The Dragon of Britain
Gildas gives us more biographical details about Maglocunus than about any of the other tyrants. Perhaps he knew him personally, or perhaps he simply saw the Dragon of the Island as such a significant figure in the destruction of Britain that it was worth covering the point in detail. Maglocunus began with the dream to rule by violence – that is, to take power violently. He was strong in arms and, in the first years of his youth, used the sword, spear and fire to despatch the king his uncle and nearly the bravest of his soldiers, whose ‘faces were not very different from those of the lion’s whelps’ . As we last saw the phrase being used of Aurelius Caninus and (in modified form) of Constantine, I do not think it is unreasonable to draw a connection. The reference could be there to remind the first two tyrants that Maglocunus is a threat to them, or to emphasise the Dragon’s crime.
If Maglocunus’s uncle himself is such a close relative of Aurelius, then it suggests a dynastic motive for Gildas’s writing. Close dynastic ties could exist between some of the tyrants, suggesting that they are united by more than the proximity of their kingdoms. If Aurelius is no longer alive, he might have been killed specifically in this coup.
Surprisingly, after this triumph, after pondering the godly life and rule of monks a great deal, Maglocunus repented of his sins, broke the chains of royal power and entered a monastery, ‘bringing joy in Heaven’. Gildas stresses that Maglocunus’s decision was voluntary, adding to the impression that Constantine’s was not.
Gildas here speaks with warm approval of monks and their life. Later historians had no doubt that he himself was a monk. This is not clear from the text – he writes only of clerics of his order or rank, contrasted with bishops and priests. However, other works attributed to him concern the monastic life and there is nothing to suggest he is not a monk. In this case, it may be fellow-feeling for Maglocunus the monk, or even the possibility that they were in the same monastery, which prompts Gildas’s vitriol.
Later, we hear that Maglocunus had as his teacher the most refined master of all Britain. This man was obviously an eminent cleric, as his teachings were religious admonishments similar to Gildas’s own. Of course, the refined master might have taught Maglocunus when he was very young, before his coup. The most reasonable supposition, however, is that they met when Maglocunus was a monk. A further inference is that Gildas applauds the refined master and his teachings because he also was one of his pupils. That raises the possibility that Gildas and Maglocunus were contemporary disciples of the refined master. One point of note is that Gildas is clear what Maglocunus looks like – he is exceptionally tall. The one other tyrant whose physical features are described is Vortiporius, ‘your head is already whitening’, but this could be no more than a reference to his age.
Maglocunus did not remain a monk. Tempted by the devil he returned to his former life ‘like some sick hound to your disgusting vomit’. Although Gildas expounds on this betrayal at length, it is not clear why Maglocunus left the monastery. Gildas says it was ‘not much against your will’ but this is suggestive that some political compulsion was behind it. Maglocunus did have a brother, who may have been ruling his former lands. All that Gildas tells us is that Maglocunus married as soon as he left the monastery. He soon tired of this woman, murdered her, then murdered his brother’s son so that he could marry his wife. He was aided and encouraged by this latter woman, and married her publicly to the acclaim of his supporters.
This dramatic story is the last Gildas relays of Maglocunus. How he came to drive out and kill ‘many tyrants’ is not explained, and Gildas can hardly have meant just his uncle and nephew. Presumably, his civil wars occurred after he left the monastery, but we hear no more than that the Dragon of the Island has committed many sins.
One last interesting feature of Maglocunus’s career is his chosen form of entertainment. ‘Your excited ears hear not the praises of God from the sweet voices of the tuneful recruits of Christ, not the melodious music of the church but empty praises of yourself from the mouths of criminals who grate on the hearing like raving hucksters – mouths stuffed with lies and liable to bedew bystanders with their foaming phlegm.’ These ‘criminals’ may also be the parasites whose lying tongues celebrate the king’s new wedding. It is surely not fanciful to suggest that we have already met these characters. Historia Brittonum synchronised the reign to Maglocunus/Mailcunus specifically to the time when ‘Talhearn Tataguen was famous for his poetry and Neirin and Taliessin and Bluchbard and Cian, who is called Gueinth Guaut, were at the same time famous in British poetry’. Perhaps some or all of these men were patronised by Maglocunus. At the very least, we have Gildas’s surprisingly impassioned invective to inform us that such men were active at the Tyrant’s court.
