Note-: This Article belongs to the Appendix of my Book about the History of the de Ferrarii Clan or Gens Ferreria ( Ferraria ) titled " Veni, Vidi, Vici,......... but who shall free me from these ubiquitous and pugnatious Ferrarii.....?"
Armorica.
Preamble.
This Article may appear offensive to the sensitivities of readers of a background
and with an historical perspective different from my own,but ‘my truth' is what is true to me ( "Ad modus recipiendi recipienda est veritas." St. Thomas Aquinas).
I'll listen to and consider, on principle, another person's own interpretation and world-view, if one has one which is painstaking, articulated, reasonable and verifiable.
In general, being able to imtrospect about this issue is generally a sign one is nearer to the truth than those who, arrogantly and unwisely, do not even harbour any doubt and tell lies.
However, since we all have, invariably,‘scheletons' to hide in a cupboard,
owing to the barbarity of ancestors, and the inevitability of our common exposure to and experience of the laws of scarcity and necessity, let us put our differences aside and agree that we are all redeemed and justified, to-day, only to the degree that we truly acknowledge Jesus Christ as our common Lord and Redeemer, and, more importantly, conduct our lives by the examples, given to us in John's Gospel as The Works of the Father.
Also, by an acceptance of Galatians 3:28.
Allelujah, Maranatha et Amen !
Armorica.
In the days of the roman Empire, this region of Gaul, included the maritime countries between the Seine and the Loire rivers, which are to-day known as Bretagne ( or Brittany ) and Normandie.
In the course of the roman occupation that had begun, interrupted by a series of rebellions, since the times of Julius Caesar, around 60 B.C., the people of Armorica had become loyal subjects of Rome, and remained co-operating provincials as long as Rome was able to secure its borders; however, in the days after the desolation of Gaul, when the survivors of Radagaisus's Gothic confederacy, defeated under the walls of Florence, penetrated and established themselves permanently within the borders of Gaul, around A.D. 407, they began to plan their independence from Rome, while keeping in touch with it, providing military support to its representatives and allies.
This loyalty was in fact to be demonstrated later on by the Armorican heavy cavalry, when the roman general Aethius fought Attila the Hun at the battle of Chalons-sur-Marne around A.D. 451. In fact, Attila must have been stalemated, as he was not defeated at Chalons-sur-Marne, by the participation of Armorican ( Breton/British ) heavy cavalry structured, trained, equipped and led in accordance to the latest developments of Roman military know-how. This tradition was maintained with technical improvements until the times of William the Conqueror, who, as the bastard of Normandy, found support in Breton knights who began replacing the old Norman/Frankish nobility which had ties to the French Monarchy which desired to remove William from the Duchy of Normandy and to totally erase latent Merovingian loyalties and memories in Britanny's nobility, a policy that had been inaugurated by Charlemagne and the Constantinian Roman Church. It is at this time in history that numerous branches of the Breton/British de Ferrarii ( about a dozen ), constituting there the largest concentration of de Ferrarii in western Europe, moved to Normandy. Heraldry ( which had begun to develop in the times of the Conqueror, as the language and science of the Blason [ i.e., Description of a Coat of Arms ] ) shows in fact that the largest number of de Ferrarii families resided in Britanny, at the time of the Conqueror. These families had had close contact with Britain all the time since the landing there of the Romans, later intermarrying with the British/Celtic noble expatriates running away from the barbarians ( the Anglo-Saxons, etc. ). The Bretons ( known in history as late as the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as a fundamentally loyal and conservative people, had in fact always remained loyal in principle to the Royal Line of the Desposynii ( The Sacred Line of the Holy Grail Kings ), since the times of the great King of the Franks, Clovis ( became King of the Salian Franks in 481 AD ), who became the first as well as the only one among the barbarians who had penetrated the Roman borders to become a Roman Apostolic Catholic, since all Barbarians had embraced the Arian heresy ( similar to the modern Jehovah Witnesses, easily assimilated by Islam if it were not for their cowardly, irresponsible refusal to fight in defence of their host nation which Islam did certainly not appreciate). One must however remember that in the days of Clovis Paganism was still the official religion of the Empire. The Bretons had been at that time Romanised, civilised Celts, who had just been granted independent status by Emperor Honorius, while still remaining loyal to Rome, until the times of the Carolingian usurpation of power from the Merovingians. The loyalty to the Merovingians never failed even when these were supplanted by the dynasty of the Carolingians, which had obtained support from the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church which at the time, was determined to erase the Jewish/Sumerian/Mesopotamic ( see Sir Laurence Gardner ) roots of Christianity and to Latinise these ( At that time it was probably the best plausible political solution in view of the Orientalisation of Bizanthium and the threats from the steppe-people among whom the Arian barbarians. Sir Laurence Gardner's tunnel-like-vision of history does not allow him to see all the ramifications of the political scenario then faced by Rome. Neither could the Bretons and the northern European people, loyal to their Desposynii-monarchs. The Merovingians had in fact intermarried with members of Jesus of Nazareth's family, thus acquiring davidic, dynastic, temporal and spiritual status. The rift between Armorica and Charlemagne who actively persecuted the Armoricans became so deep that he completely lost the military support of their heavy cavalries, a little realised fact, even by the most eminent historians, who neglect the Desposyniic ties of the Merovingians that limited Charlemagne's capacity to effectively fight the Saracens in Spain and the Hungarians in the Balkans. For the same reason, Charlemagne had to follow a path of moderation in his relations to the Roman Empire of the East. Armorica has been much influenced by migrations of British refugees ( mostly belonging to the elite ), fleeing from the barbaric invasions of Britain, when the Saxons' confederacy comprising of the Angles and the Jutes landed in large numbers on the British shores, from Schleswig-Holstein, in around A.D. 449. In fact, even prior to the roman invasion of the British Islands, a link had been forged between the Celtic tribes of Atlantic Gaul and Britain, since four Celtic peoples had been occupying England, since the days of the Late Bronze Age, the most numerous and powerful being the Belgae, who had occupied Kent. One of these, the Silures, dwelling in south Wales and Cornwall, must have originated from Armorica. This indicates a mutual cultural and commercial traffic between Armorica and Wales, since the Late Bronze Age ( due to the presence of tin and high- quality iron ore [ Normandy ] etc. ). The