[Illustration: FIG. 21. OGAM INSCRIPTION FROM SILCHESTER.]
But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found in another fact—that is the destruction of the Romanized part of Britain by the invading Saxons. War, and especially defensive war against invaders, must always weaken the higher forms of any country's civilization. Here the agony was long, and the assailants cruel and powerful, and the country itself was somewhat weak. Its wealth was easily exhausted. Its towns were small. Its fortresses were not impregnable. Its leaders were divided and disloyal. Moreover, the assault fell on the very parts of Britain which were the seats of Roman culture. Even in the early years of the fourth century it had been found necessary to defend the coasts of East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly populated and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates by a series of forts which extended from the Wash to Spithead, and were known as the forts of the Saxon Shore. Fifty or seventy years later the raiders, whether English seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland, devastated the coasts of the province and perhaps reached even the midlands.[1] When, seventy years later still, the English came, no longer to plunder but to settle, they occupied first the Romanized area of the island. As the Romano-Britons retired from the south and east, as Silchester was evacuated in despair[2] and Bath and Wroxeter were stormed and left desolate, the very centres of Romanized life were extinguished. Not a single one remained an inhabited town. Destruction fell even on Canterbury, where the legends tell of intercourse between Briton or Saxon, and on London, where ecclesiastical writers fondly place fifth- and sixth-century bishops. Both sites lay empty and untenanted for many years. Only in the far west, at Exeter or at Caerwent, does our evidence allow us to guess at a continuing Romano-British life.
[Footnote 1: About A.D. 405 Patrick was carried off from Bannavem Taberniae. If this represents the Romano-British village on Watling Street called Bannaventa, near Daventry in Northants (Victoria Hist. i. 186), the raids must have covered all the midlands: see Engl. Hist. Review, 1895, p. 711; Zimmer, Realenc. für protestantische Theol. x. (1901), Art. 'Keltische Kirche'; Bury, Life of St. Patrick, p. 322. There are, however, too many uncertainties surrounding this question to let us derive much help from it.]
[Footnote 2: Engl. Hist. Review, xix. 625; Fox, Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire, i. 371-2.]
The same destruction came also on the population. During the long series of disasters, many of the Romanized inhabitants of the lowland regions must have perished. Many must have fallen into slavery, and may have been sold into foreign lands. The remnant, such as it was, doubtless retired to the west. But, in doing so, it exchanged the region of walled cities and civilized houses, of city life and Roman culture, for a Celtic land. No doubt it attempted to keep up its Roman fashions. The writers may well be correct who speak of two conflicting parties, Roman and Celtic, among the Britons of the sixth century. But the Celtic element triumphed. Gildas, about A.D. 540, describes a Britain confined to the west of our island, which is very largely Celtic and not Roman.[1] Had the English invaded the island from the Atlantic, we might have seen a different spectacle. The Celtic element would have perished utterly: the Roman would have survived. As it was, the attack fell on the east and south of the island—that is, on the lowlands of Britain. Safe in its western hills, the Celtic revival had full course.
[Footnote 1: How much of Britain was still British when Gildas wrote, he does not tell us. But he mentions only the extreme west (Damnonii, Demetae); his general atmosphere is Celtic, and his rhetoric contains no references to a flourishing civilization. We may conclude that the Romanized part of Britain had been lost by his time, or that, if some part was still held by the British, long war had destroyed its civilization. Unfortunately we cannot trust the traditional English chronology of the period. As to the date of Gildas, cf. W.H. Stevenson, Academy, October 26, 1895, &c.; I see no reason to put either Gildas or any part of the Epistula later than about 540.]
It is this Celtic revival which can best explain the history of Britannia minor, Brittany across the seas in the western extremity of Gaul. How far this region had been Romanized during the first four centuries seems uncertain. Towns were scarce in it, and country-houses, though not altogether infrequent or insignificant, were unevenly distributed. At some period not precisely known, perhaps in the first half or the middle of the third century, it was in open rebellion, and the commander of the Sixth Legion (at York), one Artorius Justus, was sent with a part of the British garrison to reduce it to obedience.[1] It may therefore have been, as Mommsen suggests, one of the least Romanized corners of Gaul, and in it the native idiom may have retained unusual vitality. Yet that native speech was not strong enough to live on permanently. The Celtic which is spoken to-day in Brittany is not a Gaulish but a British Celtic; it is the result of British influences. Brittany would have sooner or later become assimilated to the general Romano-Gaulish civilization, had not its Celtic elements won fresh strength from immigrant Britons. This immigration is usually described as an influx of refugees fleeing from Britain before the English advance. That, no doubt, was one side of it. But the principal immigrants, so far as we know their names, came from Devon and Cornwall,[2] and some certainly did not come as fugitives. The King Riotamus who (as Jordanes tells us) brought 12,000 Britons in A.D. 470 to aid the Roman cause in Gaul, was plainly not seeking shelter from the English.[3] We must connect him, and indeed the whole fifth-century movement of Britons into Gaul, with the Celtic revival and with the same causes that produced for instance, the Scotic invasion of Caledonia.
[Footnote 1: C. iii. 1919=Dessau 2770. The inscription must be later than (about) A.D. 200, and it somewhat resembles another inscription (C. iii. 3228) of the reign of Gallienus, which mentions milites vexill. leg. Germanicar. et Britannicin. cum auxiliis earum. Presumably it is either earlier than the Gallic Empire of 258-73, or falls between that and the revolt of Carausius in 287. The notion of O. Fiebiger (De classium Italicarum historia, in Leipziger Studien, xv. 304) that it belongs to the Aremoric revolts of the fifth century is, I think, wrong. Such an expedition from Britain at such a date is incredible.]
[Footnote 2: The attempt to find eastern British names in Brittany seems a failure. M. de la Borderie, for instance, thinks that Corisopitum (or whatever the exact form of the name is) was colonized from Corstopitum (Corbridge on the Tyne, near Hadrian's Wall). But the latter, always to some extent a military site, can hardly have sent out ordinary émigrés, while the former has hardly an historical existence at all, and may be an ancient error for civitas Coriosolitum (C. xiii (I), i. p. 491).]
[Footnote 3: Freeman (Western Europe in the Fifth Century, p. 164) suggests that a migration of Britons into Gaul had been in progress, perhaps since the days of Magnus Maximus, and that by 470 there was a regular British state on the Loire, from which Riotamus led his 12,000 men. Hodgkin (Cornwall and Brittany, Penryn, 1911) suggests that the soldiers of Maximus settled on the Loire about 388, and that Riotamus was one of their descendants. He quotes Gildas as saying that the British troops of Maximus went abroad with him and never returned. That, however, is an entirely different thing from saying that they settled in a definite part of Gaul. For this latter statement I can find no evidence, and the Celtic revival in our island seems to provide a better setting for the whole incident of Riotamus.