Gildas’s chosen style, emphasising condemnation rather than praise, distorts our impression of his time. Although most rulers may be tyrants, a few, albeit a tiny number, do maintain ‘controls of truth and justice’. Gildas tells us that this tiny minority of the just support him by their prayers and that all men admire them. At least one of the unnamed contemporary rulers must be very powerful indeed. We know this because mighty Maglocunus, Dragon of Britain, deposer of many tyrants, is only greater than ‘almost all the leaders of Britain’. The likely explanation is that Gildas knows of a greater British ruler who is not a notorious tyrant. He tells us that he has reserved a special place for Maglocunus because he is first in evil, not because he is most powerful.
On the evidence of Historia Brittonum, we can probably name this man. He is Outigirn, who will fight against the Saxons when their attacks recommence, while his contemporary Mailcunus will not. Outigirn has a position distinct from that of the tyrants. The five named tyrants are likened to ‘Five mad and debauched horses from the retinue of Pharaoh which actively lure his army to its ruin in the Red Sea’. This is not just a slightly forced metaphor meaning no more than that they, like the Egyptian army, will be destroyed by God. Gildas seems to be telling us that there really is a ‘Pharaoh’ whom they served. Earlier the councillors of Vortigern are called ‘Stupid Princes of Zoan, giving foolish advice to Pharaoh’.
We have seen that Egypt represents for Gildas, as it does for Jeremiah and the prophets, the uncertain military power on which the Israelites rely instead of trusting in God. Vortigern, as Pharaoh, provides the military solution to the Council’s problem, the settlement of Saxon mercenaries. The Pharaoh of Gildas’s time could similarly be a military figure. This is an area we will turn to later.
So far, we have looked at Gildas’s evidence on the generations of Vortigern and Ambrosius. We have also seen what he says about the generation in which he lives. This will help us now to define the generation between, the Badon generation, the reign of Arthur.
The Reign of Arthur
Because there is so little in de Excidio Britanniae about the generation which succeeded Ambrosius, it is worth reiterating exactly what Gildas does say about it. The fight-back began under Ambrosius, when the British challenged the Saxons to battle and were victorious. This ushered in a period of war between the ‘Citizens’ and their Saxon enemies. First one side, then the other, was victorious, up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill. There were then some more British victories, but the Saxons were completely cowed. One point to note is that Gildas remembers the ‘year’ of the siege of Badon as a glorious turning-point. The siege was the most dramatic, the most memorable victory, characterising the whole year, but it is the year which saw the pattern of consistent British victory established, presumably in more than one battle.
As far as Historia Brittonum was concerned, all of Arthur’s battles were victories. This is unsurprising. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives a picture of more or less victorious Saxon activity too. It may be that Arthur was exceptionally successful and that although the Saxons prevailed against other commanders and kings elsewhere, they could make no headway against him. This sounds slightly unrealistic, and the battle-list itself gives some grounds for thinking it may distort
the real picture. Four battles were fought on the Dubglas. Even if the Britons were simply holding a defensive position against successive attacks, the scale of the victories did not permit a counter-attack or deterrence against the Saxons. The battle at the City of the Legion shows that the Saxons are still as far west as they were when they previously raged from sea to sea and destroyed Gloucester. They have thus regained militarily the position they yielded when they returned to the east before Ambrosius rallied the Britons.
Aside from Ambrosius, a leader of unknown rank, Gildas does not explain the military leadership required for the counter-attack, but military leaders there must have been. Battles and more importantly sieges could not just occur by the consensus of kings or citizens. The siege of Badon Hill implies the existence of a single military commander.
