The Reign of Arthur E-Book

Christopher Gidlow

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 515

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Did King Arthur really exist? The Reign of Arthur takes a fresh look at the early sources describing Arthur's career and compares them to the reality of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. It presents, for the first time, both the most up to date scholarship and a convincing case for the existence of a real sixth-century British general called Arthur. Where others speculate wildly or else avoid the issue, Gidlow, remaining faithful to the sources, deals directly with the central issue of interest to the general reader: does the Arthur that we read of in the ninth-century sources have any link to a real leader of the fifth or sixth century? Was Arthur a powerful king or a Dark Age general co-cordinating the British resistance to Saxon invaders? Detailed analysis of the key Arthurian sources, contemporary testimony and archaeology reveals the reality of fragmented British kingdoms uniting under a single military command to defeat the Saxons. There is plausible and convincing evidence for the existence of their war-leader, and, in this challenging and provocative work, Gidlow concludes that the Dark Age hypothesis of Arthur, War-leader of the Kings of the Britons, not only fits the facts, it is the only way of making sense of them.

Leseprobe

To The Oxford Arthurian Society, without which . . .

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing

This paperback edition first published in 2005

Reprinted in 2010 by

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© Christopher Gidlow, 2010, 2013

The right of Christopher Gidlow to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9515 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Who was King Arthur?

PART ONE: From History

1. In the Reign of King Arthur . . .

2. Arthur Fought against Them in Those Days

3. The Strife of Camlann

4. The Destruction of Britain

5. Tyrants and Kings

6. The Kings of the Britons

PART TWO: Into Legend

7. Arthur’s Brave Men

8. Lives of the Saints

9. Geoffrey of Monmouth

10. Arthur, King of Britain

Epilogue: Digging up Arthur – Glastonbury 1190

Conclusion: The Reign of Arthur?

Bibliography

MAPS

1. ‘Arthur’s Britain’

2. Searching for Mount Badon

3. Gildas’s Britain

4. Late Roman Britain

5. Britons vs Saxons

6. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur – The last campaigns

Many thanks to all those who helped me on the long route to The Reign of Arthur. Special thanks must go to Andrew Smith, for his persuasive suggestions, eye for detail and help with tricky translations, and also for permission to use his research on the press coverage of the Artognou stone. Thanks, too, to the numerous members of the Oxford Arthurian Society, especially Peter Ewing, whose thought-provoking talks raised many of the ideas tackled here. Dr Jeremy Catto, Dr Nick Higham and Charles Evans-Günther gave help and support when this book was still in its infancy. I should also like to thank my wife Julie, our son Geheris and my parents Alan and Valerie for, among other things, our intrepid expeditions to most of the obscure Arthurian locations mentioned in this book. Lastly, I should mention my primary school teacher Keith Moxon, who first introduced me to the dark-age historical context of the Arthurian Legends of which I was so fond. It was that encouragement which, ultimately, led to this book being written.

Unless otherwise stated, the images in this book are © Julie Hudson, and are used with permission. The extract on p. 238 is reprinted by permission of Boydell & Brewer Ltd from King Arthur, Hero and Legend by Richard Barber (Boydell Press, 1986) p. 135. Extracts from Thorpe, L. (ed. and trans), Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966), © Lewis Thorpe 1966 and Thorpe, L. (ed. and trans), Gerald of Wales: Description of Wales (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 281–8, © the estate of Lewis Thorpe 1978, are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

The quotation from Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is taken from Vinaver, A., Malory Works (OUP, 1971). It is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. The quotation from Myres, J.N.L., The English Settlements (OUP, 1986), is also reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

Unless otherwise noted, extracts from Historia Brittonum are reproduced by kind permission from Arthurian Period Sources volume 8, Nennius (ed. and trans. by Dr John Morris) published in 1980 by Phillimore, Shopwyke Manor Barn, Chichester, West Sussex, PO20 2BG.

Quotations from Gildas are reproduced by kind permission from Arthurian Period Sources, volume 7, Gildas (ed. and trans. by Michael Winterbottom), published in 1978 by Phillimore, as above.

Arthur was a great king. He ruled a land of knights in armour, damsels in distress, dragons and derring-do, home of Merlin the Magician and Morgan le Fay. He was born in Tintagel, became king by a combination of sword, stone and sorcery, and ruled from the castle of Camelot. At his Round Table sat Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad, seekers of the Holy Grail. Finally, in tragedy, the love of Lancelot and Guenevere brought down the whole kingdom, leaving Arthur sleeping in the Isle of Avalon.

Did this King Arthur really exist? Almost certainly not. He was defined by writers of romance fiction in the twelfth century and refined through the Middle Ages. He inhabited a fabulous world based on that of his medieval audience. It was in this form that Arthur was revived by the Victorians and entered the public imagination.

Could this fantastic king be based on historical reality? By the late twentieth century, scholars reached a consensus. Through the legends, they argued, could be glimpsed a genuine historical Arthur. Perhaps he was not a king but a warlord, a Roman general or Celtic chieftain, leading his armoured cavalry against invading Saxons. He fought battles at such windswept locations as Liddington Castle or Little Solsbury Hill. His capital, a declining Roman city or reclaimed hillfort, remembered by the name of Camelot, could be identified by archaeology. His world, if not exactly one of chivalry, was a last beacon of civilisation against a barbarian wind of change.

This image of the ‘historical’ Arthur found its way easily into popular history. Professional historians were soon followed by amateur enthusiasts and local antiquarians. Regional partisans still traipse across their local fields, clutching Ordnance Survey maps, seeking names resonant of Camelot and Avalon.

According to the medieval ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, the deeds of King Arthur would always provide food for storytellers. The number of new Arthurian novels, each longer than all the early Arthurian sources combined, appears to bear this out. Although in the mass media the name of Arthur will always evoke the image of ‘knights in armour’, most novels since the sixties have cloaked their Arthur in the muddy trappings of the Dark Ages. This new ‘fictional’ Arthur has become subtly different from his ‘historical’ counter-part. He emerges from a Celtic twilight into a world where the ‘old ways’ face the destructive coming of the Church of Rome. While Arthur may be ambivalent in this contest, there is no disguising the ‘old’ loyalties of the powerful women surrounding him, exponents of a matriarchal tradition stretching back to Boadicea and the Druids. Inevitably, there is love between the Queen and a Lancelot-figure, there is a grail, holy to one tradition or another, an Avalon where Christian and pagan battle for the hearts and minds of Dark Age Britain.

