After the Romans (briefly)

When our region comes into history via the Roman writers, it is populated by the Britons. The Romans dealt with their rulers - Cartimandua and her husband Venutius.  We know the names of some of their tribes, e.g.  - Novantae, Selgovae, Carvetii. We have traces of their religion in monuments to their gods Coccidius, Belatucadros, Coventina and Epona. Place names suggest gods known from Welsh and other Celtic sources - Maponos and Lugos.  From Vindolanda we have the deprecatory comments of Romans referring to the wretched little Britons [9].

But after 350 years the Britons became Romanised . In the lowland areas of South and East Britain, it is very possibly, if not probably that the Britons started speaking Latin as a first language, as they did in Gaul. In our area (as in Wales and Cornwall) the population kept its British language, though they borrowed many hundreds of words from the Latin of the occupiers. Towards the end of Roman rule and after the Imperial armies left, local warlords appear to have seized power and started dynasties in the areas they grabbed. The warlords took up Roman names and adopted Roman fashions. They wanted to be associated with Rome [10] The Romanisation appears to have gone as far north as the Antonine Wall that bisects modern Scotland. Welsh legends report that a Romanised warlord called Cunedda from Lothian was sent to drive the Irish from Wales and they founded there the kingdom of Gwynedd. It was Gwynedd of the Welsh kingdoms that had the strongest interest in the Britons of the

North and here was preserved some of the poetry and the traditions of the North.

It has been argued that the first ruler of the North after the Romans left was Coel Hen "The Old" or Old King Cole. His name is Latin, like the names of many of the early Britons like Padarn Peisrud, a ruler in Lothian, who perhaps wore the red tunic of the Romans - pais rudd - "red pinny" as a badge of office [11], [12]. The ruling houses of the kingdoms in what is today Southern Scotland and Northern England traced their descent from Coel the Old.

The Picts and the Irish raided into the former Roman province and the Romans defended it but as is well known, left Britain to her own defence in 412.  The Britons used Germanic mercenaries to fight the Picts and Irish and the story goes that these Germanic people, whom we know as the Anglo-Saxons, betrayed their British paymasters during what the Welsh call Brad y Cyllyll Hirion  - the treachery of the long knives. The Saxons get their name from their characteristic long knife the seaxa. After this the Anglo-Saxons came over and settled in greater numbers. First in Kent and the South East of England but then up the east coast to found early settlements at Driffield in Yorkshire and then at Bamburgh  (Din Guairoi to the Britons) in Northumberland in about 547.

The British monk Gildas (died 570) according to his life written by the monk of Ruys in Brittany [13], was born near the Clyde. He wrote a book called De Excidio Britanniae, reporting the destruction of Britain at the hands of the invaders and blaming the sins of the British kings and tyrants. Gildas says he was born in the same year as the Battle of Badon Hill, which is one of Arthur's battles against the incoming Saxons and dated between 490 x 520.   Gildas says this was forty-four years and one month since the landing of the Saxons. Bede used Gildas' history as a basis for his early chapters. 

Another British Historian, Nennius in his History of the Britons, dated around 830, gives the list of the battles of King Arthur [14]. Though this is c. 260 years after the death of Gildas, Gildas was aware of at least one of the battles (though he does not name Arthur). No Anglo-Saxon historian mentions Arthur or his defeats of their people. 

The Historia Brittonum names the poets famous among the British in the reign of the Northumbrian kind Ida, who captured Din Guairoi at Bamburgh from the British.  These were  Neirin (Aneirin), Taliesin, Bluchbard and Cian "Guenith Guaut" [14]