Julius Caesar’s Invasion of Britain: An Historic Illumination From a Now Lost 15th Century Work

The sole known surviving piece of a once vast and grand 15th century “Faits des Romans,” doubtless for a noble patron of enormous wealth.

 

The artist is a follower of the Coëtivy Master

The twin nostalgias of Europe— one for the powerful, all-encompassing Roman Empire, the other for connecting with the mysterious pre-Roman peoples— combine in this 15th century French illumination of Caesar’s final, and questionably successful, encounter with the Britons, led by Cassivellaunus. While Caesar won this battle, his dream of a conquered, and Roman, Britain would not be realized within his lifetime. His legacy, however, was studied, admired, and immortalized far after his fatal betrayal by Brutus. This illustration captures this historic moment of Caesar’s triumph, the beginning of the end for the Britons, and the cultural legacy as viewed during the waning of the Middle Ages.

In the nineteenth century, European medievalists began shoring up their nations’ relationships with medieval literature to try to create firm claims of their peoples’ innate heroic attributes, their noble histories, their glorious pasts. This led, for example, to the French identifying themselves with the Chanson de Roland and the English lionizing King Arthur. But the desire to have these medieval roots overshadowed the more complicated histories: the Chanson de Roland, though composed in French, is about an emperor best known by his French name, Charlemagne, but who was born in Aachen, Germany and is buried there. The first legends of King Arthur from the 9th century, reflecting a much earlier time, came from Wales, a nation suppressed by the English, and the major inventions in the narrative, like the love story of Guinevere and Lancelot, and the Round Table, were invented in France. Though English storytellers engaged with Arthur and his knights, it wasn’t until Thomas Malory in the 15th century that Arthur became English.

During the Middle Ages, Rome was the empire to draw connections to for auctoritas. This is why the empire established by Charlemagne became known as the Holy Roman Empire. Though the term was not in use until the 13th century, the Emperors were instilled with translation imperii– a transfer of rule directly inherited from the historic emperors of Rome.

One aspect of Rome that was particularly admired in the Middle Ages was the conquering and bringing into Civilization of the barbarians north of the Alps and west of the Rhine, that includes Caesar’s foray into England and his confrontation with Cassivellanus. Cassivellaunus was likely the chief of the Catuvellauni of Hertfordshire, whose tribal name translates to ‘war-chiefs’. In British accounts, he appears in Welsh literature ranging from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle about the history of the Kings of Britain in both Latin, Historia regum Britanniae, and Welsh, Brut y Brenhinedd, to the more folkloric-based Trioedd Ynys Prydein (The Triads), the second branch of the Mabinogi, and Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys (The Adventure of Lludd and Llefelys). The British chieftain even appears, briefly, in the Greek Stratagemata by Polyaenus. The Latin literature, of course, written by the winners, includes Julius Caesar’s own Commentary de Bello Gallico (Commentary on the Gallic War).

During the account of his second campaign in Britain from Gaul in 54 BCE, after a failed first a year earlier, Caesar writes that Cassivellaunus was a rabble-rouser, conquering the Trinovantes, the most powerful British tribe (perhaps how the tribe received their appellation of ‘war-chiefs’). Though his location was betrayed by the Cenimagni, Segontiaci, Ancalites, Bibroci, and Cassi, who had surrendered to Caesar, Cassivellaunus gathered the forces of the Kentish kings, Cinetorix, Varvilius, Taximagulus, and Segovax. The tribes retreated to higher ground when they saw the sheer masses of Romans that Caesar had brought to avert the same failure of preparedness he suffered the year before. The legions established their military camp on the beaches and sought out the Britons. As they searched, their party was harassed by Britons on chariots; it was chariots which had given the edge to the British during Caesar’s first invasion. About 12 miles away, he encountered Cassivellaunus’ forces at a hillfort at the River Stour. A storm destroyed Caesar’s fleet of ships, and the repair gave the Britons time to regroup and rally behind Cassivellaunus.

Previously, the Britons operated as independent tribes; under Cassivellaunus, these tribes became an army, growing with more tribes coming to support Cassivellaunus. Their knowledge of the land, and their use of chariots, created a powerful enemy against Caesar’s army which was not used to fighting such a chaotic force. Had the Britons continued this strategy, history might have played out differently; however, they appeared to try to meet the Romans head-on, in large-scale battle, a tactic at which the Romans were well-practiced and deadly.

Cassivellaunus’s attempt to attack a foraging party, as had been done to the Briton’s success in 55 BCE, was the beginning of the end for the Britons now. Though he had unified some of the tribes, the Trinovantes remained staunchly against Cassivellaunus since he murdered their king. The murdered king’s son bargained with Caesar— his tribe would support Rome and Rome would defend the tribe from any retribution. This gave the Romans a newfound understanding of the land and the warfare tactics of the Britons. Once again the tribes were divided which inclined them to making alliances with Rome. The final two-fronted battle between the Romans and Britons saw British defeat. It is this routing of the British charioteers that the French illuminator included in this illustration of the Faits de Romains some 1500 years later.

The Britons essentially defeated, Caesar sent Commius, the King of the conquered Atrebates, to negotiate peace. Cassivellaunus agreed to paying tribute. In writing up the terms, Caesar used specific legal terms which would eventually make Britain a province of Rome. But this would not come to pass before Caesar’s untimely death on the Roman Senate floor nearly a decade later. It would be another century before Britain came truly under Roman rule.

In 13th century medieval writers began to compile works by Caesar, Lucan, Suetonius and Sallust, retelling Caesar’s life in the format of a chanson des geste (a song of deeds)— the same genre as the Chanson de Roland. The text, which is listed under many names but most commonly Faits des Romans, grew very popular from 14th century onwards, with over 50 manuscripts now recorded – these usually grand commissions for noble reading with many miniatures set into the text columns opening significant chapters, of which this extract serves as an example.

This miniature depicts the great scene introduced above: Caesar’s confrontation with the Cassivellanus during the former’s great invasion of Britain.

Caesar routing the chariot-mounted forces of the British cheiftain Cassivellanus, miniature on a cutting from an illuminated manuscript of the Faits des Romains

[France (most probably Paris), mid-15th century]. The illuminator represented the two armies in armor contemporary with his own time— the armor of chivalric knights— rather than the Roman legion outfits of Caesar’s time and blue-painted leather-clad attire of the Britons. Differentiation between the Britons and the Romans is made by the Britons wearing blue and white tunics over their armor and using bows, while the Romans have pikes and silver armor without tunics (with the exception of a figure who may be Commius, a Celt-turned-Roman-ally).

An historic cutting of an illumination on verso and 16 lines of one of two original columns of text on recto. 128x98mm in total. Text column of 102mm on verso. Written in Middle French in a Gothic bâtarde script with minimal abbreviations for legibility. Some oxidation from the silver-gilt on the illustration have bled through to the text side, but still legible. Illumination is flanked on both sides by blue and gold acanthus leaves and green-leaved penwork-foliage. Illuminator applied silver to highlight the armour of the armies and gold touches to illuminate Caesar himself.

The artist is a follower of the Coëtivy Master (worked in Paris, c. 1450-85), and shares that artist’s simple but delicate facial modelling as well as his love of finely depicted drapery.

What remains of the text here allows us to see that this miniature came from a very grand manuscript, almost certainly produced at vast expense for an important noble patron. Its text was clearly in two columns, like many grand copies of the text, with column-wide miniatures set at the head of crucial chapters. Examination of other copies of the text shows that about 3700 characters of text are missing between the foot of the miniature on the recto and the first partial line of text on the verso here. With an approximate average line length of 41 characters here, this allows us to predict that the miniature here most probably sat in the inner column of the recto, and thus some 90 lines of text are missing between its foot and the first line of text on the other side. Allowing for two columns, this indicates that each column had 45 lines plus the 12 lines on the verso of this fragment, allowing us to predict that the text on each page of the parent manuscript was approximately 57 lines in height. This is more than the 50 lines in some of the grandest surviving manuscripts such as BnF, Fr. 64, made in the fifteenth century for an unknown noble patron. In addition, as the cutting here gives us measurements for the column width (95mm.) and the line height (5mm.), we can further calculate that the parent codex of this cutting had a text block of approximately 285 by 220mm. (the last 95+95mm. plus 30mm. for an approximate gutter measurement). BnF Fr. 64 has a text block that measures 278 by 200mm., and a complete size including borders of 430 by 315mm – comparable to the copy from the library of the Comte d’Angouleme (Fr. 250: 420 by 317mm.), but far smaller than that made for a member of the De Fou family, and later taken into the fine library of Cardinal Richelieu (Fr. 23,084: 345 by 245mm. and with only one miniature). The parent codex of the present miniature must have been on the same scale as Fr. 64 and 250, if not slightly larger. It was a vast codex produced on a scale to impress through its sheer opulence, doubtless for a noble patron of enormous wealth.