Note C. p. . The Early Relations between England and the Continent

The notices of Britain between the time of the English Conquest and the conversion of the English to Christianity are indeed few and far between. They are chiefly to be found in an episode of Prokopios (Bell. Goth. iv. 20), from which I have made two quotations in the text (pp. , 30). That the Brittia of Prokopios is Britain, and not, as Dr. Latham (Dict. Geog., art. Britannicæ Insulæ) fancies, Heligoland, Rugen, or some other island, I have no kind of doubt, and Mr. Kemble seems not to have entertained any. The difficulty is what his Brettania is. It strikes me that he had heard both of the continental and the insular Britannia, and that he fancied them to be two islands. His Brittia therefore is Britain and his Brettania is Britanny. (Cf. Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 362; “Βριττία, Britannia, und Βριταννία, Hibernia, wahrscheinlich durch Vermengung mit Britannia cismarina, Bretagne.”) John Kinnamos (ii. 12, p. ed. Bonn), ranks Βρίττιοι καὶ Βρετανοί among the Crusaders. Allowing for the primary error of fancying Britanny to be an island, his geographical description is really not so monstrous as might be thought. His well-known story about the souls of the dead being ferried over to Brittia, and his confused and marvellous account of the Roman wall, show how strange and mysterious a land Britain had already become. But the two passages which I have quoted are distinct and intelligible. For an island inhabited by Angles, Frisians, and Britons we need not go far afield.

Prokopios tells us nothing of the process by which these three nations came into the island. There is, as far as I know, only one foreign notice of the English Conquest, which is however probably contemporary with one stage or another of it. This is in the Chronicon Imperiale of Prosper (see Dict. Biog. and Potthast’s Wegweiser in Prosper), written either in the fifth or in the sixth century. Here we have two entries (Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. i. 198, 199; M. H. B. lxxxii.); the former saying that “hac tempestate [the time of Constantine the Tyrant, 407–411; cf. Zôsimos, vi. 5], præ valitudine Romanorum, vires funditus attenuatæ Britanniæ.” The other says that, some time before the death of Aëtius in 454, “Britanniæ usque ad hoc tempus variis cladibus eventibusque laceratæ, in ditionem Saxonum rediguntur.” I am however not sure that Prokopios has not a dark and confused allusion to the Armorican migration when he speaks of vast numbers of people coming from Britain to settle in the land of the Franks, on the strength of which it was that the Frankish Kings claimed the dominion of the island (τοσαύτη ἡ τῶνδε τῶν ἐθνῶν πολυανθρωπία φαίνεται οὖσα ὥστε ἀνὰ πᾶν ἔτος κατὰ πολλοὺς ἐνθένδε μετανιστάμενοι ξὺν γυναιξὶ καὶ παισὶν ἐς Φράγγους χωροῦσιν. οἱ δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐνοικίζουσιν ἐν γῆς τῆς σφετέρας τὴν ἐρημοτέραν δοκοῦσαν εἶναι, καὶ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ τὴν νῆσον προσποιεῖσθαί φασιν). In an earlier passage Prokopios makes Belisarios (ii. 6) make the Goths the offer of Bretannia as an island much larger than Sicily. This is evidently in mockery, and it seems to imply that both Britain and Britanny were looked on as lands which had quite passed out of all practical reckoning on the part of the Empire.

