The years around the turn of the sixth century are among the darkest in the whole of the Dark Ages. The only light in the gloom is the monk Gildas, who wrote a tract on the ruin of Britain in the mid-sixth century.1 In his inimitable fashion, Gildas provides a generalized background to a great battle which he presents as the climactic event in the fight against the marauding Saxons, ‘a race hateful to God and man’. The tract deals with the consequences of enlisting the Saxons as mercenaries and the war that followed. The Saxons said Gildas, quoting from the biblical Book of Kings, were ‘like wolves unto the fold’. ‘Nothing was ever so destructive to our country, nothing was ever so unlucky’. When Britain could no longer supply or pay them what they demanded, the Saxons seized the land for themselves, and ‘devastating with fire the neighbouring lands and cities’ they over-ran the island from coast to coast.
In a vivid passage which may owe something to Virgil’s description of the fall of Troy, Gildas describes the horror of what he calls the devastation (excidium) of Roman Britain:
. . . all the columns were levelled to the ground by the frequent strokes of the battering-ram, all the husbandmen routed together with the bishops, priests and people, whilst the sword gleamed and the flames crackled around them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies covered with livid clots of coagulated blood looking as though they had been squeezed together in a press, and with no chance of being buried save in the ruins of their houses, or in the ravening bellies of wild beasts and birds . . . So entirely had the vintage, once so fine, degenerated and become bitter that, in the words of the prophet, there was hardly a grape or ear of corn to be seen where the husbandman had turned his back.
The hapless Britons fled overseas or yielded themselves as slaves. Others retreated into forests or occupied ‘high hills, steep and fortified’ – that is, they refortified the old hill-forts. Gildas gives no sense of a planned military campaign of conquest by the Saxon immigrants. It may have been what Michael Wood likened to ‘a Dark Age gold rush’, a large-scale land-grab of the fertile lands of southern and easternEngland.2 Eventually, the British were able to organize a capable resistance under the leadership of one Ambrosius Aurelianus, whose parents ‘had worn the purple’ ‘but had been slain in these broils’. Under Ambrosius, asserts Gildas, ‘our people regained their strength’. Sometimes ‘our countrymen’, sometimes the enemy, won the field, as if God, as with the ancient Israelites, was testing their faith. The culminating battle was the siege of Mount Badon, which he described as almost the last defeat of their foes, ‘and certainly not the least’.3
Gildas, it may be noticed, has a nice line in invective. His choice of the word furciferis to describe the Saxon foes at Mount Badon has been translated as ‘scoundrels’, ‘villains’, ‘hated ones’ or even ‘gallows-birds’. After the period of uneasy peace which followed the victory, Gildas turns to his own time, in the 530s and 540s,and uses similar words to describe the decadent successors of the noble Ambrosius. The old civic way of life, he implies, never really recovered from the Saxon onslaught. ‘Neither to this day are the cities inhabited as before but, being forsaken and over-thrown, still lie desolate’. This can be only partly true. While some Roman cities like Verulanium were abandoned, urban life went on in the west, and some of the ruined towns, such as Wroxeter and Silchester, were rebuilt. The larger hill-forts, like South Cadbury, were permanently garrisoned, but it is most unlikely that the entire urban population upped sticks and headed for the hills. According to Gildas, a measure of order was re-established after the war, with ‘kings, public magistrates and private persons, with priests and clergymen’ living ordered lives ‘according to their several vocations’.
This ‘wonderful’ time, as Gildas remembered it, lasted about a generation, but eventually degenerated into civil strife. The new generation in the west had not experi-enced the same hardships and had grown wicked and fractious. The new rulers were petty tyrants, whose companions were ‘bloodthirsty, vain, adulterous and enemies of God’. They were, said Gildas, a bunch of perjurers, liars and oath-breakers and their wives were whores. They despised the poor and humble and loaded the innocent with chains.
In other words they were a bad lot, sunk in infamy and not much better than the Saxons. Typical of these ‘tyrants’ that succeeded the great Ambrosius was Aurelius Caninus. ‘What are you doing, Caninus?’ shouted Gildas rhetorically.
Are you not engulfed by the same slime, if not a more deadly one, made up of parricides, fornications, adulteries? . . . Do you not hate peace in our country as though it were a noxious snake? . . . Why are you senseless and stiff, like a leopard in your behaviour [i.e. inconstant, treacherous and probably lustful] and spotted with wickedness . . .
And so on. Caninus is described as ‘the bad son of a good king’. He shares the name Aurelius: could he have been the degenerate son of Ambrosius Aurelianus (shadesof Arthur and Mordred)? The nub of Gildas’s complaints is that Caninus and hisfellow war-lords were spending more time fighting one another rather than defending themselves from the Saxons. Britain had disintegrated into a series of warring provinces ruled by petty tyrants.
The significance of Mount Bad on, therefore, was that the battle brought peace to at least part of Britain for the first decades of the sixth century, from, say, c.500 to 530.Both sides had evidently fought one another to a stand-still, and a period of relative peace ensued, with the Britons continuing to hold on to the west while the Saxons consolidated in the east. This pattern of events is born out by archaeology. Pagan Saxon cemeteries of fifth and early sixth century date are confined to the half of England east of a line linking Southampton and Nottingham. Judging by the scarcity of Saxon grave-goods there, the Britons also held pockets in the east, between Londonand Verulamium (St Albans) and around Aylesbury and Bedford.
The achievement of Britain in defeating the invaders and securing peace for a generation seems to be unique in the chaotic post-Roman Europe. So it would be interesting, to say the least, to find out exactly how the victory at Badon cameabout. Who led the armies to victory? Was it Ambrosius, as Gildas implies withoutactually saying so? Michael Wood has argued that Gildas meant to link thebattle explicitly with Ambrosius, but that this fact has been obscured by subsequentediting.4
Meanwhile, who led the Saxons? The Historia Brittonum implies that Aesc, son of Hengist, was the would-be conqueror of the Britons.5 Aesc named his own son after Eormenric, the mighty fifth-century king of the Ostrogoths who had ruled a vast empire stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Aesc must have admired and perhaps wished to emulate Eormenric’s achievements. However, it is assumed that his own small kingdom of Kent would be insufficient to challenge the west, and that Aesc would need allies. The obvious man was Aelle, king of Sussex (note the economic names of so many of these early kings: Aesc, Esa, Ida, Port and Stuf–Aelle, by the by, was the son of Yffe). Bede refers to Aelle as the first of the bretwaldas or ‘broad-rulers’ of England. Nowhere does he explain how or why Aelle deserved this accolade, but the implication is that he enjoyed a special status among the Saxon tribes and that others deferred to him. Perhaps, then, it was Aelle, together with Aesc, wholed the Saxons at Mount Badon.
Another contender is Cerdic, the traditional founder of the kingdom of the West Saxons. In the 2004 film Arthur he appeared as a memorably hairy leader of Arthur’s enemies. However the archaeological record suggests that Cerdic did not arrive until well into the sixth century, and if so he missed the battle. Whatever its precise composition, the Saxon army at Mount Badon was probably a powerful coalition of tribes led by men with a fresh record of military success.
Later Welsh historical tradition transfers the leadership of the Britons from Ambrosius to Arthur. Mount Badon regularly appears in Arthurian literature as the hero-king’s greatest victory. Establishing whether there is a morsel of truth behind the Arthur myth is, of course, one of history’s tempting grails. Everyone wants to believe in Arthur. It may well be however that his legendary exploits were grafted onto the original historical record, such as it was. Gildas does not mention him, and neither does Bede nor the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Was Arthur ‘written out’ of English history, as some have suggested, because of his victories? Or did Gildas not mention Arthur for the understandable reason that he had never heard of him?
The evidence for Arthur’s leadership at Mount Badon comes from two sources compiled in the ninth century, but possibly based on older material. In the Annales Cambriae or Welsh Annals we find against the year 516 the famous line: ‘The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and nights, and the Britons were victorious.’ The year is only approximate. The historical entries were transcribed from tables used to calculate the time of Easter, but those earlier than 525 are considered unreliable.
In the Historia Britonnum Arthur appears again as the victor of Badon Hill, ‘and init 960 men fell in one day from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low except he alone’. In this version, Arthur is described not as king, for ‘there are many of more noble birth than he’, but as a war-lord (dux bellorum). Badon was the last of twelve battles won by Arthur, all of which are named by the chronicler (see below).
