It's been well established that Roman Britain was not just a fringe outpost occupied by necessity and held together by tacit agreements between continental officers and local tribes. Romans from Syria, north Africa, Spain, Egypt, the Black Sea and the Arabian peninsula fought, won their freedom, lived and died on the island, as we know from inscriptions set up in their name, as well as DNA and morphological evidence from burials.
But there is an interesting phenomenon that hasn't been explored in depth, but as an aside in lengthy discussions about the historicity of King Arthur, the legacy of Rome inherited by the incoming Angles and Saxons, and explorations about the nature of the late Roman military. This is the presence of distinct, ethnic communities of foreign soldiers and their families established in garrison towns close to the Caledonian frontier and the north Sea, associated with the line of defences making up the Saxon Shore. Historians in the past have mentioned this as purely an instance of the mobility of the Roman army and the pressure faced by Roman Britain. Their families, neighbours, lifestyle, beliefs and economic practices have been pretty much overlooked, and few of the potential sites have been archaeologically investigated.
The primary sources of evidence for these are the Notitia Dignitarum, an itinerary of the Western Roman army revised up to c.420 CE, toponymy (place-names), fossilized by later settlers, and a corpus of inscriptions from a handful of forts along or close to Hadrian's Wall, where considerable archaeology has been conducted.
The Notitia refers to a mixed group of limitanei as being under the command of the Dux Britanniarum, called the Maurorum Aurelianorum, which also appears as an inscription in Aballaba (Burgh-by-Sands) as Maur[o]rum Aur(elianorum) Gallineque. These soldiers were probably from a community of Berbers from the province of Mauretania, moved to the city of Aurelianum (Orleans) by the emperor Gallienus and then to Hadrian's wall. Alternatively, the Aurelianorum might refer to the unit's formation under the emperor Aurelian, who ruled shortly after Gallienus and retook Britain from the Gallic Empire around 260.
An inscription from Lancaster describes the office of a prefect commanding a number of barcariorum Tigrisiensium, or bargemen from the Tigris river, who could be related to the Equites Syriae mentioned as being under the command of the Dux in the Notitia. Another from Brougham (Brovacum) on Hadrian's Wall appears to read Equites Stratonicianorum, referring to a cavalry unit from Stratonicea, a Hellenistic city in western Anatolia named after a Seleucid queen. Since this name had been abandoned by the 2nd century (Hadrian had renamed the city Hadrianopolis), the community here must have been proud of their Hellenistic roots.
One military unit well-attested in the Notitia and in place-name evidence is the Taifals. Originally an eastern Germanic group north of Romania who lived alongside communities that were identified by later Roman authors as 'Goths' and 'Sarmatians', the Taifals were already spread across the Roman frontier by the 3rd century CE, as recruits in the service of Germanic and Roman rulers. The Notitia describes the Equites Taifali as under the command of the Dux Britanniarum in the north of Britain, and a unit of Taifals was also stationed in Gaul, as Equites Honoriani Taifali. The 16th-century copy of the Notitia gives them a characteristic 'yin-yang' draco-and-sun motif, which also appears as the standard of an unidentified unit in the Eastern empire.
The draco was a stock symbol of Dacian identity, appearing on Trajan's colum, coins and on the Arch of Constantine, so we can assume that at least some of this unit were from Dacia and worshipped Dacian gods, such as Zalmoxis, a half-man half-bear thought to be a long-lost philosopher by the ancient Greeks. Green (2014) makes the case that the village of Tealby, within a day's march from Roman Lindocolina (Lincoln), was in Anglo-Saxon times known as Tǣflasby, or village of the Taifals.
No excavation has been done here, so it is uncertain whether the designation can be supported by material culture, but in the late Roman period it may well have been a mercenary settlement attatched to the Dux's headquarters in Lincoln. The military command of northern Britain seems to have been controlled from York, ever since the Barbarian Conspiracy of 367 and perhaps since Constantine's acclamation as Emperor there in 305, but archaeological and written evidence suggests that Lincoln continued as a regional headquarters well into the post-Roman period. Indeed, as Green argues, the very name Lindisfarenas, modern Lindisfarne, implies groups of distinct settlers from in and around Lincoln that could not be painted as Angles or Saxons: Tafails, Goths, Sarmatians, Franks and any number of resettled families of continental descent.
