Welsh Journals

REVIEWS SAINT GERMANUS OF AUXERRE AND THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN. By E. A. Thompson (Studies in Celtic History, VI). The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984. Pp. x, 127. £ 19.50. Constantius's Life of St. Germanus of Auxerre contains a record of two visits which brought the saint to Britain, in 429 and c. 436-37, on missions to rid the island of Pelagian heresy. These chapters, composed in Gaul in the 480s, are almost the last distant glimpse of Britain still within the ambit of the continental Roman empire, at least for ecclesiastical purposes, at a time before the onset of the Saxon invaders. Professor Thompson believes that historians of the end of Roman Britain have been guilty of neglect where the Life of Germanus is concerned. He sets out to remedy the deficiency in this monograph, and to extract such history as he can from an unpromising record of the confounding of heretics, punctuated by miraculous cures, escapes from fire and storm, and a bloodless victory won over Saxons and Picts to the accompaniment of shouts of 'Alleluia'. Thompson is impressed most of all by the extreme vagueness and ignorance which Constantius displays about Britain, in sharp contrast to the degree of detail, for example, the citing of names of people and places, to be found in the sections recounting the saint's activities in Gaul and Britain. His conclusion is that Constantius simply did not know about what had been happening in Britain at the time of Germanus's visits, and the explanation is ready to hand: the great rupture of the Saxon raids had intervened. For Professor Thompson there is no cosy co-existence or continuity between sub-Roman and Saxon in Britain, but rather, as he vigorously argues in the final chapter of this book, a violent break whch utterly severed communications between south-eastern Britain and the continental mainland. The detailed memory of Germanus's exploits in Britain was thus lost from the record, and the historian is forced to make the best of Constantius's dim and distant outline. The historical reconstruction in this volume is presented with the kind of robust, pugnacious argument which will be familiar to habitues of Professor Thompson's writings, and much of it carries conviction. It would be difficult, I suspect, to refute his thoroughly argued case for dating Germanus's second visit to Britain as early as c. 436-37 (the same conclusion is reached by Ian Wood in the previous volume in this same series). Equally persuasive, though with fewer facts to go on, is the discussion of the geographical setting of the first visit: the principal encounter with the Pelagians at London, the pilgrimage to St. Alban's shrine at Verulamium, and the 'Alleluia' victory somewhere in northern Kent. At least suggested locations are made to seem highly improbable. Thompson's problem throughout is the familiar one of constructing history from hagiography. He admits in his preface to the 'monstrous difficulties' of the