But are these ‘Dark Age’ Arthurs any more real than the ‘medieval’ figure which preceded them? Over the last twenty-five years, the academic world has become almost unanimously hostile to the idea of a ‘historical Arthur’. It has become scholarly orthodoxy that, although someone called Arthur may have existed at some point in the Dark Ages, even that small admission is best avoided. The first mentions of him were written hundreds of years after he supposedly lived and are so hopelessly entangled in myth and folklore that nothing historical can be gleaned from them. Sources from his own time make no mention of him, archaeology has uncovered no trace of him, so it is best to ignore him completely.

This sea-change in scholarly opinion has taken place largely out of public view. It has hardly entered into popular histories. The public demand for Arthurian books has been fed by reprints of old and discredited works, or poorly researched amateur sleuthing of the ‘King Arthur shared my post-code’ variety.

The refusal of academic historians to engage with the ‘evidence’ for Arthur presented in popular works is a great disservice to interested readers. The essential questions remain unanswered. Did King Arthur exist? Was he a significant figure of history and can we learn anything of his reign? If not, how did the legendary image arise?

We shall find out what contemporary sources actually say. We shall use this information to assess how likely later works are to give us a true picture of the enigmatic ruler. We shall see how they came by their information and how reliable they are. Our investigation will take us up to the late twelfth century when romance fiction firmly took hold of the Arthurian genre, obscuring its possible factual content. I will show that the idea of Arthur as a real Dark Age British military leader is very plausible, and goes a long way to making sense of the evidence. On the way, I hope to dismiss some modern prejudices both for and against the ‘historical’ Arthur.

First, we need to find an approximate date for the reign of Arthur.

ONE

The popular view of Arthur largely derives from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, written in 1470. Although Malory portrays the king as a medieval ruler, he occasionally reveals the pre-medieval era when his tales are set:

They com to the Sege Perelous, where they founde lettirs newly wrytten of golde, whyche seyde: Four Hondred wyntir and four and fyffty acomplyssed aftir the Passion of Oure Lorde Jesu Cryst oughte thys syege to be fulfylled . . . ‘in the name of God!’ seyde Sir Launcelot, and than accounted the terme of the wrytynge, frome the byrthe of oure Lorde unto that day. ‘Hit semyth me,’ seyd sir Launcelot, ‘that thys syge oughte to be fulfylled thys same day, for thys ys the Pentecoste after the four hondred and four and fyffty yere.”

If Sir Lancelot has calculated correctly, the quest for the Holy Grail is about to begin around the year AD 487. Other Arthurian sources give similar dates from the late fifth to the early sixth centuries. However, it is clear that the romances do not give us an accurate picture of those centuries. Malory has an archbishop of Canterbury at least 50 years too early, a Holy Land inhabited by Turks 500 years before they arrived and a siege of the Tower of London (c. 1080) using ‘grete gunnes’ 800 years before they were first seen in England. Not only in such anachronisms is it obvious that we are not reading tales about the fifth century; central images and themes derive from the medieval world, not the Dark Ages. Courtly love and tournaments point us to the twelfth century. Jousting would have been impossible without stirrups, unknown in fifth-century Britain. If Arthur and his companions were real inhabitants of Britain c. 487, we must look beyond the romances for evidence of their world.

At the start of the fifth century, Britain had been part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years. Roman roads, walls and fortifications could be seen all over the country. Although most of the troops had left the island in 409 and the Emperor had formally charged the Britons with their own defence the following year, imperial documents continued to be drafted detailing the military and civil officers of the British provinces. To the bureaucrats in the imperial capitals, normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.

Roman civilisation, by 410, was not that of films such as Gladiator. Pagan religion, gladiatorial games and vestal virgins had been outlawed for almost a century. Heavy cavalrymen, not the famous legionaries, dominated the armed forces. In many cases, as imperial authority waned, Christian bishops took over governmental responsibilities. British bishops even ventured across the barbarian-infested seas to attend councils in Europe. The language of the Empire, Latin, continued to be used by the Church. The only British writers whose work has survived from this period were churchmen and wrote in Latin.

Britain, however, was hardly a well-organised Roman province. Angles, Saxons and Jutes had seized control of those parts of the island nearest the continent. We call these people the Anglo-Saxons or the English, though to their enemies they were the Saxons. They later recorded such exploits as that of one of their leaders, Aelle, taking the Roman fort of Anderida and killing all the inhabitants in 491, just four years after the date Malory assigned to the Grail quest.

Archaeology indicates that in the fifth and sixth centuries Saxon settlements were confined to the south and eastern coasts and the river valleys most easily accessible from them. It was many generations before the more remote highlands of Britain were conquered by the English.

Elsewhere in the Empire, barbarians had settled into the structures of the Roman provinces they invaded. They lived in the same cities, used the same titles and eventually, in France, Spain and Italy, came to speak the language of the Romans they conquered. Mostly, these barbarians had come from just beyond the borders of the Empire. They had all been converted to Christianity and those aspects of Roman culture this implied before they crossed the frontiers.

In Britain, the situation was different. The invaders came from areas which had not bordered on the Empire. They retained their pagan religion and culture and did not begin to accept the imperial religion until 597. Inevitably, Roman civilisation, soldiers, bishops and all, disappeared from the lands under their sway. It is English which we speak here today.

Writers referred to two other barbarian groups: the Picts who lived in the north beyond the Antonine Wall and the Scots, invaders of the western shore from Northern Ireland. Between them and the English lay the Britons themselves

Although the word ‘British’ now covers all the inhabitants of Britain, in the Dark Ages it referred to one specific people. The Saxons knew them as the Welsh, or foreigners, but the Britons called themselves the Combrogi or fellow-citizens. Although they used Latin on their monuments, they spoke British, the ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton, what we now call a Celtic language.