Saxons and other sea-raiders had been harassing Britain's shores since the times of roman rule, when the Romans had an established army and a powerful navy capable of maintaining control of the seas. In A.D. 401, when Rome had lost control of the British seas, and the Visigoths, the Alemanni, the Burgundians controlled a large part of Gaul, Emperor Honorius ( 394-423 ) granted Britain and Armorica independent status recognising mutual ties of friendship and alliance. From than on, Britain's capacity for defence from internal foes such as Picts and Caledonians, roman provincials wishing to usurp the imperial dignity, secessionist British chieftains, and raiding barbarians became continually reduced, owing to the fact that its economy had not yet reached the magnitude of scale capable to produce the surpluses required for the provision of military equipments and establishments as well as the sustenance of the degree of civilisation that had been artificially subsidised by roman contributions and investments, and above all it could not support a permanent army and navy of the magnitude required by the threats surrounding it. As the roman Empire of the West was nearing its extinction, roman provinces that achieved independence were generally not wealthy and strong enough to organise themselves in monarchies which required an established, wealthy, powerful family or clan acceptable to and recognised by all peoples within the province. Roman provincials tended to either produce usurpers of the imperial dignity and authority with great waste of resources or to establish a republic while provincials and barbarians were tempted to try a monarchy which generally failed for a lack of a wide and mature power base as well as the essential resources. The general trend in the whole Empire, the economy of which had relied excessively on slave labour, and the need for continuous wars, an increasing number of free-citizens depending on welfare handout of food, had been experiencing for centuries since its founding, a gradual process of impoverishment resulting from a complex system of causes including the decrease in the availability of slaves, barbaric invasions, the concentration of all fertile and productive lands either in the hands of not more than twelve-hundred families, or small farm-lots owned by returned soldiers which could only feed themselves and their few slaves, without being able to produce a surplus after taxation, etc. Eventually, due to shortage of slaves as well as a couple of devastating plagues, which affected the whole of the Empire, the raids of the barbarians and the removal of citizens as slaves by the barbarians, welfare failed as towns became poor as the result of a widespread decrease in revenues, and desperate citizens began to abandon these to seek sustenance in the country, some resorting to violence.
Taxation continued to breakdown, peasants ( the Bagaudae ) began to rebel and the country became a guerilla scenario. Land-owners with a self-supporting villa began to fortify, enclose, defend their possessions, since towns declined as centres of government in their capacity to guarantee law and order, forced to also defend themselves. If one adds to this scenario the hordes of barbarians also competing for food, slaves and spoils, it becomes easy to appreciate how, in the course of about 500 years the feudal system of government arose in Europe as the only viable and necessary system for the reconstruction of Europe.
Hughess, the Australian historian has written exceedingly well on Barcelona and Catalonia in roman times in so far as the mixing of the races and the economy was concerned, and it is my opinion that the roman scenario in Britain would have been similar to the one masterly depicted by him for Catalonia. I shall therefore supply quotes from his work Barcelona in order to provide useful insights.
I would like to quote from Barcelona, author Hughess, page 57-:
The economy that evolved in the general northern area of Hispania Citerior exerted a long subterranean and decisive influence on the traits of deep Catalunya. The people were a mix, the residue of earlier invasions from the north and the south. The Iberian tribes were of north African origin, related to the Berbers; centuries before they had crossed the Strait of Gibralter and spread along the Mediterranean coast. Other, Celtic tribes had come down across the Pyrenees, interbred with the Iberians, and produced the people diffusely known to protohistorians as the Celtiberians, one whose tribe was the Laietani. In general, these folks seem to have been stubborn and resistant fighters, but as time went by their men were enslaved and their women taken in marriage or concubinage by roman settlers, so that their tribal structures eventually dissolved. But the settlers were generally army veterans---privates, centurions, minor line officers---who got a few acres of stony soil at the end of their service to the imperium. There was little free capital floating around, and certainly no chance of consolidating farms into giant latifundia along the lines of the slave plantations of Sicily. Farms and households were slave run, but by a servant or two, not lines of driven laborers. Olive oil, cereals, wine, goats, some chickens, perhaps a pig---the chestnut-fed hams of the Ampurdam were already famous by the first century as an esteemed export to Rome--- and a fortified farmhouse: in its clusters of family-and-slave, homes that anticipated the larger groupings of the Catalan poblet or village, the prototype of Catalunya's rural future was prepared. Even by the standards of the times, this economy was conservative and low tech. What its farms produced, its inhabitants consumed. If there was a surplus it was sold locally, or, at most, brought to market in Tarraco. Unlike Hispania Ulterior, Hispania Citerior had no export trade. The bond between the producing countryside and the consuming, administering city was strong, but Rome was very far away.
see page 70-:
The decline of Roman Barcelona was on its way, and it had more to do with its slave economy than with its festive habits. No such economy can work without a constant supply of new slaves, and this supply had been ensured by conquest. But in Roman Spain by 350 there were no tribes left to conquer. ( The idea that the early Christians strove to enhance the "dignity of man" by abolishing slavery is a pious fiction. In Spain they wanted to enslave the Jews, and they did.) Hence there was a labor shortage, and the price of work rose steeply. Moreover, the cost of running the Spanish colonies---army, bureaucracy, public spectacles, panis et circenses that were the Roman form of welfare--- had once been offset by plunder, and in a static empire there was no more of that either. So public money had to come from increased taxes and monetary devaluation; the fourth century showed a continuous debasement of the silver denarius to the point where no one trusted the once-impeccable Roman currency. Bands of the poor began to attack villages and farms. In response, the rich dropped their political obligations to the city and set up their own fortified slave communities with private armies. In these self-contained and self-defending fincas, which reduced the tax base even further, one may see the remote seed of the feudal countships that came to dominate Catalan political life in the early Middle Ages.