The most elaborate version of the story is supplied by Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing c.1147. In his History of the Kings of Britain, Arthur emerges in more familiar form as a king-emperor, wielding a sword, Caliburn, with magical powers and with whose help he conquers not only Britain but much of Western Europe.In Geoffrey’s immensely influential story, the Saxons occupy the higher ground at Mount Badon, ranked ‘in wedges’ on the slopes. Arthur launches assault after assault, but the Saxons stand their ground until shortly before sundown when they retreat to the hill-fort. The battle recommences the next day, with Arthur suffering heavy casualties from the Saxons counter-charging down from the heights. Eventually ‘putting forth their greatest strength’, the Britons gain the hill-top and close with the enemy hand-to-hand. The fighting lasts much of the day with neither side gaining the advantage until Arthur,
waxing wroth at the stubbornness of their resistance and the slowness of his own advance, drew forth Caliburn, cried aloud the name of the Holy Mary, and thrust forward with a swift onset into the thickest press of the enemy’s ranks.
This last attack broke through the Saxon’s ranks, ‘thousands’ were slain and the rest fled, pursued by the British cavalry led by the duke of Cornwall.
Some, notably Alfred Burne, have discerned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘hotch-potch of myth and fable’ a ‘solid residue of historical matter’.6 It is just possible that Geoffrey was using an otherwise unknown lost source, but his account of the battle reads very much like an extended gloss on the brief entries in the Welsh annals. The annals themselves have a very strong whiff of myth. The Arthur that carries the cross for three days and nights and wins the battle by single-handedly slaying 960 foemen sounds more like a heavenly avatar than a flesh-and-blood human being. (Could the suspicious figure of 960 be a characteristic Welsh literary construction: ‘three three hundreds and three score’?) The inflated lines about Arthur in the normally tight-lipped annals sound like later interpolations added to a typically laconic original entry which may have said only: ‘The battle of Badon in which the Britons were victorious’. Neither of the Welsh annals has anything to add beyond the obviously mythic feats of Arthur. And they still don’t know who besieged who!
The dates of all events in the ‘lost years’ around the turn of the sixth century are uncertain, and that of Mons Badonicus is no exception. Gildas, in his usual teasing way, remarks that the battle happened forty-four years before, in the year of his birth ‘less one month’.7 Unfortunately Gildas omits to add what we need to know to make that calculation: either the year in which he was writing or the year in which he was born! For that reason, to date the battle it is important to find out roughly when Gildas was born.
A clue lies in Gildas’s denunciation of King Maglocunus (Maelgwn) of Gwynedd, which implies that the king was still alive when Gildas was writing. According to the Welsh Annals, Maglocunus died in ‘the yellow plague’ of 547. If this is right, the latest possible date for the battle would therefore be 547 minus 44, that is, 503.
Other evidence from the lives of St David and other forefathers of the Celtic Church indicates that Gildas was a good deal older than the Welsh patron saint. Hehad preached before the saint’s mother, St Non, in the year of St David’s birth, and had later complained, in 527 or 528, that David was far too young to become an abbot. Putting it all together, this would mean that Gildas was born before 500. The Welsh annals assign his death to 570,8 and, if so, he is not likely to have been born much before 490.
Bede seems to have worked from a differently worded manuscript of Gildas, which, being much earlier than the only manuscript to have survived, may have conveyed the author’s meaning more accurately.9 In Bede’s version, Gildas dated the battle not from his year of birth but from the year in which the Saxons first arrived in Britain. By tradition, this is 447, though Bede is more cautious, implying rather than stating a date between 445 and 455. Either way, by a remarkable coincidence this brings us back to the 490s again.
Hence the evidence converges on some date between 490 and 503. Recent pain-staking work on the various manuscripts by D R Howlett10 has left 496 as the most likely year for the Battle of Mount Badon.
Finding out when a battle took place helps to pin it down within the spare chronology of the Saxon Conquest. From the circumstances of the time we can cautiously deduce who might have been available to fight the battle and what their objectives might have been. But to understand the strategic significance of Mons Badonicus, we need to know where it was fought. Unfortunately, locating the battlefield is much harder than establishing its date; indeed, given the scanty evidence, it may ultimately be impossible. Every scrap of evidence, the least clue, has to be examined with care. Volumes have been written on this battle without reaching a consensus.
