Other features of the description of Cuneglassus coincide with features of the Arthur legend. Cuneglassus is a ‘rider of many’, and one of the characteristics of Guaurthur is his generosity with the horses of his own herd. Cuneglassus uses his own special weapons, and in medieval legend, Arthur’s special weapons were famous. He has put aside his wife, a possible source of a breach with his son.
The stumbling-block to connecting Cuneglassus with Arthur is that he is a contemporary of Gildas. The whole rationale for these denunciations is that the Badon generation has passed away, leaving their sons to forget the lessons learnt. If such a crucial figure as the leader at the siege of Badon was still alive, it would be difficult to see how that knowledge would have slipped. Besides which, Cuneglassus is a villainous character, while Gildas views the kings of the Badon generation in rosy hues. We might imagine a heroic warleader who subsequently went bad and, for example, put aside his wife and killed his son. Gildas specifically tells us this is not the case with Cuneglassus, who has been wicked since his boyhood. If there is a connection between Cuneglassus Ursus, and Arthur, Ursus Horribilis, then it must be at some further remove.
One possibility is that Ursus was a dynastic name or title, and that Cuneglassus was a successor or descendant of Arthur, ruling over the same area. This is the suggestion followed in King Arthur – the True Story (Phillips and Keatman 1993). Here Arthur is identified with Eugein Dantguin, Cinglas/Cuneglassus’s father in the Harleian Genealogies. This is not particularly helpful, since we know far less about Eugein Dantguin than we do about Arthur. If Cuneglassus had indeed been related to the victor of Mount Badon, it is surprising that Gildas does not mention him as he does the forebears of Vortiporius and Aurelius and the uncle of Maglocunus.
Another possibility is that Cuneglassus is called a bear because he comes from a place connected with bears. Receptaculum ursi (bear’s stronghold) could be a Latin translation of a British place-name. Other Dark Age writers translated the Welsh place-name element ‘din’ as receptaculum, suggesting that here Gildas is translating a possible ‘Din Arth’ or ‘Din Eirth’. There are two places called this in modern Wales, one in north-east Wales, the other in Dyfed. The first is plausible for a Cuneglassus who is a relative of Maglocunus, while the latter makes better sense if Cuneglassus is a neighbour of Dyfed-man Vortiporius. Of course, there is always the possibility that other Din Eirths existed, now lost beneath English place-names. None of this precludes the possibility that Cuneglassus’s stronghold might have been a previous base of Arthur, Ursus horribilis.
Although we may not be able to tell exactly why Gildas assigned the animal epithets he did to the particular tyrants (the last tyrant is called a dragon), his source for these images is the biblical Book of Daniel. In chapter seven, Daniel has a vision of various beasts who represent successive empires persecuting the people of Israel. They are all destined to have their power stripped from them by God. The bulk of Gildas’s work consists of similar attempts to apply biblical prophecies to contemporary circumstances.
In the Latin version of the Bible, the first kingdom/beast is described as ‘quasi leaena’ – like a lioness. Gildas gives us two tyrants called ‘leaenae catulus’ (whelp of the lioness) and ‘(ut propheta ait), catule leonine’ (as the prophet says, a lion’s whelp). It is not clear why Gildas gives us two lions, perhaps because Constantine and Aurelius are related, or because the political situation had changed in the years before publication, replacing the rule of one lion with two. Gildas specifically says he has waited ten years before unleashing his polemic. The untimely death of, for instance, Aurelius’s father may have changed the political landscape.
The next animal Daniel sees is ‘quasi pardus’ (like a leopard). Gildas calls Vortiporius ‘pardo similis’ (like a leopard). Then comes ‘bestia alia similis urse’ (another beast, similar to a bear); ‘urse’ (bear) says Gildas of Cuneglassus. The final beast in Daniel is ‘Bestia atque terribilis atque mirabilis, et fortis nimis, dentes ferreos habebat magnos’ (a beast both terrible and wonderful, and incredibly strong, with great iron teeth), which Gildas renders concisely as ‘draco’ (dragon). Why Gildas chose particular animals to represent particular rulers is not clear. Cuneglassus could be a bear just because he comes before the powerful Maglocunus. More likely, some points of similarity have prompted Gildas to make the particular connections.
