3 Why Arthur Is Lost to History

WHEN THE CHURCH CONTROLLED THE WRITTEN WORD PEOPLE GOT the Lives of Saints whether they wanted them or not. When they were free to choose for themselves people went for stories of Arthur, just as they would today. Modern action movies are the equivalent of late-first-millennium tales of Arthur. The Lives of Saints have no such contemporary resonance: once the Church lost its media monopoly, the boring lives of saints proved to be too boring to survive, even when liberally larded with special effects (miracles).

The Christian Church was determined to promote its own interests no matter what, and, as not every historical fact suited its book, the Church destroyed a lot of historical material. Gerald of Wales, who was present when the monks of Glastonbury pretended to find Arthur’s grave, said that Gildas destroyed several “outstanding books” that spoke well of Arthur. Jocelyn ignored the evidence he had found about Merlin-Lailoken, and Mungo Kentigern and produced the book his Bishop wanted him to produce. Non-churchmen too—men like Malory with his authorized books and unauthorized books—followed the party line to keep themselves safe.

Many inactive men today (it is usually men) like fantasy heroes. It was the same in the past: Christian clerics liked fantasy heroes too. Today we have mild-mannered Clark Kent who becomes Superman, and the unremarkable Peter Parker who is Spiderman. In the past they had mild-mannered, unremarkable men like Cadoc and Padarn, who could turn cattle into ferns and open up the earth.

Unfortunately for the early clerics, people still preferred stories of warriors (especially when they involved attractive women) to hagiographies of saints, which were bereft of sex and action. No matter what the clerics did Arthur remained popular among the people, and, as a hero of the Old Way, he distracted people from the propaganda of their church. The Church could not compete with romantic tales, because they had only saintly heroes and so no scope for romance. Lifric of Llancarfan did his best with his story about Cadoc’s parents, but no one—not then, not now—wants to hear a story about the love life of the main character’s mum and dad. The Church had to find other tactics and it did. Stories in which the hero was a composite of a cleric and an action hero were written, and so we have vapid heroes like Galahad and Perceval.

In the early 590s, Pope Gregory I the Great told his churchmen not to destroy places that were held to be special by people of the Old Way but to commandeer them and use them for their own ends. This policy was applied not just to places of worship but also to stories of Arthur and Merlin.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Lord Marchmain was contemptuous of the Christian Church but was said to have accepted Christianity just before he died, despite being too far gone by then to have had a meaningful say in the matter. When Arthur was dead and the oral tradition too weak to allow meaningful opposition, Arthur too was claimed as a Christian. He was, in effect, marchmained.

When it was recognized that the stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken were not going to go away, a different tack was taken. Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken were absorbed into the body of acceptable Christian writings. Arthur was a man of war and not primarily associated with a particular way of thinking and so it was relatively easy to pretend that he was a Christian. Merlin-Lailoken was a man of ideas and so more of a problem. Too closely associated with the Old Way for anyone to believe in a Christian Merlin (despite some rather half-hearted efforts to portray him as just that), the best that could be done was to make him a tame, sexless, avuncular figure—a sort of in-house wizard. This did not work either. Merlin-Lailoken was just not a believable Christian. The best that could be done was to ensure that he was always portrayed as operating under the aegis of the Church.

The most famous story of Arthur and Merlin is the one in which Arthur is said to have taken a magic sword from a magic stone and so proved that he was the rightful king of “England.” Malory took a historical event and changed it to create the wonderful supernatural story everyone knows today (the stone from which Arthur really took a sword is still there to be seen—see chapter 6).

Malory did not dare allow the magic of the sword and the stone episode to be at the instigation of Merlin, and so he has his Merlin ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to lend his authority to the occasion. Choosing a king was an important matter and so it had to be seen to be controlled by the Church or, at least, by a Christian. Merlin was just too obviously not believable as a Christian to be in charge of this event.

Christianizing the stories was only part of the process. Arthur and Merlin also had to be made men of the south of Britain. The scene became London and the whole sword-in-stone episode was said to have taken place under the auspices of Merlin who was, of course, acting under the authority of a Christian Archbishop. The supernatural elements in these stories are obviously fictional. London, in Geoffrey’s day the capital of England, is an obvious anachronism. Merlin-Lailoken was a champion of the Old Way and an inveterate enemy of Christianity. He would never have acted under the authority of a Christian Archbishop. Besides, London was Saxon, and there were no Christian Archbishops about at any possible time when any of this might have happened in history.

The matter of romance leads us inevitably to the matter of sex, something the Christian authorities deplored almost above all things. Consequently, just as with films until the 1950s, if characters had to “do it,” particularly outside marriage and, worse still “enjoy it,” then they had to end up unhappy. So it was with Guinevere, who, according to Geoffrey, because of her adultery, “took her vows among the nuns, promising to lead a chaste life.” That is, in effect, a warning against the dangers of promiscuity. Let that be a lesson to you all.

This adding of a Christian gloss to almost everything of importance for a thousand years served only to promote the Church and obscure what really happened, although not entirely. Over centuries the emphasis in the stories was to shift from the more Celtic Arthur to the more Anglicized, and later more Frenchified, Lancelot. It is, however, still possible to discover what really happened when Arthur took a sword from a stone; what Excalibur really was and where it came from; and where Guinevere really spent her last years.

The written word was restricted to a few compliant clerics who essentially did what they were told to do. For a millenium clerical apparatchiks—men like the monk Jocelyn in Glasgow, Saint Mungo Kentigern’s hagiographer—censored stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken to create the affront to history that is the legend of Arthur best known today. Remember Jocelyn in the twelfth century going out into the “streets and quarters” of Glasgow looking for source material to help him write a biography of Mungo Kentigern? Jocelyn was fortunate. He found a source that contained a truthful account of Mungo’s life. Most biographers would have been delighted by such a find but not Jocelyn, because the source he had found showed that Mungo’s Christianity was even further removed from the Christianity of his bishop than the original Life of Kentigern that had presented a problem in the first place.

Of course, Jocelyn, like almost all of his fellow clerics, ignored the evidence and wrote what suited the Church of his day. The original Life of Mungo and the even earlier source material Jocelyn found were allowed to disappear or (and this is more likely) were deliberately destroyed shortly after Jocelyn finished his new and authorized version. If even sources that related to Christian heroes like Mungo were deliberately warped or destroyed, it is even more likely that material that showed the people of the Old Way in a good light or that even showed them at all would not survive untouched, if it survived at all.

Men like Jocelyn and his bishop had both the means (almost complete control of the media) and the motive (maintaining that control) to create a version of past events that suited their ends. For over a thousand years men like Jocelyn and his bishop made the changes they wanted to writings that contradicted their worldview. From the time of Columba-Crimthann and the Council of Drumceatt (the Wannsee Conference of the early Christian Church) people of the Old Way were marginalized, castigated, and on occasion exterminated. At first many went underground and many became the less threatening “bards.” Later most of the people who in another time would have been druids assimilated to a degree, thinking for themselves while going through the motions of the required rituals. They had to do this to survive. (It was more difficult for women. There was no place for educated women in the new Christian world.)

Is it any wonder that even a glimpse of the true story of Arthur has been lost to us for so long?

More recently, in 1599, the Indian Church of St. Thomas, said to have been founded in the mid-first century by Jesus’ disciple Thomas, held records that contradicted the professions of the more powerful Church of St. Peter in Rome. That year the Archbishop of the Roman Church, Menezes of Goa, following a synod at Diamper (Indian equivalent of Drumceatt) burned the books of the people of the Church of Thomas. Only four manuscripts from before 1599 are known to exist in India today. It is possible, indeed likely, indeed almost certain, that almost all of the work of Taliesin and Aneirin were similarly deliberately destroyed.

More than the works themselves were destroyed; the fact that they were destroyed and, more, the very fact that they had existed at all was nearly erased from the common consciousness.

THE EUREKA MOMENT

As a child I had never dreamed that Arthur wasn’t the southern English king I knew from books and films. It was only in July 1989, when I read Richard Barber’s The Figure of Arthur, that I realized there was a Scottish Arthur-candidate: Arthur Mac Aedan of Dalriada. I was fifteen years old when I read in The Steps to the Empty Throne, the first part of Nigel Tranter’s Robert Bruce trilogy of novels, that the Scottish Gaelic for high king was Ard Righ (righ has the same root as rex, roi, rui, regal, etc.).

I was sure this had to be more than a mere coincidence and that there had to be a some connection between the hero king, Robert Bruce, and me. This was partly because Ard Righ and my surname, Ardrey, sounded somewhat similar, but this was mainly because I was fifteen years old. Until then all I had known about my second name was that it was uncommon in the extreme. I always had to repeat it and spell it out to people I met for the first time, and every Ardrey I knew or had heard of was related to me and there were very few of them.

My imagined royal connections quickly disappeared when reality clicked in. I had started out in life in a “room and kitchen” in Coatbridge, the “Iron Burgh,” in the dark heart of industrial Lanarkshire in central Scotland. I was also “good at school,” but neither of these things was consistent with royal connections. Besides, common sense told me that even if my name did mean high king in Gaelic this did not make me special in any way, because in real life I was only a wee bit Ardrey. I was just as much a Palmer, Watson, Thompson, Milligan, Hostler, Wood, Dunlop, McEwan, Justice, Neilson, Dempster, Mitchell, Judge, Brown, Walker, Comrie, Cross, Campbell, Brankin, Smith, and all the other countless other names borne by my ascendants. Even at age fifteen, I knew there were no such things as objectively special families.

When I became a lawyer and notary public I needed something akin to a motto to put on my official seal, and so I used my second name translated into Latin. When I asked a Gaelic scholar at Glasgow University to confirm that Ardrey was derived from Ard Righ and that it meant “high king,” I was told that Ardrey was actually derived from Ard Airigh and that Ard Airigh meant not high king but high pasture. I was going through a left-wing phase at the time and so this was fine by me.

My old Roman Law teacher translated high pasture into Latin for me and so Ager Altus—literally, high field—became my “motto.” I suspected Ardrey, Ard Airigh, high pasture, was a combination of an occupational name and a place name and that it had probably become attached to my ascendants because in the summer months they had tended the stock that grazed on the shielings, the high summer pastures.

I assumed that they had been Campbells or MacDonalds or some other relatively common name, and that to distinguish themselves from others of the same name, they had added “of the high pasture” to their clan name and that addition had ended up as my second name.

Soon after my marriage I took my new wife, Dorothy-Anne, to visit a place called Ardery outside Strontian in Sunart in the north of Argyll. There we found a working steading and met a man called Jimmy “Ardery,” who told us that Ardery was not his real second name but, as he had always lived at Ardery, that is the name people called him by. This seemed to confirm what I had been thinking: that my people, living for much of the year on the high pastures, had lost their original second name and come to be called simply Ardrey. I was quite happy that my second name meant high pasture. If my family’s most distinguishing feature was that they spent a lot of time in the hills with sheep … well, it could have been much worse.

One thing gave me pause, however—something I came to think of as the Righ-Airigh conundrum. I could not understand how righ meant “king” and airigh meant “pasture” when the words righ and airigh had so much in common and “king” and “pasture” did not.

In the late 1990s Lucy Marshall of New Zealand, an Ardrey on her mother’s side, provided me with evidence that our common ascendants had lived in the Townland of Mullnahunch, County Tyrone, Ireland. I couldn’t find Mullnahunch on any map and mentioned this to an Irish friend, Eugene Creally, just before he went home to Ireland one Christmas. Eugene told his father this and his father, who happened to “know the Ardreys,” kindly sent me a map on which Mullnahunch was clearly marked. Unfortunately, when I visited Ireland in 2004 with my son Eliot I forgot to take Eugene’s father’s map with me, and so we drove by memory as near to Mullnahunch as we could before stopping at a petrol station to ask directions, just as a delivery van drove up. Delivery van drivers usually know where places are and so I asked the driver if he knew where Mullnahunch was and told him why we were looking for it. He knew exactly where it was because, as it turned out, he was an Ardrey on his mother’s side. All there is at Mullnahunch today is a few fields, a few houses, and an Orange Hall (rebuilt after it was blown up in the religious troubles of the late twentieth century). My Ardreys had lived and run a little shop there in the nineteenth century and been buried in the churchyard of the Protestant Church of Upper Clonaneese nearby.

In 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, James VI, King of Scots and son of Mary Queen of Scots, became King of England too. He immediately set about quelling any notions of freedom and independence the majority of the people of Ireland might have harbored, by planting among them Protestants who were loyal to the Crown or, at least, antagonistic towards Roman Catholicism.

Over the next century most of those who settled in Ulster, the most northerly of Ireland’s four provinces, came from Scotland. A disproportionately high number of these were Scots from Argyll, although Scots had been going back and forth across the North Channel since time immemorial, and Antrim and Down were densely Scottish in population even before the plantation.

The fact that anyone living in the north of Ireland is Protestant strongly suggests Scottish roots, and as far as I knew my people had always been Protestants. This meant my people were almost certainly not native Irish; that is, they were not among those Scots who were living in Ireland before the influx of Protestant settlers in the early seventeenth century. All the evidence I found suggested that my people were part of the Protestant Plantation: Scots who had emigrated from Scotland to Ireland, probably in the late 1600s.

In 1665, a William Ardrey sailed to Virginia in the Americas. There is no record of his port of embarkation and so I cannot be sure that he was one of my people, but our second name was uncommon, even in the seventeenth century, and so it is probable that we are related, even though it is impossible to say in what degree. The political, religious, and economic pressures that drove this William from his home would have applied in equal measure to his extended family, and so it is possible that others, perhaps his siblings, left Scotland for Ireland at the same time. All that is certain is that by the late 1600s /early 1700s there were Ardreys of Scottish descent in Ireland.

The records for the year 1714 refer to George Ardree of Aghervilly; Thomas Ardree of Lislea; and Mark and Matthew Ardry of Munburge, all County Armagh. In 1725 there was a John Ardrey at Glasger and in 1731 a John Ardree at Glaskerberg, both County Down. A Mary Ardrey was married in a Quaker ceremony at Charlemont on the Armagh-Tyrone border in 1733, and Robert Ardrey leased land in Banbridge, County Down, in 1755. On November 14, 1791, William and Sarah Arderley had their daughter Margaret Arderley baptized and registered in Donaghmore, the town that for administrative purposes covered the Townland of Mullnahunch. This William and Sarah were probably also the parents of John Ardrey, who was born in 1798 and who is the first person in my direct line I can put a name to with certainty.

John of 1798, my great-great-grandfather, was a farm laborer who lived and died in 1866, in Mullnahunch. He married Ann McCewan and they had five children: George, born in 1834; an anonymous daughter, who probably died young; Sarah Anne (date of birth unknown); John, born in 1843; and my great-grandfather David, born in 1846.

