Constantine ? (of Strathclyde) b. about 520

From Rodovid EN

Events

about 520 birth:

542 title: King of Domnonia

between 612 and 617 title: King of Strathclyde

Notes

WARNING This is a mythological character, it is not a real person.Please don't put jokes or unreal persons in the database. Records containing unreal information may be challenged and deleted.

Gildas mentions Constantine in chapters 28 and 29 of his 6th-century work De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae.[1][2] He is one of five Brythonic kings whom the author rebukes and compares to Biblical beasts. Constantine is called the "tyrannical whelp of the unclean lioness of Damnonia", a reference to books of Daniel and the Revelation, and apparently also a slur directed at his mother. This Damnonia is generally associated with the kingdom of Dumnonia, a Brythonic kingdom in Southwestern Britain.

Geoffrey of Monmouth includes Constantine in a section of his Historia Regum Britanniae adapted from Gildas. Geoffrey identifies Gildas' "royal youths" with the two sons of Mordred, who, along with their Saxon allies, continue their father's insurrection after his death. After "many battles" Constantine routs the rebels, and Mordred's sons flee to London and Winchester, where they hide in a church and a friary, respectively. Constantine hunts them down and executes them before the altars of their sanctuaries. Divine retribution for this transgression comes three years later when he is killed by his nephew Aurelius Conanus (Gildas' Aurelius Caninus), precipitating a civil war. He is buried at Stonehenge alongside other kings of Britain

A figure named Custennin Gorneu (Constantine of Cornwall) appears in the genealogies of the kings of Dumnonia. The hero Geraint of Dumnonia is said to be the grandson of Custennin in the Bonedd y Saint, the prose romance Geraint and Enid, and after emendation, the genealogies in Jesus College MS 20.

A number of subsequent texts also refer to a figure named Constantine associated with Cornwall, often specifically as its king. The Life of Saint David says that Constantine, King of Cornwall gave up his crown and joined Saint David's monastery at Menevia.

The Vitae Petroci includes an episode in which Saint Petroc protects a stag being hunted by a wealthy man named Constantine, who eventually converts and becomes a monk. Here Constantine is not said to be king, but a 12th-century text referring to this story, the Miracula, specifically names him as such, further adding that he gave Petroc an ivory horn upon his conversion which became one of the saint's chief relics.

[edit] Sources

1. ↑ http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/bios/constsc.html -

From grandparents to grandchildren