Dungeons & No Dragons

I am ridiculously excited about this new video game. 

It's called 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance', and comes from the brand new company, Warhorse Studios, based in Prague. They’ve had the crazy idea that there is an audience for an RPG (that’s ‘role-playing game’, for the uninitiated) that has a medieval-esque setting, but approaches the Middle Ages like a grown-up.

In other words, without any of this:

Or this:

And definitely none of this:

Not the most practical set of armour ever devised

The typical formula for an RPG is that you start off as some lowly nobody, and gradually develop your character through a series of missions, adventures, and encounters, until you become a hero of epic renown.

The video game industry, like the movie industry, doesn’t like to stray from tried-and-tested formulas. In this case, thanks to the legacy of Tolkien, the formula involves a brain-crushing dose of magic and monsters that turns the whole thing into a kind of rainbow-coloured pantomime.

Brienne of Tarth, a true warrior maiden...

That’s all well and good, but the world of orcs, wizards, and improbably-proportioned elf warrior-maidens has never done it for me. I mean, I love Skyrim to bits, but I always play as a human rather than some weird talking cat-person (for example), and I have as little to do with magic as possible.

It’s also telling that Game of Thrones is such a massive hit, when magic is all but absent in the first couple of seasons.

Aren’t the Middle Ages exciting enough without all that frippery? Who doesn’t want to be truly immersed in a living, breathing virtual medieval world, complete with all its intrigue, adventures and dangers?

These were the questions asked by the people at Warhorse Studios. ‘Dungeons & No Dragons’ is how they pitched it.

Naturally the big games developers weren’t interested, so Warhorse have launched a kickstarter campaign online. They want to prove that there is an audience for a realistic medieval RPG, with the help of thousands of individual investors (you can invest anything from £3 to £5000).

It seems to be working, too. They reached their initial target of £300,000 within three days, and it currently stands at more than £500,000.

Both the video game nerd and the medievalist inside me are so chuffed about this. The only downside is that we have to wait till late next year to see the final product...

Holy hippies

They don’t work. They don’t wash. 

They roam across the country, preaching sanctimoniously about peace and love, despite being dangerously ill-informed. They dress in a way that is somehow shabby and pretentious at the same time. Worst of all, they have no respect for government or power structures.

Clearly, something has to be done about these ‘monks’.

Weirdos 

For an Anglo-Saxonist like me, there’s nothing weird about monks. Right through the Anglo-Saxon period, monasteries were at the heart of the church – indeed, it was founded by Irish and Roman monks. For the Anglo-Saxons, it would have been weird to have a church without monks.

The respectable face of Christianity: Santa Sabina, Rome

But it wasn’t always like this.

Let’s pretend to be a typical Christian in late Roman Gaul, circa 430.

The church, like everything in civilised life, is based around the city. It has tidy structures of bishops and priests and deacons, and congregations of ordinary people. It’s staffed by educated, cultured men from the middle and upper classes.

It’s clean, respectable.

Yes, far away in the east, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, there have always been oddballs who go out in the wilderness and live in caves.

Saint Antony in the desert

The Greeks call them monachoi – ‘those who dwell alone’. They starve themselves to the point of madness and then claim to have visions and miraculous powers.

Yes, some of these weirdos get reputations as ‘holy men’, and attract followers from the more gullible segment of society. Some even group into small communities.

A bunch of fanatical zealots bunched up together, obsessed with the end of the world? That’s fine, as long as they keep themselves to themselves.

The problem is, they don’t. Monachoi are spreading from east to west like diseased rats, infecting the whole Mediterranean with their pernicious teachings.

And now the disease is spreading into the Gallic church itself.

 

Martin

The warning signs have been there since the 360s. An illiterate, obnoxious young Pannonian called Martin, who had been dishonourably discharged from the army and kicked out of more than one city for stirring up trouble, tried to set himself up as a monachos on Gallinara, a tiny island off the north-west coast of Italy.