Now Gildas’s condemnations reach their climax: ‘Last in my list but first in evil, mightier than many both in power and malice, more profuse in giving, more extravagant in Sin, strong in arms, but stronger still in that which destroys the soul’ – Maglocunus the Dragon of the Island’.
It is clear that Maglocunus was one of the dominant figures of the age, not some petty regional tyrant. ‘The King of Kings has made you higher than almost all the leaders of Britain, in your kingdom as much as your physique.’ Gildas spends as much time castigating him as all the previous tyrants put together. He hardly even bothers to exhort Maglocunus to repentance. The crimes of which he accuses him are too many and too serious.
Yet, practically every historian dealing with the period relegates him to the backwater of Anglesey and measures his importance solely as a founding father of medieval Gwynedd. Although logically Maglocunus seems to be based somewhere north of Dyfed, but one kingdom removed from it, this gives a range of possibilities of which Gwynedd is only one and Anglesey hardly likely at all. We have seen how the Gwynedd connection is found in exactly those sources which name Arthur as the leader at Mount Badon. Unlike Arthur, however, Maglocunus was used for partisan reasons, to bolster the claims of the burgeoning Gwynedd dynasty.
Gildas calls Maglocunus ‘Insularis Draco’, Dragon of the Island. With a north Welsh connection firmly in mind, historians pick the obvious island in North Wales, Anglesey, and locate the tyrant there. Later kings of Gwynedd did live at Aberffraw in Anglesey, although no sixth-century remains have been discovered there. In fact, archaeology suggests that the sixth-century centre of the kingdom was at the mainland site of Deganwy or possibly at Caernarfon. Even the normally sober historian Ken Dark has to construct a hypothesis of Maglocunus crossing the Menai straits to conquer the lands of the Ordovices. Nevertheless, most historians consider the epithet ‘Insularis Draco’ must mean no more than dragon of the Isle of Anglesey.
In context, there is no doubt what Gildas means by Insula (the island): throughout the text, it is used as a synonym for Britain as a whole. It is Gildas’s preferred term when referring to his homeland. This is the sense in which he last used the word before the denunciation of Maglocunus: ‘The remembrance of so desperate a blow to the island’ – the Saxon revolt.
Examining Gildas’s geography in greater detail, we find further proof that the epithet ‘Insularis Draco’ cannot have anything to do with Anglesey. None of the internal evidence gives us any reason to think that Gildas was living in a part of Britain where ‘Insularis’ would automatically evoke Anglesey. The complementary suggestions, by Higham and Dark, that Gildas is writing in the civitas of the Durotriges, would lead us to expect that a casual reference to the (offshore) island meant ‘the Isle of Wight’, as it would to a modern inhabitant of Dorset.
The linguistic evidence is that Gildas is more likely to have chosen the word ‘promunturia’ (translated by Winterbourne as ‘promontory’) to describe one of the offshore islands, if that were intended. There is abundant evidence in the text that the whole of the island of Britain, not an obscure western corner, falls under the shadow of Maglocunus.
Insularis Draco should properly be translated as ‘Dragon of Britain’. It is most likely to refer to Maglocunus’s pre-eminent position among the British tyrants, not a geographical location. In the Historia, his title is ‘magnus rex apud Brittones’ – Great King among the Britons. Gildas might use the Latin word ‘Draco’ because of its similarity to Dragon, an actual title used of Welsh rulers. Rachel Bromwich was unable to find any early Welsh use of the word ‘Dragon’ except as a title for a great
warrior (Bromwich 1961). This would be similar to Snyder’s suggestion that Gildas used the word tyrannus because of its similarity to the British Tigern (Snyder 1998).
We know from DEB 27 that some of the tyrants, presumably including Maglocunus, exercise jurisdiction beyond the confines of their own civitates, as they chase thieves everywhere per patriam, ‘throughout the country’.
‘The King of Kings has made you higher than almost all the leaders of Britain in your kingdom as in your stature.’ This is a specific assertion of Maglocunus’s power. If the British kingdoms are all derived from the Roman civitates (Dark 1994), then Maglocunus cannot be the king of the Ordovices. No one could describe this little kingdom, even if it has spread into the neighbouring territory of the Decangli, as ‘almost the greatest kingdom in Britain’. The analogy Gildas makes with the King’s physical height suggests the size of the kingdom, rather than its military or economic power.