The key feature of the Badon generation, now forgotten by Gildas’s contemporaries, is that ‘kings, public and private persons, priests and churchmen kept their own stations’ – ‘reges, publici, privati . . . suum ordinem servarunt’. It is hard to see how a king would avoid stepping out of line unless Gildas means they were subject to a higher, more legitimate authority. There was a ‘Pharaoh’ before the Saxon revolt and there is one in Gildas’s own time, so it is reasonable to suppose a similar figure in the Badon generation coordinating the actions of the kings.
Although Gildas does not explicitly say that the kings were part of the military response to the Saxons, this is readily apparent. The kings clearly provide the military manpower of Gildas’s time. Their ability to carry out civil war without hindrance demonstrates this. The men who feast at their tables are specifically called their ‘fellow soldiers’. They are denounced primarily because their resources are not directed to the defence of Britain. It is inescapable that a similar situation existed in the Badon generation. The fight-back involved the military co-operation of the kings of the Britons, ‘serving according to their rank’, exactly as we are told in Historia Brittonum.
Gildas allows us to speculate who some of these kings were. One would have been the good King of the Demetae, the father of Vortiporius. If Vortiporius was sixty or more, then he might have fought in the war too. Maglocunus’s uncle was another king in the same generation. So might have been the father of Aurelius Caninus, although he apparently died young in a more recent civil war and may not have been old enough to contribute.
This gives the lie to the argument that Arthur did not exist because Gildas did not name him. The victor of Mons Badonicus existed as much as Maglocunus’s uncle or the fathers of Vortiporius and Aurelius Caninus. They, like every other member of their generation, are unnamed by Gildas. Yet the evidence for their existence is the effect they had on Gildas and his time. It was not part of Gildas’s purpose to preserve those names in his work, but that is far from saying that their names were not preserved.
The picture Gildas presents agrees with the later sources. A generation of warfare separates the resisters of the Saxon revolt from the victors of Mount Badon. Those victors consisted of united British kings, public officials and private individuals, sticking to their allotted jobs. The wars saw British defeats, glossed over in British sources, it is true. Saxon sources also concealed their defeats, but there is no reason to discount a period which could see the Saxon conquest of Anderida, for example, alternating with the British defence of the City of the Legion.
Of all the possible scenarios, a supreme British warleader, coordinating the countrywide strategy of the kings, is the most likely. While that leader lived, remembrance of the unexpected victory at Badon kept the Britons united.
Could Arthur have been the son of Ambrosius? Ambrosius had at least one child, whom we might expect to have continued his legacy. There is nothing in de Excidio to contradict this. However, it seems strange that no British source makes this link, if it existed. We might add, however, that a man bearing the British name ‘Arthur’ was unlikely to be the offspring of the ‘last of the Romans’.
As wars against the Saxons soon ceased after Badon, we can suppose that the Victor of Badon, if he died violently, was killed in one of the many civil wars. According to the Annales, Arthur was killed about twenty years after Badon. Gildas’s formative years would therefore have been during the reign of Arthur. He tells us that he began to consider his denunciations thirty years or so after Badon, which would seem reasonable for a breakdown of the common cause among the Britons.
Medieval legends connected the death of Arthur to the incident where Constantine killed the two noble youths in church. The truth is, the battle of Camlann could have formed part of any of the civil wars Gildas mentions and Medraut, too, could be one of the unnamed participants in them.
Arthur, as he emerges from the sources we have examined, was the victor of the siege of Mount Badon. The Gododdin shows that the name and fame of Arthur were already known close to the time of Gildas and Maglocunus. He was so famous that just his name was expected to evoke comparisons with Guaurthur’s fight against the English. Why is it so unreasonable to suppose that the names missing from Gildas are those provided by the Historia and Annales? Is it really so implausible that the name of the man who led the British forces at the siege of Badon Hill was indeed Arthur?
