The Forgotten Origins Of Medieval Britain - History Documentary

0:05 [music]

0:08 Off White Sands Bay, a lost world lies buried [music] beneath the waves.

0:21 Undisturbed in its watery grave since it was frozen

0:24 in time more than 10,000 years in the past.

0:34 And amidst this other world of antler, bone,

0:38 and petrified trees are to be found the remains [music] of people, too.

0:48 Long before even the first farmers came to Britain.

0:57 Out here on the far western extremity of Wales,

1:02 it isn't difficult to picture such lands of long ago.

1:14 When red deer, auroch, and monstrous brown bears stalked through the woodland.

1:23 A time of different tongues, different cultures, different people.

1:36 For the place has an older name, too.

1:42 Porthmawr, meaning [music] the big port.

1:50 A reminder [music] of its usage in ancient times

1:53 as an embarkation point across the sea road to Ireland.

1:58 From the Bronze Age all the way through to the medieval era.

2:09 And in early medieval times,

2:11 archaeology suggests this to have been a place of great significance, too.

2:20 Just off the shoreline above the sunken forest,

2:24 still stands the recently excavated St.

2:27 Patrick's Chapel.

2:32 Really, a tiny structure,

2:35 but one of the earliest of its kind found anywhere in Britain.

2:43 Radiocarbon dated from the 6th to the 11th centuries.

2:52 A mixture of adults and children of all ages were buried here.

2:58 Testament to a harsh time in the wake of Roman rule when

3:02 just a handful of people made

3:04 up scattered communities [music] across the islands.

3:11 Sometimes still clinging to a life that came before.

3:21 Looking to better days.

3:29 Their remains found in cist graves.

3:34 Their lives recorded in scattered pieces of archaeological evidence.

3:45 Many of the names from this region have their roots across the sea in Ireland.

3:55 A highway in those days and much more

3:58 accessible from here than many other regions of Wales.

4:06 But of course, other older influence can be seen on these people, too.

4:15 Newly Christianized and left adrift

4:18 on the Irish Sea by their Mediterranean converters.

4:27 Tales like the sunken realm of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the lowland hundred,

4:35 popularly thought to have once existed

4:37 beyond the marshes between Aberystwyth and Aberdovey.

4:46 Often eerily similar to real submerged worlds off

4:51 the shore at places like Borth and elsewhere.

4:56 With their petrified forests like White Sands Bay, [music]

5:07 of entrances to the mystical otherworld sought

5:11 out by mere mortals on epic quests [music] through mystical rocks, underground,

5:21 and above all else off islands in the western ocean, across water.

5:34 [music] An insular Celtic universe still kept alive today

5:37 in epic sagas written down in the later Middle Ages.

5:46 That other world was a land of never-ending youth where

5:51 time passed differently and eerie supernatural events [music] were the norm.

5:58 Of fairy hunts and sacred objects, crystal castles, little folk, and giants.

6:04 [music] [music] Unlike most other places in the world,

6:14 a great deal of evidence survives from these stories.

6:19 But perhaps most famously,

6:21 it is recorded in the 19th century corpus known as the Mabinogion.

6:29 Still often considered the national epic of Wales.

6:44 A little further along the coast, on the other edge [music] of St.

6:48 Bride's Bay, herself an Irish saint,

6:56 more evidence of the western orientation of people here in those middle days

7:01 of the first millennium AD can be seen in a much more substantial settlement.

7:12 Protected now by its isolation on a rocky

7:16 outcrop of jagged cliffs, this is Gateholm.

7:28 First excavated in 1910 and again in 1930,

7:34 the place was initially speculated to be an early Christian monastic site.

7:41 Like those purported at the time at Tintagel, Skellig Michael, and elsewhere.

7:50 Albeit one overlooked by a great fortress

7:54 of the Iron Age Celtic past on the shore opposite.

8:05 A century of intermittent digging in the years

8:08 since has instead revealed a fascinating

8:12 and unique settlement of many hundreds of people

8:17 continuously occupied for a vast period of time.

8:22 All the way from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages.

8:32 Still completely coated in faintly visible

8:35 roundhouses and more complicated rectangular buildings, too.

8:40 Testament to Mediterranean connections as well

8:44 as those of ancient British forebears.

8:51 With densely populated,

8:53 well-ordered [music] streets on one of the busiest seaways in Britain.

8:58 In the post-Roman age, Gateholm was far from an isolated nor peripheral place.

9:09 Originally an easily defended promontory [music] settlement,

9:13 today the neck connecting it to the mainland has fallen away.

9:20 Turning this into an otherworld of its own.

9:27 Recent speculation on stone phallic symbols found [music]

9:31 here again suggesting a sacred meaning to the place.

9:36 Albeit a magical pre-Christian one.

9:44 A place apart.

9:48 Not monastic cells, but a Celtic holy site protruding into the waters.

10:01 But after the Roman era is when things get really interesting.

10:09 Because here was found continental Mediterranean pottery,

10:15 amber from the distant Baltic, and tellingly,

10:20 a bronze cloak pin of an Irish design dating

10:25 to somewhere between the 5th and 8th centuries AD.

10:32 It was in places like this that the rich historiography of Britain developed.

10:38 And with tiny hints of writing and [music] monastic communities on this coast,

10:43 too, just maybe on occasion it was written down here,

10:51 honed down the centuries, perhaps hand in hand with a thriving oral tradition,

11:00 ultimately solidifying into some of the tales which still survive today.

11:13 [music] By the time the Welsh bishop and biographer of Alfred the Great, Asser,

11:22 put quill to vellum in the 9th century AD,

11:26 two or three hundred years after the heyday of Gateholm and St.

11:30 Patrick's Chapel, that great pillar of learning uses just

11:38 one word to describe the surviving Romano-British lands of Wales,

11:43 Brittany, and Cornwall.

11:48 Britannia.

11:56 And Asser [music] has a point.

11:59 Though the once singular tongues of those regions

12:02 were by [music] then already distinct,

12:05 having embarked on separate paths over the previous four centuries,

12:11 their culture remained surprisingly uniform.

12:20 Indeed, it is from these lands that we

12:23 get [music] the surviving stories and myths today,

12:28 some of the oldest found anywhere in the world,

12:33 tales which shaped the very society to develop

12:36 in centuries to come, from which J.R.R.

12:40 Tolkien and Geoffrey of Monmouth alike not just derived inspiration,

12:47 but arguably could not have existed without them.

12:57 The former using Old Welsh as a basis for the Elvish languages of Middle-earth,

13:04 the latter bringing Arthur into the world.

13:25 A little over a century before Asser, in the early 8th century [music] AD,

13:32 the Venerable Bede has a little more to say on the matter,

13:35 too, recording four distinct peoples inhabiting the island of Britain.

13:46 The English, the Picts, the Scots, and the Britons,

13:50 [music] with a fifth language, Latin, sometimes uniting them all.

13:58 By his time, Christianity providing the overarching framework for myth-making,

14:08 leaving a lot of room for origin stories linking current nations

14:12 to distant cousins and offshoots to the biblical family [music] of Noah,

14:18 dating back to Adam and Eve, the ancestors of all humanity.

14:26 By linking to post-flood ancestors,

14:29 divine legitimacy and the right to land could be claimed.

14:42 Within the rich corpus of early medieval stories, therefore,

14:47 we are told the origin myths of each of these peoples of Britain.

14:55 Many of the tales are nonsensical.

14:58 Of the English, the Saxon Anga was said to have been responsible for the name.

15:05 Albina for Albion.

15:10 Of the Scottish, an Egyptian princess gave her name.

15:19 But others contain tiny shreds of reality and of much earlier stories, too.

15:31 All alike can give fascinating insights into these lost worlds.

15:42 The oldest of all, arguably,

15:45 is a tale with ancient Indo-European roots as well as biblical myth,

15:52 seen in the writings of the 7th century AD writer Isidore of Seville

15:58 as much as Arthurian chronicler Geoffrey

16:01 of Monmouth in the 12th [music] century.

16:07 It speaks of Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas of Troy,

16:13 and legendary founder of British civilization.

16:20 In order to tell the tale of how Britannia became Wales,

16:26 of how the ancient British and their descendants

16:28 viewed their own history until very recently,

16:33 we must go back to the very beginnings of the mythological tradition,

16:41 to the largely forgotten tale of the mighty Trojan

16:45 warrior Brutus and the giants who inhabited the land before.

17:00 Though undoubtedly having biblical inspiration, the tale begins at [music] Troy,

17:11 that most [music] important foundational of places for the classical world,

17:20 when the works of Homer were just

17:22 as important as any [music] Abrahamic holy book.

17:30 For despite their defeat by the Greeks in that ancient conflict,

17:33 [music] early medieval historians, just like their classical predecessors,

17:40 regarded the Trojans with the utmost respect.

17:49 Though adapted and changed a great deal over hundreds of years since

17:54 its first form in the centuries

17:56 immediately following the collapse of Roman Britain,

18:01 the basic spine of the tale remains remarkably similar.

18:17 Following the turmoil of the Trojan War,

18:21 the conventional date used by medieval scholars being precisely 1183 BC,

18:29 the mighty hero Aeneas and his followers make their way across

18:33 the storm-tossed seas to Rome to lay the foundations of that venerable city.

18:43 Meanwhile, some years later, another Trojan lord, a grandson named Brutus,

18:50 embarks on a similar journey of his own,

18:59 battling enemies and adventuring as he goes.

19:09 In Greece, Brutus and his band come upon 7,000 of their kinsmen,

19:16 men, women, and children reduced to slavery.

19:25 Upon realizing their shared ancestry, Brutus has no choice but to act,

19:31 instigating a mass uprising, escape from bondage,

19:35 and voyage westward to new lands.

19:46 As those fellow members of the Trojan diaspora continued

19:50 to make [music] themselves useful in the coming battles.

19:54 Their leader, Corineus, described by Geoffrey of Monmouth as a just man

20:00 and good advisor of great character [music] and boldness,

20:05 rises through the ranks to become the right-hand man of Brutus [music] himself.

20:15 [bell] His people, distinct from the beginning,

20:17 would ultimately be known by his name, Cornish, and their land, Cornwall.

20:31 And crucially for the events to come, Corineus is a giant killer.

20:40 Finally, after yet more conflict in Aquitaine,

20:44 Brutus and his host are reminded of a prophecy and decide to set

20:50 sail to an obscure land lying off the sea to the north.

20:58 Coming ashore at Totnes, just south of Dartmoor,

21:04 where an ancient [music] stone is still said to mark the place of the landing.

21:15 But there is a problem.

21:17 Britain is already populated by a race of violent and hideous creatures,

21:26 the literal spawn of devils in many variations of the tale,

21:31 colossal in form, vicious and brutal in their ways.

21:39 Thus began a war to eradicate that ancient race

21:43 [music] of giants to win Britain by right of conquest.

21:55 The tale culminates with the mighty giant king,

21:59 Gogmagog, facing off against Corineus in a wrestling match.

22:08 Chained and kept alive for Brutus' sport,

22:12 Gogmagog is a force to be reckoned with, able to pull an oak

22:17 tree out of the ground as if it were a twig of hazel.

22:24 And yet, Corineus, a mighty warrior of superhuman strength,

22:30 has slain giants the world over,

22:34 able to overcome them as if he were fighting a child.

22:38 In the ensuing battle, Gogmagog is hurled off a cliff into the sea,

22:44 his mighty form kicking and screaming as he disappears under the waves.

22:53 In this way, in time, all the giants are killed.

22:59 Just a few surviving in the ancient places, in hidden glens and mountain peaks,

23:10 passing into popular folklore like Jack the Giant Killer,

23:16 who climbed up the beanstalk, which still survives today.

23:25 The giants thus eradicated,

23:28 the island of Britain, named triumphantly for Brutus,

23:32 is free for settlement and the light of British

23:35 civilization to be brought forth to the wilderness.

23:45 The legitimate inheritors of the country,

23:50 though the capital city is initially named Trinobantum,

23:56 New Troy, by the time of Brutus' descendant,

23:59 Lud, it will be renamed Caer Lud, London.

24:10 The transformation from Trojans [music] to Britons complete.

24:21 It's a great story, and though severely lacking in historical reality,

24:28 after all, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's garbled narrative,

24:32 Stonehenge had been built as a monument to 460

24:36 Britons massacred at Beast Talks by Saxons at Amesbury.

24:45 It does give a fascinating insight into the reality of the medieval mind.