The 1860 Roll of Valuation of Tenements for the Parish of Killeeshil, Co. Tyrone, names twenty-two property holders in Mullnahunch, including, as the last name on the list, John of 1798. He held three roods (3,630 square yards of land), on which were erected a house and an outhouse. The largest landholding in Mullnahunch was sixty acres or 290,000 square yards. Even John’s next door neighbor, John Beadmead, had four acres three roods or 22,990 square yards.

My John was obviously of modest means; indeed, if the value of his tenement is anything to go by, he seems to have headed one of the poorest families in the area. When John of 1798 died, his youngest son, David, my great-grandfather, signed his father’s death certificate with his mark, a cross, which means, almost certainly, that my grandfather Adam was the first in my direct line of Ardreys who could read and write.

Illiteracy was common in Ireland in the nineteenth century, and consequently family names, especially unusual family names, were often variously spelled. Men such as my great-grandfather had to rely on clerks to listen carefully and make an accurate record. There was the added complication that, for political and economic reasons, Scottish names were often Anglicized by people whose first language was not Gaelic, hence the innumerable spellings of my second name in the records: these include Ardray, Ardary, Ardery, Ardry, Ardree, Ardrie, Airdrie, Airdrey, Ardrea, Arderly, Artrey, Arderey, Arderry, Artery, Adderley, Aredrey, Ardarie, Ardare, Ardarike, and even Dare. (This sometimes had unfortunate consequences. My great-grandfather David’s brother, George, married Eliza, John Bedmead’s daughter, the girl-next-door in the village of Mullnahunch. Eliza’s name was written into the records as, variously, Bedmaid and Bedmate by clerks who no doubt thought this was funny. And it is … a bit.)

John Bedmead (father of Eliza of the user-friendly name) brought shoemaking into my family and by the middle of the nineteenth century my Ardreys were running a small shop in Mullnahunch where they manufactured and sold boots and shoes and pots and pans, and sold candles, salt, clothes, and eggs and other farm produce.

Following his father’s death, my great-grandfather David immigrated to Scotland and found work as a car conductor. It was in the early 1990s while I was looking for David’s first home in Glasgow—60 McLean Street, Plantation—that I came across an Ardery Street, a mile and a half away, over the river on the north bank of the Clyde. I wondered if this Ardery Street had anything to do with my David, though the spelling differed from my own name. I did not think that this may have been where the man called Merlin lived in the last two decades of his long life, after he was driven out of town by Mungo Kentigern’s Christians. I was not to discover the evidence for this for more than a decade.

In the 1870s a young Martha Milligan was sent from her home in Kilmarnock to work as a domestic servant in Glasgow. I picture her meeting my great-grandfather David when she was a passenger on his bus going to her work. They were married in 1877. Martha’s family found David work as a railway pointsman in Riccarton, Kilmarnock, and by the time their first son, John, was born they were living in Railway Buildings, Barleith, Kilmarnock. Seven other children followed; the last of them was my grandfather Adam. He was born in 1893, after David and Martha had moved to Coatbridge and opened a shop where they made and sold boots and shoes. The only surviving photograph of David shows a man with a large moustache wearing an apron and standing at the door of his shop near the fountain that marks the center of Coatbridge. My grandfather Adam, an Assistant Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Baillieston, Glasgow, had two sons;¹ my father, another David, was the older of the two.

I served my legal apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office that, I have always suspected, was a portal to the world of Charles Dickens. One of my jobs was to catalog deeds that had been left untouched in black tin boxes in the basement since before I was born. It was on one of these frolics, while working on documents concerning property in Argyll, that I crackled open a title deed that was dry in every sense and saw my second name on a map, on the banks of Loch Awe, Argyll. The spelling was slightly different, Ardray, but I knew old spellings were variable things. I had not known that my name had any connection with Argyll until then, but I had always known of my Protestant Irish connection and so an Argyll connection made sense.

I contacted the Forestry Commission and the people there sent me older and more detailed maps. In the early 1980s, with these to guide me, I drove north along the east side of Loch Awe, past the remains of the ancient church of Kilneuair and the ruins of Fincharn Castle, looking for the lands of Ardray. There is now a picnic site at Ardray, but when I was looking for it that first time there was nothing to suggest where it was, and so I had to use dead-reckoning. I estimated how far it lay from the crossroads at Ford at the southern end of the loch and used my car odometer to count the miles. I also counted burns as I passed, having worked out that Ardray lay between the fifth and sixth burns that ran into the loch, but identifying what was and was not a burn wasn’t easy, far less telling one burn from another. I might as well have followed the second star to the right for all the good any of this did me. I searched all day but found nothing.

On my last night in Argyll, in the bar of the Ford Hotel where I was staying, I told the Forestry Commission workmen who were drinking there my problem. They said they knew where Ardray was and that there were ruins there. They then took a broken dart from the hotel dartboard and a red paper napkin from a table and promised me that on their way home that night they would mark the site of Ardray by pinning the napkin to a tree with the dart. The next day I saw the napkin, walked uphill into the woods, and found the Ardray ruins, a stone shell of a building standing on the bank of a burn.

A few years later, on the same weekend in which we visited Ardery in Sunart, I again tried to find Ardray on Loch Awe, to show it to Dorothy-Anne, but I couldn’t find it. It was only later that I wondered what she must have thought as she stood there in the rain watching me, her new husband, slipping and sliding as I ran in and out of the trees looking for what, at that time, I was calling my “ancient family home.” It was not a scene that compared well with Mr. Darcy showing Pemberley to Elizabeth Bennet.

Ardray was not always such an obscure place. It is clear from Timothy Pont’s sixteenth-century maps that there was something significant there in his day.² Pont marks Ardray (or, as he spells it, Ardery) with a symbol that looks like two tubes above a small circle, but as no one knows what Pont meant by many of the symbols he used and because he was not always consistent, it is impossible to be sure from his map what was originally there or when it was built. The Ardray-Ardery symbol, two parallel tubes, is very uncommon, if not unique. I can find no other symbol like it on Pont’s maps.³

The nearest things to the symbol Pont used to mark Ardray-Ardery on Loch Awe are the symbols he used to mark relatively important buildings: churches and fortified places. Almost all of Pont’s churches and fortified places have a circle symbolizing a settlement nearby, as does Ardray-Ardery.

I was a new lawyer, with lots to learn, and so I did not pursue the matter of my name and family further at that time. Almost ten years later, in 1993, I was driving south of the Kilmartin Glen, along the side of the Crinan Canal to the Mull of Kintyre, to view land that was the subject of a legal dispute in Dunoon Sheriff Court, when I saw a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree with the word Dunardry written on it.

I understood this Dunardry to be Dun Ard Airigh, “Hillfort of the High Pasture,” a rather insipid name and one that did not seem right to me. There are high pastures all over Argyll. Why would anyone call such a vital fortified place, one that commanded the most important route in Argyll and which was situated only a short distance from Dunadd, the ceremonial capital of Dalriada, by such a bland name? Hillfort of the High Pasture just did not make sense.

Dunardry is a large flat-topped hill that looms over the portage route that ran along the narrow neck of land that separated Knapdale and Kintyre for thousands of years, until the Crinan Canal was built in the early nineteenth century to connect Loch Fyne and the interior of Scotland to the Sound of Jura and the Atlantic Ocean. Dunardry was of vital strategic importance, even more so than the more famous hillfort at Dunadd, the first seat of the Scots kings of Dalriada, which lies less than two miles to the north.