Gildas proceeds to tell us how Maglocunus’s kingdom has become so large: Maglocunus has ‘deprived many of the aforementioned tyrants of their kingdoms and even of their lives’. Who are these aforementioned tyrants? They are kings from throughout the island, the tyrants of Britain, the ‘kings of our homeland’. Gildas has never, to our knowledge, referred to the kings of the Ordovices, nor does he suggest that Maglocunus deposed a succession of kings of the same Ordovician area. Even if, like Dumnonia and the Demetae, most kingdoms do derive from the civitates, it is clear that Maglocunus must rule over more than one of them.
The phrase ‘supra dictorum’ many of these ‘aforementioned’ tyrants, is problematic (DEB 33). Although it could be taken to refer to British tyrants in general (‘Britain has kings, but they are tyrants’ DEB 27), its most obvious meaning is that some of the tyrants who have just been named – Constantine, Aurelius Caninus, Vortiporius and Cuneglassus – are the ones who have fallen victim to the Dragon of the Island. Winterbottom glosses over this by translating it less precisely as ‘these tyrants’. The difficulty is that Gildas has treated the other four as if they were alive. They are addressed as if they had the ability to repent and change their way of life. On the other hand, the vision of Daniel clearly refers to consecutive kingdoms. The terrible beast in Daniel was destined to overthrow some of the kingdoms, leaving others surviving and powerless. With the ten-year gap before publication, it is possible that some of the kings may have died since the first draft, but had been kept in, possibly as vindication of Daniel’s prophecy.
Gildas’s biblical models often leave some doubt as to whether the prophet is writing with hindsight or with prophetic foresight and it may be that we are encountering the same ambiguity here. Gildas frequently writes in a dramatic present tense about past events. It is worth re-reading the denunciations of the four tyrants to see if there is any hint that they have in fact been ‘driven from their kingdoms or even their lives’ by Maglocunus.
We have already wondered if the presence of two leonine tyrants rather than the expected one indicates that their predecessor has been removed, but what of Constantine and Aurelius themselves? Gildas specifically says in DEB 28 that he knows Constantine is alive, as if countering rumours that he is not. Though living, Constantine might have been cast out of his kingdom. His oath not to work his wiles on his fellow countrymen may have been part of a settlement following a defeat by Maglocunus. He may even have been forced to retire to the monastery where he ‘masquerades’ as a holy abbot. Bede and Gregory of Tours give examples of deposed Dark Age kings forced into virtual imprisonment in monasteries. Maglocunus’s conquests included overthrowing his uncle and his forces ‘Non catulorum leonis . . . magnopere dispares’ (not greatly dissimilar to the whelps of a lion). This, as we suggest, must mean something more than pejorative epithet. If it merely meant that they were acting in an evil way, then Maglocunus’s war against them would have been a good thing, which it clearly is not.
We are told in DEB 30 that some misfortune has befallen the rest of Aurelius Caninus’s family: ‘You are left like a solitary tree . . . Remember . . . the empty outward show of your fathers and brothers, their youthful and untimely deaths.’ Maybe Gildas is trying to show that these tyrants are part of the same family. Aurelius may not even be alive as Gildas writes. Gildas’s image of him being engulfed by the slime of his wickedness could be an indication that these prophesied events have already happened. His prophetic threat – ‘The king will shortly brandish his sword at you’ – could refer to God, as Winterbottom takes it, or equally to an earthly foe, perhaps Maglocunus.
Lion’s Whelp, as the Prophet Says
What exactly did Gildas actually mean by his biblical analogies? Higham argues that the heavy use of animal imagery by Gildas stems from his references to the Saxons. Having established that ‘Saxons’ is a name not to be spoken, he thereafter refers to them as wolves, dogs, villains, cutthroats and so on. Higham sees the application of similar terms to the Britons as marking their closeness to their putative ‘overlords’. In reality, the situation is not so clear-cut. Generally, when the prophets, especially Gildas’s favoured Jeremiah and Isaiah, refer to lions, lionesses or lion’s whelps, they are symbols of God or his agents of judgement against the wicked. A lion’s whelp had been established as a symbol of the tribe and kingdom of Judah and it is not surprising to find it used in this way. It is apparent, from the Maglocunus passage, that Gildas’s use of leonine images cannot always be pejorative. If Maglocunus’s victims are very similar to lion’s whelps, this is not mentioned to exonerate him but to heighten his crime.