24:52 For when Geoffrey recorded his version in the 12th century,

24:57 tapping into a well-established literary tradition,

25:00 but adding his own creative spin,

25:03 it would become one of the most famous stories in Europe.

25:11 As always, Geoffrey had an agenda.

25:17 He wrote during the Anarchy,

25:19 a period of societal turmoil in the 12th century, when anything seemed possible.

25:25 His overall aim, perhaps,

25:27 being to broker alliances between the Britons and the new Norman elite.

25:34 As a Cambro-Norman, he walked in both worlds,

25:37 seeking to forge a common past together,

25:42 including the Britons in the well-established

25:45 and well-known continental Mediterranean traditions,

25:49 such as the Trojan War and the war between the Titans and the Olympians,

25:54 while also echoing biblical accounts of [music]

25:56 giants like Nimrod the Mighty and the flood.

26:07 One of the central purposes of the tale of Brutus seems

26:12 to have been to provide an indigenous race for the Trojans to conquer,

26:19 thus cementing British identity as a force to be reckoned with.

26:25 Ultimately, even arguing that Brutus could have taken on Rome and won.

26:33 He would have done it in Geoffrey's tale, were he not betrayed.

26:40 Many versions of the tale go on to portray the origin of Brittany, too,

26:45 with Conan Meriadoc heading over with an army to help the Romans,

26:51 ultimately being rewarded with wives who were shipped over,

26:56 keeping Brittany ethnically pure.

27:02 The three British peoples thus formed, by Geoffrey's day,

27:07 their descent from glorious origins is explained,

27:13 along with a fresh, albeit ultimately unsuccessful,

27:16 desire to reforge them with Norman might.

27:26 In the wake of Geoffrey's story,

27:28 the tale would continue to evolve with men from England,

27:34 France, and elsewhere adding their own spin

27:38 and translating it into their own languages.

27:43 But what of the earliest versions of the tale?

27:54 Notably, a few decades earlier,

27:56 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had realized [music] the potential of the tale.

28:01 Geoffrey probably took it in part from there.

28:06 Though three or four centuries [music] earlier,

28:08 the tale is told in the Historia Brittonum,

28:12 an often wildly contradictory synchronizing history from North Wales.

28:21 There, though Brutus gave his name to the island,

28:25 he is a Roman consul and hated by all.

28:32 Even earlier, the skeletal myth of Brutus was mentioned by Bede.

28:37 And before that, Isidore of Seville's Chronica Maiora.

28:44 In adapting and changing these already existing tales,

28:49 Geoffrey sought to fill out [music] the historiographical

28:52 vacuum in Britain before the arrival of Julius Caesar,

28:57 the first written account in British history.

29:02 In Geoffrey's work, notably,

29:04 Caesar is humiliated and defeated by King Cassibelanus.

29:13 His venerated ancestry,

29:16 tracing all the way back to Brutus of a thousand years before.

29:28 Of course, also bringing King Arthur into the mainstream.

29:35 And being one of the bestsellers of medieval Europe,

29:43 the sheer influence of Geoffrey's tale cannot be understated.

29:50 Though by the latter half of the 12th century,

29:53 the historian William of Newburgh reviles Geoffrey

29:57 as not writing [music] history at all.

30:00 Henry of Huntingdon did not know the story

30:03 of Brutus until he came upon Geoffrey's book.

30:08 The creativity of one man [music] has

30:10 seldom had such an impact on world history.

30:19 By that time, however, circumstances had changed.

30:24 There would be no great political revival of the British past.

30:34 New identities ultimately would be forged and pushed forward.

30:40 Britannia becoming the disparate modern regions of Wales,

30:45 Cornwall, and Brittany.

30:53 The stories would survive, however.

30:56 Though few realize it, all the way down to the days of the British Empire.

31:04 A complex process of forgetting, remembering, [music]

31:08 and retelling over and over again.

31:13 Original meanings often reshaped and altered down the centuries.

31:20 Split into two figures today, Gog and Magog,

31:25 the mythical giants of old Albion can still be

31:28 seen every year marching in the Lord Mayor's parade.

31:37 King John was allegedly the first to put the giants into the parade.

31:43 It apparently being common in those days

31:46 in Europe to have giants paraded through town.

31:53 And by the time of Henry V,

31:55 two massive statues were allegedly made for the same purpose.

32:02 Though at the time, they may have represented Gogmagog and his slayer Corineus.

32:12 [music]

32:12 In 1486, a great cliff figure of Gogmagog could still be seen at Plymouth.

32:19 Emblazoned on the hillside at the supposed place

32:22 where his fateful fight with Corineus took place.

32:31 It disappeared in the years since.

32:34 And by the time a new iteration of giants were crafted in the 17th century,

32:40 Gog and Magog had become separated in the public psyche.

32:48 Though these two mighty creations were destroyed in the Blitz,

32:54 their remade smaller descendants and the legacy of Britain's largely forgotten

32:59 origin myths can still be seen year-round in the London Guildhall today.

33:09 Long before the coming of the Saxons and even the Romans,

33:15 they speak of a time when all Britain was one.

33:22 A tale of a thousand years,

33:25 of a thousand locations, of forgotten citadels and lost kingdoms,

33:32 of mighty [music] realms celebrated

33:34 in the works of medieval scholars as Britannia.

33:41 This isn't just [music] the entire history of Wales after Rome,

33:46 but Cornwall, Brittany, even Galicia in northern Spain, too.

33:53 And how these lands came to be.

33:59 From the 4th century to the 7th, it is a tale spanning more than 200 years.

34:09 The most mysterious in all of British history.

34:13 When all the modern ethnicities we know today first came to be.

34:25 My name's Pete Kelly and you're watching History Time.

34:33 Using all the cutting-edge archaeology, history,

34:37 and mythology of the modern world to tell it.

34:41 I traveled from the heartlands of Britain to the shores

34:44 of the Bay of Biscay using hundreds of sources,

34:48 visiting almost as many locations.

34:52 Five years in the making, this is the story of the birth of a nation forged

34:59 from the ashes of the Roman world and suffused with new legacies and traditions.

35:11 Many parts of it told for the very first time.

35:15 This is the entire lost history of Wales after Rome.

35:55 In the early 5th century, Roman Britain collapsed.

36:00 Not just because of invading armies, but because the economy itself fell apart.

36:09 Coins stopped flowing.

36:11 Trade routes vanished.

36:14 Records were lost.

36:17 And without good accounting, for the most part,

36:20 the light of Mediterranean civilization vanished.

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38:28 And now, back to the early Middle Ages.

38:59 When the Irish king Matholwch sailed his ship out to sea that day,

39:05 resplendent retainers around him,

39:09 the sight greeting him when he came

39:11 to shore wasn't an unusual one in those times.

39:19 By the cliffs of Harlech,

39:21 the giant Bran the Blessed sat his Goliath form upon a mighty hewn rock,

39:30 gaze fixed over the Irish Sea, to the ocean god Manannán's watery domain beyond.

39:47 For Bran was the high king of Britain in those days.

39:51 And Matholwch had come to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage.

40:00 Thus begins the second branch of the Mabinogion.

40:05 One of the most important sagas in the entire history of Wales.

40:13 A tale of love, sorrow,

40:16 and a great all-encompassing conflict spanning both shores of the Irish Sea.

40:32 Though it is a tale with roots in the deep past,

40:37 it stretches forward in time, too.

40:42 Bran has many names.

40:46 In Wales, he is Bendigeidfran, king of the Isle of the Mighty.

40:55 [music]

40:56 In later Arthurian myth, he serves as the prototype for Bron, the Fisher King.

41:05 [music]

41:06 It even remains entirely possible that he is a half-remembered version of Lugus,

41:12 the Celtic creator deity, once venerated all throughout Europe,

41:19 giving his name to Lyons, Lyons, Leiden, and leprechauns alike.

41:29 It is a tale once sung in halls all

41:32 down the western seaboard of Britain by bards and storytellers,

41:39 known as learned ones with especially high

41:42 status as court entertainers and propagandists for kings.

41:50 The storytelling ability of weaving words to influence reality,

41:55 long having been akin to magic.

42:03 For of course, Bran's [music] tale is not alone.

42:16 The first branch of this most famous

42:19 of collections of Welsh literature concerns [music] Pwyll,

42:23 lord of the kingdom of Dyfed in South Wales.

42:28 As he spends a year journeying in the other world,

42:32 ominous mirror image of earthly life.

42:39 The second tells the tale of the children of Bran, giant king of Britain,

42:46 and their quest for vengeance in the wake

42:49 of his treacherous killing at the hands of the Irish.

42:55 The third follows on from the second,

42:58 overflowing into magical enchantments in Dyfed.

43:05 And finally, the fourth concerns a cataclysmic war between the northern

43:10 kingdom of Gwynedd and Deheubarth in the south and west.

43:19 Like all the great tales of the early Middle Ages, in its present form,

43:24 the Mabinogion is an amalgamation of pagan and Christian themes,

43:30 bearing similarities with both ancient Irish stories like the Ulster Cycle,

43:36 and old English ones like Beowulf.

43:40 The stories have no individual titles.

43:44 They have no verifiable authors,

43:48 despite the efforts of some with little actual proof

43:52 to put them on individuals such as Sulien, Bishop of St.

43:55 David's.

43:59 Books that have never finished what they are trying to say.

44:04 They are tales with deep, deep roots.

44:08 Usually considered the greatest contribution

44:11 of Wales toward European literature, and some of the oldest.

44:26 Originally a term seeming [music] to mean boyhood,

44:30 then a tale of a hero's boyhood,

44:34 and finally morphing into meaning a tale in general.

44:39 The four rather tenuously linked stories [music] of the Mabinogion were first

44:44 collected together between 1838 and 1849

44:49 by English scholar Lady Charlotte Guest,

44:52 when she translated four of the stories from Welsh into English

44:57 from the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest,

45:05 high medieval collections [music]

45:07 dating to the 11th century, and likely with much older roots.

45:18 The term Mabinogion has since expanded to include all 11 tales.

45:27 Some are clearly fantastical holdouts from ancient mythology.

45:33 A Celtic wizard sending forth armies

45:36 of trees to fight beasts from another world,

45:40 and all manner of magical items and events.

45:47 Others don't seem so different from written chronicles,

45:53 containing far more history than one might assume at first glance.

46:01 We must turn to another of those stories now.

46:07 Not just concerning Britain, but Rome.

46:28 Our story begins far away from Britain, on the other side of the Alps,

46:36 at the court of a Roman emperor, Maxen Wledig.

46:43 A great soldier with a long pedigree of illustrious victories.

46:51 The best fitted of those that came before him, we're told.

47:00 One hazy afternoon, while out on a hunt in the country,

47:05 Maxen falls into a deep, dream-infested slumber.

47:13 Across continents and worlds, the Roman king wanders,

47:18 drifting between realities in the great void.

47:25 Until finally, he arrives by the banks of a great,

47:29 rugged river at the edge of the world, where mountains rise and mighty waves

47:39 [music] smash like thunderclaps against the shore.

47:45 Though he has never seen this land before,

47:50 it feels strangely familiar, like he has known it always.

47:59 And amidst this otherworldly voyage,

48:02 Maxen spies another person joining him on his journey.

48:09 So beautiful a sight that he is transfixed immediately.

48:15 And then, just as strangely as it began, it's all over.

48:24 Upon awakening, however, such is his longing for the dream girl,

48:29 the emperor could no longer think of anything else.

48:38 In the weeks and months to come,

48:41 envoys and messengers wander the face of the earth in search of her identity.

48:54 Until on the banks of the River Seiont in North Wales,

48:59 astride the mighty mountains of Eryri,

49:02 or Snowdonia as they are known in English, they find what he seeks.

49:11 Her name is Elen Luyddog, later to be known as Helen of the Hosts.

49:26 She is a daughter of the local chief living under Roman rule, so far away.

49:37 Beseeching the girl and her father to come with them to Rome

49:41 to marry the emperor at once and put an end to all this nonsense.

49:47 Stalwart and strong, she refuses.

49:51 It is he who must come to her.

49:56 Utterly transfixed by the beauty of the Welsh princess,

50:00 Maxen has no choice gathering his forces for a voyage to the Northlands.

50:15 Upon arrival at the court of the Romano-British ruler Octavius,

50:20 also known as Eudaf Hen, also the father of Conan Meriadoc,

50:26 the alleged future founder of Brittany,

50:30 a price is set and the two are married, consummating the agreement afterwards.

