Vortigern,
All I can say about Coel Hen is that he existed. Not much else sadly. Despite the frustration Arthur gives us Coel Hen is even more mysterious. And as for his being Dux Britannium, most reaserchers agree on that. For good resreach on Ambrosius Aurelianus and Vortigern I recommend "The Real King Arthur" by P.F.J Turner. However be careful, he overuses Latin translations of names and listens to Linda Melcor and Geoffrey of Manmouth too much. (ie. Arthur was Lucius Artorius Castus, he commanded the Equites Sarmatium, etc, etc.)
Drat... those mines are buried. Oh well, I guess we'll have to go back to the latest Roman records of their productivity then use our knowledge of population estimation to figure out what the mines were like. Oh, and I changed my estimate about the cavalry. If an Ala of cavalry was a hundred men and the Taifalia had two Alae and so did the Cataphractarii , then "Arthur's" cavalry force was about 600 men. Exactly two Romano-British cavalry warbands and large enough to be stationed at Cadbury Castle while leaving room for guards and a small infantry garrison.
Quote:Vortigern,
All I can say about Coel Hen is that he existed. Not much else sadly. Despite the frustration Arthur gives us Coel Hen is even more mysterious. And as for his being Dux Britannium, most reaserchers agree on that. For good resreach on Ambrosius Aurelianus and Vortigern I recommend "The Real King Arthur" by P.F.J Turner. However be careful, he overuses Latin translations of names and listens to Linda Melcor and Geoffrey of Manmouth too much. (ie. Arthur was Lucius Artorius Castus, he commanded the Equites Sarmatium, etc, etc.)
Drat... those mines are buried. Oh well, I guess we'll have to go back to the latest Roman records of their productivity then use our knowledge of population estimation to figure out what the mines were like. Oh, and I changed my estimate about the cavalry. If an Ala of cavalry was a hundred men and the Taifalia had two Alae and so did the Cataphractarii , then "Arthur's" cavalry force was about 600 men. Exactly two Romano-British cavalry warbands and large enough to be stationed at Cadbury Castle while leaving room for guards and a small infantry garrison.
That's mostly speculation and you can deduce whatever you want from it.
From what I know, Coel Hen is only known from geneaologies, post-galfridian writtings and some dubious tradition. I don't know of researchers that really assume he was
Dux britanniarum. Of course he fits the role, just as Arthur fits the role of a south-western powerful warlord circa 500 AD. Yet this is no proof that either existed.
I am quite sorry for any arthurian enthousiasts (I have been one and my interested in the period started because of Arthur among other stuff but there is still no proof at all that Arthur did ever exist, all possible sources having been dismissed by serious scholarship. Thus nothing - except the scenario of a novel, a movie or a video game - can be built on this.
There is a lot that have been discovered in the recent years in the studies of 5th and 6th century Britain, and there is possibly a lot more that awaits us. I would be the first pleased if someone discovers any real reliable proof of Arthur's historicity. Meanwhile, Ill stick my interest on attested characters such as Vortigern, Ambrosius Aurelianus or Riothamus.
About the tin, Ewan Campbell thought south-western Britain was rich enough in the white metal to attract the byzantine traders between AD 475-550. Trade with eastern Mediterranea and North Africa is very well attested in Britain by that time, the concentration of imports focusing on centres such as Tintagel in Cornwall, Bantham in Devon and Dinas Powys in South Wales. For Campbell British tin was the nearer ressource from Byzantium, he thus argues that Sapin tin mines were extinguished by that time, that there was no large ressource of tin known in Asia Minor and of course that the Byzantine military had a huge neccessity of tin.
See Ewan CAMPBELL,
Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland AD 400-800, Council for British Archaeology, 2007.
Ken Dark has reviewed this book in
Early Medieval Europe revue. He disagrees with part of Campbell's theories about the reasons of the trade of tin. Now a likely fact remains from textual sources and archaeological works: South-Western Britain seems to have produced enough tin by the late 5th and early 6th century AD to exchange it with meditarranean goods brought by eastern traders. That implies a surplus.
Now there is quite few finds linked with warfare from the digs of sites such as Dinas Powys (an iron ferule of a spear shaft), Bantham (two spearheads), South Cadbury (a crossbow bolt, an axehead that could be a tool) or Tintagel (nothing!). Of course a lot of this could have been lost. We may have found however one or two lost scales if South Cadbury really hosted 600
lorica squamata-clad battle-horsemen!
