The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  Ambrosius Aurelianus

  We can now take a closer look at what Gildas says about the resistance, the crucial period which initiates the ‘reign of Arthur’. The surviving Britons held out in high fortified hills, dense forests and sea cliffs. These are, of course, the types of sites found in the Arthurian battle-list. People fled to them from all directions. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, who ‘perhaps alone of the Roman race’ had survived the disaster. ‘Surely his parents had worn the purple’. The ‘citizens’ sallied forth from their refuges and challenged the Saxons to battle. ‘The battle went their way. From then on the victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies. . . . This lasted right up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains and certainly not the least’ (DEB 26). ‘The final victory of our country . . . granted in our times by the will of God’ (DEB 2).

  The only person Gildas names in the whole of this period is Ambrosius Aurelianus. He stands out as an important and unique figure. We must ask why he was so important to Gildas’s view of the past. Although Gildas can be read, as Bede and many later historians have done, as meaning that Ambrosius fought the Saxons, even commanding the Britons at the siege of Mount Badon, this is not how the events were presented in the Historia. There, Ambrosius is an adversary of Vortigern and overthrew his government, establishing hegemony over the (western) British kings.

  There is nothing in Gildas’s account to contradict this. It seems likely that a necessary prelude to the war of the united Britons against the Saxon settlers would be the overthrow of Vortigern’s government. This would be crucial if, as we have deduced and the Historia portrays it, this was now dominated by Hengist as the barbarian Masters of Soldiers were doing on the continent.

  Subsequent retellings have clouded what Gildas actually wrote about Ambrosius Aurelianus. The phrase ‘duce Ambrosio Aureliano’ means ‘with Ambrosius Aurelianus as their leader (or king)’ or ‘led by Ambrosius Aurelianus’. His status is further complicated by Gildas’s phrase ‘parentibus purpura nimirum indutis’ – ‘His parents had certainly worn the purple’, interpreted as ‘the imperial purple robes’. Bede paraphrased this as ‘his parents were of royal rank and title’, an interpretation which has been followed ever since. But is this the inference Gildas intended?

  Some historians, worried about this throw-away reference to British ‘emperors’ in the generation before the Saxon wars, have suggested a less forceful interpretation along the lines of ‘surely his parents must have worn the Purple’ (read – ‘one might have thought so, based on his leadership qualities.’). I do not think this passage gives any reason for ascribing real or imagined imperial qualities to Ambrosius. First, Gildas hardly considers royal descent to be a mark of virtue. The last ruler he has described is the ‘Proud Tyrant’ and his predecessors ‘anointed as being crueller than all the rest’. The self-appointed Emperor of Britain, Maximus, has no legal claim to the title, forming a ‘kingdom of wickedness’. Vortiporius and Maglocunus are none the better for coming from ‘royal’ families.

  Second, Gildas does not use ‘imperial purple’ as a symbol for or synonym of imperial or royal status. He writes of Maximus’s ‘Imperial insignia’ and ‘the throne of his wicked empire’. His imperial adversaries are ‘the crowned heads that ruled the world’. ‘Kings were anointed’ he writes, or figuratively of saints: ‘They will receive the kingdom of beauty and a glorious diadem.’ The tyrant Vortiporius sits on a ‘throne full of guiles’. Thrones, crowns, anointing, these are Gildas’s biblically inspired emblems of royal status, along with unspecified ‘imperial insignia’. He never once refers to imperial purple robes as either real or symbolic attributes of rule anywhere else in the book, so why should we expect it here?

  That is not to say that Gildas does not mention purple or purple robes. Quite the contrary, they are used as striking images, of martyrdom. When Gildas writes of ‘the purple’, he always means the blood shed by good victims of the ruin of Britain. A holy altar is ‘touched by the purple cloak, as it were, of their drying blood’. The corpses of church leaders, priests and ordinary folk slain by the Saxons ‘covered, as it were, with a purple crust of congealed blood’. This last description immediately precedes the fight back under Ambrosius, a mere 200 words before the use of purpura we are now discussing. Is it not, therefore, exceedingly likely that when Gildas writes that Ambrosius’s parents had ‘surely worn the purple’, he means to imply not that they were emperors, but that they had been killed by the Saxons? Which is precisely what he does say: ‘Ambrosius . . . had survived the shock of that notable storm which had killed his parents, who had undoubtedly worn the purple.’ To make it abundantly clear that Ambrosius was not a tyrant, king or emperor, he is described precisely as ‘vir modestus’, ‘a man of ordinary status’.