50:43 For her father, Helen's fee for her hand in marriage was

50:47 nothing less than the governorship of the entire island of Britannia,

50:53 as well as three major forts to be built in locations

50:57 of her choice and a great road network to connect them.

51:06 At the stronghold of her father in the Northlands on the river Seiont,

51:11 she chooses Carnarvon, of course,

51:15 where a Roman fort still stands today in view of the great

51:20 estuary where the two first laid eyes on each other.

51:27 The others are prominent and very real Roman settlements,

51:31 too, at Caerleon and Carmarthen.

51:39 For seven years, Maxen stayed in Wales building

51:43 his forts and spending his days with his new wife,

51:50 the court of her father at Carnarvon becoming his main residence,

51:54 as well as chief city in Wales, until finally,

52:01 word reaches the absent emperor of a usurper

52:05 claiming the city of Rome in his absence.

52:15 Amassing a great host of Welshmen under Helen's brothers, Conan and Gideon,

52:22 they march to war on the continent where Maxen

52:27 regains his rightful place as ruler of the empire.

52:35 In a strange, half-remembered nod to real events,

52:39 after assisting in conquests in Brittany,

52:42 Conan and his followers are allowed to stay there to settle.

52:47 Ultimately, Maxen leaves for good, never to return to Britannia.

52:59 Though never canonized officially by Rome, in the Welsh tradition,

53:04 Helen is remembered today and revered as a saint.

53:14 Though in reality built over hundreds of years,

53:17 the 260-km network of Roman roads that crisscrosses Wales today is

53:23 still known as the Sarn Helen in honor of the ancient queen.

53:31 From the gold mines of Dolaucothi in the south,

53:35 all the way to Holyhead and its flourishing trade to Ireland,

53:39 running past innumerable forts and bastions from Caerhun

53:43 in the north to Caerwent on the Severn.

53:49 As with most parts of Britain, many sections are now used by the modern roads.

53:59 Others are still traceable and yet more

54:04 are still lost or only recently being unearthed.

54:10 What remains clear is that this was an immense achievement.

54:19 Some areas seeming to have more infrastructure

54:22 during the Roman period than they do today.

54:34 Today, Maxen Wledig remains one of the most

54:37 unique figures in all the medieval Welsh literature.

54:45 Though his story shares elements [music] with roughly

54:48 contemporary Irish tales like The Dream of Angus,

54:52 whether sharing a deep Celtic past or borrowing from each other more recently,

54:59 it also contains a good deal of half-remembered, genuine history.

55:06 The Roman leader himself,

55:08 undoubtedly deriving from a genuine historical figure, Magnus Maximus, [music]

55:20 a military officer from Hispania [music]

55:22 and relative of the Theodosian imperial family, who in 383 was declared emperor

55:29 of the west by the soldiery [music] of Britannia,

55:33 ruling over one part of the crumbling Western Roman Empire,

55:38 though never in fact in charge of Rome itself,

55:43 until he was ultimately defeated and executed [music] five

55:46 years later after an unsuccessful attempt on the eternal city.

55:56 Whilst many in learned Latin spheres, Nennius and Gildas among them,

56:03 have blamed Magnus Maximus for not just the fall of Roman Britain,

56:09 but even the Western Roman Empire itself in the centuries since he lived,

56:14 for others, particularly in the popular sphere of vernacular literature,

56:20 he was a great foundational figure, the first independent ruler of Britain,

56:26 even, from whom all legitimate power flowed in the years after,

56:34 a folk hero who, like all the best myths,

56:38 could be whatever they needed him to be.

56:45 In the genealogies of Powys, for example,

56:49 as well as Dyfed, Deheubarth, and Gwynedd,

56:53 he is claimed as venerated ancestor to the vaunted dynasties [music] of kings.

57:05 Whichever way the pendulum swings,

57:08 just as it so often does on the question of how

57:10 much continuity there really was from the Romans to the Welsh,

57:15 often so deeply sought with only scant concrete [music] evidence,

57:22 Magnus Maximus has always remained deeply embedded in Welsh historiography.

57:30 But who was he really?

57:32 And what was the end of Roman Britain in Wales really like?

57:43 By the time the soldiers of Britannia

57:45 rose up their banners in support of Maximus

57:48 in the midst of chaotic civil conflict spreading

57:51 across the Western Empire in the early 380s,

57:55 they did so in the tradition of a long line

57:58 of similar usurpations originating in that corner of the empire,

58:04 many of whom turned out to be hugely successful,

58:11 either in carving off portions of the empire like Albinus,

58:15 Carausius, and Alectus, or, like Constantine the Great,

58:21 in conquering the entire realm.

58:26 At the time of his raising to the purple in 383,

58:31 soon afterwards transferring British troops to the continent,

58:35 just as Stilicho and Constantine III would do after him in 401 and 407,

58:42 it is possible that Maximus served as Dux Britanniarum,

58:47 or the Duke of Britannia.

58:53 Arguments for his supposedly disastrous decision ringing hollow with the clear

58:58 evidence of soldiery left in Britain in the aftermath of his reign.

59:06 Though like most Roman legions in Britannia,

59:10 many of Maximus's men very likely had their origins in Germania,

59:15 Spain, and elsewhere, the historian Sozomen's account of him gathering

59:21 a vast host of Britons, Gauls, Celts,

59:24 and tribes thereabout for his campaign against Theodosius

59:28 in 388 may well have some truth to it.

59:34 Just as it does in the much later,

59:36 colorfully preserved 12th century tradition of a vast host of Welshmen

59:41 being led to the continent for a triumphant final assault on Rome.

59:50 Ultimately, though dubious claims of campaigns

59:53 in modern-day Scotland are hinted at, Magnus

59:56 Maximus spent much of his time

59:59 in the verifiable historical sources on the continent,

1:00:03 establishing a breakaway capital for himself on the Rhine frontier,

1:00:08 minting his own coins, and ruling for 5 years.

1:00:16 Though we can't say for sure, it seems likely he chose the location

1:00:20 to hold off Germanic invaders from beyond the frontier.

1:00:27 And upon his death, as seen in tombstones and in the historical records,

1:00:32 many of the men he brought from Britain may well

1:00:35 have ended up far away in Illyricum in the Balkans.

1:00:51 But what of the real Wales Magnus Maximus entered into and left behind?

1:01:01 Still surviving tribal names in his time

1:01:05 recorded as Deceangli, [music] Ordovices,

1:01:09 Demetae, and Silures, just as they had been known before the Romans came.

1:01:18 What happened to these ancient and illustrious peoples

1:01:23 as the falling empire warred and crumbled around them?

1:01:39 To travel in Wales today, by far the most unmistakable signs of the centuries

1:01:46 of Roman occupation are the fortifications they left behind.

1:01:52 From the outer works of Cardiff Castle

1:01:55 to the immaculately preserved town walls of Caerwent,

1:02:00 to forlorn earthworks at forgotten remote sites like Caer

1:02:04 en Cawr on the banks of the Dyfi river valley,

1:02:09 they can be found all across the country,

1:02:13 seen usually in well-defined earthworks and moss-crusted banks.

1:02:22 But every now and again, in immense [music] edifices,

1:02:27 structures that would have been significantly

1:02:29 [music] more visible in medieval times.

1:02:38 All in all, some 24 forts were constructed by the Romans across Wales,

1:02:45 linked by hundreds of miles of roads, almost all of them in the 2nd century AD.

1:02:58 Archaeologically speaking, outside of these centers,

1:03:02 the landscape remaining essentially prehistoric with no towns or cities

1:03:08 to speak of and very little building in stone.

1:03:15 Not just located at sites of strategic significance,

1:03:20 forts almost always became the focus

1:03:23 centers of both military and civilian activity.

1:03:30 The goods of the Roman world filtering out to the neighboring

1:03:34 native peoples in return for goods and services rendered to the Belgic,

1:03:41 Hispanic, Germanic, and men of other ethnicities who manned the forts,

1:03:47 seeking citizenship in return for their service to the empire.

1:03:54 In time, not just material goods, but ideas and humanitas spilling forth.

1:04:07 It was from these centers, many tiny like Caer Gybi on Holyhead,

1:04:15 others massive like Caersws in the Midlands,

1:04:19 ultimately turning into modern towns remembered with Caer place names,

1:04:24 that the Romans truly subjugated conquered peoples.

1:04:35 The largest, like Caerleon and Chester,

1:04:39 where permanent legionary garrisons of many thousands were held,

1:04:43 having the biggest impact of all,

1:04:50 making Romans and complicit subjects out of the surrounding people,

1:04:56 if, albeit temporarily, and leaving a permanent legacy on the landscape [music]

1:05:03 in the form of flood dykes, watermills, and roads.

1:05:10 Technological achievements that astonishingly often remained

1:05:15 unsurpassed until the 19th century or later.

1:05:24 It is no wonder, then, that the medieval Welsh masses often chose to see

1:05:30 the Romans and Magnus Maximus in particular as their venerable predecessors.

1:05:43 Remarkably, almost all of that industry and military might came about

1:05:49 during the time of just a handful of governors of Britannia,

1:05:55 all of them at work during the 1st century or so of imperial investment.

1:06:04 The most famous of all,

1:06:07 his campaigns described vividly in the writings of his ever-admiring son-in-law,

1:06:12 Tacitus, in the last few decades of the 1st century AD,

1:06:18 was Gnaeus Julius Agricola.

1:06:25 So great were the successes of Agricola that Emperor who never was,

1:06:31 who marched his forces into northern Wales toward the end of the 1st century AD,

1:06:36 following the hard-fought campaigns of his predecessors,

1:06:40 that in the aftermath, the Romans didn't have to do much more than endure,

1:06:52 bringing in Italian and Eastern goods and ideas

1:06:56 to mingle with the Britons of the west.

1:07:04 In 140 AD, in the wake of the building of Hadrian's Wall,

1:07:10 when his equally lauded successor, Antoninus Pius,

1:07:14 significantly reduced the permanent garrisons in Britannia,

1:07:17 just one auxiliary fort remained in the northwest of what is now Wales.

1:07:25 The others, apparently no longer necessary, all it took was a generation or two

1:07:35 for the tried and tested Roman system to work,

1:07:40 and the important work of extracting raw materials

1:07:44 to pay for all the effort to begin.

1:07:51 That sole fortress to survive in the still wild northwest,

1:07:57 continuing to thrive until the very end of Roman Britain,

1:08:01 was none other than Segontium, the Caernarfon from Maxen's myth.

1:08:19 By the 11th or 12th centuries AD,

1:08:23 when the dream of Maxen was written down and solidified,

1:08:27 more or less in its present form,

1:08:31 its author clearly harked back to [music] a purported time

1:08:35 in the past when not only had Wales been united and strong,

1:08:40 but it, not England, had been the rightful ruler in Britain.

1:08:50 For in those days, there is another mainstay

1:08:53 in the towns that developed from the Roman forts.

1:09:00 Almost all of them also housing the remains of a Norman castle.

1:09:12 Caernarfon's in particular having walls purposely reminiscent of Roman ones

1:09:18 of days gone by, like those of Constantinople in the east.

1:09:26 For of course, in the midst of the Norman invasion of Wales,

1:09:30 a people who also saw themselves as the natural descendants of ancient Rome.

1:09:36 This was a time of sorely needed stories of a glorious past.

1:09:48 Not surprisingly, long before the entire country was subsumed

1:09:52 under the impossible weight of Norman and English rule,

1:09:57 there was a desire for unification.

1:10:02 It is in this context of the long-standing policy of the northern kingdom

1:10:07 of Gwynedd for hegemony over the rest

1:10:10 of Wales that the text was probably written.

1:10:15 Taking place in and around Gwynedd,

1:10:18 whilst expertly weaving together long-existent traditions, current ideas,

1:10:25 and the right of the north to rule over the rest of the country.

1:10:34 In those days, when vaunted dynasties were being extinguished for good,

1:10:41 one Welsh dynast shines brightly above all the others.

1:10:47 And though we don't know for certain that Llywelyn ap Iorwerth,

1:10:52 a castle builder and one of the only Welsh kings to be remembered as the Great,

1:10:57 was involved with the writing of the tale, it seems very likely.

1:11:03 He was a king who sought above all else

1:11:06 to create a united Welsh identity through construction of ideological stories

1:11:13 [music] and institutions.

1:11:15 In rewriting history and weaving a new future,

1:11:18 the unnamed author of The Dream of Maxen enters a realm [music] where new

1:11:23 origin stories can be made and new meanings given to past events and places.

