The Suebi end up with a fair diaspora, being in  Africa, Spain , and Austria as well. The nature of the settlement could well have involved many small distinct groups who pitched ip, found some unlorded empty  land , perhaps still with some peasants and settled it, possibly giving respect to a local Anglian leader who had a more impressive comitatus . To protect themselves against the still effective British presence they dyke up the downland that provides a flat high ground access to their main settlement. Conquest then proceeds with small bite and hold chunks.

Patrick Waterson

Quote from: Anton on December 27, 2019, 09:54:32 AM
Celtic place names tend to be descriptive. If we are talking about Camlann we are talking about a crooked glen or a crooked enclosure.  There must have been quite a few crooked places sharing this name in Britain below the Wall.  Camboglanna in Cumbria and the river Camblana in Cornwall are considered in Koch's notes on Camlann.

There are quite a few names to choose from, but for a firm identification we need more than nomenclature. Fortunately we get the necessary criteria: Camlann has to be somewhere a British traitor can meet up with a Saxon army fresh from Germany, and it has to be on the route between London and Camelot for Arthur's last campaign to make any sense.  Obviously, it has to be on or next to a river.

If we apply these criteria, there is one place which matches the requirements for Camlann exactly: Caesaromagus (Chelmsford), on the river Chelmer.  The Chelmer could accept ships as far as Chelmsford; the 'ford' in the name is a clue about the depth of the river at that point.  Chelmsford would be the ideal rendezvous for a worried British rebel expecting a Saxon fleet to join him, and meanwhile blocking the route from London to the capital at Colchester.  Chelmsford more or less 'slept' as a town between Roman and Norman times, so the key name to consider would seem to be the River Chelmer.

The Chelmer seems to have been named after a Saxon landowner, Cēolmǣr, having apparently previously been named the Baddow (with not much idea of what it had been called bbefore that).  Camlann could thus be a 'lost name' for the river, or for the location where the battle was fought.  But by using Arthur's last campaign to track its location, we do not need to depend upon actual or assumed nomenclature.

QuoteHorse breeding seems to have been popular among the British nobility.  Everybody who could did it.  Then they could ride about including to war and give presents of horses to other nobles.  The poets evidence these things and giving away horses got you noticed.

Yes, good observation.  Essex is of course traditional horse country: as recently as the English Civil War it was supplying a goodly proportion of Parliamentary cavalry.

Patrick Waterson

Quote from: Erpingham on December 27, 2019, 09:20:00 AM

QuoteExcept these are not random, but relevant and connected, facts. 

They still look pretty random to me :)

Mind if I go through the connections?  The circus is the only one in the UK, or at least the only one found, and this is a very strong indication that Camulodunum was the capital.  It thus becomes the default for a post-Roman ruler looking for Roman-style (as opposed to merely tribal) legitimacy (tribal kings do not need to drag swords out of stones to prove their birthright - then again neither do Romans ;D, but the point is that someone was seeking to be known as a rightful overall ruler).  The best capital for a legitimacy-seeker is the traditional capital - if he can get it.

Arthur, like Carthage, owed his victories to his cavalry.  Our putative Arthurian figure thus needs to govern as directly as possible an area which will supply him with good cavalry - and what better area than good old Essex?  If he tried to set up at (for example) Tintagel, he would be having to bring horses most of the way across the country or make do with Dartmoor ponies.

With Camulodunum, he has a traditional capital with all the appurtenances of rule in a traditional horse-raising area.  Pretty much the perfect arrangement for someone who depends heavily on his mounted comites to provide the nucleus of his army and keep things together.

Roy Boss

Except that one could do a similar exercise for several other sites as potential 'capitals' for a real or imagined Arthur. It would be interesting to carry out a tick box comparison of various sites with separate sections for fitting some evidential item from near the proposed floreat , ticks for  logical items such as defensible site , known to be occupied in the fifth-sixth century , accessibility to Saxon/ Irish frontiers and the Nennius  battle list, lastly and least weightily, fitting some  twelfth century romance.Roy

Jim Webster

Quote from: aligern on December 27, 2019, 03:40:06 PM
I too liked the Jim Storr book. Its big step forward is in trying to incorporate tge evidence for the dykes into the Anglo-Saxon conquest . He goes through the likely sites of dense woodland and marsh to show w that the dykes end impassable terrain and places where there are say three dykes in succession show the builders  improving the effectiveness of the defence from experience. I don't thing there is evidence of systematic garrisons or mile castles , though he believes that there would be some farms beyond the dykes and they would be placed to send  back a message if braiders passed by. It id possible that a garrison was never needed  because the purpose of the military activity was cattle raiding and as you could not get 150 steers through woodland, across marsh or over  a steep  earth barrier. Thus they had no garrison, permanent or temporary. 

I think you have to look at the individual dyke, with Wansdyke "In 2007 a series of sections were dug across the earthwork which showed that it had existed where there are no longer visible surface remains.  It was shown that the earthwork had a consistent design, with stone or timber revetment."
(From the wiki)
If you have the revetment then you'll have something that would stop cattle.

But without revetment (even if it is just turfs) soil is stable somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees and cattle will cross that with no trouble at all.

With Offa's Dyke https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/how-rare-archaeological-dig-rewriting-15244707

According to Ian, it is not dyke itself they are excavating but the ditch in front of it. Back over a millennia ago, there was a nasty surprise in that ditch for people trying to cross it.

"The dyke was mainly built using earth from the ditch although some sections will have come from quarries as well," he said.

"We excavated the ditch which is not something to take on light heartedly.

"It is six metres wide and three metres deep with a very steep 'ankle breaking trough' at the base.

"One of the things we see, even in Roman times, is a very narrow and steep trough about twice the width of the spade. This would have to be maintained and added an extra hindrance to people crossing the ditch."

Indeed with the ditch and the trough in the bottom, it is probably an anti-personnel obstacle

QuoteWith Camulodunum, he has a traditional capital with all the appurtenances of rule in a traditional horse-raising area.  Pretty much the perfect arrangement for someone who depends heavily on his mounted comites to provide the nucleus of his army and keep things together.

Roy has already said it, but lots of the UK is good horse country.   We only assume, because of the legends passed down to us, that Arthur was a notable cavalry commander (though I agree it is plausible).  We lack any evidence of an Arthurian connection to Colchester until a coincidence of names in the 12th century.  As I've said, its an unconvincing speculation.

thanks Justin for the thread transcription...!

Quote from: Justin Swanton on December 28, 2019, 09:27:00 AM
Roy Boss
Except that one could do a similar exercise for several other sites as potential 'capitals' for a real or imagined Arthur. It would be interesting to carry out a tick box comparison of various sites with separate sections for fitting some evidential item from near the proposed floreat , ticks for  logical items such as defensible site , known to be occupied in the fifth-sixth century, accessibility to Saxon/ Irish frontiers and the Nennius  battle list, lastly and least weightily, fitting some  twelfth century romance.Roy

My guess is that the 'tick-box exercise' would throw up Eboracum (York) as the leading contender with Camulodunum (Colchester) trailing close behind.  Add more weight to the twelfth-century romance and the two reverse themselves.

Though dated, this listing (http://www.wansdyke21.org.uk/wansdyke/wanart/grigg.htm) of dykes may be useful.

I was struck by the numbers and spread but also the degree of archaeological uncertainty about many e.g. on dating or structure.

Given the amount of effort in building these, one might reasonably suggest that they belong to periods of stability, rather than fluidity e.g. they would mark a frontier or boundary for a generation or more.  The idea that they are a solution of a time, rather than an integrated system, seems to fit. 

Thanks Justin  8)

Ah, but Viriconium   , Cirencester and Gloucester are all good potential. and are set well enough back to be strong against the dangerous conditions in the East Midlands . They also make sense of the Saxon combined  thrust that is defeated at Badon ( Baydon) . Cirencester, of course, was once capital of a Roman diocese ( and thus had imposing civic buildings and Roman walls and was a town too small for its circuit so had intra mural fields that would provide grazing. ) Viriconium  had the advantage of  substantial build in this period Of  course, we ought to be careful not to make up our minds which Arthurian capital we want to back as there is no conclusive evidence and its rather easy to  build a case out of 'likely' features of an Arthurian capital we might favour.
Oh and I agree York fits well, especially with the Battle list which favours Southern Scotland , but the battle list itself might be a Votadinian praise poem  that has been appropriated into the British chronicles. Thise British scribes and poets being as unscrupulous as any modern picking about tge wirks has f a twefth century novelist 😉

What we are assuming is that there was an arthur or at least an arthur in line with our 'expectations'. If we concentrate on the dykes and the potential polities and forget arthur for a minute we may getting a better view of things...

I agree with you Dave. the Dykes have been rather ignored by archaeology. I wonder if this s because dating is so difficult and , if course sequence is everything, thrre dies on a ridge going in one direction is possibly a very different story from three in the other direction.
I think Storry and tge other book on dykes  which I have do a good job of showing tgat we are generally not dealing with estate boundary markers or state frontiers, but with tactical military earthworks. However, we still have to vest guess at the precise function they represented when created.
They do, imo, give an indication that events were very fluid and often quite small scale. After all, how big was tge kingdom of Elmet?
Roy

I am at a disadvantage in not having read the book, so can't evaluate its claims directly.  But Roy's suggestion that many of these were tactical military earthworks does suggest a very different military set up than we usually think of for this period.  No more small mobile cavalry armies,  Instead large infantry forces prone to dig in.  It would be interesting to see parallels from the time to see the origins of this tactical entrenchment.  Did the Late Roman army do this?  Or was it a Germanic thing?  Or both?

I'm also not convinced that a lot of these weren't territorial boundaries, either manned or unmanned, that helped delineate agreed boundaries or claimed territory you would defend if crossed into.

One of Storr's assertions is that at least some of the dykes show a distinct resemblance (such as construction using straight lines) to sundry Roman limes to be found elsewhere in Europe.  Hence, they had to have been constructed by the 'Roman' inhabitants of Britain as opposed to Angles, Saxons or other invaders.

although we know that the Late Roman army was a conglomerate of different ethnic troops 'badged' together under the Roman Eagle. Engineering techniques can be learned and passed on to anyone especially if in, or in close proximity to, the state run military

Quote from: NickHarbud on December 29, 2019, 11:57:29 AM
.... and building dykes isn't like laying bricks.   8)

;D very true....

Here, for interest, is the section from Storr's book on the exactitude of the dykes' dimensions. These are for the Cambridge dykes. Later dykes were much more flexible in their measurements.

I've also included his diagram of the dykes sizes compared to a human figure.

(https://i.imgur.com/D9KreB0.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/JSFnPGi.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/gHo5Jiz.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/ec110sd.jpg)

Quote from: Holly on December 29, 2019, 11:42:39 AM
Engineering techniques can be learned and passed on to anyone especially if in, or in close proximity to, the state run military

However, having practised as a professional engineer for the last 40 years, I can assure you that the relevant techniques cannot be learned by simply standing in close proximity to another engineer.  According to the Engineering Council, they require a minimum 4 years study at university and a similar period of time must be spent working in an engineering environment before one is considered competent.

Therefore, whilst moving earth about requires no particular skills, the design of one's fortification is significantly more technical.  I mean, the same skills used for creating straight dykes are those used for constructing the pyramids, and how many Egyptians should one stand next to in order to master this engineering technique?

I think sticking to the dykes is the way forward here. 

Some of them could be territorial boundaries. If they are do the guard against casual lifting of livestock as well as proclaiming a border?  Or are they in place against an existential threat? Possibly the nature of the dyke depends on circumstances.

Also, the bigger British kingdoms were, in my opinion, comprised of smaller micro polities who would also delineate their boundaries.  I'd note here that many of the British towns under the later Empire fortified themselves with dykes.

It's easy to imagine polities constructing dykes to block the ready access points into their heartlands and defending the same.  Likewise I could see dykes being used aggressively to threaten and annex territory.

Can we lay Storr's data over where we think the kingdoms were and construct some sort of plausible narrative?  It might be worth taking a single kingdom and seeing what we get.

While not downplaying Nick's practical experience, we know that major earthwork building had been practiced in Britain since the Neolithic and would continue to be practiced in the Early Middle Ages.  It doesn't require the full battery of professionally trained Roman engineering.  The Cambridge dykes may be a special case in their precision and might, according to the dates given, even be Roman.  However, one alarm bell did ring reading that section of book.  I was taught archeology when Thom's "megalithic yard" was all the rage.  Pages of tables showing precise correlations in measurement which "proved" the existence of an engineer priesthood carrying physical bits of wood of the right length across Europe.  Later, better surveying and statistics showed really it was no more precise than pacing.   So, not saying he is wrong about Cambridge (he could well be right) but caution about saying that the norm was Roman trained military engineers laying these things out everywhere.

With regard to accuracy of digging, when it comes to widths, it's probably easier to be accurate with a spade than with a JCB  8)

With the spade you can just put your string down on the grass and you can be sure the digger will not go half a spade width over it, with a JCB because it's so easy to dig holes can grow  ;)

Quote from: Erpingham on December 29, 2019, 12:55:36 PM
we know that major earthwork building had been practiced in Britain since the Neolithic and would continue to be practiced in the Early Middle Ages.  It doesn't require the full battery of professionally trained Roman engineering. 

The key item in Storr's book, as highlighted by Justin's excerpts above, are that the Romans always tended to build their earthworks according to certain formulae, whereas others did not.  Rectilinear fortifications in Britain are unknown until the coming of the Romans.  Therefore, whilst one might argue that any fool could construct dykes in this manner, the only ones who methodically did so were Roman trained, who in the context of 5^th-7^th century Britain would have been the 'Roman' inhabitants, not Saxons, et al.

Incidentally, I completely disagree with anyone who underestimates the achievements of Roman engineering or the learning that went behind it.  Let us not forget that the European Renaissance was partly brought about by visitiors to Rome who realised that they could not construct many of the buildings whose ruins they could see before them.

Quote from: NickHarbud on December 29, 2019, 02:25:33 PM
Incidentally, I completely disagree with anyone who underestimates the achievements of Roman engineering or the learning that went behind it. 

I didn't mean to give the impression that I underestimated Roman engineering.  Water engineering, moving water over huge distances with precisely surveyed gradients, never ceases to amaze. 

