Why write brethren?
Like Brethren, my interest in the distant, unrecorded past began on Crow Hill.
These days the hill above the lovely Welsh town of Llangollen, just a few miles from the village I grew up in, is known as Dinas Bran and the haunting ruins of the castle built by Gruffydd II ap Madog in the 1260s commands an impressive position overlooking the Dee valley. Most of the famous castles in Wales were built by Edward the first to subdue the medieval Welsh but Dinas Bran was built by the Welsh to defend the land from English invaders. Gruffydd II wasn't the first to use that wind-swept hilltop for such a reason though. Over a thousand years earlier a local Iron Age tribe built themselves a virtually impenetrable hillfort with a steep ditch ringing the crest. Parts of this are still visible today, if you know where to look.
Many books on British history only have a cursory mention of the times before Caesar's forays into the mysterious Britannia in 55 and 54 BC and the Claudian invasion a hundred years later. So like many, I always thought this island’s culture and history began a little less than 2000 years ago with the Roman conquest. It didn't.
Not by far.
The Celts as we call them, although it’s debatable if they used that name for themselves, had a culture just as rich and diverse as any. Full of life-defining myths, magic, folklore, tradition and superstition, theirs was a way of life they fought to the death to defend, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Yet, in the annals of history and in popular culture, they are all but forgotten. In three years of history lessons in my local secondary school there was not a single mention of them and whenever I heard mention of the word Celt, more often than not it was in the context of the derogatory term ‘barbarians’. Those without culture.
Growing up, I was well aware of Boudica and the indistinct remains of hillforts that can see be seen ringing the crests of certain hills around North Wales. But I was in my late ‘30s when I first heard that the tribe who’d lived on the land I’d grown up on were called the Ordovices. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I knew of the geologic period before I’d heard of the people.
I left Wales as a teenager, just out of school, off to travel the world, and on one of my infrequent visits back, it struck me as odd, and wrong that I knew nothing of these ancient people. My grandfather’s family all came from Wrexham and Rhos area and if you can trace your family tree back in the same place for a couple of hundred years, chances are that the roots go way back into antiquity as genes don’t move about too much before the industrial revolution. One day, struggling to stand up in the wind howling around the exposed stonework, I wondered if the people who had called this wind-swept hill of Dinas Bran their home were my ancestors… and Googled the Ordovices. Miraculously a few lines about them have survived the ages in Tacitus’ On the Life and Character of Julius Agricola. (But if you don’t want to ruin the story for yourself, this is a 2000 year old spoiler alert.)
Everything of the men, women and children who lived two millennia ago, all of their hopes, fears, and loves, thousands of lives over hundreds of years, are all just distant memories scattered as dust to the winds of time. But in those few short lines, ones written by their mortal enemies, their character is revealed. Creeping ever closer from the blood-soaked south, killing and conquering everything in its path, came the biggest, most advanced and well-trained military machine the world had yet seen. As well as being far superior in tactics and weaponry the Roman legions were known to be utterly ruthless. The one thing the Ordovices had an advantage in was local knowledge of the land which allowed them to wage guerrilla warfare, attacking in terrain it was hard for the legionnaires to get into their familiar formations.
They could have submitted, paid the heavy taxes and tributes and lived under foreign masters… but even though they’d suffered terrible losses seventeen years before when the then governor of Britannia Paulinius had taken the Twentieth legion all the way to Anglesey and devastated it, they took up weapons and fought. The amount of courage that would have taken astounds me and one day a few years ago, while walking in the thick Portuguese mist on the Camino in the middle of winter, the story of Cadwal came to me. And Brei. And Bleddyn. And Helig...
I wrote Brethren so that those who once farmed on and bled for the same land I grew up on might be a little more than a footnote in a first-century text. To give them names, faces… humanity. A story behind the shallow ditches and lichen-covered stones still left in the landscape that is all that is left of them.
One caveat, and here seems as good a place as any to mention it, is that I am no qualified historian and I claim absolutely no authority on the Celts or the Ordovices. My research was done via the same websites and books that anyone can easily access. I left school at 16 and have qualifications at all, so everything I write is pure conjecture based on what Tacitus wrote, a bit of Terry Pratchett’s philosophy and my own, hopefully not too wildly inaccurate, imaginings. But Brethren is what I think might have happened in what is now Wales in the summer of the year 77.
The remains of the perimeter ditch and rampart.