More Anglo-Saxon names give the impression that Germanic groups were settled in the east of Britain, perhaps as part of a defence-in-depth strategy against Saxon raids or to keep the interior of the province secure. Suebian communities were evidently resettled by the Romans: several Swaffhams are found in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire, and a legendary ancestor in the genealogy of the Kingdom of Deira (a predecessor to Northumbria from c.500 to 650 CE) has the name Suebdaeg. The genealogy of East Anglia also claims one Swæppa as an ancestor. More speculatively, the town of Walshingham may have originally been called Wælsungaham, or homestead of the Volsungs, a poetic name for the Burgundians found in Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. The Burgundians were notably on good terms with Rome, willingly resettled twice (the second after their destruction by Hunnic mercenaries in Roman pay), and by the final days of the Western empire, their king Gundobad practically controlled what was left of the army.
The one other literary source that indicates a very cosmopolitan end to Roman rule in Britain is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In Book 5, Chapter 9, he states that the missionary tot he Saxons, Egbert, knew of 'many peoples in Germany from whom the Anglo-Saxons derive their origin', which included the 'Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, and Bructeri'. While this has traditionally overlooked in favour of Bede's more famous passage on the Anglo-Saxons, it possibly reflects an awareness that these peoples settled in Britain either with or slightly before the Angles and Saxons.
The Bructeri only appear in 3rd and 4th century accounts as a northern branch of the Franks, so this might suggest that they were settled, perhaps by Carausius (who was born in the same region) or by Theodosius after the Great Conspiracy, either to neutralise their threat to the Gallic frontier or to support the Limes Saxonici. The Frisians are attested by Old English poetry and Byzantine accounts as being part-and-parcel of the Anglo-Saxon migration, but their proximity to Britain may have led them to be brought into the province as federates somewhat earlier. Together, this might go some way to explain the close ties between the Saxon-Frisian Kingdom of Kent and the Merovingians in the 6th and 7th centuries.
The Huns are not attested anywhere else as migrating or resettling to Britain, unless a claim by Atilla recorded in Priscus' Historia Hunnorum that he 'ruled all the islands of the Ocean', the apparent similarity between the Kentish King Octa (500 - 543 CE) and the Hunnic ruler Octar (415 - 430 CE), and the claim made by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1130 CE) that during the final years of Roman rule the Huns harried the island under their king Wanius, are taken into account. As for the Danes and Rugians, the only supporting evidence comes from Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes, which claims that the legendary Danish king Frothi III (c.410 - 450 CE) invaded the island and tricked its rulers into submission, as well as the tenuous old Welsh connections to the story of Hamlet.
So if communities from the continent were resettled and stationed in late Roman Britain for generations, what archaeological impact did they leave? The most direct evidence is inscriptions, left at a number of frontier forts, commemorating their military post and sometimes leaving a name or a name of a deity. At Birdoswald, two Dacian-style falx symbols attest that as the Notitia details, Taifal and Sarmatian units were stationed in northern Britain. More speculatively, chance finds of military belt buckles, brooches, earrings and other equipment have been found scattered across the island, mainly in the east and south, and bear similarities to finds in better understood areas of the late Roman Empire, such as the Rhine frontier. The Huns are particularly associated with open-ended gold earrings, medallions and other fine gold metalwork which was adopted in Scandinavia, some of which arguably feature faces with 'Asiatic' features. A very similar earring to the Hunnic-associated ones turned up recently in north Yorkshire, and a cicada brooch nearly identical to those found in 5th-century contexts in the Crimea was found in Suffolk. Two finds, however, is not an overwhelming body of evidence.
More promising is the archaeology of the late 4th, 5th and 6th century settlement of Mucking, overlooking the Thames in southern Essex. This is a very 'organic' settlement by Roman urban standards, with several layers of occupation above a maze of Romano-British burials, Iron Age roundhouses, Bronze Age earthworks, and even Neolithic barrows. A number of Romano-British belt-fittings have been found here, and its proximity to both the Saxon Shore and Londinium makes it likely that it was originally some kind of mercenary camp. Excavations have also determined that a Romano-British village existed on the site, abandoned in the early 4th century. If the Frisian were resettled and left an archaeological record, it would be here. It is worth mentioning that the Byzantine chronicler Procopius mentions only three peoples as inhabiting Britain: Frisians, Angles and Britons. The Saxons seem to be a social construct of later centuries.
While there is plenty of DNA evidence that backs up the idea of an Anglo-Saxon / west Germanic migration, genetic research has failed to find anyone with an ancestral homeland in areas known from written sources to have once been Hunnic, Suebian, Taifal et cetera. The longevity of these mercenary communities, as demonstrated above, might make that search useless, as by five or six generations any self-identifying barbarians would have been as 'Brittonic' as everyone else, especially if they did not bring their family with them when they were resettled.
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