Having no idea what he was doing, the idiot almost killed himself by eating a poisonous plant. Undeterred, he came to Gaul and latched onto Bishop Hilary of Poitiers – another rabble-rouser who had just returned from exile.

After a few years, Hilary and his buddies engineered the election of Martin as bishop of Tours, even though he was completely unsuited to the post. He preferred to spend his time living in a shack beside the river Loire, where (of course) he quickly attracted a bunch of hangers-on – dozens of pious layabouts, disillusioned posh types who thought the best way to respond to the world’s problems was to bury their heads in the sand.

The modern Abbey of Marmoutier, successor to Martin's original hermitage

Oh, sure, they were just like those brave monachoi who lived in the depths of the desert. That is, if by ‘depths of the desert’ you mean a half-hour stroll along the banks of the Loire. They they lived in caves, true, but it’s not like they were willing to get their hands dirty: all the manual labour was done by the servants they brought with them!

They’re also famous for wearing camel-hair shirts, just like the desert monachoi. How did they come by camel-hair shirts in Gaul, you might ask? Why, they were so devoted to simplicity and poverty that they had them specially hand-crafted and imported from the across the Mediterranean.

Naturally, all this would be bad enough. But when Martin wasn’t sitting in his shack, he was traipsing around the countryside with his fanatical thugs, looking for innocent pagans to terrorise. Are monachoi not meant to be devoted to peace? It's hardly surprising that when Martin died, there was an ugly squabble between the monachoi of Tours and Poitiers over which community would get to keep his corpse.

‘Swollen with black bile’

Unfortunately this Martin started a trend. Even a former imperial governor and consul – a consul, the highest dignitary in the empire! – was brainwashed into following his footsteps, becoming a housebound monachos.

This man, the illustrious Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus, retired (with his wife, I might add) to one of his estates in Spain, where he kept himself busy weaving baskets and eating porridge, cutting himself off from all his friends except to write them pompous letters about how pious he was.

Then there’s the self-made man, Claudius Postumus Dardanus, a former prefect of Gaul. I hardly know where to start with this character. After a career of treachery, back-stabbing and murder, he didn’t just retire, but went and built himself a fortified enclave in the mountains where he now rules as a sort of robber king.

It's accessible only up a narrow, winding valley, at the top of which is a gate and an inscription proclaiming his achievements and holiness. Theopolis, he calls it – ‘the City of God’. Is there anything more offensive, more hypocritical, than this?

Google Earth image of Theopolis, near Sisteron, France - a natural fortress enclosed by 500-foot cliffs

Inscription on the road leading into Theopolis

At least Paulinus still lived a civilised life. These days it seems that every lump of rock off the coast is crowded with scruffy monachoi. Rutilius Namatianus wrote about them in the poem about his voyage from Rome to Gaul. Here’s what he says about Capraria:

"The island is a mess, filled with men who flee from the light. They call themselves monachoi, a Greek name, because they want to live by themselves, with no one to see them. They are afraid of fortune’s gifts, even while they fear the harm she causes. Who would avoid being miserable by choosing to be miserable? [...] I don’t know whether they are trying to punish themselves for their deeds with a prison or whether their melancholy insides are swollen with black bile."

And about the island of Gorgona:

"I turn away from the cliffs, monument to a recent calamity. Here a fellow countryman was lost in a living death. For not long ago one of our youths, rich in ancestry with property and a wife to match, was driven by the furies to abandon home and society and entered a shameful retreat, a credulous exile. The unfortunate fellow thought that filth is conducive to heavenly endeavours and inflicted on himself more cruelty than would offended gods."

 
He really hits the nail on the head. You must be filled with twisted self-loathing to punish yourself like some of these monachoi do.

The monastic master plan

And what can we say about the island of Lérins? Of all the monachoi, these are the worst. They’re taking the legacy of Martin to the next level. They don’t just want a comfortable retirement home: they want to take over the entire Gallic church.

