Slavery and Wales
The title says Slavery ‘and’ Wales because the degree to which slavery existed in Wales is difficult to determine. Without a doubt, many Welsh were forced into slavery–evidence points to Welsh captives on the continent of Europe as well as in Anglo-Saxon England. St Patrick himself was Briton/Welsh (born 387 AD) and was captured by the Irish and made a slave. The Celts were well-known slave-keepers, as were the Romans after them. But were the Welsh themselves, after the Romans left? Hard to imagine they weren’t when their neighbors all around were enslaving them. But in all of the 767 pages of John Davies The History of Wales, he doesn’t mention slavery once. However, Ron Wilcox writes in his book Between Romans and Normans: “Living alongside the bondsmen were the slaves who worked as agricultural labourers or artisans. Most were born into slavery but Read more…
Vortigern? Who was he again?
Vortigern was a King of the Britons who is remembered for welcoming the Saxons into Britain during the dark ages and then being unable to get them to leave. This site: http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artwho/who.htm would very much like to rehabilitate Vortigern. He has extensive information on this site. Our knowledge of Vortigern comes from some early sources. Gildas, who wrote a moral history of Britain, states, around 540 BC: “At this meeting, the council invited the Saxons in three keels from Germany, as a counter to the threat from the Picts in the north. This is followed after some time by a conflict over the annona (payment in kind), after which the Saxon federates devastate the country. Vortigern, who may have been named by Gildas, is not portrayed by Gildas as a sole ruler, or a High King if you will. He rules Read more…
Rewriting the Dark Ages
A new theory has been working it’s way through the archaeological literature that there was no Saxon ‘invasion’ of Britain after the fall of Rome. The theory states that “9th century Anglo-Saxon propaganda distort [ed] the records for the turbulent 5th and 6th centuries. . . . Rather than Briton versus Anglo-Saxon – as in the myth of Arthur – was it simply a murderous struggle between rival British warlords?” http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/rewriting-the-age-of-arthur.htm The theory, at least in this article, is based on a lack of primary sources of the era. This is an interesting argument, but there are a number of sources that suggest it isn’t accurate. First: written evidence, which the article claims to be scarce, is far more prevalent than at first appears–it’s just that the sources are not necessarily British. This site on the ruin and conquest of Britain, details, Read more…
Danish Bones Found in Oxford
There’s a new article in The Oxford Student which describes a recent find of bones, determined to have belonged to Danes and the result of a massacre ordered by King Ethelbert in 1003 AD. It sheds some light on an early period in British history and points to something that is easy to forget as you work your way through the Early Middle Ages: that the “Saxons” from literature and mythology were not monolithic, but comprised of different ethnic groups and nationalities. What this find reveals is that the Saxons, who now controlled most of England, murdered their Danish neighbors. From a Welsh perspective, these groups might seem one and the same, but they weren’t. In the Oxford article, it states: “Vikings’ skeletons found underneath one of St John’s quads are the remains of a violent “ethnic cleansing” over 1,000 years ago. Read more…
Guest Post: Anna Elliott, author of “Twilight of Avalon”
Why I love Arthurian Stories In the Spring of 2007, I woke up from a very vivid dream of telling my mother that I was going to write a book about the daughter of Modred, son of Arthur and the great villain of the Arthurian cycle of tales. I’d been writing historical fiction and sending books around to agents and editors, always coming close to being published but never actually getting a book sold. I was four months pregnant with my first baby at the time, and had been starting to think that as much as I loved writing, maybe a professional career wasn’t going to happen for me–or at least not for some time. Something about this dream, though, just wouldn’t let me go. I had been an English major in college with a focus on Medieval literature Read more…
Buried Treasure
The impulse to bury treasure, gold, or much-valued objects is long-standing. “An amateur treasure hunter armed with a metal detector has found over 52,000 Roman coins worth $1 million buried in field, one of the largest ever such finds in the UK, said the British Museum. Dave Crisp, a hospital chef, came across the buried treasure while searching for “metal objects” in a field near Frome, Somerset in south-western England.” http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/09/uk.roman.coin.treasure/ “The find includes more than 760 coins from the reign of Carausius, the Roman naval officer who seized power in 286 and ruled until he was assassinated in 293. “The late third century A.D. was a time when Britain suffered barbarian invasions, economic crises and civil wars . . . Roman rule was finally stabilized when the Emperor Diocletian formed a coalition with the Emperor Maximian, which lasted 20 Read more…
Mount Badon
In the Arthurian legend, as well as in the historical record, Mount Badon (or Caer Baddon) is the location of Arthur’s last battle that pushed the Saxons back into England for a generation. All the literary sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, the last of the historical and first of the mythical, indicate its significance. This is what they have to say: Nennius: “The twelfth battle was on Badon Hill and in it nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low save he alone; and he was victorious in all his campaigns. ” Writing in 796 AD (Historia Britonum, Page 35) Annales Cambriae: “The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and Read more…
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