This pattern had immediate economic consequences for the cities. Barcino
( Barcelona ), which had been a center of export, turned into a net importer. As the fortified community-farms of the rich were swollen by refugees from the city, they bypassed the Barcino market, preferring to barter their surplus goods left after taxation directly with other farms. More and more shut out of the economic cycle of the country, Barcino still had to feed its mouths; by the fifth century this city, whose garum Pliny had once extravagantly praised, and whose oil jars had been shipped to buyers as far away as Rhodes, had to import most of its olive oil and garum from North Africa.
Because the silver standard had collapsed, the mercenary guards who replaced the old imperial legions could no longer be relied on to defend the Pyrenees against the intruding Germanic tribes that had marched down through Gaul [ Radagaisus' army in addition to the various imperial usurpers including Constantine from Britain ] and seemed intent on taking all Europe. Some of the guards mutinied, and others simply deserted en masse. And so, beginning in A.D. 409, wave after wave of invaders came pouring through the high passes: a combined force of some two hundred thousand Vandals, Suevians, and Alani. Nothing opposed them. They took over northern Catalunya and kept on moving south ....................................................................................
In fact the invaders did not stay in Catalunya: they went straight on through to the south. Within a year or two, fifty thousand Vandals had settled in Baetica, thirty thousand Alani in the provinces of Lusitania [ modern Portugal ] and Carthaginensis, and eighty thousand Suevians and fourty thousand more Vandals in Galicia. The structure of Roman rule in northern Spain had now disintegrated so far that when the next invading army, consisting of somewhere between seventy thousand and three hundred thousand Visigoths, commanded by their king Ataulf [ Adolphus ]( the vagueness of the number may reflect the panic of the observers ), came over the eastern Pyrenees in A.D. 415, the Romans allied with them in the hope that they could somehow be used to get rid of the other blond beasts from the north.
Thus did the Visigoths march straight to Barcino and set up their court, no doubt to the relief of its residents, who had spent most of the last six years behind its walls nervously to be raped, pillaged, and put to the sword.
see page 77-:
The " count and marquis Guifre', of good memory" was the strong man who became the great unifier of the Catalan Dark Ages---the warrior who emerged from the confused murk of Pyrenean history, established the political primacy of Barcelona once and all.................................
His name was Guifre' el Pelos: Wilfred the Hairy
[ Hairy Willy ]. He was born somewhere around the middle of the ninth century and died in about 898 A.D. ..........................................................................................
And yet he did achieve power by throwing out Frankish overlords and he was the last Catalan count to be invested with his title by the Carolingian Emperor. After Giuffre', the line of Catalan counts was self-generating, and the keystone of authority in this small country, with a disintegrating Frankish empire to the north and the constant threat of the Saracens to the south, was the city and the countship of Barcelona...........................Saracens held Barcelona ..................................................................................
It was really Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, the Frankish king of Aquitaine, who had given Wilfred the Hairy his chance to start this process ..................................................................................
But in 801, Louis finally conquered the city and installed a French regent there. Even so, Barcelona did not become the capital of Catalunya, because there was no single control over the comarques until Guifre' the Hairy came along and rolled them all together. [ This Giufre' was born after Louis' death, and was named like his father who had fought on Louis' side. So Louis and old Guifre' got rid of the Saracens, and young Guifre' subjected the comarques, or french local nobility, allowing catalan gentry to rise to that power they deserved in their own right ]. Once he had done so, and moved to Barcelona, the little city promptly and automatically became the administrative capital [ as it had been in the days of Adolphus and the Visigoths]. It has remained so ever ..................................................................................
The usual explanation for the lack of Carolingian buildings in Barcelona is to blame the Moors, who retook the city almost two hundred years after Louis the Pious drove them out. In 985 the vizier of Cordoba, Al-Mansur, conquered Barcelona..........................................................................
In fact the Carolingian buildings were knocked down long after the vizier died ( in 1002) by early Catalan ‘developers' during Barcelona's first building boom in the twelth century. [ the bones of Guifre' el Pelos lie in the Church of Santa Maria de Ripoll, where Guifre' founded a Benedictine monastery.] ..................................................................................
The complete reconquest of Catalunya from the Arabs, and its first stage of territorial expansion, had taken about a hundred years---from 850 to 950. The development of its feudal system took another century, more or less, from 950 to 1050, and that system was consolidated, within static frontiers, between 1050 and 1150.
[ See Article: The Rise and development of the Feudal System in Catalunya as an archetype for Europe.]
Unquote from Hughess.
In A.D. 450 Vortigern, a british chieftain unaware of the confederate structure of Saxon alliances in the Continent, called in armies of Saxons, as mercenary troops, hoping to employ these against other Saxon groups. Although this had been a roman practice, Vortigern, unlike the Romans did not have the means or opportunity to retaliate against defaulting Saxons in their places of origin, and at their bases in the continent. Moreover, the main reason for the savage and desperate onslaught by the Saxon confederacies in the days of Honorius was the same pressure that had been exerted by the balkanic Goths of the great Hermanric, focused on replacing scythian dominance and control in all the territories east of the roman borders from the Baltic to the Black seas, prior to the arrival of the Huns on the Volga river in 375 A.D., which pressures, kept-on being further exerted in continental Europe all along the course of the Rhine and Danube rivers, by the tribes joined in the Confederacy of the Huns, who had been terrorising and destabilising all the barbaric settlements from the Caspian to the Baltic Seas. It also appears that a great deal of Saxon-occupied, agricultural land along the Baltic's sea-coast had been flooded by rising sea levels, owing to global warming, and Britain represented then to the Saxons the nearest, most easily-invaded land, the climate of which also gave promises owing to the milder winters resulting from the influence of the Gulf Stream Current.
The war between Britons and Saxons was continued for 250 years on english soil, and as roman trained troops and roman materials gradually wore down without replacement, the quality and extent of training in the roman ways slowly disappearing, the Saxons pushed the celtic Britons to easily defensible, halas infertile, mountainous places, in Wales and Cornwall, or to emigration to Armorica, where empty land was available, that had belonged to the extinct celtic tribes of the Osimii. The culminating time of the disappearing roman support to the struggles for british resistance was between A.D. 490 and 503, when a roman-british leader called Arthur ( the King of the medieval legends ), also reputed to have been the hereditary prince of the Silures ( a celtic tribe of ancient armorican origins ), achieved the last of twelve memorable victories against the Saxons, on Mt.Badon, by using relatively heavy ( mailed ) cavalry of the roman pattern ( please note the relativity of the adjective ‘heavy ' as stirrups were still unknown, saddles primitive, horse-shoes not yet readily available or adopted as standard equipment, equestrian excellence depending heavily on the innate ability, training and breeding of mounts and men ).