I suggest that before we decided that the engineers were Roman or non Roman we would have to look at the works of those dykes of similar age in Europe and those tgat occur in known non Roman situations.  There are certain commonalities in such earthworks tgat are caused by tge materials...walls too steep fall in, too shallow and they offer weak protection.  If the dyke is tge result of removal of material that then forms  a ditch then there will be a relationship between the two. It may indeed be that all military engineering from the Elbe to the Rhine/Danube in the period from AD 0 to AD 900 is effectively Roman military engineering.  Whilst I wouldn't accuse the Germans of building stone fortifications or major bridges or suspended roads or basilicas or tempkes, dykes are a bit simpler..  If Germans serve in the Roman army they acquire the techniques of field fortifications. As we do not gave Roman engineering manuals we have to assume that the techniques are passed verbally and by practical experience. It is wrong to think of a Roman in the fifth century with a German workforce. The lead engineer was probably borne German, his gang leaders are Romano Germans  and his troops Germans who joined the Roman army or whose  fathers or grandfathers joined and who kept homes, even familues beyond the Rhine.
Roy

thanks Roy, that was the point I was trying to make (badly). I agree the dykes are formulaic (Roman) and merely suggest that since Germanics were part of the Roman military for 350 years by the time of the post Roman British period, that there is no reason to suppose that the engineers were not ethnically 'German'

When you stop and look at the various banks and dykes in the UK, according to the excavation report, Maiden Castle in Dorset had at least one of its banks faced with limestone
Maiden Castle in Cheshire "Radiocarbon dating indicates that the ramparts defending Maiden Castle were built in around 600 BC.[7][9] Built from earth and timber, the inner rampart was originally 20 ft (6.1 m) wide, with a revetment of dry stone walling behind the bank, and at least 10 ft (3.0 m) high. The outer bank was originally 25 ft (7.6 m) wide and about 10 ft (3.0 m) high. It was built from sand and had a dry stone facing at the front and no revetment behind. The outer bank was later enlarged: the outer face was extended 8 to 10 ft (2.4 to 3.0 m) away from the fort and the revetment moved. Its height was probably increased to 12 ft (3.7 m)." (from the wiki)

So the level of engineering necessary to build these post Roman dikes didn't rely on remembering Roman technology.

Indeed it might well be that the constructions of pre-Roman Britain were more complex and better engineered that post-Roman Britain
People might find
https://www.academia.edu/1891255/Grims_Ditch_Wansdyke_and_the_Ancient_Highways_of_England_linear_monuments_and_political_control

Interesting

One could mischievously learn from Storr's  calculations  that whoever designed the dykes used their feet to measure the lengths. What i did not see in his calculations is a consistent set of ratios. So for a dyke x feet high dig a ditch y feet wide and z feet deep  pile the spoil .
The correlation of dimensions with a Roman foot is unsurprising if a literal foot is the  unit of measurement.

regardless of whether certain dykes were built by Germanics or Britons it does tend to suggest areas or polities in existence throughout the Late and post Roman time period. I would really love to see further evidence from these dykes to establish more accurately the timeframe of building and use. One thing I did think that the book could have provided was an overall view of all the dykes in their entirety. Storr provides mapping for isolated areas but not an overall view of the SE which I think would have helped to visualise and discern any patterns better

The British civates arise out of tribal territories minus imperial confiscations and any land taken by the Roman army for military installations and their support.  We should be able to take one, say the Cantii, and look at Storr's dykes there.

I think the British polities were there in the Late Roman period as is evidenced by Marwanad Cunedda.

Yes. I think that would be doable Stephen. An enjoyable task if/when time is available  :-[

Just checking but does Storr say all the dykes were built by Roman-British?  Justin implies he believes the earliest were by Roman-trained engineers, presumably in the pay of Roman-British polities, but does he allow any to the Germanic incomers?

Quote from: Erpingham on December 30, 2019, 04:05:14 PM
Just checking but does Storr say all the dykes were built by Roman-British?  Justin implies he believes the earliest were by Roman-trained engineers, presumably in the pay of Roman-British polities, but does he allow any to the Germanic incomers?

According to Storr the earliest dykes were built by the Jutes in Kent to keep the Romano-British out (they face towards London), and they were built with the same technical precision as later dykes constructed by the Romano-British themselves. Which raises the question of who did the Jutes find/bribe/blackmail to oversee the construction of their dykes? There are dykes built by the Saxons and Northumbrians and used in a bite and hold strategy. If I get the time I'll draw up a map of England showing all the dykes, their facing and their precision of construction. If.

Yes, it's the time Dave.  I've a big, out of our period, research project ongoing.

Just as an aside if Koch is right about an early chronology for St. Patrick then we can read the letter to the soldiers of Coroticus in a new light.

Justin, I think that would be incredibly useful should you find the time.

Another thing, we might heed Gildas and his ongoing civil wars among the British and we can note inter Germanic fights.  Maybe some of our British dykes are intended to contain other Britons and some German ones other Germans.  That means Justin's proposed project would be even more useful in understanding the period.

Quote from: Justin Swanton on December 30, 2019, 04:15:00 PM
If I get the time I'll draw up a map of England showing all the dykes, their facing and their precision of construction. If.

Just to second Anton, that would be very useful

Quote from: Jim Webster on December 30, 2019, 09:26:04 PM

Quote from: Justin Swanton on December 30, 2019, 04:15:00 PM
If I get the time I'll draw up a map of England showing all the dykes, their facing and their precision of construction. If.

Just to second Anton, that would be very useful

thirded!!!

Might I provide one thought: if an ongoing trend of dyking off bits of country is interrupted by a general reconquest in which the Britons reclaim pretty much the entire island for, say, 30-40 years, how shall we know?

It's a good point Patrick.  I think we will just have to divine what we can against what we think we know.

I had a look at my copy of Storr last night.  Thought I'd look at the south coast stuff.  Five minutes in and Jim is telling us the word 'cam' means river when it actually means crooked.  His grasp of history and linguistics take him all over the place to no avail. But, the dykes seem solid enough and that makes this exercise worthwhile.

Might I suggest that a British  'reconquest' might depopulate some areas,  giving rise to the movement to the  Continent that I think Procopius refers to and leave other areas of German settlement untouched. Some of the Germans are foederati, perhaps garrisoning a town and it dependent area and thus persona grata with the Britons.  Many  of the groups , as suggested earlier are quite small and not them selves a threat   and will pay tribute, but it would be a major move to take down a series of dykes and physically incorporate them in a new state and possibly the settlement that ended the war left the defeated with autonomy? So perhaps we would not see any change to the pattern of dykes. The ' Arthurians '   may have won a victory, which lopped off  the heads of various small kingdoms but it might well not have been so absolute  as to roll back the boundaries of settlement, especially as the Britons had no structure to put in its place.

Quotebut it would be a major move to take down a series of dykes

It would be a major undertaking, whose value would be symbolic at best.  Obviously, many were not taken down as they still exist.  In the hypothetical situation described, one might imagine a "decommissioning" with the removal of anything of value which is easily accessed and the suspension of maintenance.  Any forces assigned to the dykes, if such there were, would be re-assigned and any service requirements on local communities would fall into abeyance.  It would be quite difficult to distinguish such a decommissioning from a natural process of decline, though, so I wouldn't expect to see much evidence for it.

Quote from: Erpingham on December 31, 2019, 01:46:02 PM

Quotebut it would be a major move to take down a series of dykes

It would be a major undertaking, whose value would be symbolic at best.  Obviously, many were not taken down as they still exist.  In the hypothetical situation described, one might imagine a "decommissioning" with the removal of anything of value which is easily accessed and the suspension of maintenance.  Any forces assigned to the dykes, if such there were, would be re-assigned and any service requirements on local communities would fall into abeyance.  It would be quite difficult to distinguish such a decommissioning from a natural process of decline, though, so I wouldn't expect to see much evidence for it.

If there was any sort of dry stone facing that might pretty soon get robbed. Even timber too old rotten to be reused would burn well enough when allowed to dry  8)

Quote from: Anton on December 31, 2019, 10:22:21 AM
Five minutes in and Jim is telling us the word 'cam' means river when it actually means crooked.

I wonder if the River Cam confused him (apparently there are three: one in Cambridge, one in Gloucestershire and one in Somerset).

Quote from: Erpingham on December 31, 2019, 01:46:02 PM

Quotebut it would be a major move to take down a series of dykes

It would be a major undertaking, whose value would be symbolic at best.  Obviously, many were not taken down as they still exist.  In the hypothetical situation described, one might imagine a "decommissioning" with the removal of anything of value which is easily accessed and the suspension of maintenance.  Any forces assigned to the dykes, if such there were, would be re-assigned and any service requirements on local communities would fall into abeyance.  It would be quite difficult to distinguish such a decommissioning from a natural process of decline, though, so I wouldn't expect to see much evidence for it.

Concur.  Dykes can probably tell us something useful about the 'before' and 'after' but not the 'during' as far as Arthur (or 'Arthur') is concerned.  We can hypothesise about roads being reinstated during his reign by having the relevant part of the dyke cut away (and rebuilt thereafter when the Saxons regained the upper hand) but unless excavators have noticed different soil patterns in the vicinity of the roads, hypothesising is all we can really do.

The thing with roads is that they soon disappear if not used. Lengths may stay, but landslips  and overgrowing  soon cover them There was a greenway near us that was cut iff and in two years it was unwalkable. I would conjecture that a road that has been cut by a dyke has lost its purpose of getting stuff from A to B as A and B are no longer in a conversation.  Of course, if there is a third or higher power than A and B that needs the road and can compel maintenance  that is a different matter, but is mostly what we do not have in the Vth century. He thing tgat keeps the local network going  is trade into jarket towns, one wonders whether British and Saxon markets overlapped or were distinct?

One thing that does get carried forward as a duty is bridge work.
Roy

one thing we need to be mindful of, and has been touched only in passing so far, is that we must not be linear (no pun intended) in our view of relationships between polities, be they Romano British or 'Saxon' etc. Up until around the middle of the 7th Century, there are shifting allegiances and alliances based not upon race per se but upon opportunity. Professor Koch, amongst others, is a great proponent of declassifying old held beliefs of (Romano) British versus Saxons especially in the time period we are interested in.   

Quote from: aligern on December 31, 2019, 07:29:37 PM
The thing with roads is that they soon disappear if not used. Lengths may stay, but landslips  and overgrowing  soon cover them There was a greenway near us that was cut off and in two years it was unwalkable. I would conjecture that a road that has been cut by a dyke has lost its purpose of getting stuff from A to B as A and B are no longer in a conversation.  Of course, if there is a third or higher power than A and B that needs the road and can compel maintenance  that is a different matter, but is mostly what we do not have in the Vth century. The thing that keeps the local network going  is trade into market towns, one wonders whether British and Saxon markets overlapped or were distinct?

Good observation: in Gaul of a couple of generations previously, we know from the letters of Sidonius Apollonius that roads were falling into disrepair because in one letter he states that a local potentate had ordered a road repaired so he could undertake a procession along it.  Britannia was probably in a very similar condition, with any remaining relics of Imperial administration after AD 410 or so spending what they had on troops rather than roads (since the Constantine era civil and military spending seem to have been mutually exclusive, and road maintenance appears to have counted as civil).  Tribal chieftains presumably had a more traditional approach to roads: if they had wanted a road somewhere, I am guessing they would have cut a path through a forest and laid the cut-down and trimmed trees as a 'corduroy road' - very traditionally Celtic.

QuoteOne thing that does get carried forward as a duty is bridge work.

And here, given the traditional strength and sturdiness of Roman bridges built with good stone and Roman cement, the local population is onto a winner. :)

Quote from: Holly on December 31, 2019, 07:54:45 PM
one thing we need to be mindful of, and has been touched only in passing so far, is that we must not be linear (no pun intended) in our view of relationships between polities, be they Romano British or 'Saxon' etc. Up until around the middle of the 7th Century, there are shifting allegiances and alliances based not upon race per se but upon opportunity.

Indeed: in the Arthur cycle, Vortigern begins the trend of inviting in the foreigner, and one suspects that many a desperate kinglet would have made the same devil's pact to avoid annihilation at the hands of a more powerful opponent, culminating in 'Mordred' as a classic illustration or archetype.  Arthur himself fought as many domestic as foreign foes, although as his successes multiplied the affiliations became more polarised, distinct and definite, with Britons increasingly following his banner and Saxons and their allies (e.g. 'King Lot') opposing.

I keep trying to see it like that Holly and for Mercia coexistence looks a good model. However, my reading of things in Bernicia is that the Angles arrive, set up at Bamburgh, are attacked by the North Britons in concert, that assault fails and then the Northumbrians take the Britons out one by one. this is despite the Angles falling out amongst themselves, coalescing , breaking up, fighting down South. In the longue duree the movement is to the North Britons being penned back and incorporated into an Anglian kingdom. In other areas of the country, the same applies, there is a period when the Germans  are  restricted ,then equal poayers , then it mainly goes all their way. The wonder is that the Britons do not seem able to destroy the small initial settlements. Perhaps the problem is in calling them 'the Britons' because they do not have the unity of interest or control that implies.
Plausible cases have been made that the two societies delivered different potential with the Britons only having comitatus based forces whereas the Germans can summon every free man . The laws iof Wessex could support this, with the Welsh being at a lower wergild because their initial status when under British rule had only been 'half free''?     Of course it might just be a matter of the systematic oppression if the conquered which forced them to accommodate   and Anglicise.
Roy

It may have been that the drift from Briton to Saxon happened lower down the pecking order. Looked at from the point of view of the subsistence peasant being a Saxon was a better bet than being a Briton. Yes you got called up occasionally, but you weren't stuck in the front of the shieldwall, and there was always the hope of loot. Stay as a Briton and the tax collectors would be round soon to extort supplies etc from you to support the Comitatus.
This process happened later in Asia Minor, when there are accounts of communities along the frontier drifting from being 'Byzantine' to being 'Turkish' because the tax burden was far lower and you were less likely to get raided.

So for a peasant to become 'Saxon' he doubtless merely had to give his nominal fealty to a different lord and use more Saxon loan words in his local dialect than Latin ones

Even in the north, there are potentially shifting alliances and not on purely racial lines. Again, Koch is in favour of treating Catraeth not as a battle between Saxons and Britons but between competing established polities (based on familial lines) who used Saxons and Britons and other racial groupings in the aforementioned battle

Although overall, as Roy observes, there is a discernible trend of Saxon expansion.  An analogy might be Norman marcher lords, often at odds with their king and each other, but whose primary focus was making headway against an often disunited collection of Welsh princes.

I would not overdo the 'mixing' bit: the Britons were (mainly) Christian, the Saxons pagan.  Both sides had slaves or thralls, which would be the default status of anyone changing cultures, usually involuntarily.  Languages were mutually incomprehensible unless the Saxons picked up Latin (which some of their chiefs could have been expected to do), and although one can reasonably surmise trade at the market level whenever peace and trust existed (but not otherwise), any mixing of cultures would essentially be only chieftain-deep.  The Saxons had come to conquer and settle, and conquer and settle they did until seemingly halted for a while by 'Arthur'.  Cross-cultural intrigues, yes, but I have difficulty seeing any real blending of cultures or any virtue in Koch's interpretation of Cattraeth.

yes, the North does see Anglian expansion from the mid to late 6th onwards and inexorably leads to the juggernaut of Northumbria in the 7th. I am merely proposing that the one dimensional view of 'us versus them' is an anachronism for that particular period. After all, 'non-native' people had been part of the Roman Empire in Britain for 400 years. The swirling multi-cultural, multi-faith and multi linguistic backdrop would not have disappeared overnight. I just think we need to look at the period without our modern filters and be open to things that may seem at odds with what we think we know

Is polytheism a multi faith background?

