The Roman and the Teuton

But again comes in a very learned man, Dr. Latham [19 - English Language, vol. i. p. 200.], and more than hints that the name is derived from the Lange Börde, the long meadows by the side of the Elbe: and so a good story crumbles to pieces, and

‘All charms do fly
Beneath the touch of cold philosophy.’

Then follows another story, possibly from another saga.  How by reason of a great famine they had to leave Scoringia, the shore-land, and go into Mauringia, a word which Mr. Latham connects with the Merovingi, or Meerwing conquerors of Gaul.  Others say that it means the moorland, others something else.  All that they will ever find out we may see for ourselves already.—A little tribe of valiant fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them by the emigration of some Suevic, Vandal, or Burgund tribe.  We know nothing about them, and never shall know, save that they wore white linen gaiters, and carried long halberts, or pole-axes, and had each an immortal soul in him, as dear to God as yours or mine, with immense unconscious capabilities, which their children have proved right well.

Then comes another saga, how they met the Assipitti, of whom, whether they were Tacitus’s Usipetes, of the Lower Rhine, or Asabiden, the remnant of the Asen, who went not to Scandinavia with Odin, we know not, and need not know; and how the Assipitti would not let them pass; and how they told the Lombards that they had dogheaded men in their tribe who drank men’s blood, which Mr. Latham well explains by pointing out, in the Traveller’s Song, a tribe of Hundings (Houndings) sons of the hound; and how the Lombards sent out a champion, who fought the champion of the Assipitti, and so gained leave to go on their way.

Forward they go, toward the south-east, seemingly along the German marches, the debateable land between Teuton and Sclav, which would, mechanically speaking, be the line of least resistance.  We hear of Gothland—wherever that happened to be just then; of Anthaib, the land held by the Sclavonian Anten, and Bathaib, possibly the land held by the Gepidæ, or remnant of the Goths who bided behind (as Wessex men still say), while the Goths moved forward; and then of Burgundhaib, wherever the Burgunds might be then.  I know not; and I will dare to say, no man can exactly know.  For no dates are given, and how can they be?  The Lombards have not yet emerged out of the dismal darkness of the north into the light of Roman civilization; and all the history they have are a few scraps of saga.

At last they take a king of the family of the Gungings, Agilmund, son of Ayo, like the rest of the nations, says Jornandes; for they will be no more under duces, elective war-kings.  And then follows a fresh saga (which repeats itself in the myths of several nations), how a woman has seven children at a birth, and throws them for shame into a pond; and Agilmund the king, riding by, stops to see, and turns them over with his lance; and one of the babes lays hold thereof; and the king says, ‘This will be a great man;’ and takes him out of the pond, and calls him Lamissohn, ‘the son of the fishpond,’ (so it is interpreted;) who grows to be a mighty Kemper-man, and slays an Amazon.  For when they come to a certain river, the Amazons forbid them to pass, unless they will fight their she-champion; and Lamissohn swims over and fights the war-maiden, and slays her; and they go on and come into a large land and quiet, somewhere about Silesia, it would seem, and abode there a long while.

Then down on them come the savage Bulgars by night, and slay king Agilmund, and carry off his daughter; and Lamissohn follows them, and defeats them with a great slaughter, and is made king; and so forth: till at last they have got—how we shall never know—near history and historic lands.  For when Odoacer and his Turklings and other confederates went up into Rugiland, the country north of Vienna, and destroyed the Rugians, and Fava their king, then the Lombards went down into the waste land of the Rugians, because it was fertile, and abode there certain years.

Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open plains, which are called feld.  One says ‘Moravia;’ but that they had surely left behind.  Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about Comorn.  Be that as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli.  Eutropius says that they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and offered to pay more, if the Herules would not attack them.  Paul tells a wild saga, or story, of the Lombard king’s daughter insulting a Herule prince, because he was short of stature: he answered by some counter-insult; and she, furious, had him stabbed from behind through a window as he sat with his back to it.  Then war came.  The Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in the Roman armies, despised the wild Lombards, and disdained to use armour against them, fighting with no clothes save girdles.  Rodulf their king, too certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off if he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret anxiety as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness from God came on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax, they took the blue flowers for water, and spread out their arms to swim through, and were all slaughtered defencelessly.

Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings’ daughters married with the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr. Latham identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, ‘the noble conqueror,’ though Grotius translates it Audwin, ‘the old or auld conqueror’), who brought them over the Danube into Pannonia, between the Danube and the Drave, about the year 526.  Procopius says, that they came by a grant from the Emperor Justinian, who gave as wife to Aldwin a great niece of Dietrich the Good, carried captive with Witigis to Byzant.

Thus at last they too have reached the forecourt of the Roman Empire, and are waiting for their turn at the Nibelungen hoard.  They have one more struggle, the most terrible of all; and then they will be for a while the most important people of the then world.

The Gepidæ are in Hungary before them, now a great people.  Ever since they helped to beat the Huns at Netad, they have been holding Attila’s old kingdom for themselves and not attempting to move southward into the Empire; so fulfilling their name.

There is continual desultory war; Justinian, according to Procopius’ account, playing false with each, in order to make them destroy each other.  Then, once (this is Procopius’ story, not Paul’s) they meet for a great fight; and both armies run away by a panic terror; and Aldwin the Lombard and Thorisend the Gepid are left alone, face to face.—It is the hand of God, say the two wild kings—God does not mean these two peoples to destroy each other.  So they make a truce for two years.  Then the Gepidæ call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to help them; then, says Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries, under Amalfrid the Goth, Theodoric’s great nephew, and brother-in-law of Aldwin, has a great fight with the Gepidæ.  But Paul knows naught of all this: with him it is not Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who destroys the Gepidæ.  Alboin, Grotius translates as Albe-win, ‘he who wins all:’ but Dr. Latham, true to his opinion that the Lombards and the Angles were closely connected, identifies it with our Ælfwine, ‘the fairy conqueror.’

Aldwin, Paul says, and Thorisend fought in the Asfeld,—wherever that may be,—and Alboin the Lombard prince slew Thorisend the Gepid prince, and the Gepidæ were defeated with a great slaughter.

Then young Alboin asked his father to let him sit at the table with him.  No, he could not do that, by Lombard custom, till he has become son-at-arms to some neighbouring king.

Young Alboin takes forty thanes, and goes off to Thorisend’s court, as the guest of his enemy.  The rites of hospitality are sacred.  The king receives him, feasts him, seats him, the slayer of his son, in his dead son’s place.  And as he looks on him he sighs; and at last he can contain no longer.  The seat, he says, I like right well: but not the man who sits in it.  One of his sons takes fire, and begins to insult the Lombards and their white gaiters.  You Lombards have white legs like so many brood mares.  A Lombard flashes up.  Go to the Asfeld, and you will see how Lombard mares can kick.  Your brother’s bones are lying about there like any sorry nag’s.  This is too much; swords are drawn; but old Thorisend leaps up.  He will punish the first man who strikes.  Guests are sacred.  Let them sit down again, and drink their liquor in peace.  And after they have drunk, he gives Alboin his dead son’s weapons, and lets them go in peace, like a noble gentleman.

This grand old King dies in peace.  Aldwin dies likewise, and to them succeed their sons, Alboin and Cunimund—the latter probably the prince who made the jest about the brood-mares—and they two will fight the quarrel out.  Cunimund, says Paul, began the war—of course that is his story.  Alboin is growing a great man; he has married a daughter of Clotaire, king of the Franks: and now he takes to his alliance the Avars, who have just burst into the Empire, wild people who afterwards founded a great kingdom in the Danube lands, and they ravage Cunimund’s lands.  He will fight the Lombards first, nevertheless: he can settle the Avars after.  He and his, says Paul, are slain to a man.  Alboin makes a drinking-cup of his skull, carries off his daughter Rosamund (‘Rosy-mouth’), and a vast multitude of captives and immense wealth.  The Gepidæ vanish from history; to this day (says Paul) slaves either of the Lombards or the Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes the hero of his time, praised even to Paul’s days in sagas, Saxon and Bavarian as well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory.  We shall see now how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard.

He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and its weakness.  He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses, to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human beings to come and till it once more.

There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him.  Hardly any left in the Roman world.  The plague is come; to add its horrors to all the other horrors of the time—the true old plague, as far as I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the seventeenth century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe, through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor.  The Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation.  The two deluges of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no horsemen), had rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy.  Lothaire and his army, returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague.  Buccelin, entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained of all that mighty host.  Awful to think of: 75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other: and like water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the ground, and left no trace.

And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap, like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by disgrace.  Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like, he was harsh and cruel.  The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to court-slanders, bade him ‘leave to men the use of arms, and come back to the palace, to spin among the maids.’—‘Tell her,’ said the terrible old imp, ‘I will spin her such a thread as she shall not unravel.’

