Even though I live just an hour away from the largest city on the Interstate 90 corridor between Minneapolis and Seattle, yet, I live on the edge of perhaps the last frontier of the Lower 48. I can walk to my mailbox at the top of the driveway and stand on the edge of a forest – which first becomes tribal land, then a state park, then a national forest, then the Bitterroot Mountains, then the Rocky Mountains proper. I could walk a thousand miles before encountering another human being.
In that forest, my daughters – now grown – have wild crafted the flowers which have graced my table these many years, just as my father, I suppose, ever too poor to have bought a bouquet for my mother, would wander the woods to wild craft one for her.
With memories such as these, I should be forgiven for getting weepy at the final episode of what has suddenly become a cultural tour de force in Western cinema: the television series now three years running – Britannia – which closed its final, tragic scenes with the haunting melody of “Wild Mountain Thyme”:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=RDY3B2mntKAZo&playnext=1
(Also labeled as “Blooming Heather” by Kate Rusby).
I watched it on Epix:
Britannia: Season 3, Episode 8 https://g.co/kgs/xidGHb
Britannia is an historical drama created by Jez Butterworth (“Spectre,” “Jerusalem”) set in the mid-40s AD and is a story about the second Roman invasion of Celtic Britain. Unlike Julius Caesar who attempted the conquest a century before, only to be turned back by the Celtic navy, General Aulus Plautius (played by David Morrissey) had better luck the second time because the Celtic tribes had no advanced military intelligence of Rome’s mobilization, were at war with each other, and were completely insular. He caught them by surprise and by the time the Brits were able to put up a resistance, Rome had taken the lower southeast section of the Island.
The first year of the series was jump-started by the presence of Kelly Reilly as the Celtic princess, “Kerra,” the “pure in heart” rebel treacherously slain by Aulus – who we discover uses human sacrifice and cannibalism as a source of magical power.
As a cinematic production, Britannia’s storyline is just about as historically inaccurate as was “Gladiator,” but it is authentic. Gory, comical, and indulgent of shaman fantasies – as is required by modern tastes – yet it has weaved into its plot and dialogue the religious and cultural issues of the time between Rome’s gods and the gods of the Druids. The rustic scenery of the Welsh countryside is nostalgic and the recreation of period costume and custom well-done and makes you feel “right there.”
The unassuming heroine is a pubescent girl named “Cait” – a role played by Eleanor Worthington-Cox – who now at 21 has over the years given us a performance beyond her years and a character that we can believe in. In the story, her tribal naming ceremony has been interrupted by the invasion, her family is killed, and she wanders the island with a sometimes unhinged Druid – “Divis” (played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas) – to learn her role as “the chosen one” to unite the tribes and drive out the Romans. She is constantly pursued and in danger because the Romans want to capture her or kill her to defeat this Druid prophecy, a role to which, at first, as an impressionable girl, she acquiesces, then later rejects, and then finally accepts again as she is mentored by Divis and then by a deposed, irreverent Queen Antedia (played by Zoe Wanamaker) – a much needed balance to the wild superstitions of the other characters.
Slowly but surely, the story of Christianity emerges in the storyline because Druid prophecy now requires that the magical spear of Longinus be found by the “chosen one” – the spear which pierced the side of Jesus on the Cross – in order to prevail over the Romans. The entire third season is dedicated to finding the disaffected Roman soldier – “Lucius” (played by Hugo Speer) – who has hidden it, but now because of his nascent faith in Christ, believes that it belongs to Cait who apparently is destined – should the series continue – to become the guardian of her people and the “Britannia”: the warrior-priestess of mythical lore.
The final episode is tragic because Divis, her mentor, discovers too late that he has been hexed by a priestess (“Hemple” with a madness brilliantly portrayed by Sophie Okonedo) of the Roman earth demon – Lokka – to betray Cait and surrender her to Aulus. The final scenes find her in Rome as presumably the patrician’s wife of General Aulus, who history tells us was recalled to Rome because he now believes his conquest of Britain is complete with the capture of “the girl.” This is the tragedy which has sent the fan-base into a tailspin, but if we are true to history, probably should be left standing as it is, unless the writers are prepared to develop the role of Christianity in the transformation of Druidism into a different kind of war with Rome.
Now, for a history lesson.
As a teacher of a tradition for thirty years on behalf of “the Grail Church” or “the Cambrian Church”: “Cambria” refers to the ancient British Church which eventually was “holed-up” in Wales after the Roman invasions and the later Saxon ones. It has a history and a literature.
If Cait is really in Rome, then she is the daughter of the famed British general known to history as Caractacus, who never lost a battle against the Romans but was given up – are you surprised? – by a traitor. He and his family were taken to Rome as hostages, but according to Tacitus, their lives were spared because of an eloquent speech to the Roman Senate, but more probably because the Britons were enraged at the capture and were defeating the Romans at every turn. Claudius thought it prudent to placate them with a pardon. As says Tacitus,
In Britain, after the captivity of Caractacus, the Romans were repeatedly conquered and put to the rout by the single state of the Silures alone.
St. Paul in Britain, R.W. Morgan (1860 edition), p. 53
“Cait” would be “Gladys” (b. 36 AD) who would later change her name to “Claudia” upon her marriage to Aulus’ son, “Aulus Rufus Pudens Pudentius.” (circa. 55 AD). Our younger Aulus would become a Christian with Claudia and her brother, Linus – all who would be acknowledged by St. Paul in 2 Timothy 4:21 as benefactors of the Christians in Rome. Linus became the first bishop of Rome, which in a city of three million, would have, no doubt, been a ministry to the British delegation only, and not to the whole city. Rome would later become the See of St. Peter and Clement would be his successor.
History is usually written by the victors and the Romans were sly propagandists. The Emperor Claudius visited Britain and assumed that because he made it there and back safely, that the Island had been pacified. That was not the case.
Between AD 43 to AD 86, sixty pitched battles were fought between the Romans and the Celtic Britons. Every inch of soil was contested, and finally, by AD 86, the Roman legions had enough and just left, not to return until its third invasion in 118 AD (Morgan, p. 90). [You don’t hear that from the Roman historians.] Britain was annexed by treaty, not by conquest. Even then, Latin never became the lingua franca of the island, where the native tongues continued to be spoken throughout the occupation that ended in the Fifth Century, just prior to the fall of the Empire itself.
As far as we know, our Gladys/Claudia/Cait never returned to her homeland. She instead bore four children, nurtured the young Christian Church, and was ultimately martyred during that hideous monstrosity called the “Nero persecution.”
I doubt that our storytellers will go that direction with “Britannia.” They will probably make her into some kind of Christian Boudicca, who incidentally, did not die at the Battle of the Epping Forest, but lived to inflict yet more heavy casualties on the Romans and then finally, at the Battle of the “Hill of Arrows” in Flintshire, she simply disappears to history, Tacitus conveniently declaring that she died by poisoning (Morgan, p. 98). I think she just headed north for Scotland.
If you want to know more about why some people should still be emotionally affected by this chapter in human history, I have republished my study: The Holy Conspiracy: Christian Druids & Cultural Alchemy (1995). It’s long. Find a link under the “Online Book” section above. Or below.
— JWS
Footnote: You are supposed to leave the wild thyme for the faeries. It is an herb used for healing.