The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  The remaining Life in the manuscript is that of St Carantoc. He is an older relative of Cadoc, living thirty years before the birth of St David, a native of Ceredigion. Carantoc receives a miraculous altar from heaven which he takes down to the Severn estuary and throws into the sea. It floats off to where God willed the saint to go, and Carantoc follows in his boat. ‘In those times, Cato and Arthur were reigning in that country, living in Dindraithou. And Arthur came wandering in search of a most powerful serpent, huge and terrible, which had devastated twelve parts of the fields of Carrum. And Carantoc came and greeted Arthur, who rejoicing received a blessing from him’ (Wade-Evans 1944).

  In return for news about his altar, the saint miraculously tames the serpent. They bring it back to Cato in the fort where the saint is welcomed. Although the people are keen to kill the serpent, Carantoc prevents them, because the beast is an instrument of God, sent to destroy sinners in Carrum.

  Arthur gives back the altar, which he had tried to make into a table, but anything put on it was cast off. The king apparently the writer means Arthur grants the saint Carrum ‘forever, by written deed’ and Carantoc builds a church there. Later, Carantoc throws the altar into the sea again and sends Arthur and Cato to look for it. It has washed ashore at the mouth of the Guellit. ‘The king’ gives the saint twelve parts of the fields where the altar was found. ‘Afterwards Carantoc built a church there, and it was called the city of Carrou.’

  This provides the most detail about Arthur of any of the Lives, but it is difficult to reconcile it with what we have already deduced. The locations of Dindraithou and Carrum are unknown. It seems that the saint has crossed the Severn estuary, and that therefore we are in the West Country. Cato might be Cadwy, the son of Gereint, but this would be at variance with the chronology of the secular Welsh sources, with Gereint and Arthur contemporaries, or Arthur as the elder. In the Life he seems to be junior to Cato.

  It is also unlikely that the Life is laying claim to land in Devon and Cornwall, long lost to English dioceses. The idea of the Lives is to justify existing holdings (presumably in this case bolstered by a copy of the king’s written charter), not to lay claim to new ones outside Wales. It is most plausible that the writer intends the locations to be Welsh areas adjacent to the Severn estuary, which would fit with the geography of the other Lives.

  These linked saints’ Lives share a South Welsh viewpoint, which is as expected. They are not consistent on when Arthur flourished. For some, Sts David and Maelgwn are older or his contemporaries, which seems too late. The wars against the Saxons are completely absent. The Lives agree that Arthur is a king, either a local one or a more powerful British monarch. This is in a context of both royal and non-royal leaders like Ligessauc. The idea that Arthur is a tyrant, in contrast to his heroic image elsewhere, has been over-played. The Lives all leave Arthur chastened and reverential, and can be seen as prequels to his Christian career. They have much in common with the Welsh legends, a context in which Arthur’s companions, specifically Kei and Bedwyr, are prominent, in which miracles abound and etymology derives from such incidents. Once again, Arthur is not derived from stories such as these. He is a pre-existing historical figure, grafted on to the newly composed saints’ Lives to add to their credibility.

  The Life most influential on the development of the Arthurian legends is that of St Gildas himself. It appears in a different manuscript, called CCCC 139. It was written by Caradoc of Llancarfan, c. 1130. A previous Life of St Gildas had been composed, about a century earlier, by a monk from Ruys in Brittany, which claimed his tomb. This, however, was of little use to the monks of South Wales, hence the need for a new version.

  Neither Life helps us interpret the actual life of the writer of de Excidio. What we learn from them, for example that Gildas was the son of a Pict called Caw and studied under St Illtud in southern Wales, is belied by his ignorance of northern geography and his familiarity with the classical Latin of formal schools. Details such as the idea that he and Maelgwn Gwynedd were pupils together can be inferred from de Excidio, and need not derive from any independent tradition.

  ‘The most holy man Gildas was the contemporary of Arthur, king of the whole of Greater Britain’, Caradoc starts. Although Gildas loved and obeyed Arthur, his twenty-three brothers, led by the eldest Hueil, constantly made war against him, launching attacks from Scotland. Arthur pursued Hueil, described as a ‘very famous soldier, who submitted to no king, not even Arthur’, finally cornering and defeating him on the island of Minau (Man, or possibly Anglesey).

  Caw’s large family features in Culhwch and Olwen (Caw is spelled incorrectly ‘Cadw’ in both Culhwch manuscripts). The story of the feud between Arthur and Heuil, son of Caw, ‘who never submitted to a lord’s hand’ is also mentioned: ‘Gwydre son of Llwydeu by Gwenabwy daughter of Caw (his uncle Hueil stabbed him and the wound was the source of the feud between him and Arthur)’.

  Gildas was at this time preaching in Ireland, but hearing of his brother’s death he returned to Britain, lodging with St Cadoc in Llancarfan. Gildas prayed for Arthur and summoned the bishops to grant him formal absolution. ‘With this done, King Arthur, lamenting and grieving, received his penance from the bishops . . . and corrected himself in what way he could, until his life was completed.’ In common with the previous Lives, Arthur, though initially a practitioner of civil war, leaves his encounter with the saint ready to take up the Christian role assigned to him in the Historia. The war in northern Britain, with opponents coming from Scotland and fighting in woods and battlefields, is derived from the Historia. Robbed of a Saxon context, it becomes a civil war between Britons.

  By the end of the twelfth century, Hueil’s death was being cited as the reason why Gildas left no reference to Arthur in his writings. Whether Caradoc intends us to understand that Gildas, ‘Historiographer of the Britons’, has deliberately removed those references is not clear. Generally, Arthur and Gildas seem to be on good terms.

  The next episode takes us to territory which would dominate the Arthurian legend, signalling radical departures from the material we have seen so far. Gildas, after a spell in the Orkneys, comes to Glastonbury, where he writes the histories of the kings of Britain (de Excidio Britanniae, or possibly the Gildasian Recension of Historia Brittonum). Glastonbury, an ancient ecclesiastical centre in the civitas of the Durotriges, rather surprisingly fits all the clues in de Excidio for its place of composition, as both Dark and Higham have to admit embarrassedly. It is conceivable that Caradoc has genuine tradition to back this up. However, he has a high miss rate, Llancarfan, Armagh, Pictland and Orkney all being implausible locations with which Gildas should be familiar.

  Caradoc tells us Glastonbury’s actual name was Urbs Vitrea, City of Glass in British. He may be doing nothing more than interpreting the ‘Glass’ element in English, but we should also recall the Caer Wydyr, the glass fort or city of Preideu Annwfyn. It is, says Caradoc, in the summer country ‘in aestiva regione’, which may again be nothing more than an interpretation of the English ‘Somerset’. Remember, though, that the summer country, Gwlat yr Haf, is an enigmatic region from which Arthur summons troops in Culhwch and Olwen. At this time, King Meluas was ruling the summer country. He violates and carries off Guennuuar, wife of ‘the tyrant Arthur’ and hides her in Glastonbury, all but impregnable behind its rivers, reeds and marshes. It takes the rebel king (Arthur) the whole cycle of a year to find where his wife is held. He then raises the armies of Devon and Cornwall to besiege the city.

  The Abbot of Glastonbury, with Gildas and other clerics, steps in to make peace, persuading Meluas to restore Guennuuar to her husband. The story ends in the expected way (for a saint’s Life): the two kings give the abbot many territories and swear reverently to obey him and ‘not to violate the holiest part or even the lands bordering on the Abbey’s land’.

  All the major participants – Arthur, Meluas, Guenevere and Gildas – together with the motif of the abduction of a wife and a contest for her linked to
the annual cycle, are found in Culhwch and Olwen. In the tale, the contestants who fight annually for the hand of abducted Crieddylad, are Greidawl and Gwynn mab Nud. Another Life, that of St Collen, has Gwynn as a supernatural adversary of the saint, with a palace on top of Glastonbury Tor. Caradoc has, however, presented them as historical characters and events, linked to the rights and privileges of the ancient church at Glastonbury. Are his assumptions on the historicity and geography of the tale right, through lucky guesses or the result of established tradition? That the earlier Life of Gildas had none of these elements points to their addition from a burgeoning corpus of Arthurian legend. We have to acknowledge, however, that the picture is not implausible. The action accords with the marital and martial strife recorded in Gildas; the location is at least plausible (finds of Tintagel ware demonstrate high-status sixth-century occupation of Glastonbury Tor), with Somerset (the Durotriges) a kingdom at war with the civitas of Dumnonia. However the lack of any provenance for the material raises suspicions that only lucky guesswork has brought Caradoc to such a plausible scenario.

  The Sawley Glosses

  Corpus Christi College Cambridge Manuscript 139 (CCCC 139) reminds us that the manuscripts relating to the Dark Age history of Britain are no chance survivals. They are careful preserved by groups with an interest in passing on the information in them. In the case of CCCC 139, these were monks from the Abbey of St Mary at Sawley, Yorkshire. The textual history has been established by Dumville (Dumville 1990), suggesting that the scribes responsible included members of the Welsh immigrant community in the area. The manuscript’s origin is established by various features, including an ex libris inscription.

  The manuscript was compiled on the years immediately preceding 1166. It includes a version of Historia Brittonum immediately followed by the earliest surviving version of Caradoc’s Life of Gildas. The monks of Sawley received their Historia Brittonum in the Gildasian Recension, the most common version in the twelfth century, attributed to Gildas and often then assumed to be the actual de Excidio Britanniae. By 1164, the monks had acquired two pieces of evidence that convinced them otherwise. One was the Life of Gildas, describing him as a contemporary of Arthur. The other was a manuscript giving what they took to be the actual identity of the author – Nennius. They annotated their own version of the Historia with material from this example of the Nennian Recension, including that famous prologue: ‘I have therefore made a heap of all that I found . . . .’

  Work did not finish on the manuscript in 1166. New glosses were added through to the early years of the thirteenth century. Some of these ‘Sawley Glosses’ relate to the Arthurian material. Their late date makes them suspect as primary evidence, but their different interpretation of the Arthurian material is interesting. The first Arthurian gloss appears in the margin of the battle-list, by the description of Arthur at Mount Badon. ‘Mabutur [later glossed ‘in British’] that is ‘horrible son’ [glossed ‘in Latin’] since from his boyhood he was cruel. Arthur, translated into Latin means ‘horrible bear’ or ‘Iron hammer’, with which the jaws of lions were broken.’ This gloss reveals the author’s interest in Welsh etymology. Mab uthr could mean ‘horrible son’ and arth uthr is the Welsh for ‘horrible bear’. Most writers agree that Arthur does indeed derive from Arth. The Welsh for hammer ordd is less plausible and has not found favour.

  By the time the gloss was written, Arthur was known among Welsh speakers with the name Map Uthyr. This is a relatively recent, Middle Welsh patronymic, meaning son of Uthyr. The ‘official’ version of Arthurian history following Geoffrey of Monmouth had established that Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, a character mentioned in Pa gur. The form in the gloss is not old and there is no reason to think the writer found it in an earlier source. It is surprising, given his obvious interest in the subject, that he has not heard the canonical explanation for the name or wanted to pass it on.

  Significantly, the glossator considers Arthur to have been congenitally cruel. This ascription of ingrained cruelty to Arthur places the author in the tradition of the saints’ Lives – the sixth century was a time of tyrants and Arthur must have been one such man.

  The ‘iron hammer’ alternative points us towards Pa gur, where Kei fought lions, perhaps including the man-eating Palug’s cat. By the thirteenth century, continental romances were making Arthur an opponent, even a victim, of the monstrous cat. The gloss does not suggest that any ancient source provided the information.

  The same writer provides another gloss in the bottom right-hand corner: ‘For Arthur travelled to Jerusalem. And there he made a cross to the same size as the Cross of our Salvation, and there it was consecrated. And for three days continuously he fasted and kept vigil and prayed in the presence of Our Lord’s Cross, that the Lord should grant victory to him over the pagans, through this sign, which was done. And he carried with him an image of St Mary, fragments of which are still preserved at Wedale, in great veneration.’

  The writer here takes a guess at the nature of the image of the Virgin Mary carried by Arthur at Castellum Guinnion, in this case a separate image whose pieces still existed in St Mary-at-Stow in Wedale (Lothian). The writer makes a conflation that has become common in modern works, that of the image the Historia says Arthur bore on his shoulders at Castellum Guinnion, and the cross he carried at Badon. As the latter is not actually referred to in the Historia, it shows a familiarity with Annales Cambriae, which do not feature in the manuscript.

  As we have seen, the twelfth century was the great age for ecclesiastical ‘forgery’. We need suspect no more than that Wedale had a fragmentary image of the Virgin, which the writer has tied to the Historia to create a respectable pedigree. The true cross and Arthur’s journey to Jerusalem are also suggestive of a twelfth-century date. The Crusades to conquer, defend and reclaim Jerusalem must have been on everyone’s lips, especially the recent journey of Richard the Lionheart to the Holy Land and the church campaign to raise money for it. In this atmosphere, the Annales ‘Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’ has become in the writer’s mind the True Cross in Jerusalem.

  The Sawley glosses thus hardly indicate existing variant traditions or even sources. They are the deductions of enthusiastic historians.

  Arthur’s Palace

  Another source looked at by Dumville is Lambert of St Omer’s historical collection Liber Floridus (c. 1120). For early British history, Lambert used the Harleian Recension of Historia Brittonum, augmented by other sources, such as Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These materials reached him from a Kentish source, most likely Christ Church, Canterbury.

  Lambert used the Arthurian battle-list to expand on the references to Arthur in the Mirabilia. He appends four additional wonders to the list, two in the Gloucester region, one in Ireland and one in Scotland, a similar distribution to that in the Harleian Manuscript. Only one is connected with a named individual, and that individual is Arthur the Soldier, exactly as we would expect. This time, however, it is not one of the Gloucester-area wonders which bears his name, but the one in Scotland: ‘There is a palace in Britain in the land of the Picts belonging to Arthur the Soldier, made with wonderful art and variety, in which can be seen sculpted all his deeds and battles.’ Our examination of Historia Brittonum led us to conclude that South Welsh, Kentish and northern sources had been combined in the Arthurian section. In Lambert, this new northern material from an apparently Kentish source seems almost too good to be true!

  Where was this incredible palace which, if real, would answer our questions at a stroke? The only large stone building in Scotland ascribed to Arthur was a circular domed construction called Arthur’s O’on or Oven. This stood in the Carron valley in Stirlingshire until it was demolished in 1742–3. It was known as Arthur’s Oven (furnum arthuri) as early as 1293 (XII in Dumville 1990). From what we know of the building, it was not carved with battle scenes and we do not know whether it had an Arthurian connection as early as Lambert’s time. One indication that it did not can be found in manu
script CCCC 139. In this, a writer (c. 1200) added at the point where the Romans build a wall across the island: ‘Later the Emperor Carutius rebuilt it . . . and constructed a round house of dressed stone on the banks of the river Carun (which got its name from his name), erecting a triumphal arch in memory of his victory.’

  This rotunda is clearly the building which less than a century later would be called ‘Arthur’s Oven’. Not only does it stand in the same location and have the same shape, it is also possible that the similarity between the word fornix (arch) in the Sawley description and fornum (oven) is not entirely fortuitous. If ‘Arthur’s Oven’ and ‘Arthur’s Palace’ are the same, then we would have to accept that, in the half-century between Lambert and the Sawley writer, the Arthurian identity was lost in favour of an uninspiring etymology from ‘Carutius’. This seems unlikely, given that the Sawley school were interested in passing on Arthurian material, and that the Arthurian name resurfaced anyway.

  If we suppose that Arthur’s palace was more than a figment of the imagination, what kind of a building could it have been? Large stone structures were still being erected in Europe during the early sixth century. The rotunda built for Theodoric the Ostrogoth can still be seen in Ravenna, for example. Rich pictorial decorative schemes, more often in mosaic than carvings, were also a feature of royal and imperial buildings of the period. Needless to say, nothing of the kind has survived in Britain. There are figurative carved stones in Pictish territories, but none incorporated in the decoration of a building as distinctive as this ‘palace’. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Mirabilia intended some real or imagined Roman building. More significant, however, is the idea that Arthur the Soldier owned any kind of palace at all.