Yes, Coel Hen is somewhat theoretical but...
Just like Arthur it's a name we pin to a great leader, in this case the ancestor of the royal houses of pretty much all of the northern kingdoms. Arthur is the name we pin to the commander of the British forces from AD480 to AD520. While things are looking doubtful for Arthur I still am willing to pin my hopes for the legendary king on Arthuis of the Pennines, a little known leader who was the younger brother of Elutherius of Ebrauc and uncle to Myrddin. I have done extensive reaserch which I can't blurt out all at once. If I start I probably won't be able to stop. And as for Cadbury Castle they have only excavted a single plot of land in a central area on the summit and the gatehouse. They haven't even begun to excivate the hillfort. so if there are some loose sclaes lying around anywhere, it will probably be where the garrison was. And unfortunately, people have lost intrest in Arthurian Archaeology. And yes, most things about this era are speculative. But when all you have to go on is a sermon and folktales, the folktales maybe originating in the original timeframe, as well as extravagent chroniclers who wrote hundreds of years later, things are going to be speculative. One folktale I'd bet on would be one from Qween Camel, the town by Cadbury Castle. They say that Arthur and his captains are sleeping under Cadbury Hill, waiting for the call to fight for the Britons yet again. I'd be willing to bet a rather substaital sum of money that the real Arthur, be he Ambrosius or Arthuis, is buried under Cadbury Hill with prince Gwrfan of Rheged, Gerriant of Dumnoia, Cai of Gwynedd, and all the other historical knights. Sadly, I doubt I'll find the funds to excivate the hill, let alone all my candidates for the battle sites.
Arthuis and Arthur are different names. Same goes for the name Arthnou found on a Tintagel slate fragment. South Cadbury was excavated partially, that's true, yet enough of the hillfort was excavated for Alcock to found a possible aristocratic timber hall remains.
Study of this era really doesn't need to be speculative. Solid methodology is being applied by modern scholars, based on a critical approach of the available sources and archaeology. The only link with Arthur beeing that this is the possible era which had seen him evolves if he ever existed, or at least the era of many characters that inspired the myth.
Folktales are... Folktales. Some may have a true basis, but without any proof to back it up we will never know. There is many supposed resting places of Arthur in the British isles, Brittany and even in Sicilia. Speculation would perhaps explain this was because of the empire Arthur built in Britain and the continent. Scholarship, historiography and hagiography explain it a different way, with the spread of early arthurian legends in the 9th and 10th century in Wales, south-western Scotland, Cornwall and Brittany from the rest of Europe and the creation of the 'Matter of Britain'. Breton knights accompagnied the Normans in their conquest of Sicilia, that's an easier explanation for why Arthurian myth spreads so far south.
Many of the so called Bretons in Armorica were Alans who carried quite a lot of Eastern culture with them it seems. I dont mean the culture enthusiatically supplied by various Arthurian experts either. But,the Russians and white slaws always had this legend about the 3 knights and a round table who would resurrect and save the country. The Alans werent slavs per se but had big contact with them and all the Sarmatians seemed to drink up any culture they came across. Curious people in that way. Hence the Christian schisms they got involved with.
I dont know if it interests you but many years ago I was trying to trace stuff about amber and the trade. Succinite is the technical word for the Baltic variety. In the course of that I stumbled on a very Danish University and Museum website situated in the south of Jutland. They carefully pointed out that this had been a land transit port for the North Sea to Baltic amber trade whereby the Punics went to Kaliningrad and Eastern Balt lands to buy amber. THis did not go back to Phoenicia, it seems, but to Cornwall and Ireland to buy kassiterite. Whether cargo this was available elsewhere or not, I cant say, but the Punics had the trade which was huge. What they could nt do was break the Greek monopoly of the Black Sea routes if there was any supply that way. If there was, it went in Greek bottoms and they were at war for centuries over such things. I lost the link before I could retrace and look into it all. But, it was very good.