Dunadd, a rocky plug some 175 feet high, stands proud in the Moine Mhor, the Great Moss that stretches west to the Sound of Jura. (The Great Moss is now a bird sanctuary.) In its prime Dunadd had four walls on different levels, with terraces accessed by massive gates. On the summit, carved in a flat expanse of rock, is the figure of a boar, a symbol of Argyll; a cup shape, for which there is no generally accepted explanation; and a footprint, which played a part in inaugurations of the kings of the Scots. Nearby is inscribed a single line of as yet un-translated ogham text.

Dunadd is generally accepted as the capital fort of Dalriada, although there is reason to believe there was another, now lost, capital. As the toponymist William Watson writes, “Where was the capital of Scottish Dalriada? Since the middle of the last century [the nineteenth] it has been supposed that Dunadd … was the capital—a theory championed by Skene … though some of the literary evidence used by him refers to another site, unidentified Dun Monaidh.”⁴

I thought again of my Righ-Airigh conundrum. The men who gave the fort its name were warriors. Why would they have named a vital stronghold “the hillfort of the High Pasture,” when the name “hillfort of the High King” was obviously more appropriate? Although I accepted what I had been told, I still felt that I was missing something. Perhaps, I thought, my name meant “High King” after all; perhaps Dunardry did mean “Hillfort of the High King”; perhaps it was and always would be impossible to be sure.

My surname was of interest to me because it was mine and so, naturally, of little or no interest to anyone else. The whole point of family history is that it is personal. Being personal, it leads people down un-trodden paths and allows them to find things no one else has found (primarily because no one else cares enough to discover them). That is how it was for me.

Timothy Pont’s sixteenth century map of Loch Awe showing one of the many Ard Airigh (Ardery/Ardrey) place-names in Argyll. This place-name on Loch Awe prompted my search for Arthur.

In the year 2000 I was planning a weekend break with my then nine-year-old son, Eliot, in Kilmartin, Argyll, because of its Ardrey associations. The Kilmartin Glen is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe. There are at least 350 ancient monuments —stone circles, standing stones, cup-and-ring marks, and cist graves—within a six-mile radius of Kilmartin village. (I was proceeding in the belief that nine-year-old boys enjoy visiting ancient monuments. I did when I was nine.)

Kilmartin became famous in the 1980s following the publication of the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and follow-up books that claimed that survivors of the Knights Templar came to Kilmartin as refugees after their order was destroyed by the French king Philip the Fair and his henchman Pope Clement V, on Friday, October 13, 1307. This idea added mystery to the history of the Glen and provided me with more stories to tell my son. (I was also proceeding in the belief that my son liked to hear me talk a lot. I did when I was nine.)

The scenery, the history, the mystery, the football (on the car radio), the good food, and watching The Guns of Navarone on the TV in our B&B made that weekend one of the best times of my life.

The day before we left for Argyll I went through the “secret” passage that led from the Advocates’ Library where I work to the National Library of Scotland. I had often used this passage before to visit the National Library to research something or other, or just to read books at random. This time, looking for more Ardrey-family connections with Argyll, I found nothing that was new to me in the gazetteers, and the dictionaries only confirmed what I had been told years before: that my name, Ardrey, was originally Ard Airigh in Gaelic and that it meant “high pasture.”

Then I found a dictionary that was new to me and everything changed.

John O’Brien, Roman Catholic Bishop of Cork and Cloyne in Ireland, wrote Focalóir Gaoidhilge-Sax-Bhéarla: An Irish-English Dictionary and had it privately printed in Paris in 1768. O’Brien said he compiled his dictionary,

Not only from various Irish vocabularies … but also from a great variety of the best Irish manuscripts now extant; especially those that have been composed from the 9th & 10th centuries down to the 16th, besides those of the lives of St. Patrick & St. Bridget, written in the 6th & 7th centuries.⁵

It followed that O’Brien’s definitions were more likely to reflect the way words were used in the sixth century, than were modern dictionaries, written to be used by people today.

According to O’Brien, Airigh did not mean a “summer pasture” or “shieling,” as I had been told (in the first millennium summer pasture or shieling was Airghe). The first millennium meaning of Airigh was, “Certain, particular, especiall [sic] …” And, in a separate entry, “A Prince, a nobleman &c. [sic].”

This was my Statue-of-Liberty-at-the-end-of-Planet-of-the-Apes moment. I had been a happy high-pasture Ardrey ever since I had stopped being a happy high-king Ardrey. Now everything changed again. My second name was still Ard Airigh, but it no longer meant “high pasture”—now it meant “high prince” or “high nobleman.” I was no longer fifteen years old and so I was not deluded into thinking I had become more prince-like or noble. But I knew I had become something much more important—I had become more knowledgeable.

Until then I had not been particularly interested in either the legendary or the historical Arthur, but after reading O’Brien I knew, even before I raised my head from the page, that I had evidence that the legendary Arthur was the historical Arthur Mac Aedan.

I already knew of many Ard Airigh/Ardrey place-names in Argyll, through my interest in my family’s history, and that Arthur Mac Aedan had been active in Argyll after his father became king of the Scots there in 574. I also knew that an entry in the Annales Cambriae for the previous year, 573, contained the earliest surviving reference to the man called Merlin and that this entry placed Merlin at, “The Battle of Arderydd,” a battle after which, it was said, “Merlin went mad.”

Until I found the Airigh entry in O’Brien, all I had was an Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, in a place where there were innumerable Ard Airigh place-names and a Merlin involved in a battle at a place called Arderydd.

Arthur and Merlin were obviously connected, but what was the connection between, say, Arthur Mac Aedan’s Dunardry hillfort, in Argyll, and Merlin’s battlefield of Arderydd, one hundred miles away on the Scotland–England border?

“Hillfort of the high pasture” and the “battle of the high pasture,” while possible, had always struck me as just too much of a coincidence to believe. Two important places—one a battle and one a fort, one associated with a Merlin and one associated with an Arthur, one in 573 and one in 574—and both named after pastures? This struck me as unlikely.

Why would the main hillfort in Argyll, the hillfort that dominated the most important land route in Argyll, be named the “hillfort of the high pasture”? Why were there so many Ard Airigh/high pasture names in Arthur Mac Aedan’s Argyll? Why was a battle fought far from Argyll, on the Scotland–England border in P-Celtic speaking lands, given a Q-Celtic Gaelic, Ard Airigh name? How could these things be just coincidences?

There was no reason why pastures, high or otherwise, should have been connected to Arthur Mac Aedan. There were no especially high pastures in Argyll or on or near the battlefield of Arderydd—there were just, well, pastures.

Even if all the Ard Airigh place-names in Argyll meant “high pasture,” despite the fact that they were not attached to places that were particularly high or pasture-like, there was no reason to believe that such a bland Q-Celtic place-name would have been given to a fort as important as Dunardry or to a battle as important as Arderydd. The “high pasture” meaning of Ard Airigh had always puzzled me and it had always been a dead-end. Until I found the Airigh entry in O’Brien, I had been unable to understand why so many places in Argyll had “high pasture” names.

O’Brien’s definition of Airigh enabled me to make a sensible, albeit initially tentative, connection between the Ard Airigh place-names in Arthur Mac Aedan’s Argyll and Merlin-Lailoken’s Battle of Arderydd. (Merlin was the name used by his enemies. His friends called him Lailoken, Chief of Song. I will on occasion use Merlin-Lailoken from now on.)

