Winter's Blossom: The Seasons of Arthur

Chapter 12

We called the Angle and Saxon lands Lloegyr. It meant the Lost Lands, and we were sworn to reclaim those lands lost to us to the Saxons. The British vows seemed to diminish annually as instead from Lloegyr that the 'Angle-Saxons' spilled forth to lay claim ever more of our land in seasons of iron and blood.

Like the British kingdoms, Lloegyr was made up of a knot of smaller kingdoms, but they were all dominated by the two bigger kingdoms. There was Sussex, a Saxon kingdom. It lay on the south eastern corner of Britain and reached from the south coast up to the Thames river and all the way west to Londonnium, bordering the rich and fertile lands of Dumnonia in the south of the island. However, the larger and more powerful kingdom was to the north, Angleland, the land of the Angle people. They were led by Engist, and as the most powerful Angle Saxon sovereign he gave himself the title, Bretwalda, this was meant to the same as our High King but in fact was him simply declaring himself the most powerful king. He did not engender the same loyalty, even the reluctant kind, that Ambrosius received. Instead the Angles and the Saxons fought each other almost as much as they fought and raided we British, with the lesser kingdoms not always following their tribal ties and often changing allegiances with the flow of gold

It was a strange time of year of the sudden campaign that had caught the British off-guard. Autumn was waning. But Engist, the Angle Bretwalda was wily. He had counted on the lateness of his invasion to catch the British border people unawares, and had gone as far as capturing a small village that had sprung up around an old Roman fort on a crossroads.

The town on the crossroads was an important one, as it lay within a day's march of Ratae, the powerful town built by the Romans in the east of Powys that stood like a bastion against the Angle invasion. That bastion was threatened though as the pillars before it were slowly stripped away.

Also with the town's fall, the contested lands on the frontier was suddenly pushed west. Without a defence in front of them, there was nothing to stop the invaders from raiding them, and so the farmers were forced to flee for Ratae, which would now be open to threat.

'Ratae?' Ambrosius demanded of the messenger. 'Is it fallen? Is it under siege?'

'It was not when I left, Lord King.' The messenger replied. 'I cannot say what has befallen since then. He had only taken two days of hard riding and a string of broken horses to get here though on the roads than sprung in every direction from Ratae.

Roads, Ambrosius had said was the key to war, you could not move supplies without roads. And without supplies you could not move an army. Crossroads were vital. Especially when there was a big, Roman town with stone walls at the centre of them where an Army could spring forth from.

The final thing Engist had counted on was the weather. So late in the summer, with the approach of autumn and her rains, Engist had gambled that the Britons would be slow to react before the weather curtailed any British counterattack, giving him the winter to strengthen his defences and like that the border would have shifted ten miles west.

This was where Ambrosius' demand for a standing army made up of a small band from every kingdom was proven. In less than two days we had an army on the road marching quickly along the Roman Roads, able to march quickly along the Watling Street that reached from Viroconium all the way down to Londonnium, before turning north on the Fosse Way that stretched all the way from Dumnonium in the south west of the island, all the way to Lindum.

I was fascinated by the Roman roads, even so long after the Romans had gone, they were the key to moving quickly throughout the island. I just simply could not conceive how anyone could build stone paved roads that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of miles. What time must have been dedicated into building these roads. How many men must have been used? How much stone had been cut? It was incredible.