So there is no clear-cut way of understanding what Gildas means when he writes that Aurelius is a lion’s whelp ‘as the prophet says’. We have to make a reasoned guess as to which prophet and in what context. Gildas’s prophet of choice is Jeremiah. For Jeremiah, lions, lion-whelps and leopards are agents of God’s destruction on wicked Jerusalem, not necessarily evil in themselves. In one passage, however (DEB 51.38), he juxtaposes lion’s whelps and dragons when castigating the Babylonians: ‘The king of Babylonia cut Jerusalem up and ate it. He emptied the city like a jar; like a dragon, he swallowed it. He took what he wanted and threw the rest away . . . [Babylonia] will become a tomb and a habitation for dragons . . . the Babylonians will all roar like lions and growl like lion cubs.’
In spite of the suggestive language, it is difficult to see what this implies for Aurelius and the others, even in the vaguest terms. Gildas speaks with approval of Isaiah as the Chief of Prophets, but Isaiah too sees lions and lionesses as general instruments of God. The same use is made by the minor prophets to whom Gildas refers as his denunciations continue.
There is only one prophet who uses the words lioness and lion’s whelp in a way which parallels Gildas: Ezekiel. In chapter 19 he writes:
The Lord told me to sing this song of sorrow for two princes of Israel: what a lioness your mother was! She reared her cubs among the fierce male lions. She reared a cub and taught him to hunt. He learned to eat people. The nations heard about him and trapped him in a pit. With hooks, they dragged him off to Egypt. She waited until she saw all hope was gone. Then she reared another of her cubs, and he grew into a fierce lion. When he was full grown, he prowled with the other lions. He too learned to hunt and eat people. He wrecked forts, he ruined towns, the people of the land were terrified every time he roared. The nations gathered to fight him, people came from everywhere. They spread their hunting nets and caught him in their trap. They put him in a cage and took him to the king of Babylonia, they kept him under guard so that his roar would never be heard again on the hills of Israel.
The lion’s whelps are princes who should have protected Israel, something we would expect from the way the image is used by the other prophets. However, their vain and war-like shows have come to nothing when they confront more powerful foes. The lioness is figuratively the Israelite kingdom from which they come (Britain, to Gildas, is God’s ‘latter-day Israel’) but could be their real mother, as they are both members of the same royal family, w
hich is the obvious way the passage reads.
If this is how Gildas draws the analogy, that the lion’s whelps are the princes who should be defending Israel, should be attacking the enemies of the kingdoms, and that there is a dynastic connection between them, he might see how the prophecy could be applied to the descendants of Ambrosius Aurelianus.
Intriguingly, Ezekiel later connects the images of lions and dragons (chapter 32): ‘Take up a lamentation for Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and say to him: Thou art become like a lion of the nations and as a dragon that is in the sea.’
The historical background, as prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel make clear, is that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were dependent on the military power of the Egyptian Pharaoh as his clients. They relied on Pharaoh for support against Assyria and Babylon, their adversaries to the north and east. The prophets maintain that this one-sided alliance is in vain, that either the Egyptians will not help or that, if they do, they will be defeated by the invaders. Instead, the Israelites must put their trust in God and turn away from wickedness. The prophets draw on their knowledge of the destruction of the earlier Pharaoh and his army during the Exodus and the recent defeat of the Egyptians by the Babylonians. It is this context, Pharaoh and the Egyptians being the uncertain military power, on which the Israelites place their reliance.
There is nothing at all in their descriptions to suggest that either Vortiporius or Cuneglassus had been killed or deposed by Maglocunus, so we are left with the possibility that it is the lion’s whelps, the putative dynasty of Ambrosius, who have borne the brunt of his attacks.
The Reign of Arthur Page 13