Prokopios goes on, in the same chapter, to tell a long story, which is discussed by Mr. Kemble (Saxons in England, i. 23; cf. Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 362), of an English princess (παρθένου κόρης, γένους Βριττίας ... ἧσπερ ἀδελφὸς βασιλεὺς ἦν τότε Ἀγγίλων τοῦ ἔθνους), who was betrothed to Radiger, son of the King of the Varni, who, on his father’s death, instead of fulfilling his engagement, married his father’s widow, a sister of Theodberht, King of the Franks, who reigned from 534 to 537. The incestuous marriage, which was repeated in after days by Eadbald of Kent and Æthelbald of Wessex, is expressly said to have been contracted in obedience to the dying commands of Radiger’s father (cf. Soph. Trach. 1199–1207), by the advice of his chief men, and in conformity with the custom of the nation (καθάπερ ὁ πάτριος ἡμῖν ἐφίησι νόμος). The English princess however gathers a vast fleet and army, takes with her one of her brothers, not the King, as its commander, sails to the mouth of the Rhine, fights a battle, defeats Radiger, and compels him to send away his step-mother and marry her. The tale, which is told in great detail, is doubtless mythical in its details; but we may, with Mr. Kemble, accept it as pointing to the possibility of some intercourse, both peaceful and warlike, between the insular and the continental Teutons. But I cannot follow Mr. Kemble when he goes on (i. 25) to build up, on the expressions of a German ecclesiastical writer, a theory of insular Saxons aiding the Frank Theodoric in a war with the Thuringians. The author of the Translation of Saint Alexander (Pertz, ii. 674) is not speaking of any particular detachment of Saxons from Britain coming over to Germany to take a part in a particular war. By a strange perversion, this writer of the ninth century derives the continental Saxons, as a nation, from the English in Britain; “Saxonum gens, sicut tradit antiquitas, ab Anglis Britanniæ incolis egressa, per Oceanum navigans Germaniæ litoribus studio et necessitate quærendarum sedium appulsa est.” On this the editor remarks, “More solito traditio res gestas invertit, ita ut Saxones non e Saxonia Britanniam, sed ex Britannia Saxoniam appulisse dicantur.” The legend is no doubt a corruption of the legendary origin of the Saxons given by Widukind, i. 3–6. On the sense in which the English had a better right to the name of “Old-Saxons” than the Saxons on the continent, see Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 188.

It is worth remarking that Jordanes, though he devotes his second chapter to a description of Britain, simply gives an account patched up from Cæsar, Livy, Strabo, and Dio, and seems to describe the Britons as still the inhabitants of the island, without any reference to the settlement of the English. He makes another reference to Britain in his fifth chapter, but it is of a purely mythical kind.

I doubt whether there is any mention of England in Gregory of Tours, except in the two passages where he records the marriage of Æthelberht with the daughter of Chariberht. He does not use the words Saxon, Angle, or Britain, but he speaks of Kent as if the name were familiarly known. “Charibertus ... filiam habuit quæ postea in Cantiam, virum accipiens, est deducta” (iv. 26). So afterwards (ix. 26) he speaks of “filiam unicam quam in Cantia regis cujusdam filius matrimonio copulavit.”

Coming down later among continental writers, there is a well known passage in the Annals of Einhard (A. 786) in which he speaks of the English Conquest and of the Armorican migration as its consequence. Charles leads his army “in Brittanniam cismarinam,” and the Annalist goes on to explain; “Nam quum ab Anglis ac Saxonibus Brittannia insula fuisset invasa, magna pars incolarum ejus mare trajiciens in ultimis Galliæ finibus Venetorum et Coriosolitarum regiones occupavit.” There is another mention of the Armorican migration in Ermoldus Nigellus, iii. 11 (Pertz, ii. 490). Lantpreht (Lambert), whose command lies in Britanny, is thus described;

“Prævidet hic fines, quos olim gens inimica
Trans mare lintre volans ceperat insidiis.
Hic populus veniens supremo ex orbe Britanni,
Quos modo Brittones Francica lingua vocat.
Nam telluris egens, vento jactatus et imbri,
Arva capit prorsus, atque tributa parat.
Tempore nempe illo hoc rus quoque Gallus habebat,
Quando idem populus fluctibus actus adest.”

On the whole it would seem that a certain amount of intercourse was kept up between the Franks in Gaul and the Southern English states, but that to the world in general Britain had become an unknown land about which any fables might be put forth.