Briga of the Ships

Life as an Imperial Roman bureaucrat was lucrative.  Bribes could be harvested in every season. Perculation was a perennial.  Competence was less important than connections.  Picking and getting the right patron was the essential skill.  One's office could be sold for personal profit to a suitable candidate. Particularly astute political operators could denounce a disliked superior to the Emperor and receive half of that unfortunate’s wealth by way of recompense.

As ever there was a downside.  Regime change, a frequent occurrence, was notably tricky.  The penalty for backing the wrong faction could be fatal. Yet, there were ever more candidates than positions.  Consequently, for most bureaucrats, time pruning the imperial magic money tree was strictly limited. To be eligible for appointment a very expensive full Roman education was required.  That education was available in all parts of the Empire.  If you had the money.

A key part of the Imperial work load was managing the barbarians on the borders of Empire. It was a time consuming business of treaties, bribery, murder, kidnap and coercion. Punctuated, so far as we can tell, by once a generation massacres at the hands of the Roman Army.

Sometime in the mid 360s the Roman decision makers responsible for the Hibernian connection made the wrong call.  The treaty was broken as Ammianus Marcellinus recorded.  In practical terms this meant that subsidies were no longer paid to Irish aristocrats and that the ports of Britannia and perhaps Gaul were closed to Irish shipping.  Irish hostages may have been killed or incarcerated.

This sort of action usually followed from a Roman perception that its favoured barbarians were becoming too powerful.  In this case that would have been the Irish polity of Briga.  Briga was blessed with the most fertile land in Ireland and seems to have had a near monopoly on the Roman trade.  The great emporium of Drumanagh was firmly in its territory.  Significantly the elite of Briga had invested in Roman merchant vessels and therefore ran the Celtic Sea trade. This latter may have been the trigger factor for the Roman decision to break the treaty.

For Briga no trade and no subsidies was an existential threat.  Without both it would regress to the status of just another competitor in the struggle for inter Irish supremacy. I tend to think that the Romans wanted Briga’s ships thus breaking the monopoly and returning the trade into Roman hands.  Had the Empire wanted anything else I’m sure agreement would have been quickly reached.

Instead Briga chose to fight.  Somehow, we don’t know how exactly, that decision coincided with an identical one on the part of the Picts, Franks and Saxons.  Some historians call it a barbarian conspiracy.  If it was then it was a well coordinated one.  The Irish and Picts stormed into Britannia while the Franks and Saxons set about Gaul.

To return to Briga, we should appreciate the scale of the enterprise.  Briga could not send the totality of it’s warriors on expedition.  It too had hostile neighbours and borders to defend.  It’s immediate neighbours, probably tributary, could supply warrior contingents that could be trusted.  Beyond that it would have been unthinkable to allow the forces of the jealous and powerful polities of the West into Briga.  Fortunately for Briga, there were other military resources available in Ireland.  Every one of the 150 polities of Ireland contained bands of fénnid warriors. 

The fénnid were oath sworn pagan warriors. Recruitment was via a demanding selection process. Their patroness was the fearsome Goddess Bríg Ambue.  That is to say Bríg of the cow less warriors. It’s possible that this (from the Musée de Bretagne) is a Gallic representation of the same deity who seems to have been the martial aspect of the Goddess Brigantia .

The warriors were cow less because the lived exclusively by preying on animals and men. No farming for them. Collectively they were known as the fiann and they seem to have been closely associated with the Druids. Normal ties to kin and tribe seem to have been suspended for the duration of fiann membership. Instead they were answerable to their rígfénnid (king of their fiann band) and of course to Bríg Ambue  Their prowess in battle was proverbial. 

So far as we know there was no set number for a band of fénnid. Sometimes we come across the numbers 12, 27 and 30. If we take the the lower number and multiply it by the number of kingdoms we get a total of 1,800 warriors.  That might give us an idea of the number of additional warriors available for Briga to hire or persuade to join the raid.

Let's hear from Ammianus Marcellinus:

… Valentinian was shocked to receive the serious news that a concerted attack by the barbarians had reduced the province of Britain to the verge of ruin. Nectaridus, the count of the coastal region, had been killed, and the general Fullofaudes surprised and cut off. The emperor sent Severus, count of the household troops… Shortly afterwards Severus was recalled and Jovinus set out for the island, but sent an appeal for strong reinforcements…
 

It will suffice to say that at that time the Picts (the Dicaledones and the Verturiones), together with the warlike Attacotti and the Scots, were roving at large and causing great devastation. In addition the Franks and Saxons were losing no opportunity of raiding the parts of Gaul nearest to them by land and sea, plundering, burning, and putting to death their prisoners.

We will come back to this testimony when we look at the Great Raid for the moment we can note that it was to transform Irish -Roman relations.

 

For the Irish it was a hugely profitable enterprise.  A new unit of currency entered the language-the cumhal.  A cumhal was a slave girl and was then valued at two cows.  The slave girls were part of the loot of Britannia.  There were so many of them that they impacted on both the means of exchange and the language.

F.J Byrne notes:

“In an extremely interesting archaic poem on the Airgialla which was later adapted by the author of Crith Gablach (the Book of Rights) the rights and duties of this federation of tribes vis a vis their overlord , the high king of the O’Néill, are laid down in detail:

They are bound to military hostings  for three fortnights every three years, but not in springtime (planting and lambing) or autumn (the harvest and the return of cattle from summer pasture) they claim a cumhal in compensation for every night spent (consuming the produce of the Airgialla) by O’Néill hosts in their territory.”

In another legal mention reflecting the ubiquity of slave girls The kings of Uí Fidgenti, Iarluachrae and Raithlenn in return for military hosting could “Each claim seven cumala from the king of Cashel for this service if they return alive.”

In later times a cumhal came to simply mean a fiscal unit of cows.  In our period the meaning was starkly literal- a cumhal was a slave girl, the plural being cumala.

 

Here we can note that it was Briga’s possession of Roman merchant vessels that enabled so many to be so efficiently taken into bondage.  St Patrick* testified to the experience and the scale of it "I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others."

For the British provincials it was a year of utter horror and devastation that lingered in the collective memory even in the days of Gildas.

For the Romans it was a clear lesson that something must be done and they set about doing it.  Ireland was about to be transformed - Christianity was coming along with quite a large amount of money.

*  As you will have deduced I favour J.T Koch's suggestion of an early chronology for St. Patrick.