No one knows for sure what kind of a man might lie behind the legend of Arthur but if there really was one great leader who turned the tide of the Saxon settlement of Britain in the fifth century he may well have been a War Duke (Dux Bellorum) of Britain struggling to maintain the remnants of Roman civilisation after the departure of the legions and much of the Roman hierarchy. It is a period of British history in which hard facts are few and far between. Though Warriors of Camlann is definitely fiction, I have tried to re-create the time as realistically as I can and have included historical figures in the story. Hengist and his sons Aelle and Aesc actually existed, as did Cerdic, though he is generally thought to have been a Saxon of Celtic descent and not, as in my story, Arturus’s half-brother. He did, however, settle in Gewisse (Southampton). Ambrosius Aurelianus who ‘wore the purple’ (i.e. was an Emperor) and Vortigern (the British leader who invited the Saxons to Britain as allies to fight the Picts) are both mentioned by Gildas in Of the Fall and Destruction of Britain, a near-contemporary history.
I have tried to make the weapons, armour and strategy of the time as accurate as I can and I’m grateful to Dan Shadrake for his help, though he is not in any way responsible for any of my errors! There is a tradition of Arthur being a cavalry leader and from the late Roman Notitia Digitatum it is known that Sarmatian armoured cataphracts were stationed at Ribchester in the ancient Kingdom of Rheged in the late Roman period. They carried a dragon standard and brought their own myth of a sacred sword pulled from a stone. They were descendants of the 5,500 cataphracts brought from their native Hungary in AD175. I like to think of them as Arthur’s most powerful weapon.
There are many competing theories concerning almost everything about the Arthur story and not least the location of Camelot, but two favourite contenders are Camulodunum and Cadbury Castle, the site of my Fort Cado. No one knows the location of the decisive battle at Mount Baddon either, though it ended the Saxon advance for a generation and is supposed to have lasted three days. There is evidence to suggest that it may have happened where I place the battle site, just outside Bath (Aquae Sulis). I also place the last battle at Camlann (crooked valley), one of the many possible sites, and according to the Annales Cambriae, it is where both Medraut and Arthur died. King Arthur, A Military History by Michael Homes inspired my ideas on the military campaign, though the battles and tactics in the story are my own invention. Arthur’s burial site has, of course, never been found.
N. M. Browne