Patrick is right that the Saxons appear to be pagans worshipping the Germanic pantheon ( certainly at the top end) . The Mercians look to be the most resistant to Christianity and maybe that is an identity think lime the Vandals staying Arian as a distinguishing characteristic.   Perhaps in the more confused and patchwork  Mercian context it was more necessary for the Angles to self identify?
The religious divide is important, is it also matched by a separation of identifying gear such as brooches? do we have a Saxon world that trades with the near Continent and a British world that trades with the East Roman Empire and itself ?  I take Holly's point about alliances ( such as British contingents in Penda's army) but the longue duree theme s that Saxon advances are mostly permanent changes to a different culture.
Roy

I was thinking of paganism in general as there would have been many different forms of non-Christian religions in the period pre and post Roman control. However, that is but one part of the jigsaw of the period. Getting back to the dykes.....apart from Hadrian's Wall and possibly the Antonine Wall, do we have evidence of lots of similar structures in the North I wonder?

Koch does indeed give us examples of equitable co-existence in the Gododdin and in his treatment of the career of Penda.  In both those cases we are not in circumstances of Anglian dominance.

When the Angles or Saxons are securely dominant, we see the lack of equality located by Alex Woolf in his essay Apartheid and Economics.
Woolf shows the long- term effect of Ine's Law and similar statutes was to reduce the status of the native population to an unfree population supporting a Germanic over class. This was accomplished by differing levels of wergild. 

Therefore, it was not possible for a British peasant to learn a bit of German and declare himself a Saxon or an Angle because to do so would deprive the actual Saxons or Angles of material benefit.  Doing so would break both the letter and spirit of the laws and would not be permitted by the kings who promulgated them.  Equally a subject British nobleman could not expect his family to maintain its status nor could he proclaim himself an Angle or whatever to preserve it.

Quote from: Anton on January 02, 2020, 01:33:27 PM
Koch does indeed give us examples of equitable co-existence in the Gododdin and in his treatment of the career of Penda.  In both those cases we are not in circumstances of Anglian dominance.

When the Angles or Saxons are securely dominant, we see the lack of equality located by Alex Woolf in his essay Apartheid and Economics.
Woolf shows the long- term effect of Ine's Law and similar statutes was to reduce the status of the native population to an unfree population supporting a Germanic over class. This was accomplished by differing levels of wergild. 

Therefore, it was not possible for a British peasant to learn a bit of German and declare himself a Saxon or an Angle because to do so would deprive the actual Saxons or Angles of material benefit.  Doing so would break both the letter and spirit of the laws and would not be permitted by the kings who promulgated them.  Equally a subject British nobleman could not expect his family to maintain its status nor could he proclaim himself an Angle or whatever to preserve it.

The problem with Ine's law is that it dates from about 694AD
The laws are from a more settled time when boundaries had hardened.

When we look at the period from 400 to 500AD there are several things we ought to note
Firstly at this point how 'Christian' were the Britons anyway? There appears to be a strong school of thought that it hadn't spread much among the rural peasantry (the term pagan comes from pagensis, the country people)
Certainly in Gaul there was a lot of missionary activity in this century as urban based Christianity tried to reach out into the countryside

Secondly we have to ask how 'free' the native peasantry was anyway. The colonoi were certainly not free to just up sticks and get a better life, or a more advantageous tenancy.

Thirdly how much Latin did the peasantry speak anyway?

So you can legitimately postulate a semi-free peasantry who had a traditional folk religion and spoke a local dialect with some latin loan words
If the Saxons appear, they can happily remain a semi-free peasantry with their traditional folk religion and add a few German loan words to the dialect.
Indeed it would be easy enough to add Wotan into the folk religion as just another god, whilst the Saxons, doubtless like the Romans before them, would happily accept the local spirits of place because you never want to upset them.
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

good points Jim. I agree re the pagan/Christian conundrum for Post Roman Britain. We could even look at the lowland/highland split in addition too which effectively flipped on its head with the extreme West becoming highly (celtic) Christianised in this period

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 02, 2020, 07:08:02 PM
The problem with Ine's law is that it dates from about 694AD
The laws are from a more settled time when boundaries had hardened.

Valid point, Jim, though I am wondering whether Ine's Law was a codification of existing practice.

QuoteWhen we look at the period from 400 to 500AD there are several things we ought to note
Firstly at this point how 'Christian' were the Britons anyway? There appears to be a strong school of thought that it hadn't spread much among the rural peasantry (the term pagan comes from pagensis, the country people)
Certainly in Gaul there was a lot of missionary activity in this century as urban based Christianity tried to reach out into the countryside

There is also the question of how much the countryside 'mattered' with regard to religious orientation: Britain was Christian enough to worry about the Pelagian doctrine or heresy and was apparently riddled with 'living saints' who were as Christian as they were antisocial, which suggests a wide base of tolerance and support.  Otherwise I would not be at all surprised to learn that many country folk still adhered to the old ways in at least some aspects (country folk often do so).  Not sure this would in any way endear them to the Saxons, though.

QuoteSecondly we have to ask how 'free' the native peasantry was anyway. The colonoi were certainly not free to just up sticks and get a better life, or a more advantageous tenancy.

This would seem to come down to: who owned the land, the sheep and the cattle?  Some coloni might argue that servitude to a barbarian was little different to servitude to the Empire's tax gatherers; do we know how much of Imperial administration (and in particular Imperial taxation) had survived by this point?  Gildas seems to suggest that it was all local cities and tribes under local chieftains, but we think he was writing post-'Arthur'.

QuoteSo you can legitimately postulate a semi-free peasantry who had a traditional folk religion and spoke a local dialect with some latin loan words
If the Saxons appear, they can happily remain a semi-free peasantry with their traditional folk religion and add a few German loan words to the dialect.

I suppose the real question is whether the traditionally land- and pillage- addicted Saxons would give them the chance in the first place.  Given that the peasantry is part of a social organisation rather than an independent transferrable asset and that the Saxons tended to bring their own social organisation to occasionally ally with and more often beat up one of the British social organisations, I suspect the process of adaptation would take place when the survivors were gathered together by their new masters.

Would a semi-(or even predominantly-)pagan peasant populace actually add Wotan to their pantheon?  Conquerors tended to be jealous of their gods, and conquest tended to be taken as a sign that the conqueror's deities were superior, so the victors might not be keen to let the vanquished worship the deity or deities of the conquerors.  As far as I know, the only people who made a habit of acquiring other people's gods were the Romans, who used a ceremony called the evocatio to promise the said deities that the Romans would for the future worship them better then their current adherents, so could the said gods please withdraw their support for the said adherents while the Romans attacked and conquered the latter?  That said, if the Saxons had a deity who could make beans and corn grow and keep sheep and cattle disease-free, I can see possibilities.

Going off on a different and only distantly related tack, Gododdin strikes me as an attempt by someone to recreate the doings of 'Arthur' without understanding the substance, perhaps because he had received his account via bards.  Assembling 300 picked warriors from all over the country is very 'round table'-ish, but hosting and feasting them for a year with no mention of training and tactics suggests a very bards'-eye view of Camelot.  And missing out on the essential step of gathering the soldiery of the country to accompany the 300 into battle also indicates a narrowly Bardic perspective of Arthurian achievement, which these songsters presumably represented as being down to Arthur's comites alone rather than an army (cf. some mediaeval accounts where battles are apparently won by a handful of knights but reading between the lines indicates accompaniment by a strong force of social inferiors unmentioned in the text).  The moral would seem to be: learn generalship from generals, not from bards. ;)

Land is worthless without people to cultivate it.
When a Saxon chieftain and his followers overran another village or two, the chieftain isn't going to turn to the followers who want rewarding and say, "Here, we'll butcher the peasants and you can grovel in the mud as a subsistence farmer." He's not going to improve their lot by doing that.
Yes, at certain times of the year, even as the owner/tenant of the farm they would have to roll up their sleeves and work. We can see this in Norse Sagas. But the newly enriched warrior wants people on site to do the bulk of the work, and the chieftain doesn't want to lose a warrior to a lifetime in peasant agriculture.
Peasantry are a transferable asset, they come with the land. You want them. In fact nobody in the world knows the problems and potential of your new land than the peasantry who are currently tilling it for whoever owned it last

Found this on a BBC website. "Dr Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany sequenced genomes of human remains from Hinxton, Saffron Walden, Linton and Oakington - all of which are near Cambridge.

The burials fall into three different age categories: Iron Age, early Anglo-Saxon and Middle Anglo-Saxon.

Contrary to narratives suggesting large-scale displacement of the Britons by Anglo-Saxon invaders, the researchers found evidence of intermarriage in the earliest phase of settlement."


As for codification of law. Given that these laws weren't written down how old were they and how much had existing practice evolved over eight or nine generations?
But actually it doesn't really matter, because for the unfree, changing master can be no big deal of you never see them.
With regard to Britain was Christian enough to worry about the Pelagian doctrine, that could merely be the surviving cities. As for anti-social living saints, they could have been limited to the west, where there was more room to be an anti-social hermit. But the fact remains, there are very few signs of Christianity to be discovered, and even if the peasantry were Christian, by definition it didn't strike deep roots because they largely drifted back into paganism in time to be reconverted.

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 02, 2020, 07:08:02 PM
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50979485).   :o

QuoteValid point, Jim, though I am wondering whether Ine's Law was a codification of existing practice.

Even so, when did the existing practice arise?  It is easy enough to suggest there is a "storming and norming" phase in the 5th century where things Germanic sphere are more fluid and allegiances change with regard to utility rather than ethnicity before the rather more ethnic comes to dominate later, as polities firm up. 

On the Gododdin, it needs to be taken as what it is - an epic poem reflecting what its listeners saw as noble virtues.  That's not to say it doesn't have value in reconstructing warfare of the Early Medieval Britain but expecting it to detail weapons practice or even the raising of other , non-heroic, forces might be a stretch. 

Whilst we really do not know the actuality of religious observance  among the Anglo Saxon peasantry it has plausibly been suggested that the invaders had a two tier religion with the nobility following the sky gods and the mass following more bucolic deities . There may well have been a very permeable barrier rather than two systems.  What does seem apparent is that, for the Britons , religion was a denominator, they made little effort to convert the Saxons . This  mirrors the way that Vandals and Visigoths maintained their Arian creed as a way of protecting identity.  Certainly in the Anglo Saxon areas of England there was considerable, indeed murderous resistance to conversion, perhaps because it represented a dilution of the priestly power of the nobility by establishing a separate priesthood that depended upon and reinforced the power of the kings.  Of course traditionalists may have resisted because they thought that the foreign religion would bring bad luck in war ...it had not exactly delivered victory to the Britons.
Roy

Yes, I would say Ine's Law represents the end of a process.  Before its promulgation things had presumably been different and in flux.  It was a clever bit of legislation for it brought the British into the king's peace and allows them to live unmolested if second class lives.  It also set up a continuing system of rewards for the king's key German followers. Very good for group cohesion and eventually any wealth the king's British subjects had was transferred to his German subjects.

Gododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

Marwanad Cunedda for example has no Christian references at all. Its dated to 383 AD and Cunedda and his court seem to be pagans.  Maybe the men of the civates they fought alongside were pagan too. 

The big Christian pushes for conversion seem to have come with the ultra- orthodox Flavius Magnus Maximus Augustus- Macsen Wledig who ruled the western empire between 383 and 388 AD and St Martin who died in 397 AD.  Dark sees the evangelising Martinians as revolutionary.  Also, if Koch is right in suggesting an early chronology for St Patrick then the conversion had included the British polities beyond the Wall.  We have two arms to the conversion the usual top down from the Emperor and the bottom up from St. Martin.  I'd say Britannia was as Christian as Macsen and St Martin could make it.

QuoteGododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

No argument with that but it remains that they are not military histories - they express things differently to, say, a prose history or a legal text. 

Quote from: Erpingham on January 03, 2020, 12:14:09 PM

QuoteGododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

No argument with that but it remains that they are not military histories - they express things differently to, say, a prose history or a legal text.

true, however we have precious little military histories for the period, in fact very little histories at all

Quote from: NickHarbud on January 03, 2020, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 02, 2020, 07:08:02 PM
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50979485).   :o

but they were 'lucky' coins!

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 03, 2020, 03:44:48 PM

Quote from: NickHarbud on January 03, 2020, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 02, 2020, 07:08:02 PM
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50979485).   :o

but they were 'lucky' coins!

Indeed.  I'm not sure I would have spotted a coin the size of a 2p by the engine - lucky somebody did.

Quote from: Erpingham on January 03, 2020, 03:55:42 PM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 03, 2020, 03:44:48 PM

Quote from: NickHarbud on January 03, 2020, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 02, 2020, 07:08:02 PM
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50979485).   :o

but they were 'lucky' coins!

Indeed.  I'm not sure I would have spotted a coin the size of a 2p by the engine - lucky somebody did.

Otherwise it would have been a definite case of Foreign Object Damage.  I assume - drifting off topic for a moment - that we all have some idea of how turbine engines work and why one does not let any sort of loose objects near them.  Our Chinese traveller evidently had no such idea.  He is a good illustration of the basic fact that what is not taught is not known, and I see some of this in the Gododdin, even allowing for the fact that it is a tale told by a bard, full of sound and fury, as opposed to a 'history'.  Taking the tale at face value is quite enough to explain the defeat, if what was described was indeed what was done.  Bringing together 300 picked warriors from all over and royally feasting them looks to me very like someone going through the motions of trying to build a 'round table' equivalent without really understanding what it takes to win a war.

I think y Gododdin is a bardic description of a historic battle and not a, albeit distorted, reflection of what actually happened. The Men of The North were a martial lot and would have known how to fight. The point about y Gododdin is it's a praise poem in a society where tales and stories about war leaders needed to be embellished and given lots of artistic licence

https://www.academia.edu/39676232/The_Sources_and_Contributors_of_the_Northern_Memorandum_and_its_Heirs?auto=download

worth a read.....not dyke related but Arthurian nonetheless

Well worth a read thanks Dave.  It's certainly one to save and come back to more than once.

I was struck by this.

"Chapters 51-5 are about Patrick.  His presence is unexpected as this figure was not considered so much a British saint as an Irish one.  There is no obvious political or religious reason why Patrick is given so much importance."

I've mentioned before that Koch suggests an early chronology for Patrick.  He also thinks Patrick was one and the same as the Patrick who was Macsen's imperial fiscus.  As usual he makes a good case and if he's correct it might explain the above.  It would strengthen the case for him being from Ravenglass too- important local boy in the Northern Memorandum.

