Literary Evidence for Villas, Towns and Hillforts in Fifth-Century Britain

Literary Evidence for Villas, Towns and Hillforts in Fifth-Century Britain. N.J. Higham writes: In a stimulating contribution to a new collection of essays on St Patrick, Dr Kenneth Dark has drawn renewed attention to a reference in Patrick's Confessio to the villula from which he was taken captive, aged about sixteen, by Scottish raiders. Dark's assumption that this refers to some settlement (or estate) of a kind which begs description as a hillfort seems sound, and he is probably correct in identifying it as a villa or villa-estate of the type which is widely identified in the lowlands of Roman Britain. Dark's case would indeed have been strengthened, had he noted the rhetorical context of the diminutive form of villa which Patrick here used. This is just one element in a preface which conforms to the conventions of classical literature to the extent that it is self-deprecatory: Patrick depicted himself as a peccator rusticissimus et minimus omnium fidelium et contemptibilissimus apud plurimos (the most rustic and the least of all the faithful and most comtemptible to very many). That his patrimony was described as a villula therefore sustains his use of rusticissimus and extends his self-image as a farmer's boy; but Patrick was careful at the same time to make it plain to his readers that his father's household and his family's status was far grander than that which his words might otherwise imply. We should not, therefore, be misled by his conventional, prefatory remarks into thinking him either humble or of lowly origins: he was neither. What is less sustainable is the assumption that Gildas was ignorant of villas. In case Gildas's text should become, by default, a means of dating or contextualising the abandonment of villas his silence on this subject should be explored. The passage in Sheppard Frere's Britannia to which Dark makes such favourable allusion reads thus: