by Mike Ashley
(3) Arthur’s name was superfluous. Gildas is referring to events within living memory, only forty-three years in the past. If Badon was such a glorious victory, everyone would remember who the victor was.
(4) Gildas disliked Arthur and did not want to glorify him. If Caradog’s life of Gildas has any basis of truth, Arthur was responsible for the death of Gildas’s brother Huail. Whilst having to admit that Badon was a crucial victory, he did not see fit to go further and name him as the victor. It’s even possible that Arthur is named, but as one of the “tyrants” Gildas later castigates. He would not want to praise him whilst also vilifying him.
(5) Arthur was not yet born. It could be that the real Arthur, to whom the various legends and triumphs became attached, lived later than the time Gildas was writing. Someone else was the victor at Badon, but Arthur was retrospectively given the credit.
(6) Gildas did not know who the victor was. This seems the unlikeliest of reasons, but although Arthur seems such a major character to us today, he may not have been in Gildas’s day. His legend had yet to grow, and despite the triumph of Badon, the victor’s name may not have been that well remembered.
Whatever the reason, Gildas’s omission of Arthur’s name is not proof that Arthur did not exist, but the onus is on us to find that proof elsewhere.
Gildas’s account tells us that the siege of Badon happened in the year of his birth, 43 years and 1 month before the time of writing. Such precision, so unusual for Gildas, might have helped us date Badon and provide corroboration for the year 518 in the Welsh Annals. Unfortunately, we don’t know when Gildas wrote De Excidio.
There are, however, clues within De Excidio itself. Most telling is the final paragraph quoted from §26, in which he refers to the “calm of the present.” He is writing in a time when external wars have stopped, and a whole generation has grown up that is now ignorant of the “storm” with the Saxons. He makes no mention of plague or famine, and yet if the evidence presented by David Keys in Catastrophe and Mike Baillie in Exodus to Arthur is true – and there is no reason to doubt it – from 535 onwards Britain was subject to bitterly cold winters and summers. A plague swept through Europe during the 540s, one of the worst ever. Had Gildas experienced this at the time of writing De Excidio there is little doubt that he would have referred to it, because it was further support for his argument – another punishment from God for the wicked ways of the kings. This suggests that Gildas must have written De Excidio before 540, possibly even before 535. If so, then 43 years earlier would place Badon at 492–497 at the latest, suggesting that the entry in the Welsh Annals is wrong. The gap from 497 to 518 is 21 years, and we have seen already that later annalists, copying from earlier documents, may have confused entries dated only by Easter cycles of 19 years.
A date of 497 for Badon is more consistent with Gildas’s narrative. We deduced earlier that Ambrosius led the resistance to the Saxons during the 470s, and Gildas tells us that victories went both ways until the time of Badon. If Badon took place in 518, then the Saxon war continued for some forty years. Not impossible, of course, but Gildas’s narrative does not suggest that long a period. Also, in §25, Gildas remarks that Ambrosius’s descendants “in our day” were greatly inferior to their “grandfather’s” excellence. He would not have used the term “grandfather” unless he genuinely meant two generations. This gives us some 60 years from the 470s, which brings us to the 530s. On this basis De Excidio was written in the mid to late 530s; thus Gildas was born in the early 490s, placing Badon between 492 and 497.
An alternative translation of Gildas §26 by Bede appeared in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. Bede’s research was impeccable, his understanding of Latin first class and, living just two centuries after Gildas, he was close enough to have had access to an original or early copy of Gildas’s work, one less prone to error. The following extract, from Chapter 16 of Bede’s History, is clearly lifted from Gildas:
When the army of the enemy had exterminated or scattered the native peoples, they returned home and the Britons slowly began to recover strength and courage. They emerged from their hiding places and with one accord they prayed for the help of God that they might not be completely annihilated. Their leader at that time was a certain Ambrosius Aurelianus, a discreet man, who was, as it happened, the sole member of the Roman race who had survived this storm in which his parents, who bore a royal and famous name, had perished. Under his leadership the Britons regained their strength, challenged their victors to battle and, with God’s help, won the day. From that time on, first the Britons won and then the enemy were victorious until the year of the siege of Mount Badon, when the Britons slaughtered no small number of their foes about forty-four years after their arrival in Britain.