The island of St-Honorat, with the modern monastery of Lérins

Given their wealth and resources, this is frighteningly possible. One of the founders of Lérins, Honoratus, has already managed to bully his way into the bishopric of Arles. Bishop Proculus of Marseilles is just as bad; he’s been squatting in his see for years, ignoring papal rulings whenever he feels like it. He’s even been implicated in the murder of the previous bishop of Arles!

The tomb of John Cassian in the church of Saint Victor, Marseilles

And he’s now sheltering John Cassian, a smug, self-styled ‘expert’ on eastern monachoi who is trying to make the Gallic variety even more extreme. There is no end to the self-absorbed callousness one finds in his writings.

What will happen if we let such men usurp every bishopric in Gaul? Pope Celestine has recently written a letter in a desperate attempt to avert this disaster. He makes some good points about their ridiculous ‘desert fancy-dress’ of wooden staffs, and camel-hair shirts girded at the loins.

"What is this get-up doing in the Gallic Church, so that the custom of so many years and so many bishops is now turned into another form of dress? The laiety and others are to recognise us by our teaching, not our garments; by our way of life, not our costume; by purity of mind, not custom. For if we begin to follow novelties, we trample underfoot the order given to us by our fathers, to create a place of pointless superstition."

‘Pointless superstition’ – the words of the bishop of Rome himself! Not that these monachoi will pay any attention to him, since they never have in the past.

They will ignore his complaint about their silly costumes, just as they will ignore his complaints that they deny absolution to the dying, that they harbour wanted criminals, that they violate the territory of other bishops, that they impose foreign bishops on unwilling cities, that they ordain unqualified men to holy orders, and that they accept bribes for doing so.

The monachoi consider themselves above criticism by any power on earth. They are radical zealots, detached from reality, unwilling to compromise, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness.

Heaven help us if they ever come to rule the church!

All images from Wikipedia Commons unless otherwise stated

The highs and lows of Roman Lyon

Good times and bad, Lugdunum saw them all. 

Its first citizens were refugees, Romans expelled by the Gauls of Vienne in 43 BC. They retreated north up the Rhône to the confluence with the Saône, where they pitched camp on the rocky heights overlooking the rivers.

Happy, Abundant Colony 

This was where, by senatorial decree, a new Roman colony was to be founded. The natives called the place Lugodunon, ‘the Hill-Fort of Lug’, Lug being a Gallic deity; but the city was given the more cheerful name of Colonia Copia Felix Munatia, or ‘Happy, Abundant Colony of Munatia’, named after the main founder, Governor Lucius Munatius Plancus.

Model in Lyon's Musée Gallo-Romain, looking south

Despite inauspicious beginnings, the city came to deserve its Roman name as it prospered and grew over the following century. Four great aqueducts were built to serve the expanding population, the longest of them bringing water from more than 40 kilometres away. Temples, government offices, a forum, theatres, and all the other organs of a Roman city crowded the Fourviere Hill, as wharves and docks bustled on the river bank below.

Most impressively, Lugdunum (as the Romans came to call it) was chosen as the site of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls, a political-religious temple complex that also hosted the annual Gallic Council. Every year, on the first day of August, tribal delegates from all over Gaul would converge on the city, making it the most important Roman centre north of the Alps.

Imperial favour 

The high point came under Emperor Claudius (AD 41-54). Lugdunum was the city of his birth, so of course he had a fondness for it, and in 48 AD he even convinced the snooty Roman Senate to open up its membership to citizens of Lugdunum (provided they met the property requirements, of course).

Claudius had a transcript of his speech to the Senate inscribed on bronze plates and sent to Lugdunum, where it was proudly displayed in the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls. There it remained for hundreds of years, until the temple itself fell into ruin and was forgotten. Eventually a vineyard grew over the site; and this is where, in 1528, a section of the long-lost tablets was accidentally ploughed up.

