St. Alban and the End of Roman Britain

Abstract

The following is the first of a series of articles seeking to explain the sub-Roman cult of St. Alban in terms of the syncretic adapatation of pagan traditions, associated both with 'Albion' as the earliest recorded name for Britain and divine names in 'Albio- or 'Alb-' from a broad swathe of the Indo-European languages. It suggests the cult was in some sense a response to political pressures, associated both with the aspirations of Verulamium to a pan-British dominance, and, allied to that, the fostering of a pan-British identity. As well as antecedents from the Indo-European tradition, derivatives of our cult-figure are identified in the medieval Celtic tradition (especially 'Elen of the hosts', Part II), suggestive of a likely role for the cult in the sub-Roman period as a focus for unity amongst the Britons in their struggles with invaders. In Part III, parallel cults (especially St. Alban of Mainz) from the continent are explored while part IV seeks to analyse the etymon 'albho-' in terms of 'al= plus '-bho ', thus helping to explain the conflation in an early medieval cult context of 'elv-' from 'albio-' with 'el= from 'al-. On this basis saints and heroes in 'Ei ' are interpreted as derivative, or at least influenced by, the cult of St. Alban and its likely role in the sub-Roman period (Part V). Part VI examines the implications of this hypothesis about the cult for sub-Roman history, together with other evidence for the achievement of, or aspirations towards, some degree of political unity by the Britons of that period. Part 1 The Sub-Roman Cult of St. Alban The cult of St. Alban is the earliest recorded cult of a Christian saint in Britain, and he is one out of only three recorded British martyrs from the Roman era. His martyrdom would seem to constitute one of the very few facts that we have about Christianity in Britain during the Roman period, while the existence of his cult is one of the few things we know about Christianity - or anything else -in Britain of the immediately post-Roman period. The earliest record of his cult comes from Constantius's Life (Levison 1920) of St. Germanus of about 480, but this suggests the cult was well established, by at least 429. The earliest native record comes in the De Excidio of Gildas (Winterbottom 1978) from probably the second quarter of the sixth century while the earliest Passio from Gaul seems to date back to the early sixth century (Meyer 1904). Arguably, the one most significant fact that we have about this cult is that it was associated with the city of Verulamium, (on the edge of the modern St. Albans). Gildas is the first to supply us with this information directly but the Continental Passios seem to show knowledge of local Verulamium topography (Levison 1941: 347) and so reinforce the martyr's link with this place. It is this fact, anyway, that we will focus on here. The way that the cult of St. Alban figures so uniquely in our early sources is clearly not fortuitous but reflects the importance of the cult at the time. We might ask whether the association of such a cult with the city of Verulamium is likely to have been rather less than purely fortuitous, also. The old 'capital' of the province, or vicariate, of 'Britannia' was, of course, London, and it might not be unreasonable to expect something of that status to have been carried over into the immediate 'post-Roman' period. However there are quite good reasons why London might have lost its dominance subsequent to the Roman withdrawal, too. London had originally been highly dependant for its importance and success on trade and other links with the continental Empire, although as these declined during the later Roman period it will probably have become more and more dependant on the actual presence of the Roman military and administrative elite. Obviously the latter will have disappeared in 409 while there is not likely to have been very much of the former, subsequent to that date, either. …