He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople.  From Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come and try his fortune as king of Italy.  He sent, too, (so says old Paul) presents to tempt the simple Lombard men—such presents as children would like—all fruits which grew in Italian orchards.  Though the gold was gone, those were still left.  Great babies they were, these Teutons, as I told you at the first; and Narses knew it well, and had used them for his ends for many a year.

Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies fighting in the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the blood which should be shed.

Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a mighty multitude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians, Gepidæ, Bulgars, Sarmatæ, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose names (says Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages where they settled.  With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand of them at the least, with wife and child.  And Sigebert king of the Franks put Suevic settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.

Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on the condition that he should have them back if he had to return.  But return he never did, he nor his Lombard host.  This is the end.  The last invasion of Italy.  The sowing, once for all, of an Italian people.  Fresh nations were still pressing down to the rear of the Alps, waiting for their turn to enter the Fairy Land—not knowing, perhaps, that nothing was left therein, but ashes and blood:—but their chance was over now: a people were going into Italy who could hold what they got.

On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by the old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pass from Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to Trieste.  It must have been white, in those days, with the bones of nigh 200 years.  And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains, Paul says, and is not surprised thereat, because there are plenty of them in Hungary near by.  An old man told him he had seen a skin in which fifteen men might lie side by side.  None, you must know, are left now, save a very few in the Lithuanian forests.  Paul goes out of his way to note this fact, and so shall I.

Alboin left a strong guard in Friuli, and Paul’s ancestor among them, under Gisulf his nephew, and Marphrais or master of the horse, who now became duke of Friuli and warden of the marches, bound to prevent the Avars following them into their new abode.  Then the human deluge spread itself slowly over the Lombard plains.  None fought with them, and none gainsaid; for all the land was waste.  The plague of three years before, and the famine which followed it had, says Paul, reduced the world into primæval silence.  The villages had no inhabitants but dogs; the sheep were pasturing without a shepherd; the wild birds swarmed unhurt about the fields.  The corn was springing self-sown under the April sun, the vines sprouting unpruned, the lucerne fields unmown, when the great Lombard people flowed into that waste land, and gave to it their own undying name.

The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to the inevitable yoke.  The towns alone seem to have offered resistance.  Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take.  He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would have kept it.  At last they capitulated.  As Alboin rode in at St. John’s gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the grooms beat him with their lance-butts.  A ghostly fear came on the Lombards.  ‘Remember, lord king, thy cruel oath, and cancel it; for there are Christian folk in the city.’  Alboin cancelled his oath, and the horse rose at once.  So Alboin spared the people of Pavia, and entered the palace of old Dietrich the Ostrogoth, as king of Italy, as far as the gates of Rome and Ravenna.

And what was his end?  Such an end as he deserved; earned and worked out for himself.  A great warrior, he had destroyed many nations, and won a fair land.  A just and wise governor, he had settled North Italy on some rough feudal system, without bloodshed or cruelty.  A passionate savage, he died as savages deserve to die.  You recollect Rosamund his Gepid bride?  In some mad drinking-bout (perhaps cherishing still his old hatred of her family) he sent her her father’s skull full of wine, and bade her drink before all.  She drank, and had her revenge.

The story has become world-famous from its horror: but I suppose I must tell it you in its place.—How she went to Helmichis the shield-bearer, and he bade her get Peredeo the Kemper-man to do the deed: and how Peredeo intrigued with one of her bower-maidens, and how Rosamund did a deed of darkness, and deceived Peredeo; and then said to him, I am thy mistress; thou must slay thy master, or thy master thee.  And how he, like Gyges in old Herodotus’s tale, preferred to survive; and how Rosamund bound the king’s sword to his bedstead as he slept his mid-day sleep, and Peredeo did the deed; and how Alboin leapt up, and fought with his footstool, but in vain.  And how, after he was dead, Rosamund became Helmichis’ leman, as she had been Peredeo’s, and fled with him to Ravenna, with all the treasure and Alpswintha, Alboin’s daughter by the Frankish wife; and how Longinus the exarch persuaded her to poison Helmichis, and marry him; and how she gave Helmichis the poisoned cup as he came out of the bath, and he saw by the light of her wicked eyes that it was poison, and made her drink the rest; and so they both fell dead.  And then how Peredeo and the treasure were sent to the Emperor at Constantinople; and how Peredeo slew a great lion in the theatre; and how Tiberius, when he saw that he was so mighty a man of his hands, bade put his eyes out; and how he hid two knives in his sleeves, and slew with them two great chamberlains of the Emperor; and so died, like Samson, says old Paul, having got good weregeld for the loss of his eyes—a man for either eye.

