Conquest Or Rebellion?

[caldrail]

A few miles south of where I live is the site of a battle fought in AD556. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that "Cynric and Ceawlin fought with Britons at Beranburgh".

 

Some time ago I wrote an article about the creation of Wessex. When I came to write that piece, I discovered that a book I'd found at our local library was no longer there. Despite long searches, the desperately needed volume had vanished. To this day it still hasn't been found.

 

With hindsight, I was discovering for myself the dilemma the dark age chroniclers were faced with. In attempting to set down for posterity the history of their time, they had little to go on. They too were missing the vital data. It isn't possible therefore to describe the battle in any detail. No-one is entirely sure where it was fought. No-one knows who won it.

 

Barbury Castle

Despite the name, you won't find medieval ruins here. Barbury was an iron Age fort built around 600BC, one of many that sprang up along the Ridgeway, an old cross-country trail that runs below the fort. It was occupied by local britons during the Roman period and it sems the Romans never bothered with it. As we sometimes find in Roman Britain, the Iron Age lived on right beside them. At some point in the Dark Ages, the settlement was turned into a cemetary.

 

American soldiers quartered nearby had begun to bulldoze the ramparts sometime around 1942-43, presumably intending to use the site for similar reasons to the original inhabitants. In doing so, they uncovered skeletons, and Barbury's existence as an ancient monument had begun.

 

You can find Barbury Castle a few miles south of Wroughton in Wiltshire. It's located on the north edge of a ridge on the Marlborough Downs, overlooking the plateau where Wroughton Airfield and the Science Museum Annexe are today. The ditches and ramparts are readily visible from some distance, and were once much taller than they are today, never mind the wooden palisades that were placed on them in their heyday. It's also possible to see more than just the fort itself. A series of iron age field boundaries are visible on the hillside to the east, the remains of a wealthy landowners farm. The hillsides on the north, south, and west edges are very steep, as I can personally attest to. These days it's a country park with excellent views of the surrounding area, easily accessible by car.

 

What The Name Reveals

Barbury is of course the name by which the place is known today. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it's given as 'Beranburgh'. Other sources give it as 'Beranbyrig', and a document from 1252 mentions the fort as 'Berebyre'.

 

'Burgh' is an old english word for an enclosed space which comfortably describes the fort. 'Byrig' means something similar. 'Bere' would suggest barley cultivation and there was once a small medieval village located in the valley south of the fort, but 'Beran' infers that the site was named 'Bera's Fort' at some point, and Bera is held to be a Saxon warlord.

 

Our Dark Age Battle

Until a couple of decades ago, the battle site used to be marked on Ordnance Survey maps, so sure were historians of where this battle had been fought. That's no longer true. The nature of events surrounding this battle have become more mysterious and complex as archaeology uncovers more of our past.

 

Two sites have been favoured. First is the traditional site just southwest of Wroughton Airfield, on the sloping plateau below the castle. The other is on the high gound between the castle and Smeathes Ridge, very close to the fort itself.

 

One thing must be made very clear. Whoever defended Barbury fought outside the the fort. There is no sign that Barbury Castle was ever attacked. It was a refuge, as it had always been, a place for the population to shelter from the fighting whilst the warriors gathered outside to do bloody battle with their attackers. It was the same story with the earlier confrontation at Old Sarum. The Saxons were known to have little inclination or ability in siege warfare.

 

In order to emphasise how difficult it was for Saxons to attack hill forts, we need to realise that their armies were small. The idea of a battle conjures in our minds massed racks of thousands very easily. The dark age chroniclers list any number of confrontations, and if the casualties they list are anything close to the truth, then the death rate was horrendous.

 

In fact it's likely the numbers are exaggerated, especially since the chroniclers of the eighth and ninth centuries had little recourse but to set down the heroic stories the Saxons remembered their deeds by. This means our armies are much smaller than we might imagine. Some of these battles may well have been fought with as little as a few dozen men each.

 

Nonetheless the dark age battlefield was not a healthy place to be. Some estimates place the average chance of survival as close to even. Captured troops were routinely slaughtered whilst leaders were more usually on the receiving end of some very brutal and cruel treatment.

 

Saxon armies at this time were developing larger round shields, becoming more and more reliant on shield walls and formations, rather than the looser raiding style of combat prevalent in the struggles of the late 5th century. Spears were not thrown in volleys, but independently, the warrior running ahead of his peers in order to throw rather like a javelin,and with swords being expensive items, spears were still much more common than axes at this time.

 

Although we have unreliable accounts of Romano-British soldiers from the wars of Ambrosius Aurelianus and Germanus of Auxerre in previous generations, it doesn't necessarily follow that the Britons who fought at Barbury were the same, and given the years of peace they had enjoyed, it isn't difficult to think they were ill-equipped to fight the Saxons.

 

Conquest Or Rebellion

The most elusive quality about Dark Age history, especially that as we move from the Sub-Roman period to the Saxon Settlement, is that the closer you study it, the less you can be sure of.

 

In conventional chronology, such as obtained from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the West Saxons arrived on the south Hampshire coast in 495 led by Cerdic and his son Cynric. This was a period which according to Gildas, a 6th century british monk who wrote a sermon called De Excidio Britainnae (The Ruin of Britain), was toward the end of decades of violent struggle.

 

We learn that a battle unconnected with the West Saxons was fought at Mons Badonicus which brought forty years of peace, but already, the Saxons were preparing to restart their territorial expansion. German tribes weren't unknown in Britain. Considerable numbers had been enlisted by the Romans to defend Britain and one source describes the Saxons as 'good citizens'. When the pay ran out, these settlers broke into rebellion, and more germanic mercenaries were invited into Britain to help put down the trouble.

