If Professor Bury is right (Life of Patrick, p. 354), Riotamus had a predecessor in Dathi, who is said to have gone from Ireland to Gaul about A.D. 428 to help the Romans and Aetius. Zimmer (Nennius Vind., p. 85) rejects the tale. But it fits in well with the Celtic revival.]
This destruction of Romano-British life produced a curious result which would be difficult to explain if we could not assign it to this cause. There is a marked and unmistakable gap between the Romano-British and the Later Celtic periods. However numerous may be the Latin personal names and 'culture words' in Welsh, it is beyond question that the tradition of Roman days was lost in Britain during the fifth or early sixth century. That is seen plainly in the scanty literature of the age. Gildas wrote about A.D. 540, three generations after the Saxon settlements had begun. He was a priest, well educated, and well acquainted with Latin, which he once calls nostra lingua. He was also not unfriendly to the Roman party among the Britons, and not unaware of the relation of Britain to the Empire.[1] Yet he knew substantially nothing of the history of Britain as a Roman province. He drew from some source now lost to us—possibly an ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical writer—some details of the persecution of Diocletian and of the career of Magnus Maximus.[2] For the rest, his ideas of Roman history may be judged by his statement that the two Walls which defended the north of the province—the Walls of Hadrian and Pius—were built somewhere between A.D. 388 and 440. He had some tradition of the coming of the English about 450, and of the reason why they came. But his knowledge of anything previous to that event was plainly most imperfect.
[Footnote 1: Mommsen, Preface to Gildas (Mon. Germ. Hist.), pp. 9-10. Gildas is, however, rather more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to allow. Such a phrase as ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur implies a consciousness of contrast between Briton and Roman. Freeman (Western Europe, p. 155) puts the case too strongly the other way.]
[Footnote 2: Magnus Maximus, as the opponent of Theodosius, seems to have been damned by the Church writers. Compare the phrases of Orosius, vii. 35 (Theodosius) posuit in Deo spem suam seseque adversus Maximum tyrannum sola fide maior proripuit and ineffabili iudicio Dei and Theodosius victoriam Deo procurante suscipit.]
The Historia Brittonum, compiled a century or two later, preserves even less memory of things Roman. There is some hint of a vetus traditio seniorum. But the narrative which professes to be based on it bears little relation to the actual facts; the growth of legend is perceptible, and even those details that are borrowed from literary sources like Gildas, Jerome, Prosper, betray great ignorance on the part of the borrower.[1] On the other hand, the native Celtic instinct is more definitely alive and comes into sharper contrast with the idea of Rome. Throughout, no detail occurs which enlarges our knowledge of Roman or of early post-Roman Britain. The same features recur in later writers who might be or have been supposed to have had access to British sources. Geoffrey of Monmouth—to take only the most famous—asserts that he used a Breton book which told him all manner of facts otherwise unknown. The statement is by no means improbable. But, for all that, the pages of Geoffrey contain no new fact about the first five centuries which is also true.[2] From first to last, the Celtic tradition preserves no real remnant of recollections dating from the Romano-British age. Those who might have handed down such memories had either perished in wars with the English or sunk back into the native environment of the west.[3]
[Footnote 1: The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is obvious tradition or legend. A prince with a Celtic name may have ruled Kent in 450. There were, indeed, plenty of rulers with barbaric names in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Empire. But the tale cannot be called certain history.]
[Footnote 2: Thus, he refers to Silchester, and so good a judge as Stubbs once suggested that for this he had some authority now lost to us. Yet the mere fact that Geoffrey knows only the English name Silchester disproves this idea. Had he used a genuinely ancient authority, he would have (as elsewhere) employed the Roman name. Another explanation may be given. Geoffrey wrote in an antiquarian age, when the ruins of Roman towns were being noted. Both he and Henry of Huntingdon seem to have heard of the Silchester ruins, and both accordingly inserted the place into their pages.]
[Footnote 3: The English mediaeval chronicles have sometimes been supposed to preserve facts otherwise forgotten about Roman times. So far as I can judge, this is not the case, even with Henry of Huntingdon. Henry, in the later editions of his work, borrowed a few facts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, which are wanting in his first edition (see the All Souls MS.; the truth is obscured in the Rolls Series text). He also preserves one local tradition from Colchester: otherwise he contains nothing which need puzzle any inquirer. Giraldus Cambrensis, when at Rome, saw some manuscript which contained a list of the five provinces of fourth-century Britain—otherwise unknown throughout the Middle Ages (Archaeol. Oxoniensis, 1894, p. 224).]
But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and its explorers need to know something of the regions on both sides of the frontier. I make no claim to that double knowledge. I have merely tried, using such evidence as I can, to sketch the character of one region, that of the Romano-British civilization.