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Attacotti (Atticoti, Attacoti, Atecotti, Atticotti, Ategutti, etc. variously spelled) refers to a people who despoiled Roman Britain between 364 and 368, along with Scotti, Picts, Saxons, Roman military deserters, and the indigenous Britons themselves. The marauders were defeated by Count Theodosius in 368. Units of Attacotti are recorded about 400 AD in the Notitia Dignitatum, and one tombstone of a soldier of the Atecutti is known. Their existence as a distinct people is given additional credence by two incidental references to them, as cannibals and as having wives in common, in the writings of Saint Jerome.
There is no other information available on the Attacotti other than their brief mention in these sources, and based on historical evidence, there is nothing more to be said of them. This article discusses the historical Attacotti of Roman Britain, their likely service as Roman auxiliaries, and their possible link to Ireland.
The historian Ammianus provides an account[1] of the tumultuous situation in Britain between 364 and 369, and he describes a corrupt and treasonous administration, native British troops (the Areani) in collaboration with the barbarians, and a Roman military whose troops had deserted and joined in the general banditry. The situation was a consequence of the failed imperial power-grab by Magnentius a decade earlier, followed by a bloody and arbitrary purge conducted by Paulus Catena in an attempt to root out potential sympathisers of Magnentius in Britain, and aggravated by the political machinations of the Roman administrator Valentinus.
Ammianus describes the marauders as bands moving from place to place in search of loot. Nevertheless, one Roman commander was killed in a pitched battle and another was taken prisoner in an ambush and killed. As there was no longer an effective military force in the province, a substantial one was sent from Gaul under Count Theodosius, who quickly and ruthlessly restored order. His efforts were then focused on the repair of political problems within the province.
There is nothing to suggest that the Attacotti, Scotti, Picts, and Saxons (all mentioned in passing by Ammianus) were more than incidental participants in these events.
The Notitia Dignitatum is a list of offices of the early fifth century Roman Empire, and includes the locations of the offices and the staff (including military units) assigned to them. The names of several units resembled that of the Attacotti who were mentioned by Ammianus, and in an 1876 publication Otto Seeck assigned the name Atecotti to various spellings ("acecotti", "atecocti", "attecotti", "attcoetti", "[illegible]ti", and "arecotti") in the Notitia Dignitatum, and documented his assignments within the publication.[2] This produced four conjectural occurrences of Atecotti-related units:
The discovery of a contemporary funerary dedication to a soldier of the "unit of Ate[g,c]utti" in the Roman Diocese of Illyricum supports this reconstruction,[3] as the Notitia Dignitatum places one Atecotti unit in that diocese.
St. Jerome was a Christian apologist whose writings contain two incidental references to the Attacotti. His account is particularly noteworthy because he was in Roman Gaul c.365-369/70, while the Attacotti were known to be in Britain until 368 and may have entered Roman military service soon after. Thus it is credible that Jerome had seen Attacotti soldiers, and he would certainly have heard Roman accounts of the recent fighting in Britain.
In his Letter to Oceanus, he is urging a responsible attitude towards marriage, at one point saying that one should not be like the promiscuous Atacotti, Scotti, and the people of Plato's Republic.[4][5]
The Attacotti are also mentioned in his Treatise Against Jovinianus,[6] in a passage which has been the topic of much debate, scholarly and otherwise. In a passage where he notes that the peoples of different regions have different dietary preferences because the food available varies from region to region, he is quoted as saying:
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Quid loquor de ceteris nationibus, cum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia viderim Atticotos, gentem Brittanicam humanis vesci carnibus et cum per silvas porcorum greges et armentorum pecudumque reperiant, pastorum nates et feminarum papillas solere abscindere et has solas ciborum delicias arbitrari?[7] |
Why should I speak of other nations when I, a youth, in Gaul beheld the Attacotti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and when they find herds of swine, cattle, and sheep in the woods, they are accustomed to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds, and the paps of the shepherdesses, and to consider them as the only delicacies of food.[8] |
Disagreements continue over nuances (such as where to place punctuation marks), but disagreements over the major point of cannibalism divide up as:
De Situ Britanniae was a fictitious account of the peoples and places of Roman Britain. It was published in 1757, after having been made available in London in 1749. Accepted as genuine for more than one hundred years, it was virtually the only source of information for northern Britain (i.e., modern Scotland) for the time period, and historians eagerly incorporated its spurious information into their own accounts of history. The Attacotti were mentioned in De Situ Britanniae, and their homeland was specified[11][12] as just north of the Firth of Clyde, near southern Loch Lomond, in the region of Dumbartonshire.
This information was combined with legitimate historical mentions of the Attacotti to produce inaccurate histories and to make baseless conjectures. For example, Edward Gibbon combined De Situ Britanniae with St. Jerome's description of the Attacotti by musing on the possibility that a ‘race of cannibals’ had once dwelt in the neighbourhood of Glasgow.
Perhaps as early as the seventeenth century, and certainly in the eighteenth century, some Irish scholars had suggested that the origin of the Attacotti might lie in Ireland. This was based on the perceived similarity between Latin Attacotti and the Old Irish term aithechthúatha, a generic designation for certain Irish population-groups, usually translated "rent-paying tribes", "vassal communities" or "tributary peoples". Combined with the knowledge of Irish raids on the coast of Britain in the late Roman period, it was suggested that one group of raiders had stayed to become the historically attested people mentioned by Ammianus.
The thesis was given great impetus when the influential Charles O'Conor promoted it in the late eighteenth century. The issue was still undecided in the late nineteenth century, with respected scholars either accepting or rejecting it, but with neither side able to put the matter to rest.
Later scholarship has diminished the notability of these early arguments by criticising the possible connection between Latin Attacotti and aithechthúatha (or rather, its hypothetical Primitive Irish antecedent) on etymological grounds. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the language of interest here was not the Old Irish known to early scholars, but Primitive Irish (which was unknown to them, and of necessity, a largely hypothetical construct).
It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which knowledge and understanding of the history of the Irish language were revolutionised from the end of the nineteenth century, largely owing to the efforts of Rudolf Thurneysen (1857 – 1940), who is considered the father of the modern discipline. As an aside in a rather obscure article on a largely unrelated theme, Thurneysen expressed the view that Attacotti and aithechthúatha are unconnected. He hypothesised that the Primitive Irish equivalent to aithechthúatha would be *Ateûiācotōtās, which, in his opinion, is too far removed from the form Attacotti in late Roman sources.
A new dimension to the Irish origin thesis has been opened by Philip Rance.[15] In his attempt to resolve the identity of the Attacotti, Rance avoids arguing from etymology. Rather, he investigates whether the historical and broader literary evidence offers any corroboration to this thesis, in particular in relation to historically attested Irish raiding and settlement of parts of western Britain, especially southern Wales. He notes that early medieval Irish and Welsh (British) literature variously report the migration of certain Irish groups who were certainly tributary population-groups in this period, namely the Déisi, and who therefore, in some contexts and linguistic registers, would have been classed as “aithechthúatha”. The historical horizons of these population movements are ca. 350 – 450 (compare Attacotti attested in Roman sources ca. 360s – 400). This does not confirm that the Attacotti and aithechthúatha were the same people, but it is a new departure and seems to offer relevant circumstantial evidence.