alacrity, besieged and slew Constans at Vienne 51, and menaced the father with deposition. The troops of the legal emperor, Honorius, profited by the quarrel, and destroyed the competition. Constantine was taken at Arles, and Gerontius was pursued to the confines of Spain; his house was besieged, and the assailants set it on fire. His friend and wife received from his hands the death they implored, and he joined them in the tomb. 52 СНАР. VII. 411. Britain. 409. Amid this complexity of rebellion and sub-rebellion, The barbathe western provinces of the Roman state were sacri- rians attack ficed to the revenge of the military competitors. The crime which degraded all the merit of Stilicho was, from the same motives of selfishness, repeated by Gerontius. He also, to diminish the danger of his revolt, by his incitements and advice influenced into hostile invasion the barbarians who hovered near the Celtic regions. 53 This desperate act of ambition was unfortunate for Rome. Constantine could not repel the torrent, because the flower of his army was in Spain. 54 Britain and Gaul experienced all its fury. 51 Orosius, lib. vii. Olympiodorus ap. Photium, 183. Marcellin. Chron. 38. Eusebius Chronicon, 412. 52 See the detail in Gibbon, iii. p. 259. I am tempted to imagine, that in drawing his Vortigern, Jeffry has copied and distorted the Gerontius of the imperialists. Some particulars are alike in both. He makes Constans a monk, and Vortigern a British consul, who rebelled against, and caused Constans to be destroyed. Vortigern being afterwards besieged in the place to which he fled, and his pursuers finding they could not get an entrance, it was set on fire, lib. vi. and lib. viii. —— The facts from the Roman historians are, that Gerontius proceeded from Britain, and was a comes or count; that he revolted from Constans, who had been in a monastery and caused his death; that he fled for refuge afterwards, and prevented his pursuers from entering his house, who therefore applied flames. These coincidences would induce me to strike Vortigern entirely out of true history, but that I find a Gurthrigernus mentioned in Gildas, and a Gwrtheyrn in the Welsh remains. Their authority inclines me to believe, that Jeffry has confounded Gerontius, who died in Spain, with Gwrtheyrn, in England, and in his Vortigern has given us a fictitious medley of the history of both. 53 Zosimus, lib. vi. p. 375. There was a severe imperial law in existence, made A. D. 323, which was applicable to these crimes of Gerontius and Stilicho: "Si quis barbaris scelerata factione facultatem depredationis in Romanos dederit, vel si quo alio modo factam deviserit, vivus amburatur." Cod. Theod. lib. vii. tit. i. It was perhaps in execution of this law that the flames were applied to the retreat of Gerontius. 54 Zosimus, lib. vi. p. 375. BOOK 409. The cities even of England were invaded. To whatever quarter they applied for help, the application was vain. Honorius was trembling before Alaric, and Constantine could not even save Gaul. In this extremity the Britons displayed a magnanimous character; they remembered the ancient independence of the island, and their brave ancestors, who still lived ennobled in the verses of their bards: they armed themselves, threw off the foreign yoke, deposed the imperial magistrates, proclaimed their insular independence, and, with the successful valour of youthful liberty and endangered existence, they drove the fierce invaders from their cities. 55 The sacred flame of national independence passed swiftly over the channel, and electrified Armorica. This maritime state, and its immediate neighbours, in the same crisis and from the same necessity, disclaimed the authority of a foreign emperor, and by their own exertions achieved their own deliverance. Thus the authentic history from 407, is, that the barbarians, excited by Gerontius, assailed both Gaul and Britain; that Constantine could give no help, because his troops were in Spain; that Honorius could send none, because Alaric was overpowering Italy; that the Britons, thus abandoned, armed themselves, declared their country independent, and drove the barbaric invaders from their cities; that Honorius sent letters to the British states, exhorting them to protect themselves 56; and that the Romans never again recovered the possession of the island. 57 55 Zosimus, p. 376.; and see Nennius, s. 25-27. 56 Zosimus, lib, vi. p. 381. puλátteσbai. The silver ingot discovered in 1777, n digging among the old foundations of the Ordnance office of the Tower, marked "ex officio Honorii," implies that the authority of Honorius was at first respected in the island. 