Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Agraes]

Nicholas raised a good point: given usual Jornandes exagerations, it is not really possible that Riothamus has gathered as much as 12.000 warriors, 1.200 already beeing a good number. The man was certainly powerful, he probably had power in Britain and was able to rely on the Letavi, the Britons settled in Gaul more or less recently. Certainly the traditionnal picture of Britons fleeing the Saxons to settle in Gaul is partially biaised. The reasons were much more varied, they had possibly to do with irish raids and colonisation, with civil wars, but were probably mainly economical and politic. The first Britons were settled in Gaul in the 4th century by Rome itself, and possibly in the 5th century, the Armorican civitates called for more reinforcements, to act against the expanding Franks of Clovis, the saxon raiders and the Wisigoths.

Back to Riothamus, Léon Fleuriot proposed that may have been Ambrosius Aurelianus title or nickname on several arguments. Stuart Laycock has recently proposed Riothamus was the leader of the Dumnonii by AD 465, and the beginning of the trade with Mediterranea can be linked to his alliance with Anthemius - a Greek emperor in the west.

Laycock also did a great work on British late roman belt buckles. There seems to be a lot of regional styles which can be linked to a specific civitas. That does include the territories of the Dobunni (not to be confused with the Dumnonii) or the Cornovi. Those buckles are mostly late 4th century or early 5th century in date. If it can be linked to a regional production for the regular army, Stuart Laycock argued in his book Britannia: the Failed State that they were equipping territorial militias, akin to those seen in a more recent context in ex-Yougoslavia.

See here a review of the book by Robert: <!-- l <a class="postlink-local" href="http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=24393">viewtopic.php?f=18&t=24393<!-- l
And here Stuart Laycock website on belt buckles: http://www.lateromanbuckles.org.uk/

About swords: we know a lot of exemples in frankish and anglo-saxon context for the late 5th/6th centuries, but none has yet been found in a brittonic context (except a possible saxon sword in Wales). We don't know exactly which type of swords the Britons used in that period. Did they kept going on the 4th century type roman spathae, or fashionned the germanic ones, or were their swords more similar to the (often) shorter exemples used by the Gaels and Picts in the early medieval period? We have really few weapons finds in western Britain generally speaking, save a few spearheads and axeheads. No burial finds, and poor acid soils that most of the time live the diggers without much metal artefacts.