For centuries, after the Romans left, Britain was ruled by the seven kings of the Heptarchy. This was a time of rival realms and rival claimants, a time of petty kingdoms and tribute extracted at the point of a sword. This was a time where might made right, where the most powerful of the kings earned the right to be called the Bretwalda, and where power was gained and wielded through battle. This was a time where kingdoms were overthrown, only to rise again. Somewhere in this ill-documented mess it was also the time of King Arthur, with a heavy emphasis on “maybe”. Not the fictionalized Arthur of the later medieval romances, nor an Arthur like any of the modern versions, each of which offers a gloss only on the accumulated characterization that came before, none ever approaching the reality. As we have noted before, searching for King Arthur is a pyre on which more than one promising historian has burned their career to ash. For the problem is not that we can’t find Arthur for lack of detail. The problem is we know pretty much what happened through these decades and centuries, and nowhere in what we know is there space for this king. Any one of the Bretwalda of the Anglo Saxon centuries could be Arthur. All of them could be, but none of them are. If you need closure as to who this great king really was, when he really existed, then you must understand him as a later creation, taking all that was great from the Bretwaldas (and the Romano-British that came before) and merging them into one character. Header Image: Eighteenth century depiction of Alfred the Great, the last and greatest Bretwald of Anglo Saxon Britain and the first true king over all Anglo Saxons. Source: Samuel Woodforde / Public Domain.
The Voyage of Pytheas, the Arctic Explorer of Ancient Greece
Pytheas is not a familiar name, even to those familiar with the ancient world. But in this man we see a resolve, a determination to explore and to discover, which merits him a place among the greats. The world used to be a smaller one than it is now. For the civilizations of ancient Europe it scarcely left the Mediterranean, and on the shores of this small but crowded inland sea half of human history was written. This is not to say the ancients did not know of a wider world beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which were said to guard the entrance to the Mediterranean from the fearsome Atlantic beyond. They may not have written “here be dragons” on their maps as later cartographers did when faced with the unknown, but they knew the unknown was out there. And they knew things about it, as well. The Phoenicians had visited the British Isles, coveting these wild lands for their tin and apparently dismissing all else. They and others had heard stories from the bravest and widest ranging of explorers and travelers, who in turn had heard tale of a frozen land in the far north, populated by a people the Greeks called Hyperborean. They were so named literally for their existence beyond the knowledge of the Greeks: they are Hyperboreans because they were beyond Boreas, the god of the north wind. Their homeland was described as a land of ice and snow, sometimes frozen and sometimes bathed in sunlight for weeks at a time. Such stories were little more than fables for the Greeks, tempted by their geography and their belligerent neighbors to look inwards. But not so for Pytheas, determined to see these wonders with his own eyes, to confirm their existence, and to report back the truth of what he saw. Without Pytheas, ancient Greece would have been a smaller world. A Lost Treasure Pytheas was born in Massalia around 350 BC into the world of Greek Antiquity. These were not the Bronze Age Greeks of Homer, these were later Greeks, bonded by their shared history and watching their culture spread across Europe like a wildfire. Massalia was a Greek colony in France, buried underneath modern Marseille. Pytheas was a man of discovery, or science, and apparently while still in his twenties he fitted out a voyage to explore the farthest reaches of the frozen north. We know this because the Voyage of Pytheas was famous in his own lifetime, and the account he wrote of his journey and what he saw there was well known across the ancient world. Sadly none of his writings are known to survive, and we only know of Pytheas, or his voyage, through the writings of others. For this we must thank the cheerful plagiarism of the Greeks and Romans, happy to copy wholesale what they could not research themselves. Much of Pytheas survives in Strabo, who dutifully wrote it down even as he ridiculed much of it. He is also in Diodorus of Sicily, or even later in Pliny’s Natural History. Hundreds of years out of date, but faithfully copied and thus preserved. And what we can put together from these records of his account tells of a truly challenging affair. The Strait of Gibraltar was off limits, blockaded by the Carthaginians, but here Pytheas was lucky. He found himself ready at a rare interlude in the two centuries of war between Carthage and her great enemy Rome, and an amenable and peaceful Carthage meant access to the Atlantic. We know that Pytheas sailed upwards along the coast of Portugal and was the first to circumnavigate the British Isles, although the figure he apparently gave for its perimeter is wildly exaggerated. We also know that he went ashore. Pytheas had a strange name for Britain, in that he named it at all. He called the island Bretannikē, a Celtic word which has nothing to do with archaic Greek and which therefore, presumably, the islanders gave themselves and revealed to the explorer. It even tells us where he likely was when he heard the name, as it matches Welsh or general Celtic but not Irish. Pytheas described the island as a triangle, with the three corners being Kantion, Orkas and Belerion. The first two are clearly Kent and the Orkney Islands, names which are therefore ancient enough to come from prehistory, and the third can only be Cornwall. Heading north from Britain, Pytheas became the first Greek in history to encounter pack ice, translated by Pliny as mare concretum, a solid (frozen) sea. Further still he apparently sailed into the Baltic, having passed along the northern coast of Germany. But he did not sail far enough to meet the peoples who gave the Baltic its name. The Balts, from modern day Lithuania and Latvia, more or less bordered the Scythians, another people of the region, but while Pytheas knew the latter we have no record of him pressing on further. Thus we can define the apparent limit of his voyage. In fact, with the Baltic Pytheas seems to have considered the north to be explored, his voyage to be done. And he had certainly seen many new things. He reckoned his latitude by the position of the sun and used it to navigate, he saw the midnight sun with his own eyes, and he was among the first to notice the link between the Moon and the tides. But it is perhaps his most important discovery that is also his most enigmatic. Pytheas, leaving the British Isles and travelling to the Baltic, encountered a land he named Thule. Perhaps this is the general name he gave to these northern wastes; the Greeks and later the Romans would certainly use it as a general term in this way. But Pytheas seems to confirm that there was a single, distinct Thule as well, and even gives details about it. Thule was an island, 6 days’ sailing from the tip of Scotland. It
Hengist and Horsa: Arthurian Myth or Saxon Reality?