Image from Wikipedia Commons

The outstanding Musée Gallo-Romain in Lyon has a lot of archaeological treasures, but the Claudian Tablets are surely the greatest.

Outside the museum lie the remains of what one might call the 'theatre district' of Lugdunum - the impressive odeum and the even larger theatre, built right next to one another.

On the image to the right you can see the theatre and the odeum, along with some government offices and shops. The entire site is free to access, the only charge being for the museum itself.

The stage facades are long gone, of course, as are the roofs and upper tiers of wooden seating. Originally they would also have been largely clad in gleaming marble, long since stripped away; the only marble remaining is in the pavements of the orchestras, around which is the area demarcated for 'posh' seating - so the fancy folk didn't have to mix with hoi poloi. My favourite part of the complex is the multi-coloured marble of the odeum pavement - each different colour is a specific type of marble sourced from a different part of the empire.

The large theatre

The smaller odeum

The odeum orchestra, showing the elaborate pavement and posh seating area (they brought their own cushioned chairs)

Painted wall plaster on a staircase leading up to the odeum

The surviving theatre at Bosra in Syria gives some notion of what the theatres would have looked like in their heyday, as does the scale model in the Musée Gallo-Romain. They were built into the slope of Fourviere Hill, and the odeum even had an upper gallery behind the stage facade so the well-to-do could promenade between performances with clear views of the Alps to the east.

Model in the Musée Gallo-Romain - note the upper promenade behind the odeum facade

Imperial disfavour 

Lugdunum prospered for another 150 years before the wheel of fate brought it down.

During the civil wars of 193-197, the citizens of this ‘Happy, Abundant Colony’ made the fatal error of choosing the losing side. The final battle of the wars took place on the doorstep of the city on 19th Feburary 197.

This was remembered as one of the largest and most terrible battles ever fought between Romans, involving – even by modern estimates – upwards of 100,000 men.

When the ultimate victor, Septimius Severus, rode into the city, he was not in the mood for clemency. Lugdunum had supported his enemy, and needed to be punished.

The good days were over. With the loss of imperial favour, and later administrative reforms that reduced the city’s political importance, Lugdunum, once the heart of Roman Gaul, sank into provincial obscurity.

Twilight of the empire

As money dried up, so did the aqueducts; the city could not afford to maintain them. People began to flee the Fourviere Hill for the lower ground by the river.

Slowly the vast hilltop citadel became a haunted wasteland. Over time the marble-decked temples crumbled, roofs fell through, columns toppled into the weed-choked streets. Even the great facades of the theatres fell to ruin.

Certainly by the fifth century, the much-reduced population was huddled on the right bank of the Saône and the peninsula between the Saône and the Rhône. Their new focus was the cathedral of Saint John the Baptist.

The only places still used up on the hill were the funeral churches of Saint-Just and Saint-Irénée, outside the old city walls.

In 428 the monk Eucherius wrote In Praise of the Wilderness, a hymn glorifying the monastic island of Lérins, off the south coast of Gaul. ‘Faithful to her reputation,’ he wrote, ‘she takes in her faithful arms those who come to her from being shipwrecked in the stormy world.’

The haunting death-mask of a young girl

This idea of retreating from the ‘stormy world’ appealed strongly to religious-minded people of the time. During these twilight years of the western Roman empire, men and women sought refuge in the promise of the next world. It was in 435 that a monk named Romanus left his monastery near Lyon and ventured into the deep valleys of the Jura Mountains to become a hermit.

Eucherius was elected Bishop of Lugdunum about the same time. For him, the looming ruins of the old citadel must have been a potent reminder of earthly transience.

Yet even among the most religious, the dream of Rome lived on. Eucherius himself owned a miscellany which included not only a calendar with the traditional Roman festivals recorded alongside the Christian ones, but also lists of Roman emperors and provinces, a breviary of Roman history, and a sort of compendium of must-see sights in Rome itself.