The leaders of the British came from those areas which had seen the least Romanisation. For example, archaeology and history show the Cornish leaders to have been important, though no major Roman structures have been found west of Exeter. Other British leaders came from Wales, Cumbria (still bearing the name of the Combrogi) and, north of Hadrian’s Wall, land which had barely been under Roman control at all. Some British rulers held Roman cities. Most preferred to refortify the ancient hillforts deserted since the Roman Conquest. The massive South Cadbury Castle, often said to be the original Camelot, is one of the most famous.

There seemed to be little trace of Roman culture among these Britons. St Patrick wrote of some that they were ‘not Citizens of the holy Romans, but of the devil, living in the enemy ways of the barbarians’.

It was among the Britons that the legends of Arthur were preserved. History, archaeology and, perhaps, their legends provide clues to these, the darkest of the British Dark Ages. Somewhere in the gloom, if the medieval romances are to be believed, we should find the evidence for the reign of Arthur.

Ancient Manuscripts

The main historical texts relating to the years 400–550, with the approximate dates they were written, are:

Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘On the Destruction of Britain’) (c. 500)

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731)

Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’) (829)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (early part 891)

Annales Cambriae (‘Annals of Wales’) (977)

All except Gildas are from long after the time they describe. This is a common feature of most history books and does not necessarily imply that they are untrustworthy. To investigate the real Arthur, we must discover how reliable and internally consistent these texts are, how plausible are their accounts, and how they compare to what can be deduced from archaeology.

Historians used to place great reliance on written sources. These provided the names, dates, kings and battles from which conventional history was constructed. Writers tended to accept that the sources covering the Dark Ages were a close approximation of the truth. Even later sources were sometimes used, on the grounds that they probably contained material from oral tradition or lost written sources. Archaeological remains were largely interpreted on the basis of these written sources.

Where historians were critical, they were inclined to favour the English over the British material. The first English historian, Bede, a congenial and deceptively modern scholar, provided a reassuring framework of AD dates and recognisable kingdoms. The apogee of almost uncritical acceptance of written material came in 1973 with John Morris’s The Age of Arthur. Sources of disparate periods and genres were combined by Morris into a highly imaginative story of Arthur as Emperor of Britain. This was challenged four years later, in the rather more obscure pages of the journal History, by David Dumville. An expert in the ancient languages of the British sources, he argued that all of them were very late and so infected with legendary material that no reliance could be placed on them. Academics have, generally, accepted Dumville’s thesis. It is assumed, rather than argued, that the ninth- and tenth-century material dealing with Arthur is ‘inadmissible evidence’ (Dark 2000).

Archaeologists have effectively been given carte blanche to disregard the written sources. No longer fettered by the prejudices of ancient Britons, they treat sub-Roman Britain to all intents and purposes as prehistoric. Finds can be interpreted according to the prevailing fashion. Gildas can be used selectively to bolster a case, as where he says that Britons retreated to fortified hills, but ignored when he says that they were fleeing Saxons intent on destroying their cities and massacring them. Because all written sources are equally suspect, they are all equally useful if they reinforce or attract publicity for an archaeologist’s latest finds. Thus, experts who would dismiss any notion that Arthur was a Dark Age king will happily connect the name ‘Artognou’ on a slate from Tintagel with the twelfth-century legend that Arthur was conceived there by magic.

As noted, this change in academic opinion is unknown to the general public. Morris’s Age of Arthur, discredited by reputable historians, is still in print and available in all good bookshops. Books by Dumville are harder to find. Readers with a general interest in King Arthur, spurred on by authors such as Morris, are surprised to find few academic works ready to debate the points.

The ‘evidence’ deserves to be analysed, not simply dismissed. For this reason, I will deal with the written sources in some detail. I will show why they are not used as uncritically as once they were, while re-examining whether they have anything plausible to say about the reign of Arthur.

All Dark Age sources were written to serve particular interests, especially the Catholic Church and the dominant dynasties of Wessex and Gwynedd. They derive from eras when literacy was confined to the elite. There were no sources composed by ‘ordinary’ people. Moreover, the written sources only survived because elite groups had them copied and preserved. This is just as true of the sixth-century ‘admissible’ evidence as it is for the ninth-century ‘inadmissible’ evidence. The work of Gildas survived because it contained a message which it was useful for tenth-century ecclesiastics to perpetuate.

If a history book is written to support particular circumstances, this does not by itself prove it is false. Current circumstances might exist because of those past events. Conversely, knowing that these sources were written and preserved to serve particular interests is also useful. When the material supports those interests, attention should be drawn to it. When it has nothing to do with, or indeed contradicts, them, this provides very useful evidence indeed.

He was not Arthur

Apart from the odd monument inscribed with names such as Voteporix or Drustanus (Sir Tristan?) the sixth-century British left practically no written records. Instead, Gildas tells us, they loved to hear their deeds recited by bards, men with ‘mouths stuffed with lies and liable to bedew bystanders with their foaming phlegm’.

Bardic poems were passed on from generation to generation, surviving to be written down in the Middle Ages. The oldest of the poems, Y Gododdin, gives detailed insight into the lives of the Britons. It includes this verse referring to Arthur himself.

More than three hundred of the finest killed.

In the middle and on the flanks he laid them low

Splendid before the host, most generous willed,

Bestowing horses from his own herd every winter’s snow.

He brought down black crows to feed before the wall

Of the city, though he was no Arthur.

Of men he was amongst the mightiest of all,

Before the fence of alderwood stood Guaurthur.

The poem was written down in the thirteenth century, but scholars agree that many of its verses are much earlier in origin. The most recent work concludes, on grounds of language and content, that this verse is among the oldest, possibly from as early as 570 (Koch 1997). Not only is Arthur the rhyme for the hero’s name, but in the original Welsh all the four last lines rhyme, making it unlikely that Arthur was inserted by a later scribe.

Guaurthur was one of the heroes of the Gododdin, the tribe living around Edinburgh, who took part in an expedition against Catraeth (modern Catterick). This is probably where he provided the crows with carrion, since the word used, Cair, refers specifically to a Roman city, as Catraeth was. The Gododdin were fighting against the Saxons of Deira some time in living memory before 570. In some way, Guaurthur was comparable to Arthur. Arthur was not said to be among the Gododdin. The best explanation is that he was a famous figure the poet expected his audience to recognise.