“A prince, a nobleman,” said O’Brien. It is now generally accepted that the legendary Arthur was not a king but a prince. I also knew that the historical Arthur Mac Aedan was a prince, the descendent of Scots warlords who had arrived in Argyll some sixty years before he was born; he died years before his father Aedan, king of the Scots. This was only a beginning but at least O’Brien’s Airigh definition, “prince or nobleman,” was relevant to both the legendary Arthur and Arthur Mac Aedan, while the “pasture” definition was not.

The Britons of southern Scotland spoke P-Celtic. Their neighbors, the Scots of Dalriada-Ireland and Dalriada-Scotland, spoke Q-Celtic. The words ard and airigh, from which Arderydd is derived, are Q-Celtic Irish-Scots-Gaelic words. Airigh is especially relevant to Ulster, the part of Ireland from which Arthur Mac Aedan’s family came to Scotland at the turn of the fifth century. If Ard Airigh meant high prince or high nobleman it would not be surprising if the warriors who came to Scotland from Ireland at the turn of the fifth century gave the places they found there Ard Airigh names.

Of course, Arthur Mac Aedan was only one among many sixth-century warlords of Dalriada, and so it did not necessarily follow that he was the high lord or even one of the high lords who inspired the Ard Airigh place-names of Argyll. But Arthur Mac Aedan did live in Argyll and so directly or indirectly there was some connection. Arthur Mac Aedan was also a contemporary of Merlin-Lailoken and Merlin-Lailoken fought at the Battle of Arderydd and so there was another connection. This was, of course, provided that the legendary Arthur (who was connected with a man called Merlin) and Arthur Mac Aedan were one and the same man. If they were not, then this was a most amazing coincidence. Two Arthurs both connected with a Merlin at different times and in different places—an amazing coincidence indeed.

How many other Arthurs lived at the same time as a man called Merlin and shared Ard Airigh associations? None. In legend there was a Merlin and an Arthur. In history there was a Merlin-Lailoken in 573 (at the Battle of Arderydd) and an Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, in 574 (at Dunardry). The simplest solution seemed to me to be that these Merlins and Arthurs were one and the same.

Arderydd: the battle of the high pasture. Dunardry: the hillfort of the high pasture. It is not clear why anyone would give a battle and a fort such names. These translations did not make sense. Arderydd: the battle of the high lord or high lords. Dunardry: the hillfort of the high lord or high lords. These translations made sense. (I will from now on use the more user-friendly high lord or high lords in place of the clumsy combination high prince or high nobleman.)

It had never rung true to me that Dunardry, the most vital political, economic, and strategic hillfort in Argyll, was called Dun Ard Airigh, the hillfort of the high pasture. The men who named this fortress were warriors. The chances of these warriors calling their stronghold the “hillfort of the high pasture” when names such as the “hillfort of the high prince or princes” or the “hillfort of the high nobleman or noblemen” were available and more obviously attractive and appropriate options were slight in the extreme.⁶

It is reasonable to suppose that a place like Dunardry might well be called by a name that sounded of a high prince or nobleman and that a battle too might be named in memory of a high prince or nobleman (maybe not in its immediate aftermath, but certainly after that high prince or nobleman became the most famous hero in British history). Arthur Mac Aedan, certainly, especially, and particularly fitted the profile of the prince or nobleman after whom the fort and the battle were named. He lived in and was a prince in Argyll. He was a contemporary of Merlin of Arderydd, and, although I did not know this to begin with, Arthur Mac Aedan fought at the Battle of Arderydd.

If I was right and the battle-name Arderydd was a Q-Celtic name in a P-Celtic place and meant the “battle of the high prince or nobleman,” this suggested the possibility that the battle-name Arderydd commemorated the Q-Celtic speaking Arthur Mac Aedan.

If Arthur Mac Aedan was not the high prince or nobleman commemorated in the battle-name Arderydd, then we would be looking for some other prince or nobleman with a Q-Celtic and an Argyll connection, who was active in 573 and who was or who became so famous that he inspired the name of this major battle.

Alternatively, the battle-name Arderydd and the Ard Airigh place-names in Argyll could be simple, albeit highly unlikely, coincidences. I did not think a simple coincidence was a reasonable possibility.

O’Brien’s definition of Airigh provided me with a solution to what I had called the Righ-Airigh conundrum. I had been unable to understand how, if righ meant “king” and airigh meant “pasture,” the words righ and airigh could be so similar when “king” and “pasture” are so different. If however righ meant “king,” which it does, and airigh meant “prince or nobleman,” which, according to O’Brien, it does, then there was an obvious relationship. Righ and airigh were similar in the same way bishop and archbishop are similar. The dichotomy that was the Righ-Airigh conundrum ceased to exist.

Welsh scholars cannot say what Arderydd means with any certainty or authority or with reference to any convincing sources because they have been looking for answers in the wrong place among the wrong people and at the wrong time. One Welsh academic with whom I corresponded, wrote to me,

A battle was fought at Arderydd (or Arthuret) in c. 573 CE between various British factions, which became the epitome of heroic battle. As such it is frequently mentioned in Welsh literature … I have never seen an explanation of the name, and it could contain several elements: possibly arf (“weapon”), and some form of dâr (“oak”), although deri (not *derydd) is the usual plural form.

Battle of the Weapon Oak seemed to me to be as unlikely a name for a battle as Battle of the High Pasture. “High prince” or “nobleman” place-names in Argyll and a battle involving high lords made more sense to me. If my Ard Airigh interpretation is accepted, no tortuous interpretation of Arderydd, involving weapons and oaks, is needed.

I looked for corroboration of O’Brien’s Airigh entry and found it in MacBain’s Etymological Dictionary, where Airigh is defined as follows: “Airigh: worthy, Irish airigh (Ulster), airigh, nobleman … Old Irish aire(ch), primas, lord; Sanskrit árya, good, a lord; ârya, Aryan, âryaka, honourable man.” There are two categories of meaning in MacBain’s dictionary. The first includes “worthy,” “good” and “honourable.” The second includes “nobleman” and “lord.” O’Brien’s definition “prince” falls into MacBain’s second category.

MacBain says Airigh, in the sense of “worthy,” is derived from Irish sources and in particular from the Irish of Ulster, the most northerly of Ireland’s four provinces. It was from Ulster that the Scots came to Argyll in the early centuries of the first millennium and from which Arthur Mac Aedan’s immediate and direct ascendants came in circa 500 to found Dalriada, the first kingdom of the Scots in what is now Scotland. If Ulster-Scots brought the word Airigh with them from Ireland and used it to name places in Argyll, this goes some way toward explaining the high frequency of Ard Airigh place-names in Argyll.

Until I found O’Brien’s “high lord” definition of Ard Airigh, I had given no more thought to Arthur, Merlin, and Camelot than I had to innumerable other subjects, and none at all to writing books about any one of them. I had not been looking for anything to do with the Arthurian canon that day in the National Library. I had been looking for something to do with my second name and that is all. However I found evidence that threw light on the matter of Arthur, and so I decided to see if I could find more evidence.

I knew I had a solution to the Righ-king, Airigh-pasture conundrum when I read O’Brien’s definition of the word Airigh because, unlike king and pasture, Righ-king and Airigh-lord were obviously connected. I had never accepted that it was merely coincidental that Arthur Mac Aedan lived in Argyll among innumerable Ard Airigh place-names, such as Dunardry, and Ardery on Loch Awe, and that completely separately and one hundred miles from Argyll, Merlin had fought in an Ard Airigh battle, the Battle of Arderydd.