Eucherius, who died about 449, did not live to see the end of Roman Gaul. This came in 476, with the deposition of the last western emperor. By now Lugdunum was well and truly part of a barbarian kingdom, ruled over by the Burgundians from their court in Geneva.

Ursus ‘of good memory’ 

But still the people of Lugdunum considered themselves Roman. For another generation at least, Christians buried their dead in the graveyards of Saint-Just or Saint-Irénée and dutifully inscribed the tomb slabs with the date of death – giving not the regnal year of the Burgundian king, but the names of the eastern Roman consuls, as though they were still a full part of the empire.

IN THIS TOMB RESTS URSUS OF GOOD MEMORY, WHO LIVED IN PEACE ?40 YEARS [AND] DIED ON THE SECOND DAY BEFORE THE NONES OF MARCH IN THE YEAR AFTER THE CONSULATES OF THE MOST ESTEEMED ANASTASIUS AND RUFUS (6th March 493) 

This grave slab feels as though it is teetering between worlds. On the one hand, it is so Roman: the tidy Latin script, the traditional formula, the reference to the consuls. But then there is the Christian imagery of the birds and the twisting vines, and the little slips in grammar (bone for bonae; annus for annos; obiet for obiit).

Most telling, though, is the way the grave is dated by the previous year’s consuls. The consuls were officially appointed on 1st January every year; in 493 they were Albinus and Eusebius. Ursus died in March, and when he was buried news of these latest appointments had still not reached the city.

For Ursus and his fellow-citizens of Lugdunum, the empire, now based in distant Constantinople, was well and truly beyond the horizon. What we now call 'the Middle Ages' had begun.

A Kentish jaunt

It’s odd that you can live for three decades in a country the size of England and still never have visited whole corners of it. 

Kent is one of those corners for me. Last week I ventured down to the mysterious lands beyond the M25 with my brother, a fellow Roman nut.

Cantia incognita

A typical Kentish scene

Growing up in Worcestershire, we heard all manner of tales about the Kentish folk. People spoke of them as Pliny and Martianus Capella had once spoken of the Blemmyes of Nubia: ‘They have no heads,’ they said, ‘and their eyes and mouths are on their chests.’ Some claimed that no such place as ‘Kent’ even existed, or if it did, it was probably in France.

So it was with great excitement and trepidation that we hurled ourselves over the Dartford Crossing, half-expecting to fall off the edge of the world.

As it turned out, Kent is lovely, even in the gloomy greyness of January. We only had one full day to explore, and had a few places we definitely wanted to see. For the most part these weren’t the usual tourist sites, which was useful, since a lot of those places are closed on winter weekdays.

Landing site

First stop was the beach between Walmer and Deal, the (probable) landing site of Caesar in his two expeditions to Britain. Nowadays this is a heavily stepped shingle beach that feels very exposed to both seaward and landward weather, hardly ideal for a massed landing of the two legions that Caesar brought over from Gaul in 55 BC.

When Caesar returned in 54 BC, he brought five legions; the later Claudian conquest involved about 40,000 troops, including both legionaries and auxiliaries.

Compare this with the size of the Norman invasion army in 1066, which probably numbered fewer than 10,000 men - the size of Caesar's initial 'scouting' force. Yet with this tiny army, Duke William was essentially able to conquer England after a single pitched battle. This highlights one of the most striking things about early medieval warfare, i.e. how small-scale everything got after the collapse of the empire.

Anyway, back to the Romans. The landing site was probably different in Caesar’s time, though, as this part of the Kentish coast has shifted and changed a lot over the centuries. The beach may have been sand instead of shingle, and sheltered somewhat by sand bars off the coast. In any case, Caesar chose the same site for his full-scale invasion the following year.

There's a modest monument to Caesar close to the beach, an unassuming flat sculpture with his head in profile. As you can see from the picture above, it could do with a bit of a scrub.