  What is actually most surprising about Gildas’s description of Ambrosius is that he ‘almost alone of the Roman race’ – ‘solus forte romanae gentis’ – has survived the Saxon invasion. Even if we tone this down to read ‘the last survivor from a proper Roman family’, the implication is intriguing. Later writers have seen Ambrosius as a post-colonial civilised Romano-Briton, in contrast, perhaps, to Celtically named figures such as Maglocunus, the Gododdin heroes and, of course, Arthur. This, however, cannot have been Gildas’s intended image. For him, the inhabitants of Britain were Britons or citizens. Throughout the book they are contrasted with the Romans, a continental people who once ruled Britain but have since departed. There was a time, granted, when harsh Roman rule transformed, as he says ‘Britannia into Romania’. Those days are long gone. By the time of Maximus, ‘The island was still Roman in name, but not by law or custom’. Romans returned twice to help the Britons against the Picts and Scots, but they ‘bade farewell, never to return’. They returned home, and later Agitius, a ‘man of Roman power’ refused to help.

  It is therefore a little unexpected to find that Ambrosius, perhaps alone of the Roman race, is still holding out in the island. The implication, from Gildas’s usage of the word ‘Roman’, is that he considers that Ambrosius’s family have continental origins, even though his parents have both been killed, presumably, in Britain. If Gildas does see Ambrosius as a continental Roman, then no native Britons are ever named in the book except three saints and five tyrants.

  Why then, is he named at all? This is also fairly clear in context. The named characters are overwhelmingly the contemporary tyrants addressed by Gildas. The events of the past are used to make clear the patterns of the present and their likely future outcomes. The names in the past are most likely to be recalled for their importance in the present. What resonance does Ambrosius Aurelianus’s name have in the present? ‘His grandchildren have greatly degenerated from their ancestor’s example.’ It seems likely that these grandchildren are addressed directly by Gildas. Why would he not take them to task personally? Two of the named tyrants stand out as potential candidates, the only two who, like Ambrosius Aurelianus, have Roman names: Constantine and Aurelius Caninus, as if the similarity of Aurelius and Aurelianus were not enough to signal a connection.

  The images of Gildas’s Ambrosius (‘last of the Roman race’) and Nennius’s Ambrosius (‘king among the kings of the Britons’) seem almost irreconcilable, but are not absolutely mutually exclusive. There is every reason to suppose that the former ‘vir modestus’ used his position to establish a hereditary monarchy. The evidence for this is that Gildas saw fit to castigate his grandchildren. No ordinary people are criticised in de Excidio. Gildas’s targets are the tyrants and the priests who should know better. The grandchildren fall short of Ambrosius’s example. As Ambrosius’s example was not a priestly one, it must be one of kingship. Logically, then, his grandchildren must be tyrants. Even the odd feature of Ambrosius as a fatherless boy has resonance in Gildas, where one of the few facts we are told about Ambrosius is that he is an orphan.

  When was the Siege of Mons Badonicus?

  It is nowhere explicitl
y stated that Ambrosius was the victor at Mons Badonicus. It is likely that the wars lasted for over a generation since Gildas, born in the year of the battle forty-four years before writing the book, is a contemporary of Ambrosius’s grandchildren. There are at least four generations between the arrival of the Saxons and Gildas’s own day. The first generation, that of Vortigern and the Council, included Ambrosius’s parents, killed in the Saxon revolt. We know that the revolt itself lasted no more than a generation or two since some people have witnessed both the desperate blow and the recovery. The next generation was that of Ambrosius himself and the last that of his grandchildren. The generation between, that of Ambrosius’s children, would be that of the battle of Mount Badon.