Let me quote from Gibbon, I, p.626-:
After a war of an hundred years the independent Britons still occupied the whole extent of the western coast, from the walls of Antoninus to the extreme coast of Cornwall; and the principal cities of the inland country still opposed the arms of the barbarians. Resistance became more languid, as the number and boldness of the assailants continually increased. Winning their way by slow and painful efforts, the Saxons, the Angles, and their various confederates, advanced from the North, from the East, and from the South, till their victorious banners were united in the centre of the island. Beyond the Severn the Britons still asserted their national freedom, which survived the heptarchy, and even the monarchy of the Saxons.
The bravest warriors, who preferred exile to slavery, found a secure refuge in the mountains of Wales: the reluctant submission of Cornwall was delayed for some ages; and a band of fugitives acquired a settlement in Gaul, by their own valour, or the liberality of the Merovingian kings. The western angle of Armorica acquired the new appellations of Cornwall and the Lesser Britain; and the vacant lands of the Osimii were filled by a strange people, who, under the authority of their counts and bishops, preserved the laws and language of their ancestors. To the feeble descendants of Clovis and Charlemagne, the Britons of Armorica refused the customary tribute, subdued the neighbouring dioceses of Vannes, Rennes, and Nantes, and formed a powerful, though vassal, state, which has been united to the crown of France. In a century of perpetual, or at least implacable, war, much courage, and some skill, must have been exerted for the defence of Britain.
Yet if the memory of its champions is almost buried in oblivion, we need not repine; since every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown. The tomb of Vortimer, the son of Vortigern, was erected on the margin of the sea-shore, as a landmark formidable to the Saxons, whom he had thrice vanquished in the fields of Kent. Ambrosius Aurelianus [ living between 474 and 491 A. D. in the days of emperor Zeno, whose father had assumed consular dignity] was descended from a noble family of Romans; his modesty was equal to his valour, till the last action, was crowned with splendid success.
But every British name is effaced by the illustrious name of Arthur, the hereditary prince of the Silures, in South Wales, and the elective king or general of the nation. According to the most rational account he defeated in twelve successive battles, the Angles of the North and the Saxons the West; but the declining age of the hero was embittered by popular ingratitude and domestic misfortunes.
Unquote.
In the middle of the fifth century, in the times of Attila the Hun, Aethius and Emperor Valentinian III (423-455), the Roman Empire of the West was on the verge of an irreversible state of bankrupcy, an Empire in which the ideals of freedom, virtue and honor which had been fundamental characteristics of the roman spirit of the days of the roman Republic, were becoming extremely difficult to foster, preserve and exercise. All the wealth of the Empire had become concentrated in the hands of only 1200 families, and the ancient roman character was practically non-existent among the populace. Peasants owning small farms in Gaul, particularly in Armorica, and in most developed localities of Spain, found life extremely heavy, due to excessive taxation ( due to their local nobles, to the clergy and to Rome), and rebelled, forming an armed confederation called of the Bagaudae, which tended to favour independence, however ending in chaos, disorders and anarchy, while Rome in its growing weackness found it extremely difficult to pacify them. This also helps to explains why and how Armorica and Britain requested and obtained their independence from Rome in the days of Emperor Honorius (394-423), the local leading families wishing to have a free hand in reducing chaos and anarchy. As already mentioned, british victories could not stop the large number of Saxons continuously reinforcing their armies on english soil. According to Gibbon, I, p. 625, the first waves of invasion were by Frisians, Jutes, old Saxons ( Avars or Old Prussian cavalrymen ), and Angles. Following the unfortunate call of Vortigern, other waves followed consisting of Danes, Prussians ( Goths ), Rugians and even Huns, some of the tribes that had branched away from the great horde that had reached the Volga river in 375 A.D. having reached even the Baltic Sea, some of which had joined Radagaisus' confederacy bound for the invasion of Italy ( 405 A.D.).
As we well know, paradoxically enough, the descendants of the ancient Britons never ceased from stolidly opposing whoever attempted to rule England, even when coming as a liberator or wishing to rule in the best interests of England, as was the case of the Norman and Plantagenet dynasties. Henry VII and the House of Tudors were in fact related to the ancient welsh rulers, and did not see Norman and Plantagenet ( i.e., Angevin, Lancaster, York ) dynasties with the equanimity due to the descendants of those who had liberated Britain from barbaric rulers, the latter having been making a mockery of the christian faith and of feudal ethics, in the days of William the Conqueror. One would have expected the Britons to have co-operated with the Normans, since, from a religious point of view the barbarian conquerors of Britain had come as pagans , had acted with extreme and unforgivable barbarity and, even after their conversion to catholicism, had found the British Church unwilling to join together in worship, a rift that remained latent until coming to the surface in the days of King Henry VIII. In fact, paradoxically enough, even from a purely religious perspective, the Britons ( or whoever happened to absorb and corrupt them in the course of their exile in the uplands of Britain ) have always been arrogantly against centralised roman catholic guidance, owing to primitive Hibernian influence of the monastic rule of St. Columba, in spite of the orthodoxy of the ancient missionaries to Hibernia, i.e., St. Patrick, who was a roman briton born in the Severn Valley, on english soil, and later-on St. Augustine, Paulinus, Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian of Carthage.
For example, St. Augustine organised two conferences with the christian British Bishops on behalf of Ethelbert, the King of Kent, who had married Bertha the sister of Clovis, the catholic King of the Franks, but Ethelbert rejected pleas for christian unity on trivial, cosmetic differences.
Paulinus, a member of Augustine's previous mission to England, as the new papal Legate, and the new converted Edwin, the saxon King of Northumbria, who had married a christian princess of Kent, made overtures for christian conversion and unity to Penda, the King of Mercia ( modern Midlands ). The latter's reaction was that a heathen english King Penda, for the first time in history, accepted in A.D. 633, the offers of an alliance with Cadwallon, the christian british King of North Wales, in order to fight a catholic englishman.