Hillforts

It was during his second invasion that Caesar ventured properly inland, fighting a skirmish next to a river usually identified as the Great Stour outside Canterbury, and capturing a hillfort that is commonly thought to be Bigbury. It’s the strongest contender, at any rate.

View from the Stour - the slight rise on the left skyline is the optimistically named 'Bigbury' hillfort

There isn’t much of archaeological interest to see at Bigbury now. The summit is occupied by leafy lanes and idyllic houses and gardens, and few of the surviving ramparts are accessible, though some were excavated in the 1970s. It was useful to visit the site, though, just to get some idea of its size and setting. As hillforts go it’s not an especially formidable one, which is why Caesar apparently captured it so easily (having 20,000 legionaries probably also helped).

The south gate at Oldbury - from this imposing entrance, the path runs up a narrow channel with ramparts on either side

Much more impressive was Oldbury in west Kent, just off the M26. This much larger hillfort dates from around the same time and may also have been captured by Caesar’s troops. Nowadays the entire hill is laced with tracks and bridlepaths snaking through dense woodland, so it’s hard to get a sense of the overall scale from the ground – that is, until you find yourself confronted by the surviving ramparts, which are still intimidating after two thousand years. When first constructed, even grizzled Roman legionaries must have found them a fearsome prospect.

Museum

A slave about to strangle her mistress...?

Canterbury Roman Museum was also a highlight, with its fine reconstruction scenes and selection of genuinely interesting artefacts. I've added a selection of photos from the museum below.

My own favourite items were the most mundane: a messy chi-rho scratched on the bottom of a dish, and an iron hinge-pivot that was found in situ during an excavation of one of the Canterbury city gates.

(I didn't know I could get so excited about a hinge-pivot, but being trained as an archaeologist does weird things to you.)

There’s clearly much more Roman stuff to see in Kent. Two sites I really want to visit, both sadly closed this time, are Richborough Roman Fort and Lullingstone Roman Villa – they’ll be top of my list on the next trip. If you have any other recommendations, leave a comment below!

The early Christian chi-rho symbol inscribed on bottom of dish

The wonderful hinge-pivot

If you squint, you might be able to make out the tiny chi-rho inscribed in the bowl of the lower spoon

Roman mouse

A late Roman soldier

Roman Canterbury at its height in the second century

Anglo-Saxon Canterbury, c. 700 - note the remains of the theatre, and the new cathedral complex in the distance

Blood and Bone: England and Germany in the Dark Ages

I should probably start by apologising for the title.

In the eighth century there was no ‘England’ (unified only in the tenth century), there was no ‘Germany’ (unified in the nineteenth century), and we early medievalists really don’t like the term ‘Dark Ages’.

Right, now that’s sorted, let’s talk about blood and bone.

Two World Wars and one World Cup

Judging from the current ‘ding-dong’ (as Mary Beard referred to it on BBC Radio 4 last Sunday morning) between Michael Gove and Richard Evans about public remembrance of the First World War, it’s clear that the historical relationship between England and Germany is going to be popping up a lot in the news over the next four years.

It’s sad that the modern English perception of Germany is still so dominated by the World Wars. (‘Two World Wars and one World Cup’, as the football chant goes.) The medievalist, to whom any history after about 1789 is basically journalism, naturally takes a longer view. He or she might see the wars of the twentieth century as a regrettable blip in the relationship between two populations who historically have a great deal in common.

Out of Germany 

Image from Wikipedia Commons

More than a thousand years ago, the Venerable Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk living in Jarrow about A.D. 730, wrote down one of the earliest known accounts of ‘English’ origins. He believed that the English – or the Anglo-Saxons, as we normally call them – only came to Britain across the North Sea about three hundred years earlier.

“Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany [Germania]: Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain deserted to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.”

