Children of the (inscribed) stones
Romans on the edge
If you visit on the right day, you can walk into a small former schoolhouse next to Margam Abbey parish church in a suburb of Port Talbot – there’s no entrance fee, and no staff at the door, just open it – and travel back in time to one of the most enigmatic periods of Britain’s history. ‘The Dark Ages’ is an unpopular term now, but it really is the most accurate term to describe the period between 410 and 597 when we have almost no written evidence for what was happening in Britain at all. It is an era that is evidentially dark to the historian, regardless of how dark we may think the deeds perpetrated in those years were. The latest thinking has swung back to a sympathetic appraisal of Gildas’s and Bede’s accounts of what happened in those years as broadly accurate – the Britons were indeed pushed west and replaced by groups of Germanic settlers. Those settlers were illiterate – they have left no textual record, barring the occasional rune. But the people they pushed to the west – the people who would become the Welsh and the Cornish – remained literate in three languages: Latin, Brythonic and Old Irish. The witnesses to their literacy can be found in remote places all over Wales, Cornwall and Devon, if you know where to look. For these were the people of the inscribed stones, leaving their indelible mark from Anglesey to Land’s End.
My first encounter with an inscribed stone took place in Cornwall in 2011. Every visitor who goes to Cornwall wants to see Mên-an-Tol, the famous remains of a Megalithic tomb that includes a circular stone visitors can crawl through. But just a few yards from Mên-an-Tol is another wonder, a prehistoric standing stone in the next field that bears an inscription carved in those mysterious centuries that followed the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain: RIALOBRANI CVNOVALI FILI, ‘Of Rialobranus, son of Cunovalus’. It wasn’t unusual for the people of the inscribed stones to make use of pre-existing standing stones; these are people whose material culture is almost wholly elusive in the archaeological record, as if they had nothing but writing. In some cases they wrote on old Roman stones, too. We can guess something of who they were from the languages they wrote in and the names they bore. Some of them wrote in Ogham and were clearly Irish, especially in South Wales – the same Irish raiders and settlers in Demetia who, in the fifth century, snatched Patrick away to their homeland and unwittingly created the greatest missionary of the age. Others bear obviously British names whose Welsh cognates can be traced to this day. But some had distinctly Roman-sounding names like Paternus and Saturninus, and careful analysis of the stones has shown that these people spoke Latin as their native tongue as well as using it for inscriptions (as people would continue to do for many centuries thereafter). For example, the formula HIC IACET (‘here lies’) is consistently spelled HIC IACIT on the inscribed stones, suggesting they had developed their own idiosyncratic local Latin, which was on the way to developing into a Romance language.
The lost incipient Romance language of the post-Roman Britons is one of the great linguistic ‘what ifs’ of this island – we don’t fully understand why it didn’t survive, although it probably survived as a spoken vernacular outside monasteries into the 7th century at least. Within the monasteries, of course, Latin continued – but it was no longer a language children spoke from birth. The most likely explanation for the demise of the Latin vernacular is that the warlords who wielded the sword increasingly came from the remote, Brythonic-speaking fastnesses that had never had much time for Latin anyway; but it should be remembered that Welsh, the descendant of Brythonic, is so peppered with Latin-derived words that some linguists are tempted almost to consider it a Romance language. Just look past the spelling and you’ll start to see it, in words like eglwys (ecclesia), ysgol (schola), perygl (periculum) and thousands more. The dynasty of Cunedda, which ruled Gwynedd and from whom Llewellyn the Last descended, claimed descent from a certain Padarn ap Tegid – Paternus, son of Tacitus. If we look past the Celtic Romanticism of the last three centuries, it is pretty clear that these people were the last pragmatic Romans clinging to the edge of Britain rather than the mystic Celts of an imagined Arthurian twilight.
If we can learn something of the language of the people of the inscribed stones from their memorials, we can also learn something about their religion. Apart from a few of the Irish people who wrote in Ogham, we can be fairly certain that everyone who wrote the inscribed stones was at least nominally Christian. Apart from the numerous stones bearing explicitly Christian symbols and words, the formulae used on the stones (even ones as simple as hic iacit) are Christian ones. Not a single post-Roman stone bears the formula Dis Manibus sacrum – the standard pagan wording for memorials. One of the unsolved problems in the historiography of religion in Britain is why, from an unpromising and shaky baseline at the beginning of the 5th century when the Romans withdrew, Christianity quickly established itself as the only religion of the Britons soon after they left. The most likely explanation, in my view, is that when Roman administration collapsed the church was left as the only institution still standing, and became a unique focus for identity and continuity. I would draw an analogy with the Lithuanians in 1795 – a people who had been somewhat uncertain about Christianity for centuries, but faced with absorption into Russia suddenly rallied around Catholicism and the Catholic church as the defining marker of their identity.