You're probably wondering how I made the connection... Well here it goes. Elutherius was King of Ebrauc (My revised date taking into account contempary people had parents born in AD440 made me think someone had messed up the dates) about the same time Ambrosius became High King. Elutherius was Ambrosius' strongest northern supporter. When his father, either Maeswig or Mar, died, his brothers Llenauc (historic Lancelot) and Arthuis moved in with him, he was twenty years older than them so, by Celtic law, he ad to adopt them. Now to confuse things even further Elutherius had a daughter named Arddun. When translated into, say, the contemporary Germanic language that the Saxons used the 'dd' is translated and pronounced as a 'th'. Meaning that, to the Saxons, her name was Arthun. Due to the similarity of her name to her uncle's they assumed that they had to be one person and Arthuis transformed into Arthun. And very interesting is the fact a certain document held at Oxford I believe miscopies Arthun into Arthur, A sleepy copiest could have easily made the mistake. Also this document is one which Geoffrey of Manmouth had acess to when writing his tales of Arthur. Long story short. He confused Elutherius as Arthuis' father and now you have the semi-fictional Uther Pendragon (a composite character based on Elutherius and Ambrosius) becoming the father of the legendary King Arthur.
But we aren't here to debate King Arthur, that belongs to another thread if it exists. we are here to discuss Sub-Roman British cavalry, which leads me to my next interesting tidbit. But first, again I challenge any reenactors to use the four sided spear, and I think we would all like to see exactly what even a half dozen men armed as such could do to even a substantial shield wall. Now back to the cavalry. I understand that many Scholae cavalry units at the time of the Roman Empire's fall were made up exclusively of franks. Now would anyone now if the famed winged fankish cavalry spearheads existed in Britain at roughly around the time of "Arthur's" campaign? If they did, could anyone tell me the sort of damage they could do? Sorry to ramble for so long but I have a lot to talk about. Also if you have watched the documentary "Britain AD" then you should know that at the time that the southern hill forts were being strengthened then the now independant Hadrian's Wall forts were being reused as well. However, no matter how much we discuss just the cavalry it will soon come down to the nitty-gritty little details of how large they were and who commanded them. Once we do get to that point, let's all just get along and say that "Arthur" commanded the forces so we can continue with our colourful debate. Battles I will refer to will most likely be from Nennius' list and I suppose we could argue about where they were thought because then we would be talking about region, manpower, and the kind of weapons and horses available. Again, sorry for rambling.
No winged spearheads in Britain by that period to my knownledge. None are displayed in Swanton's classification, and they seems to be merovingian and especially carolingian weapons.
And a 'four-sided spearhead' could stand to pretty much spearheads. You only need a midrib and then you have four faces to your spearhead.
Quote:Many of the so called Bretons in Armorica were Alans who carried quite a lot of Eastern culture with them it seems.
Sources? :roll:
I throw a good part of my free time studying early medieval Brittany and apart from a few dubious associations with the name 'Alan' (that could be a celtic name refering to animals with red fur such as deer or fox) and Gohar expedition in Armorica circa 430-440 there is no links between Bretons and Alans. We know Taifales were settled in Poitou but it's not in Brittany.
About breton cavalry, see what I said on page 13.
Quote:Bretons in the IXth century used hit-and-run tactics. That's not the heavy cavalry of lancers used by the Sarmatians or Alans. It is more common with the tactics of the Maures, also famous for their cavalry in late roman times. Magnus Maximus rallied a unit of such cavalry, and Mauri limitanei garrisonned western Armorica in the 4th century.
Even this is not obvious link for me.
Hit-and-run tactics were used by both celtic, germanic and roman cavalry for hundred of years before the stirrup came west. A 2nd (?) century roman account from Vindolanda complains about those brittunculi, fighting on horseback with javelins and never getting caught...
The Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons [Brittunculi] mount in order to throw javelins.
Quote:Sources? :roll:
I throw a good part of my free time studying early medieval Brittany and apart from a few dubious associations with the name 'Alan' (that could be a celtic name refering to animals with red fur such as deer or fox) and Gohar expedition in Armorica circa 430-440 there is no links between Bretons and Alans. We know Taifales were settled in Poitou but it's not in Brittany.
[edited by moderator: Roderic, please watch your quotes!]
I am sure you spend enormous time studying Brysonnais material. As for sources, Alanus and others have liberally plastered the website with good ones and with good perceptive comment. Are you suggesting that the Alan name indicates "furry fox person" all the way from Britanny ferries to Moesia to Ossetia?
I dont know how this obsessive thing of Sarmatian oh so heavy cavalry developed. To start with, there were many tribes of Sarmatian.. (They had four periods in their history) and they all equipped, it would seem, according to circumstance and resource. Their activities in places like Moesia and Moldawa were most certainly light cav and that remained the case even when the Serbs re introduced the methods to Hungary prior to 1500. The system remained in place until almost 1700 with varying degrees of heaviness and lightness.