57 The Abbé Du Bos, Hist. Crit. 211., and Mr. Gibbon, iii. 275., agree in placing the defection and independence of Britain in 409. The words of Procopius are express, that the Romans never recovered Britain, lib. i. p. 9. Grot. Prosper, in his Chronicon, intimates as much. In the year before the fall of Constantine, he says, Hac tempestate, præ valetudine Romanorum, vires funditus attenuatæ Britan To these facts, which we know to be authentic, it is with much distrust that we endeavour to adapt the vague lamentations of Gildas, which Bede has abridged. The account which he has left us of men sitting on the wall to be pulled down; of the British nation cut up by the Picts and Scots, like sheep by butchers; of the country becoming but the residence of wild animals; of the antithetical letter to Etius in Gaul," the barbarians drive us to the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians; so that between the two we must be either slaughtered or drowned;" of part of the natives enslaving themselves to the barbarians, to get victuals; and of the remainder turning robbers on mountains, caves, and woods, can only awake our suspicion that querulous declamation has usurped the place of history, in his verbose yet obscure composition, or has converted local incidents into a national catastrophe. He who has stated these things has also declared that the Britons, whom the Romans for near four centuries had civilised, could not build a wall, nor make arms without patterns 58; has mentioned nothing of the emperors, or transactions after Maximus; and has ascribed the walls of Hadrian and Severus to the fifth century, and the castles of the Saxon shore, so long before constructed, to a legion quitting Britain for ever. As far as Gildas can be supported and made intelligible by others, he is an acceptable companion; but he contains so much ignorant and exaggerated narration, and uses so many rhetorical generalities, that he cannot be trusted alone. 59 If niæ, p. 50. Scal. Euseb. Bede, though he afterwards copies Gildas with mistaken chronology, yet, lib. i. c. 11. after mentioning the capture of Rome by Alaric, adds, ex quo tempore Romani in Britannia regnare cessarunt, after having reigned in it 470 years since Cæsar. Now in c. 2. he says, Cæsar came 60 ant. Chr.; therefore according to Bede, in this passage, the Romans lost the government of Britain by the year 410. 56 Gildas, s. 12. and s. 14. Gildas. Bede, lib. i. c. 12. and 13. The errors of Gildas are not to be CHAP. VII. II. BOOK any application was made to Etius from Britain, it must be referred to the period when the civil contests that pervaded it, invited the attacks of the northern invaders, and facilitated their progress, as we shall afterwards notice; and it may have been sent on behalf of particular districts only. 60 charged upon Bede; he has only adopted them because he had no other Latin document to use. The Roman account of British transactions ceased when the imperial troops finally quitted England. Native literature only could supply materials afterwards for future history; but the Saxons of Bede's age did not understand the British tongue. Hence Bede had no authority but Gildas for this part of his history. Nennius had certainly other materials before him; for, with some fables, he has added many original circumstances which are entitled to attention. 60 M. Niebuhr in 1824 has published at Bonn the Panegyric of Merobaudes on the consulate of Etius in Latin verse. It contains about 200 lines, and gives us a contemporary's laudatory account of the actions of this Roman general. f CHAP. VIII. The History of BRITAIN, between the Departure of the ROMANS and the Invasion of the SAXONS. WHEN Zosimus mentions Britain, for the last time, in his history, he leaves the natives in a state of independence on Rome, so generally armed as to have achieved the exploits of Roman soldiers, and to have driven the invaders from their cities. This appears to be authentic history. We may assume the governing powers of the island, at that period, to have been the civitates or the territorial districts, because the emperor would of course have written to the predominant authority. This was the state of the island in or after the year 410, and to this we may add from others, that the Romans never regained the possession of it. There is evidence that they assailed the liberties of Armorica 2, but none that 1 Mr. Camden makes Britain return to the subjection of Honorius, and to be happy for a while under Victorinus, who governed the province, and put a stop to the inroads of the Picts and Scots. Introd. 85. Henry, lib. i. c. i. p. 119. 8vo. enlarges still more; he states, that after the death of Constantine, Britain returned to the obedience of Honorius, who sent Victorinus with some troops for its recovery and defence; and that this general struck terror into all his enemies in this island; but the increasing distresses of the empire obliged Honorius to recall Victorinus, and all his troops, from the island. There is no authority for this circumstantial detail. Rutilius, in his journey in Italy about 416, merely takes occasion to compliment Victorinus on his former honours. In this friendly digression he says, that the ferox Britannus knew his virtues, whom he had governed so as to excite their attachment. Itiner. 499. p. 14. ed. Amst. Whether he governed it under Theodosius or Honorius is not said. That he could have no command of troops is certain, because the vicarius or governor was a civil officer. The act of his government, according to Rutilius, was not then a recent thing, but at some distance, because he adds another event, which, he says, lately happened, "illustris nuper sacræ comes additus aulæ :" marking this honour as a recent event in 416, implies that the others were not recent; hence there is no reason to place him in Britain after 409. 2 Du Bos, Hist. Crit. p. 213., thinks, that the revolt of Armorica contributed more than any other event to establish la monarchie Françoise in Gaul. Armorica comprehended five of the seventeen provinces of Gaul. On its struggles for liberty, СНАР. A.D. 410. |