Edwin sadly lost both kingdom and life.
The christian Britons then savagely dedicated themselves to unrestrained revenge.
Both roman and celtic missionaries kept on evangelising the english north, in the midst of wars between pagan and christian English and between the latter and christian Britons.
English pagans were eventually routed and converted, and, quoting from Churchill's work, " A History of the English Speaking People ". vol I, p.63-:
To the ferocious British-English racial feud there was added a different view of Church government, which sundered the races almost as much as the difference between Christianity and heathenism.
Henceforward the issue is no longer whether the Island shall be christian or pagan, but whether the Roman or the Celtic view of Christianity shall prevail. These differences persisted across the centuries, much debated by all the parties concerned.
Unquote.
A short Digression.
I here wish to remind the reader that this competition and rivalry between roman Catholicism, Anglican Catholicism, Celtic Christianity ( of the Sir Laurence Gardner's type ) and the multitude of christian moods and variations is still dangerously alive in the West. Who shall deliver us from this curse? The trouble is that instead of focusing on reforming societies( for example the obscenities and unnatural abominations of western pornography about which everyone knows and no one does anything about ), all churches prefer to squabble their energies and divided resources on trivial theoretical theological dogmas and variations of belief which are of a subordinate importance in relation to morality and ethics. The Roman Apostolic Catholic Church is really the only one with the resources and tradition to carry out the Works of Mercy and Compassion of the Father. History is repeating itself since the times of Bizanthium. I personally hope the Trinitarian God Jehovah shall protect me and shelter my Clan, however unworthy it may be, for my speaking-up here, thanks, I must admit, to Telstra/BigPond/BigBlog's generosity.
Good on you Telstra Australia!
End of digression.
A quote from Gibbon, op.cit., I, p.629-:
The independent Britons appear to have relapsed into a state of original barbarism from whence they had been imperfectly reclaimed. Separated by their enemies from the rest of mankind, they soon became an object of scandal and abhorrence to the catholic world. Christianity was still professed in the mountains of Wales; but the rude schismatics, in the form of the clerical tonsure, and in the day of the celebration of Easter, obstinately persisted the imperious mandates of the Roman pontiffs. The use of the Latin language was insensibly abolished, and the Britons were deprived of the arts and learning which Italy communicated to her Saxon proselytes. In Wales and Armorica, the Celtic tongue, the native idiom of the West [of Britain], was preserved and and propagated; and the Bards, who had been the companions of the Druids, were still protected, in the sixteenth century, by the laws of Elizabeth............................. Liberty had peopled the mountains of Wales and Armorica: but their populousness has been maliciously ascribed to the loose practice of polygamy; and the houses of these licentious barbarians have been supposed to contain ten wives, and perhaps fifty children. Their disposition was rash and choleric: they were bold in action and in speech; and as they were ignorant of the arts of peace, they alternately indulged their passions in foreign and domestic war. The cavalry of Armorica, the spearmen of Gwent, and the archers of Merioneth, were equally formidable; but their poverty could seldom procure either shields or helmets; and the inconvenient weight would have retarded the speed and agility of their desultory operations ...................................................................................
By the revolution of Britain the limits of science as well as of empire were contracted. The dark cloud which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean. One hundred and fifty years after the reign of Honorius [ c. 553 A.D.] the gravest historian of the times [See Procopius de Bell. Gothic. l. iv. c. 20, p.620-625{ed. Paris; tom. ii. p.559 sqq., ed. Bonn}, the Greek historian is himself so confounded by the wonders which he relates, that the weakly attempts to distinguish the islands of Brittia and Britain, which he has identified by so many inseparable circumstances.] describes the wonders of a remote isle, whose eastern and western parts are divided by an antique wall, the boundary of life and death, or, more properly, of truth and fiction. The east is a fair country, inhabited by a civilised people: the air is healthy, the waters are pure and plentiful, and the earth yelds her regular and frutiful increase. In the west, beyond the wall, the air is infectious and mortal; the ground is covered with serpents; and this dreary solitude is the region of departed spirits, who are transported from the opposite shores in substantial boats and by living rowers [ as the fulfilment of pagan beliefs in the power of the dead souls to vicariously occupy land ]. Some families of fishermen, the subjects of the Franks, are excused from tribute, in consideration of the mysterious office which is performed by these Charons of the ocean.................After this dream of fancy, we read with astonishment that the name of this island is Brittia; that it lies in the ocean, against the mouth of the Rhine, and less than thirty miles from the continent; that it is possessed by three nations, the Frisians, the Angles and the Britons.................
Unquote.
Another interesting quote from Gibbon I,op.cit. chapter xxxviii, note 135, may help to understand, in view of the thorough ‘ ethnic cleansing ‘ that the Anglo-Saxons indulged with, the ‘ bastardised ‘ condition of the Britons of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall who wasted so many of England's resources, opposing perfectly viable governments, by perpetuating the feud between Normans and Anglo-Saxons. I am criticising these peoples ( those who for some unknown reason wish to identify with the barbaric Anglo-Saxons and hate anything Norman, catholic and roman ) for their distortions of history and for the perpetuation of lies which tend to sabotage to-day Great Britain's contribution to the great ideal of the European Unity, for their trying to pass, even to-day, through B.B.C.'s propaganda, as Britons, rather than Anglo-Saxons, which, per se, invalidates the claims of modern B.B.C.'s sponsored historians who idealise them (i.e., the Anglo-Saxon lobbyists) as freedom fighters, and I wish to revive the idea that ‘ Anglo-Saxon' may be a dirty word that is being wrongly used whenever‘ Britsh' should be rather used. That is why, in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold is shown against the background of a broken flag, blazoning the golden dragon of the false Britons, i.e., the Saxons, and a standing flag, blazoning the red Welsh dragon ( the Pendragon of King Arthur, the roman-briton by excellence ), which represents the liberation of the authemtic Britons by the Normans. It is even possible that a contingent of Welsh levies in Harold's army may have turned against him toward the end of the battle of Hasting. The question is, oh B.B.C.'s historians--: "Why the golden and the red dragons on the same field, at the moment of defeat, the former broken down, the latter standing proud?
