Gildas the Wise makes a muddle of things

Excavations at Vindolanda should have begun on Monday.  The first part of the season including my session has been cancelled. It seems likely the entire 2020 campaign will be lost.

Too bad, as this season would have been especially interesting as it would have involved among other things taking down a section of the site from modern ground level.  In theory this means a peek at the enigmatic late occupancy of the fort.  Theories vary but there is evidence of a sub Roman war lord/chieftain occupying some of the buildings after the end of Roman Britain, and then later perhaps a religious community.  A few odds and ends from 9th century Saxons turn up but may just have been wandering through.

The end of Roman Britain in this part of the world saw the dispersal of a highly organized defense system centered of course on The Wall, but also including forts, signal towers, roads and civilian communities.   Naturally one imagines a dramatic end, with shaggy barbarians scaling the Wall and pouring southwards.  But in reality it was - to the extent we can say anything - a more complex process.   A few dates to consider:

394 AD - Battle of Frigidus (Italy).  A donnybrook slaughter between the armies of rival Emperors representing the East and the West.  The Eastern Emperor Theodosius "won" but things were never the same after that.  When he died four months later the Roman Empire was divided between his two idiot sons Honorius and Arcadius, never to be made whole again.

402 AD - large numbers of the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain.  Absence of coinage later than this date suggests those who stayed behind were not getting paid.  Unpaid soldiers recruited from the locals might quickly become Part of the Problem.

406 AD - The Rhine river freezes over and Germanic tribes cross.  Vandals and Goths march across modern day Germany, France and Spain with little to stop them.  Britain is now cut off except by problematic sea routes.

410 AD - "The Rescript of Honorius".  If accurate*, this was a letter from the Emperor to the cities of Brittania saying in effect "Adios, you're on your own".

So what actually happened up on the Wall?  The archaeological record is sketchy.  As is one of the few near contemporary written sources, a monk named Gildas the Wise.

Born circa 500 AD in what is now Scotland, he wrote a surviving history that gives clues.....but also has egregious errors.  He for instance appeared to have no idea when the Hadrianic and Antonine walls were built, suggesting that the Romans threw them together just before their final departure.  

And according to Gildas, once the Romans left for good the garrison of the Wall did not manage a particularly glorious Last Stand:

"Moreover, having heard of the departure of our friends, and their resolution never to return, they seized with greater boldness than before on all the country towards the extreme north as far as the wall. To oppose them there was placed on the heights a garrison equally slow to fight and ill adapted to run away, a useless and panic-struck company, who slumbered away days and nights on their unprofitable watch. Meanwhile the hooked weapons of their enemies were not idle, and our wretched countrymen were dragged from the wall and dashed against the ground. Such premature death, however, painful as it was, saved them from seeing the miserable sufferings of their brothers and children. But why should I say more? "

Then plague, famine and general sinfulness ruled the land.  

"Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press; and with no chance of being buried, save in the ruins of the houses, or in the ravening bellies of wild beasts and birds.."


Pretty grim stuff but it is worth remembering that Gildas got a number of obvious facts wrong in his off the cuff comments on history, and that he was recounting events that were approximately 150 years in the past.  He was handing down tales of the past, and with the shorter life spans of those times probably not three generations past but four or five.

In that it is akin to my passing along a few scraps of family lore about my great grandmother fleeing the Sioux Uprising in 1862.  Filtered and embellished by elderly relatives I'm sure I only have the thinnest connection with actual events.

Gildas was one gloomy scold but he was looking back at hard times.  Hopefully - in the sense of being full of hope - a year from now I'll be returning to sunny fields among the old friends and the older stones. 
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* And Boy Howdy is the Rescript of Honorius controversial among scholars.  It may have been referring to "Bruttium" a part of southern Italy. I found reference to our site Director of Excavations going on record as doubting any connection to Britain at all....