Gildas, our main authority, offers no direct geographical information, but he does include the suggestive phrase obsessio montis badonicus. Much has been squeezed out of these three words. Mons Badonicus can be translated as Mount Bad on or Badon Hill. Obsessio means a siege or a blockade. Gildas is clearly referring to a siege rather than a field battle, for which the appropriate word would be bellum.He does not say who besieged whom. But the implication is that the Saxons were besieging the Britons. Certain Iron Age hill-forts, like South Cadbury in Somerset, were refortified during the calamitous times following the Roman withdrawal. Linear defences were also being dug, like the Wansdyke in Berkshire and Wiltshire or the Devil’s Dyke in East Anglia. The Saxons did not place the same reliance on fortifications. They were a free-booting army, depending on mobility and surprise. They were besiegers rather than the besieged. Hence Mons Badonicus was very probably a hill-fort with the Britons inside it.
Mons (genitive montis) is a name normally given to a separated hill with slopes on all sides. It need not necessarily be very large or high, but the hill would stand out from the surrounding scenery and be visible for miles around.It would, by implication, be a defensible site with room enough for a large settlement inside: a flat-topped hill guarding vital communications between one town and another would fit the bill. The problem with such hills is that they can be surrounded and isolated. Our Mons should therefore have a water supply and adequate food stores as well as strong defences of the right date.
The most helpful of the three words is of course the place-name, Badon, of which Badonicus is the Latinized version. There is, needless to say, no Mount Badon or Badon Hill on today’s map. But, given the date and what is known of Anglo-Saxon settlement at the time, one would expect it to be somewhere to the west of the then British–Saxon frontier, roughly on a line linking Christchurch in Dorset with the Trent and the Humber. The context of Gildas and later texts indicates that the battle was fought in southern England (though there is also a northern school, of which more anon, which places it at Dumbarton Rock near the mouth of the Clyde) The two most likely candidates for Badon are the city of Bath or one of the Badburys, most likely the village of Badbury in Wiltshire, and that the battle was fought on a hill near one of them.
We do not know what the fifth-century Britons called the Roman town of Aquae Sulis, but Nennius, writing in the ninth century, refers to the marvellous baths of‘Badon’. This was probably also the name in Gildas’s day, when Bath was still a British city. Various Saxon documents mention Bathu, Bathum or Bathanceaster, that is, the‘ city of the baths’. Bath and Badon are clearly similar words; in the Domesday Book, Bathum was Latinized as Bade.(What the Saxons had done was to take the original ‘d’ and convert it into a ‘crossed-d’ or thorn, pronounced ‘th’ as in ‘bathe’). Bath is surrounded by hills, but among them is an obvious mons crowned by a hill-fort ofsuffcient size. This is Little Solsbury Hill overlooking the Avon, two miles from the city centre. Could this be Mount Badon?
For the alternative, ‘Badbury’, we have to assume that the Saxons would add a ‘-burh’ or ‘byrig’ to a fortified place, hence Badenbyrig, or as we would now say, Badbury. We must assume that Bad was a British word of uncertain meaning which the Saxons later co-opted (the old idea that Badbury is derived from someone called Badda has been dismissed – as J N L Myres wittily noted, ‘for some unexplained reason [he] specialized in leaving his name to hill-forts’).11 There are several hill-forts called Badbury in central southern England and also further afield. The most dramatic is Badbury Ring in Dorset, but a more likely candidate is Badburyin Wiltshire, close to a hill-fort formerly known as Badbury Castle, but which has since for reasons of tenure adopted the name of the next village and become Liddington Castle.
The long and the short of it is that Mons Badonicus was probably either a hill near Bath or Liddington Castle near Badbury, Wiltshire, close to the M4 near Swindon. There is a good case to be made for either (and a bad case to be made for many other places which Ido not propose to discuss here). Let us briefly look at each in turn.
The best point in favour of Bath is the name: more certainly than anywhere else, Bath is Badon. Perhaps Gildas had no further need to particularize since everyone knewwhere it was. Bath was the original spa town and also a place of strategi importance.It lay at one end of a Roman road known as Verlucio or the Sandy Lane, running westwards from the Kennet valley across the downs. In the fifth or sixth century part of this road was fortified and partly overlain by the earthwork known as the Wansdyke. This suggests that the road was part of a frontier and that the land to the south of it was strategically valuable.
The walls of Liddington Castle are still formidable.
Bath was also on the major north–south road known as the Fosse Way, connectingBath with the important towns of Corinium (Cirencester) and Lindinis (Ilchester).The line of the Fosse Way and its bend westwards into Bath along the Avon valley can still be followed. In Roman times this part of Britain, broadly coinciding with the later Saxon kingdom of Wessex, was the territory of a tribe called the Atrebates. The fifth-century descendants of the Atrebates had probably reverted to their tribal homeland which was now threatened by the Saxon colonizers in the Upper Thames valley. By taking Bath, which lies only fifteen miles from the Bristol Channel, the Saxons would effectively isolate the land of the Atrebates from their British allies further north. It would also open up an invasion route into the Midlands as well as the south-west. In terms of military strategy, a move against Bath would make sense.