Quote from: Holly on January 03, 2020, 07:53:12 PM
The Men of The North were a martial lot and would have known how to fight.

That is precisely my point: they would have known how to fight, indeed appear to have been selected on that very basis.  But the impression I gain is that neither they nor their leader knew how to make war effectively.  Anyone who does not know the difference is destined to lose heroically.

QuoteThe point about y Gododdin is it's a praise poem in a society where tales and stories about war leaders needed to be embellished and given lots of artistic licence

Be that as it may (and I shall not ask for specific examples of artistic licence), they still have to be based on a kernel of factual activity, and had an actual army been involved along with the '300' one would have expected the bards to sing its praises quantitatively, qualitatively or both.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on January 04, 2020, 09:31:30 AM

Quote from: Holly on January 03, 2020, 07:53:12 PM
The Men of The North were a martial lot and would have known how to fight.

That is precisely my point: they would have known how to fight, indeed appear to have been selected on that very basis.  But the impression I gain is that neither they nor their leader knew how to make war effectively.  Anyone who does not know the difference is destined to lose heroically.

They probably did know how to make war effectively, 'within the constraints of their culture' which is pretty much all any of us do.

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 04, 2020, 10:15:50 AM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on January 04, 2020, 09:31:30 AM

Quote from: Holly on January 03, 2020, 07:53:12 PM
The Men of The North were a martial lot and would have known how to fight.

That is precisely my point: they would have known how to fight, indeed appear to have been selected on that very basis.  But the impression I gain is that neither they nor their leader knew how to make war effectively.  Anyone who does not know the difference is destined to lose heroically.

They probably did know how to make war effectively, 'within the constraints of their culture' which is pretty much all any of us do.

A sound point.  Just as the form of the record reflects how their culture understood war, they will will have had a cultural model of effective war making.  This may have revolved around assembling elite warrior households and launching them against one another, rather than mass mobilisation.  What happens when you launch a household after a long campaign of recruitment against its target?  Your opponent knows you are coming and has had time to prepare a defence (although I don't think the Gododdin bothers much with what the enemy is doing - it doesn't even say who they are).

The Bards concentrated on the deeds of the aristocracy. The aristocracy provide for the Bards. We know Bards were regulated by a Bardic Order. Cunedda's nameless Bard mentions it.  It was a transactional relationship but in essence the poems had to truthful.  Most of the audience would have either witnessed the events described or known people who had.

Warriors who were not aristo's might get an occasional mention on mass the "men of Bryneich" in Marwanad Cunedda or the "innumerable spears"in Cynan for example. 

Mostly though we can infer nothing from the absence of mention of the lower ranks from the surviving poems.  The focus was always on the aristocracy. 

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 04, 2020, 10:15:50 AM
They probably did know how to make war effectively, 'within the constraints of their culture' which is pretty much all any of us do.

Entirely agree, Jim, the question being whether the constraints of their culture let them appreciate what it took to beat the enemy as opposed to just fighting him.

Quote from: Anton on January 04, 2020, 11:16:07 AM
Warriors who were not aristo's might get an occasional mention on mass the "men of Bryneich" in Marwanad Cunedda or the "innumerable spears"in Cynan for example. 

One would hope the bards remembered to make mention where relevant, although your next comment leaves little hope of this.

QuoteMostly though we can infer nothing from the absence of mention of the lower ranks from the surviving poems.  The focus was always on the aristocracy. 

And what yours truly is wondering is how far this was a two-way process, witrh the aristocracy perhaps being led by this bardic emphasis to disregard the lower orders as being inconsequential in the making of war.

Anyway, I have aired my thought about the Gododdin in case it is of interest to anyone; I cannot prove anything in connection with it, so we can all draw such conclusions as we see fit.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on January 04, 2020, 08:28:05 PM

And what yours truly is wondering is how far this was a two-way process, witrh the aristocracy perhaps being led by this bardic emphasis to disregard the lower orders as being inconsequential in the making of war.

This does happen, but normally it needs a period of relative peace, or a few desultory wars against nominal opposition. There's nothing like having the man fighting next to you dragged off his horse and butchered by the lower orders to remind you that they can be effective.
If the 300 had been the sort of nobility who had gathered more for the hunting than war, I could see it being an issue, but all 300 were men who had current experience and much of it against Saxons

Quote from: Anton on January 04, 2020, 09:05:29 AM
Well worth a read thanks Dave.  It's certainly one to save and come back to more than once.

I was struck by this.

"Chapters 51-5 are about Patrick.  His presence is unexpected as this figure was not considered so much a British saint as an Irish one.  There is no obvious political or religious reason why Patrick is given so much importance."

I've mentioned before that Koch suggests an early chronology for Patrick.  He also thinks Patrick was one and the same as the Patrick who was Macsen's imperial fiscus.  As usual he makes a good case and if he's correct it might explain the above.  It would strengthen the case for him being from Ravenglass too- important local boy in the Northern Memorandum.

Yes and the earlier chronology for Patrick would make a lot of sense and 'fits' quite nicely

One would hope the bards remembered to make mention where relevant, although your next comment leaves little hope of this.

QuoteMostly though we can infer nothing from the absence of mention of the lower ranks from the surviving poems.  The focus was always on the aristocracy. 

And what yours truly is wondering is how far this was a two-way process, witrh the aristocracy perhaps being led by this bardic emphasis to disregard the lower orders as being inconsequential in the making of war.

Anyway, I have aired my thought about the Gododdin in case it is of interest to anyone; I cannot prove anything in connection with it, so we can all draw such conclusions as we see fit.
[/quote]

There is no evidence that the aristocratic warriors or any of the bards thought non noble free men inconsequential in making war.  In the Gododdin the political unit is expressly the tribe and every free man was a member of it. Free status brought military obligations and rights.   In Cunedda the free men of Bryneich are expected to fight alongside aristocratic Cuneddda.  Both Bryneich and Gododdin belonged to the same North British cultural system and shared the same social hierarchy. 

Cunedda was not the most important aristocrat in Bryneich but he had his own court and retinue.  When he was, unexpectedly it seems, killed in a skirmish his bard celebrated his life and mourned his death.  Then, he set out the case for the continuance of the court and the retinue and his own position as bard. In that sense the marwanad was also an appeal to a higher power that could grant continuity.  I think it's a good indication of the bardic perspective.

If we are not careful, we will disappear into another generic Arthurian discussion.  Going from what has been reported, Storr says his original dyke builders with their Roman trained engineers operated in the Roman lowland zone.  His views of dykes in Essex, Cambridgeshire and Kent have been reported.  Even if we assume the society depicted in the Gododdin existed in the same period, our evidence is of the North British, on the fringes of Roman rule.  Can we assume a similar model in the post-Roman zone, with its civitates and their Roman-titled oligarchs? 

Quote from: Erpingham on January 05, 2020, 02:54:35 PM
If we are not careful, we will disappear into another generic Arthurian discussion.  Going from what has been reported, Storr says his original dyke builders with their Roman trained engineers operated in the Roman lowland zone.  His views of dykes in Essex, Cambridgeshire and Kent have been reported.  Even if we assume the society depicted in the Gododdin existed in the same period, our evidence is of the North British, on the fringes of Roman rule.  Can we assume a similar model in the post-Roman zone, with its civitates and their Roman-titled oligarchs?

The trouble is that the 'North British' could be seen as dwellers in what was the 'military zone', the area where there was most likely to be Roman units with engineering capability

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 05, 2020, 03:48:42 PM

The trouble is that the 'North British' could be seen as dwellers in what was the 'military zone', the area where there was most likely to be Roman units with engineering capability

But how would we see them having hegemony in what will become Cambridgeshire, Essex and Kent? 

There is a suggestion (and I cant for the life of me remember where the reference is from!) that Britannia was partially 'recovered' in around 417AD so if this was the case presumably some form of field army would have been present and limitanei of the coastal regions (re)organised...so maybe engineering experience around then.

Quote from: Holly on January 05, 2020, 06:49:49 PM
There is a suggestion (and I cant for the life of me remember where the reference is from!) that Britannia was partially 'recovered' in around 417AD

Based at least in part on the existence of a British field army in the Notitia, updated up to c.425 - see here (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=umTXAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=roman+reoccupation+britain+417&source=bl&ots=XDjr9DI4eE&sig=ACfU3U3lIw1IMoHJfDMDDEsWNI2XGUQLQg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5nMn1mu3mAhXHgVwKHfgcDEAQ6AEwC3oECA0QAQ#v=onepage&q=roman%20reoccupation%20britain%20417&f=false) for an unconvinced assessment.

Possibly based on this Britannia article from the 1970s.

Quote from: Erpingham on January 05, 2020, 04:33:03 PM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 05, 2020, 03:48:42 PM

The trouble is that the 'North British' could be seen as dwellers in what was the 'military zone', the area where there was most likely to be Roman units with engineering capability

But how would we see them having hegemony in what will become Cambridgeshire, Essex and Kent?

what I was driving at was that the capability to do engineering of that sort doubtless existed in the north, the fact we don't seem to have vast numbers of dikes may be because of natural geography providing plenty of boundary features anyway

Regarding the Notitia, assuming there was a British field army in the 420s, is there strong reason to assume it was necessarily in Britain? 200 years later, the armies of Thrace and the East kept their names when they were relocated to Asia Minor.

Quote from: Holly on January 05, 2020, 06:49:49 PM
There is a suggestion (and I cant for the life of me remember where the reference is from!) that Britannia was partially 'recovered' in around 417AD so if this was the case presumably some form of field army would have been present and limitanei of the coastal regions (re)organised...so maybe engineering experience around then.

Storr's assessment is that Britain officially remained part of the Roman Empire until about the middle of the 5th century (hence the reason the Britons would appeal to Aegidius for military help). There was no Roman abandonment of the island in the early 5th century, just - at the most - an affirmation by the Emperor that no additional units could be spared from the army on the continent to help restore order in Britain, as had been done by Theodosius in the previous century.

Thanks Justin.  So, the Gododdin as a military model either reflects practice beyond the Roman zone or later practice?  The dykes were built by regular troops (presumably limitanei?).   

Quote from: Erpingham on January 06, 2020, 09:35:05 AM
Thanks Justin.  So, the Gododdin as a military model either reflects practice beyond the Roman zone or later practice?  The dykes were built by regular troops (presumably limitanei?).

As far as I know the Gododdin reflects later practice. It corresponds to what was happening on Hadrian's wall, where a barn was converted into a mead hall for the chief (former unit commander) and his men. That was at Housteads I think.

The dykes: all Storr affirms is that the construction of the earlier ones was overseen by Roman-trained engineers, of which you wouldn't need many per dyke (just one actually). Their actual construction wouldn't need skilled labour. The dykes in Kent - clearly constructed by Jutes as they face London - is evidence that those engineers did not necessarily work exclusively for the Romano-british regular army units, though the facing of the later dykes would suggest that they generally did. Dykes after, I think, the late 6th century show no signs of precision engineering.

There are two schools of thought here. One is that Roman units continue on in place after the imperial supply system , collection of taxes, purchase of food, transport  to military sites coloapses. In this vision local comnanders keep their units together and overawe or tax in kind enough supplies to feed thenmen and tgeir families.
In the other scenario, once the pay and food stop the army units very rapidly decay...like in weeks and the troops are demobilised because very few can be fed. That leaves room for commanders to become a somebody in the new world , but a somebody with  a bodyguard of 20-50 toughs, able to dominate a local city and its territories, not to keep together a unit if say 3-400 men.
In the latter scenario the units that can keep in being are  the limitanei and the foederati such as the Franks in Northern Gaul  or the Saxon settlements in Aremorica that respond to Aetius' call  because they are already settled in a direct relationship between food and military service.

With reference to the good point made about the continuance in name of Byzantine armies withdrawn to Asia Minor, it is significant that the troops are rapudly given a relationship with the land . Its the problem of armies once the link to tax and spend is broken...if you cannot feed the soldiers they are gone...probably in a week once stores run out. I suggest that this is what happened in Britain and that there was a rapid  degeneration from formed military units located strategically, but not near food, to small  groups of paramilitaries forjed  around large landowners and located on or near productive estates.
Roy

Quote from: nikgaukroger on January 05, 2020, 08:13:58 PM
Possibly based on this Britannia article from the 1970s.

Though wikipedia notes earlier dissenters

"Certain scholars such as J. B. Bury ("The Notitia Dignitatum" 1920) and German historian Ralf Scharf, disagreed entirely with the standard chronology. They argued that the evidence in fact supports later Roman involvement in Britain, post 410. "

Quote from: Erpingham on January 06, 2020, 10:29:05 AM

Quote from: nikgaukroger on January 05, 2020, 08:13:58 PM
Possibly based on this Britannia article from the 1970s.

Though wikipedia notes earlier dissenters

"Certain scholars such as J. B. Bury ("The Notitia Dignitatum" 1920) and German historian Ralf Scharf, disagreed entirely with the standard chronology. They argued that the evidence in fact supports later Roman involvement in Britain, post 410. "

Personally I'd not put much weight on what was argued for/suggested a century ago. So much has moved on with archeology (not least in the amount of evidence available) and the understanding and interpreting of sources and finds since then - such as in the area of identity and how it is expressed.

QuotePersonally I'd not put much weight on what was argued for/suggested a century ago.

I'm not - just tracing the longevity of the idea.

The fellow at Housesteads was Brigomaglos.  He seems to have been a Brigantian/Bryneich man.  The name could be read as 'great among the Brigantes' or 'servant of the Brigantes'.  The latter would be serving in a high status position. 


I've always thought Brigomaglos would have been doing on what ever scale what Cunedda did.  Cunedda we should note seems to have been based well south of the Wall.

My own impression is that Britain remained technically part of the Empire for half, or even most, of the 5th century, but was in effect a self-governing diocese, in the same way Egypt remained technically part of the 19th century Ottoman Empire but was in fact autonomous. In time of dire need the autonomous province could call on the central imperial authority for help, but didn't have to give much in return.

I've already aired my view that the Roman army had a remarkable ability to survive independently of the political system it originally upheld, and in fact Roman military units existed in Gaul right up the the middle of the 6th century. I would hypothesize that the same thing took place in Britain, where the army seems to have had a certain autonomy from the shifting political landscape - Arthur makes perfect sense as a Roman military commander who could to a certain extent operate above the political rivalries around him. This may have come about from the fact that the Roman army was not politically subordinate to the Roman state, but only to the general who sat on the throne or who had rebelled against it.

Quote from: Justin Swanton on January 06, 2020, 11:16:11 AM
My own impression is that Britain remained technically part of the Empire for half, or even most, of the 5th century, but was in effect a self-governing diocese, in the same way Egypt remained technically part of the 19th century Ottoman Empire but was in fact autonomous. In time of dire need the autonomous province could call on the central imperial authority for help, but didn't have to give much in return.