Bede has read Gildas’s reckoning of 43 years and one month as being from the arrival of the Saxons, the so-called Saxon adventus, and not related to Gildas’s birth at all. Bede actually gives a year for the adventus, 449, a date later adopted by the ASC. This gives us a date of 492–493 for Badon which, by pure coincidence, fits into the timeframe cited above.
If Arthur was the battle leader at Badon, and not someone simply added by an overzealous annalist, then he was in his heyday at the end of the fifth century. And, if the Welsh Annals have the date for Badon wrong, then the date for Camlann may also be out by the same degree. Instead of 539 it could have been during the 510s, certainly no later than the year 520. However, we must not assume that the victor of Badon and the victim of Camlann are the same “Arthur”, and thus the Annals entry for Camlann might still be accurate.
There is one other reference in this first part of Gildas’s work which is easily overlooked, but which will prove crucial to our later research. In his earlier discussion about Britain under the Roman Empire, he refers to Britain’s martyrs: “St Alban of Verulam, Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of the Legions, and the others of both sexes who, in different places, displayed the highest spirit in the battle-line of Christ.” In referring to their shrines, Gildas says, in §10:
Their graves and the places where they suffered would now have the greatest effect in instilling the blaze of divine charity in the minds of beholders, were it not that our citizens, thanks to our sins, have been deprived of many of them by the unhappy partition with the barbarians.
In other words, in the time that Gildas was writing, the mid to late 530s, there was a partition between the British and the Saxons which denied the British access to these sites. These shrines must have been in the east, because we know from both written and archaeological records that the Saxons had not advanced far to the west by this time. Verulam (St Albans) was north-west of London. The City of the Legions, as we will discuss in Chapter 7, could apply to at least three sites, but as two of those, Caerleon and Chester, were in the west, Gildas must have meant York. York was part of the Angle kingdom of Deira, later part of Northumbria, and Nennius tells us (see Chapter 6) that the start of this Saxon colony was in the mid fifth century under Soemil. By Gildas’s time presumably Yffi, father of Aelle, was established as the ruler.
The two big questions are where this partition ran and when it came into being. Fitting York into the division is less of a problem than St Albans. It is known that there were significant British enclaves in both London and St Albans throughout most of the fifth century, with no evident Saxon infiltration until the late sixth century. The battle of Biedcanford entered in the ASC for 571 shows that Cuthwulf succeeded in capturing the towns of Limbury, Aylesbury, Benson and Eynsham. If those locations are correct, then Cuthwulf captured a small British kingdom known as Calchvynydd, usually treated as covering the Chilterns, mostly Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire (see Map 1). Limbury, now part of Luton, was within 20km of St Albans, suggesting that St Albans must have been right on this frontier. The resident population may have remained primarily British, hence the archaeological evidence, but under Saxon control, hence the access problem.
Normally one mig
ht expect divisions to be decided by rivers, but few rivers in eastern England flow north-south. However, there is another obvious boundary. The Roman road of Dere Street ran from the eastern end of the Antonine Wall, past Hadrian’s Wall near Corbridge, continuing just west of York and on to Lincoln. From there, now renamed Ermine Street, it ran direct to London. A confluence of roads there allows a switch along the Lower Icknield Way to St Albans, and from there south, skirting London to the west and terminating, presumably, at the Thames (see Map 3).
This boundary, which follows the route of today’s Al trunk road, would contain all the nascent Anglo-Saxon settlements along the east coast. The kingdom of Kent, tucked away at that time in the far south-east of the island, was to a large extent separated by the natural boundary of the Weald.
As to when, the obvious answer must be the Battle of Badon. That victory allowed the British to contain the Saxons within a fixed area, just as Alfred’s victory over the Danes resulted in the same division, the Danelaw, four centuries later.
We will return to this partition in Chapter 7.
2. The Tyrants
We have not yet finished with Gildas. Having presented us with his understanding of the history of Britain, he then launches into an attack on five kings whom he sees as wicked and the enemies of God. I will not transcribe these in full, colourful though they are, as his lengthy condemnation of their lives and actions adds little to our quest for Arthur. But there are some factors that are relevant.