Little Solsbury Hill is a flat-topped isolated hill just two miles downriver of the spa city. Naturally steep-sided, it has been reinforced with impressive earthworks. Excavations have shown that the hill-fort was reoccupied in the fifth century. Bathis a valley town, protected by the river on two sides but vulnerable to attack from the north where the downs overlook the city. As a Saxon-ceaster it was probably awalled town. No doubt the old hill-fort was militarized as a redoubt commanding the approaches to the city from the east.
Subsequent history strengthens the case for Bath. The victory at Mount Badon put back the Saxon colonization of the West Country for generations. As we have seen, Bath eventually fell to Ceawlin after the Battle of Deorham in 577. Perhaps Ceawlin’s strategy was based on that of his unsuccessful predecessor at Mount Badon. Longafter Deorham, in 665, the Britons made a final attempt to snatch back the city in alliance with the Saxons of Mercia. The battle, the Welsh Annals tell us, took place on the same ground as in 496 at Mons Badonicus. A second battle was fought in the same year at Wirtgernesburh, – which has been identified with Bradford-on-Avon, a few miles east of Bath. The full evidence has been discussed in detail in a paper in the Somerset Archaeological Society by Tim and Annette Burkitt.12
The final straw of evidence is from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histories of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey places the battle at Bath. No one takes his legends and tall tales very seriously as history, but in placing Mount Badon at Bath Geoffrey may have taken it for granted that the battle was fought there because his unknown source said so.
Liddington Castle is an oval-shaped hill-fort at the western end of a ridge of downland overlooking the villages of Liddington and Badbury. The hill dominates the skyline for miles around. The castle’s bank-and-ditch is still impressive, and forms only part of what was evidently an elaborate system of earthworks along the northern and western slopes of the hill.
Like Little Solsbury, excavations at Liddington Castle in the 1970s found evidence of reoccupation and imported pottery from the time of the battle.13 It is easy to see why the place was important. The hill-fort overlooks the conjunction of three important roads. One is the Ridgeway, ‘Britain’s oldest route way’, which was in use throughout Roman and Saxon times and was particularly useful as a relatively dry road in winter. The others are the Roman roads from Winchester (which passes by the eastern end of the hill-fort) and from Silchester which converge at Wanborough, two miles to the north to form Ermine Street, which follows the line of the modernA419 to Cirencester. This was a crossroads of major strategic importance, and Liddington Castle was the key to it.
Liddington Hill, as an isolated and steep-sided down, is definitely a mons. But, as J N L Myres suggests, Mons Badonicus could also be translated as ‘the hill-country of Badon’ in which case it could apply to a larger area of downs around a place calledBadon.14 Sure enough, on the crest of the downs three miles south of Liddington Hill we find the village of Baydon. Did this Baydon exist in Dark Age times? It lieson the Roman road at its highest point – and is, in fact, the highest village in Wiltshire. But no Roman remains have been found, and no documentation of a settlement there exists before the Middle Ages. Moreover Baydon has no earthworks or defences. Butthe coincidence of two nearby villages called Badbury and Baydon suggested to Myres that ‘Badon’ could well have been the name for the whole stretch of hilly country south of this part of the Ridgeway. As the most prominent as well as the best-defended of these hills, Liddington Hill is the obvious place for Mons Badonicus.
One interpretation of the Battle of Badon has the Saxons approaching from the Ridgeway and attacking from the east. This may be the scene of the British charge that scattered their foes after a nine-day siege.
The Roman road near Baydon, Wiltshire’s highest village.
In his Battlefields of England, Alfred Burne plumps for a battlefield near Liddington Hill on the grounds of ‘inherent military probability’. He assumes that the Saxons from the tribal kingdoms of Kent, Sussex and East Anglia had put aside their petty enmities and united for this decisive advance, perhaps led by the great King Aelle. Using the Roman roads they would naturally converge at this point (‘What a meeting point! The roads seem almost fore-ordained for the purpose’15). A likely concentration point for the Britons, meanwhile, would be Cirencester, another natural communications centre for armies gathering from Wales and the Severn valley. Hence they would clash somewhere on the line of the Roman road. Following Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, Burne puts the Saxons inside the hill-fort, with the Britons, under Arthur, attacking them. Most authorities believe it was the other way round,but many agree that Liddington Castle is indeed a likely place for Gildas’s obsessiomontis Badonicus.