1:11:30 Stories of heroism linking Caernarfon, Carmarthen, and Caerleon,

1:11:36 three previously unconnected forts and power centers into one story.

1:11:44 But how Roman were these places really?

1:11:48 And what can they tell us about the end of Roman Britain in Wales?

1:12:02 Still one of the most significant population centers in the southwest of Wales,

1:12:08 the town of Carmarthen,

1:12:09 in fact, the first of those forts said to have been made in Maxen's day,

1:12:15 doesn't seem to have played an important role in Welsh tradition until

1:12:19 Geoffrey of Monmouth linked [music] it to the tale of the wizard Merlin.

1:12:25 Though, nevertheless,

1:12:26 it had been a very real Roman fort and settlement of some importance.

1:12:37 Today, very little remains of the once [music] significant

1:12:40 Roman town which stood here in the west of Wales.

1:12:45 Fragments of an amphitheater and a few scattered

1:12:49 earthworks being all that can be viewed above ground.

1:12:56 Little more being visible from the air.

1:13:01 A good deal of archaeology has been carried out, though,

1:13:05 and a popular theory is that the place served

1:13:07 as the civitas capital of the British tribe of this region,

1:13:15 the Demetae, one of around 20 such tribal centers across Britain.

1:13:27 Specifically designed by the Romans to be a place of assembly

1:13:32 for the various power brokers of a subjugated region and their Roman masters.

1:13:42 In those days, it was known as Moridunum.

1:13:46 And though none survive above ground today, just like many places in the empire,

1:13:52 impressive town walls were built [music] between 200 and 230 AD,

1:13:59 complete with earthen ramparts and ditch.

1:14:08 According to the geographer Ptolemy, who created a map of Roman Britain based

1:14:13 on travelers' tales in the 2nd century AD, Moridunum was a polis.

1:14:20 And like other polises in Wales, such as Caerwent in the southeast,

1:14:26 the majority of its buildings were mercantile and artisanal in character,

1:14:32 a little like a larger version of the forts,

1:14:35 seeming to represent a centralization of craft

1:14:37 activity amidst the hefty rural hinterland they served.

1:14:45 And within those countryside areas,

1:14:47 aristocratic estates that border on the status of villas have been excavated.

1:14:57 A clear example of the burgeoning inequality that very

1:15:00 often accompanied the concept of Romanitas taking off.

1:15:12 Thoroughly Romanized areas like Italy then going hand in hand with vast

1:15:17 estates owned by individual families and presided over by legions of slaves.

1:15:25 Not anywhere near that level yet.

1:15:28 The estates of the lords of the Demetae have

1:15:30 nonetheless been suggested as being on the path to Romanization.

1:15:38 A previously unknown Roman road

1:15:41 recently excavated in Carmarthenshire during modern

1:15:45 roadworks further adds to burgeoning evidence of Roman activity in this region.

1:15:52 And there are other hints, too.

1:15:55 The territory of the Demetae always producing

1:15:58 more coins than other more peripheral areas,

1:16:04 perhaps unsurprisingly being concentrated in the coastal

1:16:08 regions where traders could easily have got around.

1:16:16 Nevertheless, though having more evidence than much of Wales,

1:16:20 on a whole, the southwest still seems to have been largely un-Romanized.

1:16:27 Though its enclaves of Romanitas would have

1:16:30 important ramifications for the people who came after.

1:16:41 The next of the three forts in The Dream of Maxen,

1:16:45 with some of the most impressive of all Roman remains in Britain,

1:16:49 is the town of Caerleon.

1:16:58 Thought to have been the home of a prominent

1:17:01 Roman legion until the 3rd or 4th centuries.

1:17:12 When the Cambro-Norman writer Gerald of Wales visited in the 12th century,

1:17:18 he found it still exceptionally well preserved

1:17:22 with vast amounts still visible above ground.

1:17:30 Speaking with wonder of the sprawling houses and wide streets,

1:17:36 palaces and temples built with great skill and care.

1:17:45 But perhaps most impressive of all was the amphitheater that still stands today.

1:17:54 In its heyday, capable of seating an entire legion of 5 to 6,000 men.

1:18:02 Built early on in the conquest as a statement of intent and power.

1:18:12 Unlike nearby Caerwent and Carmarthen off to the west, however,

1:18:17 Caerleon had never been a center for the local tribes.

1:18:23 Being one of three legionary garrisons of occupying forces in Britain,

1:18:29 alongside those at York and at Chester.

1:18:34 These three sites, arguably,

1:18:36 having even more of an impact in Romanizing the surrounding [music] peoples.

1:18:47 The construction of immense bathhouses here show how Roman the place was.

1:18:53 Built around 75 to 77 AD, and wide-scale excavations over the last 100 years

1:19:02 have shown more and more about the place.

1:19:13 By Gerald's time, the large tetrapylon built

1:19:16 as a statement of Roman authority still stood.

1:19:23 But soon, it would be gone.

1:19:28 Its meaning having changed by that time

1:19:31 already to be associated with Welsh kingship.

1:19:36 Harking back to times of old.

1:19:44 Finally, the third fort was of course

1:19:47 Maxen's capital in Arvon on the Seiont river.

1:19:52 Standing on a hilltop just above the modern town and castle at Caernarfon.

1:20:04 Excavated [music] time and again for over a hundred years.

1:20:09 It isn't just famous from the Mabinogion,

1:20:12 but claimed by the earlier 9th century Historia Brittonum,

1:20:16 too, as the place where Constantius,

1:20:20 father of Constantine the Great, ended his life.

1:20:26 Today, we know it as Segontium.

1:20:40 By the time Mortimer Wheeler arrived at Caernarfon in the 1920s,

1:20:46 though individuals of an antiquarian dissuasion had

1:20:49 been investigating nearby sites in Gwynedd for centuries,

1:20:54 very few modern excavations of any Welsh forts had been carried out.

1:20:58 [music] As early as 1693,

1:21:06 Caerhun Caer on the marshy plain of Aber Dyfi had been visited by Maurice Jones,

1:21:12 rector of Dol Gellau,

1:21:15 and a partial excavation of Segontium had been carried out in 1845 during

1:21:22 the construction of a new vicarage in the southeastern corner of the site.

1:21:29 But for the most part, academic information was lacking.

1:21:36 With the arrival of excavators like Wheeler

1:21:38 in the years following the First World War,

1:21:40 using modern stratigraphic techniques, all this would change.

1:21:50 Just like at Neath and at Brecon Gaer, similar forts also excavated by Wheeler,

1:21:57 and some of the most impressive left in Britain,

1:22:01 several wall sections and gateways still stood above ground at the time,

1:22:08 never having been subsumed under the earth.

1:22:21 Though standing high on a hill overlooking the estuary

1:22:24 of the Seiont river and Caernarfon Castle down below,

1:22:29 Segontium still stands very much within the limits of the modern town.

1:22:37 The expansion of which in the late 19th and early 20th

1:22:41 centuries had led to discoveries of traces of the extensive vicus,

1:22:46 or civilian settlement, that sprawled far outside the fort's defenses.

1:22:52 Just as the dream of Maxen described.

1:22:57 Though only tiny sections have been available

1:22:59 to be excavated due to the urban sprawl.

1:23:04 [music] Indeed, very recent excavations underneath Caernarfon Castle,

1:23:11 too, have shown similar evidence of Roman occupation.

1:23:17 And though scholars of a more sensationalist persuasion would love to equate

1:23:21 this directly and categorically with the capital of Helen of the Hosts' father,

1:23:27 just as they would the fortress

1:23:28 of the giant Bran with Harlech Castle, unfortunately,

1:23:34 as with most modern cities and towns built directly over archaeological sites,

1:23:40 the evidence remains ever elusive.

1:23:47 However, Wheeler did find incredible evidence at Segontium

1:23:53 of just how unusual the fort really was, turning out to be one of the largest

1:23:59 and most important settlements in the whole of Wales,

1:24:05 with much more of a lasting impact than the others he excavated.

1:24:13 Having been established by Agricola just after

1:24:15 the seizure of Anglesey in the 1st

1:24:17 century AD and not being abandoned until the very end of the 4th century,

1:24:22 perhaps even later, though no concrete evidence

1:24:26 of post-Roman habitation has been found so far.

1:24:31 Further investigations in the late 1970s only added to the story.

1:24:42 Standing at the ramparts of the fort,

1:24:45 extensive views over the western entrance to the Menai Straits can be seen.

1:24:50 Anglesey, the breadbasket of Wales, beyond.

1:24:56 On a clear day, the mighty peaks of Eryri can be spied to the south.

1:25:02 Goliath mountain, Snowdon, ever looming above.

1:25:06 The Llŷn Peninsula clear as day to the west.

1:25:11 From this strategic and well-defended position,

1:25:15 the tidal mouth of the Seiont provided a sheltered route for supplies ferried

1:25:19 back and forth along the water roads to various outposts north and south.

1:25:32 The fort of Hen Waliau, also situated at Caernarfon,

1:25:36 known from a mere portion of wall still visible in back gardens,

1:25:41 probably acting as a storage depot for the entire region.

1:25:48 Indeed, just as in the dream of Maxen, in archaeology,

1:25:53 the late 3rd and 4th centuries heralded a new

1:25:57 flurry of very real activity at the site.

1:26:03 As well as the relatively nearby Caer Gybi naval fort

1:26:06 in Holyhead and signal station on top of Holyhead mountain,

1:26:11 coin deposits, pottery, and even the construction of a Mithraeum at Segontium

1:26:18 showing a good deal of occupation at this time.

1:26:22 Just as many other forts were being abandoned.

1:26:30 No other fort in all of Wales,

1:26:33 and few in Britain, were occupied for as long as Segontium.

1:26:41 Suggestions have been made for the need to protect Roman interests

1:26:45 against the operations of increasingly aggressive

1:26:48 pirates from across the Irish Sea.

1:26:52 In particular, the copper works on Anglesey

1:26:56 and perhaps silver-bearing lead along the Flintshire coast.

1:27:04 The sequence of coins at Segontium extends

1:27:07 all the way into the Theodosian period,

1:27:10 until at least 395 AD, suggesting Magnus Maximus did not,

1:27:18 after all, strip the place of its soldiers entirely.

1:27:23 The last official Roman soldiers from here perhaps being

1:27:27 withdrawn to fight the revolt of Eugenius the Gaul after.

1:27:34 But soon enough, by the first decades of the 5th century AD,

1:27:41 it had all come to an end.

1:27:45 For all its sprawling civilian settlement and garrison of thousands,

1:27:53 Segontium passed into legend as Caer Aber Seiont,

1:28:07 the fort at the mouth of the Seiont river.

1:28:13 By that time, the great bath at Caerleon had already collapsed into disrepair.

1:28:21 Maridunum was largely abandoned for good.

1:28:26 Something had gone terribly wrong.

1:28:35 Whether Maximus could have conceived it or not,

1:28:38 within just one generation of his demise, the world he'd known,

1:28:43 allowing him to cross from one side of Europe to the other with relative ease,

1:28:49 would be a thing of the past.

1:28:55 Whether he knew this would be the case, we can only speculate.

1:29:01 But end it would.

1:29:12 The first signs of something amiss come at the very end of the 3rd century.

1:29:18 After 150 years of gradual disarmerment,

1:29:22 a new defensive fleet was established on the Severn Sea.

1:29:27 Likely performing the sort of naval reconnaissance described as having

1:29:30 taken place in British seas by the military strategist Vegetius.

1:29:40 Brand new forts were raised at the mouth of Holyhead Harbor,

1:29:45 the banks of the River Taff in modern-day Cardiff,

1:29:48 where one named Ratostabius was built.

1:29:51 An unusual name, perhaps showing the Irish influence on those who built it,

1:29:59 as well as at various other locations along the Irish Sea.

1:30:07 Not to mention the state-of-the-art bastions

1:30:10 of the Saxon Shore on the East Coast.

1:30:17 At Carmarthen, Caerwent, Londinium, and most other Roman towns of Britannia,

1:30:24 similarly formidable defensive works were suddenly deemed necessary.

1:30:31 Roman Britain, no longer able to rely on reputation alone as protection.

1:30:38 Clearly, something had changed.

1:30:46 Something that is clear from the contemporary written sources.

1:30:55 In the 360s, the great Roman

1:30:58 military historian Ammianus Marcellinus in particular,

1:31:02 describes devastating raids all over Britain by Picts and Irishmen,

1:31:10 soon to be joined by Franks and Saxons.