Quote:Yes, Coel Hen is somewhat theoretical but...
Just like Arthur it's a name we pin to a great leader, in this case the ancestor of the royal houses of pretty much all of the northern kingdoms.
Coel existed, I have little doubt that he was a real person. But.. then the problems start. Who was he and what was his function/position? Pedigress are just that - lists. And we have a similar number of pedigrees from Wales who claim Magnus Maximus as the ancestor of a number of dynasties. Or, for that matter, the emperor Constantine.
And pedigrees, as we know, are subject to a number of problems themselves. The first written ones date back to the later Middle Ages, not to contemporary times. Apart from the 9th c. Historia Brittonum we usually jump to c. 1100 AD for the next ones.
And pedigrees, as we know also, are always subject to change. Later dynasties had no problems changing the material if it could enhance their own legal claims.
Finally, the head of a pedigree is usually the 'hero' on which to hang the whole thing. You take a known hero, leader, emperor or whatever, not necessarily even with the remotest connection but if possible rooted in Roman times, and declare him your 'true ancestor'. Like Constantine, Maximus, or even Coel. That makes Coel real rather than mythical, but the number of dynasties descending from him might also not have had any real connection.
Only when you can find sources that date from earlier times (such as the Historia Brittonum) that might indicate a 'better' link.
Anyway, even if we should overlook these problems we still don't get closer to real information. The speculation of Coel as 'Dux Britanniarum' is purely based on the position of Magnus Maximus in Welsh pedigrees - we know a bit more more about Maximus, for instance that he was a military commander, even though we don't know his exact function. Coel, being 'at the head of' many northern pedigrees, is therefore assumed to have had a) a military function and b) one in the north of Britain. The deduction is then: he was the Dux Britanniarum.
But this is based on nothing, really, just educated guesswork.
Sure, it would be my guess as well, but he might also have been a 'strong man' who took power and really carved out a new kingdom, not based on any previous function at all.
Quote:As for sources, Alanus and others have liberally plastered the website with good ones and with good perceptive comment. Are you suggesting that the Alan name indicates "furry fox person" all the way from Britanny ferries to Moesia to Ossetia?
Well, I named my son Bran (raven) but his hair is not exactly black.. Nor does he have wings, btw.
IF the name Alan in Brittany and elsewhere has any connections with the tribal group (as you suggest, and you are following Malcor & Littleton here), where is the proof? I mean, it sounds alike, but is there any other tribal group which name is used in a similar fashion? Rom for Roman, Vik for Viking, Sarm for Sarmatian? I think not. I have seen such tribal names used as a last name or epithet. Such as X 'the Alan', or X 'of the Alani', but not as given name.
The one exception would be Frank, but there we already have an exception, because the name 'frank' also means 'sincere or truthful'.
My guess would be that this is yet another case of the hasty theory: "it sounds like... so it must be...".
Quote:I am sure you spend enormous time studying Brysonnais material. As for sources, Alanus and others have liberally plastered the website with good ones and with good perceptive comment. Are you suggesting that the Alan name indicates "furry fox person" all the way from Britanny ferries to Moesia to Ossetia?
I dont know how this obsessive thing of Sarmatian oh so heavy cavalry developed. To start with, there were many tribes of Sarmatian.. (They had four periods in their history) and they all equipped, it would seem, according to circumstance and resource. Their activities in places like Moesia and Moldawa were most certainly light cav and that remained the case even when the Serbs re introduced the methods to Hungary prior to 1500. The system remained in place until almost 1700 with varying degrees of heaviness and lightness.
That's not the whole point. The point is simply that there is no reason for the Bretons to have adopted light cavalry tactics directly from Sarmatians or Alans. There is enough closer paralleles with celtic and roman ways of fighting, and generally speaking with most cavalry tactics before the stirrup got west.
My point is simply that there is no known steppic heritage in Brittany, nothing that can't be at least found to have a close origin.
And I have no clue what 'Brysonnais' is.
Quote:dashydog:2bdtj6v7 Wrote:As for sources, Alanus and others have liberally plastered the website with good ones and with good perceptive comment. Are you suggesting that the Alan name indicates "furry fox person" all the way from Britanny ferries to Moesia to Ossetia?
Well, I named my son Bran (raven) but his hair is not exactly black.. Nor does he have wings, btw.