The cases for Bath and Liddington Castle seem to me to be evenly matched. I incline towards Liddington Hill on the grounds that it would have been rash for the Saxons to have pushed so far west as Bath in 496, leaving the as yet unconquered hill-forts of Wiltshire threatening their communications. In the renewed war of conquest from the middle of the sixth century, Bath fell only after several decades of fighting, in which the crucial struggles were over the hill-forts at Sarum (Salisbury),Beranburh (Barbury Castle) and Dyrham. Barbury Castle, significantly, lies only a few miles west of Liddington Hill. It implies that Briton and Saxon were fighting over the same crucial ground in 556 as they had sixty years earlier. The key towns were taken only after the climactic battle at Dyrham had destroyed the British field army and its leaders. In 496 as in the 550s, the killing grounds seem to have been the triangle of land formed between the Roman towns of Silchester, Cirencester and Salisbury.
My other reason for preferring Liddington is a matter of the heart, not the head. I live nearby, and the long green hill with its clump of beech trees is the sight that greets me when I return home from a journey. The view from Liddington Castle towards the Thames Vale, the Ridgeway and the straight Roman road to Cirencester is full of history. When I climb the hill I experience what you might call the tingle-factor, which I did not experience on Little Solsbury Hill, impressive though it is. Michael Rayner, author of English Battlefields,16 felt the same, and so did Alfred Burne (‘What a place for a pageant!’). It feels right. Whether that makes the case for Liddington any stronger perhaps depends on whether the tingle-factor does it for you too.
As we have seen, the main historical evidence for Arthur comes from the Historia Brittonum, compiled in the ninth century by the Welsh monk, Nennius. It consists of a list of twelve victories of Arthur which ends with the victory at Badon Hill already quoted where Arthur slays 960 men in a single charge. Arthur’s twelve battles are named after obscurely named rivers, forests, mountains and cities, and it is generally agreed that the passage is based on a Welsh war-song. It reads as follows:
Then Arthur fought against them [i.e. the Saxons] in those days with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was leader of battles (dux bellorum).The first battle was at the mouth of the river called Glein. The second, the third, the fourth and the fifth were on another river called the Dubglas, which is in the region of Linnuis. The sixth battle was on the river called Bassas. The seventh battle was in the Caledonian Forest, that is, the Battle(Cat)of Calidon Coit. The eighth battle was in Guinnion castle, and in it Arthur carried the image of the holy Mary, the everlasting Virgin, on his shoulders, and the heathen were put to flight on that day, and there was a great slaughter upon them, through the power of Jesus Christ and the power of the holy Virgin Mary, his mother. The ninth battle was in the City of the Legion. The tenth battle was on the bank of the river called Tribruit. The eleventh battle was on the hill (mons) called Agned.The twelfth battle was on Badon Hill and in it 960 men fell in one day from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low except he alone. And in all the battles he was the victor.17
Acres of print have been devoted to speculating where Arthur’s battles were fought. Perhaps the first to play at this game was Geoffrey of Monmouth, more than 800 years ago, who found a site for the second battle on a River Douglas near Lincoln and another just north of that city for the seventh battle. Interestingly, some of the more plausible sites are in the north. The present-day Caledonian Forest, for example, is in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, although Welsh tradition apparently places it in the Borders. The City of the Legion could be Carlisle or Chester. Norma Lorre Goodrich, a linguist specializing in ancient French and Celtic, has suggested northern locations for all twelve, based on clues in Geo¡rey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and other sources. By her reckoning, the river called Dubglas is on he Isle of Man, the river called Glein in Northumberland near the Saxon fort of eavering Bell, and Guinnion castle at the Roman fort of Vinovia (Binchester) in County Durham. Even Mount Badon, which in my translation of the Historia is near Bath, is sited at Kaer Alclyd, which Goodrich translates as ‘the fort of the Clyde’, that is, Dumbarton Rock.18
It is possible that some at least of the twelve are garbled versions of battles entioned by other sources. For example, the eleventh battle, ‘the hill called Agned’ as a second name, Bregomion or Breguoin, which has been identified Roman fort of Bremenium at High Rochester in the Cheviots. There was indeed a battle fought there in the late sixth century, but it involved not Arthur but Urien of Rheged, whose existence is in no doubt. Similarly there was a mighty battle between the Welsh and the Saxons at Chester, the Roman Caer Legion,but it took place in 613, more than a century after Mons Badonicus. The River Glenin Northumberland is an attractive location for Arthur’s first battle, except that the Saxons did not penetrate that far until the mid-sixth century – an objection one could extend to nearly all northern locations. If one accepts the historical validity for a northern Arthur in the sixth or even seventh century, he could not have been the same man that defeated the Saxons at Mount Badon around 496. It seems much more likely that Nennius’ list consists of a garbled memory of various battles to which Arthur’s name was subsequently attached by the bards.
