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The Last British Entry in the ‘Gallic Chronicles’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

M. Miller
M. Miller
Affiliation:
58 Hamilton Drive, Glasgow 12
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Extract

The date of 441/2 for the decisive point in the series of events which constituted the adventus Saxonum has frequently been quoted as deriving from a contemporary source. As a matter of fact, however, it is a ghostdate, born in 1892. It originated in a marginale by Mommsen to a chronicle-fragment which is one of the continuations used to extend the Carolingian edition of Jerome. This fragment was edited and annotated by Mommsen before the modern editions of Jerome were available. The information required to correct Mommsen has, however, been readily accessible since 1923, and the manuscript basis of his text has been open to consultation in London for much longer. It is not my purpose here to wage any wars, even upon a long neglect of the primary source, but merely to set out some considerations of Form-kritik which are the historian's equivalent to the archaeologist's typological criteria.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 9 , November 1978 , pp. 315 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © M. Miller 1978. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 Chronica Minora i [= Mon. Germ. Hist., Auct. Antiqq. ix (1892)], 515–66Google Scholar, especially 660.

2 Fotheringham, Iohannes Knight, Eusebii Pamphili Chronici Canones latine vertit … Hieronymus (London 1923)Google Scholar. The other modern edition by Helm, R., Die Chronik des Hieronymus [= Eusebius Werke vii, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte 47 (1956)]Google Scholar has no detail for our present purposes.

3 BL Addit. 16974 fos. 109r-110v.

4 For a temperate view of the unsatisfactory British content, see now Harrison, K., The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History (Cambridge 1976), 26–29.Google Scholar

5 This description is taken from Mommsen and Fotheringham, amplified by the kindness of Dr D. N. Dumville, who examined the manuscript for me.

6 A similar development in the Armenian Eusebius is undated, but fortunately irrelevant here.

7 See now Matthews, John, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court (Oxford 1975), 169, n. 3.Google Scholar

8 Blair, P. Hunter, ‘The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian History’, in Fox, C. and Dickens, B. (eds.), Early Cultures of North West Europe (Cambridge 1950), 245–57Google Scholar.

9 Miller, M., ‘Bede's Roman Dates’, in Classica et Mediaevalia 31 (1970), 239–52.Google Scholar

10 Jones, C. W., Bedae Opera de Temporibus (Massachusetts 1943), 346.Google Scholar