A FAMOUS VICTORY

Maes Garmon (Garmon’s Field) is on a low

and bosky hillside in a river valley

in North East Wales, and is named for a battle,

from the Dark Ages, that probably

never occurred there or anywhere else –

the so-called ‘Alleluia Victory’.

St Germanus, a Gaul from Auxerre, a

5th century career civil servant

and prelate – before he was sanctified,

of course – was dispatched to Brittania

on a mission. Pelagianism was rife,

the belief that there is no such thing as

original sin, which remains one of

the Christian Church’s unique selling points.

According to the Venerable Bede

in his Ecclesiastical History

of England, having brought the flock to heel,

as it were, Germanus led the Britons

in battle against Saxons and Picts. With three

alleluias, the heathens were routed –

‘many of them,’ Bede wrote, ‘flying headlong

in their fear, were engulfed by the river

which they had crossed.’ He gave no date or place

for this latter day Jericho miracle

An 18th century landowner,

for no recorded reason, gave the battle

a habitation and a date, erecting

on obelisk on one of his fields,

choosing not to question why there would be

Saxons in Wales when they had not yet settled

in England, or why the Picts would march

four hundred miles south to fight with other Celts,

or how even the rump of an army might drown

in a river no more than a yard deep.

Victories are determined by whoever

gets to write them up: priest, gentry, autocrat.