Arthur’s last and most famous battle was fought at Camlann. Tennyson memorably described it as ‘the last, dim, weird battle of the west’.19 Camlann was the ‘dolefulest battle’, symbolized in John Boorman’s film Excalibur by the sun sinking in orange glory to the majestic chords of Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. It was the place where King Arthur received his death-wound at the hand of his illegitimate son Mordred, and where Sir Bedivere, after some understandable hesitation, surrendered Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake.20
The actual evidence for Camlann is a bare entry in the Welsh Annals for 537: ‘The strife at Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell; and there was plague in Britain and Ireland’ (Gueith ca lann inq arthur et medraut corruer et mortililitas in brittania et in hibernia fuit). The Latin wording is curious. The verb corruo means to break or fall down. In this context it certainly implies the death of Arthur and Medraut, but it also has a mythic undertone. Similarly the choice of gueith, usually translated as strife or struggle, instead of bellum or battle, is suggestive. The same word was used by the Irish annalist for what he called the ‘strife of the heron-lake’, better known as the Battle of Nechtansmere,in 685 (q.v.),fought between two kings described as brothers(fratrueles). Is it a hint that Arthur and Medraut were related? Were they on the same side? Or were they fighting one another? As usual, the annalist contrives to keep things nice and mysterious.
There is another passing reference to the battle in the Chronicle of Ystrad Fflur, recording the death in 550 of one Derfei Gadarn‘ who fought at Camlann’.21Whatevercould be said of Arthur, the battle seems real enough. But where was it? Without muchelse to go on, historians have fallen back on philology. A century ago the antiquarian O G S Crawford suggested that the name is derived from Camboglanna, meaning‘ crooked glen’ or ‘crooked bank’.22 The one known place with that name is the Roman fortress of Camboglanna on Hadrian’s Wall. Crawford identified this with the fort at Birdoswald, where the River Irthing swings round in a loop to make aperfect ‘crooked glen’. In their spoilsport way, archaeologists have since relocated Camboglanna further west to Castlesteads, where the river flows relatively straight. If this is Camlann, it is evidence for a northern Arthur, leading the fight against the enemies of the Britons on the Borders (and whoever else they might have been, they were probably not Saxons).
However there are alternative Camlanns. One is the River Allan in central Scotland,a winding river which has also been known as Camallan or ‘crooked Allan’.23 Abattle was fought here between Aedan, king of Dalriata and the Picts of Miathi, an ancient kingdom around the Forth, in 582. The Annals of Ulster refer to it as the Battle of Manann. Adomnan, writing a century later, refers to what may be the same battle‘ against the Miathi Picts’. Its interest to Arthur-seekers is in Adomnan’s reference to one Artur, son of Aedan, killed in that battle. There is another reference to Artur in the Irish Annal of Tigernach, which records his death at the Battle of Circinnin 596.Was this our Arthur, and our Battle of Camlann? Were all these battles one and the same(despite the disparity of dates)?Promoters of this theory point out that there is ‘only one battle fought between Arthur and the Britons on one side and the Picts on the other’ and that this was it.24 In this version, Arthur’s rival, Medraut becomes a Pictish chieftain. A Pictish standing stone supposedly marks the site of the battle.