1:31:17 No longer mere pirates, but ravaging armies and expeditionary fleets.

1:31:24 On one particularly dire occasion, we're told they overran the entire province,

1:31:30 killing the count [music] of the Saxon

1:31:32 Shore and imprisoning the Duke of Britannia.

1:31:41 According to Marcellinus' account,

1:31:43 the entire island only being saved with the timely

1:31:46 arrival of a relief force from Hispania under Count Theodosius.

1:32:00 Clearly, despite the hefty investments in bullworks and bastions,

1:32:06 the new Roman strategy was not entirely successful.

1:32:11 Destruction and burning layers seen in the geology

1:32:15 at many Roman settlements and reoccupied Iron Age hillforts alike.

1:32:24 Because there is more than just evidence of the Roman world at this time.

1:32:30 During the course of the 4th century,

1:32:32 and particularly in the ensuing centuries, the Britons, it seems,

1:32:37 were now able to look to their own defenses at sites like The Breiddin,

1:32:43 Castell Odo, Dinorban, and Coedlannau Camp, among many others.

1:32:53 Centers of native tribal culture

1:32:56 and political native power structures re-emerging, perhaps.

1:33:01 The Romans, either powerless to stop them,

1:33:04 or even fully endorsing this re-emergence of the Iron

1:33:07 Age culture in preference to newer barbarian foes.

1:33:34 The influential archaeologist and expert in post-Roman hillforts, Leslie Alcock,

1:33:41 the lands beyond the Cambrian Mountains were

1:33:43 for the most part never truly pacified, let alone Romanized.

1:33:50 And despite the trappings of the Roman world still showing up,

1:33:54 suggesting contact and even tacit support,

1:33:59 self-government increasingly began to be the norm.

1:34:07 With yet more centers like Coedlannau Camp and Degannwy

1:34:11 seeming to have taken defense into their own hands,

1:34:15 arguably only hastening the Roman decline.

1:34:27 The Notitia Dignitatum, a miraculously surviving early 5th century list

1:34:32 of Roman military posts in Britain and Gaul,

1:34:35 suggests that by around 390 AD, no Roman forces were left in Wales.

1:34:44 Caerleon and Chester had both been abandoned.

1:34:48 Whether having been moved by Magnus Maximus or not,

1:34:51 the force known as Seguntienses,

1:34:54 perhaps raised at Carnarvon, were by then in Illyricum.

1:35:00 And yet, fascinatingly, just prior to the end of the 4th century,

1:35:05 at Segontium, a dramatic increase in activity can be seen in the geology,

1:35:12 as well as reoccupation at relatively nearby

1:35:15 forts like Canovium in the Conwy Valley,

1:35:19 which had a deep enough port for large seagoing vessels.

1:35:28 Extremely useful to an ambitious local commander,

1:35:32 or even a famed figure like Magnus Maximus.

1:35:40 Just maybe a shred of reality buried within the Mabinogion.

1:35:48 By that time, however, to make any lasting change, [snorts]

1:35:53 it was already too late.

1:35:57 This time, simply too much had happened to recover from.

1:36:03 Increasing societal instability taking a hammer blow to the economy,

1:36:08 already in terminal decline since the 2nd century.

1:36:16 As a result of the disappearance of markets due

1:36:19 to the withdrawal of official military units along with their pay,

1:36:24 the economy would now entirely collapse.

1:36:30 By the early 5th century,

1:36:32 even Segontium and its network of supporting forts at Caer Gybi,

1:36:37 Canovium, and Holyhead Mountain were abandoned for good.

1:36:48 Within just a few decades, things began to go silent.

1:36:57 Forests of alder and oak seen in pollen records

1:37:02 as being cleared in Roman times began to grow back.

1:37:09 Fields and settlements abandoned.

1:37:14 History receding into myth.

1:37:39 At Pembroke Docks, the layers of the past

1:37:42 can still be seen near everywhere you look.

1:37:50 Mighty cranes thundering back and forth to load cargo

1:37:55 ships for the voyage out to the Irish Sea, to halfway around the world beyond.

1:38:07 And besides all that machinery of the modern age,

1:38:13 medieval ramparts and Iron Age hillforts still stand resolute.

1:38:19 Napoleonic era bastions, tower blocks, and oil refineries alike.

1:38:26 Not just financially, but strategically important, too.

1:38:33 Modern fortresses and bastions of elder days.

1:38:46 Crawling along Milford Haven on a passenger ferry to Rosslare,

1:38:51 it takes a long time to make the journey

1:38:54 to the skerries at the sea's edge alone, let alone Ireland beyond.

1:39:12 From its origins at Haverfordwest,

1:39:15 both sides of the mighty waterway here aligned with towns,

1:39:19 wind farms, and industry.

1:39:29 In the Second World War, the Haven suffered heavy bombing from the Luftwaffe

1:39:33 due to its manufacture of ships and its airfields.

1:39:41 It's such a deep and lengthy waterway, in fact,

1:39:44 that the British Navy used it as a launch pad to Ireland for centuries.

1:39:51 From the 12th century days of the Norman warlord Strongbow to Cromwell.

1:40:00 By the time the very last invasion of British soil

1:40:03 was landed here by the French in the late 18th century,

1:40:09 it was famous as a haven for fishermen.

1:40:16 Soon becoming involved in ever more ambitious,

1:40:19 globe-spanning whaling exploits to the great blue beyond.

1:40:26 And as the Victorian age rolled on in the mid-19th century,

1:40:31 it was even hypothesized by some in high society

1:40:36 that the banks of Milford Haven might continue to expand and evolve,

1:40:41 ultimately becoming a super city the size of London.

1:40:49 All that was needed, it was argued,

1:40:51 like the new industrial powerhouses of Birmingham or Manchester,

1:40:56 was for the disparate towns along the shore

1:40:58 to connect up and forge a bright new future.

1:41:07 That future never happened.

1:41:11 Those 19th century theorists, not having taken into account the often

1:41:16 nonlinear path of progression faced by humanity,

1:41:22 the edifices of those Victorian days can still be seen,

1:41:26 however, astride the mighty ramparts of Napoleonic times.

1:41:36 The English, meanwhile,

1:41:38 kept coming just as they had since the days of Strongbow.

1:41:48 By the 20th century, much to the displeasure of many of the locals,

1:41:54 this entire region of Pembrokeshire was commonly known as Little England.

1:42:05 The mind wanders when appreciating a place such as this.

1:42:11 Those towers of lead and steel,

1:42:15 the furnaces of industry chugging on just as they have for centuries,

1:42:21 a single line of continuity from one generation to the next,

1:42:30 advancing, progressing, and sometimes regressing, but always going somewhere.

1:42:41 Because just as Roman Britain of the 4th century AD ultimately

1:42:47 stemmed from the classical world of the Mediterranean of centuries before,

1:42:54 ours is a world derived [music] from our Victorian forebears,

1:42:59 a great chain from the Middle Ages

1:43:01 to the Renaissance to the information economy.

1:43:10 Standing out on deck, it's not difficult to ponder the future, too,

1:43:16 to imagine what will be left in another 200 years from now.

1:43:25 Just as the world of the late 4th century differed from that of 600 AD,

1:43:39 so vast those modern structures are,

1:43:43 it seems likely a great deal should survive,

1:43:49 even if the will or the means to build any more has gone,

1:43:54 even if they're reduced to ruins.

1:44:03 It would take more than mere destruction to remove them.

1:44:14 After 400 AD, however, the situation was different.

1:44:20 A previous world of mighty edifices and succession

1:44:24 from one generation to the next came to an end.

1:44:30 Such was the loss of technology and meaning that the stones

1:44:35 of previous structures were taken away for new, smaller buildings.

1:44:46 Long-crafted expertise having been lost,

1:44:52 and by the time 200 years had passed, just shells remained.

1:45:00 The forward momentum, generally oriented from the mind,

1:45:04 from thoughts and societal consensus, coming to an end in a noticeable break,

1:45:17 by far the greatest in all of British history.

1:45:26 Such would likely be the case for our world if things were to go awry.

1:45:33 The collapsing of towers and factories [music]

1:45:35 being brought about not by centralized civil engineering,

1:45:40 but looters with little understanding [music] of the world that came before.

1:45:48 For at its heart, what is a society [music] but an idea?

1:46:08 At the outer edge of Milford Haven,

1:46:10 the settlement of Dale stands resolute against the ravages of time.

1:46:20 Sheltered beneath a vast headland,

1:46:23 defended by no less than three Iron Age promontory forts,

1:46:29 a castle has stood here for a thousand years.

1:46:37 It is a strange place, quaint, seeming stuck in time.

1:46:46 With the industry of Milford Haven on one side of the village,

1:46:50 the wild Irish Sea the other.

1:46:59 The owner of the castle is still the landlord for many of the locals,

1:47:06 and just adjacent to the village, an even older fortress still stands.

1:47:21 This is Dale Fort.

1:47:24 It's been altered so much over the years

1:47:27 that its original form is barely recognizable.

1:47:34 Today, military bastions of the Napoleonic era onwards have morphed the place,

1:47:41 solidifying and changing with stone and concrete.

1:47:47 Yet, underneath, that far older heritage still stands.

1:47:55 The ancient Celtic past from a very different

1:47:59 time at the end of the Roman world.

1:48:07 Because Dale Fort has been excavated, and though only tiny fragments survive

1:48:19 in the form of a miraculously surviving earthwork bastion,

1:48:24 a few potsherds and other refuse, habitation has been confirmed at the end

1:48:31 of Roman Britain in the later 4th century AD, [music]

1:48:42 a time when Irish raiders would have been coming

1:48:46 in from the outer edge to ravage and settle, [music]

1:48:58 capitalizing on the newfound weakness of Rome.

1:49:04 This fort may have provided part

1:49:07 of a defensive bastion for local British people.

1:49:11 Now fending for themselves after the Romans went their own way.

1:49:18 Alternatively, some Romans, like Magnus Maximus,

1:49:23 might have carried on here themselves.

1:49:29 Alongside British enemies or allies.

1:49:33 As Irishmen, no doubt, walked amongst them, too.

1:49:41 Today, Dale can give us an incredible glimpse into that time.

1:49:47 When forts all across the land began to be occupied once more.

1:49:56 Whether one of these reoccupied forts existed

1:49:59 here after the end of the 4th century, we can't say for sure.

1:50:05 The evidence is simply too shredded,

1:50:09 too fragmentary to say with any ambiguity being removed.

1:50:15 But, as we shall see, many reoccupied Iron Age forts do exist all over Wales.

1:50:27 By the end of the 6th century AD,

1:50:30 living a completely unrecognizable life to that of two centuries before.

1:50:50 We can see this total break that took

1:50:52 place between 400 and 600 AD all over Britain.

1:50:58 But, in few places more so than the region around modern-day Cardiff.

1:51:07 There had been a great city there in those days.

1:51:11 Venta Silurum, the still lingering settlement known today as Caerwent.

1:51:25 Once the administrative heart of the Silures people,

1:51:30 with some of the finest surviving Roman architecture anywhere in the world.

1:51:39 Still a thriving town in the late 4th century,

1:51:44 it was by then [music] already a shadow of what it had once been.

1:51:50 Mighty public buildings used for tribal

1:51:52 meetings superseded [music] by newer concerns.

1:51:59 Shanty structures having been thrown up within a new set of walls,

1:52:04 erected during [music] a brief resurgence of Western Roman power.

1:52:13 By the year 600, a haunted shell of rubble and ghosts were all that remained.

1:52:25 But, some sort of a very different kingdom had arisen from its ashes.

1:52:34 Today, we know it as Gwent.

1:52:47 In 1586, a remarkable book was

1:52:51 released by historian and antiquary William Camden,

1:52:59 Britannia is an ambitious county-by-county [music] description

1:53:03 of the geography and history of the entire island.

1:53:08 The first such work of its kind.

1:53:14 Amidst innumerable fascinating episodes of how scholars

1:53:18 of Tudor England viewed their own past, we get a description of Venta Silurum.

1:53:27 Camden describing it as a very ancient city whose

1:53:31 name neither the rage of men nor time has extinguished.

1:53:40 The mighty ramparts, the most intact of any of the northern provinces,

1:53:46 still standing resolute at that time.

1:53:50 Just as they did a thousand years earlier and still today.

1:54:01 A few decades earlier, another antiquary, John Leland,

1:54:06 described just 16 or 17 tiny houses still

1:54:10 being inhabited within the mighty walls of the past.