The truth that Cornwall was indeed bastardised by the Anglo-Saxons is confermed by Gibbon I, chapter xxxviii, note 135-:
Cornwall was finally subdued by Athelstan ( 927-941 A.D.), who planted an English colony at Exeter, and confined the Britons beyond the river Tamar. See William of Malmesbury, I, ii, in the Scriptores post Bedam, p. 50.............and another, note 136-:
The establishment of the Britons in Gaul is proved in the sixth century by Procopius [ Bell. Goth. iv.20], Gregory of Tours, the second council of Tours ( 567 A.D.), and the least suspicious of their chronicles and lives of saints. The subscription of a bishop of the Britons to the first council of Tours ( 461 A.D., or rather 481 A.D.), the army of Rhiothamus, and the loose declamations of Gildas ( alii transmarinas petebant regiones, c.25, p. 8), may countenance an emigrration as early as the middle of the fifth century. and another, note 145-:
In the beginning of the seventh century the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons mutually understood each others's language which was derived from the same Teutonic root ( Bede. l. i. c. 25, p. 60)
In 668 A.D., two missionaries were sent to England in order to convert, unite and reform-: Theodore of Tarsus, from Asia Minor and an african, named Hadrian of Carthage.
While the Britons were reverting to barbarism and isolationism, the Saxons, under the influence of Catholic Christianity were learning to become members of a wider community of nations, which to-day, is being exemplified by the European Community of nations. Bede, Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the west-Saxon Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, were products of the new Saxon, cultured society. However, the Saxons were too slow at their efforts at joining the fast pace of European civilization, and it was necessary to confront them with the dinamic, efficient, progressive, morally un-ambiguous, if uncomfortable guidance of the Normans. The history of Britain is one of a malevolent, unnecessary, silent, secret, revengeful re-assertion of the ancient British tribes, confused by their wrong identification, in a promiscuous alliance, with the memories of the wounded pride of their Anglo-Saxon persecutors, rebelling against a wrongly-perceived, European aggressiveness (i.e., the Romans and the Normans ). If anyone can be labelled an aggressor in the history of the world, the barbarians from the steppes have right of precedence, including the Celts and Britons. To my way of seeing reality, historical reality, right and legitimacy are represented, moral and ethical standards being the same, by righteous co-operation, efficiency and stability in policies, productivity, law and order, etc. The Anglo-Saxons and Britons were retrogressive and inefficient nations, and still suffered, in the days of the Norman invasion from their anscestral, congenital lack of profundity of character and low morality, caused, as a contrast to their Armorican kins, by insularity, isolation, inbreeding , the oppression of savage nations like Gothic Scotland, a ‘ bastardised ‘ Ireland, Sweden and Norway, etc.
Another issue worth clarifying is that the kinship between Scots and Celtic Irish is really a myth encouraged by the ancient Irish missionaries to Scotland. Both Gothic Scots and Celtic Irish had themselves invaded, conquered and subjected neolithic tribes of natives all over pre-roman Europe, in the days of the bronze Age, therefore proving my criterion in relation to the rights of occupation of productive land, and on the basis of the fact that they also were invaders and oppressors, their descendants have no right to-day to historically vilify Romans, Normans, Roman Catholics or the supporters of the ideal of modern United Europe. One can recurringly see modern English ( they are not however alone in suffering from this type of treachery ) treacherously ready to share in whatever good Europe may have to offer, withdrawing into their insularity whenever the time comes for loyalty and co-operation in relation to some difficult issue confronting Europe. In a way, they and the French have been responsible for both W.W. I & II. As an example of my way of thinking, the rebellions of the Scots against the Romans were totally pointless if one stops injecting Rousseaussian, Wagnerian/Neo-Nazi romantic idealism in the scenarios of the noble savage. In fact, a throw-back to the true Irish type, is probably to be found in Brittany, rather than in Scotland or Ireland. Moreover, Anglo-Norman achievements in the character building of the British people have been slowly disappearing since the advent of the Tudors, as time shall unfortunately tell, unless reformation in relation to a closer unity and co-operation, is embraced by all peoples dwelling in the British Islands, including Ireland, and a correction be made to the false idealisation of the Anglo-Saxons to the exclusion of other tribes who really contributed to the greatness of England, i.e., the Normans, etc.. Moreover, in my opinion, in relation to the islamic theocratic threat to the western civilisation, member-nations of United Europe should either reinforce their ties with existing monarchies ( whose prerequisite for their being adopted or accepted should be their being and remaining absolutely christian) or adopt again, if republics, superseded monarchies or even adopt entirely new ones for the sake of providing a permanent constitutional barrier to possible future take-overs by Islamic fifth columns obsessed with a theocratic religious ideology. In fact, the fundamental weakness of the Anglo-Saxon democracies to-day, that may eventually destroy our power and civilization base, is in their abuses of the idea of freedom, which has replaced in their idolatrous democracies, the christian God.
In this atmosphere in which the worship of the god of freedom distorts all traditional moral balances (i.e., the concept of the balance required by human right and human duty ) it has become impossible for our politicians and leaders to think about the necessity that certain fundamental issues should be classified by professionally trained experts chosen for their expertise in relation to each particular issue, as " not-politically-negotiable ", "to- be-debated-and-decided-upon by experts only ", and not by the masses etc.
Let me quote here an interesting note from Gibbon I, chapter xxxviii, note 154-:
The life of Wallus, or Cambricus, homo, who possessed a hyde of land, is fixed at 120 shillings, by the same laws ( of Ina, tit. xxxii. in Leg. Anglo-Saxon. p.20) which allowed 200 shillings for a free Saxon, and 1200 for a Thane ( see likewise Leg. Anglo-Saxon, p. 71).
Unquote.
We may observe that these legislators, the West-Saxons and Mercians, continued their British conquests after they became Christians. The laws of the four kings of Kent do not condescend to notice the existence of any subject Britons.Is this an archetype of the idealised Anglo-Saxon, who is purported to have inspired our modern freedom in our democracies?