  Gildas gives a precise dating for the siege of Mount Badon. In the work as we have it, he writes: ‘That was the year of my birth; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then has already passed.’ The Latin is slightly obscure, but the implication is clear: Mount Badon was forty-three/forty-four years before the time of writing. Although Badon was not quite the last battle, there has been peace between the Britons and Saxons for most of the succeeding period. This long period of peace is not exactly what we would have expected from the later sources.

  The Historia reads as if the Saxons began planning their counter-attack soon after their defeat at Badon, though if the wars are fought against Octha, and not resumed until Ida, a forty-four-year period of peace could be possible. In the Annales, Mailcun dies only thirty-one years after the battle of Badon. Gildas was a contemporary of this man, and does not seem to be denouncing someone thirteen years dead. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle leaves a maximum gap of only twenty-five years between Saxon victories.

  How is it possible to reconcile Gildas’s versions of events – that Badon ushers in a relatively long period of peace, at least forty-four years – with the shorter period given in the later sources? Forty-four years might seem a long time to someone who has lived through it, but with the benefit of hindsight, may be nothing more than a hiatus, as it seems to Nennius. This, however, does not address the detailed discrepancies with the Annales and the Chronicle.

  It may be that Gildas, based in the south, had not heard that fighting had already broken out in the north. How, though, could Gildas not have noticed the wars of Cerdic and Cynric in Hampshire and Wiltshire recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle? If we accept for the moment that the West Saxons were right about these wars, then there is an intriguing possible explanation.

  The answer could lie in the concept of ‘a long period of peace’. Though Gildas is often cited as living in an era of peace, he makes it perfectly clear that the years after the siege of Badon were not by any means peaceful. The British kings often wage wars, but only civil and unjust ones. It could be that Gildas regarded the wars of Cerdic and Cynric as being among them. The story of the establishment of Wessex in the Chronicle has some strange features if they are taken simply as wars between Britons and Saxons. Cerdic and Cynric are never called West Saxons. Their names are in fact British. Cerdic is the same name as Certic, the name of various British characters in the Historia, the Genealogies and the Gododdin. Cynric is a British name meaning ‘Hound King’, a popular type of name among Gildas’s tyrants: Maglocunus (Hound Prince), Cuneglassus (Blue Hound) and Aurelius Caninus (Doglike – compare with Cinon in the Gododdin). The Chronicle does indeed say that they arrived in ships and proceeded to fight the British. This is a formula used for all the founders of Saxon dynasties in the Chronicle and derives from the established story of Hengist and Horsa.

  Cerdic and Cynric are called aldormen, or duces in the Latin translation, right from their first mention, the only ‘Saxon’ leaders to be given titles before their arrival. The West Saxons, Stuf and Wihtgar, arrived nineteen years later. Five years after this, Cerdic and Cynric obtained the kingdom of the West Saxons. They went on to conquer the Isle of Wight and bestowed it on Stuf and Wihtgar.

  The idea that Cerdic and Cynric led hordes of invading West Saxons into the country is at variance with the information in Bede. He says that the inhabitants of Wight and the adjacent mainland were Jutes and were still so called in his own time. He does not make the West Saxons important in the early colonisation of Britain, though he was well informed of their history by Daniel their bishop. He revealed that the area around Winchester, by his time the West Saxon heartland, had formerly been called Gewissae. This is a Saxon word meaning something like ‘allies’, an appropriate translation of the Latin word foederati used for the settled Germanic mercenaries. If the West Saxons are seen as participants in a British civil war, there is plenty of time in the Chronicle’s version of events to accommodate a long period of peace.

  An analogous situation occurred on the continent. Sixth-century Gallic writer Gregory of Tours recorded the career of the Roman Magister Militum Aegidius. He had started as a military officer of the empire. As this crumbled, he set himself up as ‘King of the Romans’ ruling the sub-Roman enclave around Soissons. When their own leader fled, the neighbouring Franks unanimously chose him as their king, in which position he reigned for eight years. His son Syagrius succeeded him as King of the Romans, until he was ousted by the new Frankish ruler, Clovis, in 486. Aegidius was probably known in Britain, his name influencing Gildas’s ‘Agitius’.