1:54:14 Framed by a Norman motte and bailey on one side.

1:54:24 Just how long people had lived there and whether

1:54:27 they had ever truly left remaining a fascinating conundrum.

1:54:34 In order to find out, as early as the 1700s, excavations began.

1:54:40 They continue periodically to this day.

1:54:49 Far wealthier than Carmarthen and Segontium, for example,

1:54:53 the southeast was by far the most Romanized part of Wales.

1:55:00 Almost matching lowland Britain in terms of its opulent houses,

1:55:04 temples, and high-status villas in the country around.

1:55:11 Inhabited by around 3,000 people in its heyday,

1:55:16 archaeology suggests the population of the city to have been

1:55:19 less than the 30,000 of Londinium or 10,000 of Viroconium.

1:55:26 Though, nevertheless,

1:55:28 it remained [music] the largest settlement in Wales for 1,500 years to come.

1:55:40 And the only definitely confirmed civitas.

1:55:45 The place having been run by decurions chosen from the ranks of the Silures.

1:55:53 We know this because in the 3rd century,

1:55:56 well after their conquest by Rome around 150 years earlier,

1:56:00 an inscribed stone was erected by the Silures

1:56:04 in honor of a Roman commander named Tiberius Claudius Paulinus.

1:56:12 An act of gratitude by Romanized tribal leaders

1:56:16 to a man whose patronage was worth cultivating.

1:56:21 A man who would soon become governor of Britannia.

1:56:28 Far from just seeking a place at the forefront of Roman society in the province,

1:56:34 Venta had all the typical features of a Roman town.

1:56:39 A forum, bathhouses, and a basilica.

1:56:45 Three or four temples to a variety of deities.

1:56:50 A hotel with at least 40 rooms.

1:56:54 And of course, townhouses and villas complete with ornately carved mosaics,

1:57:01 murals, and underfloor heating.

1:57:07 Just 2 miles from the Severn, with easy access to the sea,

1:57:12 and with dependent territories stretching far and wide into what is now Brecon,

1:57:17 Glamorgan, and Monmouthshire.

1:57:24 Venta was also well placed on the main road between Caerleon and Gloucester.

1:57:36 And beyond that, the rich villa country around Bath and Cirencester.

1:57:44 In the whole of Roman Wales, just a handful of villas existed.

1:57:50 The most remote being built in Carmarthenshire.

1:57:55 And of those villas,

1:57:57 almost all existed in the southeast in the vicinity of Venta.

1:58:07 Sites like Llantwit Major and Barry being

1:58:10 indistinguishable from most of those in the Cotswolds.

1:58:19 Though Latin graffiti is seen scrawled over the walls at Caerwent,

1:58:24 suggesting a glut of literacy,

1:58:28 as well as tiny shreds of evidence in the form of inscriptions,

1:58:32 for the most part, no history survives.

1:58:37 The only mentions of the place coming

1:58:39 in brief mentions in the 3rd century Antonine Itinerary,

1:58:43 a road book listing principal routes and stopping places,

1:58:48 and the Ravenna Cosmography,

1:58:51 a 7th-century topographical list based on earlier information.

1:59:00 Much like many places in Roman Britain, in order to tell the story of the town

1:59:07 [music] and what became of it, we have to rely almost entirely on archaeology.

1:59:19 But there is much here.

1:59:22 That many thousands of people don't just vanish into thin air.

1:59:38 Since 1888, excavations at Caerwent Major have suggested the place

1:59:44 to have been built on new foundations without an Iron Age predecessor.

1:59:50 Here, at least, whether they were Silurian or from elsewhere,

1:59:55 someone was enjoying all the wealth and power the Roman world had to offer.

2:00:05 And while not quite on the level

2:00:07 of the near industrial scale villas in Provence and Tuscany,

2:00:12 where the vastly outnumbered owners had

2:00:14 become masters over legions of slave workers,

2:00:21 capitalistic methods certainly were being introduced,

2:00:29 pioneering new ways of undertaking agriculture, like heavy plows,

2:00:34 as well as the introduction of new crops and species,

2:00:41 such British staples as apples, oats, parsnips, leeks, turnips,

2:00:47 and carrots, all being introduced by the Romans during this time.

2:00:57 And just like in Somerset, across the Bristol Channel,

2:01:02 and in the Fens on the other side of the island,

2:01:06 vast civil engineering projects were instigated, too.

2:01:14 These landscapes, all being originally drained by Roman engineers,

2:01:19 long before similar operations by medieval

2:01:22 monks led to their more modern reclamation.

2:01:32 In those days, the boggy marshes of the Gwent Levels around

2:01:35 Caerwent became some of the most fertile farmland on the whole island,

2:01:42 just as they are today.

2:01:50 At Goldcliff Point, the evidence of this can

2:01:54 still be seen in great hewn ditches,

2:02:01 leading to a time of great prosperity during the first half of the 4th century.

2:02:10 By which time, [music] in a completely different manner to the rest of Wales,

2:02:15 the region had been thoroughly Romanized.

2:02:22 With direct continuity from the Iron Age seen in some areas,

2:02:26 with land ownership seeming to continue from before the conquest.

2:02:33 The gentry ultimately becoming archaeologically indiscernible from other Romans.

2:02:44 But of course, with all that prosperity, came a price.

2:02:54 Tellingly, [music] impressive city walls were also constructed during this time.

2:03:01 Towards the end of the 360s,

2:03:06 perhaps in the wake of the so-called barbarian conspiracy,

2:03:11 when covetous peoples from outside the empire spilled

2:03:15 over the borders to take what they could.

2:03:24 Such was the reality of life on the far northern frontier.

2:03:31 But barbarians didn't conquer cities, not yet,

2:03:36 tending instead to simply go around and strangle them

2:03:40 into submission if relief forces did not arrive in time.

2:03:48 There was no great invasion here, but a slow, lingering end.

2:04:01 After the construction of a new temple to an unnamed god,

2:04:06 almost no further buildings would be made in stone on the site.

2:04:13 The latest coins at Caerwent in circulation seem

2:04:16 to date from the start of the 5th century,

2:04:20 dating from the reign of Honorius in four buried hoards,

2:04:25 hidden by desperate individuals seeking to come back to retrieve them later.

2:04:35 They never did.

2:04:37 Already 20 or 30 years before that time, it seems likely that Roman Wales had

2:04:44 ceased to be governed by a central authority.

2:04:52 Currency was no longer in use, having lost its meaning entirely,

2:04:58 a barter economy taking its place, only further quickening the collapse.

2:05:11 But how did this happen?

2:05:13 How did glorious Venta go from its great town houses to squalid hovels?

2:05:25 The 100-year period from the construction of the last temple

2:05:30 to the mythic establishment of the succeeding kingdom of Gwent,

2:05:34 etymologically derived from the Roman name for the town,

2:05:38 is one shrouded in mystery and chaos.

2:05:44 Whether people continued living in the city,

2:05:47 squatting in the remains of their ancestors, remains a hotly debated subject.

2:05:56 There is almost no history and very little archaeology to draw from.

2:06:08 For lack of a better option, we can,

2:06:11 however, turn to more [music] unorthodox sources,

2:06:16 hagiographies, or saints' lives from later centuries,

2:06:21 providing mythic foundations for the kingdom of Gwent.

2:06:33 The Gwent Levels are a land suffused with legend.

2:06:41 Though no verifiable post-Roman evidence has been

2:06:44 uncovered at the Iron Age Llanmelin Wood Hillfort,

2:06:48 despite extensive digs in the 1930s,

2:06:53 the place remains popular with fringe scholars.

2:06:57 But unlike many other places associated with the King Arthur legend,

2:07:03 it having been posited as a potential location for Camelot,

2:07:08 there is real evidence of post-Roman life here, too.

2:07:19 Not far from Venta, the village of Portskewett overlooks the Severn.

2:07:30 Great bridges running over the mighty

2:07:32 sea road now belie its ancient foundations.

2:07:41 Portskewett [music] has been inhabited for over 1,500 years.

2:07:50 According to hagiography,

2:07:52 here once lived one of the earliest recorded Christian saints in the region,

2:08:01 a half-remembered performer of miracles, originating in Ireland,

2:08:07 living on the borderlands of myth and history.

2:08:14 Written in the first half of the 12th century,

2:08:18 the life of Saint Tathyus relates the move of the saint

2:08:22 to Portskewett on the behest of the local king, Caradog ap Our.

2:08:32 [music] Sometime, apparently, in the 5th or 6th centuries, [music]

2:08:43 a king who, similarly in some traditions,

2:08:46 is credited with moving the court of Gwent

2:08:49 from Venta to the harbor at Portskewett, where there was a fresh water spring.

2:08:57 [music]

2:09:01 And a site remembered as one of the chief ports of Wales in a 7th century poem.

2:09:12 But most importantly of all, though the harbor has now dried up,

2:09:17 replaced by edifices of the information age, there is archaeology, too.

2:09:26 Wetland structures, such as fish traps,

2:09:32 and other evidence from the 6th century onwards have been located.

2:09:36 And in 1973, a whole series of Christian burials were dug,

2:09:48 tracing an unbroken line of succession from the 4th to the 9th centuries AD.

2:09:57 Lingering on to become something new entirely.

2:10:02 It seems that Caerwent became Christian before the end.

2:10:09 But can the surrounding region tell us anything more?

2:10:26 At the eastern edge of Glamorgan, 28 miles or so along the coast from Caerwent,

2:10:34 a wooded hill stands in the middle of parklands and farms.

2:10:40 It's largely forgotten today, the domain of dog walkers,

2:10:44 ramblers, and a middle-class suburb.

2:10:49 Just one of many such castle mounds and ring

2:10:52 forts found all over Glamorgan and wider Wales.

2:11:00 Once clearly discernible overground fortifications,

2:11:04 long having since rotted away.

2:11:12 Few stop to notice the significance of the place now.

2:11:20 Most mounds, such as this, date either

2:11:23 from the Iron Age or the High Middle Ages.

2:11:27 The Normans, in particular,

2:11:29 being prolific in throwing up motte-and-bailey castles all

2:11:33 over the land from the 11th century onwards.

2:11:40 But a handful are different.

2:11:45 Dinas Powys is one such site.

2:11:55 In 1949, British archaeologist H.N.

2:11:59 Savory [music] attempted to create a classification for all Welsh hill forts,

2:12:06 arguing for one particular type of defended homestead,

2:12:09 measuring less than 2 acres in size,

2:12:12 to have been occupied exclusively in the Roman period.

2:12:17 Dinas Powys was one of these sites, named for a small promontory enclosure.

2:12:26 And even for that type, it was exceptionally small.

2:12:32 The place was so obscure, in fact,

2:12:35 that it had no verifiable name until digs began in the early 1950s.

2:12:45 The chief excavator deciding to rename the site after the local town,

2:12:50 which he surmised to have originally been

2:12:52 called Dinas Powys in reference to that motte.

2:12:59 For as we shall see, the place was much older than the Normans.

2:13:07 The name of the excavator was Leslie Alcock,

2:13:11 and we will be hearing much more from him.

2:13:14 For he was destined to become the most prolific

2:13:17 of all excavators of post-Roman hill forts in Britain.

2:13:26 When Alcock first arrived to dig at Dinas Powys,

2:13:31 he initially assumed the place to be 11th century in origin.

2:13:36 What resulted was the unenviable task of disentangling a later

2:13:41 Norman castle from the post-Roman remains that lay beneath.

2:13:48 The resulting dig between 1954 and 1958 would become one

2:13:53 of the most important of any site from that era,

2:13:58 revealing six phases of occupation in all.

2:14:02 The most intensive, phase four, dating to the 5th and 6th centuries AD.

2:14:12 Just as Caerwent faded to oblivion.

2:14:19 At Dinas Powys, unprecedented discoveries were made.

2:14:25 One of the richest collections of locally

2:14:27 made metalwork found anywhere during that time.

2:14:32 And imported pottery, too.

2:14:38 Unfortunately, most [clears throat] of the metal was in a bad state of erosion.

2:14:44 Though reconstructions have shown it to have once made

2:14:48 up several penannular brooches of an insular Celtic style.

2:14:57 Items from outside Wales were found, too.

2:15:01 A strip of bronze ripped from a bucket,

2:15:04 usually associated with Anglo-Saxon settlements,

2:15:09 as well as the remains of a rare blue glass squat beaker,

2:15:14 known elsewhere from the so-called princely burials,

2:15:17 such as Prittlewell and Sutton Hoo.