Keep this in mind when we confront arguments against Arthur being a historical figure. If Y Gododdin were the only source mentioning Arthur, no one would doubt that he was historical, famous as a warrior, from a period sometime before the expedition to Catraeth. No one else in Y Gododdin is a mythical superman, a composite character pieced together from scattered legends. Another verse includes the comparison ‘what Bratwen would do, you would do, you would kill, you would burn’. Bratwen is not a rhyme for the hero’s name, or anything else in the verse. No one, however, has written articles suggesting Bratwen’s name was intruded into the text close to the thirteenth-century date of the manuscript. Bratwen is accepted by all commentators as a genuine character familiar to the listeners.

The Gododdin reference to Arthur ought to be uncontroversial. Unfortunately, the weight of medieval tales is always set in the balance against such simple conclusions. This seems most unfair. If being the stuff of medieval legends is a good enough reason for being banished from genuine history, Alexander, Charlemagne and Richard the Lionheart would be discounted as historical.

It is crucial to know whether Y Gododdin is genuinely early. Like most works from the ancient and early modern world, it survives only in a copy from a much later period. Historians must judge the content, not the physical age of the book. There are three main reasons for dating it to the late sixth century. In its current form, it has verses attributing it to Neirin. The Historia Brittonum says that Neirin was a famous poet soon after Arthur, apparently in the sixth century. This argument is circular, as either of the references could have influenced the other. Moreover, the name Neirin does not appear in the earliest verses.

To fight at Catraeth, the Gododdin would have had to pass through the land of Berneich (Bernicia). Various sources describe a Saxon takeover of Berneich in the mid-sixth century. The earliest version of Y Gododdin only speaks of the Deor (Deirans), the English in the Catraeth area, with no mention of Berneich. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the expedition took place before the Saxon conquest of the more northerly region.

Most compellingly, the language of Y Gododdin is an incredibly old version of Welsh. The manuscript preserves two versions of the text, the first (A) being a more recent and expanded version than the second (B). Many pre-Old Welsh spellings are preserved in both texts, a fact which can be checked from established linguistic theory, place-names and contemporary Irish material. These forms predominate in the B text, which includes the Arthur verse. Koch argues that the B text is itself a composite, with some parts, including the Arthur verse, of sixth-century vintage. His hypothesis is not universally accepted, but all authorities agree that the B text is earlier than the A. The idea that the Arthur reference was inserted when the manuscript was written does not explain why the inserter would put it into the more difficult older text while not carrying it through into the easier A text, where Guaurthur is also named.

Since the nineteenth century, philologists have demonstrated the regular and predictable rules by which languages have evolved. It is now relatively simple to trace how the name ‘Maglocunus’ found in Gildas became ‘Mailcunus’ in Historia Brittonum, later emerging as ‘Malgo’ in Geoffrey of Monmouth and ‘Maelgwn’ in the Triads. However, this process was not understood by Dark Age or medieval writers. It is thus easy for modern historians to deduce the age of the sources by the form of language used, irrespective of the age of the manuscript or any chronological claims within it. At its most simple level, we know that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s source for the exploits of Urien Rheged must be later than that used by the Historia Brittonum, as he calls the king Urianus, while the Historia preserves the name in the earlier form of Urbgen. By studying their language, we can deduce that poems like Y Gododdin are much earlier than the late thirteenth- or fourteenth-century manuscripts in which they survive.

All the evidence suggests that the reference to Arthur was an original part of a mid-to-late sixth-century poem. He was a famous warrior, with whose deeds those of one of the Gododdin men were comparable. To suggest anything other than this straightforward explanation is utterly illogical. The probability is that the reference is to a real warrior of the recent past.

This is a plausible and reasonable inference from the evidence. There is nothing to suggest that Guaurthur was not a real British warrior of the sixth century. There is likewise no reason to think any differently of Arthur. Arthur’s existence rests on exactly the same source. If Koch is right, then Arthur was known to have existed before the late sixth century, when the first verses of Y Gododdin were composed. His fame as a warrior made him a fitting subject for comparison to a similarly named Gododdin hero.

This plausible and reasonable hypothesis forms the basis of the rest of the book. There was an Arthur. His deeds were known to a sixth-century poet and his audience. He was comparable to and better than Guaurthur. Like everyone else in the poem, he is not a mythological demi-god. He is not a composite character formed from various stories of men of the same name. For the Gododdin poet there is obviously one recognisable Arthur. We know, in short, that Arthur existed in so far as it is possible to know that any named Briton of the fifth or sixth century existed. There is no reason why he alone should have to demonstrate his existence beyond reasonable doubt, rather than on the balance of probability.

Asserting that Arthur was a real person, however, is not the same as proving that ‘King Arthur’ existed. Though the poem has given us reason to believe that Arthur was real, we will have to look at other Dark Age sources to see what light they shed on the enigmatic comparison. If Guaurthur was not Arthur, then who was?

TWO

Then Arthur fought against them in those days, with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was the leader in the battles. The first battle was towards the mouth of the river which is called Glein. The second and third and fourth and fifth were on another river, which is called Dubglas and is in the Linnuis region. The sixth battle was on the river which is called Bassas. The seventh battle was in the wood of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth battle was in Castellum Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of Saint Mary ever Virgin upon his shoulders, and the pagans were put to flight on that day and there was great slaughter upon them through the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the virtue of St. Mary the Virgin His Mother. The ninth battle was waged in the City of the Legion. He waged the tenth battle on the shore of the river which is called Tribuit. The eleventh battle was made on the hill which is called Agned. The twelfth battle was on the hill of Badon, in which 960 men fell in one day in one charge by Arthur. And no-one laid them low save he himself. And in all the battles he emerged the victor.

Historia Brittonum

The source which first gives the military career of Arthur is Historia Brittonum (The History of the Britons). The earliest version is found in Harleian Manuscript 3859, so called because it once belonged to the eighteenth-century collector, Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford. In the Harleian Manuscript, the Historia is anonymous, but other versions give its author as, variously, Nennius, a son of Urbacen, Mark the Anchorite or Gildas, a much earlier writer.