IF the name Alan in Brittany and elsewhere has any connections with the tribal group (as you suggest, and you are following Malcor & Littleton here), where is the proof? I mean, it sounds alike, but is there any other tribal group which name is used in a similar fashion? Rom for Roman, Vik for Viking, Sarm for Sarmatian? I think not. I have seen such tribal names used as a last name or epithet. Such as X 'the Alan', or X 'of the Alani', but not as given name.
The one exception would be Frank, but there we already have an exception, because the name 'frank' also means 'sincere or truthful'.
My guess would be that this is yet another case of the hasty theory: "it sounds like... so it must be...".
Hi Robert,
The Breton name Alan can hardly come from Latin Ala:nus, or its Alanic original, since both had a long final -a:- and would have produced *Alon in Old Breton, *Aleun in Middle Breton.
As mentioned by Leon Fleuriot (Les origines de la Bretagne, p. 204), the name Alan should rather be linked with Welsh elain, plural alanedd, "young deer, doe" (from Brittonic *elani:, pl. *eleaniias or *alani:, pl. *alaniias; compare Irish elit "hind" from Proto-Irish *alanti- or *elanti) and the Welsh plant name alan(n) "coltsfoot", though the linguist Eric Hamp suggests that the Celtic *alan- meant "colt" originally and not "deer" (which fellow linguist Peter Schrijver does not necessarily agree with). Breton Alan could, thus, be derived from a Brittonic masculine noun *alanos "(young) buck" (or "colt", if we follow Hamp), with its corresponding feminine form *alani: "doe" surviving as Welsh elain.
See Peter Schrijver, Studies in British Celtic Historical Phonology, pp. 78-79 for a discussion:
[url:2bdtj6v7]http://books.google.com/books?id=f_RMQkk3OSIC&pg=PA78#v=onepage&q=&f=false[/url]
As has been alluded to, Alanik is a Breton diminutive form of the name Alan and used poetically to refer to the fox; the exact origin of this usage is debated (Julius Pokorny grouped all of the various Indo-European cognates of W. elain and Irish elit under the PIE root *el- "red, brown", so that may be relevant here - perhaps *alan- was a Celtic root used for any red/brown colored animal - but not all linguists agree with Pokorny's grouping; Hamp favors a derivation of a Celtic root *al- from PIE *plH- "colt").
UPDATE: It should be noted, too, that the suffix -an in Neo-Brittonic also acted as a diminutive (most Celticists propose that it was borrowed from Early Irish -agn-, which gave Old Irish -a'n), so Breton Al-an could mean "Little Al" (where Al- is either a root word or a pet form of some longer name beginning in Al-).
Good points Chris. Thanks and welcome.
Quote:Alanus:2lbsycqj Wrote:Where is the "th" arriving post 600 attested please?
See the chronology of Brittonic sound changes laid out by Kenneth Jackson in his "Language and History in Early Britain" (there is a significant body of literature on these sound changes now - in recent years Patrick Sims-Williams, Graham Isaac, Peter Schrijver, et al., have both done a lot of excellent work on "updating" Jackson's hypotheses - but it still remains one of the most influential books in British Celtic linguistics).
The Neo-Brittonic phoneme|th| likely developed during the 6th century (arising from the spirantization of the Brittonic geminate -tt-, along with later spirantization of the clusters -gt-, -ct-, -rt-, -ntr-, -ntl-, -ltr-, etc. by the Old Welsh period), however it continued to be
written as -t- by scribes well into the medieval period (so that a name element like Welsh Arth- "bear" was still being spelled as Art- in the 9th century, for example). One needs to be careful to distinguish between phonological and orthographical changes - the two do not often keep pace with one another, since spelling conventions tend to be very conservative.
Quote:So far, it's still unknown what is exactly meant by 'gwledig', but 'prince' as well as 'leader' or 'landowner' are known.
On the meaning of Welsh gwledig, I agree with Paul Russell (Celtic word-formation: the velar suffixes, 1990,? p. 65), who suggests that "gwledig could be as 'someone who has gwlad 'lordship'" and "gwlad may originally have had a similar range of meanings to its Irish counterpart flaith, which 'can be used of the lordship or kingdom (territorial sense), of the lord himself or the lordship that he wields'."
The root of Irish flaith, Welsh gwlad and gwledig (also Gaulish ulat-, attested in several personal names) is ultimately Proto-Indo-European *wal- "to be strong, to rule". So, gwledig is best rendered in English as "lord" or "ruler (of a kingdom").