I've already aired my view that the Roman army had a remarkable ability to survive independently of the political system it originally upheld, and in fact Roman military units existed in Gaul right up the the middle of the 6th century. I would hypothesize that the same thing took place in Britain, where the army seems to have had a certain autonomy from the shifting political landscape - Arthur makes perfect sense as a Roman military commander who could to a certain extent operate above the political rivalries around him. This may have come about from the fact that the Roman army was not politically subordinate to the Roman state, but only to the general who sat on the throne or who had rebelled against it.

I'm in agreement Justin. There is some evidence for continuity at military sites at the Wall. Also if we extend the foederati reasoning, there is nothing to suppose that units based along these lines continued especially if they were in effect 'billeted' on or around major (SE) civitas capitals and/or agricultural bread baskets (literally!). This has been explored and proposed by several researchers/authors

Though we are again drifting from dykes, I think there are a number of questions bubbling up for me.

I am aware of Justin's earlier stated belief that regular Roman army units of essentially the same effectiveness persisted in Gaul long after the Roman presence.  Would the same be believed to apply in Britain?  Or would we be looking , as Roy suggests, of "legacy" units, diminished in size and supported on a subsistence basis by the civitates?  We certainly know archaeologically that their weren't massive amounts of coin available.  Where would these units be based?  In the towns?

Regarding Hadrian's Wall, we do have to think about what is going on there.  We do have signs of continuity, albeit it on a reduced scale.  But are they signs of a regular army presence or warlords descended from units which were essentially lost to the Empire in the late 4th century? 

We are drifting away from dykes but none of us seem to have anything more to say about them at the moment.

I find the Wall is interesting.  If in Cunedda's time he was hosting with the men of Bryneich was that just who defended his locality?  Were there still Roman regulars north and south of him?  Or had the defence already formally passed to what the Welsh later called the Men of the North?  Are the early Men of the North foederati?  If so who made the foedus?

If we consider an early Patrick then his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus seems to indicate that he sees them as part of the Roman world and expects that they should respond accordingly to his Roman Christian message. Coroticus was based well north of the Wall.

There was a powerful co-ordinating force in the North that held Cunedda accountable and it seems to have survived the break with Rome for sometime. 

Quote from: Erpingham on January 06, 2020, 12:03:10 PM
I am aware of Justin's earlier stated belief that regular Roman army units of essentially the same effectiveness persisted in Gaul long after the Roman presence.  Would the same be believed to apply in Britain?  Or would we be looking , as Roy suggests, of "legacy" units, diminished in size and supported on a subsistence basis by the civitates?  We certainly know archaeologically that their weren't massive amounts of coin available.  Where would these units be based?  In the towns?

I think we need to take into account the implication of trained military engineers for much of the 6th century.* A milieu where engineering skills are being passed on from one generation to the next argues a professional military structure and not some post-Roman tribal warlord with a retinue of a couple dozen warriors.

Roy brought up the economics of supporting a military unit, but how much land do you need to support 300 men and/or their horses? A man needs about two acres (to be generous) of land to feed him adequately. So 300 men need 600 acres. Add 4 people per soldier to the mix: each man's wife and 3 children average, and then tack a few hundred servants to work the land and you get something like 2000 people in total. That's 4000 acres to feed everybody, or an area of land measuring 400 x 400 metres.

Horses: the sites I've seen recommend 1 1/2 acres - 2 acres per horse. Let's make that 4 acres. So 500 horses (300 mounts plus extra animals for breeding, replacement of sick mounts, etc.) needs 2000 acres. That's an additional piece of land measuring 300 x 300 metres. The local military unit, even if it has horses, doesn't need a lot of land or big infrastructure to support itself. Everything necessary can be within 500 metres of its fort.


*this is the part where I stick to the topic.

There is no reason not to suppose your line of thinking Stephen...

It is loosely dyke related but my 2 penneth worth suggests the following:

369AD - Barbarian conspiracy and Theodosius recovers/creates province of Valentia (between the walls of Antoninus and Hadrian)

382/3AD Magnus Maximus (Macsen Wledig) (re)organises the British provinces possibly recinding control of Valentia to 'Men of the North' = effectively allied/Romanised tribes whilst on his continental expedition. He effectively 'retreats' Roman control to Hadrian's Wall and uses a mixture of the above with strategically placed (newly/extra introduced) Foederati (Germanics and Irish warriors) in place of 'Roman' regulars. He does the same in the West/Wales and in the East/South (mainly Germanics). I am also suggesting there were standard Roman units probably making up a mobile field army and so probably mainly cavalry.

407AD - Constantine does the same as the above but reduces the regular contingent and possibly adds to the Foederati and/or 'promotes' some of the longer term 'Britonised' existing Foederati to regular troops.

410AD - possible loss of the Diocese of Britain due to breakdown of the government. Foederati continue to patrol sectors assigned. Any regulars continue although possibly 'degrade' in effectiveness due to gradual loss of centrally controlled infrastructure. Some civitates start to 'go native' eg North of the Wall and possibly just below the Wall, Western seaboard and SW Britain so gives rise to local magnates and tribal leaders assuming control rather than centrally lead. Coins still in circulation but reliance on monetary economy shrinking

Circa 420AD +/- a few years, possible partial recovery of Britannia by centrally led 'Roman' administration and Field army, concentrating on the more civilised areas of central and SE. Tribal or Foederati leaders made 'officials' of Roman administration on the Fringes ie carry on chaps you're doing a fine job etc. Britain reorganised around Civitates since monetary and central control is effectively impossible at this time

430AD-450AD - possible permanent removal/loss or Roman Regulars and Civitates become self sufficient. Loose control of Central/South and SE by a Roman appointed/approved leader or Vicarius in the mould of a Vortigern type person. Possibly still other Roman appointed senior figures are around eg Comes/Dux Britannium and Comes Litoris Saxonici. Disagreements arise between these leaders leading to Civil War in that area. Rise of the 'first' Arthur type person to lead the fight possibly, Ambrosius Aurelianus using mainly 'local' troops versus Vortigern/Vortimer using mainly recently recruited Foederati. 4 battles major battles including Wallop etc. Leads to restoration of nominally (Post)Roman control of SE and re-distribution/dispersal of Foederati to effect defence but reduce capacity for trouble. Meanwhile in the North and West, 'nativisation' of the local troops controlled by local magnates/leaders. Gildas 'account' does potentially allow for this

450AD - end of the century - 2-3 generations of peace as suggested by Gildas. Central monetary system all but gone. Troops effectively billeted on local land that they effectively patrol. Civitates are effectively self sufficient and led by local magnates. Possibly a nominal central leader exists but has increasingly less control over these outside of his immediate civitates. Western Roman Empire has 'ended' so less need or requirement for Britain to be tied to the continent although factions for and against may arise into this vacuum. Thus Civitates are becoming increasingly hostile to one another and in the SE especially start building defences including dykes against one another to protect their interests. In the West and North, the de-Romanisation has been in effect for longer and so petty kingdoms have arisen before the SE.

500-550AD - return of civil wars (ref Gildas) although protagonists increasingly along West+North+Central vs South/East lines. Control of immigration of non aligned or Free Germanics decreases dramatically. Individual Civitates begin to assume/display certain cultural features. Even so, wars are fought along ideological and not necessarily strictly racial lines. Terms like Saxon could be used to denote an area of Britain rather than purely a racial term. eg 'Saxons' is a label applied to people of the Saxon Shore area not necessarily because they are Germanic in all facets (a bit like today's Midlanders or Londoners who are a diverse lot!). Potential culmination in this period with a 'second' Arthur type person and the rest of the battle list attributed to him and referenced by Gildas.

550AD-600AD - Rise of the Heroic Age and move towards kingdoms, racial/cultural solidification begins

Start of 7th Centruy onwards - racial/cultural identification increasingly solidified/codified and Welsh/British versus Anglo/Saxon more readily observable. Absorption of lowland Britain by the latter through grinding warfare and piecemeal accumulation over time (hence the dyke building and rebuilding)

All conjecture obviously :)

Quote from: Justin Swanton on January 06, 2020, 09:48:28 AM

Quote from: Erpingham on January 06, 2020, 09:35:05 AM
Thanks Justin.  So, the Gododdin as a military model either reflects practice beyond the Roman zone or later practice?  The dykes were built by regular troops (presumably limitanei?).

As far as I know the Gododdin reflects later practice. It corresponds to what was happening on Hadrian's wall, where a barn was converted into a mead hall for the chief (former unit commander) and his men. That was at Housteads I think.

Not disagreeing with the argument but I think you mean Birdoswald

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banna_(Birdoswald)

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 06, 2020, 09:14:22 PM

Quote from: Justin Swanton on January 06, 2020, 09:48:28 AM

Quote from: Erpingham on January 06, 2020, 09:35:05 AM
Thanks Justin.  So, the Gododdin as a military model either reflects practice beyond the Roman zone or later practice?  The dykes were built by regular troops (presumably limitanei?).

As far as I know the Gododdin reflects later practice. It corresponds to what was happening on Hadrian's wall, where a barn was converted into a mead hall for the chief (former unit commander) and his men. That was at Housteads I think.

Not disagreeing with the argument but I think you mean Birdoswald

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banna_(Birdoswald)

That's it.

Justin, re your numbers to support  a military unit
You have a force of 300 men supported on 400 x400 yards of territory giving 4000 acres . An acre is 4046 square metres. So 4000 acres is 16000000 square yards whereas 400 metresx 400 metres is 160000sq yards approx.
Soneone more mathematical can check out my numbers, but one thing I can tell you is tat 400  by 400 metres is not going to support 2000 people not least because you have lower yields, a mix of crops needed and woods, marshes etc to account for.
Nor is it likely that it was so easy to support military units at high effectiveness . If you can get an effective unit out of your 400m x 400m zone  then the military potential of the whole country would be huge and  in reality it just isn't
Roy

Quote from: aligern on January 06, 2020, 11:19:52 PM
Justin, re your numbers to support  a military unit
You have a force of 300 men supported on 400 x400 yards of territory giving 4000 acres . An acre is 4046 square metres. So 4000 acres is 16000000 square yards whereas 400 metresx 400 metres is 160000sq yards approx.
Soneone more mathematical can check out my numbers, but one thing I can tell you is tat 400  by 400 metres is not going to support 2000 people not least because you have lower yields, a mix of crops needed and woods, marshes etc to account for.
Nor is it likely that it was so easy to support military units at high effectiveness . If you can get an effective unit out of your 400m x 400m zone  then the military potential of the whole country would be huge and  in reality it just isn't
Roy

You're right. It's 40 x 40 hectares, i.e. 4000 x 4000 metres = 4km x 4km. I got a decimal point in the wrong place. So the agricultural land is 16km² The horses need half as much land = 8km². Total land area is 24km² = 4,9 x 4,9km, or if you have it in a circle the radius is 2,78km. Make it a 4km radius to account for agricultural inefficiency and not all the land being optimal for cultivation. Still quite workable.

Re military potential, professional armies were generally much smaller than the land resources capable of supporting them, unlike tribal levies. I don't think it was just about food. Philip's Macedonia was barely capable of supporting a professional army of about 40 000 men and it certainly had enough land. It was probably in part about creating/replacing equipment. One can hypothesize that the Romano-british forces could be fed from local resources but could not over time replace their worn or damaged equipment nor, ultimately, their horses.

Quote from: Justin Swanton on January 07, 2020, 05:34:00 AM

Quote from: aligern on January 06, 2020, 11:19:52 PM
Justin, re your numbers to support  a military unit
You have a force of 300 men supported on 400 x400 yards of territory giving 4000 acres . An acre is 4046 square metres. So 4000 acres is 16000000 square yards whereas 400 metresx 400 metres is 160000sq yards approx.
Soneone more mathematical can check out my numbers, but one thing I can tell you is tat 400  by 400 metres is not going to support 2000 people not least because you have lower yields, a mix of crops needed and woods, marshes etc to account for.
Nor is it likely that it was so easy to support military units at high effectiveness . If you can get an effective unit out of your 400m x 400m zone  then the military potential of the whole country would be huge and  in reality it just isn't
Roy

You're right. It's 40 x 40 hectares, i.e. 4000 x 4000 metres = 4km x 4km. I got a decimal point in the wrong place. So the agricultural land is 16km² The horses need half as much land = 8km². Total land area is 24km² = 4,9 x 4,9km, or if you have it in a circle the radius is 2,78km. Make it a 4km radius to account for agricultural inefficiency and not all the land being optimal for cultivation. Still quite workable.

Re military potential, professional armies were generally much smaller than the land resources capable of supporting them, unlike tribal levies. I don't think it was just about food. Philip's Macedonia was barely capable of supporting a professional army of about 40 000 men and it certainly had enough land. It was probably in part about creating/replacing equipment. One can hypothesize that the Romano-british forces could be fed from local resources but could not over time replace their worn or damaged equipment nor, ultimately, their horses.

The actual area the ancients awarded soldiers seems to be far larger than you think. I gathered some figures together for a slingshot article "Food, land and fertility and the troops you can support" which I wrote in 2009

These are the actual areas in the attachment

Most if not all of those [excepting the Egyptian peasant, obviously] would be expected to not only feed themselves and any servants etc. from that land, but also to equip themselves by selling the surplus, right?

What was the situation of c. AD 400 legionaries and auxiliaries - where they issued kit, or were they too expected to to buy their own?

In one sense it doesn't matter of course: someone is going to have to produce the agricultural surplus to feed the equipment-makers. But Justin seem to be envisioning a model where equipment is (or eventually isn't) distributed centrally which should make a big difference to how much land is directly assigned to the soldiery.

Does anyone know the process by which late-empire limitanei (the most likely troop style for 5th-6th century AD Britain) were assigned land, and if so, how much?

There are a few caveats regarding land.  There is good land and bad land.  A few acres of prime tilth will yield more than several times the number of acres of thin, rocky soil.  Practices regarding fertiliser and/or leaving fallow need to be taken into account (more land is needed if some is left fallow).  Did land-sustained soldiery pay taxes or not?  And did they have to (as Andreas asks) fund their own equipment or not?  If not, then any comparison with civilians (who might have to give up between one tenth and one third of their crop) has to be unskewed.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on January 07, 2020, 08:56:27 AM
Does anyone know the process by which late-empire limitanei (the most likely troop style for 5th-6th century AD Britain) were assigned land, and if so, how much?

There are a few caveats regarding land.  There is good land and bad land.  A few acres of prime tilth will yield more than several times the number of acres of thin, rocky soil.  Practices regarding fertiliser and/or leaving fallow need to be taken into account (more land is needed if some is left fallow).  Did land-sustained soldiery pay taxes or not?  And did they have to (as Andreas asks) fund their own equipment or not?  If not, then any comparison with civilians (who might have to give up between one tenth and one third of their crop) has to be unskewed.