And old Narses died at Rome, at a great age; and they wrapt him in lead, and sent him to Byzant with all his wealth.  But some say that while he was still alive, he hid his wealth in a great cistern, and slew all who knew of it save one old man, and swore him never to reveal the place.  But after Narses’ death that old man went to Constantinople to Tiberius the Cæsar, and told him how he could not die with that secret on his mind; and so Tiberius got all the money, so much that it took many days to carry away, and gave it all to the poor, as was his wont.

A myth—a fable: but significant, as one more attempt to answer the question of all questions in a Teuton’s mind—What had become of the Nibelungen hoard?  What had become of all the wealth of Rome?

LECTURE VIII—THE CLERGY AND THE HEATHEN

I asked in my first lecture, ‘What would become of the forest children, unless some kind saint or hermit took pity on them?’

I used the words saint and hermit with a special purpose.  It was by the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes of savages, destroying each other by continual warfare.

What our race owes, for good and for evil, to the Roman clergy, I shall now try to set before you.

To mete out to them their due share of praise and blame is, I confess, a very difficult task.  It can only be fulfilled by putting oneself, as far as possible, in their place, and making human allowance for the circumstances, utterly novel and unexpected, in which they found themselves during the Teutonic invasions.  Thus, perhaps, we may find it true of some of them, as of others, that ‘Wisdom is justified of all her children.’

That is a hard saying for human nature.  Justified of her children she may be, after we have settled which are to be her children and which not: but of all her children?  That is a hard saying.  And yet was not every man from the beginning of the world, who tried with his whole soul to be right, and to do good, a child of wisdom, of whom she at least will be justified, whether he is justified or not?  He may have had his ignorances, follies, weaknesses, possibly crimes: but he served the purpose of his mighty mother.  He did, even by his follies, just what she wanted done; and she is justified of all her children.

This may sound like optimism: but it also sounds like truth to any one who has fairly studied that fantastic page of history, the contrast between the old monks and our own heathen forefathers.  The more one studies the facts, the less one is inclined to ask, ‘Why was it not done better?’—the more inclined to ask, ‘Could it have been done better?’  Were not the celibate clergy, from the fifth to the eighth centuries, exceptional agents fitted for an exceptional time, and set to do a work which in the then state of the European races, none else could have done?  At least, so one suspects, after experience of their chronicles and legends, sufficient to make one thoroughly detest the evil which was in their system: but sufficient also to make one thoroughly love many of the men themselves.

A few desultory sketches, some carefully historical, the rest as carefully compiled from common facts, may serve best to illustrate my meaning.

The monk and clergyman, whether celibate or not, worked on the heathen generally in one of three capacities: As tribune of the people; as hermit or solitary prophet; as colonizer; and in all three worked as well as frail human beings are wont to do, in this most piecemeal world.

Let us look first at the Hermits.  All know what an important part they play in old romances and ballads.  All are not aware that they played as important a part in actual history.  Scattered through all wildernesses from the cliffs of the Hebrides to the Sclavonian marches, they put forth a power, uniformly, it must be said, for good.

Every one knows how they appear in the old romances.—How some Sir Bertrand or other, wearied with the burden of his sins, stumbles on one of these Einsiedler, ‘settlers alone,’ and talks with him; and goes on a wiser and a better man.  How he crawls, perhaps, out of some wild scuffle, ‘all-to bebled,’ and reeling to his saddlebow; and ‘ever he went through a waste land, and rocks rough and strait, so that it him seemed he must surely starve; and anon he heard a little bell, whereat he marvelled; and betwixt the water and the wood he was aware of a chapel, and an hermitage; and there a holy man said mass, for he was a priest, and a great leech, and cunning withal.  And Sir Bertrand went in to him and told him all his case—how he fought Sir Marculf for love of the fair Ellinore, and how the king bade part them, and how Marculf did him open shame at the wineboard, and how he went about to have slain him privily, but could not; and then how he went and wasted Marculf’s lands, house with byre, kine with corn, till a strong woman smote him over the head with a quern-stone, and all-to broke his brain-pan;’ and so forth—the usual story of mad passion, drink, pride, revenge.

