Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[cagwinn]

Using Jarman's translation of Y Gododdin, Mersey did an analysis of the text and military word usage.

So for example shields are mention 24 times, and broken shields 12 times. Armour is mentioned on 12 occassions, mail on 4 occassions, a curiass once, and there are no mentions of helmets. Nor are bows or arrows mentioned. Horses get 36 mentions, but a saddle is mentioned only once.

A helmet (or, at least, some type of headgear) is mentioned in stanza A.51 (with a slightly corrupt version in stanza B1.7) - "drem di-bennor" ("eyes unencumbered by headgear", per Koch's translation, "Gododdin of Aneirin", p. 35).

I don't know how useful the Gododdin is for elucidating the arms and armor of sub-Roman Britain - even if the original poem was composed in the early 7th century, it has several layers of later accretions.