 

Despite its limitations, however, the Chronicle provides a picture of the invasion and conquest of Wessex by Saxons who extended their control northwards from the south coast of Hampshire to embrace the entire region. It is however, unwise to assume, as some writers have done, that the battles, which tend to occur in a northward progression, were necessarily fought at a frontier or that they represent the rate of advance from southern Hampshire into Wiltshire and beyond.

Victoria History of the Counties - Wiltshire -Vol 2

 

Archaeological evidence shows that germanic settlements existed along the upper and mid Thames valley as early as the late 4th century. In some cases, the remains exist alongside Roman burials suggesting that they were indeed settlers under Roman patronage. These were immigrant populations in considerable numbers who dominated these central regions. Further, these settlers don't appear to have mixed with the local populations very readily.

 

When the Saxons rose in rebellion against the Romano-British from around 440, there was more resistance than foreign merenaries. Gildas describes resistance led by Ambrosius Aurelianus, possibly with a stronghold at Amesbury, said to be a man of noble Roman family. His successor may have been the elusive Arthur, but at any rate, the victory of Mons Badonicus around the turn of the 6th century brought the troubles in the south of England to an end.

 

At least, that's what Gildas tells us. There some people who believe the date given for his De Excidio Brittanae is much later than it really was. Instead of an estimated origin of around 540, some believe the sermon was written as much as fifty years earlier, thus making Ambrosius Aurelianus the true victor of of the Saxon Rebellion within a realistic time frame. Whilst there are some questions to be asked about the events he describes, Gildas does discuss 'tyrants' known to have been alive during the accepted period .

 

It is tempting to think therefore that the Battle of Mons Badonicus was against the Thames Valley Saxons, rather than those of Aesc and Aella, and that the threat of conquest was therefore from the northeast. It's as well to point out at this time that the old Roman provinces had long since vanished. The Roman presence was organised from urban centres and connected to a government in mainland Italy. Once the Britons had broken away from the Roman Empire, as they had done by the late 440's, there was effectively no central government, and what was left of the former Roman administration had collapsed, although Roman titles of office continued to be used as honorifics, suggesting some level of co-operation against threats.

 

Dumnomnia, comprising the distant southwest of Britain in Devon and Cornwall, had always been treated with some respect by the Romans. That part of the British Isles was never subject to warfare and the occupying forces were light. It would appear that Dumnonia evolved from areas that had willingly co-operated or come to some arrangement with the Romans.

 

In the more central south west, areas had broken into petty kingdoms, whose names are not certain but suggested as Caer Celemion, with a capital at Calleva Atrebatum ("Woodland Town of the Atrebates" or Silchester), Caer Gwinntuic whose capital was Venta Belgarum ("Market of the Belgae" or Winchester), and Caer Glui, with a capital at Glevum ("Bright" - exact meaning unknown, or Gloucester). The borders would have been ill-defined and subject to controversy. There is still some controversy because we don't know with any certainty what political divisions exited. This was not an era of organised government.

 

It must be pointed out that these capitals were the regional government centres set up by the Romans to administer the British tribes. In the Migration Period, these cities were in decline. Without the economy the Romans brought with them, these urban centres were impossible to maintain, reduced to abandonment sooner or later. Gildas refers to the ruins found by the Saxons, and we're also told that these germanic warriors largely avoided them. In all probability disease had something to do with that decision as much as the impression they had been built by giants, and one wonders if this awe was the origin of Geoffery of Monmouths 12th century account of Britain having been inhabited by giants in prehistory.

 

Wiltshire, the county where both the battles of Searobyrig (Old Sarum, 552) and Beranbyrig (Barbury, 556) were fought, was divided between Caer Gwinntuic in the south, Caer Celemion in the northeast, and a section in the northwest dominated by the Hwicce, a tribe who later expanded their territory before Wessex conquered them and whose name has been linked to the Gewisse. In other words, the seperation between Saxon and Briton in the south of England was not as clear cut as elsewhere.

 

Archaeologically the area around Barbury connects with the Saxons of the Thames Valley, and although Saxon remains are plentiful, they're also diverse, scattered, and not especially illustrative of great events. There is however a Saxon cemetary at West Overton, some miles south of Barbury, which includes remains that date from the 5th century, well before the battle.

 

We therefore have Saxons living in Wiltshire long before the Battle of Beranburgh happened. Worse still, the West Saxon leaders have british names, not germanic. By association the Gewisse, as the Venerable Bede calls the West Saxons, have involvement with the Romano-British. This is despite some DNA evidence that suggests a form of apartheid into the Dark Age, with Saxon settlers in the Thames Valley living apart from their Romano-British neighbours.

 

Instead of a campaign of conquest as is usually written of, it might be more accurate to think of this as a campaign of domination. Buried in this curious war is a tale of politics, petty rebellion, and armed struggle. What a great shame then that all we know is that a young Caewlin, later to become one of the Bretwalda's ("Britain Ruler") listed in those Dark Age chronicles, began his military career at Beranburgh. It's hard not to think the victory was his. Or that this was indeed part of a conquest of immigrant warriors.

 

Perhaps, with knowledge that the West Saxons had strong links to the native Britons, we are in fact looking at the new rulers putting down a rebellion. Even if the mysterious Bera was a Briton, a man resisting the rule of his new masters - Even if the britons actually won that fight, seeing as the Chronicle does not trumpet Saxon victory - Barbury became a graveyard.

Edited August 29, 2010 by caldrail