The limitanei were not normally assigned land. There appear to have been some forts with grazing attached, but we know that limitanei drew rations just like everybody else
Indeed Southern & Dixon. the Later Roman Army point out on page 36 that it was in the Laws of Justinian that we see Limitanei defined as those whose duty was to defend the cities of the frontier and cultivate the earth.  To quote, "The sixth-century use of the word is not necessarily synonymous with that of the fourth and may have been applied anachronistically by later writers to the frontier arrangements of former emperors. "

Most late Roman soldiers, especially limitanei, would have families, and it was common enough for soldiers to own slaves as well.
According to Elton, food and equipment were not deducted from the salary, mainly because the salary was probably so small

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IXFUAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT223&lpg=PT223&dq=trades+of+men+in+the+limitanei&source=bl&ots=NmoXsbZy6z&sig=ACfU3U0N7nmW7UFCXZD18j1VPqG4jvZheQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZic-IlfHmAhVHhlwKHaAxBa0Q6AEwDHoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=trades%20of%20men%20in%20the%20limitanei&f=false

should take you to something on the life of the Limitanei in Egypt

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 06, 2020, 09:14:22 PM

Not disagreeing with the argument but I think you mean Birdoswald

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banna_(Birdoswald)

Don't know why but the final bracket has fallen off that link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banna_(Birdoswald) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banna_(Birdoswald))

We might also note the late Roman stipulation that soldiers' sons were obliged to follow their fathers' profession, if physically able.  They weren't obliged to join their fathers old unit, though one can see how, if the central system of conscription has broken down, this might be the case.  One can therefore see what started as an army unit evolving into a social or kin entity, as soldier families intermarried.

I think it might well have played out something like Dave conjectured above.  It would be useful if we knew where the imperial estates where in Britannia.  Last time I checked we still don't.


I think the military community as a thing apart came into being quite early on. Soldiers could be born into it.  Maybe the sons of the veterans settled in the Colonia also enlisted.  If they were a self contained community once they were transferred they were gone. 

I often wonder at the relationship between the British Colonia and the non military population.

Anthony , wasn't the legislation enforcing that soldiers sons  joined the arnyin the  Late Empire possibly an indication of a central authority desperate for troops attempting to solve the problem through legislation which may have been very ineffective?  Its a commonplace that in the Early Empire towns were run by the local elite who served for honour. With the third century crisis and the growth of the army events  led to a militarised  bureaucracy abd the flight of the local nobles to their estates plus  the concentration of estates in fewer richer hands and  often absentee landlordism with estates farmed by depressed semi slave coloni.  Legislation at the centre might not be well enforced, recruits could flee to the Bagaudae , or be hidden by their landlord, pay a bribe to avoid unpopular service. Governments of the period could enforce legislation only patchily.
Roman Society ran on clientage and it must have been a problem for Late Empire recruiters that client relationships   ran counter to the one to one 'atomised'  relationship with the state that the bureaucracy tried to enforce.
Roy

Quote from: aligern on January 08, 2020, 09:45:01 AM
Anthony , wasn't the legislation enforcing that soldiers sons  joined the arnyin the  Late Empire possibly an indication of a central authority desperate for troops attempting to solve the problem through legislation which may have been very ineffective?  Its a commonplace that in the Early Empire towns were run by the local elite who served for honour. With the third century crisis and the growth of the army events  led to a militarised  bureaucracy abd the flight of the local nobles to their estates plus  the concentration of estates in fewer richer hands and  often absentee landlordism with estates farmed by depressed semi slave coloni.  Legislation at the centre might not be well enforced, recruits could flee to the Bagaudae , or be hidden by their landlord, pay a bribe to avoid unpopular service. Governments of the period could enforce legislation only patchily.
Roman Society ran on clientage and it must have been a problem for Late Empire recruiters that client relationships   ran counter to the one to one 'atomised'  relationship with the state that the bureaucracy tried to enforce.
Roy

At this point I'd recommend 'Corruption and the Decline of Rome' by Ramsay Macmullen
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corruption-Decline-Rome-R-Macmullen/dp/0300047991/

Quote from: aligern on January 08, 2020, 09:45:01 AM
Anthony , wasn't the legislation enforcing that soldiers sons  joined the arnyin the  Late Empire possibly an indication of a central authority desperate for troops attempting to solve the problem through legislation which may have been very ineffective?

It was part of Diocletian's general overhaul of the Roman system in which he decreed that sons must follow the profession of their fathers.  Contrary to general belief, a strong driving rpinciple behind this legislation was that far too many men were joining or trying to join the army - and leaving tax-paying civilian occupations to do so.  Diocletian wanted to ensure predictable future supplies of goods and revenues (this was also part of his attempt to fix prices to curb rampant inflation - keeping supply and demand steady does tend to help).

A century onwards, and the sons-follow-fathers provision was not producing enough soldiers, especially on account of the rash of civil wars in the 4th century AD which significantly reduced soldier numbers.  Barbarian foederati and recruits made up the difference, but a new problem - severely exacerbated by Theodosius' abolition of the worship of Mithras - was that Christianity was cutting off any flow of new recruits because of a new emphasis on 'thou shalt not kill' (this had not been a serious problem up to Diocletian, but men were now avoiding the system by entering monasteries or deliberately mutilating themselves to avoid military service).

The way I see it, the recruitment problem seems to have been not so much one of organisation as actual available manpower (Vegetius was lamenting the decline in quantity and quality, and in addition the tendency of good officers to serve with the auxilia not the legions).  The warm bodies were there for potential or actual recruitment: the motivation to serve was, on the whole, not.  This resulted in the increasing barbarisation of the army, and cutting out Mithras left predominantly Arian Christian barbarians defending a predominantly Athanasian Christian Empire.  Add in emperors of the capacity of Honorius and Valentinian II and III and the collapse of the Western Empire is not too surprising.

My knowledge of Late Roman systems is mainly through their impact on early medieval ones, rather than direct.  Late Roman Empire moved more to a tax-in-kind system for supporting the army, including a levy of conscripts based on an assessment at civitas level.  The wealth of the civitas included those large land-owners locally, who were expected to make contributions from among their tenants.  This burden varied in number of men required and was not levied every year - sometimes it was commuted to a cash payment.  How well this worked in practice I don't know - it may have depended on how much central authority could make it self felt.  What it did do was present the civitates with an acknowledged set of military manpower obligations for local landowners which, if left to look to their own defences, might have come in handy.

I don't think the soldiers' sons legislation is part of this but a different obligation (I think there were other professions which had this hereditary obligation too).  Theoretically, soldiers sons were marched off and could be posted anywhere but, again, this would depend on the strength of central authority - if families stayed around their limitanei bases, enforcement locally may have been the rule.  If people left the area, there was limited ability to track them and enforce this without active higher authorities.   

I find the discussion interesting in trying to work out what the autonomous Britannia was like after the traditional 410 AD end point we were taught in school.  It seems fairly straightforward to believe that, for decades, both the British civitates and the Empire expected things to return to normal (whatever normal was in the late Empire of the west).  There were fairly stable sets of relationships between civitates and foederates and relics of army.   I do struggle a bit with the idea of a resurgent army though - I think it takes a bit more than some dykes surveyed in Roman feet to suggest a revitalised, fully effective force.  The archaeology (which is far less than you'd really want) suggests the reconfiguring of old forts into fortified settlements.  These would be useful locally, perhaps discouraging raids and unregulated migration but were not the regular army of old.  How did the civitates defend themselves?  Militias?  Estate militias and bodyguards/comitati of major landowners?  Local foederate agreements or alliances with foreign settlers?

Very good questions.

How did the big estates survive the Martinian revolution?  How did they survive the primacy of the civates?  Did their owners lead the transition or had they been swept aside with a share out of their assets to the victors.  What happened to all that imperial real estate?

I can think of two examples that might give us a clue.  The Irish foederati in Dyfed do not displace the local tribal aristocracy but are given imperial land.  Later, the Powys dynasty turned over former Roman military land to the Church creating one of the wonders of Western Christendom according to Bede.

Quite suddenly assets are in play and have to be allocated and protected.

one element I am not sure about is the split of Foederati 'settled' by Imperial or Post Imperial authorities and the Foederati that were recognised as such (defacto) after they migrated onto the British Isles under their own steam. Bit of a moving feast but I would assume there would be a split of some sort. What interaction there was between such groups, one can only imagine.

I'd think so too.  No reason to think that the original foederati wouldn't have upheld their foedus for as long as it was beneficial.

in times of peace....its a good gig, being billeted and supported by the locals and also as time went on, more and more recognised as the military of the isles

Its likely that, as with  the Franks in North Gaul, the foederati were given land in return for service. There was thus every incentive for them to behave and to continue to have legal rights to their farms. I sort of doubt that the foederati had any overarching organisation that linked them, or any multi group leadership .

Quote from: aligern on January 10, 2020, 06:29:22 PM
Its likely that, as with  the Franks in North Gaul, the foederati were given land in return for service.

Would that technically make them laeti rather than foederati?  Not sure how useful this question is, given that the important part is their attachment to their land and by extension whoever settled them there.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on January 10, 2020, 06:53:12 PM

Quote from: aligern on January 10, 2020, 06:29:22 PM
Its likely that, as with  the Franks in North Gaul, the foederati were given land in return for service.

Would that technically make them laeti rather than foederati?  Not sure how useful this question is, given that the important part is their attachment to their land and by extension whoever settled them there.

I wonder if Laeti actually farmed the land (because a lot of them were settled in areas where the peasantry had run off etc) and their children and some spare men were destined for the army.)
Whereas Foederati were soldiers supported by the peasantry who farmed the land for them, allowing them to be full time soldiers.
Doubtless both lots faded into each other in the middle

Jim

agreed Jim,

in the early 5th century, 'traditional' roles and conditions would probably have been the norm and as time (and the central authority declines) goes on, there would have been a blurring of the lines as you point out.

Quote from: Holly on January 10, 2020, 07:54:23 PM
agreed Jim,

in the early 5th century, 'traditional' roles and conditions would probably have been the norm and as time (and the central authority declines) goes on, there would have been a blurring of the lines as you point out.

And, of course, a number of scenarios about what could go wrong.  A legal title to land needs an enforceable legal system.  While everyone thinks the situation is a temporary blip and normal service will be resumed, this is OK.  Once a more localised approach takes hold, with perhaps more "might is right" approaches breaking out, a sensible foederate might look to defending his own, making alliances and then moving on to "consolidating" by taking over what is someone else's.  We might also wonder about the relationship of the "old" settlement of Imperial foederates as against later, locally brokered ones.  Are they going to be natural allies or rivals?

Quote from: Erpingham on January 11, 2020, 09:35:31 AM

Quote from: Holly on January 10, 2020, 07:54:23 PM
agreed Jim,

in the early 5th century, 'traditional' roles and conditions would probably have been the norm and as time (and the central authority declines) goes on, there would have been a blurring of the lines as you point out.

And, of course, a number of scenarios about what could go wrong.  A legal title to land needs an enforceable legal system.  While everyone thinks the situation is a temporary blip and normal service will be resumed, this is OK.  Once a more localised approach takes hold, with perhaps more "might is right" approaches breaking out, a sensible foederate might look to defending his own, making alliances and then moving on to "consolidating" by taking over what is someone else's.  We might also wonder about the relationship of the "old" settlement of Imperial foederates as against later, locally brokered ones.  Are they going to be natural allies or rivals?

The thing about 'old' and 'new' foederate is that they might not even speak the same language.
Also remember that when things start to break down, direct ownership of land becomes much more important, so that the foederati who hold land 'from the emperor' and are armed and organised have a damned good claim to what they're sitting on.
If anything, they are going to be courted by neighbours, local landowners, would-be warlords etc. The first part of the negotiation would be guaranteeing that the foederati's land was theirs (if only because you probably had no way of throwing them off)

hence.....going back to the OP....that polities based around civitates possibly became more and more jealous of guarding their 'patch' be it with militia, Foederati, Laeti or recently hired outsiders. This could be the start of the dyke building 'explosion' in the SE which originated in local rivalries rather than purely racial lines

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 11, 2020, 09:49:52 AM
The thing about 'old' and 'new' foederate is that they might not even speak the same language.

Shades of Joe Haldeman's Forever War......

Quote from: Holly on January 11, 2020, 11:55:47 AM
hence.....going back to the OP....that polities based around civitates possibly became more and more jealous of guarding their 'patch' be it with militia, Foederati, Laeti or recently hired outsiders. This could be the start of the dyke building 'explosion' in the SE which originated in local rivalries rather than purely racial lines

I think that regional alliances of landowners and military men (who to some extent would become the same people) would tend to coalesce
And probably within previously existing local boundaries because they were the people you knew and trusted

Very true....shrinking horizons, no imperial overlordship or control. In those circumstances the relationship between landowner/local populace becomes ever more symbiotic with the military stationed In the area

When do the local aristocracy resume an active military leadership role?  I'd think in the military zone they had probably never relinquished it.

In the civil zone did the local aristos follow the general trend to do so across the Later Empire?

Presumably the basic building block is the traditional boundary of the tribal civates and mixed in or adjacent to that is the former imperial land civil and military.

That's what I think too. The militarized north was too well established and so "unit" leaders morphed into warband leaders by evolution. The western areas were probably similar. The lowland areas would see local magnates first off organising and supporting military units new and old followed by assumption of power in some civitates and merging with warband leaders in others

I think it's not a bad guess at all.  Somewhere in all this there's Dark's Martinian revolution that, if I read Koch right, seems to find its eventual champion in Powys.

And Powys always seems to be at odds with other groupings especially the west

Quote from: Holly on January 11, 2020, 04:53:12 PM
Very true....shrinking horizons, no imperial overlordship or control. In those circumstances the relationship between landowner/local populace becomes ever more symbiotic with the military stationed In the area

yes, granting land (and peasants to work it) is an acceptable way of supporting a military force.
When you think about it, the end of imperial overlordship merely shortened the supply chain. Rather than have  the peasantry pay over more than half their income to bureaucracy which would, effectively, have to be funded out of tax income, and this left a residue to spend on the army.
With the end of the Empire you could cut out the bureaucracy, because with the shrinking horizon, the land owner could provide with military force, taking no more from the peasants than the bureaucracy did.
Given that the landowner would doubtless have evaded tax before, pushing the burden down onto the defenceless peasants, he would be no worse off.

been rereading The Ruin of Roman Britain by James Gerrard and he proposes something along those lines ie under Imperial control Britain is geared toward agricultural surplus to support the army and general taxation. With the central authority removed, it is postulated that Britain doesnt need the surplus and so reduces its output and/or efficiency and moves to mixed agricultural and domestic animal output.