The Arthurian material in the Historia is of vital importance, since it is the earliest record of the actual deeds of Arthur. Whether this material is historical or legendary is crucial to any argument about the reign of Arthur. We must therefore consider what kind of document the Historia is.

Dumville, the current editor of the Historia, is adamant that it is overwhelmingly of a legendary or ‘synthetic’ character. The ninth-century author has heavily edited his sources to fit them into a preconceived framework. Unfortunately, Dumville has yet to complete his publication of the work, meaning that for the past twenty-three years we have simply had to take his word for this. Historians have consciously avoided making any comments but have generally taken his assertions as full permission to ignore the Historia’s Arthurian material. It is academic received wisdom that the Historia is valueless as a historical source for the fifth/sixth centuries.

Popular works on the historical Arthur usually make no reference to this. In them it is generally assumed that the Historia was written by a ninth-century Welsh monk called Nennius and that much of the material is presented at one remove, for instance by translating Welsh poems into Latin, from lost primary sources. This gulf of understanding is compounded by the version of ‘Nennius’ most accessible to amateur historians. This version (Morris 1980) is so inaccurate and inconsistent that it must be used with extreme caution. Its editor, John Morris (author of The Age of Arthur), died before completing his work. What was published was the Harleian Recension, augmented with excerpts from other texts and with no indication as to the criteria used for selection. Other additions, such as a section identifying Badon as Bath, are not found here in any text whatever.

Historia Brittonum was copied numerous times in the Middle Ages. Its disjointed style made it easy for scribes to omit or add sections and update the material. These produced many variants, which we can group together in families called ‘recensions’. The recensions follow, more or less faithfully, a particular exemplar. The Harleian Recension, represented by the oldest surviving text, is generally considered the closest to the original. Whether this is actually true must await Dumville’s full publication. For the purposes of this book, we assume it is.

The Nennian Recension claims to be written by a certain Nennius. Its prologue continues: ‘I have undertaken to write down some of the extracts that the stupidity of the British cast out; for the scholars of the island of Britain had no skill, and set down no record in books. I have therefore made a heap of all that I have found, both from the annals of the Romans and from the chronicles of the Holy Fathers, and from the writings of the Irish and the English and out of the traditions of our elders.’

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the Nennian prologue was part of the original Historia. If it had been, we might expect it to be reproduced in the other recensions as well. There is no reason to believe that the writer, although he may be passing down a true tradition of authorship, had any genuine knowledge of the author’s sources or intentions. Nevertheless, the name ‘Nennius’ is now conventional for the otherwise anonymous author. I use ‘Nennius’ when discussing the methods and intentions of the author, without committing myself to his actual identity.

Most commentators follow the Nennian prologue in assuming that the author simply gathered together excerpts from various books, mixed them with oral traditions and regurgitated them almost undigested in the Historia. The ancient sources are therefore preserved at only one remove in a sort of historical scrapbook. Dumville, however, is convinced that the writer had worked over his sources in a comprehensive way to fit a chronological framework, leaving little material unaltered. This understanding is crucial to an appreciation of the Historia.

Historia Brittonum covers a broad sweep of time, from the legendary founding of Britain after the Trojan War, through to the seventh century. About two-thirds of the book deal with the most recent 300 years of history. The author provides the approximate date of the book. At the start, he gives the present as AD 831. Later, he calculates that Patrick went to Ireland in AD 405, 421 years before the present (i.e. AD 826). In the same section, he gives Patrick’s date as 438, giving a date for the present of 859. Either an authorial or scribal error has resulted in two different dates for the same event, or the manuscript has been updated. Dumville suggests that Nennius intended a date of AD 829 for the present (IV in Dumville 1990).

Wonders of Britain

After the end of the Historia, there is a gazetteer of Wonders of Britain, the Mirabilia. It is not clear whether this originally formed part of the work. The author seems to be a contemporary of Nennius and to share an interest in the same area of Britain. The wonders have been associated with the Historia from early in the manuscript tradition, passing together into different recensions. I will treat them as the work of the same author, although if they are not, the fact that two ninth-century writers give supporting material on Arthur would strengthen my case.

‘Arthur’s Britain’.

Although the scope of the wonders is national, the fact that most of them are actually to be found in South Wales and the Severn Estuary points firmly to the author’s home area. In Buelt (Builth), he tells us, there is a pile of stones called Carn Cabal built by Arthur the Soldier. The topmost stone bears the footprint of Arthur’s dog Cabal, made when he was hunting the boar Troynt. In Ercing, 35 miles away in modern Herefordshire, is the wonder of Licat Anir. This Anir was the son of Arthur the Soldier, who killed him and built a tomb there. The author has personally tried to measure the tomb and found it impossible to obtain the same measurement twice. (The name of Arthur’s son is frequently given as Amr. I follow the reading of the current editor.) The only other wonder the author connects to a named individual is a tomb in a church built by St Illtud in Llwynarth, on the Gower peninsula, 50 miles away from the two Arthur wonders.

These wonders are important pieces of information. They tell us Arthur was a soldier, as we might have expected from Y Gododdin, but locate him in South Wales. We know that, as Y Gododdin was transmitted through the early Middle Ages, it acquired verses linking it to Welsh heroes. However, these emphasised the North Welsh Kingdom of Gwynedd, not Builth or Ercing. Moreover, we also know that the verse referring to Arthur pre-dated those interpolations.

Although the wonders are folkloric in character, this gives no reason to doubt that Arthur was real, any more than that Illtud was a real Dark Age cleric. Folklore and legend linked to real characters and events were in the idiom of even the most sober Dark Age historian. The wonders attributed to Arthur are no more than would be expected from a writer of Dark Age Britain. No one doubts Bede’s account of Oswald of Northumbria’s death at the battle of Maserfelth. Yet Bede devotes most of this account to describing wonders such as the cure of a sick horse which rolled onto the spot where Oswald was killed or the man whose house burnt down save for the beam where his cloak, touched by the mud from the site, had hung (EH IV 2). Even tombs of varying length were not considered impossible. The stone sarcophagus made for King Sebbi of the East Saxons was too short. ‘In the presence of the Bishop and of Sighard, son of the monk king . . . and a considerable number of men, the sarcophagus was suddenly found to be the correct length for the body.’ By contrast, although Anir’s tomb and the footprint of Cabal are wonders to the contemporary writer, they derive from less than wonderful events in Arthur’s life, hunting a boar at Builth and killing his son in Ercing.

