More substantial is the extraordinary way in which the landscape is named for Arthur. Over half of Britain and Brittany there are more than 2,000 places that commemorate him: hills, caves, rocks, streams, geological oddities; the gazetteer is huge. This must speak of a hero, of a real person whose achievement made an indelible mark on the memories of the ordinary people who walked and worked the land, even if no contemporary and few historians after him wrote down what he did.
Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae is the only account close to the time when Arthur lived and he does not mention him. But he does say that Britain enjoyed a ‘time of present security’ between 500 and 560. Which in turn clearly implies military success in stemming the invading tide. It was Arthur who did this in a long and widely spread campaign which culminated in a decisive victory around 500 at a place called Mount Badon.
Seventy years later the north was still British and still the focus of P-Celtic culture, the place where its defining stories were made and told. That is true of Arthur, and also of Merlin. It is more than a coincidental buttress to my argument to know that the two most colourful and powerful figures in the weave of British legend both came from southern Scotland and lived within two generations’ reach of each other. It shows where the core was, where Britain was most emphatically Celtic with enough confidence to tell itself stories, to remember its heroes and prophets.
Also significant is a flurry of royal Arthurs at the end of the sixth century.¹²⁰ Four royal fathers named their sons Arthur and most prominent but unlikely was the Q-Celtic King Aedan MacGabrain of Dalriada. As Guledig he led an alliance of the kingdoms of the north against the Angles, losing at Degsastari in 603. Using the name as a sort of banner against the invaders, he named his son Arthur and rode into battle with him against his illustrious namesake’s enemies.
The pattern made by all this evidence is sometimes difficult to follow, often only partial or allusive and always unsatisfactory. Thus far it is only possible to assert with confidence that Arthur existed and was a successful war leader in the British resistance to their external enemies, and equally possible to assert that the P-Celtic kingdoms of the north provided a cultural, political and military focus of a power lacking in the civil society of the south of England. All the circumstances are right but the key linkage between the Men of the North and Arthur is only implied, not yet securely made.
The most solid, most reliable documentary evidence will do that if carefully considered. This material comprises three bits. First there are the Annales Cambriae or the Annals of Wales which historians also call the Easter Tables. Certainly compiled close to the time Arthur lived, they were transcribed much later, complete with radical errors of dating. Then there is Gildas. His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae or The Ruin and Fall of Britain is a bitter and arid review of the recent post-Roman past written in the middle of the sixth century. Disappointed, sometimes dismissive and snooty, Gildas offered an account short on names and facts and long on blame and complaint. And finally there is Nennius, a Welsh monk who wrote in the eighth century the Historia Brittonum or The History of the British, a ramshackle, disjointed collection of story and history. ‘I have heaped together all that I found from the annals of the Romans, the writings of the holy fathers, and the traditions of our own old men,’ runs his disarming preface. As good a recipe as any.
Buried under confusion and contradiction, the story of Arthur is in these documents and it can be found and assembled if the searcher brings the right compass. Looked at from the north, much of the mist clears and Gildas, Nennius and the Easter Tables can be set in a line to form a clear narrative.
Gildas first. There is a powerful tradition that he was a southern P-Celtic priest summoned to Ireland to help restore and regulate the running of monastic life.¹²¹ The Rule of Gildas was likely written around 565 and it dealt with the quotidian issues of life in a monastery, offering advice on how to resolve disputes, discipline the errant sensibly, and some words on the place of a monastery in the politics of the world beyond its walls. Gildas was clearly a literate and experienced man who understood something of the legacy of Rome and the loss of order and learning that followed its fall in the West. His letters and the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (The Ruin and Fall of Britain) install him as part of the flickering remnant that preserved parts of the old world as it was overrun by the barbarians pouring out of the east.
