Archaeology Tuesdays – Quarter Stater of Cunobelinos

During the building of the A505 Baldock Bypass in 2003-4, Albion Archaeology excavated several sites along its route. Close to the A507 Buntingford Road, archaeologists discovered a large boundary ditch, up to 3.5 m wide and up to 1.5 m deep. It ran for at least 140 m along a west-southwest to east-northeast course through open countryside (determined by the types of snails found in the bottom fills).

The excavators suggested that it formed the southern boundary of the town that was growing up in Walls Field during the first century BC. It originally had a gateway through it, some 5 m wide, that was eventually blocked. By the second half of the first century AD, it was falling into disrepair: people were no longer cleaning out the soils accumulating inside it. In the early second century, a dump of much older rubbish finally filled it. Among the material thrown in was a small gold coin issued by the ruler Cunobelinos.

The coin weighs 0.9 g, and its size shows that it is a quarter stater. Staters were originally Greek silver coins based on the Phoenician shekel, but some cities also minted gold versions, worth between 20 and 28 silver staters according to the place. Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) paid some of his mercenary troops in gold staters, which they brought back to western Europe. There, their rulers began to copy them, slowly modifying the designs. They first arrived in Britain in the second half of the second century BC and by about 100 BC, British rulers were issuing their own versions. A stater of the early first century AD was about half the weight of a Roman gold aureus; an aureus was worth about forty day’s pay for a legionary soldier, so our quarter stater would be the rough equivalent of five days’ pay.

Cunobelinos came to power about AD 10, claiming – probably justifiably – to a son of the Tasciouanos who had ruled the area north of the Thames from about 25-10 BC. He issued his first coins at Camulodunon (Colchester), with a laurel leaf design, hinting at a military victory. He was soon also issuing coins from Uerulamion (St Albans) and over the coming decades expanded his sphere of influence across much of southeastern Britain. Writing a century later, G Suetonius Tranquillus simply referred to him as britannorum rex (‘king of the Britons’) when he exiled his son Amminius, who had been ruling in Kent and fled to Caligula. Cunobelinos died shortly after this and his son Caratatcos (‘King Caractacus’) succeeded him.

Cunobelinos would have remained an obscure character, a footnote for Classical scholars and a mere name for numismatists, had he not enjoyed a medieval afterlife as three separate people. The fifth-century historian Paulus Orosius (about AD 375-420) quoted Suetonius’s phrase Adminio Cynobellini Brittannorum regis filio (‘Adminius, the son of Cunobelinos King of the Britons’) in his Historia Aduersus Paganos (‘History against the Pagans’), a work specifically intended to rebut claims that Christianity had led to the decline of the Roman Empire. He unfortunately miscopied the phrase as Minocynobellinum Britannorum regis filium (‘Minocynobelinus the son of the king of the Britons’) or used a manuscript that had already mangled it.

Orosius was a widely-read author in the early medieval period, whose work was known to Bede (AD 672-735), although he did not include this story. The early ninth-century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’) does quote it, but introduced a further error, making the phrase read proconsul regi brittannico, qui et ipse rex bellinus uocabatur, et filius erat minocanni (‘The proconsul to the British king, who was himself called King Bellinus, and he was the son of Minocannus’). From here, the non-existent ‘Bellinus son of Minocannus’ entered Welsh legend as Beli Mawr ap Mynogan (‘Beli the Great, son of Mynogan’).

Geoffrey of Monmouth (about 1095-1155) wrote a purported history of the Britons covering prehistory to AD 680, the de Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’, better known as ‘The History of the Kings of Britain’). He raided existing histories for source material, including the Historia Britonum and a collection of Old Welsh genealogies. From these disparate sources he got the name of Heli, a mis-spelling of Beli Mawr, who appears under this name in the Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s work. Heli was the father of the Cassibellanus who fought Julius Caesar, and Bellinus was a general of his, as in the Historia Brittonum. Cunobelinos finally appears, with (almost) his correct name, Kymbelinus son of Tenuantius, as an ally of Augustus who had been brought up in Rome. He had two sons, Guiderius and Aruiragus; he took the first name from a tenth-century genealogy that names Guidgen map Caratauc map Cinbelin map Teuhant (‘Gwyddien, son of Caratacos, son of Cunobelinos, son of Tasciuanos’), while the second occurs in a poem by the satirist Juvenal. Guiderius was killed during the Roman invasion of AD 43, while his brother Aruiragus married the Emperor Claudius I’s daughter Genuissa and became governor of the new province. None of this is genuine history.

Many medieval writers took Geoffrey’s historical fiction as true. Raphael Holinshead (about 1525-1582) used it as a source for his popular The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, first published in 1577. Shakespeare used the second edition Holinshead’s work, published in 1587, as a source for many of his plays, including Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear (another of Geoffrey’s inventions) and Cymbeline. While the first three are well known and often performed, Cymbeline is no longer highly regarded. First performed in 1611, five years before he died, it was among his most popular until the late Victorian era. Many critics believe that Cymbeline was one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote.

The story is complex, with three sub-plots not in Holinshead’s work, and picks up themes the poet had explored in earlier works: jealousy, treachery, fidelity, mistaken identity, female to male cross-dressing and family ties. It is impossible to say if the play is a tragedy, a comedy or a romance, as it contains elements of all three: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews saw it performed almost as a pantomime in Manchester in 1984. A review of this production in The Guardian called Cymbeline ‘one of Shakespeare’s silliest plays’, which was performed by actors who ‘manage to utter some of the most ridiculous lines in the history of drama with hardly a snigger from the audience’. Although the First Folio edition of his works published in 1623 called it The Tragedie of Cymbeline or Cymbeline, King of Britain, the play has a happy ending and only the wicked get their just deserts.

Its relationship to history is non-existent, beyond the king’s name. The real Cunobelinos did not have a daughter called Imogen (the name is a misprint for Innogen, anyway); although Aruiragus probably existed, he seems to have lived two generations after Cunobelinos, so can hardly have been his son; not one other character in the play is historical. Nor did Cunobelinos face an invasion of Britain by the emperor Augustus; no would-be Roman conqueror would land at Milford Haven, although this was where Henry Tudor landed before defeating King Richard III.

As has happened so often with these discussions, the object with which it started has almost disappeared. Small objects can open the doors to much larger and more diverse stories.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews