The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  That this Arthur was a real person seems unarguable. We have no reason to think that he did not exist, and every reason to suppose that he did. This is not all we can say about him. The comparison seems most apt if we take this Arthur as being the character presented to us in Historia Brittonum, the soldier and general who led the kings of the Britons in the wars against the Saxons perhaps two generations before Guaurthur, fighting in the same disputed areas of the north. This seems the obvious background which the poet invokes, comparing the dead warrior to his similarly named forebear.

  In order for the comparison in the Gododdin to make sense, the germ of the idea, that Arthur was a warleader of the Britons in the days before the sixth-century Anglian colonisation of Bernicia, must have existed before the poem. If the Guaurthur/Arthur verse genuinely dates back to the sixth century, then Arthur the warleader would have been fighting not far beyond the living memory of the audience, and must have been a real person.

  Historia Brittonum does not merely describe an Arthur of the north-east, as we might expect from Y Gododdin. It combines Arthurian material from more than one source, including ones linking Arthur to south-east Wales. It is a work of its time. It does not present ancient documents unaltered from the distant past. What it does do, however, is testify to widespread and consistent material on Arthur the Warleader from before the early ninth century. Equally importantly, it identifies Arthur with another indisputably real person, the leader of the Britons at the battle of Mount Badon.

  We know that this man existed, based on his real achievement, the victory at the siege of Badon Hill. The contemporary record is silent as to his name, and indeed the names of just about everyone else in Britain in the period, but that does not detract from the fact he must have existed.

  Common sense dictates that somebody coordinated the British military response to the Saxons. He lived, it seems, at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries and led the Britons in their united defence. For the Saxon advance to be stopped across the country, the fighting must have occurred in other areas beyond the immediate vicinity of Badon. The political reality of the period seems characterised by the growth of small kingdoms. If they combined in a united response against the Saxons, they must have enjoyed military unity on a different basis and at a higher level than the civitas.

  Although the victor of Badon was obviously a military commander, the political realities of the time blurred the distinction between military and civil power, with warlords dominating or overthrowing provincial rulers across the western empire. The logistics of supplying and coordinating a united response across the civitates necessitates a higher authority, which the military commander might have dominated. This higher authority combined responsibility for the civitates of Britannia Prima, the wall system of Britannia Secunda and the enclaves of Britons in the east. It is therefore not misleading to state that this authority ‘reigned’ over Britain.

  The coincidence between the British Magister Militum and a supporting civil authority, waging wars against the Saxons in the generation before Gildas and Maglocunus, and Arthur the Warleader of Historia Brittonum and the Gododdin is obvious. It is likely they were one and the same person. The only counterargument is wildly unlikely: that in all the British Kingdoms, the true name of the man who led the resistance was forgotten and replaced with that of another man who did not.

  This position, at its most extreme, would make the author of Historia Brittonum the creator of a fictional Arthur, which somehow obliterated all traces of the real warlord. It seems impossible that a single work could ensure that among the Britons no trace of an alternative name for the victor of Badon survived.

  Historia Brittonum is not the sole authority linking the names Arthur and Badon. Annales Cambriae present independent yet supporting material. This not only provides corroboration for Arthur’s role at Badon, but also an account of his death which seems to place this in a civil war, exactly as Gildas’s characterises the succeeding period. The Gododdin, Historia and Annales describe the same real man, the victor of the battle of Badon, and are perfectly consistent with historical reality.

  It is easy to discern a faultline between this material and Welsh Arthurian legends. The historical material pre-dates these legends and does not derive from them. The legends, including the saints’ Lives, do not see Arthur as a warleader coordinating the kings of the Britons against the Saxons. Instead, he is shown as a Dark Age Welsh king, with a similar position to the tyrants of de Excidio. He is shifted in time, to become a contemporary of Gildas, Maelgwn and Owain, son of Urien. Furthermore, he is assigned his own warband of fabulous heroes, rather than his actual colleagues, the kings of the Britons.

  All this is a distortion of the picture presented by the historical sources. Even Arthur’s victory over the Saxons at Badon, the touchstone of his existence, is missing. This eleventh-century legendary Arthur is distinct from everything which has gone before. This causes no problem for researchers into the real Cassivelaunus, the real Magnus Maximus, the real Gildas, who similarly became the focus of Welsh legendary material at the same time.

  The legendary and the historical Arthurs were blended by the artifice of Geoffrey of Monmouth, producing a fictionalised picture in which the legendary aspect predominated. This has cast doubt on the historicity of Arthur, but it is relatively easy to see where Geoffrey has built on and reinterpreted existing sources. His fictionalised Arthur has no bearing on whether the real Arthur existed or not, and it is unfair to treat a refutation of the former as reflecting on the latter.

  The victor of Mount Badon was a real person, and his dominating role in Britain implicit in his achievement. We have every reason to think that he is the original behind the Arthur of the Gododdin and Historia Brittonum. We have equally no reason to think that those sources are wrong in granting him the name Arthur. This man, this Arthur, commanded kings, at a time when private citizens and public officials kept to their allotted positions. In this sense, therefore, it is reasonable to say that the generation which witnessed the siege of Badon did indeed live in the ‘reign of Arthur.’

  Abbreviations

  DEB

  Gildas’s de Excidio Britanniae

  EH

  Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People

  HB

  Historia Brittonum (‘Nennius’)

  HRB

  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae

  YG

  Y Gododdin

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