For most people, the history of England begins with the Norman Conquest in 1066. The line of kings is generally traced to William I, the first Norman king who invaded across the channel and defeated the Saxons under Harold Godwinson, as famously depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. This is certainly a convenient way to do things, but it is a gross oversimplification. The problem comes from the tangled web of Saxon kings which came before, not so much a line of succession as a web of competing claimants and warlords in a country far more in flux and less stable than Norman England. There are other problems with reaching back further than Wiliam I as well. The Saxon kings tend to have complicated names, disputed claims to changing parts of the country. While it is not true that the Normans united England, they certainly drew a line in the sand and it can be convenient to start with them simply because it was, indeed, a fresh start. So, who were these people that the Normans overthrew and subjugated, importing their own aristocracy which lasted for centuries? Saxon cliches are almost endless, think blonde giants with pigtails and battleaxes, think ornate Celtic designs and raiding parties who disappear into the mists of time. For this is the other great problem with the Saxons. We know of the later kings, but their earliest history rubs up against mythology. The Saxons were once invaders too, raiding parties like the later Vikings, Norsemen from far-off Scandinavia. That is, until they were invited to settle in England, invited to establish themselves permanently. We are told that the names of the first chieftains who came to England to stay were Hengist and Horsa. We also know the name of the King of the Britons who invited them: the mighty warlord Vortigern. Case closed, right? Well, unfortunately not. Because we also know who they faced to conquer this new territory, and here we are on far more problematic ground. For Hengist and Horsa fought Arthur, king of the Britons. And now we have to ask what is real at all? A Forgotten English Mythology? Attempts to uncover the truth behind the legends of King Arthur have been described as career-ending for historians and archaeologists. The consensus today is that there may have been such a figure, but anything we could know about the real man and his world has been almost entirely lost, with only the broadest brushstrokes remaining, hopelessly intermingled with later inventions. Aside from anything else we have no evidence of King Arthur. Everything about him was written centuries later, set in that same anachronistic later world. Lancelot and Gawain are chivalric knights of the middle ages, not post-Roman warlords. Only Merlin survives with a touch of the old Britain. And so Hengist and Horsa, brothers who arrived from Denmark at the head of an invasion force of the Scandinavian Saxons, Jutes and Angles and established a kingdom in southeastern England, must be legendary too? There is certainly much to suggest this. Let’s start with their names. The too-neat alliteration points to a fictional origin, as does the meaning of the names, which translate to “stallion” and “horse” respectively. It is not impossible that these were their real names, but they fall short on realism in the same way as “Magnum PI” or “Harley Quinn”. Puns rarely exist in the real world. Then there is their genealogy. According to the 9th century text History of the Britons attributed to the Welsh monk and historian Nennius, the brothers could trace their lineage back ten generations, to a pagan god no less. The association with this kind of fictional ancestry, especially one with such a round number, shows that at least a part of the story is fake. Nennius claimed that the brothers arrived on three ships, exiles from Germany who established themselves on the marshy island of Thanet at the most easterly point of what is now Kent. This island had been gifted to them in 447 AD by Vortigern, “King of the Britons”. Vortigern saw in the invaders potential allies in his ambition to fully control all of ancient Britain. The brothers and their companions had a reputation as fierce warriors, and Vortigern saw an opportunity to yoke that strength. He is another difficult character who stands at the edge of history. Like Hengist and Horsa (and Arthur) we only know of him from documents written centuries later. Like them, we have nothing that survives to prove his existence. According to the story Hengist and Horsa, welcoming into Britain, sent word to their homeland that this land was rich and offered much. This led to a wave of Saxon immigration: every year there were more Saxons, every year they had more fighting men and more to fight for. Vortigern’s critical error occurred when he was a guest at a Saxon feast. Drunk and enamored of Hengist’s daughter, he promised the Saxons the entirety of Kent for their kingdom if he could win her hand in marriage. Hengist agreed and Vortigern initially won himself a powerful ally in his new father-in-law. But there were problems. For a start, Vortigern was already married, to the daughter of the Bishop of Auxerre, a powerful man. Secondly and more pressingly, Kent already had a ruler and was not strictly Vortigern’s to give. And while Saxon allies were extremely handy at Vortigern’s side against Pictish insurrection, more and more kept arriving. With Vortigern in hiding from his (original) father-in-law, it fell to his son Vortimer to face the encroaching Saxons. He openly engaged them and forced them back to their isle of Thanet, but they were never eradicated. Hengist and Horsa fought Vortigern and Vortimer in 455 AD at a great battle at Aylesford. Horsa was there slain, with the Saxon kingdom ruled henceforth by Hengist and his son Esc. Two years later the Britons under Vortigern were crushed at Crayford and forced to flee: the Saxons had won