What they do lack is any sense of a historical context. The reason for this is perhaps that one had already been provided by the Historia. Here, Arthur is one of three named leaders of the British in their wars against the Saxons. The Historia says these wars began after a British ruler, Vortigern, invited the Saxons to settle in the island in return for military service against the Picts. This was in the consulship of Felix and Taurus, i.e. AD 428.

Nennius treats Vortigern as ruler of Britain, but his own regional bias is obvious. Most of Vortigern’s deeds are located in central and southern Wales. The writer tells us that Fernmail, contemporary ruler of Buelt and Guorthigirniaun, is a descendant of Vortigern. He traces his genealogy back through ten generations to that king.

The Saxons were led by two brothers, Hengist and Horsa. The Saxons settled peacefully in Kent, but soon broke into revolt. Although Vortigern is shown as weak and helpless, other Britons are ready to take up the fight. The three successive leaders are Vortimer, son of Vortigern, Arthur and Outigirn.

Nennius writes in the same way about all three resistance leaders. Either their exploits derived from a single source or the author has worked different sources into a unified style. At first sight, this seems not to be the case. The passages dealing with them are not sequential, but crudely interwoven with material from apparently different sources. King Ida appears after Arthur and then again, just before Outigirn, though several English genealogies have been inserted between the two mentions.

The first resistance leader is Vortimer, who won four battles against the Saxons, three named and apparently located in Kent. ‘The second battle was fought at a ford called Episford in their language and Rithergabail in our language, and there fell Horsa with a son of Vortigern whose name was Categirn.’

Vortimer died soon after his victories. The Saxons were once again resurgent. We are told about St Germanus and St Patrick. ‘At that time [we still seem to be in the fifth century] the English increased their numbers and grew in Britain. On Hengist’s death, his son Octha came down from the north of Britain to the Kingdom of the Men of Kent, and from him are sprung the kings of the Men of Kent.’

This is followed by the Arthurian battle-list which begins this chapter. This has been examined countless times. Current opinion favours the idea that the list is a composite of battles from various periods ascribed to one legendary leader. It is sometimes said that the battles have been multiplied to bring them up to the ‘legendary’ number twelve. There is nothing to show that Nennius saw any significance in this number. He was happy to give other leaders different numbers of battles.

Most of Arthur’s battles are probably unidentifiable, irretrievably hidden behind modern English place-names or British ones too common to be pinpointed. Only two can be located with certainty. It seems clear that the Caledonian wood was somewhere in Scotland. In the Dark Ages, the name was applied to the forests of lowland Scotland.

There were two cities called ‘the City of the Legion’, Chester and Caerleon-on-Usk. Special pleading could be made for York, which had been a city of the (Sixth) legion though it is never given that name in Dark Age sources. We can be certain which of these the author of the Historia had in mind – Chester. He includes between the historical section and the wonders a list of the cities of Britain. These include York, as Cair Ebrauc, Caerleon as Cair Legeion guar Uisc and Chester simply as Cair Legion. Annales Cambriae mention Chester twice, once as the City of the Legion, in Latin exactly as in the battle-list and once as Cair Legion, site of a battle which also figures in Bede. He gives the Latin and Welsh forms of the name, as well as the English Legacestir, from which our word Chester derives.

The other battles are more problematic. The Linnuis region is usually taken to be the Lincoln area. Castellum Guinnion ought to be a Roman fort. The Historia refers to Britain having ‘innumerable castella, made from stone and brick’ which can only be Roman buildings. Unless named after an unknown man called Guinnion, it seems most likely to be the British version of Vinovium, Binchester in County Durham (Rivet and Smith 1979).

Every writer on Arthur has his theory about the location of Mount Badon. Liddington Castle, on the Ridgeway between Badbury and Baydon, is a favourite. Other Badburys, like the hillfort in Dorset, are also frequently cited. The earliest medieval idea placed it at Bath, perhaps at one of the hills like Little Solsbury outside the city. We will return to the location of the battles again later, but it is important to see that the battle-list implies that Arthur fought wide-ranging campaigns against the Saxons.

After Arthur’s victories, the English invited more settlers and leaders over from Germany. This continued until the time of Ida, who became first King of Bernicia. Working backwards from the reign dates for the Northumbrian kings given in the Historia, we can calculate that the author was thinking of this event as taking place shortly before 560. (Bede placed Ida’s arrival in 547.) The flow of the narrative is broken by some Saxon genealogies, but it soon returns to Ida. ‘At that time, Outigirn then fought bravely against the English nation. Then 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.’

We know nothing more about Outigirn from any sources. Possibly he was celebrated by some of the poets mentioned. The fact that he has no wonders attributed to him, no famous victories or adversaries and no dynasty, all convince that the Historia had no ulterior motive for mentioning him, except a tradition that he had fought the English. Few historians doubt that he was a real figure from this obscure period. Unlike Arthur, he was not burdened by a weight of medieval legends.

As mentioned, later verses added to Y Gododdin claim that it was written by Neirin. Whether Neirin composed the poem or not, the early verses give a view consistent with the Historia, that the expedition took place before Ida’s arrival in Bernicia.

The Historia thus provides a story covering the period c. 450 to c. 550, with the career of Arthur perhaps somewhere in the middle. Arthur seems to be connected to central or south-eastern Wales and to have fought, in the north, with the kings of the Britons against the Saxons. This background is perfectly consistent with Y Gododdin. We can see how Guaurthur was like Arthur: they both fight the Saxons, in the north, at a Roman fortified city. Guaurthur has fought at an encounter where three hundred were slain, but he is not up to the standard of Arthur, who won twelve battles and overthrew three times as many. The obvious conclusion is that the Gododdin poet knew the same story of Arthur as Nennius; that Arthur was credited with similar feats as early as the sixth century. It is highly unlikely that both authors coincidentally linked an Arthur to wars against the Saxons at the same time in similar locations. Although Nennius knew of the Gododdin tribe, he shows no knowledge of the poem. In short, the story of Arthur recorded in the Historia seems to be just what the Gododdin poet had in mind when he made his comparison in the late sixth century.