“Britain has kings, but they are tyrants,” Gildas begins (in §27). The first he castigates is Constantine, “tyrant whelp of the filthy lioness of Dumnonia” (§28). Constantine is evidently alive at this time, as Gildas writes: “This same year after taking a dreadful oath not to work his wiles on our countrymen . . . he nevertheless, garbed in the habit of a holy abbot, most cruelly tore the tender sides of two royal children and their two guardians.” Constantine apparently killed these children in a church, with sword and spear, whilst they clung to the altar. Gildas also accuses Constantine of adultery and sodomy. Constantine appears in the Arthurian story as Arthur’s appointed successor, and he is described as the son of Cador, duke of Cornwall. Dumnonia was the Celtic kingdom in south-west Britain, including Cornwall and Devon, although just to add to the confusion it was also the name of a province in Brittany. When Gildas states that Constantine had sworn not to act against “our countrymen”, he could be talking about the men of Brittany. However, this Constantine does not feature in the Welsh pedigrees and thus is not in Table 3.10, although he would be a contemporary of Geraint and Mark.
Geoffrey of Monmouth repeats this story, making the princes that Constantine kills the sons of Mordred. This happened soon after the battle of Camlann, which, as Gildas tells us, had happened only within the last year. If Gildas was writing in the period 535–540, perhaps Camlann’s date really was 539, and not subject to the 19–year error. This heightens the idea of an Arthurian Golden Age lasting from 500 to 540. Gildas seems to support this as in §26 he speaks of the “calm of the Present” and of “an age” ignorant of past violence. This seems more like forty years than twenty.
The next king to be excoriated by Gildas is Aurelius Caninus, who, according to Geoffrey, later murdered Constantine. Gildas states that Caninus is “engulfed by the same slime” as Constantine, and accuses him of “parricide, fornications, adulteries” and of being a warmonger (§30), but does not say where he ruled. Some authorities have equated him with Cynan Garwyn (Cynan of the White Chariot, or Cynan the Cruel), a prince of Powys who was noted for his battles. However, this Cynan ruled towards the end of the sixth century and would not be a contemporary of Gildas. There is also no indication that Cynan Garwyn killed his father, the famous Brochwel of the Tusks. Another Cynan appears in the genealogies, five generations in descent from Vortigern, but he was a contemporary of Cynan Garwyn and was thus unlikely to have been born when Gildas was writing.
The name Caninus is more likely an epithet applied by Gildas. He was fond of nicknames, calling all of the kings he identified after animals. “Caninus”, or “little dog”, would mean “the whelp”, and the king’s name was therefore Aurelius, suggesting that he may have been one of the grandchildren of Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas had described as “greatly inferior” to their forebear. If this is so, the father that Aurelius Caninus killed was either Ambrosius’s son or son-in-law. Such an action would be sure to raise Gildas’s wrath.
Aurelius may not have inherited a kingdom, but usurped one through murder. If so, this is likely to have been in the south, possibly in the Severn Valley.
It’s possible that Caninus is the same as Conmor, sometimes called Comorus, or Conomorus, the ruler of Leon in Armorica and later usurper of the whole territory. Conmor had killed the ruler, Ionas, forcibly married Ionas’s widow, and imprisoned their son, Iudwal. Conmor was an exact contemporary of Gildas – indeed the usurpation had happened while Gildas was deliberating over writing De Excidio (he put it off for ten years). Conmor is sometimes identified with Mark (or March), a king of Dumnonia associated with the Tristan legend. This may explain Gildas’s remark than Caninus was “engulfed by the same slime”, meaning that Caninus and Constantine ruled in the same territory. Interestingly, Conmor called for a holy man, Paul, a pupil of Illtud, to spread the Christian faith through Brittany. This Paul is called Paul Aurelian, and though the epithet is believed by some to refer to the fact that Paul’s remains were later moved to Orleans, it is possible that Paul was related to the Aurelian family.