I had always suspected that there had to be some connection between the Ard Airigh names in Argyll and the battle name, Arderydd, but when I thought Ard Airigh meant “pasture” I could not see what this connection might be. Why should so many places in Argyll and a battle fought on the Scotland–England border have high pasture names?

However if Ard Airigh meant “high lord” things made sense. It made sense that a warrior people, like Arthur Mac Aedan’s Scots, would name their most important fortress Dun Ard Airigh, Dunardry, hillfort of the high lord or lords, and that a battle would be called the Battle of Ard Airigh, Arderydd, the battle of the high lord or lords; after all, Arthur Mac Aedan was a high lord and his men were high lords (at least high lords of war).

I knew I was onto something when I saw O’Brien’s definition of Airigh, and so I tried to remember all I could about Arthur and Merlin and Argyll, to see if there was anything that worked for or against my provisional conclusion that Arthur Mac Aedan was the legendary Arthur. All the time I was doing this I knew I was missing something. I stopped to think what it might be, and when that didn’t work, I tried not thinking about it at all, in the hope that the answer would just come to me. But that didn’t work either until it did … well, almost.

I suddenly knew that what I was looking for was on a map, but which map? I had not been looking for evidence of Arthur until that day (indeed, I could not remember the last time I had even thought of Arthur—probably the last time I had seen him played in a film or read a book in which he featured, and that had not been for a long time). It followed, therefore, that if the map I was looking for was not primarily Arthur-connected it, probably had something to do with my name and was perhaps one of my maps of Argyll. If it was a map in a book I had looked at in passing and then put aside, then I had a problem.

When I got home that day I looked at my maps of Argyll—the maps the Forestry Commission had given me, Ordnance Survey maps, and maps in books—until I found what I was looking for in a standard Collins roadmap. It was a place-name.

I had overlooked its Arthurian significance when I used this map to get about Argyll when I was researching my family-name. Its significance would have been obvious to anyone thinking about Arthur, but at that time I had not been thinking about Arthur.

The earliest surviving indirect reference to Arthur is in Gildas’s De Excidio. It is “indirect” because Gildas hated Arthur and deliberately omitted Arthur’s name. De Excidio was written in the early sixth century according to the conventional wisdom, but, by reckoning, it was compiled circa 598, although the exact date does not matter overmuch for these present purposes; what matters is that toward the end of his history Gildas writes, “From then on victory went now to our countrymen now to their enemies … This lasted up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.”⁷

Just over two hundred years after Gildas wrote De Excidio, Nennius listed twelve battles in which Arthur was in command in his Historia Brittonum. The last item on Nennius’s battle-list reads, “The twelfth battle was on Badon hill and in it nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low save he alone.”⁸

The Annales Cambriae, the earliest versions of which date to the early ninth century, contain records of four battles between circa 447, when the entries begin, and 600, when, everyone agrees, Arthur (whoever he was) was dead. These four battles include the Battle of Badon: “The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors.”⁹ This makes the Battle of Badon the only battle mentioned in all three of the generally accepted, most important early sources. Indeed, the Battle of Badon is the only one of Arthur’s battles mentioned more than once in any of the early sources. The Battle of Badon has become the litmus test by which potential “Arthurs” are measured.

Arthur Mac Aedan lived at Dunardry-Dunadd. The place-name I had found on my Collins road map showed that the land between Dunardry and Dunadd is called Badden. This Badden extends north from the shadow of Dunardry to Dunadd, and east with the Badden Burn to Lochgilphead and Loch Fyne.

This Badden had the right name (allowing for the usual variations in spellings) and was the very place where Arthur Mac Aedan lived for much of his life and where his father was king. No case for any southern Arthur has evidence that can outweigh this one item of evidence that Arthur Mac Aedan was the man who became the legendary Arthur.

Once I knew what I was looking for and where to find it, I found Badden on other maps with ease, but these were all modern maps and so I had to find out if the name Badden was modern too. For all I knew some “New Scots”—say the Badden family from the south of England—had moved to Argyll and named the land between Dunardry and Dunadd after themselves or, worse still, used a corrupt variation of their hometown, Bath! The maps created when the railways were introduced to Argyll showed a place called Badden in the late nineteenth century, and so if my hypothetical family from the south of England had called their new home Badden, they must have done this before 1873.

It is arguable that a period of more than 130 years is long enough to establish Badden as a traditional name and to allow it to be fairly inferred that it had been called Badden for far longer. However, the further back I could trace the name, the more likely it would be that it had some connection with Arthur Mac Aedan’s sixth century. I set out to see if I could fill the thirteen-century gap that lay between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries.

Fitzroy MacLean, writing of the sixth century in his book Highlanders, refers to the Cinelbadon, the family or “kin” of Baodan. This Baodan was a grandson of Lorne, one of the brothers of Arthur Mac Aedan’s great-great-grandfather Fergus Mor, and so Arthur’s second cousin twice removed. Unfortunately, Fitzroy MacLean did not identify his authority for this reference. MacLean did however parachute behind enemy lines during the Second World War, with instructions from Churchill to take the partisans in hand and beat the Nazis in Yugoslavia and he did just that. He was one of those men, who, if he said something, you could rely upon it: a man like that did not go about making things up. The very fact that it was he who was writing was good enough for me, but even Fitzroy MacLean was not around in the sixth century, and so it followed he must have had some authority for what he wrote.

I looked for MacLean’s source material and found other Baodans in the Senchus Fer nAlban, the history of the men of Scotland. The Senchus is a genealogical record—in effect, a Who’s Who of the sixth century. It shows several Baodans including a Baodan Mac Eochaid Mac Aedan Mac Gabhran Mac Domangart Mac Fergus (Arthur’s nephew); and a Baodan Mac Ninnud Mac Duath Mac Conall Mac Niall of the Nine Hostages, who died in 586. This first Baodan was closely related to Arthur Mac Aedan. The second Baodan, although a contemporary of Arthur, was only distantly related to him (and to Columba-Crimthann who played a large part in events during Arthur’s lifetime).

Whether a particular Baodan lived a generation before or after Arthur Mac Aedan or was related to him is immaterial, however. What really mattered was the very existence of men called Baodan in Arthur’s day. Nor does it matter whether Lorne and Comgall were the sons, brothers, or grandchildren of Fergus Mor, Arthur’s great-great-grandfather (the sources vary). What matters is that they gave their names to the lands of Lorne in the north and to the Cowal Peninsula in the south of Argyll, names that are still used today.

In the sixth century, when Scots of Ireland led by members of Arthur Mac Aedan’s family invaded Argyll, they, quite naturally, replaced some of the place-names they found there with Scottish names. The aforementioned Baodans were in the right place at the right time to make these changes. It is likely therefore that the lands of Badden outside Lochgilphead were named after one of the many Baodans who were about at the time, which means, almost inevitably, a Baodan who was closely related to Arthur Mac Aedan. The existence of numerous Baodans in the time of Arthur Mac Aedan all but closes the gap between the sixth century and 1873. In any event, the legendary name Badon clearly echoes in the modern place-name Badden, a name that can be connected to the life and times of Arthur Mac Aedan.

Again, this evidence alone is more than anyone else can muster for any other possible location of the Battle of Badon. Furthermore, unlike so many southern sites, there is no shortage of hills around the lands of Badden, the most prominent being Dunardry. Dunadd was the ceremonial capital of Argyll, but Dunardry commanded the most important land route in Argyll and was its administrative capital. There is no more likely place for a sixth-century battle than the land about Dunardry; the land of Baodan-Badon-Badden.