In view of the above presented scenario, I really do not see the wisdom of our modern B.B.C.'s broadcasting commentators and hired biased historian practitioners, when these extol the Anglo-Saxons and their oath-breaking leader Harold to the disparagement and vilification of the Normans and of their leader, William the Conqueror. The Normans gave England, in relation to the times, the best system of taxation ( at least they attempted to establish what everyone owned, something that even to-day has disappeared with our mafia-inspired privacy laws, whereby a great deal of wealth is hidden and untaxable), which allowed the support of a very effective military system for the defence of Britain, Magna Carta, Parliament, etc.
The Moslems had invaded and established themselves in Spain, after defeating the visigothic monarchy in 711 A.D.
In 732 A.D. they were stopped at the battle of Tours/Poitiers by Charles Martel, the Carlovingian Mayor or Duke of the Merovingian Palace. In this battle, Eudes the Duke of Aquitaine, who was related to Clovis, the Merovingian, also took place with his Gascons, who descended from roman gaulish provincials, together with descendants of visigothic subjects who had once dominated Septimania or Languedoc. Although Gepidae ( one of the three divisions of the Goths) and other Germanic contingents had gone to help, they had been unable to reach the field of battle in time to share in the victory. Duke Eudes was a bold, very experienced soldier who had previously defeated the first invasion of the Saracens led by Zama the lieutenant of the caliph under the walls of Toulouse, however having had to abandon Septimania, Aquitaine, and even Provence ( Arles) to subsequent invasions by the Moslems.
Gaul was liberated at the battle of Tours/Poitier, and Charlemagne, the son of Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, although not attempting a total expulsion of the Moslems from Spain, participated in a war fought to help the Emir of Saragossa, in which Christians were killed and obedience and service to the Mahommedans were rewarded.
However he established the Spanish march which extended from the Pyrenees to the river Ebro-: Barcelona was the residence of the french governor; he possessed the counties of Roussillion (Languedoc) and Catalonia, and the infant Kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon were subjected to his jurisdiction, thus plan ting the roots of the recovery of Spain under Ferdinando of Aragon and Isabella of Castilia in the XVth century.
Armorica's as well as Aquitaine's liberties and privileges were challenged by Charlemagne's dominating personality, when the Britons ( Gibbon, II, p. 211) of the former were confined to the coastal areas of Brittany, chastised by the imposition of tribute, hostages and peace, and the Dukes of the latter ( who were descendants of Clovis the Merovingian), were punished by the forfeiture of their province ( reduced to the Duchy of Gascogne, and the Counties of Fesenzac and Armagnac), their liberty and their lives.
The Normans who eventually precipitated the fall of Charlemagne's race and monarchy, in the course of seventy years, were however beginning to raid territories in Normandie, thus generating some equilibrium in favour of the liberties of these oppressed Europeans. It is clear, although unknown and forgotten by the modern masses that the religious differences existing among the Christians of the Roman and Bizantinian Empires helped to cause their fall, due to their criticism and depreciation of the martial spirit and of the moral worth of the military person, apart from the loss of morale resulting from the divisions encouraged in the societies of the times. In general, our modern clergymen are similarly afflicted with a sort of ‘tunnel' vision of the world whereby they tend to neglect the imperatives of economics, productivity, security, and focus on community as if we were living in a perfect world. Of course, most of them are very well provided and taken care of when sick and old, having their own hospitals and nursing homes, while the person at the bottom levels of our societies have to endure waiting queues of 12 hours for ambulances and of 12 months plus for hospitals, unless one happens to collapse in a public place ( Australia: 2005 A.D.).
However, this scenario does not appear to have developed in Armorica where martial spirit remained justly honoured, recognized, rewarded and humanized in so far as the prevalent customs of those rough feudal societies allowed, while law, order, religion and the Roman Catholic Faith were taken very seriously in that Province of Gaul, this remaining a characteristic of Brittany even in the days of the French Revolution, when Lower Brittany (the region of La Vendee ) was the last of the french regions to submit to the Republic, under the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was forced to send troops to the area. Similarly, in the days of the restoration of the Bourbons, La Vendee always signalled the beginning of rebellion against the Republicans, the future colonialists who were going to oppress peoples in the name of the gods of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Armorica, although providing troops whenever and wherever Romans opposed barbarians, kept its independence, acquired since the times of Honorius, until the days of Clovis, the Merovingian King of the Franks who was converted from Paganism ( not from Arianism as the case was with the Goths and others ) to the roman catholic christian Creed ( the Nicene Creed ) in A.D. 497. It is however to be noted that Armorica's submission to the Merovingians was voluntary, honourable and legal, since the Franks had become by then the most reliable among the roman allies, in Gaul, and not without the preservation of the liberties and privileges of the local government of the Armoricans, including the recognition of the armorican language (gaelic), the freedoms of the nobility, of the clergy, and of the institutions.
Let us dwell for a moment on the voluntarity of Armorica's co-operation with Clovis and compare it to the wasteful, malicious rebellions of the people involved in the struggles in the British islands, see whether we can learn something for the sake of our attitudes and beliefs to-day, in relation to the scenario of wastefulness and damage resulting from the activities of modern terrorists from unco-operative nations in the third world.
It is important for me to add here, since one of the aims of this work is the history of the De Ferrarii clan, that the largest number of Coat of Arms acquired by families of this clan at the very beginning of the History of Heraldry, is to be found in Brittany and Normandy with comparatively smaller numbers occurring in Auvergne, Piedmont (Savoie), Provence, etc. The historical and heraldic links between the De Ferrarii and Armorica, and between Armorica and its contributions to the history of the equestrian arts and achievements in the middle of a barbarian scenario of chaos and disorder, are not pure coincidences, but a clear evidence of a long contribution to the efforts of rebuilding the western civilisation in Europe. By these standards and by the vision and memory of these historical scenarios, in the struggles for the re-establishment of Law and Order must we, the modern, measure worthiness and merit, and the actions of the people of the past, not in the petty, selfish, insular, limited, brutish seeking for unessential comforts, luxuries, pleasures of the senses, and of that false freedom that in allowing these, really makes us slaves.