This is about as far as we can go following the narrative sources for the reign of Arthur. Clearly, we are not yet in a position to sum up a probable outline of the reign of Arthur. For that we must consider other sources. Since 1977, historians, deprived of the ‘inadmissible’ evidence we have spent the first half of the book considering, have turned to other sources to illuminate the fifth and sixth centuries. Archaeology is one source of data. Purely archaeological studies, however, have divorced the picture entirely from any written sources, eliminating wars, massacres and exiles according to the political whim or archaeological fashion of the writer. More recently, studies have linked the archaeological material firmly to linguistic evidence, comparative data from the continent and elsewhere in the British Isles, and the few ‘admissible’ contemporary written sources. These provide useful models which we can use to assess our picture of the reign of Arthur.
SIX
A good place to start our search is with Arthur’s companions-in-arms, the British kings. When the Dark Age administrations emerge into the written records, Britain had become a patchwork of kingdoms. In the lowland (England), they are ruled by and named after Angles or Saxons. Their laws consider that most of their inhabitants are similarly Angles or Saxons. In the highland zones, the West Country, Wales, Cumbria and Scotland, the kingdoms are ruled by ‘Celtic’ kings, whether of British, Irish or Pictish origin, and are composed exclusively of such peoples. Where there is any higher form of government, it is imposed militarily by rulers of these kingdoms. These might be the Great Kings or Bretwaldas of the Anglo-Saxons, or the kings of Gwynedd. Where money, the Roman church, written bureaucracy or other features of Roman civilisation exist, they have been re-imported from overseas since the end of the sixth century.
On the other side of the historical divide, we have evidence of the administrative structures of the Roman Empire which dominated most of Britain. Most of this comes from Notitia Dignitatum, which seems to reflect late fourth-century reality. This shows Roman Britain with a hierarchy of civilian government operating alongside separate military structures. Coinage, public works, literacy and a city-based ecclesiastical structure were features of this system.
Late Roman Britain.
The transition between these systems must have occurred around the time we are studying. The nature of the reign of Arthur depends on how far we can see this transition as having progressed. The nature and timing of the transition form the basis of Dark’s work, most notably in Civitas to Kingdom. Many of his conclusions are taken for granted here, and I refer readers to his work for further clarification. Needless to say, Dark is very much of the view that Arthur and his reign rest on inadmissible evidence and I stress that the interpretation of his work offered here is my own.
Ro
man Britain formed a diocese of the late Roman empire. Its governor, the Vicarius Britanniarum (viceroy of the Britains/British provinces), was based with his staff in London. He reported to the prefect of the Gallic provinces in France. Under him were five provincial governors. The technical term for these governors was ‘rectores’ (singular rector) although the British governors used several different titles. One of the provinces, Valentia, has not been identified. However, as it was formed from part of one of the other provinces, its fate will be covered with whichever province it came from. Maxima Caesariensis and Flavia Caesariensis covered the lowland zone, and Britannia Prima and Britannia Secunda the highlands.
Beneath the provinces were the civitates (singular civitas). They were county-like areas centred on Roman cities, with their own municipal governments. Some un-Romanised areas do not seem to have been organised as civitates in the technical sense of the word. Coloniae, the major towns founded by Roman veterans, also had their own governments.
Although the Vicarius had some troops at his disposal, the main military units were independent of civil structures. The commanders reported to the Magister Militum in Gaul. The most senior was the Comes Britanniarum, the companion or (as the title became in the Middle Ages) Count of the Britains. He held the mobile reserve which helped the static commands or defended against civil unrest or invading Irish. Next came the Comes Litoris Saxonicii – the Count of the Saxon Shore – who ran the limitanei or frontier troops and their settlements on the south coast, defending against Saxon invasions. Finally, the Dux Britanniarum (leader or duke of the British provinces) commanded the limitanei and forts of Hadrian’s Wall and their supply lines. This was the front line of defence against the Picts. The official titles vary between Britanniae (of Britain) and Britanniarum (of the Britains) and the latter clumsy designation would soon fall out of use.
The Reign of Arthur Page 14