Inscribed stones tend not to attract a lot of attention, compared with megalithic monuments; I suspect that many people are not quite sure what to make of them. And indeed we don’t know for sure what their purpose was; in spite of the fact that they speak – in contrast to every other kind of standing stone – we can’t be sure what they’re saying. They thus fall short of the compelling enigmatic silence that people expect from standing stones, while also being frustratingly opaque in meaning. For example, inscribed stones almost always begin with a name in the genitive – Rialobrani, not Rialobranus. But what is the implied nominative preceding the genitive? Are we to read ‘the stone of Rialobranus’? Or ‘the grave of Rialobranus’? Or even ‘the territory of Rialobranus’? The stones have variously been interpreted as cenotaph-memorials, as grave-markers, and as territorial markers; or were they (as Ken Dark has suggested) sacred sites in the landscape for the veneration of saints at a time when there were virtually no churches? Only a single inscribed stone can be linked to a historical personage known from another document, so we have no other sources to go on; they are evocative of a society we do not understand.
What fascinates me about inscribed stones is that, while being so far from our understanding, they are also so close to us. These were people who spoke a language I understand (Latin) and who professed a religion I also profess (Christianity); we’re not in the realms of unfathomable cultural distance that separate us from the megalith-builders. But these stones are still bewilderingly other, and often located in remote places that are not easy to reach. My second encounter with an inscribed stone was on Exmoor in 2022, at dusk – the Caratacus stone has its own little shelter to protect it from the elements and roving sheep, but has probably been standing in a remote spot on the moor since the 6th century. But why? Who was Caratacus? Why was this spot so significant?
Last month I went to Pembrokeshire and made a determined effort to seek out inscribed stones in one of the Welsh counties that is richest in them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into the Lapidarium at St Davids Cathedral that houses several, but I did manage to see some in the church at St Nicholas Tremarchog and at St Dogmaels Abbey. In many places inscribed stones have been moved into the nearest church, which is natural enough – they are, after all, Christian monuments – but it is a shame that this removes them from their original locations. Prof. Nancy Edwards, in three enormous volumes, has catalogued and described every known inscribed stone in Wales; looking through the volume for Southwest Wales, I was struck by how many of them have been lost. Often we only have drawings and notes from the Edward Lhuyd in the 17th century or his 18th- and 19th-century successors. Many stones were still considered holy in the 16th century but the Reformation saw the more prominent ones (like the Cross of Conbelin at Margam) torn down, while the stones were re-purposed in buildings and as gateposts; even in modern times some have been consigned to rubbish dumps.
At St Dogmaels I saw the Sagranus stone, which is written in both Latin and Ogham (Old Irish), suggesting a mixed cultural context. St Nicholas Tremarchog has three stones, one of which (unusually) is dedicated to a woman: Tuncetacca, the wife of Daarus (her name is an early form of the Welsh tynghedog, ‘fortunate’). Another stone, amusingly, commemorates a certain Pa[g]anus with a Christian cross. And then, quite close to Tremarchog, something rather strange happened. I was on my way back from a small cove (Aber Bach) along the footpath that led back to the old woollen mill at Tregwynt when I noticed an old gatepost that looked rather like a standing stone. On closer inspection I could make out letters on the lichen-encrusted surface – seemingly the letters ‘NOO’, although I am not sure that’s the correct reading.
The idea of encountering an inscribed stone unexpectedly ‘in the wild’ is so much an idle daydream of mine that at first I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, but not only do the letters look ancient but the ‘N’ seems to follow the style on other inscribed stones; the re-use of what looks like a standing stone is also consistent with other examples. I then found that the stone isn’t listed in Prof. Edwards’s corpus, so I contacted her about it. She very graciously replied, and in her view the letters are not early medieval; the stone may have marked a farm boundary, indicated farm ownership, or marked the path down to the beach. However, the letters are still old; an inscribed stone, but not one belonging to the crucial period.
I conclude where I began, at the Margam Stones Museum near Port Talbot. This is one of the few museums dedicated entirely to inscribed stones, and features such wonders as the Bodvoc stone (once set into a line of four prehistoric barrows), the Pumpeius Carantorius stone, the Cantusus stone (inscribed on the back of an old Roman milestone), and (from a later era), the great tenth-century wheelheaded Cross of Conbelin. It is entirely possible there are still inscribed stones to be found; they might be built into buildings and walls, facing inwards or covered over with plaster, or serving (like the stone I noticed between Aber Bach and Tregwynt) as gateposts. To medieval Welsh Christians they were already strange memorials of a long-vanished world, and vanished languages; to us they are doubly so. But like the inscriptions on Britain’s Iron Age coins that are the sole voices speaking from a pre-literate darkness, so the inscribed stones of the 5th to 7th centuries speak still, even if we cannot always understand what they are telling us. But like listening to Queen Victoria on a wax cylinder, perhaps the most important thing is not understanding every word – it is connecting with a former world from which we will hear no other voice.
I remember seeing a Welsh house name - 'Ceffyl mor' as a child, and on being told it meant 'seahorse' instantly made the connection to French! 'Cheval' and 'mer'. Fascinating connection.
Fascinating, thank you! The late Professor Quentin Hughes held that there a significant number of Welsh words borrowed from the Phoenician traders: do you have anything on that?