The Coming of the Saxons

The basic story of the Saxon settlement, revolt and British resistance did not originate with the Historia. It is only the name of Arthur as resistance leader which is not found in the earlier sources.

Bede gives the most detail on names and dates. He uses Gildas’s De Excidio as a primary source, but adds English materials. Bede supplies the name Vortigern for the British ruler who invites in the Saxons, and is followed by all later versions. Gildas simply called this ruler Superbus Tyrannus (the Proud Tyrant). Most commentators see this as a pun on the name Vortigern, which means ‘foremost prince’. There is a convincing case that Gildas specifically uses the Latin term tyrannus because of its similarity to the title tigern actually used by the rulers (Snyder 1998). Some writers argue that Vortigern was not the ruler’s name, but a title, similar to ‘high king’. There is no evidence for this. Many Dark Age men had names incorporating royal or noble titles. ‘Vortigern’ is treated as a proper name by all subsequent writers, and was never used as a title by anyone else.

Gildas may even have named his Proud Tyrant as Vortigern. The name appears in the Avranches family of Gildas manuscripts, from which the earliest excerpts are taken, but not the earliest complete text (I in Dumville 1990). It seems more likely, however, that this name was inserted by a later copyist. Gildas was generally very sparing of proper names. Given the near unanimity that the tyrant’s name was Vortigern, I will use it as a shorthand for the Proud Tyrant when comparing Gildas to the other sources. Whatever his actual name, all sources agree that he existed.

Bede more or less introduced the AD dating system to England. Using it, he established a fifth-century date for the arrival of the Saxons. Gildas states only that the first settlement of the Saxons took place at some undefined time after the Britons had appealed to a Roman leader on the continent, one called Agitius, ‘three times consul’, for help against the Picts and Scots.

The appeal to Agitius can be dated in various ways. At its earliest, the appeal would be made to Aetius, Roman military commander in Gaul from 425, at its latest to Aegidius, sub-Roman ruler of northern Gaul from 457 to 462. The balance of scholarly opinion favours Aetius in the period 446–54 when he was actually consul for the third time. Dark Age writers often used the Latin letter ‘g’ to stand for the ‘y’ sound, meaning Gildas may have pronounced the name as ‘Ayitius’, very close to Aetius. Here the Historia shows its independence from Gildas. If Nennius knew about the appeal to Aetius, consul for the third time, he could have dated it from the consul lists he was using.

The idea that the Saxons were given lands specifically in Kent originates with Bede as well. Bede’s book is called The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It traces the spread of Catholic Christianity through the kingdoms of the Angles and the Saxons. Bede’s concept of the kingdom of Kent being the first Saxon kingdom to be established in Britain is closely linked to the fact that it was the first to be converted to Christianity. Gildas tells us only that the Saxons settled in ‘the eastern part of the island’. Archaeologists have found Saxon settlements over most of eastern England, although whether this directly corresponds to the extent of their political control is not certain. The Saxon revolt did not lead to the massacre of all Britons in the east of the island. Gildas says that some Britons remained there as slaves.

Both Bede and Nennius see Vortigern’s government as being taken over by the Saxons. This would follow the pattern of contemporary events in the rest of the western Roman Empire. Germanic peoples settling in the Roman Empire in return for military service, followed by their violent takeover of these lands, is common in the fifth century. Modern scholars seem to be keen to dismiss Hengist and Horsa themselves as legendary. Archaeology seems to show Saxons infiltrating the island for over a century. The Roman coastal defences were already known officially as the ‘Saxon Shore’. This was paralleled elsewhere in the western Roman Empire, where Germanic barbarians had settled gradually during the fourth century. Universally, however, the Germans took over the western provinces during the fifth century, under named rulers. No one doubts the historicity of Alaric the Visigoth or Clovis the Frank. They led their people in these wars, establishing dynasties which continued to rule in the areas they conquered. Hengist and Horsa are not therefore implausible

What is unique is the idea that the Britons organised their own resistance. This was no wishful thinking by later Welsh writers. Gildas tells us that he is living in a period of peace which has followed the British resistance. The sixth-century Byzantine historian Zosimus says that the Britons, ‘fighting for themselves, freed their cities from the attacking barbarians’. He dates this to the period immediately following the defeat of usurper Constantine III in 409.

If Nennius was harking back to a mythical golden age, it is hard to see why he named Vortimer, Arthur and Outigirn as the leaders. They were not remembered as the founders of Welsh dynasties nor were they used to explain contemporary place-names, as both Saxon and British leaders are used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There seems to be no ulterior motive for ascribing the victories to them.

The details of the wars from the British side are first found in the Historia. Unsurprisingly, Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle concentrate on the English side of the picture. Gildas confirms that, up to the battle of Badon, both sides scored victories. Bede knew that Horsa had been killed in battle against the Britons and was buried in east Kent. His principal authority on the area was Albinus, an eminent scholar and Abbot of Canterbury from 709. None of Bede’s English sources passed on the names of the Britons who opposed them until Brocmail, a leader killed at the Battle of Chester, the City of the Legions, in 603. The Historia had no knowledge of Brocmail.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Horsa was killed in 455 at the battle of Aegelesthrep (Aylesford in Kent?). In this version, Vortigern himself was the British commander, though this might have been a guess. Battle after battle under various Saxon leaders is recorded in the Chronicle. The British commanders are nearly all unnamed. In 501, Port, Bieda and Maegla fought at Portsmouth and ‘slew a young Briton, a very noble man’. Seven years later, Cerdic and Cynic slew ‘a Welsh King, whose name was Natanleod, and five thousand men with him. The district was known afterwards as Natanleag [Netley].’ Natanleod was not remembered by the Britons, and his name may have been concocted, as indeed Port’s might have been, to explain the place-name. The next Welsh leaders named are the Kings Coinmail, Condidan and Farinmail, killed at the battle of Dyrham in 577. Being remembered after these wars seems to be a fairly unpredictable occurrence!