Quote from: Holly on January 11, 2020, 10:41:55 PM
been rereading The Ruin of Roman Britain by James Gerrard and he proposes something along those lines ie under Imperial control Britain is geared toward agricultural surplus to support the army and general taxation. With the central authority removed, it is postulated that Britain doesnt need the surplus and so reduces its output and/or efficiency and moves to mixed agricultural and domestic animal output.

I suspect that once the 'pull' from the Army stopped, and there wasn't the market for all the grain, agriculture would soon switch to something more mixed and with more domestic livestock

Returning land to grass and grazing it would improve fertility, soil structure, etc etc
Those actually farming the land would probably see an improvement in their diet
The smaller areas that the country was now being governed in would be more self-sufficient, in that now everybody had grain, wool, meat, and leather and you weren't having to 'import' them

It wasn't a 'less' efficient system, it was just a system geared for different ends in a different world, and so would produce efficiently to meet those ends

Re foederati/laeti  and land law, it has been proposed that tge origin if the Salic law is the Roman agreement with the Franks and that its inheritance rules are designed to always have a soldier on the estate who could provide the milutary duties. That makes sense as the last thing Rome wanted was to have the units depopulated as a few  men became wealthy and took on the lands of less successful managers.
There was a question raised as to why the 'Goths' in Septimania kept their Gothic attribution.It was suggested that military service and land rights were key. If you were a Goth you could claim rights under Gothic law and crucially land title.
We should not underestimate the desire of societies to not just live in the  world according to Thomas Hobbes. Certainly Gildas is representing a traditional and legalistic outlook, albeit one which in reality has to accommodate to new realities of power. Even oarvenu military leaders hanker over legitimacy and security of tenure. Saxon mini kingdoms attempt this through being in a line of heredity from Wotan.
Roy

Yes, I think that as power gradually shifted from 'Roman State' to 'Successor State' we would see constant attempts of the new players in the game to provide themselves with legitimacy. To win that legitimacy they may well have been willing to compromise. So if you are a Saxon looking for land to settle your followers, you are happy enough to sign up to an agreement that gives you the land, provided (effectively) you fight to protect it as well as protect the other landowners who, if they won't fight alongside you, will at least provide you with rations etc.
Not only that but whilst you might not live in a town, the town is to your advantage. When your peasants harvest your crops, you and your followers can sell your surplus there as well as buy little luxuries.
Whilst Leaders were supposed to be gift givers to their followers (much as Emperors had to provide regular donatives to keep their forces loyal) the same followers would handle cash and buy things they wanted which their lord wouldn't provide.

We can visualise the shift from Roman to Post Roman to 'Saxon' in the lowlands centred around the land and thus the land-holding. We must remember that it took 200 odd years for the Lowland to become English is outlook and expression of culture....which is an awful long time

Quote from: Holly on January 12, 2020, 08:57:06 PM
We can visualise the shift from Roman to Post Roman to 'Saxon' in the lowlands centred around the land and thus the land-holding. We must remember that it took 200 odd years for the Lowland to become English is outlook and expression of culture....which is an awful long time

I suspect some of it could have been that the first 'saxons' were also trying to be a bit 'Roman'.

Theoderic himself was said to have observed, "the poor Roman imitates the Goth, the rich Goth the Roman."
I see no reason why we didn't seem a similar process in Britain as in Italy

I suspect that eventually the 'Roman' that they were copying faded away and they would end up copying the Frankish and Gothic aristocracies

Especially in Kent which had strong links with the Franks

Quote from: Holly on January 13, 2020, 05:19:36 AM
Especially in Kent which had strong links with the Franks

Yes, and from 600AD onwards, Rome

On the continent the 'Roman' model of the elite survived in three ways.
Firstly the Church. Bishops were upper class Romans placed by their locally powerful families and often they ran the towns when imperial bureaucracy faded. The church found the barbarians mostly heretical , but generally respectful .

Secondly in independent  cities or those with an arrangement with the Frankish, Burgundian or Visigothic rulers survived well into the sixth century. One assumes that several  Spanish cities who invited in East Roman garrisons from 552 were not incorporated into 'Visigothic' Spain except by a submission arrangement.

Thirdly  Living on their large estates surrounded by their clients . The Arvernians who turned up to support AlaricII  at Vouille in 507 and then did a deal with the victors were Gallo Romans living a Roman or at least post Roman life. Mummolus, for example who was active as a general in an army of the Franco Burgundian state against the Lombards was quite possibly a Roman and possibly led some 'Roman' troops.

In Britain those models were not maintained because the Angles et al. did not arrive with a large army of 10-20,000 men and dominate a whole province. The arrived in small groups and Anglicised that area before encroaching gradually on the next ( building dykes at each bite and hold.) . When they advanced the Roman elite fell back before them, leaving no model of Roman culture. Cities on the continent shrank, in Britain they were abandoned. Christians on the continent faced Christianised barbarians and sought to incorporate them.
in Britain the Church turned away from the aggressively pagan Germans and their sky gods.  Of course I accept that Roman influence had penetrated the Germanic world and the penetration of  Roman symbolism is more apparent in some of the tiny new Germanic states. I would also point to the long  resistance of the continental Saxons to Roman religion.

In Britain , Romanness was ground out between two stones, on the one hand the Germans with a culture that did not value Roman religion or lifestyle , on the other a Celtic society that   claimed a Roman inheritance, but was actually something new as it fought its way to an identity. Aurelius Ambrosianus was indeed the last Roman.

😉 Roy

nice summary of the contemporary continental 'Roman' world Roy. I think it helps to draw similarities and differences to that in Britain

Kent is interesting. Keeps its original name, Christianity survives and native British law is finally eradicated on the 9th of April 1925 when the Administration of Estates Act received royal assent.

All in all I'd suggest that this probably means the account of Vortigern's foedus with Hengist is likely right in its essentials. 

Hengist seems to behave in terms of native name, religion and law as someone who saw themselves as an legitimate authority rather than as a conqueror.

I believe there is a split of views on whether Hengist (and Horsa) are real or 'legendary' personages that acrue local affiliations to legitimise royal lines.... I still tend to the former but see the point of the latter

Yes, indeed and the gable ends stuff.  On the other hand there's the Finnsburgh fragment.  I think it's the process that's most interesting.

Quote from: Holly on January 13, 2020, 03:08:51 PM
I believe there is a split of views on whether Hengist (and Horsa) are real or 'legendary' personages that acrue local affiliations to legitimise royal lines.... I still tend to the former but see the point of the latter

I think some authors accept Hengist but not "his wife (or horse) Horsa" (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1411213-1066-and-all-that), if only because Hengest appears in the Finnsburg Fragment without Horsa.

and indeed interestingly studied by one esteemed Professor Tolkien..

Quote from: Holly on January 13, 2020, 03:08:51 PM
I believe there is a split of views on whether Hengist (and Horsa) are real or 'legendary' personages that acrue local affiliations to legitimise royal lines.... I still tend to the former but see the point of the latter

It is certainly strange that both personages, legendary or real, are named after horses.  Are these real names, nicknames (in the style of the later Scandinavians) or even titles? 

Quote from: Erpingham on January 13, 2020, 05:21:45 PM

Quote from: Holly on January 13, 2020, 03:08:51 PM
I believe there is a split of views on whether Hengist (and Horsa) are real or 'legendary' personages that acrue local affiliations to legitimise royal lines.... I still tend to the former but see the point of the latter

It is certainly strange that both personages, legendary or real, are named after horses.  Are these real names, nicknames (in the style of the later Scandinavians) or even titles?

one only has to look at Arthur.... arth is bear in welsh, ur(sus) is bear in latin etc etc ad finitum  :)

https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/axe-the-anglo-saxons.htm

of related interest.....

Is there a tendency for Late Antique Authors in Britain, both British and German to try and weave in every source, perhaps without a hard and fast distinction . So a 'bardic' tale or legend or royal myth of The Kentish 'dynasty' having a horse totem and maybe once horse cult gets fitted in as the arriving  leader's brother. It is likely that tge early German leaders had part time priestly roles in an elite cult so it might be that they had two names for their secular and religious roles or could someone else in the royal clan perform the priestly function?
I don't doubt tgat they had the priests who contended with the Christians, just to what extent these formed a separate profession as opposed to being members of the ruling class or the ruler, with dual functions?
Roy

Quote from: Holly on January 16, 2020, 09:37:38 PM
https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/axe-the-anglo-saxons.htm

of related interest.....

An interesting contrast.  I'm not sure it fully explains how these new polities come into existence, or, if all was harmonius, why Gildas' account clearly talks of conflict and the early medieval (aka Anglo-Saxon) tradition also talked of conflict.  Presumably, the dyke building craze in this theory were just territorial markers with no military function?

I did like the idea of the reason we all speak English is because we adopted a version of the working language of our new economic sphere centred on the North Sea in the East, as the economic dominance of Rome faded. 

Quote from: Erpingham on January 17, 2020, 10:00:12 AM
An interesting contrast.  I'm not sure it fully explains how these new polities come into existence, or, if all was harmonius, why Gildas' account clearly talks of conflict and the early medieval (aka Anglo-Saxon) tradition also talked of conflict.

A harmonious interlude that just happens to fall into the ill-attested period between the invasions and civil wars of the fourth century and the wars of the seventh strikes me as a wee bit suspicious.

QuoteI did like the idea of the reason we all speak English is because we adopted a version of the working language of our new economic sphere centred on the North Sea in the East, as the economic dominance of Rome faded.

The linguistic content of the article is frankly mostly bonkers. Old English was a firmly Germanic language, with surprisingly little British influence (something that has been taken as evidence that Latin had largely replaced British in much of England by AD 400 or so - Latin influence is more evident).

Yes, all that. 

I'd say the Latin influence on English is because Latin was the elite language of Christianity. In Northumbria English, Latin and Irish were the elite languages the last two because of the Church.  Iona and all.

To agree with Anton, an advantage that the church had was that much of what it was  engaged n was new, so there was no existing word to be replaced. Rather like Spanish milutary terms in the sixteenth century, Latin had a fiekdvall to itself.
Roy

From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Quote from: Swampster on January 20, 2020, 09:05:42 PM
From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 20, 2020, 09:18:54 PM

Quote from: Swampster on January 20, 2020, 09:05:42 PM
From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

Anyone up your way still using yan tan tethera (or variants) for their sheep?

Quote from: Swampster on January 20, 2020, 09:21:45 PM

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 20, 2020, 09:18:54 PM

Quote from: Swampster on January 20, 2020, 09:05:42 PM
From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

Anyone up your way still using yan tan tethera (or variants) for their sheep?

Cumbria has a wide and strange collection of dialects  8)
I don't know anybody who counts like that, but 'yan' is still used widely for one in some parts.
But then so is 'yar', as "I've only get yar left"
And of course, "I've only got yan left" (which is how the legendary puppy came to be known as yan)

QuoteYes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

I think it depends on what you think was the commercial language of markets in the lowland zone was.  The idea that the upland zone maintained more Celtic culture than core lowland zone is not an uncommon one.  Thus a language variation is possible, maybe roughly bounded by a line Exeter, Chester, York.   If we assume a mass depopulation of this lowland zone, removing the British speakers by ethnic cleansing, this accounts for the almost total lack of British influence on Old English.  But this no longer seems to be the consensus.  If we assume that the lowlanders spoke Low Latin, the presence of Latin but not British in OE maybe explicable.  OK, there are lots of problems with this.  We can't demonstrate how the Latin got into Old English because we don't have any material not compromised by the fact it is being written by a church educated elite.  We know people spoke Latin in Roman towns but how widely was it spoken outside?  Did you use your Latin to relate to luxury commerce and your British for buying sheep, as Jim suggests?  Hence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

good points Jim. Perhaps large world (ie Roman/Latin+local everyday languages) conditions shrinking to small world (ie post Roman/generic Germanic) meant adoption of a common everyday language as the use of formal language passed to the clergy almost exclusively

Quote from: Erpingham on January 21, 2020, 09:35:32 AM

QuoteYes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

I think it depends on what you think was the commercial language of markets in the lowland zone was.  The idea that the upland zone maintained more Celtic culture than core lowland zone is not an uncommon one.  Thus a language variation is possible, maybe roughly bounded by a line Exeter, Chester, York.   If we assume a mass depopulation of this lowland zone, removing the British speakers by ethnic cleansing, this accounts for the almost total lack of British influence on Old English.  But this no longer seems to be the consensus.  If we assume that the lowlanders spoke Low Latin, the presence of Latin but not British in OE maybe explicable.  OK, there are lots of problems with this.  We can't demonstrate how the Latin got into Old English because we don't have any material not compromised by the fact it is being written by a church educated elite.  We know people spoke Latin in Roman towns but how widely was it spoken outside?  Did you use your Latin to relate to luxury commerce and your British for buying sheep, as Jim suggests?  Hence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

I don't think it's any longer possible to speak of an ethnic cleansing of the lowland zone. It's long been held that Kent was different, and I felt that https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/axe-the-anglo-saxons.htm made good points with regard to the continuation of agricultural practices and boundaries etc.
It may be that the people in the lowland zone spoke a basic latin with a lot of loan words. Indeed from what I've been told about Welsh, modern 'kitchen Welsh' differs considerably from valley to valley, and there is no reason why the dialect of latin spoken in one settlement would be easily comprehended by the inhabitants of a settlement fifty miles away. If they ever met, perhaps at a market half way between, they might have to make the effort 'to speak proper'

Quote from: Holly on January 21, 2020, 10:13:36 AM
good points Jim. Perhaps large world (ie Roman/Latin+local everyday languages) conditions shrinking to small world (ie post Roman/generic Germanic) meant adoption of a common everyday language as the use of formal language passed to the clergy almost exclusively

I suspect Latin became something of a mess, because it didn't really fit.
As a church language, it was OK but to do theology properly at a high level you had to have Greek
As a rural language it probably lacked a lot of useful terms that were necessary

So it probably did best with the administration and the army, with other people having to use dialects with other words thrown in. Greek terms if you were a serious cleric, British terms if you were a peasant.
When your local lord 'Became German' from the peasant's point of view, they found they had a new language which had all the words they needed, so they just kept names and place names.

Also we don't actually have the ancient spoken languages, we merely have the literary version. This is important

I thought this paper was interesting
https://www.academia.edu/2305301/Loanwords_in_Welsh_Frequency_analysis_on_the_basis_of_Cronfa_Electroneg_o_Gymraeg_Celts_and_Slavs_in_Central_and_Southeastern_Europe._Studia_Celto-Slavica_III_Editors_Dunja_Brozovic_Roncevic_Maxim_Fomin_Ranko_Matasovic_Zagreb_2010._P._183-194

In the conclusion it makes a very serious point

" A huge gap still exists between the literary norm and spoken dialects in Welsh. On the lexical level one of the most obvious differences is the wide use of loanwords in spoken language and a tendency to avoid them in the literary standard. "

really interesting Jim....no different to Queens English and common English today with all its regional variants and 'flavours'

Quote from: Holly on January 21, 2020, 11:35:13 AM
really interesting Jim....no different to Queens English and common English today with all its regional variants and 'flavours'

As somebody who once had to act as an interpreter between a Glaswegan and a Geordie, I would suggest that this is the sort of 'language' we would expect to find in various villages as we travelled around Britain in the 4th and 5th centuries  8)

QuoteAs somebody who once had to act as an interpreter between a Glaswegan and a Geordie

I'm sure they made it easier because they realised they were speaking to foreigners, so spoke slowly and loudly :)  I once worked with two Glaswegians.  It was OK when they talked to me but when they talked to each other, they lost me.