‘And there the holy man a-read him right godly doctrine, and shrived him, and gave him an oath upon the blessed Gospels, that fight he should not, save in his liege lord’s quarrel, for a year and a day.  And there he abode till he was well healed, he and his horse.’

Must not that wild fighting Bertrand have gone away from that place a wiser and a better man?  Is it a matter to be regretted, or otherwise, that such men as the hermit were to be found in that forest, to mend Bertrand’s head and his morals, at the same time?  Is it a matter to be regretted, or otherwise, that after twenty or thirty years more of fighting and quarrelling and drinking, this same Sir Bertrand—finding that on the whole the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, were poor paymasters, and having very sufficient proof, in the ends of many a friend and foe, that the wages of sin are death—‘fell to religion likewise, and was a hermit in that same place, after the holy man was dead; and was made priest of that same chapel; and died in honour, having succoured many good knights, and wayfaring men’?

One knows very well that it would not be right now; that it is not needed now.  It is childish to repeat that, when the question is, was it right then—or, at least, as right as was possible then?  Was it needed then—or, at least, the nearest thing to that which was needed?

If it was, why should not wisdom be justified of all her children?

One hopes that she was; for certainly, if any men ever needed to be in the right, lest they should be of all men most miserable, it was these same old hermits.  Praying and preaching continually, they lived on food which dogs would not eat, in dens in which dogs ought not to live.  They had their reasons.  Possibly they knew their own business best.  Possibly also they knew their neighbour’s business somewhat; they knew that such generations as they lived in could not be taught, save by some extravagant example of this kind, some caricature, as it were, of the doctrines which were to be enforced.  Nothing less startling, perhaps, could have touched the dull hearts, have convinced the dull brains, of fierce, ignorant, and unreasoning men.

Ferocity, lawlessness, rapine, cruelty, and—when they were glutted and debauched by the spoils of the Roman empire—sensuality, were the evils which were making Europe uninhabitable for decent folk, and history—as Milton called it—a mere battle of kites and crows.  What less than the example of the hermit—especially when that hermit was a delicate and high-born woman—could have taught men the absolute superiority of soul to body, of spiritual to physical force, of spiritual to physical pleasure, and have said to them, not in vain words, but solid acts—‘All that you follow is not the way of life.  The very opposite to it is the way of life.  The wages of sin are death; and you will find them so,—in this life the victims of your own passions, and of the foes whom your crimes arouse, and in life to come of hell for ever.  But I tell you I have no mind to go to hell.  I have a mind to go to heaven; and I know my mind right well.  If the world is to be such as this, and the rulers thereof such as you, I will flee from you.  I will not enter into the congregation of sinners, neither will I cast in my lot with the bloodthirsty.  I will be alone with God and His universe.  I will go to the mountain cave or to the ocean cliff, and there, while the salt wind whistles through my hair, I will be stronger than you, safer than you, richer than you, happier than you.  Richer than you, for I shall have for my companion the beatific vision of God, and of all things and beings God-like, fair, noble, just, and merciful.  Stronger than you, because virtue will give me a power over the hearts of men such as your force cannot give you; and you will have to come to my lonely cell, and ask me to advise you, and teach you, and help you against the consequences of your own sins.  Safer than you, because God in whom I trust will protect me: and if not, I have still the everlasting life of heaven, which this world cannot give or take away.  So go your ways, fight and devour one another, the victims of your own lusts.  I am minded to be a good man; and to be that, I will give up—as you have made all other methods impossible for me—all which seems to make life worth having’?  Oh! instead of finding fault with such men; instead of, with vulturine beak, picking out the elements of Manichæism, of conceit, of discontent, of what not human frailty and ignorance, which may have been in them, let us honour the enormous moral force which enabled them so to bear witness that not the mortal animal, but the immortal spirit, is the Man; and that when all which outward circumstance can give is cast away, the Man still lives for ever, by God, and in God.

And they did teach that lesson.  They were good, while other men were bad; and men saw the beauty of goodness, and felt the strength of it, and worshipped it in blind savage admiration.  Read Roswede’s Vitæ Patrum Eremiticorum; read the legends of the hermits of the German forests; read Colgan’s Lives of the Irish Saints; and see whether, amid all fantastic, incredible, sometimes immoral myths, the goodness of life of some one or other is not the historic nucleus, round which the myths, and the worship of the saint, have crystallized and developed.

Take, for instance, the exquisite hymn of St. Bridget, which Colgan attributes to the sixth century: though it is probably much later; that has nothing to do with the argument:—