  The problem with the explanation that Cerdic and Cynric are feuding Britons, perhaps allied to or employing Saxons, is that, had Gildas known, he would surely have castigated them. The simplest explanation is that the Chronicle is wrong, that the early history of the West Saxons did not consist of almost continuous warfare against the Britons. Even if it did, we have no reason to take the dates at face value. As noted earlier, it is unlikely that the various Saxon leaders had sequential careers. There were surely periods when all Saxons took advantage of British weakness and, as Gildas tells us, others when virtually all Saxon attacks ceased.

  We should note that the Chronicle writers were working from a slightly different time-frame, derived from Bede’s History. Bede had a much older text of Gildas than any which survive. It is conceivable that at some stage a copyist has inadvertently altered Gildas’s meaning. As Bede reports it, the battle of Badon Hill was fought about forty-four years after the arrival of the Saxons (c. 493), not forty-four years before the time of Gildas. It has been argued that this a variant tradition, and that the battle could, coincidentally, have been forty-four years before the time of Gildas as well, but the odds are that the figure comes from a different reading of the manuscript source.

  A forty-four-year period before Mount Badon implies the generational pattern already established, that the victor was of an age with Ambrosius’s sons. Gildas’s description of the siege of Mount Badon occurring ‘in our time’ might seem to place it nearer to him than forty-four years. Altogether, however, it is more reasonable to suppose that Bede has mistaken the rather obscure Latin than that all surviving versions of Gildas have followed one incorrect exemplar. Gildas mentions the time period to reinforce his certainty ‘as I know . . .’ because it was the year of his birth. His certainty is far more likely to derive from his current age than an (untestable) idea that the Saxons arrived forty-four years before he was born.

  The Annales present a different picture. Although Gildas’s death is mentioned, fifty-four years after the battle of Badon, they show no knowledge of the contents of his work. There is no Vortigern, no Ambrosius and no Saxons. The only character in common is Mailcun/Maglocunus. Yet he is recorded as dying ten years before the date when de Excidio would have been written.

  A crucial factor in creating a difference between the Annales and Gildas could be the starting date for the Annales. If this is actually 455, the start of the new Easter great cycle, then the events of the Saxon revolt could have taken place before this, or the Annalist might have imagined that they had. The contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives 455 as the year of Horsa’s death, with the revolt happening before this. Is the date a coincidence or is it indicative of tenth
-century thinking? The last time the Christian Britons were known to be in contact with their continental co-religionists, when they accepted the Easter change of 455, could easily have been seen as a milestone by both sides.

  I am wary of arguments based on tinkering with dates in Dark Age sources, especially the Annales and the Chronicle. This assumes that particular given dates are the ‘true’ ones. I do not believe the dates in the Annales and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have any objective reality. With Saxon events, the participants could not have known what ‘the date’ was. Rather the dates give an impression from the period of writing of when certain events occurred relative to others and to the present. As such, they are far more likely to have been calculated by estimating back from fixed points. It is hard to imagine, for instance, the preservation of a tradition that Arthur fought his great battle seventy-two years after the start of an Easter cycle, but easy to imagine it being remembered as occurring a hundred years before the reign of King Edwin.

  If we allow ourselves to consider that the origin of the Arthur dates was not that his ‘final’ battle against the Saxons (Badon) was fought 100 years before Edwin, as the Annales report it, but that the remembered connection was actually with his final battle, in which he was slain (Camlann), the chronology takes on a much more consistent shape. The battle of Camlann would then take place twenty years earlier, at the date given for Badon, with Badon correspondingly earlier, between 486 and 499. This harmonises far better with the impression from the other sources that Badon was fought a generation (but no more) after the Saxon revolt, considered as happening in the middle of the sixth century. The Harleian Genealogies and the Annales have already allowed us to calculate a generation span of 32 or 33 years. Mailcun would then have died fifty years after Badon, in keeping with what we would expect from de Excidio. Gildas would have died at a venerable seventy-four, far more consistent with his reputation as a wise old saint. It would also leave enough time for a new and forgetful generation to have arisen between the time of Badon and Mailcun, as Gildas tells us it has. As I said, I am wary of manipulating Dark Age dates, but here the weight of all the other sources, especially Gildas’s own testimony that he is forty-three/four years old, leads us to conclude that a minor mistake has been made establishing the Annales chronology of Arthur relative to Edwin of Northumbria.