The next to feel the bite of Gildas’s tongue was Vortipor, “tyrant of the Demetae” (§31). We know something about him because his tombstone was discovered in 1895 in the churchyard at Castelldwyran in Dyfed. It bore the inscription MEMORIA VOTEPORIGIS PROTICTORIS. “Protector”, the title also given to Coel, was a genuine title bestowed on barbarians who, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, helped patrol the Empire’s frontiers. Vortipor appears in the genealogies of Dyfed/Demetia as the son of Aircol Lawhir (“the long-hand”). Aircol is the Brythonic version of Agricola, suggesting that Vortipor’s father was a Romano-Briton. Gildas clearly thought well of Aircol, calling Vortipor the “bad son of a good king”. Vortipor is charged with having divorced and possibly even murdered his wife and then raping her daughter (presumably by a previous marriage, though Gildas does not say). Vortipor may not have been all bad. Gildas calls him “spotted with wickedness”, and it is likely that he was a once strong king who descended into wickedness in his final years. Gildas remarks that “the end of your life is gradually drawing near” and that his “head is already whitening”, so we may presume Vortipor was well into his sixties. This is borne out by the analysis of the Demetian pedigree in Table 3.6, which suggests a lifetime for Vortipor of 470–540. If so then Vortipor would have been a young man at the time of Arthur’s triumphs and his father, Agricola, would certainly have known, and possibly fought alongside Ambrosious Aurelianus.
Incidentally, the name by which Vortipor is known in the Irish pedigrees is Gartbuir. If a later chronicler came across this written in Gaelic script as Gartbuir, might he have misread the ‘b’ as an ‘h’ and red Garthuir? A thought.
The fourth of Gildas’s kings is Cuneglasus, the “tawny butcher” (§32). Cuneglasus’s sin, in addition to waging war “with arms special to yourself”, was to reject his wife and lust after her sister, a widow who had retired to a convent. This king is most likely Cynlas Goch, a cousin of Maelgwyn and ruler of the small cantref of Rhos (Table 3.8). Gildas reports that Cuneglasus had been a wicked man ever since his youth, and refers to him as “driver of the chariot of the Bear’s Stronghold.” Knowing Gildas’s delight in puns, we can interpret “Bear’s Stronghold” into Welsh as “Din-arth” (din for fortress and arth for bear); Dinarth is a small village near Llandrillo in North Wales. Others have taken the reference to “the Bear” as relating to Arthur, as the prefix Arth means “the Bear”, and have suggested that Cuneglasus was Arthur’s charioteer or even
Arthur himself.
What did Gildas mean by referring to Cuneglasus as having “arms special to yourself”? What did he have that no one else did? A specially trained army, perhaps, or a huge arsenal of weapons? Yet Gildas’s phrase sounds more personal, as if Cuneglasus had his own particular weapon. It makes one think of Excalibur. Would a sword that invoked awe and wonder, and which the owner believed protected him, be “special”? Probably, but unless Cuneglasus had somehow acquired Arthur’s own sword, I find it hard to believe that Cuneglasus, a violent, psychotic despot, could ever be remembered as the heroic Arthur.
Gildas saves the worst for last: Maglocunus, better known as Maelgwyn, whom Gildas refers to as “first in evil.” The catalogue of Maelgwyn’s crimes takes up as much space as all the others put together. In his youth, Maelgwyn murdered his uncle, the king. This might have been Owain Danwyn (“white-tooth”), ruler of Rhos and father of Cuneglasus, but according to Peter Bartrum in A Welsh Classical Dictionary, the word used for uncle, avunculus, means strictly “his mother’s brother”. We do not know who his mother’s brother was, so cannot be sure which kingdom Maelgwyn usurped. He seems to have repented and sought penance in a monastery. But this was short-lived. He subsequently murdered his wife, and, determined to marry his nephew’s wife, had his nephew murdered as well.
Gildas must have felt very sure of himself. Castigating one or other of the first four kings was risky enough, but to take on Maelgwyn was like Thomas More taking on Henry VIII. As Gildas describes him, Maelgwyn was “dragon of the island”, the Pendragon or High King. Arthur was also described as the Pendragon, a title steeped in historical lore which I shall explore later. Maelgwyn was the most important ruler in Britain, although Gildas did not see it this way: “The King of all kings has made you higher than almost all the generals of Britain, in your kingdom as in your physique.” (§33). Maelgwyn was called “the Tall”, and we can imagine him as a well built, powerful man, towering over all others. Gildas does not say what he means by “almost all the generals,” but he clearly believed that there was one more powerful than Maelgwyn in Britain. Gildas had decried most of the kings of Wales and the West and had made no comment on the kings of the North. Perhaps he is alluding to one of them. Or perhaps this is Gildas’s one cryptic reference to Arthur. We know the names of most of Maelgwyn’s contemporaries, and possibly only Eliffer of the Great Host or his sons Peredur and Gwrgi might otherwise be classified as great generals. Once again Gildas masks his facts.