This is Gildas’s theme. He has much to say, in a self-consciously decorated style, about the general causes and effects of the invasion of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, and maddeningly little about the detail of what happened. He is the source for the traditional story of the coming of the Germanic peoples whom the P-Celts called (and still call) the Sais or the Saxons. Their ultimate victory – which Gildas can clearly see coming – is to be a divine punishment. Because the British kings were slothful, sinful and incompetent, God would punish them by allowing the Sais to take their lands and extinguish such enlightenment as remained. But there were some heroes and, more important, some recognizable bits of history in Gildas’s narrative. Around the year 460, after the Saxon revolt in the south and after the unsuccessful appeal to Aetius, the military commander in Gaul, there occurs this passage:
Meanwhile as the British feebly wandered, a dreadful and notorious famine gripped them, forcing many of them to give up without delay to their bloody plunders, merely to get a scrap of food to revive them. Not so others: they kept fighting back, basing themselves on the mountains, caves, heaths and thorny thickets. Their enemies had been plundering their land for many years; now for the first time they inflicted a massacre on them … [With the Britons now on the offensive] the impudent Irish pirates returned home, though they were shortly to return, and for the first time the Picts in the far end of the island kept quiet from now on, though they occasionally carried out devastating raids of plunder. So in this period of truce the desolate people found their cruel scars healing over.¹²²
This is the beginning of the resistance. The south had fallen and P-Celtic forces were regrouping in the ‘mountains, caves, heaths and thorny thickets’ of the north and west. The heirs of Cunedda and the warriors of the Gosgordd absorbed fleeing refugees from the south-east and turned back to face and defeat the barbarians. The cavalry of the Gododdin had ejected ‘the impudent Irish pirates’ and ‘now inflicted a massacre’ on the Sais. While ‘for the first time’ the Picts did not pose a continual and immediate threat to Britannia.
In this extract Gildas offers a neat summary of the status of the war for Britain in 460. The P-Celts had three lots of enemies, Picts, Irish and the Saxons, and their resistance came from the up-country of mountain, heath, cave and thicket. These were the places controlled and recolonized by the Men of the North. They were organized. They had cavalry forces previously deployed against the Irish and the Picts but not the Saxons. These last were foot soldiers, often poorly equipped and unlikely to have the tactical discipline to close ranks and stand their ground against the furious charge of Cunedda’s Gosgordd. If they had turned, then Gildas was right to report a massacre.
There are traditions in Wales that Ambrosius Aurelianus was based there.¹²³ Dinas Emrys is ‘the fort of Ambrosius’ in the mountains of the north but unfortunately Gildas does not describe his campaigns or list his battles. But in the passage that names Ambrosius there is a notice of a great British victory. ‘This lasted up until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, almost the most recent defeat of the rascals and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth; and as I know since then forty-four years and one month have already passed.’
Several bits of vital information and a clear set of attitudes are to be read from this passage. Taking together other sources about Gildas and when and how long he lived, it is possible to date the Battle of Badon Hill to 499 or 500. If he describes it as the ‘most recent defeat’ of the Saxons and it happened forty-four years before he wrote about it, then it sounds like a decisive victory which allowed more than forty ye
ars of peace to follow. Gildas says that the battle was ‘a siege’ and that it was fought on a hill. Now if it was the Cymry who were besieged on a flat-topped hill fort with their cavalry horses, then it would have needed a large Saxon army to surround it completely, and to feed themselves while doing it. A large army, a siege – this sounds like the culmination of a long campaign with much at stake at Badon.
And finally Gildas’s attitude. To describe the Saxons he uses a Latin word furciferes which literally means ‘fork-carriers’. This has nothing to do with their weaponry but is a demeaning term for a slave, someone who waits at table. Better translated as ‘rascals’, it shows how Gildas thought about the Saxons. Lower-class ruffians, irritants, perpetrators of great and destructive mischief, destroyers, almost completely beneath contempt if it were not for their military success against the querulous, corrupt kings of the British.