2:15:25 Most interesting of all, however,

2:15:28 were the goods that had originated outside of Britain.

2:15:33 A glass bead coated in gold leaf, most probably originating in Coptic Egypt,

2:15:41 and over 70 pottery and glass vessels imported from production

2:15:46 centers in southern France and the distant western Mediterranean.

2:15:53 Some of them ornamented with stamped

2:15:55 designs of crosses and other Christian symbols.

2:16:00 The most impressive of which are a red bowl with a glossy surface,

2:16:05 and another with freely arranged patterns of running felines.

2:16:15 Though concealed by trees today, on high ground above the Severn Estuary,

2:16:22 Dinas Powys stands less than a mile from the Estuary of the River Ely,

2:16:27 highway to the Severn Sea, Ireland,

2:16:31 continental Europe, and even the Mediterranean beyond.

2:16:42 The finds at the site suggest a person or dynasty

2:16:46 of individuals possessing a great deal of wealth and power.

2:16:56 Made even more the extreme by the lack

2:16:59 of finds from almost anywhere else during this time.

2:17:05 Given the wide-reaching trade contacts of the place,

2:17:08 it is even tempting to think of the lord of Dinas Powys sitting in his fortress,

2:17:14 drinking Mediterranean wine out of elegant glass beakers.

2:17:23 And yet, far from the magnificent

2:17:26 picture suggested in the heroic bardic tradition,

2:17:30 picturing resplendent princes feasting their war bands in great halls,

2:17:37 the reality of the site is a curious mixture of luxury and squalor.

2:17:45 On a far smaller scale than the aristocratic

2:17:48 Britons of the centuries before under Roman rule.

2:17:54 A fact always highlighted by Alcock himself.

2:18:01 The reasons for this become [music] immediately clear upon visiting.

2:18:06 The ramparts enclosing an area of just 100 by 190 ft.

2:18:16 One of the most famous and highly publicized finds from the dig,

2:18:20 however, was the buildings themselves.

2:18:25 One of them, widely interpreted as a royal hall.

2:18:38 The first site that greets you when arriving at Dinas Powys today,

2:18:43 after traipsing through woodland for what seems like far too long,

2:18:49 are the massive earthwork ramps and ditches at the southern entranceway.

2:18:55 10 ft wide and 5 ft deep with earth

2:18:59 thrown up to create a rampart on the inner side.

2:19:08 As Dinas Powys is a whaleback hill with steep,

2:19:11 impenetrable cliffs on the other sides,

2:19:15 these were ample defense to keep any unwanted visitors out.

2:19:22 Originally, Alcock had dated banks 1, 3, and 4 to the 11th century,

2:19:29 only later confidently reassigning all of them to the fifth and sixth.

2:19:38 One of the tiny handful of sites then having been discovered from that time.

2:19:45 The banks only seem to have survived at all by chance,

2:19:50 having been incorporated into the Norman

2:19:52 defenses and surviving intensive farming

2:19:56 only by the dense thickets of trees that coat its surface.

2:20:05 When walking by those earthen banks,

2:20:09 it's easy to contemplate why so few sites like this are left now.

2:20:15 The others having already been lost to the plow long ago.

2:20:24 Inside the enclosure, two principal buildings once stood.

2:20:30 One in particular, complete with drainage gullies

2:20:34 and rich assemblages of animal bones in midden heaps,

2:20:37 has famously been interpreted as a feasting hall,

2:20:43 akin to Beowulf and the Mabinogion.

2:20:54 Though some of the stones had been

2:20:56 removed and reshaped by later Norman builders,

2:21:00 the buildings survived relatively well,

2:21:03 surrounded by the slag heaps of at least five carefully built hearths,

2:21:12 attesting to the onsite manufacture of fine jewelry of copper, silver,

2:21:19 and gold, along with the smithing tools to go with them.

2:21:28 In addition to potentially quaffing exotic wines from the Mediterranean,

2:21:34 those who lived here regularly dined on pork, mutton, and beef.

2:21:42 In comparison to the vacuum of elsewhere at this time,

2:21:46 where the concept of pottery making itself had

2:21:49 disappeared by the end of the fourth century,

2:21:52 it does seem increasingly likely to have been at least a kind

2:21:56 of a princely hall fit for a sort of a king.

2:22:08 The kind of place where Beowulf's thanes would assemble and sleep,

2:22:13 the king himself retreating to his wife's hall in the second,

2:22:17 smaller building after the feast's conclusion.

2:22:25 Whether the metal smiths of Dinas Powys, like bardic poets, were peripatetic,

2:22:32 traveling far and wide to seek out the patronage of chiefs and kings,

2:22:37 or whoever paid the best, we simply don't know.

2:22:42 Though bardic allusions in the storytelling

2:22:45 traditions often hint at such an arrangement.

2:22:52 In the years since the Alcock's digs at the site,

2:22:56 many such metalworking centers have been found

2:22:59 from the same time at Chun Castle in Cornwall,

2:23:04 the Motte of Mark in Galloway, and elsewhere.

2:23:11 Though by his own admission, when compared even to the Iron Age La

2:23:16 Tène metalworkers of close to a millennia earlier,

2:23:20 Alcock reminds us that the smiths of Dinas Powys pale in comparison.

2:23:28 The hall itself is a relatively meager affair,

2:23:31 too, a subrectangular house of drystone wall,

2:23:36 similar in size to other so-called halls found at Cadbury Congresbury,

2:23:42 Cadbury Castle, and perhaps at Castle Dore,

2:23:45 though the latter may in fact not date [music] from the same era.

2:23:50 All are minuscule compared to the rich Glamorgan villas of Roman Britain.

2:23:55 [music] Today, Dinas Powys remains the most

2:24:05 extensively excavated post-Roman hillfort in Wales

2:24:10 and the richest in the quality and quantity of its material evidence.

2:24:20 But, it is a place of contradictions,

2:24:26 seeming to shift whichever way you look at it.

2:24:30 On the one hand, it is often compared

2:24:33 to the great hall complexes of Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia,

2:24:39 sites such as Yevering and Rendlesham,

2:24:45 a focal point for patron-client relationships kept alive

2:24:50 through feasting and the manufacture of prestige goods,

2:24:56 a theater of power where gift exchange

2:25:00 and the collection of tribute was facilitated.

2:25:05 Imported glass and local metalwork,

2:25:08 sometimes associated with a kind of sacred kingship.

2:25:17 On the other hand, its tiny size led Alcock to once describe

2:25:22 it as the squalid and inconvenient eyrie of a nest of robbers.

2:25:34 Dinas Powys has even been argued to be an early

2:25:38 court or lease and hall of a Christian chieftain,

2:25:48 terms in fact from much later medieval writings.

2:25:57 Apparently enjoying a relationship with a local Christian site,

2:26:02 perhaps the post-Roman cemetery and monastic site at Llandaff,

2:26:10 largely attested from the seventh century,

2:26:14 but where fifth and sixth century imported amphorae and glass are also found.

2:26:24 Though in truth, there is nothing specifically Christian about Dinas Powys.

2:26:31 Enjoying wine does not necessarily equate to Romanitas, nor Christian belief.

2:26:41 We must even entertain the remote possibility that all

2:26:45 the exports came from a single wayward ship.

2:26:53 Given the good deal of evidence for Christianity,

2:26:57 both before and after the fall of Roman Britain,

2:27:01 it is likely that a kind of missionary activity,

2:27:05 left adrift to develop in Britain on its own,

2:27:09 did indeed have a marked impact on the population,

2:27:13 going hand in hand with a reorganization of ideological transformations

2:27:18 related to the end of Roman imperial control from the Mediterranean.

2:27:26 Rulers like those of Dinas Powys may well have leveraged their access

2:27:31 to the spiritual to gain power in the eyes of their subjects.

2:27:38 The strategic placement of Dinas Powys, then,

2:27:42 and just how it controlled its hinterlands,

2:27:46 has huge implications for understanding power

2:27:50 and the first kingdoms that formed in post-Roman Britain.

2:27:57 Construction here taking place at the very same

2:28:00 time as the abandonment and reorganization of villas, farmsteads,

2:28:06 and urban settlements such as Venta Silurum, not far away,

2:28:17 but for the most part, already a memory.

2:28:23 Unfortunately, despite centuries of research,

2:28:27 there still remain real issues in understanding how

2:28:31 and even where people lived in Britain during this time.

2:28:39 Just how exactly supposed dynasties, like the one hypothesized at Dinas Powys,

2:28:45 were able to initially leverage the resources to carve out their kingdom,

2:28:50 foster connections with the Mediterranean, and even employ an onsite jeweler.

2:28:57 Just how large such a polity might have been remains largely a mystery.

2:29:03 As does what the Mediterranean traders got in return.

2:29:11 Though a complex exchange network along the Severn Sea with Tintagel

2:29:16 in North Cornwall as the central tin trading hub has long been suggested.

2:29:23 With coastal sites almost always seeming to be favored.

2:29:33 Though hard evidence remains scant.

2:29:35 [music] Meager hints of a kingdom can nonetheless be threaded together.

2:29:48 Just an hour or two's walk from Dinas Powys

2:29:52 by a council estate in Cardiff a monster of a hillfort looms.

2:30:01 Hidden to most residents of the city in a most [music] unlikely of locations.

2:30:10 This is Caerau.

2:30:17 One of the mightiest [music] Iron Age hillforts in all of South Wales.

2:30:23 And one which has seen a fair bit of excavation in recent years.

2:30:32 Though the colossal ramparts of Caerau had been

2:30:35 dug long before the Romans ever came to Britain.

2:30:40 Tiny hints of habitation afterwards have been pinpointed, too.

2:30:47 Certainly a medieval ringwork is cited on the top

2:30:51 of the hill as well as an adjacent church.

2:30:58 A post-Roman settlement in such a place

2:31:01 of the ancestors is at least semi-plausible.

2:31:06 Though evidence is lacking so far.

2:31:14 Another site in the region which shares many similarities

2:31:18 with Dinas Powys is the unexcavated bivallate fort near Llanvithyn.

2:31:26 Only future digging will determine definitively when this site dates to.

2:31:33 Though some scholars like Andy Seaman and Leo Thomas have suggested all three

2:31:38 of these sites to have been one part of a network of interrelated power centers.

2:31:49 A sort of peripatetic kingship even,

2:31:52 not unlike that practiced by much later medieval kings.

2:31:59 The likes of Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd known to have journeyed

2:32:03 between the various courts over the year rather than having one singular base.

2:32:13 Dinas Powys then a gatekeeper to the outside world

2:32:18 standing just 4 km from the sea and two

2:32:21 from the nearest landing site could have been just

2:32:26 one site among many in a sort of proto-kingdom.

2:32:31 Across estuary polity is even possible, too.

2:32:35 The fort being only 30 km over

2:32:38 the water from the contemporary forts at Cadbury Congresbury,

2:32:42 Brent Knoll, and Cannington in Somerset.

2:32:52 With Congresbury in particular actually being

2:32:55 visible from Dinas Powys and vice versa.

2:33:02 It even shares similar features with Dinas Powys such

2:33:06 as a rectangular building similarly interpreted as a hall.

2:33:16 Though it remains equally possible that any of these post-Roman sites could

2:33:22 have made up connected polities or acted

2:33:25 as strongholds for singular elite families.

2:33:29 It does seem likely that their inhabitants

2:33:31 operated within the same network of elites.

2:33:39 Particularly those visible from one another.

2:33:46 Perhaps if relatively friendly a system of beacons

2:33:50 on hilltops uniting them in times of trouble.

2:33:58 Certainly like most hillforts Dinas Powys enjoyed a great

2:34:03 vantage point to see widely over the landscape.

2:34:09 No one could arrive at the nearby navigable landing

2:34:12 points at Sully and Cogan Pill without being clearly seen.

2:34:18 And those moving through the landscape likely would have acted accordingly.

2:34:23 Perhaps paying homage to the dynasty there in order to do so.

2:34:34 We know that in later centuries the landed aristocracy

2:34:38 wielded a considerable amount of power over their immediate dependents.

2:34:45 Largely engaged in farming of which they would give a portion of tax.

2:34:54 Rather than feeling loyalty towards the kingdom

2:34:56 itself the relationship was with the king.

2:35:04 Mafia-esque dons generally seeming to have origins in the 5th century.

2:35:15 Military obligation being a personal oath to the lord.

2:35:23 Armies therefore varied hugely based on the personal charisma of the lord.