Bede is known as ‘the Father of English History’ for this work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He was writing two centuries before the Anglo-Saxons were finally brought together into a single kingdom called ‘England’. Even so, he viewed the Anglo-Saxons as a single people, unified by three things:

1. Language (English, or ‘Old English’ as we now call it) 
2. Religion (the newly introduced Christianity) 
3. A common origin in ‘Germania’ (what are now the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark)

The Roman coastal fort at Portchester (Hants), one of the mythical landing places of the Anglo-Saxons

It’s strange to think of now, but Bede still saw his own people essentially as immigrants. (This is why Anglo-Saxonists like myself rip our hair out when the BNP and other right-wing groups talk about the English as the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of Britain – but that’s a topic for another time).

Lingua Germanica

So the Anglo-Saxons and the various peoples of ‘Germania’ were basically cousins. In fact, Bede writes as though the Anglo-Saxons were of pure Germanic descent, but that certainly wasn’t the case; from the very beginning the immigrants had intermarried with the pre-existing population of Britain.

In terms of language, though, he was spot-on. The closest ‘relative’ to modern English is Frisian, a dialect of Dutch. If Eddie Izzard can go to Frisia and, speaking only Old English, manage to buy a brown cow (or brúnu cú) from a local farmer, then his eighth-century counterpart would have had no trouble at all making himself understood across the North Sea.

Christians and pagans

An ancient oak in Reinhardswald, near Kassel

But there was one big difference between the Anglo-Saxons and their distant cousins in Germania: religion. The peoples across the Rhine had never been fully converted to Christianity, and were largely still pagan. They were devoted to gods like Thunaer and Wodan, and given to arcane rituals in forest groves and at natural springs.

This was a big deal for devout Christians like Bede. Judgement Day was coming, and it was crucial to spread the ‘light of salvation’ to every corner of the world. How could the Anglo-Saxons stand by and let their close relatives dwell in darkness, and be doomed to eternal damnation? Something had to be done.

And so from the 690s onwards there was a stream of charismatic, idealistic Anglo-Saxon missionaries across the North Sea, determined to bring the Word of the Gospels to the ‘ignorant’ pagans of Germania.

There were men like the Northumbrian Willibrord, who became Bishop of Utrecht and was buried in his monastery of Echternach, in modern Luxembourg; or like Boniface, originally from Devon, who led a 33-year mission that stretched from Frisia to Bavaria, became an archbishop and the foremost representative of the pope north of the Alps, and is now patron saint of Germany. Or there were remarkable women like Boniface’s relative Leoba, the miracle-working abbess of Tauberbischofsheim, who won the respect of bishops and kings alike, and ended up a saint herself.

There is something distasteful about these figures to modern liberal sensitivities. They smack of later European missionaries to Africa, with their patronising, contemptuous view of indigenous religions, and their unashamed desire to impose Christianity on people who did not always want it.

But there is no denying their courage. Germania was not always a safe place. Two of the first missionaries to enter Saxony were stabbed to death and dumped in the Rhine. In 751, pagan rebels burned more than 30 of Boniface’s churches to the ground. Boniface himself was eventually murdered by brigands in Frisia, butchered along with about 50 of his companions, whose corpses were left scattered in the marshes of Dokkum.

Blood and bone 

Despite all this, the missionaries kept coming. One priest in Wessex, hearing that there might be a new mission into Saxony, wrote an excited letter to the Anglo-Saxon bishop of Mainz:

Modern statue of Boniface at Fritzlar

“If a door of divine mercy should be opened to the region of our people – that is, among the Saxons – be sure to inform us of the matter. There are many who would like to hurry this door with their help, with the assistance of God.”

Our people, he wrote. This Anglo-Saxon priest, even though his ancestors might have left Germania three hundred years earlier, still viewed the continental Saxons as family.

Before his martyrdom Boniface also wrote back home, urging the Anglo-Saxon church to support his mission with their prayers, so that God would “convert the hearts of the pagan Saxons to the faith”. “Have pity on them,” he wrote, “for their repeated cry is: ‘We are of one blood and bone’.”

This, I think, will be a useful phrase to keep in mind over the next few years, as the centeneries of the most terrible battles of the First World War pop in and out of the headlines.

Of course we must never forget the lessons of that war. But at the same time, we should take the long view and see it for what it was: an awful violation of a relationship between two peoples whose common roots, in history as well as in culture and language, go far deeper than the mud of the Somme.

Hardknott Pass - a Roman vanity fort?

Taking a shiny, brand-new rented car up the steepest road in England seemed like a good idea.

At least, until I started to do it. That was when I saw that the 1:3 gradient wasn’t the issue. The steepness is fine. The issue is everything else: the coiling switchbacks; the one-car width of the road; the naked verges that mean there is nothing between you and the rocky valley floor 500 feet below; and, worst of all, everyone else who is trying to come down the same narrow road at the same time as you, and is equally reluctant to have their car turn into a tumbling metal coffin – a fate narrowly missed by an American tourist on neighbouring Wrynose Pass a few months back.

To drive over Hardknott Pass, you need two things: a head for heights, and good clutch control. A sturdy handbrake also helps.

It doesn’t hurt to pray in advance for dry weather, either. If you do, I’d recommend making a sacrifice to Mars, because the main reason to put yourself through the trial of Hardknott Pass is to visit the Roman fort situated near its summit.

View from the fort, looking east to Hardknott Pass half a mile away

At the roof of Roman Britain

This fort, Mediobogdum, is easily one of the most impressively situated Roman forts in Britain. Actually, probably not many forts in the entire empire could compete with its dramatic setting. The peaks of the Lake District rise like thunder on every side, an ominous backdrop of scree and broken shoulders of volcanic rock. The monotony of grey stone and russet-brown grass is broken only by the shining patches of snow that hide in mountainside clefts and hollows until the end of spring.

Remains of the bath house (left) and the south corner of the fort (right)

If a Roman defined civilisation in terms of urban life and cultivation, then this landscape was as barbaric as it came. Rocky it may be, but every other step lands you in a bog, especially after the winter when the ground is saturated with meltwater. There is hardly a level patch of ground to build a single house, never mind an entire fort. Clearly, nothing much is going to grow up in this miserable soil, with the cold wind whipping over the pass.

But when did the Romans ever give up so easily? Despite its remoteness, despite the challenges, with typical bloody-mindedness they built a fort up here in the AD 120s. This was around the same time as the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, so there was a serious amount of engineering ‘can-do’ in the air. They built a road, drained the boggy ground, hauled rocks from the peaks, and threw up a fort that looked as tough as the mountains around it.

Outside the fort they even levelled an area larger than a football pitch by cutting into the side of the mountain – though quite why they did this is a mystery. It is generally interpreted as a parade ground, which makes me wonder if Mediobogdum was a specialised training fort, a place to drill recruits and toughen them up before sending them to guard the rugged northern frontiers of Britain.

The 'parade ground' above the fort

Abandoned

Even so, the fort was only occupied for a short period, probably no more than a generation. Then it was abandoned. This says a lot about the remoteness of the setting, guarding a mountain pass that could not have seen a great deal of traffic at the best of times. Impressive, sure, but not a practical use of military resources.

I’m guilty of a sleight of hand in The Lion and the Lamb, where I have the fort being reoccupied in the fourth century. This probably never happened. True, some fourth-century coins have been found at Mediobogdum, which makes me feel a bit better, but they might just as well be evidence of passing traders making use of the abandoned ruins.

Yet all you have to do is visit this place, a monument to Roman determination at the roof of Britain, look up at the looming mountains and down into the deep haven of Eskdale to the west, feel the sharp air gusting in from the coast, and imagine how it would have been for the soldiers trapped in this fort through the bitter grip of winter – and then you can forgive a little dramatic licence.

Eskdale, with the Irish Sea just about visible on the horizon