Badon was a famous battle. Pivotal in marking the successful end of a campaign of British resistance but also in recognizing the new frontier. By 500 half of what became England was lost. East of a line drawn from Southampton to Hull, the Germanic invaders controlled most of what had been the wealthiest and most intensively farmed and settled part of Britannia.¹²⁴
The Annals of Wales also remembered Badon but before looking at the relevant entry, it is important to understand what these documents were. They had two functions: one historical and one religious. In a tradition initiated in Ireland monastic chroniclers began to imitate Roman Christian forms by compiling tables of years which noted key events: the birth and death of Christ, the early papacy, the movement of saints and the process of conversion and so on. The Irish adapted this model and also mixed in parts of their pre-Christian history. The second function of the annals was as an aid in reckoning the date of the moveable feast of Easter. The most important festival in the Christian calendar needed precise plotting and complex methods were used in arriving at an agreed date. The years and dates were usually arranged in columns and often a manuscript would leave the right-hand side of the page blank so that scribes could write short notes of important events against any given year.
These Irish annals were transmitted first to Scotland where missionary exchange was frequent and activity was intense and well documented. The early Christian history of Britain has a northern focus with Ninian at Whithorn in Rheged almost a century before Augustine came to Canterbury, Kentigern at Glasgow in Strathclyde, Patrick from Carlisle in Rheged and other lesser figures elsewhere among the Men of the North. It is impossible to trace the mechanics of this sort of transmission or even the location of sender and receiver, but its context and what that allowed are clear enough. Christian Ireland and Christian Scotland were in regular contact both through the mighty figures of Columba and Patrick but also ultimately in sharing the distinctive practices and beliefs of what came to be known as Celtic Christianity.¹²⁵ By the early seventh century Irish and Scots monks found themselves in conflict with Rome ostensibly over the dating of Easter but actually a range of issues was at stake. At the Synod of Whitby in 635 the Celts lost the political battle and retreated to their island and Highland heartlands, and to the margins of temporal involvement.
But before that event, the Celtic Church was powerful and traditions and stories from Ireland regularly found their way into P-Celtic history. The Annals of Wales for the fifth and sixth centuries are very largely transcriptions of Irish annals for the same period.¹²⁶ Likely compiled at first in the north, they include a few British notices which understandably deal with events known to the chroniclers and which seemed important to them.
In both versions of the Annales Cambriae the following is written against the year 499 or 500: ‘The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shield and the Britons were the victors.’ This is extremely important. In a battle mentioned by the reticent Gildas, dated clearly by him to the same date, Arthur is unequivocally named as the leader of the British forces who won a decisive battle against the Saxons which allowed a long period of peace until the last quarter of the sixth century. More, the annalist adds a little to Gildas’s account, saying that the battle lasted three days, a detail which fits well with the notion of a siege. And since this is a very rare corroboration between two sources in an age where there are very few pieces of documentary evidence of any sort, it allows us to be sure about the importance of Badon and its date of 499/500. And also surer about the reliability of both Gildas and the annalists.
There is another entry, which also appears in both versions of the Annales Cambriae: ‘516/517. The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.’ This allows a little more flesh on the narrative. Not only is Arthur named again but the date of his death is given, as is that of another man, Medraut. And, very important, there is another location to add to Badon. Where Camlann and Badon were is clearly key to an understanding of the prosecution of the war and the career of the Guledig, Arthur.
The last piece of documentary evidence is the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, a Welsh-speaking monk writing in the middle of the eighth century. It is a collection of documents honestly drawn from several sources and uncritically welded together into a rough and ready sequence of events.
Nennius opens with a long and colourful slice of myth-history, beginning, like a typical monastic chronicler, with Noah and the Flood. And then in a shift of tone detectable across thirteen centuries, he begins to write of post-Roman Britain.
This is known as the Independent Section and it deals with the deeds of the Roman British leader Vortigern, and his fateful encouragement of the Saxons’ settlement in Kent. But the burden of the narrative centres on the supernatural powers of Ambrosius, a boy brought to Vortigern originally as a candidate for human sacrifice. The myth relates how the Britons had tried to build a new fortress but that its foundations always crumbled, toppling the walls. The blood of a ‘fatherless’ boy (an illegitimate child, one assumes) was needed to placate the gods and cement the founds. But the boy Ambrosius shows astonishing powers by telling the Vortigern to drain a pool which lies under his unsteady castle. When this is done, red and white dragons are found. They fight and the white is victorious – a prophecy, says the boy Ambrosius, of the eventual defeat of the British by the Saxons. A good source for the Red Dragon of Wales, and probably a memory of the Sarmatian draconarius. This is, reputable scholars contend, the first appearance of a version of Merlin and a tale that Geoffrey of Monmouth made much use of when he wrote his Historia Regum Britanniae four centuries later.
Nennius establishes the German invaders/settlers on the east coast of Britain and then relates how Aesc ‘came from northern Britain and settled in Kent, whence came the Kings of Kent’. Even from these slight sentences, it is clear that the Angles and Saxons had created some organization and some control over the eastern English seaboard. From the later Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the succession of Aesc in Kent can be sensibly dated at 468.
Then Nennius continues:
Then Arthur fought against them in those days,
with the Kings of the Britons, but he himself was
the Leader of Battles.
The Dux Bellorum or the Guledig leading an alliance of British kings against those who would take their territory away from them. The clear statement in this sentence that Arthur is not a king is confirmed in another, more mythic part of the text where Arthur is described simply as miles, a soldier. He marshals his borrowed army against the Saxons, and Nennius follows his passage about Aesc with ‘Arthur pugnabat contra illos’ with illos clearly meaning ‘those people’ or the Anglo-Saxons. However other sources are less clear. Gildas writes of ‘three enemies’ while the Easter Tables are silent, saying only that the Britons were victors. Since there is hard evidence for conflict on all sides – Cunedda fought the Irish/Scots in Wales, the Picts and Scots raided as far south as Chester in 361 and London in 396, and the Anglo-Saxons began arriving from t
he east a generation later – I think it reasonable to assert that illos would have applied to more than the kinsmen of Aesc, although, writing at three centuries’ distance in Wales, Nennius had probably forgotten that. Invaders needed to be resisted wherever they came from and the P-Celtic kingdoms of southern Scotland had held out against pressure from all sides and sources.
The central passage in the Historia Brittonum is a sequential list of the locations of Arthur’s victories and it is worth setting down here in full:
The first battle was at the mouth of a river which is called Glein. The second, third, fourth and fifth were beyond another river which is called Dubglas, in the district of Linnuis. The sixth battle was beyond the river which is called Bassus. The seventh battle was in the wood of Celidon, that is, Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth battle was in the stronghold of Guinnion, in which Arthur carried a likeness of Holy Mary Everlasting Virgin on his shield, and the heathens were turned in flight on that day and there was a great slaughter upon them because of the goodness of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the goodness of the Holy Virgin Mary his mother. The ninth battle happened in the city of the Legion. The tenth battle happened on the bank of a river which is called Tribruit. The eleventh battle was done on the hill which is called Agned. The twelfth battle was at Badon Hill in which Arthur destroyed 960 men in a single charge on one day, and no one rode down as many as he did by himself. And in all these battles he emerged as the victor.¹²⁷
Despite the fact that it is set down in inelegant, imprecise and badly spelled Latin, perhaps 300 years after the events, this passage has the smit of authenticity about it. It reads right. Almost certainly derived from a bardic recital of the great deeds of Arthur, the original Welsh can be heard echoing behind Nennius’s rough-edged prose. Celidon, Guinnion and Badon sound like the remnant of a rhyme scheme and the repetition of the Old Welsh ‘Cat Coit Celidon’ is a surviving alliterative fragment. It reads like the frame of a terrific campaign fought over a wide area of Britain, and most resounding of all it speaks of brilliant success. After years of defeat and retreat, Arthur led the British in a dazzling series of victories which stabilized the kingdoms of the Cymry and beat back the enemy for two generations.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 20