There was reason to believe that the Battle of Badon had been fought on the approaches to and on the land about Dunardry and that, consequently, Dunardry is the legendary Mount Badon. In the American Civil War the North named battles with reference to geographical features, while the South named battles with reference the nearest town, and so we have Bull Run and Manassas, Antietam and Sharpsburg. If the South had named Nennius’s twelfth battle it would have been the Battle of Dun Ard Airigh; if the North had named the twelfth battle it would have been the Battle of the Hill of Boadan (before it became in Latin the Battle of Badonici montis or monte Badonis, Mount Badon).

The Badon entry on Nennius’s list contained three clues. The first clue was the battle-name “Badon.” The second clue was that the battle had been fought on or in the vicinity of a hill. Both pointed to the Battle of Badon having been fought at Dunardry-Badden in Argyll. The third clue, the place of this battle on Nennius’s battle-list, twelfth of twelve, remained to be solved.

The Annales Cambriae say the Battle of Badon was fought in 516 and the Battle of Camlann, Arthur’s last battle, in 537. The entries in the Annales Cambriae for the fifty years before the Battle of Badon and for the fifty years after the Battle of Camlann mention twenty-two people. These include Columba-Crimthann, who lived in Dalriada where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king; Mordred of the Gododdin, who lived on the border of Manau, Arthur Mac Aedan’s father’s kingdom; Gabhran, Arthur Mac Aedan’s grandfather; Gildas of Cambuslang in central Scotland, Arthur Mac Aedan’s neighbor; the sons of Eliffer, who included Rhydderch Hael, King of Strathclyde, Merlin-Lailoken’s brother-in-law and a neighbor of Arthur Mac Aedan; Gwenddolau, defeated at the Battle of Arderydd fighting against Arthur Mac Aedan and the man known as Uther Pen Dragon; Merlin-Lailoken, Chancellor of Strathclyde, Arthur Mac Aedan’s friend and partner in the Great Angle War; Brendan of Birr, an advisor to Columba-Crimthann and so connected to Dalriada, where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king; Gwrgi and Peredur, probably lords of York and southwest Scotland respectively and contemporaries of Arthur Mac Aedan; Constantine, probably the son of Rhydderch of Strathclyde and Gwyneth-Languoreth, Merlin-Lailoken’s sister; and lastly Dunod, probably a man of Dunadd, the ceremonial capital of Dalriada, where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king.

It boils down to this—these early entries in the Annales Cambriae are not concerned with people and events in Wales, despite the title Annales Cambriae (the Annals of Wales), but with people and events in Arthur Mac Aedan’s late-sixth-century Scotland, and almost all of them are closely connected with Arthur Mac Aedan.

Gildas’s De Excidio contains the earliest reference to the Battle of Badon. It is generally accepted that De Excidio was written in the early sixth century. “Gildas wrote his main work, the Ruin of Britain, about A.D.540 or just before,” says one authoritative editor.¹⁰ However, Michael Winterbottom of Oxford University said, “we cannot be certain of [Gildas’s] date, of where he wrote, of his career, or even his name.”¹¹ This uncertainty ceases to exist when Gildas, a name that means Servant of God in Gaelic, is looked for north of the Scotland–England border. There Gildas can be found and recognized as a man of southern Scotland who flourished as a Christian polemicist in the late sixth century. It is more likely that De Excidio was compiled by Gildas from earlier writings and completed in circa 598, some ten years after the Battle of Badon.

In the Preface to De Excidio Gildas says,

I have kept silence, I confess, with much mental anguish, compunction of feeling and contrition of heart, whilst I revolved all these things within myself; … for the space of even ten years or more, my inexperience … and my unworthiness preventing me from taking upon myself the character of a censor.¹²

Gildas waited “ten years or more” before he completed his masterwork, but ten years or more from when? It makes sense to suppose ten years after the last major event in the “History” part of De Excidio. The “History” part of De Excidio ends with an account of a victory won by Ambrosius Aurelianus (who, in Finding Merlin, I identified as Emrys, the first Pen Dragon). This account segues smoothly into the Battle of Badon passage:

From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to do) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not. This lasted right up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.¹³

It seems to be common sense to suppose that the ten years during which Gildas “kept silence” followed the date on which he ended his History—that is, followed the date of the Battle of Badon. It would also be common sense to suppose that Gildas brought his History up to date, more or less. In other words, his history ended with the Battle of Badon, the last historical event he mentions. He then either waited ten years before writing about it, or, and this is more likely, he waited ten years before making his work public.

Gildas’s Latin is obscure in the extreme and apparently notoriously difficult to translate. The translator I have quoted above says Badon was, “pretty well the last defeat of [the Angles], and certainly not the least.” J. A. Giles interprets this vague passage differently: “… until the year of the siege of Bath-hill, when took place also the last almost, though not the least slaughter of our cruel foes.”¹⁴

When someone feels the need to say something is “not the least” it usually means this something is pretty close to being “the least.” When Gildas tries to give the Battle of Badon some added status, he doth protest too much, methinks. There is therefore reason to believe that although Badon was the most famous of Arthur’s battles—because it is the only one mentioned more than one of the earliest sources, the four horsemen of history—it was far from his greatest battle.

It could be argued that if Gildas was writing some ten years after Badon and if Arthur Mac Aedan was the victor in the Battle of Badon, that Gildas would have mentioned this fact. Why does Gildas’s Badon passage not mention Arthur? Gildas’s De Excidio was not primarily a history but a piece of religious propaganda and so he mentioned very few individuals. In the whole fifth century he names only one person and one place and provides only one date (and he gets that wrong).

I have argued in Finding Merlin that when Gildas was a boy Emrys, the first Pen Dragon, saved the Britons from the Angles and consequently Emrys became Gildas’s boyhood hero. This is why Emrys appears in Gildas’s History (albeit burnished with spurious Roman antecedents and a grand name, Ambrosius Aurelianus). Gildas’s relationship with Arthur did not include hero-worship; on the contrary, Gildas hated Arthur Mac Aedan, because Arthur killed Gildas’s brother Hueil. In these circumstances it would be surprising if Gildas mentioned Arthur in his history. If Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan he would have been a Scot in Gildas’s eyes, and Gildas hated Scots (he said we were “like worms which in the heat of mid-day came forth from their holes”). If Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan he was a man of the Old Way, and Gildas hated anyone who was not a Christian, in addition to a goodly number of people who were Christians: Gildas was big on hate. Even if Gildas had been bothered to name people in his History, and he was not, he would never have named Arthur Mac Aedan.

The main pillar upon which the dating of Gildas’s De Excidio stands is a passage dealing with the legendary Arthur’s famous Battle of Badon: “There is, perhaps, no passage in Gildas that has been more frequently discussed than that in which he appears to assign a date for the siege of the Badonic Mountain,” explained the English Historical Review in 1926.¹⁵ All attempts to date De Excidio center on this one corrupt passage in which Gildas refers to Badon and to his own age.

From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies … This lasted up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth: as I know, one month of the forty-four years since then has already passed.¹⁶

This is usually taken to mean Gildas was born in the same year as the Battle of Badon. It is however a very corrupt passage. The English historian Bede, writing in the eighth century, lifted large passages from Gildas, including the above passage, but his version is somewhat different. Bede says, “Thenceforward victory swung first to one side and then to the other, until the Battle of Badon Hill, when the Britons made a considerable slaughter of the invaders. This took place about forty-four years after their arrival in Britain.”¹⁷

This passage is more likely to reflect accurately what Gildas wrote because it makes some sense. One rule used when interpreting a law is to assume the law maker intended to make sense. Gildas either dated Badon with reference to his age or with reference to the arrival of invaders in Britain. He does not tell us when he was born nor does he tell us when the invaders arrived. If we assume Gildas intended his readers to make sense of De Excidio, then the Bede version of the Badon passage is more likely to be correct, given that it would be reasonable to expect that more people would know about an invasion than would know about Gildas’s birth.