It is important to note that the conversion of barbarians to christianity probably began in the days of Emperor Gallienus (Caesar: 253-259; Augustus: 259-268) when a considerable number of roman provincials were enslaved by barbaric nomads in their raids inside the roman borders. Many of these roman provincials were christians, however, it so happened that the great missionary Ulphilas, who was captured as a small boy together with his parents in Cappadocia, who preached to the gothic tribes even translating the Scriptures in their main dialect, professed Arianism ( according to the creed of Rimini ). Now the Goths had great influence on most barbaric nomad tribes, in fact we know that under the rule of the great Hermanric, the Goths had replaced everywhere along the roman borders scythian influence and dominance, prior to the arrival of the Huns at the Volga in 375 A.D. and Arianism became the version of christianity embraced by the Burgundians of Gaul until the days of King Sigismund, the Suevi in Spain ( Galicia ), the Vandals in Africa, the Ostrogoths in Pannonia ( later on led by Theodoric I the King of Italy ) , the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain, and the various bands of barbarian mercenaries which raised Odoacer to the throne of Italy.
The Franks became Roman Catholic in the days of the Merovingian King Clovis in A.D. 497 and, in the course of their european conquests, influenced the conversion of the Burgundians ( in the days of their last King Sigismund ), the Saxons, etc. The Visigoths of Spain became converted in the days of King Recared, the Suevi of Galicia followed, the Lombards of Italy becoming converted by their queen Theodolinda, under the guidance of Pope Gregory the Great, the same who had also sent missionaries to Britain.
It is interesting to quote Gibbon, I, p. 607-:
But the cause of Arianism was gradually suppressed by the weight of truth, of interest, and of example; and the controversy, which Egypt had derived from the Platonic school, was terminated, after a war of three hundred years, by the final conversion of the Lombards of Italy.Unquote.Sectarian competitions and struggles for an exclusive control of the religious life in the Empires added to the atmosphere of chaos and anarchy of the scenarios of the times, the most virulent among these sects being Arianism, owing to the fact that it had been embraced by all barbarians before the times of Clovis
( c. 497 A.D.), the king of the Franks. It is important to appreciate the magnitude and impact of this chaos and disorder on all aspects of human life, and its persistence in various parts of the Empires, in order to facilitate the understanding of the reasons for and causes ( i.e., the re-establishment of law and order) of the future rise of nationalism and the universal adoption of the feudal system, in Europe, especially so in view of the failure of the return to centralisation, attempted by the great Charlemagne. It is also of interest to focus on Arianism, since to-day there has been a resurgense of this sect under the name of the Jehovah Witnesses, an apparently, deceitfully very peaceful sect, except for its encouraging civil and military disobedience and a lack of civil responsibilty, that would finely suit a nation's enemies. The Arians were the first to persecute members of the opposite creed, under Euric, the King of the visigothic kingdom of Aquitaine, in Gaul. However, whilst Euric limited his persecution to the Bishops and clergy of the opposition, the Vandals of Africa carried out the most atrocious and cruel persecutions of a whole people, that included bodily amputations, the sale as slaves to the Moors of the desert, the condemnation to forced labour in Corsica and Sardinia, etc., the Arian clergy, on the example and advice of the Donatists, even surpassing in cruelty the excesses perpetrated by the secular arm of the Vandals. The lesson to be learnt from these past events is that even the best intentioned believers in a supreme God and in divine justice and reward cannot be trusted with the secular power to legislate and act against other sects and religions except in so far as to ensure that no one be allowed to indulge in the illusion/delusion of the establishing of a theocratic government on earth, on the safety of the belief that God alone possesses the wisdom and authority to do so, if and when it shall please Him/Herself, as the beloved Apostle John says ‘ at the last day'. Amen. In view of the threat imposed to-day by endemic Moslem, Jewish, Russian Orthodox theocratic obsessions, this lesson is still, more than ever, particularly important.
Quoting from Gibbon, I, p.612-:
The slight foundations of the Armorican republic had been repeatedly shaken or overthrown; but the same people still guarded their domestic freedom; asserted the dignity of the Roman name; and bravely resisted the predatory inroads and regular attacks of Clovis, who laboured to extend his conquests from the Seine to the Loire.
Their successful opposition introduced an equal and honourable union. The Franks esteemed the valour of the Armoricans; and the Armoricans were reconciled by the religion of the Franks. The military force which had been stationed for the defence of Gaul consisted of one hundred bands of cavalry or infantry; and these troops, while they assumed the title and privileges of Roman soldiers, were renewed by an incessant supply of the barbarian youth. The extreme fortifications and scattered fragments of the empire were still defended by their hopeless courage. But their retreat was intercepted, and their communication was impracticable-: they were abandoned by the Greek princes of Constantinople, and they piously disclaimed all connection with the Arian usurpers of Gaul. They accepted, without shame or reluctance, the generous capitulation which was proposed by a catholic hero [ Clovis King of the Franks]; and the spurious or legitimate progeny of the Roman legions was distinguished in the succeeding age by their arms, their ensigns, and their peculiar dress and institutions. But the national strength was increased by these powerful and voluntary accessions; and the neighbouuring kingdoms dreaded the numbers as well as the spirit of the Franks.
Unquote.
A quote from Gibbon I, chapter xxxviii,note 142-:
Hoc anno [ 490 A.D. ] Aella et Cissa obsederunt Andredes-Chester [ Newenden, Kent ]; et interfecerunt omnes qui id incolerent; adeo ut ne unus Brito ibi superstes fuerit
( Chron. Saxon. p.15, edit. Gibson );
an expression more dreadful in its simplicity than all the vague and tedious lamentations of the British Jeremiah.
Unquote.
My translation from Latin-: In that year [490A.D.] Aella and Cissa placed Newenden, Kent under siege; and slaughtered all those living therein; in such a manner that no British person would survive.
Unquote.
Note 142 is added here because I believe that a tribute must be paid to the vanquisced and persecuted civilised Britons, those who died and are being forgotten by some of our modern, arrogant, biased, false scholars who, in our barbaric Era of Crap, of the Sewer, Ordure and Manure seem to find the Anglo-Saxons eminent. I invite these type of individuals to humility, self-analysis and reformation, which are one of the ethical aim of this Appendix.
