An interesting tidbit that came up while researching my next novel is a potential tribe of cannibals living in late Roman Britain.
The Attacotti are one of Britain’s more mysterious tribes as nobody is too sure exactly where they lived or if they were Britons, Picts, Scots or belonging to some other culture. They are first mentioned by the historian Ammianus in connection with the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367 A.D. in which they, along with the Picts, Scots, Saxons and Franks, attacked Roman Britain in a possibly coordinated assault. The Attacotti certainly seem to have been regarded as a distinct people but they are mysteriously absent for much of Roman Britain’s subsequent recorded history.
The next reference to them crops up in the Notitia Dignitatum, a document of the 4th to 5th century which details the military organisation and units of the late Roman Empire. This document mentions at least a couple of auxiliary infantry units which seem to be made up of Attacotti tribesmen; the Attacotti Honoriani Seniores, and the Attacoti Honoriani Juniores; the former making appearances in Gaul, and the latter in both Gaul and Italy.
Barbarian warriors were often recruited into the military of the Roman Empire but we still don’t know anything else about the Attacotti. That leaves it to St. Jerome, an early priest and historian to give us his two cents in his late 4th century treatise, Against Jovinianus.
“Why should I speak of other nations when I myself, a youth on a visit to Gaul, heard that the Atticoti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and that although they find herds of swine, and droves of large or small cattle in the woods, it is their custom to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women, and to regard them as the greatest delicacies?”
A pretty alarming claim about a people we know nothing else about. Were they cannibals or was this just Christian slander against a pagan barbarian people? We have little way of knowing as there are no other mentions of the Attacotti to either dispute or confirm St. Jerome’s claims. Everything else about them is pure speculation.
Several attempts have been made to link the Attacotti to the Irish ‘aithechthúatha’; a derogatory term for various low status tribes who paid tribute to the more powerful Irish tribes at the time, although the etymology for this is a little shaky. Irish settlers did indeed put down roots and build kingdoms in Britain at the end of Roman rule including the Scots, (‘Scotia’ being an old Roman word for Ireland) and the Attacotti may well have been one of these Gaelic-speaking groups who found a new home in Britain.
As for St. Jerome’s cannibalism claims, it is strange that nobody else mentioned such extraordinary behavior going on as late as the 4th century, and there are only minor indications that any Celtic peoples practiced cannibalism. The discovery of a bone deposit in a cave at Alveston, South Gloucestershire in 2001 (including a split human femur from which the bone marrow had been scraped out) was interpreted as evidence of cannibalistic activity at the beginning of Roman occupation in Britain. In addition to this, the Greek philosopher, geographer and historian Strabo claimed that the people of Irene (Ireland) were ‘man-eaters’, but, like the cave in Gloucestershire, that was back in the 1st century so perhaps St. Jerome was merely repeating old news.
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