2:35:33 Even so the estimates of the Black Book of Carmarthen of 6 to 900 in an army

2:35:39 dating to the 12th century would generally have been far too many for our age.

2:35:45 Though may have represented a similar sort of system.

2:35:49 Something like 50 to 100 men likely being the norm.

2:35:58 Still a formidable force to reckon with for unwanted

2:36:01 visitors into a land like that of Dinas Powys.

2:36:09 And come they probably did.

2:36:12 War remaining a key form of funding and gaining and preserving prestige.

2:36:19 Any warbands who did come in from afar would have had to face the king's

2:36:24 warband kitted out with Germanic equipment found

2:36:29 all over hillforts that were never conquered.

2:36:33 Their goal to acquire livestock, slaves, and riches.

2:36:43 In a very different world to that once enjoyed by the citizens of Caerwent.

2:36:52 There is therefore an argument for Dinas Powys forming the focus of a petty

2:36:58 kingdom in the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff Basin from the 5th century onwards.

2:37:09 Either forged in the fires of Roman collapse or in the vacuum thereafter.

2:37:19 Until it was finally subsumed into the larger kingdom of Glywysing

2:37:25 around the time of its abandonment in the later 7th century.

2:37:37 Perhaps this abandonment being no coincidence.

2:37:46 Now that we have constructed one potential early

2:37:49 kingdom what can we say of Venta Silurum?

2:37:54 Just a day's walk away.

2:37:57 And of Gwent the venerable kingdom that supposedly succeeded it.

2:38:10 By the time the ramparts of Dinas Powys were

2:38:13 being dug the Gwent levels had already broken their banks.

2:38:21 Without the careful maintenance of the provincial government persistent

2:38:25 floodwater gradually returned the place to its natural state.

2:38:31 But it wasn't just the coastal wetlands that made

2:38:35 a comeback towards the end of the 4th century.

2:38:39 Pollen samples taken from Wentwood,

2:38:42 suggesting a significant re-emergence of birch, beech, oak, hazel, and ash.

2:38:52 Accompanied by the widespread abandonment of settlements and villas,

2:39:00 after centuries out in the cold, the wild wood began to return.

2:39:14 At both Caerleon and Caerwent,

2:39:17 not only did construction of new buildings come to an end,

2:39:22 but many others began to fall down for lack of maintenance.

2:39:31 Though we can't rule out the last inhabitants continuing

2:39:34 to live on or squat in the ruins for a time,

2:39:39 there certainly weren't enough people to man the walls,

2:39:44 making them potentially vulnerable to raiders.

2:39:51 With the surrounding landscape going wild again,

2:39:55 the last inhabitants of urban South Wales may have simply left.

2:40:04 For lack of a better option,

2:40:07 heading out into the unknown to seek somewhere more easily defensible to live.

2:40:18 Certainly by 500 AD, Caerwent had come to an end.

2:40:28 Archaeologically speaking,

2:40:29 the most densely settled area in all of Roman Wales is

2:40:34 followed by an extreme lack of settlement evidence of any kind.

2:40:49 As we have already seen, unlike Dyfed Powys,

2:40:53 the kingdom of Gwent does exist in certain,

2:40:57 albeit questionable, semi-historical sources originating in a much later age.

2:41:09 The 12th-century life of Saint Tathyus, in particular,

2:41:13 speaks of the journey of an Irish monk during the 5th or 6th centuries,

2:41:22 following visions of an angel who spoke to him.

2:41:26 Tathyus, the son of an Irish king,

2:41:29 traveled across the sea with eight disciples and up the River Severn,

2:41:35 making landfall in the kingdom of Gwent.

2:41:41 Tathyus was feasted by the local king, Caradoc,

2:41:46 going on to found a monastic school there at his town of Venta Silurum.

2:41:54 Though no verifiable evidence exists [music] for Caradoc's existence at all,

2:42:00 he would later be immortalized as a knight of King Arthur, no less.

2:42:06 [music]

2:42:08 A more grounded suggestion for his origin, if any shred of reality remains,

2:42:14 would be a descent from the last decurions or ruling council of Venta.

2:42:26 There are other sources, too.

2:42:29 Some relevant, though mostly questionable,

2:42:32 information being found in the Book of Llandaff,

2:42:36 again, likely originating much later in the 12th century.

2:42:42 Though some scholars, like Wendy Davies,

2:42:45 date it much earlier, to the 7th century.

2:42:52 Ultimately, the book suggests that Meurig ap Tewdrig,

2:42:56 living sometime in the 5th, 6th, or 7th centuries,

2:43:01 extended his power from his home kingdom

2:43:04 of Glywysing over Erging as well as Gwent.

2:43:10 Rarely mentioned historically on their own, according to archaeologist Ken Dark,

2:43:17 both kingdoms ultimately deriving from the last vestiges of the Silures,

2:43:26 eventually forming two constituent parts of the larger kingdom of Morgannwg,

2:43:35 better known today as Glamorgan.

2:43:44 Morgan being [music] the supposed ancestor of a line of kings

2:43:48 who would rule in these parts for 500 years to come.

2:43:59 Though yet more garbled histories suggest occasional

2:44:03 factionalism within the kingdom of Gwent itself,

2:44:08 with the southeastern corner, Gwent Iscoed,

2:44:11 occasionally ruled by a breakaway dynasty.

2:44:16 In reality, the only thing we can be

2:44:18 completely sure of is the scientifically dated remains.

2:44:27 Most importantly, those individuals buried at the Christian cemetery

2:44:32 at Caerwent between the 5th and 10th centuries AD,

2:44:42 and those at Llandaff near Dyfed Powys.

2:44:50 If only they could speak and tell us whether

2:44:53 there was any real succession from the Roman world.

2:45:02 Because though there isn't much evidence of it in South Wales,

2:45:07 quite paradoxically, in the rest of the country,

2:45:10 in regions that were actually far less Romanized, there is a great deal.

2:45:24 By the time the Roman way of life

2:45:27 definitively ended in Britain by around 450 AD,

2:45:32 there was a significantly reduced standard

2:45:34 of living than before the Romans came.

2:45:40 Where before vast city-sized hillforts had dominated the island,

2:45:47 coinage being widespread among many of the lowland peoples,

2:45:54 now a barter economy had taken over.

2:45:59 Scattered settlements, just pinpricks in a lawless land of chaos.

2:46:06 And yet, the names of hundreds of individuals survive on memorial stones.

2:46:19 People whose commemorators often chose to consciously

2:46:23 hearken back to that world before.

2:46:30 Well over 300 named individuals in Wales alone,

2:46:35 not just often going by Roman names, like Maglocunus,

2:46:42 son of Clutorius, and Vitalianus Emeretos at Nefyn in around 500 AD,

2:46:54 and Macaritinus, son of Bericus, by Swansea.

2:47:02 But also using often grandiose terms.

2:47:06 At least two kings are noted, four saints, and other more unusual terms, too.

2:47:17 In around 500 AD, a certain Cantiorix is described as a citizen of Gwynedd.

2:47:27 On Anglesey, Melisat Hlan Gienan is described as doctor.

2:47:37 The stone of a certain Cantiyacus states

2:47:41 he was a cousin of Maglos, a magistrate.

2:47:47 And finally, in Caernarvonshire in around 540 AD, we have Justinus, the consul.

2:47:57 It is a fascinating conundrum.

2:48:00 Did these individuals truly understand the gravitas of such titles?

2:48:07 Or did they use them in order to inspire

2:48:10 some sort of a hearkening back or authority?

2:48:16 Perhaps speaking more of Christianity than of a Roman

2:48:21 pattern of administration as we would recognize it.

2:48:27 Fascinatingly, many of the stones have another writing system on them, too,

2:48:34 derived not from British or Roman,

2:48:38 but from another newly Christianized land across the Irish Sea.

2:48:50 This is Ogam, and it is some of the best evidence

2:48:55 for the Irish invasions of Britain taking place at this time.

2:49:07 And many of the memorial stones in Wales are bilingual,

2:49:12 having Ogam as well as British or Latin inscriptions.

2:49:18 A certain Bivatodus, for example, son of Bodibever,

2:49:23 a Latin chieftain with a hereditary Roman title, was written in Ogam, too.

2:49:30 This early system of Irish writing.

2:49:38 Another commemorates Paulinus, preserver of the faith,

2:49:43 constant lover of his country, the devoted champion of righteousness.

2:49:52 Ogam stones are found all over the west of Britain, all over the seven sea,

2:49:58 and beyond on Scilly, the Isle of Man, and even Scotland.

2:50:08 And it is to these Irish settlers in Britain,

2:50:12 seen in archaeology, myth, and history, that we turn to next.

2:50:23 As we move beyond the civilized south to the wild west coast and the north.

2:50:47 Woo.

2:50:48 Wow.

2:50:49 That was a lot of fun, an absolute [music] joy to make, in fact.

2:50:54 For 5 years I've been working on it.

2:50:57 Reading, researching, writing, rereading, visiting sites.

2:51:03 I visited pretty much every single site

2:51:06 in the entirety of Wales from this time period, between the 400s and the 600s.

2:51:11 Now, the initial script was 40,000 words.

2:51:15 It's since ballooned, I think, to about 50,000 words.

2:51:18 It's nearly a whole book.

2:51:19 So, of course, this episode is just one of, I think,

2:51:24 nine episodes I had planned.

2:51:27 These are all my scripts, basically.

2:51:31 Uh Absolutely loads of them.

2:51:37 I get a bit carried away, okay?

2:51:39 But that's the joy of this thing.

2:51:40 That's the joy of this thing.

2:51:42 Um So, yeah, years of work goes into these things.

2:51:48 You may have noticed that YouTube is sort of, at the moment, the end of 2025,

2:51:54 filled with a lot of content that, let's just say,

2:51:58 isn't very well researched and hasn't had a lot of effort put into it.

2:52:04 So, bizarrely, this is what it's come to.

2:52:07 I just wanted to say that I am a human being.

2:52:11 I'm the guy who does everything on this channel.

2:52:13 I do all the research, I do all the writing, I do all the narrating,

2:52:15 I do all the video editing,

2:52:17 I do all the putting of the music [music] to the videos.

2:52:21 Um Unless, in the video description, I say, "This video was edited by so-and-so.

2:52:28 This video was written by so-and-so." Which does happen, which does happen.

2:52:32 But, yeah, by and large, the main big videos, it's just me.

2:52:36 Unfortunately, uh I am only human.

2:52:40 But, yeah, if you want to hear anything more from me,

2:52:44 I've got my own channel called Pete Kelly,

2:52:46 which is like a subsidiary channel to this main one, History Time.

2:52:48 You can go and watch that, uh on the link here.

2:52:52 You can also watch the entire back catalog of History Time.

2:52:55 I've been doing this for nearly a decade now.

2:52:57 [music] Alternatively, I have a Substack, which you can go and read, which,

2:53:02 uh, charts my adventures around the world

2:53:05 at the world's greatest archaeological sites.

2:53:08 Been a lot of fun working on that channel.

2:53:13 And, of course, make sure to subscribe here

2:53:16 for when the next episodes in this series come out.

2:53:20 Next one is, uh, going to be on the Irish

2:53:23 invasion of Wales in the 5th century AD.

2:53:26 Absolutely awesome, unheard of period of history.

2:53:28 [music] People don't tend to focus on that period.

2:53:31 And after that, of course, we go to the northern kingdom of Gwynedd,

2:53:35 and we speak about the incredible goings-on there,

2:53:37 which is is probably my favorite kingdom of the period.

2:53:41 So, that's going to be a really special episode.

2:53:43 And after that, we continue to investigate everything that goes

2:53:46 on in Wales between the years 400 and 600.

2:53:50 It's all coming, guys.

2:53:51 It's all coming.

2:53:52 All in these research books I've got here,

2:53:55 these research sort of packs of dense information that I've written.

2:54:01 So, yeah, guys, uh, it's been beautiful.

2:54:05 I'm loving doing this, but unfortunately,

2:54:08 in this new era of the AI slop inundation,

2:54:12 you're going to have to see a little bit more of me on screen.

2:54:14 So, I'm sorry about that.

2:54:16 Ideally, I would like it to not be so.

2:54:18 I'd like to just remain the disembodied narrator.

2:54:22 But, unfortunately, if you put effort into anything these days,

2:54:24 it's assumed you've used AI.

2:54:28 So, yeah, this is me, this is my library.

2:54:31 I'm Pete Kelly.

2:54:33 See you on the next one.