It is thus unlikely that the Historia had one source naming both Arthur and Octha as adversaries in these battles. The author had a genealogy, reproduced later in the work, of the kings of Kent naming Hengist’s son as Octha. He probably deduced that, if Hengist was the leader in the first generation of the revolt, his son would have followed in the second wave. Bede had heard of Octha too, in the genealogy of Ethelbert, King of Kent, where he is given as Hengist’s grandson, son of Oisc, Hengist’s son. Oisc appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the more modern spelling Aesc. He is said to have become co-ruler with Hengist in 455 after the death of Horsa. Thereafter, the two are always reported together until 488: ‘In this year Aesc succeeded to the Kingdom and was king of the people of Kent for twenty-four years.’ There is nothing at all of what he did in those twenty-four years, by which time he would be in his late seventies at least. Thereafter none of the dynasty is mentioned until 565 when Ethelbert succeeded. Three years later, he is recorded as being defeated in battle by the West Saxons.

If Arthur indeed fought against the kings of Kent, they seem to have taken a severe beating. It is even possible that the line of Hengist and Horsa had really died out. The kings of Kent were in Bede’s time called the Oiscings after their ancestor, Oisc, whom they simply linked to the existing traditions about Hengist. Moreover, in Bede’s time, the inhabitants of Kent were said to be Jutes, though no source describes Hengist’s mercenaries as anything other than Saxons.

The Historia’s assumption that the kings of Kent were always the leaders of the Saxons during these wars may be based on lack of evidence about any other potential adversaries. According to Bede, before the time of Ethelbert of Kent, two Saxon kings had ruled over all the provinces south of the River Humber. The first was Aelle, King of the South Saxons; the second, Caelin, King of the West Saxons. Considering that Bede’s interest lay in tracing the ecclesiastical history of the English – starting first in Kent, then moving to his own land of Northumbria – this tradition of the Great Kings, serving no political purpose at the time it was recorded, is extremely valuable. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle preserves a title for these great Kings, the Bretwaldas, ‘Rulers of Britain’. The chroniclers, although their primary purpose was to celebrate the exploits of their West Saxon dynasty founder, Cerdic, faithfully recorded victories of Aelle, Bretwalda from the (by then) politically moribund South Saxons. In 491, for instance, he besieged the Roman Saxon shore fort of Pevensey, and took it, killing all the British inside. This was the first time the conquest of a Roman fortification by the Saxons was recorded.

Even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle cannot disguise the fact that Saxon victories did not continue unabated. Aelle is never mentioned after his capture of Pevensey. The next Bretwalda, Ceawlin (Bede’s Caelin), fights against the Welsh in 556 and becomes king of the West Saxons in 560. Before his time, there had been a period of twenty-five years (527–52) in which not a single victory against the Britons was reported.

I do not imagine that these dates have any absolute value. The compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle faced the same problems as the author of Historia Brittonum. They had traditions from various Saxon kingdoms with no means of fixing them until the histories of the West Saxons and men of Kent shared a common event just before the arrival of St Augustine. Only the conversion of the king of Kent brought their traditions within the ambit of literate Christian historians.

We know that one of the sources used to compile the history of the Anglo-Saxons, their kings’ lists, were not completely reliable. Bede reports that the disastrous rules of two Northumbrian kings, killed fighting the Britons, were omitted by the men who kept the kings’ lists. We have a glimpse of what might be something similar in some of the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In one of the West Saxon genealogies, Creoda, son of Cerdic, is given as the grandfather of Ceawlin and father of Cynric. In all the other genealogies he is omitted and Cerdic, founder of the dynasty, is given as father of Cynric. In the actual entries of the Chronicle, Cynric rather implausibly accompanies his ‘father’ Cerdic, throughout the early conquest of Wessex, then rules through the victoryless period of 527–52 before appearing again for a victory at Old Sarum. Creoda has evidently been written out of the official history, and a period of defeat by the Britons provides a convincing reason. In spite of the best propagandist efforts of its compilers, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle seems to tell the same story of British victory as the Historia.

The Historia, therefore, gives us a picture of Saxon settlement and revolt, followed by British resistance, which accords with the other sources. The Historia’s unique contribution is naming the warleader of the main wars as Arthur.

The War of Resistance

Historians fall into two main camps over the Arthurian battle-list. Most see it as almost mythological in its hyperbole, and unworthy of consideration. The others, particularly before Dumville, saw it as preserving almost intact an ancient Welsh praise-poem, translated into Latin. Let us consider the charge of mythologising first.

At the Battle of Mount Badon, Arthur is said to have overthrown 960 men in a single charge ‘and no-one laid them low save he alone’. This is supposed to set up Arthur as a mythical superman who could destroy whole armies in single combat. Even given the tendency for exaggeration by Dark Age writers, I cannot believe this is how Nennius intended his comment to be read. It was a commonplace, then as now, to ascribe the feats of an army to its commander. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on the battle of Chester, says: ‘Aethelfrith led his levies to Chester and there slew a countless number of Welsh.’ In the report of the death of Natanleod, a literal reading would suggest that Cerdic and Cynric had killed all 5,000 Welsh. Only Aelle and his son Cissa are said to have captured Pevensey and slain all the inhabitants. The absurdity of suggesting that the battle-list means that Arthur in person had killed all the 960 men is obvious. The presence of armies with the leader is implicit. If Arthur was leading a charge in which 960 men were overthrown, the claim is modest compared with the totals recorded by the Saxon leaders.

If we look at the report of Mount Badon in context, it is plain that the statement ‘and no one overthrew them save him alone’ is not meant to exclude Arthur’s troops (they have never been mentioned), but his partners, the kings of the Britons. In previous battles, they fought together, but in this final charge at the last battle, the glory went to Arthur alone.

The alternative explanation of the list, repeated since the 1930s (Chadwick and Chadwick 1932), is that it is a translation of a Welsh praise-poem. The implication is that we are reading a genuinely ancient source, composed close to Arthur’s time, in which his exploits were celebrated.