If so, Arthur was soon poached by Welsh poets, who remembered an Arthur in a variety of semi-legendary but decidedly Welsh settings.25 There are even a couple of candidate Camlanns in Wales, a valley of Camlan and a River Gamlan. There are, for that matter, rival Camlanns in England. A medieval tradition followed by Malory placed‘ the last dim weird battle’ on the Plain near Salisbury, which Malory considered to be close to the seaside. Another candidate is the River Cam which flows past South Cadbury below the hill-fort traditionally associated with Arthur’s legendary Camelot. The most celebrated of all sites for Camlann is the River Camel at Slaughterbridge near Camelford in Cornwall. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur and his treacherous son Mordred came to blows at Camelford, ‘may the name last forever’. Mordred had gathered a huge army of 60,000 men. Arthur’s army was also very large ‘although it was doomed’. This Camlann fits the tradition of a Cornish Arthur, born at Tintagel. The battle is celebrated there each year with bunting, a parade and a re-enactment on the battle’s supposed anniversary of 6 August.26
To Britons living at the time, Camlann may have been less celebrated than another vain episode of civil strife fought in about 573, the Battle of Arfderryd.or Arthurnet There are allusions to the battle in later bardic verses that suggest that the exploits of its heroes were being sung at the mead-bench long afterwards. The Welsh annal of Ystrad Fflur refers to it as ‘the third futile battle of the island of Britain’ (we are not told which the other two were, but, at least by implication, Camlann was probably one of them).27 Arthuret was a dynastic battle between two branches of the British royal family ruling in the Pennines and the Borders. Two brothers described as the ‘sons of Eliffer’, Peredur, king of York and a fellow king Dunaut from the Pennines, made war on one Gwendoleu, son of Ceido, who ruled in Carlisle. The armies clashed near the old Roman fort of Nether by on the Esk, ten miles north of Carlisle. The brothers won, and Gwendoleu was killed. However, losses on both sides were severe and the brothers were unable to take advantage of their victory. The winner in the dispute seems to have been another Briton, Urien of Rheged(for more on him, see Chapter 4), who became the new lord of Carlisle. Gwendoleu’s bard, Merddin or Merlin, went mad with sorrow, and lived on as a hermit in the depths of ‘Celidon Forest’. As for the sons of Eliffer, they fell in battle at an unknown place called Caer Greu in about 580 fighting the real enemy, the Angles of Bernicia led by a king called Adda. Peredur, like Urien, enjoyed posthumous fame as one of Arthur’s knights. The Battle of Arthuret seems to have been a fine example of the futile civil wars of Briton against Briton which Gildas complained about so bitterly, and which became rooted in Arthurian myth.
Arthur’s Stone, a sixth-century inscribed stone in a dry streambed at Slaughterbridge, near Camelford. Nearby is a commercial ‘Arthurian Centre’ with tearooms and a gift shop. There are rival Arthur’s Stones on Dorstone Hill, Hereford, and the Gower in south Wales, as well as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh.
Barring some sensational discovery, we shall probably never know which of the rival Camlanns, if any, is the ‘real’ one, just as we can never be sure which, if any, of the Arthurs on offer was the progenitor of the Round Table and the Quest for the Holy Grail. The historical basis of Arthur is so thin and slippery that enthusiasts have gone to great lengths to try to identify him on the basis that beneath all this legendary smoke there must have been a real fire. Norma Goodrich, for example, has suggested that Arthur was an adopted name of a leader of the northern Votadini tribe, and meant‘ The Bear’.28 The 2004 film, claiming to be ‘the true story behind the legend’, portrays Arthur as a rough, tough, half-Roman centurion. None of these theories seem to square very well with the ‘traditional’ Arthur, the hero-king who brought peace to Britain for a generation as portrayed in John Morris’s controversial history, The Age of Arthur.
In fact, the early history of Britain would make more sense without Arthur. He confuses everything and sets up vain trails in all directions. None of the evidence is very convincing, and if he were not also the mighty king of medieval legend and the inspirer of great works of literature down the ages, the question would scarcely arise. The existence of a historical Arthur is surely irrelevant to the power of the Arthur myth. His legend has struck a chord in generation after generation, each of which has reinvented him after its own fashion. Whether he is ‘the Once and Future King’ resting in the cave with his knights, or the monarch of the Round Table dispensing Christian justice and charity in an idealized past, he has become an important part of the nation-spirit of Britain. He colours our perceptions of bygone days throughs tories and tales that bring history to life. King Edward III revitalized the legend of the Round Table to bolster his own conceptions of a knightly order.Tennyson createda Pre-Raphaelite version full of colour, fabrics and Wagnerian backdrops. Nearer our own time, T H White imagined a rustic, semi-comic Arthur who learned his kingly craft from watching how animals behave. That creation was in turn adapted by Walt Disney. The mythic Arthur has a resonance that seems to be perpetually beyond time and fashion.