This passage in Bede may have escaped the depredations of those determined to place Arthur in the south because it was a little out of the Gildas mainstream and because, no matter what, Bede’s history was considered sacrosanct by the Church. As late as the nineteenth century J. A. Giles, ever determined to place Arthur in the south, translates the passage in Bede as, “Bath-hill … was (as I am sure) forty-four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity.”¹⁸

Giles’s translation is an overt attempt to place Arthur in the south. The Latin Badonici montis is blithely translated as “Bath-hill” because Giles wanted Badon to be Bath and so he wrote what he wanted. The Latin says novissimaeque ferme de furciferis non minimae stragis, that is, “pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.” There is no mention of Angles or of Saxons. Where did Giles get his Saxons from? Not from Bede. Bede does not mention Angles or Saxons in the passage in question. It is however clear from the immediate context that the villains to whom Bede refers are Angles. Why, if Giles wanted to mention a particular people, did he not refer to Bede’s Angles? Perhaps this was because the Angles tended to be in the north and the Saxons tended to be in the south, and Giles wanted Arthur in the south.

If the received wisdom is correct and Gildas was born in the year of Badon, it follows that he ended the “History” part of De Excidio at about the time he was born. This is counter-intuitive. Gildas was permanently worked up to frothing point about people and events of which he disapproved. A man like Gildas would have been certain to touch upon events that happened during his lifetime. He would not have been able to stop himself.

Why would Gildas not bring his history up to his time of writing and so cover the one period of which he had first-hand knowledge? There is no good answer to this question.

It makes no sense to suppose that Gildas was born in the same year as Badon. This would leave what is a very precise period of time, forty-four years and one month, hanging in mid-air. What is the point of saying, in effect, I am forty-four years and one month old and the Battle of Badon was fought the year I was born? Unless Gildas tells his readers the date when he is writing, his readers cannot know either the date of the Battle of Badon or when he was born—what is the point of that?

If the received wisdom is correct and the time period, forty-four years and one month, relates to the date of publication of De Excidio, which it must if Gildas was born in the year of Badon, this presupposes a known and exact date of publication (to the very month), a concept that would have been meaningless in the sixth century.

It is probable that the received wisdom is wrong and that Gildas was not born in the same year as Badon but forty-four years before Badon. If this is correct the above problems disappear. It seems more likely that Gildas dated the Battle of Badon forty-four years after the Angles landed in Britain: that is, forty-four years and one month after he, Gildas, was born, just as Bede said.

Of course, without a date for the arrival of the Angles this does not help date De Excidio. The Angles had been arriving on the east coast of Britain from at least the middle of the fifth century, and so if the “arrival” of the Angles is to have any meaning, Gildas must have meant some particular arrival. There is only one particular arrival this might be: the arrival of the Angle chief war-chief, Ida. Ida and his men came to fight as mercenaries on behalf of Vortigern, the Gododdin British King. When? We do not know exactly—Gildas is imprecise.¹⁹

All we know is that before long, Ida discovered that Vortigern was weak and so sent for more men: what Gildas calls “a second and larger troop of satellite dogs.”²⁰ At earliest this would have been the following year. Ida and his Angles then inveigled themselves into positions of power, “sprouted in our [Gododdin] soil with savage shoots and tendrils.” This would have taken some little time, say, another year. The Angles asked for supplies, which had been given to them, but then they demanded more. When more supplies were not forthcoming they rose up against Vortigern and overthrew him. For a short while Vortigern was kept on as a figurehead but before long he had taken to the hills to hide and Ida became king. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says Ida became king in 547.

Given that the Angles had been coming to Britain for a long time, there must have been something special about this particular arrival, and there was: Ida overthrew the British king and started a sequence of events that culminated in the Great Angle War of the 580s. I say this is the arrival of the Angles to which Gildas refers, because the arrival of Ida changed everything, especially for Gildas, who, by my reckoning, was born the year Ida’s Angles arrived and who grew up a few days march from what was from then on hostile territory. By my calculation, and I accept this cannot be precise; Ida arrived some three years before he staged his coup in 547—say, in 544.

Following Ida’s coup Gildas spent his childhood, like everyone else in southern Scotland, in fear of Angle invasion. He would have had reason to remember the arrival of Ida circa 544, especially if he had been born that very year. It is easy to picture Gildas when he was a boy being told that he was born the year the Angles under Ida arrived in Britain. Every one of his contemporaries would have known that date.

The above, if correct, throws the received wisdom into confusion because, according to the received wisdom, based upon the Annales Cambriae, Gildas traveled to Ireland in 565 and died there five years later. This would mean, according to the received wisdom, that Gildas went to Ireland at the age of about seventy-five. If, however, I am correct, then Gildas went to Ireland at the age of twenty-one and left Ireland five years later. Gildas departed Ireland, not this life, in 570.

In summary, in my view, Gildas was born circa 544, the year Ida’s Angles arrived in Britain, and the Battle of Badon was fought forty-four years and one month later, circa 588. Gildas brought his history up to date, more or less. This means the “History” part of De Excidio tells of events in the late sixth century, which means the book was compiled or completed circa 598, when Gildas was an old man.

Gildas’s De Excidio is the nearest thing we have to a contemporary history of the sixth century. This is why so much effort has been put into claiming it for the south. In the centuries that followed De Excidio, the historical record was kept alive in the poems recited and songs sung by the bards. Many of these poems and songs were of Arthur; indeed, it is likely he was one of the most popular subjects in the whole body of this work, because he was greatest hero of the Britons and, if he was Arthur Mac Aedan, of the Scots. “There is ample evidence,” historian John Morris writes, “that in the 6th and 7th centuries many epics of Arthur were sung in Britain … but only two survive, the Elegy of Geraint, preserved in modernised Middle Welsh form, perhaps of the 8th or 9th century, and the Nennius epitome.”²¹ (Aneirin’s Y Gododdin, which contains the earliest reference to Arthur and which originated in Scotland, seems to have been overlooked.)

The Elegy of Geraint is said to be based on sixth-century material. It mentions Arthur only in passing, “In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s / Heroes who cut with steel.” Geraint’s father is said to have been king of Dumnonia (Devon), England; a place that is frequently confused, deliberately or in ignorance, with Damnonia, Strathclyde, Scotland. Even today Damnonia is sometimes simply translated as Dumnonia, irrespective of the spelling in the original. One translation of De Excidio reads in Latin, “est inmundae leaenae Damnoniae,” and in the English translation, “whelp of the filthy lioness of”—not Damnonia (Scotland) as one might expect—but “Dumnonia” (England).²²

A Geraint also appears in Y Gododdin as a man of the south active in the north. It may be that this Geraint was one of the many Britons who came north to join the fight against the invading Angles, first successfully, under Arthur Mac Aedan, and then, after the death of Arthur Mac Aedan, unsuccessfully under the Gododdin king who led the disastrous campaign commemorated in Y Gododdin.

As for the Nennius “epitome,” with its battle-list of twelve battles, we will come to it—to all twelve battles.