However, we should be careful talking about modern parallels.  UK English is a much more homogenous language than it was even a hundred years ago, thanks to the pressures of formal education and the influence of mass media.  Our Glaswegian and Geordie probably had a lot of common grammar and vocab if you could get past the accents, especially as they both speak northern variants of English.

Quote from: Jim Webster on January 21, 2020, 10:45:53 AM
As a rural language it [sc. Latin] probably lacked a lot of useful terms that were necessary

It evidently worked well enough for peasants on the continent.

(The success of Latin in replacing the indigenous languages in the Western Empire is pretty remarkable: the survivors are pretty much British, Basque, and Berber - apparently there's something magical about the letter 'b' - plus Greek, but that doesn't really count.)

Quote from: ErpinghamHence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

If we accept that, despite what the article says, Old English clearly isn't a contact language, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. And why, anyway, would Pictavia be outside this brave new North Sea world?

(It's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.)

QuoteIf we accept that, despite what the article says, Old English clearly isn't a contact language, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work.

Fair point but worthy of further reflection rather than total rejection, I think (I got the impression from the review that the whole book is full of these imaginative ideas where you might want to say "OK, but hang on a minute....."

Quote
And why, anyway, would Pictavia be outside this brave new North Sea world?

Because it looked westward culturally?  It's hard to get a handle on Pictish language.  We have little idea what level of borrowing it might have taken from the North Sea languages or Irish, on when over its long existence it did so.

QuoteIt's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.

There is an old theory, of course, that this is exactly what it is - a language which evolved to allow inter-operability between two different but related language groups Old English and Old Norse.  Once it had that structure, it was well positioned to adapt to and ultimately hybridise with Norman French to create early modern English and continue with the same magpie tendencies from then on.

But this is drifting ever further from the topic.

Quote from: Andreas Johansson on January 21, 2020, 01:40:05 PM

(It's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.)

"The English language is in fact three languages stacked on top of one another wearing a trenchcoat."   ;)

If I recall correctly the linguists think the Celtic languages were mutually intelligible until the 5th Century.   Then they begin to diverge. By the time the Irish are converting the Picts interpreters are needed. Conversely the Irish dynasties in Wales become Brythonic speakers after a couple of generations. I guess it was an easy shift linguistically and a shared legal/social system helped.

There's also the point that post Empire Latin loses out to Brythonic as the prestige language among the British elite. That seems to have happened before anything like a substantial German conquest in lowland Britannia.

Quote from: Anton on January 21, 2020, 04:51:45 PM
If I recall correctly the linguists think the Celtic languages were mutually intelligible until the 5th Century.   Then they begin to diverge. By the time the Irish are converting the Picts interpreters are needed. Conversely the Irish dynasties in Wales become Brythonic speakers after a couple of generations. I guess it was an easy shift linguistically and a shared legal/social system helped.

There's also the point that post Empire Latin loses out to Brythonic as the prestige language among the British elite. That seems to have happened before anything like a substantial German conquest in lowland Britannia.

The problem is, in a thousand years time, the linguists may well assume that all English dialects were mutually intelligible in the 20th century  :-[

Almost certainly Jim unless specific books are read that explain the difference between written and spoken english

Quote from: Holly on January 21, 2020, 06:01:39 PM
Almost certainly Jim unless specific books are read that explain the difference between written and spoken english

Yes I wonder how much will survive in a thousand years time. If like the Roman world, we pass through a 'dark age' perhaps not a lot

This is the point that is made several times over across different treatises on the subject. We have very little evidence for spoken languages during this period and are reliant on written evidence often in a completely different language to those we are interested in! As Stephen alluded to earlier, there are assumed splits in the root languages for many British languages of the high medieval period that were forged in the period we are interested in. Professor Koch, amongst others, has spent a lot if time 'recreating' or at least identifying older branches of goidelic and brythonic sub sets

Quote from: Holly on January 21, 2020, 06:14:11 PM
This is the point that is made several times over across different treatises on the subject. We have very little evidence for spoken languages during this period and are reliant on written evidence often in a completely different language to those we are interested in! As Stephen alluded to earlier, there are assumed splits in the root languages for many British languages of the high medieval period that were forged in the period we are interested in. Professor Koch, amongst others, has spent a lot if time 'recreating' or at least identifying older branches of goidelic and brythonic sub sets

I can imagine his successor a thousand years hence working back and coming up with English and perhaps suggesting that there were dialects, but I cannot imagine he would recreate Glasgow or even Devon dialects

I suspect our problem is that when we are looking at the language spoke by illiterate rural villagers the linguists would find it impossible to get down to the level of detail we're toying with  :-[

exactly. Add into the mix shifting ethnicity then it becomes a swirling morass of unknowns and unfathomables. I suspect a multitude of dialects originated and thrived all over the British Isles once Latin lost its hold and Brythonic was allowed to rise or fall along with the introduction of Germanic in certain areas.

Quote from: Holly on January 21, 2020, 10:38:09 PM
exactly. Add into the mix shifting ethnicity then it becomes a swirling morass of unknowns and unfathomables. I suspect a multitude of dialects originated and thrived all over the British Isles once Latin lost its hold and Brythonic was allowed to rise or fall along with the introduction of Germanic in certain areas.

Even in my own lifetime, when I was younger, the population in the villages around Barrow-in-Furness had a very different dialect/accent to that of Barrow itself.
Forty years later, populations have mixed more and people now live in the villages and work in Barrow more, so the difference is less and largely confined to older inhabitants

The question is how great a hold did Latin have on the general population?

Barrow had industry and I'd guess that pulled people in from quite far afield in its hey day bringing new linguistic influences.  The easiest discernible linguistic divide in the North East of England is the Mek and Mak and it doesn't seem explainable by a geographic feature.

it would obviously depend on the level of Romanitas (a combination of the level of urbanity, demilitarisation and time). For me it comes back to the N+W vs S+SE divide or otherwise known as highland/lowland split

Quote from: Holly on January 22, 2020, 07:03:02 PM
it would obviously depend on the level of Romanitas (a combination of the level of urbanity, demilitarisation and time). For me it comes back to the N+W vs S+SE divide or otherwise known as highland/lowland split

Apparently, or so I was told by an archaeologist, the highland lowland split may not have been as pronounced as people used to think
When they did rescue archaeology with the work on the A1(M) etc, they kept finding Roman civilian stuff in 'the military zone'. So began to wonder whether the lack of Romanitas was more due to the lack of digging.
Certainly we have found 3rd century Roman pottery which is in Herriot Watt university and according to the books, the Romans weren't really here

QuoteApparently, or so I was told by an archaeologist, the highland lowland split may not have been as pronounced as people used to think

It is always a risk that our distribution plans are just showing where we haven't looked :)  However, I thought there was more to the zone thing than just material culture - that the "military zone" was administered differently?  Do we have civilian towns, or just vici (is that the correct plural?) 

good points both. Obviously things are never straight forward. On balance it appears that the lowlands are more productive from an agricultural perspective and so possibly more 'developed' (a relative term) than the more highland/militarised zones. However, where the army goes, a whole industry dedicated to servicing it follows. High status houses in the militarised zones could be for important people and or farming grandees just probably less of them than in the lowland areas

Quote from: Holly on January 23, 2020, 04:19:15 PM
good points both. Obviously things are never straight forward. On balance it appears that the lowlands are more productive from an agricultural perspective and so possibly more 'developed' (a relative term) than the more highland/militarised zones. However, where the army goes, a whole industry dedicated to servicing it follows. High status houses in the militarised zones could be for important people and or farming grandees just probably less of them than in the lowland areas

They've found a lot of farms growing grain for the legions in Cumbria, (or at least arable in the Roman period) at higher altitudes than we'd normally bother with grain now

the highland zones werent agriculture free of course and the question on yields would come into play to a certain extent. Interesting aside although we have travelled agricultural yields a fair bit in the past :)

and of course interestingly there were several potential 'cataclysmic' climate events in and around the 6th Century although possibly too 'late' for Arthur. Having said that, such events and cooling/wetting of the climate in teh 6th could have been the final nail in the coffin of many post Roman polities

Quote from: Holly on January 24, 2020, 08:12:29 AM
the highland zones werent agriculture free of course and the question on yields would come into play to a certain extent. Interesting aside although we have travelled agricultural yields a fair bit in the past :)

You might find the introduction to the dig report here interesting.  Good quality arable in an upland setting.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yl3JDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT729&lpg=PT729&dq=the+expulsion+of+the+deissi&source=bl&ots=_mQNt3P5eA&sig=ACfU3U3fNT9gi-BUFd3OBvup3gGfgzBOmg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjiwaqRwIHpAhUHXsAKHT7mDlcQ6AEwDXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20expulsion%20of%20the%20deissi&f=false

Quote from: Anton on May 23, 2022, 06:05:31 PM

Quote from: Holly on January 24, 2020, 08:12:29 AM
the highland zones werent agriculture free of course and the question on yields would come into play to a certain extent. Interesting aside although we have travelled agricultural yields a fair bit in the past :)

You might find the introduction to the dig report here interesting.  Good quality arable in an upland setting.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yl3JDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT729&lpg=PT729&dq=the+expulsion+of+the+deissi&source=bl&ots=_mQNt3P5eA&sig=ACfU3U3fNT9gi-BUFd3OBvup3gGfgzBOmg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjiwaqRwIHpAhUHXsAKHT7mDlcQ6AEwDXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20expulsion%20of%20the%20deissi&f=false

There is a lot of evidence of cereal production at quite high altitudes in North Cumbria, as the valley bottoms were often impassable bog

thanks both. Interestingly many highland areas were forested and arable and its only relatively recently (ie the last 1-2000 years) that many upland areas have become barren

Quote from: Holly on May 23, 2022, 07:00:01 PM
thanks both. Interestingly many highland areas were forested and arable and its only relatively recently (ie the last 1-2000 years) that many upland areas have become barren

It's not they've become barren, more farmed differently. So Dartmoor is barren because of geology, but frankly last time I walked across Exmoor I was struck by the fact that large amounts of it are unploughed because of policy. (I think it was in the 1980s or 90s there was a 'scandal' about a farmer intending to plough some of his land up there.)
Similarly on the hill, Lacra that overlooks the back of Millom, you might assume timeless moor but actually there are parts where you find traces of rig and furrow and long abandoned farm buildings. It might have been farmed during the First World War, or perhaps the Napoleonic Wars.

For a lot of land, Barren often depends as much on the price of grain as on anything else :-)

Jim

Interesting observation as ever Jim.

I am much taken by Nerys Patterson's view that sub polities were always viable geographic "eco units" of arable and pastoral lands surrounded by waste to enable expansion and offer some military/political insulation.  She expressed it more elegantly.

It seems obvious that even a small loss of territory could seriously unbalance and threaten the whole affair.  That in turn explains the need for affiliation to a higher level of authority that could mediate internally or defend against external aggression.

and the more upland you go the more 'tribal' the polity and cattle and other movable herds are the real wealth

No doubt about wealth on the hoof.  I'm now clear that it was also the norm to intensively cultivate the available good arable land too.

It would be an interesting exercise to look at individual parish's in upland Britannia and see the ratio of arable to pasture.  A case has been made that parish boundaries preserve the original territory of ancient political sub units.

QuoteIt would be an interesting exercise to look at individual parish's in upland Britannia and see the ratio of arable to pasture. 

Though, as Jim has pointed out, modern percentages may be misleading.  Land may have supported arable in different climate conditions or, as Jim said, in different economic ones.  A move from a local subsistence set up where you grew stuff even with marginal yields to one in which produce could be easily imported could change land use.

Certainly, although the potential should still be discernible. 

I wonder how much of the cattle as movable wealth approach to status was copied in the lowland areas

The prestige hierarchy of livestock was horses, cattle, sheep, goats.  I'd say that prevailed in the lowlands too.

Good pasturage for horses and cattle, less good for sheep, rough for goats. Swine are somewhat otherworldly, important but different.

Quote from: Holly on May 25, 2022, 08:39:00 PM
I wonder how much of the cattle as movable wealth approach to status was copied in the lowland areas

Portable wealth and portable tax avoidance. It was difficult to hide the land from the tax authorities, but provided you had some livestock when the accessor arrived, the rest could take a short holiday in a clearing in the woods whilst authority was present  8)

you've done this before havent you Jim....  ;D

Quote from: Holly on May 26, 2022, 07:39:58 AM
you've done this before havent you Jim....  ;D

An easy way to transfer cash from one jurisdiction to another  ;)

And none of them will talk.

a bit of mooing from the cows but hope the pigs dont squeal on you

Quote from: Holly on May 26, 2022, 11:09:39 AM
a bit of mooing from the cows but hope the pigs dont squeal on you

we have ways of not making you talk  ;)

In the 1990's I was involved in the milk quota system, merging the separate systems for England, Scotland and Wales into a single system.  We came across a number of duplicate entries.  Turned out farmers had been moving their herds across the border and claiming quota twice for the same cows.  Various farmers were prosecuted for fraud....

Quote from: lionheartrjc on May 26, 2022, 06:53:35 PM
In the 1990's I was involved in the milk quota system, merging the separate systems for England, Scotland and Wales into a single system.  We came across a number of duplicate entries.  Turned out farmers had been moving their herds across the border and claiming quota twice for the same cows.  Various farmers were prosecuted for fraud....

Actually at least one person did it with entire farms. The map squares duplicate, so there are the OS squares over the UK, but there are identical squares with one digit different to the west and to the east of us.
One chap was claiming three farms, all identical but one was in the North Atlantic and the other in the North Sea  8)

Quote from: Jim Webster on May 26, 2022, 09:05:06 PM

Quote from: lionheartrjc on May 26, 2022, 06:53:35 PM
In the 1990's I was involved in the milk quota system, merging the separate systems for England, Scotland and Wales into a single system.  We came across a number of duplicate entries.  Turned out farmers had been moving their herds across the border and claiming quota twice for the same cows.  Various farmers were prosecuted for fraud....

Actually at least one person did it with entire farms. The map squares duplicate, so there are the OS squares over the UK, but there are identical squares with one digit different to the west and to the east of us.
One chap was claiming three farms, all identical but one was in the North Atlantic and the other in the North Sea  8)

Trout farms....I've heard of them....

 ::) ;D